Short Stories 1927-1956 (94 page)

Pig

Pig
*

It was the Fortieth Annual General Meeting of the S.S.C.P.P., and the hall was thronged. Its five lofty long glazed windows drenched at least three hundred attentive human faces with the low white light of a November
mid-morning
. Nor, happily, was there the least trace of fog; neither in the hall itself, nor in the address now in progress, nor in the audience. Ever and again a wan old Sol had fitfully peered in, timing his intrusions, it seemed, with the occasional sallies of applause. Possibly, he too in his celestial
habitation
was beginning to muse upon his luncheon, one no doubt, as Hamlet has suggested, of less fastidious a kind than that which now awaited the Members of the S.S.C.P.P.

In ample morning coat and striped cashmere trousers Sir Andrew Campbell, their idolized Chairman, sat on the platform behind a somewhat insubstantial table draped with baize. A printed slip with a half-sheet of notepaper beneath a gilded pig on a small slab of granite was the only island in its sea of green, apart from a somewhat formidable ink-stand in silver. His chair, Tudor at least in design, afforded him plenty of space sideways, and he had himself secured the few inches middleways that were
indispensable
to his person. Claw-set pearl in cravat, his elbows rested on its arms, and his double chin on the wide white wings of his starched collar, he had been to the Society what its acorn was to an oak, its keystone is to an arch, its mainspring to a clock, its tail feathers to a swallow. Or rather he
was
in fact the Society, and now sat to all appearances as amply based and stable as St Michael’s Mount at high tide in the sheen of sunset.

Meanwhile, his mind was at liberty, since in a large-sized registered envelope he had himself supplied all the relevant facts and figures which the Society’s distinguished guest, who had very kindly consented to address the meeting, was now decanting.

His audience, thus favoured, fortunately preferred quantity to quality, and enjoyed, above everything, to be talked to about itself. With an
excusable
digression now and then, concerning
him
self, this was Lord Sounder’s present occupation. Sir Andrew, then, had been at liberty to subside into his usual vagrant reverie on these occasions.

This morning’s was proving less serene than usual, although, as he sat there, his eyes fixed on or idly roving over the furthermost rows of chairs and their occupants, only an observer all but as close to him as his guardian angel could have detected anything amiss. Some minute mishap of mind or mood, a passing gloom was enshrouding momentarily his psyche, a
weariness
,
a vague embarassment, an unexpressed or unexpressable desire for he knew not what. He felt restless, slightly elated, as slightly anxious, insecure, ill at ease.

Time if not Nature had served him well. A face, of the general shape and size of John Silver’s, ‘like a ham’, had expanded proportionately to his general contours. Small green-grey eyes no less active than alert looked out of it on either side of a large somewhat shapeless nose. Age had at last silvered the bristling hair at his temples, but not the clipped moustache that graced the upper lip of his small full mouth. It was a placid visage in repose. A faint haze of detachment had now gathered over it. He had floated off into the distant past. He was musing on his beginnings, on his youth.
Whatever
age he might look to outward view, say sixty-three, he was now sweet seventeen again in inward semblance. But as he mused, yet again, stealthy, seductive as the spice-laden breezes of Cythera, there wisped beneath his nostrils an odour – the odour of bacon-rashers frying in the pan. His cheek paled then purpled, he beckoned secretly but violently to a minor employee fortunately standing under the nearest window. And with an airy waft of his hand bade him shut the window above his head.

He was once more back in the past again. No longer an office boy but a junior clerk. It was a Tuesday morning, and on the stool beside him,
opposite
the window they shared, sat Jimmie Cadmer, who had succeeded him in the office he had lately vacated.

Small-boned, narrow-shouldered, narrow-faced – as were also his
exquisite
eyebrows arching his dark eyes as large and liquid as a gazelle’s. At this moment, in that distant past, and punctual as ever, a faint bawling, squeeching and grunting had made itself audible from the gates beyond the yard. Jimmie who had been vainly endeavouring to mend a cross-nibbed pen, and re-inking his long bony fingers in the process, at once stopped to listen. Andy more sluggishly had followed suit.

