Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

by Roald Dahl

  ‘And might I ask how you propose to run this maggot-factory of yours?’ When he spoke the word maggot, it seemed as if he were spitting out a sour little pip from his mouth.

  ‘Easiest thing in the world to run a maggot-factory.’ Claud was gaining confidence now and warming to his subject. ‘All you need is a couple of old oil drums and a few lumps of rotten meat or a sheep’s head, and you put them in the oil drums and that’s all you do. The flies do the rest.’

  Had he been watching Mr Hoddy’s face he would probably have stopped there.

  ‘Of course, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. What you’ve got to do next is feed up your maggots with special diet. Bran and milk. And then when they get big and fat you put them in pint tins and post them off to your customers. Five shillings a pint they fetch. Five shillings a pint!’ he cried, slapping his knee. ‘You just imagine that, Mr Hoddy! And they say one bluebottle’ll lay twenty pints easy!’

  He paused again, but merely to marshal his thoughts, for there was no stopping him now.

  ‘And there’s another thing, Mr Hoddy. A good maggot-factory don’t just breed ordinary maggots, you know. Every fisherman’s got his own tastes. Maggots are commonest, but also there’s lug worms. Some

  fishermen won’t have nothing but lug worms. And of course there’s coloured maggots. Ordinary maggots are white, but you get them all sorts of different colours by feeding them special foods, see. Red ones and green ones and black ones and you can even get blue ones if you know what to feed them. The most difficult thing of all in a maggot-factory is a blue maggot, Mr Hoddy.’

  Claud stopped to catch his breath. He was having a vision now – the same vision that accompanied all his dreams of wealth – of an immense factory building with tall chimneys and hundreds of happy workers streaming in through the wide wrought-iron gates and Claud himself sitting in his luxurious office directing operations with a calm and splendid assurance.

  ‘There’s people with brains studying these things this very minute,’ he went on. ‘So you got to jump in quick unless you want to get left out in the cold. That’s the secret of big business, jumping in quick before all the others, Mr Hoddy.’

  Clarice, Ada, and the father sat absolutely still looking straight ahead. None of them moved or spoke. Only Claud rushed on.

  ‘Just so long as you make sure your maggots is alive when you post ’em. They’ve got to be wiggling, see. Maggots is no good unless they’re wiggling. And when we really get going when we’ve built up a little capital, then we’ll put up some glasshouses.’

  Another pause, and Claud stroked his chin. ‘Now I expect you’re all wondering why a person should want glasshouses in a maggot-factory. Well – I’ll tell you. It’s for the flies in the winter, see. Most important to take care of your flies in the winter.’

  ‘I think that’s enough, thank you, Cubbage,’ Mr Hoddy said suddenly.

  Claud looked up and for the first time he saw the expression on the man’s face. It stopped him cold.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Mr Hoddy said.

  ‘All I’m trying to do, Mr Hoddy,’ Claud cried, ‘is give your little girl everything she can possibly desire. That’s all I’m thinking of night and day, Mr Hoddy.’

  ‘Then all I hope is you’ll be able to do it without the help of maggots.’

  ‘Dad!’ Clarice cried, alarmed. ‘I simply won’t have you talking to Claud like that.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him how I wish, thank you, miss.’

  ‘I think it’s time I was getting along,’ Claud said. ‘Good night.’

  Mr Feasey

  We were both up early when the big day came.

  I wandered into the kitchen for a shave but Claud got dressed right away and went outside to arrange about the straw. The kitchen was a front room and through the window I could see the sun just coming up behind the line of trees on top of the ridge the other side of the valley.

  Each time Claud came past the window with an armload of straw I noticed over the rim of the mirror the intent, breathless expression on his face, the great round bullet-head thrusting forward and the forehead wrinkled into deep corrugations right up to the hairline. I’d only seen this look on him once before and that was the evening he’d asked Clarice to marry him. Today he was so excited he even walked funny, treading softly as though the concrete around the filling-station were a shade too hot for the soles of his feet; and he kept packing more and more straw into the back of the van to make it comfortable for Jackie.

