The Spectator Bird (21 page)

“Khhhhhl” Eigil said in his throat. “There's that bastard with the bad horns!” He cramped the Volkswagen around in two quick moves, and we were accelerating out the way we had come in.

As soon as we turned behind a screen of trees, he put his foot to the floor. We zipped around behind the stables and pulled up in a cloud of gravel next to the room where we had showered. Eigil jumped out, leaving the door open and the motor running. In a minute he came running back with a little Mannlicher in his hand. “Hold thisl” he said, and shoved it at me. Off again, like Crazy Horse on his way to intercept Custer.

Of course the stag was gone when we got there, and five minutes of careful prowling failed to flush him. I was glad. I am not much on killing things, and I didn't need a lesson in selective breeding.

“I ought to get back,” I said as soon as we got to the car again —me walking on the sides of my feet, my hips, knees, and shoulder already stiff. The trees on that lane were fuzzy with sprouts clear to the ground, like the legs of some chickens, and peasants had harvested these sprouts for faggots year after year, leaving an extraordinary stubble of cut sprouts out of which grew new green ones. Never waste anything. Make faggots of your prunings, and make a business of making faggots.

Eigil looked at the sun, bedding down in high clouds over the Baltic. “It's not quite six-thirty. There's time to show you the museum. Are you interested in archaeology?”

I thought I'd better be, as the quickest way of closing out the tour. “I don't know anything about the archaeology of Denmark, but sure, I'd like to see it, if you have time. Just a quick look, and then I'll have to go and dress.”

Going back, we circled down to the shore, through the village, and up the hill to the lane of lindens. As we passed the Sverdrup cottage, the girl I had seen was picking flowers in the yard. Eigil lifted his hand in casual greeting from the wheel, and she gawped after us as we headed toward the castle. I had an impulse to tell him my mother had lived in that house. Then I remembered that when I first saw him he had been coming out of it. Why not, he owned it. Visit from the landlord. Nevertheless, there was Miss Weibull, upon whom I suspected him of having exercised a few droits de
seigneur,
and she lived in that house, or once did. I decided that instead of revealing my family history I would praise the lane of lindens. Naturally they turned out to have been planted by Eigil's father.

The museum was a long half-timbered cottage beyond the sta bles, three rooms full of the kind of stuff that quickly gives me museum feet and strabismus: tools, weapons, utensils, skulls, bones, a complete record of all the Danish horizons from the antler-and-bone culture to the Iron Age. Seems that Danish places whose names end in
-inge
are invariably old, and therefore often rich archaeologically. Bregninge, according to Eigil, has been continuously inhabited since at least 4000 B.C. “All Danes,” he said with a grin. “There's no evidence of any immigrations or invasions. These people raided other tribes, but they don't seem to have been raided. My tribe. Except for an occasional captive woman, an essentially unmixed strain for six thousand years. You can imagine what that meant to my father.”

I let it be assumed that I could. Still wearing his sidelong smile, Eigil took hold of a cloth that covered something the shape of a big bird cage. “Here, let me introduce my first known ancestor,” he said, and pulled off the cloth. Inside was this mummy his peat diggers had found. Its hands and feet were tied, and it had been strangled with a thong. The museum in Copenhagen thinks it was an executed prisoner of war or criminal, but Eigil thinks it was a sacrifice to keep the fields fertile. “What's more logical?” he says. “This was hundreds of years before the invention of manure. In any case, I don't want him to be a prisoner of war, because then he couldn't have been my ancestor. Don't you think we look alike?”

Simpering, he posed beside the bell jar, and by God, he did look a little like the mummy. I wondered if perhaps I did, but I didn't want to ask. Because that thing was more likely to be my ancestor than his. My folks undoubtedly belonged to the class that got strangled, his to the class that did the strangling.

“You're better looking,” I said. “The breed has improved since the Bronze Age.”

