PIG.
Go, stalk the red deer o'er the heather
Ride, follow the fox if you can!
But, for pleasure and profit together,
Allow me the hunting of Man,--
The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul
To its ruin,--the hunting of Man.
The Old Shikarri.
I believe the difference began in the matter of a horse, with a
twist in his temper, whom Pinecoffin sold to Nafferton and by whom
Nafferton was nearly slain. There may have been other causes of
offence; the horse was the official stalking-horse. Nafferton was
very angry; but Pinecoffin laughed and said that he had never
guaranteed the beast's manners. Nafferton laughed, too, though he
vowed that he would write off his fall against Pinecoffin if he
waited five years. Now, a Dalesman from beyond Skipton will forgive
an injury when the Strid lets a man live; but a South Devon man is
as soft as a Dartmoor bog. You can see from their names that
Nafferton had the race-advantage of Pinecoffin. He was a peculiar
man, and his notions of humor were cruel. He taught me a new and
fascinating form of shikar. He hounded Pinecoffin from Mithankot to
Jagadri, and from Gurgaon to Abbottabad up and across the Punjab, a
large province and in places remarkably dry. He said that he had no
intention of allowing Assistant Commissioners to "sell him pups," in
the shape of ramping, screaming countrybreds, without making their
lives a burden to them.
Most Assistant Commissioners develop a bent for some special work
after their first hot weather in the country. The boys with
digestions hope to write their names large on the Frontier and
struggle for dreary places like Bannu and Kohat. The bilious ones
climb into the Secretariat. Which is very bad for the liver.
Others are bitten with a mania for District work, Ghuznivide coins
or Persian poetry; while some, who come of farmers' stock, find that
the smell of the Earth after the Rains gets into their blood, and
calls them to "develop the resources of the Province." These men
are enthusiasts. Pinecoffin belonged to their class. He knew a
great many facts bearing on the cost of bullocks and temporary
wells, and opium-scrapers, and what happens if you burn too much
rubbish on a field, in the hope of enriching used-up soil. All the
Pinecoffins come of a landholding breed, and so the land only took
back her own again. Unfortunately--most unfortunately for
Pinecoffin--he was a Civilian, as well as a farmer. Nafferton
watched him, and thought about the horse. Nafferton said:--"See me
chase that boy till he drops!" I said:--"You can't get your knife
into an Assistant Commissioner." Nafferton told me that I did not
understand the administration of the Province.
Our Government is rather peculiar. It gushes on the agricultural
and general information side, and will supply a moderately
respectable man with all sorts of "economic statistics," if he
speaks to it prettily. For instance, you are interested in gold-
washing in the sands of the Sutlej. You pull the string, and find
that it wakes up half a dozen Departments, and finally communicates,
say, with a friend of yours in the Telegraph, who once wrote some
notes on the customs of the gold-washers when he was on
construction-work in their part of the Empire. He may or may not be
pleased at being ordered to write out everything he knows for your
benefit. This depends on his temperament. The bigger man you are,
the more information and the greater trouble can you raise.
Nafferton was not a big man; but he had the reputation of being very
earnest." An "earnest" man can do much with a Government. There
was an earnest man who once nearly wrecked . . . but all India knows
THAT story. I am not sure what real "earnestness" is. A very fair
imitation can be manufactured by neglecting to dress decently, by
mooning about in a dreamy, misty sort of way, by taking office-work
home after staying in office till seven, and by receiving crowds of
native gentlemen on Sundays. That is one sort of "earnestness."
Nafferton cast about for a peg whereon to hang his earnestness, and
for a string that would communicate with Pinecoffin. He found both.
They were Pig. Nafferton became an earnest inquirer after Pig. He
informed the Government that he had a scheme whereby a very large
percentage of the British Army in India could be fed, at a very
large saving, on Pig. Then he hinted that Pinecoffin might supply
him with the "varied information necessary to the proper inception
of the scheme." So the Government wrote on the back of the letter:--
"Instruct Mr. Pinecoffin to furnish Mr. Nafferton with any
information in his power." Government is very prone to writing
things on the backs of letters which, later, lead to trouble and
confusion.
Nafferton had not the faintest interest in Pig, but he knew that
Pinecoffin would flounce into the trap. Pinecoffin was delighted at
being consulted about Pig. The Indian Pig is not exactly an
important factor in agricultural life; but Nafferton explained to
Pinecoffin that there was room for improvement, and corresponded
direct with that young man.
You may think that there is not much to be evolved from Pig. It all
depends how you set to work. Pinecoffin being a Civilian and
wishing to do things thoroughly, began with an essay on the
Primitive Pig, the Mythology of the Pig, and the Dravidian Pig.
Nafferton filed that information--twenty-seven foolscap sheets--and
wanted to know about the distribution of the Pig in the Punjab, and
how it stood the Plains in the hot weather. From this point
onwards, remember that I am giving you only the barest outlines of
the affair--the guy-ropes, as it were, of the web that Nafferton
spun round Pinecoffin.
Pinecoffin made a colored Pig-population map, and collected
observations on the comparative longevity of the Pig (a) in the sub-
montane tracts of the Himalayas, and (b) in the Rechna Doab.
Nafferton filed that, and asked what sort of people looked after
Pig. This started an ethnological excursus on swineherds, and drew
from Pinecoffin long tables showing the proportion per thousand of
the caste in the Derajat. Nafferton filed that bundle, and
explained that the figures which he wanted referred to the Cis-
Sutlej states, where he understood that Pigs were very fine and
large, and where he proposed to start a Piggery. By this time,
Government had quite forgotten their instructions to Mr. Pinecoffin.
