Short Stories 1927-1956 (96 page)

It had advanced from strength to strength, and since it appealed to such members of the public as have leisure for activities of this nature, and also to those who can afford, as it were, to refrain from certain articles of diet, luxuries, dainties, because their means provide an ample field of selection elsewhere. Indeed the great majority of its members were of the leisured and moneyed classes – those who not only admire the pig
per
se
and so wish to – as well as
ought
to – refrain from eating him, and those on whom this entails no violent self-sacrifice. The ardent in action, that is, may be
shockingly tepid in motive. Even a by-election or a prize-fight may be proof enough of that …

The years, alas, had brought their sacrifices. There had always been a curious hint in Jimmie’s eye that he was not long for this world. The faintest cloud of a true inward grief and sadness passed over the Chairman’s face as memory of this old loss returned to him.

Sir Andrew was not ‘musical’ by nature. Even his racial enthusiasm for the bagpipes was mainly psychological. His younger daughter, Jeannie, however, was being taught to use the viola, and when, one sociable tea-time, he had referred casually to a rival colleague as ‘fit after all, only to play
second
fiddle’, she had intervened, with, ‘But Daddy, darling, that is one of the most beautiful instruments in the
whole
orchestra. It’s like the stop on the organ which is just like the human voice.’

In both ways, he now reflected, Jimmie had triumphed. Maybe in part
because
Jimmie had never been able to free his memory of the spirited little porker who had
looked
at Andy that far-away morning, and had yet trotted on to its fate, he had never seemed
happy
at these annual reunions. Albeit it would be impossible to compute how many pigs had escaped being Sorbeaued in their youth – even if many of these had lived on, only to be slaughtered in their maturity, a fate common to so many of us. But this had been largely on account of pure affection for Jimmie. The feminine
members
of the Society loved Jimmie. And tears had all but crept out of Sir Andrew’s eyes, sitting up there so conspicuously on the platform, and yet seemingly at his ease, as he thought of him – of Jimmie, and of the old, old days when the Society was little better than a remote ideal; Jimmie with his almost cherry-black, wild, far-away eyes, his flaming temper, sudden rages and matchless pluck. His all but hysterical enthusiasm, and those sudden unplumbable desolating dumps – a friend so true and generous and
affectionate
; for ever borrowing, but never sorrowing; and sometimes paying back in the oddest of fashions, whether or not they were as welcome to his creditor as just simple cash would have been.

Sir Andrew had never reflected until this very moment whether his own remoter past bore the faintest resemblance to Shakespeare’s ‘carcanet’. If it had, then Jimmie, he would instantly have admitted, had been its
mistress-jewel
.
Mistress
rather than ‘master’ because Jimmie had possessed that
half-secret
something which a boy may inherit straight from a passionate and impulsive mother. And Jimmie’s mother, as Andy knew, had died young.

The Society had done its best to show their feelings. Thirty-five of its members – many of them bearing floral tributes – and (in spite of its being at Bournemouth) had personally attended the funeral ceremony. It was an expression of their affection and regret.
One
of them, a very old lady, as well as an ‘original’ member and shareholder – at the last moment
tremblingly 
stepped forward to the very edge of the unhappy cavity and herself dropped into it a minute piglet in pure gold – which immediately concealed itself from view beneath the verger’s sprinkling of ‘dust and ashes’.

Had Jimmie lived until
this
Annual Meeting, it would have been deferred for a while, and for the tens present at his funeral there might well have been hundreds.

It had never entered the mind of the Society to consider what would happen when its ultimate aims had been achieved. As a matter of fact at no time had there ever been any need for this. The Society showed not the faintest promise of attaining its ultimate aims, and – as almost
instantaneously
Sir Andrew’s inward eye coursed over previous reunions, resembling lamp-posts beading the darkness in the long road of Time – this particular fact, though it certainly was not what still remained the secret of his daylong disquietude, a little troubled him.