Several times this afternoon I noticed his way of looking at me hard when I said something, as if he suspected double meanings. He is not a man who understands playfulness, I think, in spite of his competitive instincts. But there had not been a trace of hostility in him since the tennis. Knock heads with him and he was your pal. In fact, he had a look of eagerness, a certain impetuousness of explanation and argument, as if he wouldn't mind converting me to something. To what? Membership in a six-thousand-year-old strain of Homo sapiens? He didn't know, but I already had at least a guest card in that club.

“You'd be surprised,” he said. “There can't have been much change, especially in families like mine. We got a shot of Prussian and Hanoverian in the last couple of centuries, but that didn't greatly dilute us. We're one of the rare examples of selective breeding of humans over a long period. First a pure type like this one, without mongrelization, and then a naturally selected superior class from that type—the biggest, strongest, most intelligent —and then the aristocratic practice of seldom breeding outside that class, at least officially. Aristocracies are always essentially endogamous. If we had used the same intelligence in breeding ourselves that we use to breed cows or pointers, we'd have a race of supermen. I am not necessarily being smug when I say my family and my class come as close as you're likely to find. Even as it is, with infusions of Wendish and Polish and German and Swedish blood, we come close to being a pure strain, and unlike primitive endogamous groups, we have kept records. This was something that fascinated my father.”

I was thinking of the countess' remark that the men of her class were all drunks and the women all witches, and remembering vague sophomore biology courses which spoke of inbreeding and exhaustion. “You know a lot more about it than I do,” I said, “but as an American I have to stand up for hybrid vigor.”

His eyebrows went up and his finger went up, he backed me against a case of old bones—relatives of ours, no doubt—and said, “Hybrid vigor, exactly. It's a fact, it exists, it can be demonstrated. But it's too accidental. America will be ten thousand years developing an American type as pure as that fellow there with the string around his neck, and while you're developing the pure type you'll have other results of mongrelization besides hybrid vigor.
If it could only be done scientifically,
that was what my father always said. He didn't mean play Hitler, he was not interested in tyrannical eugenics or Brave New Worlds. He meant only that if there could be a controlled experiment over a good many generations, a demonstration clear enough to show the superiority of method over accident. When Darwin said that man is a wild species, he meant just that—nobody ever domesticated it or bred it scientifically for quality.”

“What about the Egyptian royal line?”

“All right. Brother-sister incest through hundreds of years. But who was keeping track of the experiment? Who made the kind of records that I make on my Holsteins? What Pharaoh ever won a Best of Breed ribbon at a fair? And who would permit any such experiment now? Sentimental outrage, Lutheran horror. It would hurt no one, it would move the human race a quantum jump forward. But
nej, nej,
thou shalt not. They would crucify anyone who suggested it, especially since Hitler gave it racist and fascist connotations. Eh?”

“I guess,” I said.

“We need to know so many things we are prevented from finding out,” Eigil said, pinning me against the bone case. “It takes many generations to develop the qualities you want, without bad recessive traits. You breed dogs for decades to get the carriage, coat, docility, ferocity, intelligence, nose, whatever it is you're after. If you could once get it pure, you could inbreed forever without bad results. But no line is pure enough, and so your dogs after a while show, say, hysteric traits, excessive nervousness, that sort of thing. Then you have to breed out for a generation or sometimes two. Not mongrelize—you don't let your bitches run in the woods and get mounted by anything that catches them at the right time. You pick another good line that has strength where yours has this weakness, and when you've got it firmly built into your mixed strain, you turn back, you exchange exogamy for endogamy again. Think what it would mean to the human race if we had an elegant and incontrovertible experiment to show the transmission of certain traits in human beings. You would be on the way to eliminating physical defects, heritable diseases, even ugliness. Mendel thought everything could be explained by peas. I know some people these days who think fruit flies will provide all the answers. But there is no alternative to experimenting with the animal itself.”

I eased away from the case and flexed my blistered hand and looked at the blisters to suggest a change of topic. He was really on his pulpit, and preaching. “I don't know,” I said. “I'm not sure I want my gene pool manipulated. You know what I miss on this marvelous estate of yours?”

