“So you have the secret of life?” I said. “You’re four hundred years old, and wounds can’t kill you. It only takes a certain mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, turpentine and honey. . . . Is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Corporal Cuckoo.
“Well, didn’t you think of buying the ingredients and mixing them yourself?”
“Well, yes, I did. The doctor had said in his notes how the digestive he’d given me and Captain Le Rat had been kept in a bottle in the dark for two years. So I made a wine bottle full of the stuff and kept it covered up away from the light for two years, wherever I went. Then me and some friends of mine got into a bit of trouble, and one of my friends, a guy called Pierre Solitude got a pistol bullet in the chest. I tried the stuff on him, but he died. At the same time I got a sword-thrust in the side. Believe me or not, that healed up in nine hours, inside and out, of its own accord. You can make what you like of that. . . . It all came out of something to do with robbing a church.
“I got out of France, and lived as best I could for about a year until I found myself in Salzburg. That was about four years after the battle in the Pass of Suze. Well, in Salzburg I came across some guy who told me that the greatest doctor in the world was in town. I remember that doctor’s name, because, well, who wouldn’t? It was Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He’d been a big shot in Basle a few years before. He was otherwise known as Paracelsus. He wasn’t doing much then.’ He hung around, most of the time, drinking himself crazy in a wine cellar called The Three Doves. I met him there one night—it must have been in 1541—and said my piece when nobody else was listening.” Corporal Cuckoo laughed harshly.
I said: “Paracelsus was a very great man. He was one of the great doctors of the world.”
“Oh, hell, he was only a fat old drunk. Certainly was higher than a kite when I saw him. Yelling his head off, banging on the table with an empty can. When I told him about this stuff, in strict confidence, he got madder than ever, called me everything he could think of—and believe me, he could think of plenty—and bent the can over my head. Broke the skin just where the hair starts. I was going to take a poke at him, but then he calmed down a bit and said in Swiss-German, I think it was, ‘Experiment, experiment! A demonstration! A demonstration! If you come back tomorrow and show me that cut perfectly healed, charlatan, I’ll listen to you.’ Then he burst out laughing, and I thought to myself, I’ll give you something to laugh at, bub. So I took a walk, and that little cut healed up and was gone inside the hour. Then I went back to show him. I’d sort of taken a liking to the old soak, see? Well, when I get back to this tavern there’s Doctor von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus, if you like, lying on his back dying of a dagger stab. He’d gotten into a fight with a woodcarver, and this woodcarver was as soused as he was, see? And so he let this Paracelsus have it. I never did have no luck, and I never will. We might have got along together, me and him: I only talked to him for half an hour, but so help me, you knew who was the boss when he was there, alright! Oh well, that was that.”
“And then?” I asked.
“I’m just giving you the outline, see? If you want the whole story it’s going to cost you plenty,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I bummed around Salzburg for a year, got whipped out of town for being a beggar, got the hell out of it to Switzerland, and signed on with a bunch of paid soldiers, what they called condottieri, under a Swiss colonel, and did a bit of fighting in Italy. There was supposed to be good pickings there. But somebody stole my little bit of loot, and we never even got half our pay in the end. Then I went to France, and met a sea captain by the name of Bordelais who was carrying brandy to England and was short of a man. A fast little English pirate boat stopped us in the Channel, and grabbed the cargo, cut Bordelais’ throat and slung the crew overboard—all except me. The limey captain, Hawker, liked the look of me. I joined the crew, but I never was much of a sailor. That hooker—hell, she wasn’t bigger than one of the lifeboats on this ship—was called the Harry, after the King of England, Henry VIII, the one they made a movie about. Still, we did alright. We specialized in French brandy: stopped the froggy boats in mid-channel, grabbed the cargo, shoved the captain and crew overboard. ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ old Hawker always said. Well, I jumped the ship somewhere near Romney, with money in my pocket—I didn’t like the sea, see? I’d had half a dozen nasty wounds, but they couldn’t kill me. I was worried about what’d happen if I went overboard. You could shoot me through the head and not kill me, though it’d hurt like hell for a few days while the wound healed itself. But I just hated to think of what would happen if somebody tried to drown me. Get it? I’d have to wait under water till the fishes ate me, or till I just sort of naturally rotted away—alive all the time. And that’s not nice.
“Well, as I was saying, I quit at Romney and got to London. There was an oldish widow with a linen-draper’s business near London Bridge. She had a bit of dough, and she took a fancy to me. Well, what the hell? I got married to her. Lived with her about thirteen years. She was a holy terror, at first, but I corrected her. Her name was Rose, and she died just about when Queen Elizabeth got to be queen of England. That was around 1558, I guess. She was scared of me—Rose, I mean, not Queen Elizabeth, because I was always playing around with honey, and eggs, and turpentine, and oil of roses. She got older and older, and I stayed exactly the same as I was when I married her, and she didn’t like that one little bit. She thought I was a witch. Said I had the philosophers’ stone, and knew the secret of perpetual youth. Hah, so help me, she wasn’t so damn far wrong. She wanted me to let her in on it. But, as I was saying, I kept working on those notes of Doctor Paré’s, and I mixed honey, turpentine, oil of roses, and yolks of eggs, just as he’d done, in the right proportions, at the proper temperature, and kept the mixture bottled in the dark for the right length of time . . . and still it didn’t work.”
I asked Corporal Cuckoo: “How did you find out that your mixture didn’t work?”
“Well, I tried it on Rose. She kept at me until I did. Every now and again we had kind of a lovers’ quarrel, and I tried the digestive on her afterwards. But she took as long to heal as any ordinary person would have taken. The interesting thing was, that I not only couldn’t be killed by a wound—I couldn’t get any older! I couldn’t catch any diseases! I couldn’t die! And you can figure this for yourself—if some stuff that cured any sort of wound was worth a fortune, what would it be worth to me if I had something that would make people stay young and healthy forever? Eh?” He paused.
I said: “Interesting speculation. You might have given some of the stuff, for example, to Shakespeare. He got better and better as he went on. I wonder what he would have arrived at by now? I don’t know, though. If Shakespeare had swallowed an elixir of life and perpetual youth when he was very young, he would have remained as he was; young and undeveloped. Maybe he might still be holding horses outside theatres . . . or whistling for taxis, a stage-struck country boy of undeveloped genius. If, on the other hand, he had taken the stuff when he wrote, say, The Tempest—there he’d be still, burnt up, worn out, world-weary, tied to death and unable to die. . . . On the other hand, of course, some debauched rake of the Elizabethan period could go on being a debauched rake at high pressure, for centuries and centuries. But, oh my God, how bored he would get after a hundred years or so, and how he’d long for death! That would be dangerous stuff, that stuff of yours, Corporal Cuckoo!”