“Was,” I said. I felt like dying.
“You’re amazing for your age. Were you ever ranked?”
“Long time ago. Never higher than the third ten.”
“But in the United States, that’s tremendous. I used to follow these things in the Spalding Tennis Annual. Who were the number one people in your years?”
“Tilden?” I said. “Johnny Doeg? Ellsworth Vines? Riggs? Don Budge?”
“Did you ever play them?”
I mopped my face and neck and flopped my head to look at him. He sat on the grass, towel around his neck, eager and enthusiastic, an admirer. In a minute he would ask for my autograph. Instead of being upset that I had split with him, he apparently had this fantasy of having held his own against an American inter-nationalist with a houseful of cups.
“Played some of ‘em,” I said. “Never beat any of ’em.” But I didn’t have the heart to deflate him completely. “After college I only played in tournaments for a few years. In my senior year my partner and I won the national intercollegiate doubles, that was why I was ranked.”
“Yes, doubles!” old Eigil says. “I could tell you’re a splendid doubles player. The way you punch a volley, the way you hit your overhead. I need to play more with people who play your game, serve and volley. Why don’t you stay a month and we’ll play every day.”
I think he meant it. I was almost sorry to remind him that we were leaving in the morning, and that even if we weren‘t, I wouldn’t be able to play on those feet for at least week. There we sat, pouring sweat and rehashing shots, a couple of locker-room jocks. I have to admit that I’ve always enjoyed the company of jocks more than that of the literary intellectuals and hyperthyroid geniuses among whom, unhappy one, I earned my living. Also, I hadn’t had any company but that of women since we landed in Denmark, more than six weeks ago. I found myself half liking the bugger. Quite plainly he was delighted with me.
After we showered he found me some Band-Aids to patch my feet. Then nothing would do but I must see the estate. I said that my wife, whom I had left at two o’clock, would wonder what had happened to me. Promptly he called the castle and told somebody that Mr. Allston would be in around seven.
My feelings were mixed. My mind’s eye kept wandering to the bottle of scotch in my suitcase—I knew that Ruth would expect to hold a note-comparing session over it before dinner. Instead, here I was hobnobbing with the hobgoblin. I wondered where he would go for dinner, since we were pre-empting his castle. Lonely service in the library, with smoking jacket, brandy, and cigar? A tray in the kitchen? To the stable to eat with the horses? To Bregninge Inn for Koldt bord and beer? A good old-fashioned Dracula picnic in some local graveyard?
It seemed to me he was being pretty good-natured in the face of his sister’s non-fraternization policy. I enjoyed talking to him. He had been around—England, where he was educated, and Italy, some, and France and Germany a good deal, and the United States once, with an agricultural mission. He remembered Decorah, Iowa, for some reason. He knew a lot of people and had read books and knew what went on. I had to admit that once he got past his impulse to throw me out as a trespasser he had been good company.
See the estate? All right, why not? He said it was the most scientifically run estate in Denmark, perhaps in the world. The very compulsiveness of his brag made me curious. And I supposed that he was the one who had got Miss Weibull pregnant, but who she was, and what she was doing in the castle, and why the countess was so implacable against him for what was, in emancipated Denmark, surely no mortal sin—those were things a man might find out.
Okay, let’s go. How would you say that in Danish? Having fallen into this particular sea, I found myself without the linguistic wherewithal. Without a Danish word I climbed into the Volkswagen parked outside the stables, and we toured the farm.
It isn’t a farm, it’s an economy. In an hour and a half of whizzing around an area about the size of Delaware, he showed me wheat fields, beet fields, truck gardens, three different varieties of hybrid com he’s experimenting with, and a battery of greenhouses. Also pine plantings, cherry orchards, apple orchards, game coverts, and pastures. Also pigpens, cow stables, henhouses, pheasant and grouse hatcheries, and kennels full of German short-haired pointers and English setters. Also a sawmill, smokehome, dairy, cheese factory, and refrigerated fruit warehouse. There are two other villages besides Bregninge on the estate, and he owns the port and all its facilities; for all I know, he may have a private merchant fleet. And he is no raw material producer only. Everything he grows, he processes, except the cherries, which are shipped to Amager to be made into Cherry Heering, and the sugar beets, which go, I think he said, to Kiel.
I heard a good deal about confiscatory taxes and a government that lay in wait until a landowner died and then came down on the heirs. I gathered that things had shrunk sharply when his father died in the 1930s. But he had a bit left. At the hour we went around, there was hardly a working soul in sight. He had everything mechanized, even automated. The peasants who used to work on the place must all be up in Copenhagen on welfare (my mother got out just in time).
Crops grow by blueprint. The pigs come off the belt line within a pound of their bacon weight While the milking machines relieve them of their day’s production, the cows can contemplate on the stanchions by their heads the charts that reveal their intake in grain and ensilage and their output in milk and butterfat. No contented cows there. Stakhanovized cows. No tickee, no laundly. Any cow that doesn’t keep up her statistics is schnitzel.
Everything clean, nothing smelly, nothing wasted. The straw that most Danish farmers burn in their fields, Eigil bales and uses for fuel to heat his greenhouses, which produce the year round. Now I know where those hard little tomatoes come from, and those incessant cucumbers. He is proud of the hay-burning furnace, which he designed himself.
“You’ve got a lot to be proud of,” I said, and meant it. “You and your father. I understand he was called the Doctor Faustus of genetics.”
His shoulder bumped mine, he twisted around in the cramped seat. “Where did you hear that?”
“Karen Blixen, I think.”
“Oh, you’ve met her.”
“Last week.”
“Better her than some others,” Eigil said sourly. “At least she’s intelligent.”
“She said he was a very talented man.”
“Was he not,” Eigil said, looking straight ahead down the lane. “And they hounded him as if he were the Antichrist. He was the greatest man in Denmark, a century ahead of his time. Do you believe that?”
Without half trying, he seemed to have worked himself into a rage. I said mildly that I knew nothing about his father, or next to nothing, but had no reason to think he wasn’t exactly what Eigil said he was. Nevertheless, as an unsuccessful father myself, I almost resented so much filial loyalty. Would Curtis have defended me if someone had questioned my intelligence or integrity? I doubted it But then I wasn’t the Doctor Faustus of anything, either.
“All those rhododendrons you saw in the park are his hybrids,” Eigil said. “Half the roses—did you get taken into the rose garden out beyond the ballroom terrace? Those pointers in the kennels are desired all over the world-that’s the finest strain anywhere. We grow and ship two varieties of apples he developed. So it goes, all over the estate. He made things, new things. He improved what he found. People talk about Mendel. My father looked through windows that Mendel didn’t even know were there.”
We were rolling softly along a dirt road between scrub woods and a pasture fenced with woven wire. From the woods, pheasants and grouse and what I took to be chukars watched us without flying. The pasture on the other side was humped with dozens of feeding hares as big as dogs. Everything was as Eigil said—nature improved, cultivated as carefully as his bacon hogs and pine plantings. Even the scrub woods were carefully cultivated scrub woods, the perfect game covert. And then as we rolled slowly and he talked about his father, with his eyes straight ah
ead and his jaw bunched up, he stepped suddenly on the brake. A buck, or stag I suppose they would call him, had just stepped out onto the bank of a ditch a hundred yards ahead.
“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 wi
thout 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?”