"You've got it," said Corporal Cuckoo, nodding. "I knew you'd get it."
I was stupefied by the preposterousness of it all, and could only say, with what must have been a silly giggle, "Well, my venerable friend; by all accounts, after four hundred and thirty-odd years of life you ought to be tremendously wise—as full of wisdom, learning, and experience as the British Museum Library."
"Why?" asked Corporal Cuckoo.
"Why? Well," I said, "it's an old story. A philosopher, let us say, or a scientist, doesn't really begin to learn anything until his life is almost ended. What wouldn't he give for five hundred extra years of life? For five hundred years of life he'd sell his soul, because given that much time, knowledge being power, he could be master of the whole world."
Corporal Cuckoo said, "Baloney! What you say might go for philosophers, and all that. They'd just go on doing what they were interested in, and they might—well—learn how to turn iron into gold, or something. But what about a baseball player, for instance, or a boxer? What would they do with five hundred years? What they were fit to do —swing bats or throw leather! What would you do?"
"Why, of course, you're right, Corporal Cuckoo," I said. "I'd just go on and on banging a typewriter and chucking my money down the drain, so that in five hundred years from now I'd be no wiser and no richer than I am at this moment."
"No, wait a minute," he said, tapping my arm with a finger that felt like a rod of iron, and leering at me shrewdly. "You'd go on writing books and things. You're paid on a percentage basis, so in five hundred years you'd have more than you could spend. But how about me? All I'm fit for is to be in the army. I don't give a damn for philosophy, and all that stuff. It don't mean a thing to me. I'm no wiser now than I was when I was thirty. I never did go in for reading, and all that stuff, and I never will. My ambition is to get me a place like Jack Dempsey's on Broadway."
"I thought you said you wanted to grow roses, and chickens, and bees, and turpentine trees and whatnot," I said.
"Yeahp, that's right."
"How do you reconcile the two? . . . I mean, how does a restaurant on Broadway fit in with the bees and roses et cetera?"
"Well, it's like this ..." said Corporal Cuckoo.
“... I told you about how Doctor Pare healed up my head when it was split open so that my brains were coming out. Well, after I could walk about a bit he let me stay in his house, and I can tell you, he fed me on the fat of the land, though he didn't live any too damn well himself. Yeahp, he looked after me like a son—a hell of lot better than my old man ever looked after me: chickens, eggs in wine, anything I wanted. If I said, `I guess I'd like a pie made with skylarks for dinner,' I had it. If I said, `Doc, this wine is kind of sour,' up came a bottle of Alicante or something. Inside two or three weeks, I was fitter and stronger than I'd ever been before. So then I got kind of restless and said I wanted to go. Well, Doctor Pare said he wanted me to stay. I said to him, `I'm an active man, Doc, and I've got my living to get; and before I got this little crack on the head I heard that there was money to be made in one army or another right now.'
"Well, then Doctor Pare offered me a couple of pieces of gold to stay in his house for another month. I took the money, but I knew then that he was up to something, and I went out of my way to find out. I mean, he was Army Surgeon, and I was nothing but a lousy infantryman. There was a catch in it somewhere, see? So I acted dumb, but I kept my eyes open, and made friends with Jehan, the kid that helped around the doctor's office. This Jehan was a big-eyed, skinny kid, with one leg a bit shorter than the other, and he thought I was a hell of a fellow when I cracked a walnut between two fingers, and lifted up the big table, that must have weighed about five hundred pounds, on my back. This Jehan, he told me he'd always wanted to be a powerful guy like me. But he'd been sick since before he was born, and might not have lived at all if Doctor Pare hadn't saved his life. Well, so I went to work on Jehan, and I found out what the doctor's game was. You know doctors, eh?"
Corporal Cuckoo nudged me, and I said, "Uh uh, go on.”
"Well it seems that up to the time when we got through the Pass of Suze, they'd treated what they called `poisoned wounds' with boiling oil of elder with a dash of what they called Theriac. Theriac was nothing much more than honey and herbs. Well, so it seems that by the time we went up the hill, Doctor Pare had run out of the oil of elder and Theriac, and so, for want of something better, he mixed up what he called a Digestive.
"My commander, Captain Le Rat, the one that got the bullet that smashed up his ankle, was the first one to be dosed with the Digestive. His ankle got better," said Corporal Cuckoo, snapping his fingers, "like that. I was the third or fourth soldier to get a dose of Doctor Pares Digestive. The doc was looking over the battlefield, because he wanted a dead body to cut up on the side. You know what doctors are. This kid Jehan told me he wanted a brain to play around with. Well, there was I, see, with my brains showing. All the doctor had to do was, reach down and help himself. Well, to cut it short, he saw that I was breathing, and wondered how the hell a man could be breathing after he'd got what I had. So he poured some of his Digestive into the hole in my head, tied it up, and watched for developments. I told you what happened then. I came back to life. More than that, the bones in my head grew together. Doctor Ambroise Pare believed he'd got something. So he was keeping me sort of under observation, and making notes.
"I know doctors. Well, anyway, I went to work on Jehan. I said, `Be a good fellow, Jehan, tell a pal what is this Digestive, or whatever your master calls it?'
"Jehan said, `Why, sir, my master makes no secret of it. It is nothing but a mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine.' (I don't mind telling you that, bub, because it's already been printed.)"
I said to Corporal Cuckoo, "I don't know how the devil you come by these curious facts, but I happen to know that they're true. They are available in several histories of medicine. Ambroise Pares Digestive, with which he treated the wounded after the Battle of Turin, was, as you say, nothing but a mixture of oil of roses, egg yolks, and turpentine. And it is also a fact that the first wounded man upon whom he tried it really was Captain Le Rat, in 1537. Pare said at the time, `I dressed his wounds and God healed him.' ... Well?"
"Yeahp," said Corporal Cuckoo, with a sneer. "Sure. Turpentine, oil of roses, egg. That's right. You know the proportions?"
"No, I don't," I said.
"I know you don't, bub. Well, I do. See? And I'll tell you something else. It's not just oil of roses, eggs and turpentine—there was one other thing Doc Pare slipped in in my case, for an experiment—see? And I know what it is."
I said, "Well, go on."
"Well, I could see that this Doctor Ambroise Pare was going to make something out of me, see? So I kept my eyes open, and I waited, and I worked on Jehan, until I found out just where the doctor kept his notebook. I mean, in those days you could get sixty or seventy thousand dollars for a bit of bone they called a `unicorn's horn.' Hell, I mean, if I had something that could just about bring a man back from the dead—draw his bones together and put him on his feet in a week or two, even if his brains were coming out hell, everybody was having a war then, and I could have been rich in a few minutes."
I said, "No doubt about that. What—“
"What the hell—" said Corporal Cuckoo, "what the hell right did he have to use me for a guinea pig? Where would he have been if it hadn't been for me? And where do you think I'd have been after? Out on my neck with two or three gold pieces, while the doctor grabbed the credit and made millions out of it. I wanted to open a place in Paris—girls and everything, see? Could I do that on two or three gold pieces? I ask you! Okay; one night when Doctor Pare and Jehan were out, I took his notebook, slipped out of a window, and got the hell out of it.