Ripeness is All

by Eric Linklater

  Meanwhile, unaware of the important part they were shortly to play and as yet unseen by the two or three hundred guests, two well-grown young pigs, of the kind called Large Black, lay upon straw in one of several outhouses that projected from the east wing of the house. With them sat a little man called Bowles, lately a butcher and now a market gardener, and four of the Purefoy children: Cecily was twelve, Patrick ten, Rosemary seven, and Peter was approaching his fifth birthday. The two older boys, Denis and Rupert, were at school, luckily for Mr Bowles: they were daring and imaginative boys, and Mr Bowles’s stories would soon have tempted them to mockery and rude parody. But the younger Purefoys sat enthralled by his tedious and prolix descriptions of the pole-axing of bullocks and the slitting of sheep’s throats. Though comparatively quiet and well behaved, they were not squeamish, and Rosemary and Peter were still young enough to confuse blood-letting with heroism: they listened to Mr Bowles’s stories of the abattoir and saw him, in imagination, as kinsman to Blackbeard the Pirate, du Guesclin, and the Light Brigade; for Rosemary was a constant reader, and Peter was always her willing audience. Cecily and Patrick, however, had no need of literary illusions with which to sustain their attention: they were interested in killing for its own sake, and as they took great delight in shooting rabbits with a small rifle and hunting rats with a fox terrier, so they suspected major pleasure in the pole-axing of beeves. But what none of them could understand was why Mr Bowles had given up this absorbing occupation and taken to market-gardening.

  ‘There can’t be much excitement in growing lettuces,’ Cecily protested.

  ‘There’s the satisfaction of knowing that you’re producing good ’ealthy food,’ said Mr Bowles. ‘A lettuce is very cleansing to the blood, and the more you eat the cleaner your insides’ll get. There was a time, mark you, when I thought there was nothing tastier than a nice cow’s ’eel. But I know better now. I’m a vegetarian, and ’ave been these last two years.’

  ‘I like meat,’ said Peter.

  ‘Vegetarians are generally atheists,’ observed Patrick.

  ‘You’ve no call to say that,’ Mr Bowles replied. ‘I’m a Wesley an and always ’ave been, and you can be a Wesley an on lettuces just as well as you can on cow’s ’eels.’

  ‘Tell us more about killing things,’ said Cecily.

  ‘Not if you’re going to misunderstand me,’ said Mr Bowles. ‘I’ve only been telling you about slaughter-’ouses and so on to show you what ’orrible places they are. It’s because I came to realize what a ’orrid life I was leading that I gave up being a butcher and took to market-gardening. I ‘ad a dream one night, a nightmare I suppose you would call it, though perhaps it was a vision. I was standing in the slaughter-’ouse, at least that’s what I dreamt I was doing, and there in the corner was an old sheep looking at me in a most peculiar way. Well, I went up to ’er, with my knife ready, and I’m blessed if she didn’t get up on her ’ind legs and begin to dance. So I stopped short and said “’Ere, that’s no way to behave!” But she just went on dancing, looking at me in a very curious manner, and presently she stepped right out of her skin and was dancing bare naked. And then I saw it wasn’t a sheep at all, but a girl called Gladys Hoops, that used to be well known in Lammiter and went to London to go on the stage. Well, it shook me, that dream did, and the next day I ’adn’t any ’eart for my work through thinking that all the sheep I was killing might be Gladys Hoops under their skin. So I went to a doctor, and ‘e told me I’d got blood pressure and ought to stop eating meat and look for an easier job. So what with that, and the ’orror I began to feel about butchering, I gave it up, and I wouldn’t go back to it now not if you paid me a thousand a year.’

  ‘When are you going to show us that pistol you were talking about?’ asked Patrick.

  One of Mr Bowles’s several talents was a certain mechanical faculty, and he had lately given practical expression to his revulsion against the horrors of the slaughter-house by inventing a new kind of humane-killer. Neither its killing-power nor its humanity had as yet been sufficiently tested to substantiate his high opinion of the weapon, but he could be very eloquent about it, and his commendation of it had persuaded Lady Caroline that the Bowles Humane Pistol, as it was already christened, was the most efficient thing of its kind, and the bullocks and the wethers of England would be happier beasts on the day when it was generally adopted by the abattoirs. She hoped to demonstrate its advantages to Lammiter this afternoon.

