Last Spring I was discussing food with our local doctor. Last Spring
it was quite a favourite topic.
"Now," I said, "we can manage to scratch along somehow. But next
year..."
The Doctor, a hearty man, gave me a smashing blow on the shoulder. "I
have it!" he trumpeted. "We'll start a Patriot Pig Club."
Before he left I found myself an important pillar of the scheme.
Pillars, you know, are the parts of an edifice that bear the weight.
Their function is to be sat upon by the arches. In this case the
arches were Jones the doctor and Perkins the butcher.
The Committee began sitting. I put five pounds into the preliminary
pool and promised them all my pig-swill. I know I did, because the
Doctor came straight from the meeting to my house to tell me I had,
and to collect the cheque.
The pigs arrived. I myself and a number of other enthusiasts turned
out to welcome them. The Doctor, I remember, made a happy little
speech, and we all laughed a lot. The Committee were very pleased with
themselves. They _were_ dear little chaps--the pigs, I mean--very
small, of course, but that gave me the opening for what was
undoubtedly the most successful sally of the afternoon. Someone said
they weighed five pounds apiece. "One pound per pound," I remarked.
A week later the Doctor called for my second instalment. "Pig going
strong," he chattered gaily while I wrote out the cheque; "best of a
good litter--bust its pink ribbon yesterday; twice the weight it was
when it came."
It was on the tip of my tongue to repeat my witticism, which was still
true, but I refrained.
I paid the first dozen five-pound instalments without comment. Up till
then I had been fully occupied in studying how FOCH was getting on
with the other sort of pig over there. But now I began to think.
I was thinking heavily when I put on my hat, but when I reached the
premises of the Patriot Pigs I was thinking things that I prefer not
to talk about. To begin with, they were housing the poor little beasts
in a place you wouldn't dream of inflicting on the poorest labourer.
And the overcrowding! And the dirt! And the pigs themselves! They were
positively uncanny. There was something almost human about them. They
were all heads and no bodies. It was just as though the other half of
the wits of the half-witted boy who looked after them had distributed
itself among the whole herd. I could have wept when I thought how
my purse and my swill-tub had been emptied to keep such puny
monstrosities in the land of the living.
I had my pig taken out and weighed. He turned the scale at forty-eight
pounds.
A week later I went and weighed him again; he had shrunk to forty.
I am a man of action. In a flash my mind was made up. I put him on a
string and led him home.
My wife seemed rather surprised when we entered the drawing-room, but
I hastened to explain.
"I paid five pounds," I said, "for a five-pound pig. Since then I 've
paid fifty-five pounds more, and I have been led to expect, that at
the very least the pig was keeping pace. But it isn't. The sterling
is increasing by leaps and bounds; the avoirdupois is not even
stationary. That's not counting several tons of swill that ought to
be inside him but aren't. It can't go on." I paused and added darkly,
"That pig shall not return."
"But surely you're not going to have him live with _us_, Henry?"