Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now
they were standing, all six of them--Henry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Denis,
Gombauld, Anne, and Mary--by the low wall of the piggery, looking into
one of the styes.
“This is a good sow,” said Henry Wimbush. “She had a litter of fourteen.
“Fourteen?” Mary echoed incredulously. She turned astonished blue eyes
towards Mr. Wimbush, then let them fall onto the seething mass of elan
vital that fermented in the sty.
An immense sow reposed on her side in the middle of the pen. Her round,
black belly, fringed with a double line of dugs, presented itself to the
assault of an army of small, brownish-black swine. With a frantic greed
they tugged at their mother’s flank. The old sow stirred sometimes
uneasily or uttered a little grunt of pain. One small pig, the runt,
the weakling of the litter, had been unable to secure a place at the
banquet. Squealing shrilly, he ran backwards and forwards, trying to
push in among his stronger brothers or even to climb over their tight
little black backs towards the maternal reservoir.
“There ARE fourteen,” said Mary. “You’re quite right. I counted. It’s
extraordinary.”
“The sow next door,” Mr. Wimbush went on, “has done very badly. She only
had five in her litter. I shall give her another chance. If she does no
better next time, I shall fat her up and kill her. There’s the boar,”
he pointed towards a farther sty. “Fine old beast, isn’t he? But he’s
getting past his prime. He’ll have to go too.”
“How cruel!” Anne exclaimed.
“But how practical, how eminently realistic!” said Mr. Scogan. “In this
farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed,
make them work, and when they’re past working or breeding or begetting,
slaughter them.”
“Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty,” said Anne.
With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar’s
long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself
within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious
sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment.
The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey powdery scurf.
“What a pleasure it is,” said Denis, “to do somebody a kindness. I
believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being
scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense or
trouble...”
A gate slammed; there was a sound of heavy footsteps.
“Morning, Rowley!” said Henry Wimbush.
“Morning, sir,” old Rowley answered. He was the most venerable of
the labourers on the farm--a tall, solid man, still unbent, with grey
side-whiskers and a steep, dignified profile. Grave, weighty in his
manner, splendidly respectable, Rowley had the air of a great English
statesman of the mid-nineteenth century. He halted on the outskirts of
the group, and for a moment they all looked at the pigs in a silence
that was only broken by the sound of grunting or the squelch of a sharp
hoof in the mire. Rowley turned at last, slowly and ponderously and
nobly, as he did everything, and addressed himself to Henry Wimbush.
“Look at them, sir,” he said, with a motion of his hand towards the
wallowing swine. “Rightly is they called pigs.”
“Rightly indeed,” Mr. Wimbush agreed.
“I am abashed by that man,” said Mr. Scogan, as old Rowley plodded off
slowly and with dignity. “What wisdom, what judgment, what a sense of
values! ‘Rightly are they called swine.’ Yes. And I wish I could, with
as much justice, say, ‘Rightly are we called men.’”
They walked on towards the cowsheds and the stables of the cart-horses.
Five white geese, taking the air this fine morning, even as they were
doing, met them in the way. They hesitated, cackled; then, converting
their lifted necks into rigid, horizontal snakes, they rushed off in
disorder, hissing horribly as they went. Red calves paddled in the dung
and mud of a spacious yard. In another enclosure stood the bull,
massive as a locomotive. He was a very calm bull, and his face wore an
expression of melancholy stupidity. He gazed with reddish-brown eyes at
his visitors, chewed thoughtfully at the tangible memories of an earlier
meal, swallowed and regurgitated, chewed again. His tail lashed savagely
from side to side; it seemed to have nothing to do with his impassive
bulk. Between his short horns was a triangle of red curls, short and
dense.
“Splendid animal,” said Henry Wimbush. “Pedigree stock. But he’s getting
a little old, like the boar.”
“Fat him up and slaughter him,” Mr. Scogan pronounced, with a delicate
old-maidish precision of utterance.
“Couldn’t you give the animals a little holiday from producing
children?” asked Anne. “I’m so sorry for the poor things.”
Mr. Wimbush shook his head. “Personally,” he said, “I rather like seeing
fourteen pigs grow where only one grew before. The spectacle of so much
crude life is refreshing.”
“I’m glad to hear you say so,” Gombauld broke in warmly. “Lots of life:
that’s what we want. I like pullulation; everything ought to increase
and multiply as hard as it can.”
Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children--Anne ought to
have them, Mary ought to have them--dozens and dozens. He emphasised his
point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull’s leather flanks.
Mr. Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and
Denis to little Denises. The bull turned his head to see what was
happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned
back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility
was odious, unnatural, a sin against life. Life, life, and still more
life. The ribs of the placid bull resounded.
Standing with his back against the farmyard pump, a little apart, Denis
examined the group. Gombauld, passionate and vivacious, was its centre.
The others stood round, listening--Henry Wimbush, calm and polite
beneath his grey bowler; Mary, with parted lips and eyes that shone with
the indignation of a convinced birth-controller. Anne looked on through
half-shut eyes, smiling; and beside her stood Mr. Scogan, bolt upright
in an attitude of metallic rigidity that contrasted strangely with that
fluid grace of hers which even in stillness suggested a soft movement.
Gombauld ceased talking, and Mary, flushed and outraged, opened her
mouth to refute him. But she was too slow. Before she could utter a
word Mr. Scogan’s fluty voice had pronounced the opening phrases of a
discourse. There was no hope of getting so much as a word in edgeways;
Mary had perforce to resign herself.
“Even your eloquence, my dear Gombauld,” he was saying--“even your
eloquence must prove inadequate to reconvert the world to a belief in
the delights of mere multiplication. With the gramophone, the cinema,
and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented
the world with another gift, more precious even than these--the means of
dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now
an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be
broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows?
the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it
optimistically. Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward,
Swan of Lichfield, experimented--and, for all their scientific ardour,
failed--our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal
generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state
incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with
the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society,
sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros,
beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from
flower to flower through a sunlit world.”
“It sounds lovely,” said Anne.
“The distant future always does.”
Mary’s china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever,
were fixed on Mr. Scogan. “Bottles?” she said. “Do you really think so?
Bottles...”