“Reasons!” she said, “you didn’t think you were fit to be trusted with reasons, did you?” And she snorted at me, and tucked the knitting under one arm.
“No,” I said. “In a way that is so. But there were others.”
“More fools they,” said the witch; “as if they didn’t know I can’t get through more than one of you in a month, these days, what with my new false teeth and the times being what they are! Get along in with you!” And she suddenly and unexpectedly gave me the most unpleasant shove into the dark entrance of Soria Moria castle.
The facts as they appeared were quite incontrovertible and more displeasing than I can well express. The cauldron was hooked over a small fire on my left. It was quite beyond my power to look at what it contained or indeed to take any kind of direct glance at it, but the smell which arose from it was of so discouraging a nature that I began to find it very hard to stand upright, nor was the very business-like triangular knife lying on the kitchen table any less unreassuring. For, although it seems for the first minute or two quite unthinkable that such things should be in any way connected with oneself, yet there was no possible way of escaping the conclusion that they were. It was only at this point that it began to dawn on me what kind of reality the committee had so guardedly referred to towards the end of our discussion, and as I observed the back of the witch ferreting about in her kitchen cupboard for certain herbs and accompaniments, I became filled with extreme indignation at the fact that reality was so astonishingly different at close quarters. Fortunately, this indignation was accompanied by the customary outpouring of secretion from the adrenal glands which, in their turn, re-affected the muscles and sinews of my back and legs to such a degree that I now resolved to accept nothing without the fiercest possible struggle.
As the witch turned round I said to her, “I am not going into your cauldron!” She did not answer but proceeded to look at me in a curiously fixed and horrible way, as though she were seeing me, my own highly important and cossetted self, as so many pounds of meat. At the same time saliva dripped from her lower lip and from what I could not help recollecting were her new false teeth. This look almost succeeded in reducing me to my former condition of complete discouragement, and had I not made a sudden move, it would certainly have done so. However, I snatched up the triangular knife from the table and threatened her with it. The witch’s look immediately lost some of its disgusting impersonality, and she made a sign with two fingers at the knife, which promptly lighted at the tip and, being apparently made of magnesium or some similar metal or alloy, flared up blindingly as I dropped it between myself and the cauldron, and threw one hand up over my eyes. When I could see again, the witch’s back was towards me once more, and she was muttering to herself. When she turned she had three small objects in her hand. “Well, if you won’t go into the cauldron,” she said, and her voice broke off into mutters of “Most annoying, most annoying,” and she held out her hand towards me: “You may choose whichever you like.”
“I don’t see why I should!” I said, almost crying with anger and misery at the idea of being compelled to touch and accept any one of these three ambiguous little objects. At the same time, however, I did see, only too clearly, that there was no possibility of evasion, nor, for that matter, of prolonging the affair indefinitely by any argument. The light in the cave was none of the best, especially as the entrance had, as might have been expected, crumbled inwards immediately after the vibration of our tread had unsettled the sand particles of which it was, after all, composed. There was no telling where any one of the three choices would carry me. I chose at random the middle one of the three objects, which was no other than a grain of common wheat.
Immediately three sensations overwhelmed me: a sensation of shrinking, a sensation of hardening and a sensation of darkening. They were not in any way painful and yet they concealed a profound tension, as though from shrinking and hardening I must needs burst forth into sudden softness, and as though my present darkness must collapse into a starred rent. So for a time I waited, with no sense of place in any world or passage of any measurable period of days or months. Only the tension slowly increased until it became apparent that the constriction was about to yield to some violent and now localised pressure. My whole self was become intent on a growing point, and soon enough the constriction and darkness which had been part of me for so long were parted, and I knew my white and tender root had begun to feel downwards through a different darkness and a hardness unexpectedly creviced for the forcing of ways; soon afterwards, too, my upper growing point had begun its struggle through fissures in a yielding hardness with an extension of special feeling to the phototropic cell-cluster now hourly expecting the dazzle of reward. I had by this almost forgotten the hardness and tension of the safe grain life, but my rapidly separating growing-points were a-tingle with ever-present danger. What horrors of drought or rotting wetness, above all of blind, remorseless, chewing mouths! And yet my growth was momently attaining a toughness which could outface all.