  Then he came into the kitchen to fix breakfast, and I watched him put the pot of soup on the stove and begin stirring it. He had a long metal spoon and he kept on stirring and stirring all the time it was coming to the boil, and about every half minute he leaned forward and stuck his nose into that sickly-sweet steam of cooking horseflesh. Then he started putting extras into it – three

  peeled onions, a few young carrots, a cupful of stinging-nettle tops, a teaspoon of Valentines Meatjuice, twelve drops of cod-liver oil – and everything he touched was handled very gently with the ends of his big fat fingers as though it might have been a little fragment of Venetian glass. He took some minced horsemeat from the icebox, measured one handful into Jackie’s bowl, three into the other, and when the soup was ready he shared it out between the two, pouring it over the meat.

  It was the same ceremony I’d seen performed each morning for the past five months, but never with such intense and breathless concentration as this. There was no talk, not even a glance my way, and when he turned and went out again to fetch the dogs, even the back of his neck and the shoulders seemed to be whispering, ‘Oh Jesus, don’t let anything go wrong, and especially don’t let me do anything wrong today.’

  I heard him talking softly to the dogs in the pen as he put the leashes on them, and when he brought them around into the kitchen, they came in prancing and pulling to get at the breakfast, treading up and down with their front feet and waving their enormous tails from side to side, like whips.

  ‘All right,’ Claud said, speaking at last. ‘Which is it?’ Most mornings he’s offer to bet me a pack of cigarettes, but there were bigger things at stake today and I knew all he wanted for the moment was a little extra reassurance.

  He watched me as I walked once around the two beautiful, identical, tall, velvety-black dogs, and he moved aside, holding the leashes at arms’ length to give me a better view.

  ‘Jackie!’ I said, trying the old trick that never worked. ‘Hey Jackie!’ Two identical heads with identical expressions flicked around to look at me, four bright, identical, deep-yellow eyes stared into mine. There’d been a time when I fancied the eyes of one were a slightly darker yellow than those of the other. There’d also been a time when I thought I could recognise Jackie because of a deeper brisket and a shade more muscle on the hindquarters. But it wasn’t so.

  ‘Come on,’ Claud said. He was hoping that today of all days I would make a bad guess.

  ‘This one,’ I said. ‘This is Jackie.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘This one on the left.’

  ‘There!’ he cried, his whole face suddenly beaming. ‘You’re wrong again!’

  ‘I don’t think I’m wrong.’

  ‘You’re about as wrong as you could possibly be. And now listen, Gordon, and I’ll tell you something. All these last weeks, every morning while you’ve been trying to pick him out – you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping count. And the result is you haven’t been right even one-half the time! You’d have done better tossing a coin!’

  What he meant was that if I (who saw them every day and side by side) couldn’t do it, why the hell should we be frightened of Mr Feasey. Claud knew Mr Feasey was famous for spotting ringers, but he knew also that it could be very difficult to tell the difference between two dogs when there wasn’t any.

  He put the bowls of food on the floor, giving Jackie the one with the least meat because he was running t
oday. When he stood back to watch them eat, the shadow of deep concern was back again on his face and the large pale eyes were staring at Jackie with the same rapt and melting look of love that up till recently had been reserved only for Clarice.

  ‘You see, Gordon,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I’ve always told you. For the last hundred years there’s been all manner of ringers, some good and some bad, but in the whole history of dog-racing there’s never been a ringer like this.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said, and my mind began travelling back to that freezing afternoon just before Christmas, four months ago, when Claud had asked to borrow the van and had driven away in the direction of Aylesbury without saying where he was going. I had assumed he was off to see Clarice, but late in the afternoon he had returned bringing with him this dog he said he’d bought off a man for thirty-five shillings.

