When Kelly was gone to practise on his accordion,—he had opened a dancing academy at Fa’a,—the octogenarian asked me if I had read of the recent achievements of the scientists who were making the old young. He elaborated on the discoveries and experiments of Professor Leonard Huxley in England with thyroid gland injections, of Voronoff in France with the grafting of interstitial glands of monkeys, and of Eugen Steinach in Austria and Roux in Germany, with germ glands and X-rays. Steinach, especially, he discoursed on, and drew a magazine picture of him from his Prince Albert. The Vienna savant had a cordon of whiskers that made him resemble Stroganoff, and his eyes in the photograph peered through all one’s disguises.
“That is what grates me,” said Stroganoff. “I am far from all these worth-while things, these men of brain. I knew Ilya Ilich Metchnikoff before he became director of the Pasteur Institute. Here I am a rotting hulk. In the Caucasus I had kephir, and I used to carry kephir grains, and in America I, at least, could have kumiss or Ilya Ilich’s lait caille. Look! I came here as Ponce de León to Florida to find youth, or to keep from growing older; in a word to escape anno Domini.”
I turned and looked at him. He was a venerable figure, but there was no sign of eighty years in him. Rid of that white, hirsute mask, so associated with age, Stroganoff might have been twenty years younger. I said so, but it did not allay his yearning.
“I am well enough,” he said, “because I have not dissipated for thirty years. I turned a leaf, as did Leo Nikolaievitch, after ‘War and Peace.’ Now I feel myself slipping into the grave.”
He gazed ruminantly away from the lagoon to the pool of Psyche, where the Tahitian women squatted on their shapely haunches and thumped their clothes.
“See,” he said earnestly. “I am old and useless. Why should not Steinach or the others make the grand experiment on me? If they succeed, very good; if they fail, there is no loss. They say those glands make a man over, no matter what his age. I offer myself freely. I am not afraid of death. Me, I am a philosopher.”
He spoke excitedly. His eyes were fixed on distance, and I followed them.
Auro, the Golden One, as her name meant, had been washing her muslin slips in the pool of Psyche, and now stood in the entrance to it. She was for a fleeting second in her pareu only, her tunic raised above her head to pull on, and her enravishing form disclosed from her waist to her piquant face, over which tumbled her opulent locks.
It flashed on me that, wise and old as he was, the spectrum of the philosopher’s soul had all the colors of the ignorant and the young. I looked from the nymphs of the pool to his darkening eyes, and I had a revelation of the persistence of common humanity in the most learned and the most philosophical. My castigation of myself for not buying his steamship ticket ceased in a moment, though not the less did I continue to enjoy his fount of learning and experience.