  Mr Bowles took the weapon out of a battered cardboard-leather attache case, and proudly showed it to the children. It had been originally a wheel-lock pistol of the largest kind. It was about two feet long. Rosemary and Peter immediately conceived a new image of Mr Bowles: they saw him, black-visored, voluminously caped, riding along the Great North Road by Dick Turpin’s side, and heard his somewhat meagre voice command affrighted travellers to stand and deliver. But Mr Bowles was explaining the action of the pistol in technical terms that would have puzzled the highwayman. He had designed a new breech, and the barrel had been rifled. The projectile was a steel bullet, sharply pointed and nearly three inches in length. This made the cartridge so long that he had been compelled to use a bolt like the bolt of a service-rifle, and the pistol had a curiously hybrid appearance. Mr Bowles said the muzzle velocity was uncommonly high, and the rifling of the barrel gave to the sharp-pointed bullet such power of penetration as would kill an elephant, and, moreover, kill it before suspicion rose in its mind that death was on the way.

  ‘What if the bullet comes out on the other side?’ asked Patrick.

  ‘That won’t matter, so long as there’s nobody standing there,’ said Mr Bowles.

  Further discussion was stopped by the arrival of Lady Caroline. She had acquired a certain air of untidiness, as though her excited mind had produced a homologue in the disorder of her dress. Her voice was pitched a little higher than usual, and its inflection had a taut and nervous quality. She was intensely anxious for the success of her demonstration, and she had found the strain of waiting for it almost intolerable. She was tired, moreover, by ceaseless conversation with her guests, and her recent efforts to parade them in seemly order for the performance had been exhausting.

  ‘They’re all waiting for you, Mr Bowles,’ she said. ‘Have you got everything ready?’

  ‘Yes, your ladyship. I’m ready.’

  ‘And Cecily and Patrick will be able to – help you? You won’t require more assistance?’

  ‘I think they’ll be able to do what’s wanted, your ladyship.’

  ‘Of course we shall,’ said Cecily and Patrick.

  ‘Us too,’ demanded Rosemary and Peter.

  ‘No, no,’ said Lady Caroline, ‘you’ll come with me. I don’t believe in pampering children, Mr Bowles, or encouraging them to be frightened of things, but Rosemary and Peter are too young to be really helpful. They have excellent nerves and they wouldn’t be alarmed by the demonstration, but they might get in the way. Now be sure you do exactly what Mr Bowles tells you, Patrick, and don’t jerk the pig’s leg like that. Persuade it to go with you, don’t bully it.’

  With some difficulty the pigs were coaxed out of the shed and driven towards the garden. Each was held by a rope tied to its near-side foreleg, and this arrangement, though fairly effective in preventing them from running away, was of little help in guiding them. With Lady Caroline’s assistance, however, they at last reached their destination, and when Rosemary and Peter had been given into the hands of Miss Foster, who volunteered to look after them, the little group of Lady Caroline and Mr Bowles, Cecily, Patrick, and the two pigs, advanced to a central position before the middle bed of multi-coloured antirrhinums.

  The majority of the guests stood facing them, and at some height above thern, on the broad terrace that fronted the house. A curtain of wistaria climbed the stone walls, its pendant clusters still grey-green at the point but opening above their soft mauve plumage; and separating the onlookers from the imminent demonstration were a green bank and
a generous border, hedged by dwarf box, of poppies and pyrethrums, lupins, geums, and petunias. To Lady Caroline’s right stood other rows of spectators with the pergola for their background; and on her left were as many more, in a double or treble rank, on the high path that separated the parterre from the rhododendron dell. Behind her, between her and the rose garden, a mere score or so of people, of the kind that always stands separate from the crowd, completed the attentive square. Without any formal introduction, Lady Caroline began to speak.