It was seven years since the Society had reached its zenith. Since then it had not exactly declined – it had settled. The younger generation, cryptic creatures, were not coming along quite so eagerly as they should. The annual statistics which the speaker had already been rather rapidly citing, had been proof enough of that. And he had entirely refrained from
mentioning
other available statistics which revealed that the annual national sacrifice of pigs far from being static was rapidly increasing. That may be due, Sir Andrew had been ruminating, largely to the ‘Eat More Pork’
crusade
, despite its having latterly brought the Society a few new members. It might be owing also in part to the increase of population. In part, since rising wages had given an edge to the ‘Bacon for British Breakfasts’ slogan. More pork may have been consumed too by unaccustomed gluttons of this meat, or by mere distasters or detractors of the animal. Heathen of this order were exceedingly difficult to wean from their habits.

On the other hand there was the somewhat eerie possibility that certain of his fellow members and associates – a few of them actually present
perhaps
– habitually refrained from pork, either because they had no taste for it, not the faintest hankering after it, or, no less simple, because it disagreed with them.
This
was a question, however, he would never deign to face. Beyond that, and here cynicism soured and poisoned the matter, was it conceivable that, in spite of donations, subscriptions, and an unceasingly ardent expression of interest and zeal, were many (or any) of them (in private) treacherously continuing to consume their full share? Pork strictly
en
famille
?
Secret ham and baconism orgies? Bedroom porkists? And so reaping mutual moral respect and admiration at no expense to themselves?

Judge others as you would be judged, had been a declared rather than an innate axiom even in Andy’s younger mind. As Sir Andrew, he was ageing, and the elderly are apt to err in the direction of worldly wisdom and, above
all, of
caution,
masked as sagacity. He detested these reflections even in the act of admitting them.

Besides, would he not presently ‘be gone’ himself? Let alone ‘persons’, Death is no respecter of personages – nor for that matter of pigs. Another Chairman must some day take this very chair he now amply occupied in his stead. And in the inexorable course of time, one such who had ‘never heard of Joseph’. Meanwhile, how had he himself come to admit and even to tolerate the notion that his life’s work, although it could not possibly have been wasted, had fallen short of its full fruition? With quivering chin, he muffled a profound yawn with his pocket handkerchief and – like an idling schoolboy, gently oscillating on his sister’s swing in the family orchard – continued to day-dream.

Few things in modern life had pleased him better than the counsel of ‘Safety First’ – a sort of second cousin of course to ‘Out of the frying pan …’, and a distant relative of ‘Look before …’ Years ago the Society’s Council of the day had decided, though not quite unanimously, against drawing within its orbit other familiar and meritorious inmates of the domestic farmyard – Calf, Sheep, Lamb, Rabbit, Turkey, Goose, Duck, Chicken, Pigeon, Guinea-fowl. Discretion had won the day. Pig, the whole Pig, and nothing but the Pig had remained the Society’s specific official protégé. After all, the Society’s main, its consuming incentive was a natural central and condensed sympathy, a fervent fellow-feeling; rather than any ethical or aesthetic ideal.

So Sir Andrew might have continued to lull his mind with day-dreams into the very middle of Lord Sounders’s peroration – which, since he had composed it – he already knew all but by heart. But at that moment (as with the sleeper who is awakened by the
stopping
of his clock) his Lordship gave utterance to a minute statement entirely off his own bat – a sort of brisk little cut to leg. Basking in his rambling reverie, Sir Andrew however caught but one brief sentence, which, nonetheless, abruptly brought his
slumbering
brains to
life –
a life resembling some little Etna in violent eruption. How harmlessly the sentence had begun: ‘No,’ had said the speaker, a little unctuously perhaps, ‘I cannot profess to be anything approaching a
specialist
in this matter. I have heard of the astonishingly youthful Mrs Beaton (mild amusement) and of her notorious hare (much amusement) but am no master of how the victim should be jugged (loud laughter). But what
matter
? Have we not as ever in our midst this morning, that Tower of Strength – our Chairman? Simple though this question just presented to me is, surely it should be resolved by our fountain head. Sir Andrew! He is of age. Ask him.’

