by Roald Dahl
Rummins glanced up from examining the screw. 'You didn't tell us what you were going to offer,' he said.
'Ah,' Mr Boggis said. 'That's quite right. I didn't, did I? Well, to tell you the truth, I think it's a bit too much trouble. I think I'll leave it.'
How much would you give?'
'Shall we say ... ten pounds. I think that would be fair.'
'Ten pounds!' Rummins cried. 'Don't be ridiculous, Reverend, please!'
'It's worth more than that for firewood!' Claud said.
'All right, my friend - I'll go up as high as fifteen pounds. How's that?'
'Make it fifty,' Rummins said.
A delicious thrill ran all the way down the back of Mr Boggis's legs and then under the bottom of his feet. He had it now. It was his. No question about that. But the habit of buying cheap, as cheaply as possible, was too strong in him now to permit him to give in so easily.
'My dear man,' he whispered softly, 'I only want the legs. Possibly I could find some use for the drawers later on, but the rest it, as your friend rightly said, is firewood, that's all.'
'Make it thirty-five,' Rummins said.
'I couldn't sir, I couldn't! It's not worth it. And I simply mustn't allow myself to argue like this about a price. It's all wrong. I'll make you one final offer and then I must go. Twenty pounds.'
'I'll take it,' Rummins answered. 'It's yours.'
'Oh dear,' Mr Boggis said. 'I speak before I think. I should never have started this.'
'You can't change your mind now, Vicar. A deal's a deal.'
'Yes, yes, I know.'
'How are you going to take it?'
'Well, let me see. Perhaps if I drove my car up into the yard, you gentlemen would be kind enough to help me load it?'
'In a car? This thing will never go in a car! You'll need a truck for this!'
'I don't think so. Anyway we'll see. My car's on the road. I'll be back in a few minutes. We'll manage it somehow, I'm sure.'
Mr Boggis walked out into the yard and through the gate and then down the long track that led across the field towards the road. He found himself laughing uncontrollably, and there was a feeling inside him as if hundreds of tiny bubbles were rising up from his stomach and bursting in the top of his head. He was finding it difficult to stop himself from running. But vicars never run; they walk slowly. Walk slowly, Boggis. Keep calm, Boggis. There's no hurry now. The commode is yours! Yours for twenty pounds, and it's worth fifteen or twenty thousand! The Boggis Commode! In ten minutes it'll be loaded into your car - it'll go in easily - and you'll be driving back to London and singing all the way!
Back in the farmhouse, Rummins was saying, 'Imagine old fool giving twenty pounds for a load of old rubbish like this.'
'You did very nicely, Mr Rummins,' Claud told him. 'Do you think he'll pay you?'
'We won't put it in the car till he does.'
'And what will happen if it won't go in the car?' Claud asked.
'You know what I think, Mr Rummins? I think the thing's too big to go in the car. Then he's going to drive off without it and you'll never see him again. Nor the money. He didn't seem very keep on having it, you know.'
Rummins paused to consider this new idea.
Claud went on, 'A vicar never has a big car anyway. Have you ever seen a vicar with a big car, Mr Rummins?'
'I can't say I have.'
'Exactly! And now listen to me. I've got an idea. He told us that it was only the legs he wanted. Right? So if we cut them off quickly right here before he comes back, it will certainly go in the car. All we're doing is saving him the trouble of cutting them off himself when he gets home. How about it, Mr Rummins?'
'It's not such a bad idea,' Rummins said, looking at the commode. 'Come on then, we'll have to hurry. You and Bert carry it out into the yard. Take the drawers out first.'
Within a couple of minutes, Claud and Bert had carried the commode outside and had laid it upside down in the middle of the yard. In the distance, halfway across the field, they could see a small black figure walking along the path towards the road. They paused to watch. There was something rather funny about the way the figure was behaving. Every few seconds it would start to run, then it did a little jump, and once it seemed as if the sound of a cheerful song could be heard from across the field.
'I think he's mad,' Claud said, smiling to himself.
Rummins came over, carrying the tools. Claud took them from him and started work.
'Cut them carefully,' Rummins said. 'Don't forget he's going to use them on another table.'
The wood was hard and very dry, and as Claud worked, a fine red dust fell softly to the ground. One by one, the legs came off, and Bert bent down and arranged them neatly in a row.
Claud stepped back to examine the results of his labour. There was a pause.
'Just let me ask you one question, Mr Rummins,' he said slowly. 'Even now, could you put that enormous thing into the back of a car?'
'Not unless it was a van.'