  ‘Is he fast?’ I had said. We were standing out by the pumps and Claud was holding the dog on a leash and looking at him, and a few snowflakes were falling and settling on the dog’s back. The motor of the van was still running.

  ‘Fast!’ Claud had said. ‘He’s just about the slowest dog you ever saw in your whole life!’

  ‘Then what you buy him for?’

  ‘Well,’ he had said, the big bovine face secret and cunning, ‘it occurred to me that maybe he might possibly look a little bit like Jackie. What d’you think?’

  ‘I suppose he does a bit, now you come to mention it.’

  He had handed me the leash and I had taken the new dog inside to dry him off while Claud had gone round to the pen to fetch his beloved. And when he returned and we put the two of them together for the first time, I can remember him stepping back and saying, ‘Oh, Jesus!’ and standing dead still in front of them like he was seeing a phantom. Then he became very quick and quiet. He got down on his knees and began comparing them carefully point by point, and it was almost like the room was getting warmer and warmer the way I could feel his excitement growing every second through this long silent examination in which even the toenails and the dewclaws, eighteen on each dog, were matched alongside one another for colour.

  ‘Look,’ he said at last, standing up. ‘Walk them up and down the room a few times, will you?’ And then he had stayed there for quite five or six minutes leaning against the stove with his eyes half closed and his head on one side, watching them and frowning and chewing his lips. After that, as though he didn’t believe what he had seen the first time, he had gone down again on his knees to recheck everything once more; but suddenly, in the middle of it he had jumped up and looked at me, his face fixed and tense, with a curious whiteness around the nostrils and the eyes. ‘All right,’ he had said, a little tremor in his voice. ‘You know what? We’re home. We’re rich.’

  And then the secret conferences between us in the kitchen, the detailed planning, the selection of the most suitable track, and finally every other Saturday, eight times in all, locking up my filling-station (losing a whole afternoon’s custom) and driving the ringer all the way up to Oxford to a scruffy little track out in the fields near Headingley where the big money was played but which was actually nothing except a line of old posts and cord to mark the course, an upturned bicycle for pulling the dummy hare, and at the far end, in the distance, six traps and the starter. We had driven this ringer up there eight times over a period of sixteen weeks and entered him with Mr Feasey and stood around on the edge of the crowd in freezing raining cold, waiting for his name to go up on the blackboard in chalk. The Black Panther we called him. And when his time came, Claud would always lead him down to the traps and I would stand at the finish to catch him and keep him clear of the fighters, the gypsy dogs that the gypsies so often slipped in specially to tear another one to pieces at the end of a race.

  But you know, there was something rather sad about taking this dog all the way up there so many times and letting him run and watching him and hoping and praying that whatever happened he would always come last. Of course the praying wasn’t necessary and we never really had a moment’s worry because the old fellow simply couldn’t gallop and that’s all there was to it. He ran exactly like a crab. The only time he didn’t come last was when a big fawn dog by the name of Amber Flash put his foot in a hole and broke a hock and finished on three legs. But even then ours only just beat him. So this way we got him right down to bottom grade with the scrubbers, and the last time we were there all the bookies were laying him twenty or thirty to one and calling his name and begging people to back him.

  Now at last, on this sunny April day, it was Jackie’s turn to go instead. Claud said we mustn’t run the ringer any more or Mr Feasey might begin to get tired of him and throw him out altogether, he was so slow. Claud said this was the exact psychological time to have it off, and that Jackie would win it anything between thirty and fifty lengths.

  He had raised Jackie from a pup and the dog was only fifteen months now, but he was a good fast runner. He’d never raced yet, but we knew he was fast from clocking him round the little private schooling track at Uxbridge where Claud had taken him every Sunday since he was seven months old – except once when he was having some inoculations. Claud said he probably wasn’t fast enough to win top grade at Mr Feasey’s, but where we’d got him now, in bottom grade with the scrubbers, he could fall over and get up again and still win it twenty – well, anyway ten or fifteen lengths, Claud said.