Their window overlooked a fenced-in asphalted alley some two or three yards wide. They sat still, and watched. Apart perhaps from Pig-Hour itself, the most dramatic and stirring event of the working week was about to begin. Grunts, yells, squawks and squealings drew nearer, and in a moment the vanguard of a numerous posse of pigs, a trotting tumbling little multitude at least two or three dozen strong, appeared on the scene. They were part and parcel of the weekly supply of the Universal Sorbeau Sausage Company, and so far as they were concerned it was the spectre of death, grisly bones and grin complete, that straddled the fence opposite the boys’ window.

Andy, such is the hardening outcome of custom, penholder resting on his lower lip, was surveying them cold and empty-eyed this bright fine
morning
. Every Tuesday during the last two years he had witnessed this moving
and dramatic little spectacle; but being possessed of brains and sentiments which were somewhat slow in action, he had not yet even decided whether the alert, clean-lined, pawky, good-humoured, active little animals were even vaguely aware of what in the course of the next dark hour was in store for them. It had not at any time even occurred to him to speculate whether suicide, self-sacrifice, euthanasia, ever took place among the lower animals, but if pressed even at that early age he might have agreed that whatever mundane benefits might result to others by a sudden self-inflicted exit,
they
preferred life to death.

The foremost pig of the trotting throng was by this time out of sight,
propelled
possibly in his head-long career by those behind him rather than by any will of his own. On came the remainder of the multitude, until at last only a few stragglers preceded the two blue-linen-overalled janitors who were in charge of the drove, and who came into view. One of these
stragglers
, a pale, wiry, rather elongated little personage, conveying a suggestion of unusual presence of mind, suddenly paused, came to a standstill, turned his three-cornered head, and for the space of a few immense moments fixed its minute green-grey eyes on the window glass – if not actually on Andy himself, who sat beyond it. To Andy this confrontation somehow appeared to be intentional, even purposeful – a gaze, inquiring, piercing, pleading, in vocative, and of a shattering sorrowfulness that went straight to his
somewhat
lymphatic heart. Never before had he thought of these weekly victims of the Universal Sorbeau Sausage Company – such was the somewhat
arrogant
designation of the firm in which he was employed – as a collection of unique individuals. Hitherto they had merely been a little doomed mob of animated pork, on which incidentally he relied for his daily bread wholly apart from bacon.

A thin perceptible flush had spread over his pale cheek. He was by nature of a bilious humour, intermingled with the sanguine and phlegmatic. Once moved he was wholly moved. That brief exchange of glances – lad with pig – had acted on him instantaneously. It was a challenge, a mute
overwhelming
appeal. At that time he had not heard of the oriental belief in the transmigration of souls. Nevertheless, if that of a great-great aunt or uncle had actually been resident behind those tiny greenish windows, this one tragic interchange of glances could not have had a more radical or enduring effect. Probably a less.

The procession was over, nothing remained of it except the dwelling odour of passing pig, and at intervals throughout the rest of the morning distant, plangent, prolonged yells. Which of these, if any, he speculated, was being addressed perhaps, but utterly in vain, to himself?

A quarter of an hour before his usual lunch-time, which he shared with his friend Jimmie Cadmer, when funds were low – a few sandwiches, a hunk
of bread and cheese, and an occasional Sorbeau sausage, though it was
not
provided by the firm – and which on a fine day they partook of under the fence overlooking the green fields beyond the factory – a quarter of an hour before lunch-time he laid down his pen and remarked very slowly and with extreme difficulty, ‘It’s pretty beastly, Jimmie, all those pigs.’

All Jimmie’s movements were abrupt. He jerked round his dark narrow head and shoulders, fixing his gazelle-dark luminous eyes on his friend’s face – eyes in which, like the shadow of a granite crag on a mountain pool, all the sorrows of the world seemed to be lying concealed, and replied, ‘When their thoats are slit and the blood’s come, they are scalded and scraped … And then I suppose,’ he added pensively, ‘they’re pork.’ A longer pause followed: ‘I wonder if they think.’