And now the upper shoot had pierced into a gratification of warm light; the cell layers spread and flattened to receive gifts. Green grains of chlorophyll had appeared in my upper layers, immediately specialising my vaguely rampant growth into the delightful pattern of a sun-needing plant; while below my pale busy fibres sucked up a constant stream of success from the dark earth which anchored me. As I grew I began to be aware that I was not alone. With the drawing-out of sun and rain my green leaves overlapped the leaves of my neighbours, catching from them a delicate tingle of response. Nor, in the warm days and cool nights of early summer could any of the wheatfield have been less than utterly satisfied with the tender and neighbourly response of stem to stem, the effortless rippling and stretching as the breezes tossed us, the effortless breathing in and out in our daily and nightly rhythm, our age-old vegetable ordering of the gaseous elements that gently blanket the ever-living world. Effortless too, the stooping under warm rain that slithered down our stems to our matted and neighbourly rootlets. Effortless, the shaking off of the shining drops; effortless our constant growth, supported and supporting, one by the other. And by now each was aware, in its own midst, and in the midst of its neighbours in the uncounted community of the harvest field, of that for which all was a preparation. Tenderest leaflets now unfolded from our green grain spikes, plumed with the delicate pale grass flowers, stigmas as yet half uncoiling and unaware, stamens with the light gold burden of half ripe pollen grains.
There came then a day, indeed a succession of days, when the long pouring down of warmth had aroused us all to the same quivering pitch of waiting inaction about to be loosed at a last climax of ripeness. And then, with a parting and shedding and minute splitting of cell walls, there was cast wide upon the calm warm air about our upflung soft seed-spikes such a multitude of floating pollen grains that the very nature of our environment became changed. The light rays from the sun became paths for these scarce-weighted particles which, as though they had been only molecules of matter, could be deflected and driven by the low battering of light. Thus, then, our stigmas received them in open certainty of righteousness. Neighbour to neighbour, our unity was now in this mixing completed; we of the wheatfield having given out were now receiving, as the pollen cells nested on the open slopes of the stigmas poured themselves out in hastening long tongues of transparent life towards the awaiting seed cell, which, when at last a pollen tongue laid hold of it, became what it was meant to be, settling with a new toughness into the common life of the corn.
How, then, put into words, the days following? For by the middle of summer we were all part of one life, through our fertility losing our identity, but ever in a daze of dancing leaves and hardening stems through which now juices scarcely crept, a daze of the mingling and splitting of cells, a uniting and casting off of chromosomes, each one a single wheat plant and yet each inseparably and inextricably part of the others. And now in our joint consciousness we became aware of a new need, since the earth n
o longer anchored us securely and yet our heaviness was between us and the wind. No longer did we feel identity with those roots which had been our earliest and most passionate point of intenseness. Our stems and leaves had almost lost hold on life; we had become concentrated upon the heavy goldenness of our bowing heads.
There was no pain as the steel blade severed our stems, no shock of parting from earth. Our golden heads lay ever thicker and more neighbourly in harvest. There was no pain in the threshing; all growth was dormant, and without growth there is no pain. Nor did the seed corn which was made separate from the bread corn rejoice or grieve in any way at its destiny. There was no pain in the grinding, but only wonder, and a still more profound mixing of essences.
