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
22
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 carthorses.
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
23
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
24
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..."
25
CHAPTER VI.
Mr. Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He
was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In
his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but
was comforted by reading in Balzac's "Louis Lambert" that all the world's
great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and
obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious
functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the
more closely these two organs approach one another; argal...It was
convincing.
Mr. Barbecue-Smith belonged to the old school of journalists. He
sported a leonine head with a greyish-black mane of oddly unappetising
hair brushed back from a broad but low forehead. And somehow he
always seemed slightly, ever so slightly, soiled. In younger days he had
gaily called himself a Bohemian. He did so no longer. He was a
teacher now, a kind of prophet. Some of his books of comfort and
spiritual teaching were in their hundred and twentieth thousand.
Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. He had never been
to Crome before; she showed him round the house. Mr. Barbecue-Smith
was full of admiration.
"So quaint, so old-world," he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather
unctuous voice.
Priscilla praised his latest book. "Splendid, I thought it was," she
said in her large, jolly way.
"I'm happy to think you found it a comfort," said Mr. Barbecue- Smith.
"Oh, tremendously! And the bit about the Lotus Pool--I thought that
so beautiful."
"I knew you would like that. It came to me, you know, from
without." He waved his hand to indicate the astral world.
They went out into the garden for tea. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was duly
introduced.
"Mr. Stone is a writer too," said Priscilla, as she introduced Denis.
"Indeed!" Mr. Barbecue-Smith smiled benignly, and, looking up at
26
Denis with an expression of Olympian condescension, "And what sort of
things do you write?"
Denis was furious, and, to make matters worse, he felt himself
blushing hotly. Had Priscilla no sense of proportion? She was putting
them in the same category--Barbecue-Smith and himself. They were both
writers, they both used pen and ink. To Mr. Barbecue-Smith's question
he answered, "Oh, nothing much, nothing," and looked away.
"Mr. Stone is one of our younger poets." It was Anne's voice. He
scowled at her, and she smiled back exasperatingly.
"Excellent, excellent," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith, and he squeezed
Denis's arm encouragingly. "The Bard's is a noble calling."
As soon as tea was over Mr. Barbecue-Smith excused himself; he had
to do some writing before dinner. Priscilla quite understood. The
prophet retired to his chamber.
Mr. Barbecue-Smith came down to the drawing-room at ten to eight.
He was in a good humour, and, as he descended the stairs, he smiled to
himself and rubbed his large white hands together. In the drawing-room
someone was playing softly and ramblingly on the piano. He wondered
who it could be. One of the young ladies, perhaps. But no, it was only
Denis, who got up hurriedly and with some embarrassment as he came
into the room.
"Do go on, do go on," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. "I am very fond of
music."
"Then I couldn't possibly go on," Denis replied. "I only make
noises."
There was a silence. Mr. Barbecue-Smith stood with his back to the
hearth, warming himself at the memory of last winter's fires. He could not
control his interior satisfaction, but still went on smiling to himself. At
last he turned to Denis.
"You write," he asked, "don't you?"
"Well, yes--a little, you know."
"How many words do you find you can write in an hour?"
"I don't think I've ever counted."
"Oh, you ought to, you ought to. It's most important."
27
Denis exercised his memory. "When I'm in good form," he said, "I
fancy I do a twelve-hundred-word review in about four hours. But
sometimes it takes me much longer."
Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded. "Yes, three hundred words an hour at
your best." He walked out into the middle of the room, turned round on
his heels, and confronted Denis again. "Guess how many words I wrote
this evening between five and half-past seven."
"I can't imagine."
"No, but you must guess. Between five and half-past seven-- that's
two and a half hours."
"Twelve hundred words," Denis hazarded.
"No, no, no." Mr. Barbecue-Smith's expanded face shone with gaiety.
"Try again."
"Fifteen hundred."
"No."
"I give it up," said Denis. He found he couldn't summon up much
interest in Mr. Barbecue-Smith's writing.
"Well, I'll tell you. Three thousand eight hundred."
Denis opened his eyes. "You must get a lot done in a day," he said.
Mr. Barbecue-Smith suddenly became extremely confidential. He
pulled up a stool to the side of Denis's arm-chair, sat down in it, and began
to talk softly and rapidly.
"Listen to me," he said, laying his hand on Denis's sleeve. "You want
to make your living by writing; you're young, you're inexperienced. Let
me give you a little sound advice."
What was the fellow going to do? Denis wondered: give him an
introduction to the editor of "John o' London's Weekly", or tell him where
he could sell a light middle for seven guineas? Mr. Barbecue-Smith
patted his arm several times and went on.
"The secret of writing," he said, breathing it into the young man's ear-"
the secret of writing is Inspiration."
Denis looked at him in astonishment.
"Inspiration..." Mr. Barbecue-Smith repeated.
"You mean the native wood-note business?"
28
Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded.
"Oh, then I entirely agree with you," said Denis. "But what if one
hasn't got Inspiration?"