  ‘You all know the purpose of this garden-party,’ she said. ‘The principal object, the ostensible object, was to raise funds for the B.A.I.S. – the Brackenshire Association for Improved Slaughter-houses – and though there aren’t quite as many people here as I’d hoped to see, the inclement weather may be responsible for that deficiency, and after all it doesn’t matter much, because we sold a great number of tickets, and from the financial point of view we’ve done very well indeed. But money isn’t everything. Indeed money is very little compared with our determination to put a stop to the terrible cruelty with which so many cattle and pigs and sheep are killed for our daily use. I don’t say that we shouldn’t eat meat, but I do say the poor cattle should be put to death as painlessly as possible, and not in the barbaric way that is still too common in some of our abattoirs, and especially in small villages where there isn’t proper supervision. I know that you all agree with me about this matter, but I’ve often felt that some of you are not sufficiently earnest in your desire and your determination to bring about the necessary reforms, and that may be because you don’t really know what goes on in a slaughter-house, or, on the other hand, because you don’t realize that it’s quite possible to be kind to animals even while you are killing them. A lot of people won’t listen to arguments: they only believe what they see. And so this afternoon I’m going to appeal to you not by argument but by example, and you will see two methods of killing a pig, one cruel and one kind. Mr Bowles, who abhors cruelty just as much as we do, has very kindly consented to be our demonstrator, and he will kill one of these pigs in the old-fashioned way by sticking a knife into its throat, and the other in quite a different way by shooting it with a humane pistol that he himself has invented, a very clever and charitable thing to do, as I’m sure you will all agree when you have seen how efficient a weapon it is. I hope you will all be impressed by the contrast between these methods, and those of you who have never seen a pig being killed will be shocked beyond words to know that it is often done with the disgusting and abominable cruelty that Mr Bowles, to whom we should all be very grateful, has agreed to demonstrate. It is a truly revolting spectacle, but as you will all see it for yourselves in a few minutes, and as I’m afraid it’s going to rain before long – but most of you have umbrellas, I see – I won’t keep you longer by describing it in detail, but I shall now call upon Mr Bowles to begin the demonstration.’

  There was no applause when Lady Caroline, having finished speaking, stood aside and pointed to Mr Bowles. The few hands that came together in mechanical salutation tapped lightly together as dying leaves on a window, and this flickering noise – it might be dead leaves, or the owlet’s wings in a twilit lane – was altogether lost in the confused and excited chattering that immediately began. Noise encircled the garden: such a noise as occupies the intermission when the Queen’s Hall is filled with the admirers of Wagner, but mingled with the sharper sound of starlings frightened in a shrubbery, and coarsened and hoarsened by protest half-shocked beyond the use of words. There were now three hundred and sixty people present, and not half a dozen had ever seen a butcher working – except upon dead meat – and none would have thought of seeking entertainment in an abattoir. But though they muttered, though they exclaimed, though some were gruffly disapproving and others tittering, and here and there a woman cried she could not bear to see blood, yet a kind of decorum held them where they were; a sort of decency anchored them to the paths; their English habit of preferring to endure an outrage, rather than become conspicuous by rebelling against it, kept them from marching out of the garden. And then again they all disliked the thought of offending Lady Caroline. They decided to stay. It was easier to stay than flamboyantly retreat; and many of them, after the first shock was over, felt curiosity come creeping into their minds; they began to desire the discomforting titillation of horror. A few drops of rain fell, and more threatened. They put up their umbrellas, those who had them, and those who had not resented this curtailment of their view, and thrust their way forward, being now at all costs resolved to outwit the eclipsing umbrellas and to watch for all they were worth that which they had but lately shrunk from seeing.

  With the gesture of a conjuror who holds up a magic wand for his audience’s approval, Mr Bowles displayed his highwayman’s pistol and loaded it with grave precision.

  ‘I think it will be better to use the knife to begin with,’ said Lady Caroline. ‘First of all show us the cruel and disgusting way in which many people kill their pigs, and then let us see how nicely it can be done by the humane method.’