For some indefinite time we lay slackly as flour, sacked or binned, in dusk and formless. Then hands were laid on us and there was a new mixing, with substances which were at first alien and then became part of us, bringing with them faint, diffuse memories of a hotter sun and different growth, or of an animal life, incomprehensible and yet acceptable. Thus, by the time of the baking, all the ingredients had mingled in intimate combination of starch, sugar, milk-fat and protein molecules, making a smooth and homogeneous substance, which at last, cake-shaped and oven-hot, gathered itself into a single consciousness, so that again there was an “I,” individual and yet in a complete sympathy with the other cakes which had been formed out of the same material. I then, as a cake-individual, was proudly and gaily decorated with a cake’s final and not least fripperies of coloured icing, split cherries and green pistachio nuts, which, expertly laid upon me, became part of my rich and copious edibility. I was now carefully placed upon paper and that again on a platter, and so, by mid-morning, though whether of summer or winter I cannot tell, onto a shelf behind a great shining sheet of glass interposing itself completely between my white and pink immobility and the jostling and dusty street.
Beside me on the shelf were other cakes, my sisters, they too all a-glisten with pinks and blues and shimmering bridal white, and I was aware that they too were all rounded towards fulfilment of themselves. They too were longing for the appraising eye, forerunner of the more appraising lips and tongue; they too knew themselves made for the sale, the handing-over, the ritual wrapping and unwrapping, the setting upon a strange table, the knife and the laying-open, above all the sacred and basic awakening and satisfying of hunger. We were aware now that beyond the great screen of glass, eyes were looking at us, the living eyes of hunger and delicious greed: oh if we could but have given ourselves at once to its satisfying, now with our hearts still warm from the oven, and our icing snow-cool and fresh, unhardened by time and the tarnishing caress of air! Thus would we, without wearying and in our first freshness, have become one with life. And occasionally, indeed, one of us might be taken up and sold and given to the eyes and the final assuagement of hunger. Yet this was rare, and as the day passed and the last oven-warmth died out of the midst of each of us, our impatience grew and lay heavy upon us. Lights were switched on above us in the shop and a richer glow came on the smooth sugar, and the eyes of hunger and greed trailed past us, and now and then a finger was dabbed upon the plate glass. Yet by the evening few of us had taken on their fulfilment. We passed the night in darkness, still in the shop.
The next morning again we were set out, again we offered our sweetness and richness to the eyes behind the glass. But by now it was becoming apparent to me that those eyes in which pure, sharp hunger itself was the dominating force—eyes whose live bodies we on the cake shelves most longed to satisfy—were not the same eyes as those of our purchasers, which were in general illumined by a less frank and to us desirable force. For it seemed to us that among these purchasers, most of whom were women, elaborate as ourselves in pinks and blues and silks that shone almost like icing, there were those who might merely and brutally use a cake—a cake made for the food of mankind—for the decoration of a party; there were those, it seemed to us, who might languidly and without appetite shear off a thin slice and unadmiringly consume or perhaps only crumble it, leaving the great body of the cake to wither and dry up and at last be eaten grudgingly and ingloriously; there were those, we thought, who would not scruple to throw away a half-eaten cake into hideous non-fulfilment. But why then, why could the hungry eyes not choose out and buy the cake they needed and which needed them? We did not know, we only wanted to be a satisfaction instead of a temptation to the hungry eyes.
So passed a second day and a third, and a strange weariness and heaviness began to come on me and such of my sisters as still shared my loneliness. We felt that we were no longer so delicious, so assuaging as we had been. Our sugar icing had hardened unkindly, here a cherry was loose upon us, there a nut. And still the many hungry and the few who could buy! It was after the lights were turned on that this pressure of eyes upon us became almost more than we could bear. We knew obscurely that some of these eyes belonged to children finished with school, children who would seize on us joyously and unashamedly with both hands, gobbling us whole-heartedly into their growing life. And others belonged to men coming back from labour, hard work of hands and bodies which had left their muscles worn and fainting for sugar to burn up and reconstitute them; we knew the great hungry mouths of these men and the teeth that would meet on us and the strength we would become in them. And yet other eyes belonged to women whose thoughts, beating upon us through the unmoved glass, were of many hungers, their own and their husbands’ and their children’s, and we knew that if one of these women could have had us on her table, there would have been no crumb left unpraised and uneaten. But those hungry eyes passed and hesitated and passed reluctantly on, in an endless stream, and none might cross the threshold and take us from the shop into their homes.
