"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 all right. 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 Rommey, 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 Rommey 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 Pare's, and I mixed honey, turpentine, oil of roses, and the 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 on at me till I did. Every now and again we had kind of a lovers' quarrel, and I tried the Digestive on her afterward. 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.
"lf, 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, tired 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!"
"Shakespeare?" he said. "Shakespeare? William Shakespeare. I met him. I met a buddy of his when I was fighting in the Netherlands, and he introduced us when we got back to London. William Shakespeare—puffy-faced man, bald on top; used to wave his hands about when he talked. He took an interest in me. We talked a whole lot together."
"What did he say?" I asked.
Corporal Cuckoo replied, "Oh, hell, how can I remember every goddam word? He just asked questions, the same as you do. We just talked."
"And how did he strike you?" I asked.
Corporal Cuckoo considered, and then said, slowly, "The kind of man who counts his change and leaves a nickel tip. ...One of these days I'm going to read his books, but I've never had much time for reading."
I said, "So, I take it that your only interest in Pare's Digestive has been a financial interest. You merely wanted to make money out of it. Is that so?"
"Why, sure," said Corporal Cuckoo. "I've had my shot of the stuff. I'm all right."
"Corporal Cuckoo, has it occurred to you that what you are after is next door to impossible?"
"How's that?"
"Well," I said, "your Pare's Digestive is made of egg yolk, oil of roses, turpentine and honey. Isn't that so?"
"Well, yes. So what? What's impossible about that?"
I said, "You know how a chicken's diet alters the taste of an egg, don't you?"
"Well?"
"What a chicken eats changes not only the taste, but the color of an egg. Any chicken farmer can tell you that. Isn't that so?"
"Well?"
"Well, what a chicken eats goes into the egg, doesn't it—just as the fodder that you feed a cow comes out in the milk? Have you stopped to consider how many different sorts of chickens there have been in the world since the Battle of Turin in 1537, and the varieties of chicken feed they might have pecked up in order to lay their eggs? Have you thought that the egg yolk is only one of four ingredients mixed in Ambroise Pare's Digestive? Is it possible that it has not occurred to you that this one ingredient involves permutations and combinations of several millions of other ingredients?"
Corporal Cuckoo was silent. I went on, "Then take roses. If no two eggs are exactly alike, what about roses? You come from wine-growing country, you say: then you must know that the mere thickness of a wall can separate two entirely different kinds of wine—that a noble vintage may be crushed out of grapes grown less than two feet away from a vine that is good for nothing. The same applies to tobacco. Have you stopped to think of your roses? Roses are pollinated by bees, bees go from flower to flower, making them fertile. Your oil of roses, therefore, embodies an infinity of possible ingredients. Does it not?"
Corporal Cuckoo was still silent. I continued, with a kind of malicious enthusiasm. "You must reflect on these things, Corporal. Take turpentine. It comes out of trees. Even in the sixteenth century there were many known varieties of turpentine—Chian Terebinthine, and what not. But above all, my dear fellow, consider honey! There are more kinds of honey in the world than have ever been categorized. Every honeycomb yields a slightly different honey. You must know that bees living in heather gather and store one kind of honey, while bees living in an apple orchard give us something quite different. It is all honey, of course, but its flavor and quality are variable beyond calculation. Honey varies from hive to hive, Corporal Cuckoo. I say nothing of wild bees' honey."