They were like the gentlemen, in Keats' poem, who turned well-oiled
wheels to skin other people. But Pinecoffin was just entering into
the spirit of the Pig-hunt, as Nafferton well knew he would do. He
had a fair amount of work of his own to clear away; but he sat up of
nights reducing Pig to five places of decimals for the honor of his
Service. He was not going to appear ignorant of so easy a subject
as Pig.
Then Government sent him on special duty to Kohat, to "inquire into"
the big-seven-foot, iron-shod spades of that District. People had
been killing each other with those peaceful tools; and Government
wished to know "whether a modified form of agricultural implement
could not, tentatively and as a temporary measure, be introduced
among the agricultural population without needlessly or unduly
exasperating the existing religious sentiments of the peasantry."
Between those spades and Nafferton's Pig, Pinecoffin was rather
heavily burdened.
Nafferton now began to take up "(a) The food-supply of the
indigenous Pig, with a view to the improvement of its capacities as
a flesh-former. (b) The acclimatization of the exotic Pig,
maintaining its distinctive peculiarities." Pinecoffin replied
exhaustively that the exotic Pig would become merged in the
indigenous type; and quoted horse-breeding statistics to prove this.
The side-issue was debated, at great length on Pinecoffin's side,
till Nafferton owned that he had been in the wrong, and moved the
previous question. When Pinecoffin had quite written himself out
about flesh-formers, and fibrins, and glucose and the nitrogenous
constituents of maize and lucerne, Nafferton raised the question of
expense. By this time Pinecoffin, who had been transferred from
Kohat, had developed a Pig theory of his own, which he stated in
thirty-three folio pages--all carefully filed by Nafferton. Who
asked for more.
These things took ten months, and Pinecoffin's interest in the
potential Piggery seemed to die down after he had stated his own
views. But Nafferton bombarded him with letters on "the Imperial
aspect of the scheme, as tending to officialize the sale of pork,
and thereby calculated to give offence to the Mahomedan population
of Upper India." He guessed that Pinecoffin would want some broad,
free-hand work after his niggling, stippling, decimal details.
Pinecoffin handled the latest development of the case in masterly
style, and proved that no "popular ebullition of excitement was to
be apprehended." Nafferton said that there was nothing like
Civilian insight in matters of this kind, and lured him up a bye-
path--"the possible profits to accrue to the Government from the
sale of hog-bristles." There is an extensive literature of hog-
bristles, and the shoe, brush, and colorman's trades recognize more
varieties of bristles than you would think possible. After
Pinecoffin had wondered a little at Nafferton's rage for
information, he sent back a monograph, fifty-one pages, on "Products
of the Pig." This led him, under Nafferton's tender handling,
straight to the Cawnpore factories, the trade in hog-skin for
saddles--and thence to the tanners. Pinecoffin wrote that
pomegranate-seed was the best cure for hog-skin, and suggested--for
the past fourteen months had wearied him--that Nafferton should
"raise his pigs before he tanned them."
Nafferton went back to the second section of his fifth question.
How could the exotic Pig be brought to give as much pork as it did
in the West and yet "assume the essentially hirsute characteristics
of its oriental congener?" Pinecoffin felt dazed, for he had
forgotten what he had written sixteen month's before, and fancied
that he was about to reopen the entire question. He was too far
involved in the hideous tangle to retreat, and, in a weak moment, he
wrote:--"Consult my first letter." Which related to the Dravidian
Pig. As a matter of fact, Pinecoffin had still to reach the
acclimatization stage; having gone off on a side-issue on the
merging of types.
THEN Nafferton really unmasked his batteries! He complained to the
Government, in stately language, of "the paucity of help accorded to
me in my earnest attempts to start a potentially remunerative
industry, and the flippancy with which my requests for information
are treated by a gentleman whose pseudo-scholarly attainments should
at lest have taught him the primary differences between the
Dravidian and the Berkshire variety of the genus Sus. If I am to
understand that the letter to which he refers me contains his
serious views on the acclimatization of a valuable, though possibly
uncleanly, animal, I am reluctantly compelled to believe," etc.,
etc.
There was a new man at the head of the Department of Castigation.
The wretched Pinecoffin was told that the Service was made for the
Country, and not the Country for the Service, and that he had better
begin to supply information about Pigs.
Pinecoffin answered insanely that he had written everything that
could be written about Pig, and that some furlough was due to him.
Nafferton got a copy of that letter, and sent it, with the essay on
the Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in
full. The essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen
the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's
table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous
discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern
Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical
issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks
and sent them to Pinecoffin.
I have already stated that Pinecoffin came of a soft stock. This
last stroke frightened and shook him. He could not understand it;
but he felt he had been, somehow, shamelessly betrayed by Nafferton.
He realized that he had wrapped himself up in the Pigskin without
need, and that he could not well set himself right with his
Government. All his acquaintances asked after his "nebulous
discursiveness" or his "blatant self-sufficiency," and this made him
miserable.
He took a train and went to Nafferton, whom he had not seen since
the Pig business began. He also took the cutting from the paper,
and blustered feebly and called Nafferton names, and then died down
to a watery, weak protest of the "I-say-it's-too-bad-you-know"
order.
Nafferton was very sympathetic.
"I'm afraid I've given you a good deal of trouble, haven't I?" said
he.
"Trouble!" whimpered Pinecoffin; "I don't mind the trouble so much,
though that was bad enough; but what I resent is this showing up in
print. It will stick to me like a burr all through my service. And
I DID do my best for your interminable swine. It's too bad of you,
on my soul it is!"
"I don't know," said Nafferton; "have you ever been stuck with a
horse? It isn't the money I mind, though that is bad enough; but
what I resent is the chaff that follows, especially from the boy who
stuck me. But I think we'll cry quite now."
Pinecoffin found nothing to say save bad words; and Nafferton smiled
ever so sweetly, and asked him to dinner.