And so passed days, and with them a terrible discouragement to the cakes which no one had bought, which had lost their freshness, which had hardened and dried and cracked a little. And the cakes knew the fear of mildew and crumbling and of being no longer fit for the assuagement and life-making of mankind. And the sugar on the cakes was a little flecked with dust, and pieces had broken off here and there; they were handled roughly morning and evening. And it came about that one morning the master of the shop bade his servants to clear out the old rubbish, and I and the other cakes which had not been sold were bundled together, breaking as they did so. A piece here and there was picked up and eaten by the servants of the baker, but mostly the stuff of the cakes had become dry and unpalatable, so that even the eyes of the very hungry would not have looked on them with any pleasure. And I and the other cakes were thrown out on the dust heap and it was as though we had never been of the stuff of cakes.
And with that I was again standing before the witch in Soria Moria castle, but there was yet in my body and mind a terrible dryness and fear, so that I could scarcely face her. She was sitting beside the cauldron going on with that stocking, and the smell which rose from the cauldron was no more attractive than it had been. She looked at me and sniffed and wiped her nose with the half-knitted stocking. “So you’re back, are you?” she said. I nodded, being still unable to speak. “Bad pennies,” she said. “Well, you’ll just have to have another turn. Or of course if you didn’t want to—” She licked her lips and glanced towards the cauldron, just as a small and purposeful seeming flame jetted from below it, giving me sufficient illumination for me to see that her hand was crooked into half openness. Nor did I wait for another word from her, but immediately snatched up the next of the small objects out of her palm.
The same sensations overcame me as had done so upon the first occasion, shrinking and hardness and darkness. And again the tension, becoming unbearable, broke into pale, thready growing-points, a pushing up towards light and warmth and down towards dampness and anchorage. And again I grew and spread green leaves and sucked through their pores the gases which dissolved through my warm chloroplasts. But this time I was a stronger growth, my stem thickened and became the chief part of me; strong cells within clustered an
d pushed and became the bud-points of branchlets. Rain and sun passed over me; my fibrous roots clung onto rock, sucking the life-giving soil salts away from weaker, brittler root-growths. In autumn my leaves fell, no longer part of me, and became food for me as they rotted; and in winter I rested, scarcely aware of my aliveness, only a core of potentials between twiggy dry stem and twiggy clinging roots. There was a man who bent over me in my winter sleep and sheared the thin end of my stem and took from round me the weeds, they too half dead. But all this passed me by, until in Spring I came alive again, with swelling and splitting of cells, rush up of sap, hurry towards the hot bright sun which drew the tendrils of the young vines after him all across and across the well-tended vineyard.
And so, for me as a vine, seasons went by, and at last I was to be part of the vintage; I put forth flowers, I sent out pollen and received it again, the minute green cell clusters swelled to berries, hard seed and around it the growing pulp that sucked up and stored the sugar out of my sap. I was aware of my neighbours then, although less closely than when I had been a wheat plant, but I knew that they too had brought forth grape bunches and were holding and feeding them in the shade of their leaves. I was aware too of the men who came, aware of their pride in me, dimly aware of their purpose with me and my grapes. I endured the pain of the summer pruning, and the shearing of the smallest bunches, knowing that the great purpose was coming closer upon us. I endured the spraying, the branding and spotting of my wild loveliness by the ugly security of the cuprous solution. My leaves bent carefully, sheltering the bunches from a too drying sun, or from rain which might spoil the bloom which now had begun to dawn wonderfully upon the baby skin of my grapes. More and more, the “I” that I was became concentrated upon the ripening grape-bunches, purpose and intention of my existence. There was now a mingled sweetness in the still air of the vineyard, breathed out from the compact proletarian bunches of good wine-grapes, so that our selves, pollinated from one another, became inextricably one by the time that the vintage was upon us.
The Fourth Pig Page 9