“What?” He had expended his vehemence, he was grinning again. His eyes were as yellow as amber.

“Wild things,” I said. “Little cottontails or gophers or snakes or moles or raccoons or polecats that could breed in the hedges and live in spite of you. Holsteins and short-haired pointers are nice, but a little predictable.”

Curious, smiling, he searched my eyes, trying to understand me and probably making it all too complex and difficult. “Why would I permit them?” he said. “Why should they be allowed to eat what might feed my cows or hares or game birds or deer?”

“You were all set to shoot that buck with the bad horns,” I said. “How do you know he doesn't have everything else a deer ought to have—size, strength, speed, a good digestion, virility, everything but good horns? How do you know for sure that shooting him won't
weaken
the strain?”

The smile remained on his square face, with a shadow of amused forgiveness in it. “But I raise them for
trophies,”
he said.

There was an old Morris Minor parked in the drive when we walked to the front of the castle. Eigil gave it a glance. “The doctor. I suppose my grandmother isn't digesting well.” He stood there in his jodhpurs and corduroy, country squire, feudal lord, smiling and shaking his head regretfully. He put out his hand and gave my poor blistered mitt a hearty crushing. “I'm going to have to write Astrid a thank-you note. I had no idea what she was bringing, or I would have insisted on being at home.”

“I'm glad you didn't entirely vanish,” I said. “I've enjoyed the afternoon.”

“So have I. Immensely. I'm sorry I didn't meet your wife. Perhaps you'll both come again, without Astrid so that we won't have to play these silly games.”

Embarrassed, I said, “I don't understand anything about that, and don't particularly want to. I hope you see that in the circumstances we...”

“Of course. But come again, please. I hope your feet don't trouble you too much. I took advantage of you. But I want you to know, that was the best tennis I've had for a long time.”

We parted, mutually complimentary. He went away somewhere, and I rang the bell and was admitted by the brawny maid, who was obviously agitated. I couldn't understand a word of her Danish, but she kept looking up the stairs, so I started up, to be met halfway by Ruth, crying, Oh, where have you
been,
I've been going out of my
mindl
You shouldn't have stayed out so long, what have you been doing? Etc. Turns out the old countess was no sooner steered back to her rooms than she had a seizure of some kind, stroke, heart attack, nobody seemed to know. She might be dead or alive at this moment. Manon and the countess were with her, dinner was canceled, they would send something up.

In the circumstances I didn't want to ring for ice. We had a couple of warm scotches and water while I told her what I had been doing, and with whom. She looked at my hand and my skinned feet and lamented. She wondered that I hadn't had a heart attack, what on earth was I thinking of, how could
I dream
of playing tennis, the way I had been feeling? Shortly the maid knocked and wheeled in a tea cart with dinner on it, and a good dinner, too, with a good cold bottle of Mosel, and over it we speculated a long while about this feud between the countess and her brother, and about Miss Weibull, and discussed my adventures down the lane and among the fields and woods and on the courts of honor.

We kept expecting the countess to come and let us know what was going on, but it got to be ten-thirty, and then eleven, without a sign of her. Ruth kissed me a trembling, helpless kiss and went off to her canopied four-poster and after a while I heard that she was asleep.

And here I sit, with thirty great wounds, of the least of which an emir would have died, scratching in a God damn notebook. Why? Do I think I'll forget this? I can smell the lilacs that breathe up through the open casements, and watch the moonlight chase timidly back and forth across the Aubusson rug, advancing to Ruth's bed, scurrying back, creeping out again. Outside it is not really dark; we are getting close to the time of the white nights, when there is no true darkness, but only some hours of dusk. The sky now is either filled with moonlight or is the same predawn gray that it was when I looked out before going to bed.

The moonlight ventures out, reaches, stretches, dimly trembles on the bedclothes, on the darkness of Ruth's hair, the paleness of her face. I hope she is dreaming something gorgeous, her first night in an authentic castle.