  ‘Very good, your ladyship,’ said Mr Bowles, and laid his pistol on the lid of his cardboard attache case. Then from a rolled-up sack he took a long brightly-bladed knife. The spectators stood silent. ‘Now you look after that for a minute,’ he said, and gave the knife to Patrick. Cecily firmly held the second pig by its tether.

  ‘The first thing to do,’ said Mr Bowles, now addressing his audience,’ is to put the pig on its back. Then you make a little cut in the skin between its neck and its chest, so to speak, and thrust in the knife till it reaches the big veins that go into the heart. Or arteries, they’re sometimes called,’ he added. A shiver rippled along the dark front of the spectators, and some sidled backwards into the rearward rank.

  Mr Bowles laid expert hands on the nearest pig and cast it on its back. Immediately, in the hellish fashion of a pig, it began to scream. The second pig, symipathetic, squealed in lighter tones. The din was ear-splitting, loud as a factory whistle and infinitely more poignant. Only Mr Bowles was unperturbed by the diabolical uproar – even the children grimaced – and, kneeling above the thrown pig’s head, he put a loop of the rope round its forefeet, pulled them towards him, and took his knife from Patrick. Deftly he made a small incision at the base of the porker’s fat throat.

  Few of the spectators would have believed that any noise could be louder and more fearful than that which they had heard already – many of them, despite decorum, forgetful of their English phlegm, were now in full retreat – but as soon as the pig felt the knife its voice acquired new strength and a still more hideous tone. To Mr Bowles, however, that was not unexpected. What he did not anticipate was that the beast would leap so convulsively as to knock him off his balance and break free. But Mr Bowles was somewhat excited by the proximity of so many spectators, and the rope was wet with the rain, and his hands and the pig were wet, and calamity occurred. The porker kicked its feet out of the rope and galloped headlong for the pergola. It was a fearsome sight. Its black body was convulsive with rage and speed, its huge ears flapped, and as it galloped it diabolically screamed. Panic broke the ranks of those who stood by the pergola. They tumbled over each other to get out of its way, and the pig crashed through the trellis-work, turned right, and ran beneath the crimson and the yellow roses.

  Now the second pig, emulous of its brother’s liberty, also struggled to get free, and Cecily could hardly hold it. Patrick dramatically came to his sister’s rescue. He seized the highwayman’s pistol, aimed, and fired. But the pistol kicked abominably and the bullet, scoring a furrow down the pig’s back, rose in a ricochet and whined over the rhododendron dell. Yelling with fright and pain the second pig broke loose, turned, and followed the way of the bullet. The spectators on the path that intersected its line of flight uttered loud cries of alarm, and bolted at ungainly speed towards the house.

  The scene of confusion in the garden was now almost indescribable. Most of the guests were women, and many of
them were old. But the older they were the more able they appeared to look after themselves, and the more determined to save the short residue of their lives. Brandishing their umbrellas like clubs, or stabbing with them as though they were assegais, they drove a resolute way to safety through indeterminate clusters of men and betwixt vocal groups of matrons and excited girls. In a very short time all the old ladies were inside the house again, with the doors barricaded behind them, and Miss Montgomery, who was seventy-nine, had rung the bell and ordered more tea.

  Meanwhile the Vicar, with great shouting such as he used in the hunting field, was summoning to him all the men whom he could recognize and knew to be moderately sound in wind and limb. His mind, released by the prospect of activity from the frustration and worry of the afternoon, was already elaborating plans for the recapture of the pigs. He had been far from happy since his conversation with Wilfrid, for his dignified and tactful attempts to elicit some information about the will from Mr Peabody had been quite unsuccessful, and the sudden revelation of his wife’s intention to butcher pigs in the middle of the garden – she had never told him the details of her plan to popularize Mr Bowles’s humane pistol – had startled and perturbed him. The necessity of repairing her folly, and the chance to forget his disappointment with Mr Peabody in pig-hunting, cheered him a lot, and he began to give orders for surrounding the dell with great vigour and confidence. His instructions were delayed by old Sir Gervase Flood, a fierce veteran of the Indian Civil Service, who came clamouring for a boar-spear.