  So all I had to do this morning was go to the bank in the village and draw out fifty pounds for myself and fifty for Claud which I would lend him as an advance against wages, and then at twelve o’clock lock up the filling-station and hang the notice on one of the pumps saying ‘GONE FOR THE DAY’, Claud would shut the ringer in the pen at the back and put Jackie in the van and off we’d go. I won’t say I was as excited as Claud, but there again, I didn’t have all sorts of important things depending on it either, like buying a house and being able to get married. Nor was I almost born in a kennel with greyhounds like he was, walking about thinking of absolutely nothing else all day – except perhaps Clarice in the evenings. Personally, I had my own career as a filling-station owner to keep me busy, not to mention second-hand cars, but if Claud wanted to fool around with dogs

  that was all right with me, especially a thing like today – if it came off. As a matter of fact, I don’t mind admitting that every time I thought about the money we were putting on and the money we might win, my stomach gave a little lurch.

  The dogs had finished their breakfast now and Claud took them out for a short walk across the field opposite while I got dressed and fried the eggs. Afterwards, I went to the bank and drew out the money (all in ones), and the rest of the morning seemed to go very quickly serving customers.

  At twelve sharp I locked up and hung the notice on the pump. Claud came around from the back leading Jackie and carrying a large suitcase made of reddish-brown cardboard.

  ‘Suitcase?’

  ‘For the money,’ Claud answered. ‘You said yourself no man can carry two thousand pound in his pockets.’

  It was a lovely yellow spring day with the buds bursting all along the hedges and the sun shining through the new pale green leaves on the big beech tree across the road. Jackie looked wonderful, with two big hard muscles the size of melons bulging on his hindquarters, his coat glistening like black velvet. While Claud was putting the suitcase in the van, the dog did a little prancing jig on his toes to show how fit he was, then he looked up at me and grinned, just like he knew he was off to the races to win two thousand pounds and a heap of glory. This Jackie had the widest, most human-smiling grin I ever saw. Not only did he lift his upper lip, but he actually stretched the corners of his mouth so you could see every tooth in his head except perhaps one or two of the molars right at the back; and every time I saw him do it I found myself waiting to hear him start laughing out loud as well.

  We got in the van and off we went. I was doing the driving. Claud was beside me and Jackie was standing up on the straw in the rear l
ooking over our shoulders through the windscreen. Claud kept turning round and trying to make him lie down so he wouldn’t get thrown whenever we went round the sharp corners, but the dog was too excited to do anything except grin back at him, and wave his enormous tail.

  ‘You got the money, Gordon?’ Claud was chain-smoking cigarettes and quite unable to sit still.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mine as well?’

  ‘I got a hundred and five altogether. Five for the winder like you said, so he won’t stop the hare and make it a no-race.’

  ‘Good,’ Claud said, rubbing his hands together hard as though he were freezing cold. ‘Good good good.’

  We drove through the little narrow High Street of Great Missenden and caught a glimpse of old Rummins going into The Nag’s Head for his morning pint, then outside the village we turned left and climbed over the ridge of the Chilterns toward Princes Risborough, and from there it would only be twenty odd miles to Oxford.

  And now a silence and a kind of tension began to come over us both. We sat very quiet, not speaking at all, each nursing his own fears and excitements, containing his anxiety. And Claud kept smoking his cigarettes and throwing them half finished out the window. Usually, on these trips, he talked his head off all the way there and back, all the things he’d done with dogs in his life, the jobs he’d pulled, the places he’d been, the money he’d won; and all the things other people had done with dogs, the thievery, the cruelty, the unbelievable trickery and cunning of owners at the flapping-tracks. But today I don’t think he was trusting himself to speak very much. At this point, for that matter, nor was I. I was sitting there watching the road and trying to keep my mind off the immediate future by thinking back on all that stuff Claud had told me about this curious greyhound-racing racket.