It was a Parthian shot. The name of Mr. Parfitt was meant to wound me to the quick, to bring the blush of shame to my cheek. For had not Mr. Parfitt been the perfect, complete and infallible editor? Whereas I . . . Mr. Bosk left it to my own conscience to decide what I was.
And indeed I was well aware of my short-comings. ‘The Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette,’ with which, as every schoolboy knows, is incorporated ‘The Mouse Breeders’ Record,’ could hardly have had a more unsuitable editor than I. To this day, I confess, I hardly know the right end of a rabbit from the wrong. Mr. Bosk was a survivor from the grand old days of Mr. Parfitt, the founder and for thirty years the editor of the Gazette.
‘Mr. Parfitt, sir,’ he used to tell me every now and then, ‘was a real fancier.’ His successor, by implication, was not.
It was at the end of the war. I was looking for a job—a job at the heart of reality. The illusory nature of the position had made me decline my old college’s offer of a fellowship. I wanted something—how shall I put it?—more palpitating. And then in The Times I found what I had been looking for. ‘Wanted Editor of proved literary ability for livestock trade paper. Apply Box 92.’ I applied, was interviewed, and conquered. The directors couldn’t finally resist my testimonial from the Bishop of Bosham. ‘A life-long acquaintance with Mr. Chelifer and his family permits me confidently to assert that he is a young man of great ability and high moral purpose, (signed) Hartley Bosh.’ I was appointed for a probationary period of six months.
Old Mr. Parfitt, the retiring editor, stayed on a few days at the office to initiate me into the secrets of the work. He was a benevolent old gentleman, short, thick and with a very large head. His square face was made to seem even broader than it was by the grey whiskers which ran down his cheeks to merge imperceptibly into the ends of his moustache. He knew more about mice and rabbits than any man in the country; but what he prided himself on was his literary gift. He explained to me the principles on which he wrote his weekly leaders.
‘In the fable,’ he told me, smiling already in anticipation of the end of this joke which he had been elaborating and polishing since 1892, ‘in the fable it is the mountain which, after a long and, if I may say so, geological labour, gives birth to the mouse. My principle, on the contrary, has always been, wherever possible, to make my mice parturate mountains.’ He paused expectantly. When I had laughed, he went on. ‘It’s astonishing what reflections on life and art and politics and philosophy and what not you can get out of a mouse or a rabbit. Quite astonishing!’
The most notable of Mr. Parfitt’s mountain thoughts still hangs, under glass and in an Oxford frame, on the wall above the editorial desk. It was printed in the Rabbit Fancier for August 8, 1914.
‘It is not the readers of the Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette,’ Mr. Parfitt had written on that cardinal date, ‘who have made this war. No Mouse Breeder, I emphatically proclaim, has desired it. No! Absorbed in their harmless and indeed beneficent occupations, they have had neither the wish nor the leisure to disturb the world’s peace. If all men whole-heartedly devoted themselves to avocations like ours, there would be no war. The world would be filled with the innocent creators and fosterers of life, not, as at present, with its tigerish destroyers. Had Kaiser William the Second been a breeder of rabbits or mice, we should not find ourselves to-day in a world whose very existence is threatened by the unimaginable horrors of modern warfare.’
Noble words! Mr. Parfitt’s righteous indignation was strengthened by his fears for the future of his paper. The war, he gloomily foreboded, would mean the end of rabbit breeding. But he was wrong. Mice, it is true, went rather out of fashion between 1914 and 1918. But in the lean years of rationing, rabbits took on a new importance. In 1917 there were ten fanciers of Flemish Giants to every one there had been before the war. Subscriptions rose, advertisements were multiplied.
‘Rabbits,’ Mr. Parfitt assured me, ‘did a great deal to help us win the war.’