Sir Andrew’s eyelids very exquisitely widened. His lips fell a
hair’s-breadth
apart. His massive head jerked back in his chair – well, say a
centimetre
.
What the –
could
the question have been? His mind practically fell into ruins, e.g. ‘What, Mr Chairman,
is
actually
in
our Product?
Our
“Sorbo”?’ Incredible fact, it had never been asked before. Still more
incredible
, Sir Andrew had clean forgotten what
was.
In the passage of years every single detail of the work of pure genius – the magic recipe, the magic formula, which poor Jimmie had concocted and which only by pure assumption was still actually in operation, had abandoned him. He could no more at this moment have separated the ‘Sorbo’ from its contents or listed its differentia from the Sorbeau, than he could have presented Lord Sounders with his well-worn soul on a charger. Ruin, as they say, stared him in the face, and, by good fortune, there and then sent him off into a faint! He fell back in his chair. Striped trousers, morning coat, claw-pearled cravat became merely the carapace of a small modicum of the enormous
Unconscious
. He was inundated with smelling salts, and nearly drowned with water, and all but suffocated with smouldering brown paper. But – how odd a paradox! – in some exotic fashion he had definitely saved his bacon.

Dr Iggatt

Dr Iggatt
*

Doctor Iggatt’s evening surgery hour was from seven to eight, and any
observant
patient could tell how long the doctor had kept him waiting simply by one glance at his hair. It grew over his head very much as if it were
pretending
to be a wig; and owing to his habit of thrusting his fingers through it when listening, the longer he was at work the more dishevelled it became. On this particular evening his work was done.

Thin clouds were racing over a half-moon – the rain had but just ceased to fall – when, the scarecrow figure of Dr Iggatt, in its small
pepper-and
-salt jacket appeared at his front door to bid, as he supposed, his last patient, good-night. He watched him for a moment or two, mildly, and without the least interest, then once more thrusting his stumpy hand over his cranium, he turned back into his consulting room preparatory to making his evening meal.

It was not till then he noticed, in the long gloomy room beyond, that yet another fellow-creature was waiting to be attended to. A queerish creature too, to judge from appearances. A rather ungainly man in dark, loose-fitting clothes, standing bolt upright and immobile, with just three fingers of his right hand resting on the corner of the adjoining table, and his hat (a ‘high’
hat) and kid gloves in the other, almost as if in an attitude of gallantry, pressed to his hip.

‘Aha,’ said Dr Iggatt involuntarily, but not aloud. ‘I am afraid the maid didn’t mention that you were here.’

‘My name is Laman,’ said the stranger.

‘Pray come in,’ said Dr Iggatt, followed by what really at last appeared to be his last patient for this evening. Dr Iggatt sat down at his table, and entered Mr Laman’s name in his book. ‘And address?’ he murmured.

‘4 The Grove,’ said Mr Laman, after a seemingly profitable pause and with stress on the last word.

‘Ah, yes, thank you,’ said Dr Iggatt, and revolved himself once more in his patent chair. Mr Laman then proceeded to explain that he had sought Dr Iggatt’s advice solely on account of one unfortunate disability. He was an extremely bad sleeper. Seated there on the bench, his tall hat now on his left knee, and that long face angling downwards, so to speak, towards his chin, and his thick sweep of black hair, longish nose, and eyes only darker in themselves than the deep dark sockets in which they dwelt – his general appearance certainly corroborated his complaint. Not that he appeared to be complaining with any bitterness, or even with much interest. He was holding himself perfectly erect, and merely stating his case.

As Dr Iggatt lifted his head a little to observe him better in the
incandescent
gaslight, the actual thought, How devilishly odd it is that being too much
awake
in a world so rich and abundant and diversified should have such questionable results – no such thought actually occurred to him. But a good many others did, and every one of them suggested to a more or less automatically professional mind that it was high time Mr Laman exercised a period of unconsciousness.

‘You have no other symptoms to suggest?’ he remarked with that curious burbling voice of his, and the odd little jerk of his large tousled head to one side.

‘I am complaining of nothing, Dr Iggatt,’ said his patient. ‘All that I am asking you is if you will be kind enough to prescribe a really efficacious soporific; and if you would please give me your prescription in writing.’

If anything, Dr Iggatt looked at him more benevolently than ever, though his face had set a little with the kind of attention a thrush shows on a lawn as it pauses hearkening betwixt worm and worm.