Andy allowed this bitter comment to sink in.

‘Yes,’ he added at last. ‘What else can they do when they’re not doing anything else. But I meant, meeself, principally what becomes of them.’

‘I’ve always heard,’ said Jimmie, ‘they are the best and tastiest sausages on the market, and I suppose they wouldn’t say that in the ads if there wasn’t
any
truth in it. I
suppose
not. It wouldn’t be legal. Though I shouldn’t be surprised if gristle is added, and if the bread is sometimes mouldy. At least my mother
thinks
it’s bread.’

Andy pondered. ‘Haven’t you ever even been in “the House”, then?’ he inquired. ‘Those just now aren’t the only pigs. The others come in the evening, or after dark, or anyhow round by the back alley, real old hogs, full-sized some of them, and old sows almost as hairy as hyaenas. I have seen them myself.
They
know where they are going to all right … And you have never even been into “the House”!’

The deep, liquid, tragic eyes gazed softly back, and it was now Jimmie’s turn to flush. He shook his head. ‘I have never wanted to,’ he confessed. ‘I did know. But I can’t stick blood. Nor can my mother. When I was a
nipper
eight years old I fainted even when I cut my thumb – the basin and the bandage. I went all of a swirl …
I
don’t know. Things like that just come up, and you are gone before you know it. Is that what you meant by “beastly”?’

Andy’s realization that from infancy upwards he had been of a far less sensitive temperament, though it had opened his eyes a little, only
strengthened
his position. He too abstracted from his pocket a grubby handkerchief and blew his nose.

‘Oh, yes,’ he agreed. ‘The blood too. But not
only
that.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s the poor little devils themselves. Even if they are only pigs, they are alive.’ A distant grievous and infantine squeal, so faint to the ear that it might almost have been said to have descended on them from out of the blue, had emphasized his remark. ‘Or at least,’ he added pensively, ‘they were.
And – though of course it may sound pretty silly – one looked at me just now.’

‘One of
them
?
… At
you?’ whispered Jimmie.

Andy turned his solemn pink-and-pallid-chapped face and glinting eyes full in the direction of his younger colleague, as if to bear witness to his sobriety. ‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘
at
me. And I shan’t forget it needier.’

A forlorn screech from the hooter of the factory here announced it was one o’clock. During the lunch hour they shared together the two boys
continued
to discuss this little problem, until it veered off into a more familiar one, that of Andy’s salary.

On his fourteenth birthday his Aunt Clara – he was an orphan – had taken him to see the Manager, and it was agreed that he should begin his duties as office boy at a salary of eight shillings and sixpence a week. It wasn’t a princely arrangement; and Sir Andrew Campbell, up in his chair on the platform, had actually smiled to himself at remembrance of this occasion. These scenes of his distant past moreover were slipping through the minute eyepiece of Memory far more vividly and rapidly than can the slides of a magic lantern. After his first year of honest if rather sluggish progress his salary had been raised by eighteen pence – all but a sheer 20 per cent. A year after that Jimmie had succeeded to his office; but although Andy had for some six months past been a junior clerk, nothing had yet
rewarded
him out of the Manager’s mouth but a promise to think the little matter over. This ill-merited treatment had been steadily festering in Andy’s mind.

Munching their apples and sandwiches of bread-and-cheese, the two friends had again and again discussed it, and to very little purpose. They were discussing it now, but in the light of the events of the morning, the
situation
was more complicated. Hitherto Andy’s grievance had been merely financial. It affected his sense of justice and of his own worth and dignity. He had never objected either to his connection with the ‘Sorbeau Young Pig Sausage Company’ – which in smaller type was followed in their manifesto by
Save
the
young,
you
save
the
old
also.
Now, even in those very early days, Conscience or at least a sort of fellow-feeling was having a say in the matter. He had flung away the minute remnant of his apple core into the hedge and had declared his determination to confront the Manager with an ultimatum. Some day.