And conversely, the war did so much to help rabbits that Mr. Parfitt was able to retire in 1919 with a modest but adequate fortune. It was then that I took over control. And in spite of Mr. Bosk’s contempt for my ignorance and incompetence, I must in justice congratulate myself on the way in which I piloted the concern through the evil times which followed. Peace found the English people at once less prosperous and less hungry than they had been during the war. The time had passed when it was necessary for them to breed rabbits; and they could not afford the luxury of breeding them for pleasure. Subscriptions declined, advertisements fell off. I averted an impending catastrophe by adding to the paper a new section dealing with goats. Biologically, no doubt, as I pointed out to the directors in my communication on the subject, this mingling of ruminants with rodents was decidedly unsound. But commercially, I felt sure, the innovation would be justified. It was. The goats brought half a dozen pages of advertisements in their train and several hundred new subscribers. Mr. Bosk was furious at my success; but the directors thought very highly of my capacities.
They did not, it is true, always approve of my leading articles. ‘Couldn’t you try to make them a little more popular,’ suggested the managing director, ‘a little more practical too, Mr. Chelifer? For instance,’ and clearing his throat, he unfolded the typewritten sheet of complaints which he had had prepared and had brought with him to the board meeting, ‘for instance, what’s the practical value of this stuff about the use of the word “cony” as a term of endearment in the Elizabethan dramatists? And this article on the derivation of “rabbit” ’—he looked at his paper again and coughed. ‘Who wants to know that there’s a Walloon word “robett”? Or that our word may have something to do with the Spanish rabear, to wag the hind quarters? And who, by the way,’ he added, looking up at me over his pince-nez with an air—prematurely put on—of triumph, ‘who ever heard of an animal wagging its hind quarters?’ ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, apologetically, but firmly, as befits a man who knows that he is right, ‘my authority is no less than Skeat himself.’
The managing director, who had hoped to score a point, went on, defeated, to the next count in the indictment. ‘And then, Mr. Chelifer,’ he said, ‘we don’t very much like, my fellow directors and I, we don’t much like what you say in your article on “Rabbit Fancying and its Lesson to Humanity.” It may be true that breeders have succeeded in producing domesticated rabbits that are four times the weight of wild rabbits and possess only half the quantity of brains—it may be true. Indeed, it is true. And a very remarkable achievement it is, Mr. Chelifer, very remarkable indeed. But that is no reason for upholding, as you do, Mr. Chelifer, that the ideal working man, at whose production the eugenist should aim, is a man eight times as strong as the present-day workman, with only a sixteenth of his mental capacity. Not that my fellow directors and I entirely disagree with what you say, Mr. Chelifer; far from it. All right-thinking men must agree that the modern workman is too well educated. But we have to remember, Mr. Chelifer, that many of our readers actually belong to that class.’
‘Quite.’ I acquiesced in the reproof.
‘And finally, Mr. Chelifer, there is your article on the “Symbology of the Goat.” We feel that the facts you have there collected, however interesting to the anthropologist and the student of folk-lore, are hardly of a kind to be set before a mixed public like ours.’
The other directors murmured their assent. There was a prolonged silence.
CHAPTER III
I remember an advertisement—for some sort of cough drops I think it was—which used to figure very largely in my boyhood on the back covers of the illustrated weeklies. Over the legend, ‘A Pine Forest in every Home,’ appeared a picture of three or four magnificent Norway spruces growing out of the drawing-room carpet, while the lady of the house, her children and guests took tea, with a remarkable air of unconcern and as though it was quite natural to have a sequoia sprouting out of the hearth-rug, under their sanitary and aromatic shade. A Pine Forest in every Home. . . . But I have thought of something even better. A Luna Park in every Office. A British Empire Exhibition Fun Fair in every Bank. An Earl’s Court in every Factory. True, I cannot claim to bring every attraction of the Fun Fair into your place of labour—only the switchback, the water-shoot and the mountain railway. Merry-go-round, wiggle-woggle, flip-flap and the like are beyond the power of my magic to conjure up.
Horizontal motion and a rotary giddiness I cannot claim to reproduce; my speciality is headlong descents, breathlessness