‘You say a really efficacious sedative,’ he remarked amiably. The stranger lifted his hand a little, his serene yet tortured eyes fixed unswervingly on the doctor’s face. ‘I was not suggesting for one moment that you would
prescribe
anything that in ordinary circumstances would not be immediately effective. But mine, Dr Iggatt, is a rather exceptional case. The sleep I want has not been mine for seven years or more.’

‘And he is now – and he is now about forty-one,’ thought Dr Iggatt. ‘May I inquire what the cause of the insomnia is?’

‘Ah, there,’ said Mr Laman, ‘I must ask you to forbear. Will it be
sufficient
if I say that it was not due to any particular illness, nor, as might be said, to any particular shock. All I would add is that there are very few
prescriptions
of the nature which I have not experimented with. And none has been successful.’

‘I assume then that anything already in tabloid form will not serve?’ The stranger nodded.

Dr Iggatt gave him one last close but well-mannered scrutiny. ‘Well, Mr Laman, yours is rather an unusual request. May I feel your pulse? … Thank you. And tongue? … Thank you.’ He turned about in his chair and engaged for a moment or two in writing. Having blotted his paper, folded it, placed it in an envelope, he once more turned to his patient. ‘That is one dose, Mr Laman. It is in no sense dangerous as such. And it is not necessary to warn a man of your experience that these things must be taken with a certain amount of caution.’

The stranger accepted the envelope, with the ghost of a bow, and tucked it carefully into an inner pocket. There was a brief pause, occupied by the gas-jet with a remote hissing whistle – during which the professionalism that had stood between them, gently evaporated. Dr Iggatt had really not taken his eyes off that shrouded face, though he was accustomed to
practically
every eccentricity of which the human face is capable. Mr Laman, on the other hand, had fallen apparently into vacant thought – certainly there was little indication in that abstracted eye of one who was at last about to enjoy a long refreshing sleep.

With a trace almost of shyness, Dr Iggatt put out his hand. ‘I am sure I hope, er – Mr Laman, that the prescription will be of some service.
Insomnia
is an obstinate enemy. And every attention of course should be paid to one’s general health. Merely old grandmotherly remedies you know: gruel, bread and milk, onion porridge – I don’t pooh-pooh them.’

The stranger once more turned his slow dark eyes away from the doctor’s face, to fix them on the spirited engraving of the stag at bay. ‘You are very kind indeed,’ he said. ‘But one may have given up hope – if you will forgive me for saying so – without being actually in a state of despair.’

With yet another almost demure little bow, he stooped and took up his hat and gloves, and took his leave.

Dr Iggatt closed the door sharply after him; returned to his bright-lit room, where now the faint trickling of his water-tap was engaging in a duet with the gas-bracket, paused a moment, trod lightly across the floor and gently drew aside a corner of the blind. The lank figure of his visitor was already approaching the gate. In the midst of a semi-circle of metal upon it
hung a lamp, casting its light chiefly among the green leaves of a lime tree that grew beside the pavement of the road beyond. Without even glancing behind him, the insomniac swiftly withdrew Dr Iggatt’s envelope from his pocket, pulled out the prescription folded within, and examined it under the rays of the lamp. With what was uncommonly like a slow shrug of his shoulders, he scrunched up the fragment of paper in his hand, and flung it into the roadway. Then turning abruptly to the left, in a moment he had disappeared, leaving nothing but the still lamp shining up into the vacancy of the linden tree behind him.

It is odd how, when some men vanish from sight, it is almost as if they had never been in the place which they vanish from. Dr Iggatt had noticed this peculiarity without remarking it. He had turned from the window with the little smile on his plain honest features which invariably accompanied any slight show of eccentricity in his patients. He was a man without the slightest trace of vanity, yet perfectly and tacitly confident of his
commonsense
, of his large experience, and of the general valuelessness of the
exceptional
. ‘Threw it away, by Gad,’ he muttered to himself; ‘as if he knew …’ He bent, read over the terms of the scorned prescription, shut up the book with a slap, turned out his light, and, being for that evening a man bereft of his sister and housekeeper, went in at once to his dinner.