‘That’s what I mean,’ explained Miss Gay. ‘The old Piggy never bothered like you do. As for snap tests—I can just see his groups standing for anything like that ! Yet, for you, we just sit up and beg.’
‘Naturally. I’m old enough to be your father. I am a father, at that. I’m accustomed to implicit obedience—or else !’
Miss Gay giggled.
‘It isn’t that,’ she said. ‘And it isn’t the Romeo in you, because there isn’t.’
‘Isn’t what? Look at that young boar we were so worried about last week. Putting him in with the little hog pig has bucked up his appetite no end. Nothing like rivalry to make a boar show what he’s made of.’
‘There you go again!’ said the amused and exasperated Miss Gay. ‘I believe you’d take a lot more interest in us if we were pigs.’
‘Well, of course I should. Pigs are infinitely more interesting than callow young women.’
‘It’s a good thing all men don’t think alike, then. When are you taking us to that bacon-curing place ? I hate to think of our pigs ending up as streaky and long back rashers.’
‘I know. It is sad, but life’s like that. I’m not sure that I myself wouldn’t rather end up that way, though, appreciated to the last, and of some use, even in death.’
Miss Gay giggled.
‘Even your jokes aren’t a bit like his,’ she said. ‘But when I heard he’d broken his leg I was simply terribly upset. He was quite a heart-throb, you know. He came here from Highpepper.’
‘Did he ? I suppose he considered his talents were wasted among the Philistines.—Miss Morris, lift that piglet by one hind leg and the shoulders. No, you won’t hurt him that way. Gentle but firm—that’s it.’
‘He couldn’t manage the men, so I heard,’ said Miss Gay, mucking out rapidly. ‘Why is it that, when we let these animals out for exercise, they make straight for the nearest mud and then come back and rock and roll on my nice clean straw?’
‘High body temperature, poor creatures.—Cod-liver oil for that sow, Miss Walters, and don’t forget her mineral salts. How long have you had her in the paddock?’
‘Best part of the day, Mr Lestrange.’ Miss Walters was the rhubarb-fancier, but Carey did not know that.
‘That’s the idea. Keep her toned up with exercise. She’ll have a rotten time if she gets too fat, poor old girl.’
‘Piggy,’ pursued the indefatigable Miss Gay, ‘would have added a personal touch to that advice, if you see what I mean, Mr Lestrange.’
‘Piggy by name but Wolf by nature, I presume?’
Miss Gay giggled.
‘He isn’t exactly U, like you,’ she explained.
‘He seems to have been good with pigs,’ said Carey, leaning over and slapping a lop-eared Cumberland, ‘and that’s the whole point, is it not?—What about that youngster of yours with oedema, Miss Platt?’
‘Like you said, Mr Lestrange—sloppy bran mash with an ounce and a half of Epsom salts, and small ordinary bran mashes three times a day.’
‘That’s the spirit.’ He took an apple out of his breeches pocket and gave it to a young pig which was scratching itself against his gaiters. ‘Well, knock off any time now, girls. I want to get home to my telly.’
‘It’s too bad you go home every evening,’ said Miss Gay, ‘and weekends, too. Think of the fun you could have.’
‘I do—and shudder,’ said Carey.
One morning, at his home in Oxfordshire, his wife Jenny had gone down to the piggeries with Ditch, Carey’s pigman, to look at a new boar, when Mrs Ditch, who acted, in their small, square, stone-built house, as housekeeper, cook and general factotum, came to the Scandinavian-type pig-house with the tidings that the master was on the telephone.
Answering it, Jenny learned that her lord was staying the night in College.
‘Sorry,’ he said, when she took the call, ‘but I shan’t be home tonight. We’ve run into a spot of trouble.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Only a gang of louts, but everything’s in a mess. Fences broken, pigs let out, fowl-runs opened—all the works. Anyway, we’re slaving like mad to get things shipshape, and I’m going to do a spot of sentry-duty tonight. Haven’t told Miss McKay. She’d have a fit if she thought I wasn’t getting my beauty sleep. But my pigman and I are rather cross about things. I have a lovely gilt in-pig, and I’m afraid this may have upset her. Pigs are terribly temperamental, as you know. How’s Ernest settling in? Yes, quite. The importance of being Ernest is that if he mates nicely with Barbara we ought to get a beautiful litter of Gloucester Old Spots, which is a pig I’ve always wanted to try.’
‘If you’ve had a lot of destruction, why don’t you call in the police?’
‘Miss McKay thinks it may be a Highpepper rag. She’s had their bloke on the phone and he’s promised to brainwash his lads, but, personally, I don’t think it’s ragging. It’s nasty, which the boys, on the whole, are not. Anyway, don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow night, with any luck.’
Carey and his pigman stayed up until three in the morning and caught nobody. Carey had no lectures until after the mid-morning break, so he slept-in until half-past nine, made a leisurely breakfast in the Staff dining-room and then went for a short stroll in the grounds.
The pigs which had been released by the marauders had done a considerable amount of damage, most of which was still being tidied up by the students. Carey stopped beside a perspiring lass in breeches and leggings who was putting a flower-bed to rights, and pointed to a heap of rhubarb crowns and the extremely decayed carcass of a small mammal.
‘How come?’ he enquired. The girl straightened her back and leaned on the garden fork she was using.
‘Isn’t it horrible?’ she said. ‘We keep finding rhubarb and rats all over the place. This is the fifth lot that I know of. Those filthy louts! I’d like to get hold of one of them!’
‘I doubt whether this is the work of louts,’ said Carey, gazing at the remains of the dead rat. ‘It looks more like ancient history to me. I should incinerate that carcass, if I were you. Let’s hope the pigs didn’t investigate the corpses too closely. It can’t have done them much good if they did.’
By lunch-time seventeen more deposits of rats and rhubarb crowns had been discovered, and the Principal of Highpepper had been along to look at the damage. His view was that the gentlemen-farmers were innocent of the destructive raid on Calladale, but it turned out that, although Soames and Preddle had contrived to remain discreetly silent about the rats and the rhubarb, Old Benson, the local rat-catcher, had confessed to the sale of sundry corpses to ‘some of the gentlemen’ at the end of the previous term.
‘Not a nice rag,’ said Miss McKay, ‘but if Mr Sellaclough declares that his men did no damage, I have no option but to agree. I do wish they would leave this College alone.’
That in some respects this was unlikely was demonstrated very shortly afterwards. In spite of Preddle’s ungallant assertions, not all the Calladale students were uncouth in body and mind. Some, indeed, were both handsome and gifted, not the least pulchritudinous being one Rachel Good. From the point of view of Miss McKay, Rachel was inclined to belie her surname, but in the eyes of a certain Highpepper youth named Cleeves she was the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley. In other words, at the end of the summer term they had plighted their troth, and, as Cleeves was a young man of substance, Rachel sported an engagement ring tricked out with rubies and was taken into Garchester to partake of ambrosia and the blushful Hippocrene far more often than some of her envious contemporaries thought was reasonable.