'Correct!' Claud cried. 'And vicars don't have vans, you know. All they've got usually is small cars.'
'The legs are all he wants,' Rummins said. 'If the rest of it won't go in, then he can leave it. He can't complain. He's got the legs.'
'You know very well he's going to start reducing the price if he doesn't get every bit of this into the car. A vicar's just as smart with money as everyone. Especially this old man. So why don't we give him his firewood now and finish it? Where do you keep the axe?'
'That's fair,' Rummins said. 'Bert, go and fetch it.'
Bert went and fetched the axe and gave it to Claud who then, with a long-armed high-swinging action, began fiercely attacking the legless commode. It was hard work, and it took several minutes before he had the whole thing more or less broken in pieces.
'I'll tell you one thing; he said. 'That was a good carpenter who put this commode together and I don't care what the vicar says.'
'We're just in time!' Rummins called out. 'Here he comes!'
Pig
Once upon a time, in the city of New York, a beautiful baby boy was born, and his joyful parents named him Lexington.
The mother had just returned from hospital carrying Lexington in her arms when she said to her husband, 'Darling, now you must take me out to a most wonderful restaurant for dinner.'
Her husband kissed her and told her that any woman who could have such a beautiful baby as Lexington deserved to go anywhere she wanted. So that evening they both dressed themselves in their best clothes and, leaving little Lexington in the care of a trained nurse who was costing them twenty dollars a day, they went out to the finest and most expensive restaurant in town.
After a wonderful evening, they arrived back at their house at around two o'clock in the morning. The husband paid the taxi driver and then began feeling in his pockets for the key to the front door. After a while, he announced that he must have left it in the pocket of his other suit, and he suggested they ring the bell and get the nurse to come down and let them in. A nurse who was costing them twenty dollars a day must expect to have to get out of bed occasionally in the night, the husband said.
So he rang the bell. They waited. Nothing happened. He rang it again, long and loud. They waited another minute. Then they both stepped back on to the street and shouted the nurse's name up at the nursery window on the third floor, but there was still no answer. The house was dark and silent. The wife began to become frightened. If the nurse couldn't hear the front doorbell, then how did she expect to hear the baby crying?
'You mustn't worry. I'll let you in.' He was feeling rather brave after all he had drunk. He bent down and took off a shoe. Then, holding the shoe by the toe, he threw it hard and straight through the dining-room window on the ground floor.
'There you are,' he said, laughing. He stepped forward and very carefully put a hand through the hole in the glass and undid the lock. Then he raised the window.
'I'll lift you in first, little mother,' he said, and he to
ok his wife around the waist and lifted her off the ground. Then her husband turned her round and began moving her gently through the open window into the dining room. At this moment, a police car came driving silently along the street towards them. It stopped about thirty metres away and three policemen jumped out of the car and started running in the direction of the husband and wife. The policemen were all holding guns.
'Hands up!' the policemen shouted. 'Hands up!' But it was impossible for the husband to obey this order without letting go of his wife. If he had done this, she would either have fallen to the ground or would have been left half in and half out of the house, which is a very uncomfortable position for a woman; so he continued to push her upwards and inwards through the window. The policemen, all of whom had received rewards before for killing robbers, shot at them immediately. Although the policemen were still running, they hit both bodies several times and killed both of them.
So, when he was no more than twelve days old, little Lexington became an orphan.
The news of this killing was brought to all the relatives of the dead couple by newspaper reporters, and the next morning the closest of the relatives got into taxis and left for the house with the broken window. They gathered in the living room and sat around in a circle, smoking cigarettes and talking about what should be done with the baby upstairs, the orphan Lexington
It soon became clear that none of the relatives wanted responsibility for the child, and they talked and argued all through the day. Everybody declared an enormous desire to look after him, and would have done so with the greatest of pleasure but their apartment was too small, or they already had one baby and couldn't possibly afford another, or they wouldn't know what to do with the poor little child when they went abroad in the summer, or they were getting old, which would surely be very unfair on the boy. They all knew, of course, that the father had been heavily in debt for a long time and that there would be no money at all to go with the child.
They were still arguing at six the next morning when suddenly, in the middle of it all, an old aunt (her name was Glosspan) arrived from Virginia. Without taking off her hat and coat, without even sitting down, she announced firmly to the gathered relatives that she herself intended to look after the baby boy. She would take full responsibility, she said, for the boy's education - and all the costs - and everyone else could go home. She went upstairs to the nursery and took Lexington and went out of the house with the baby held tightly in her arms. The relatives simply sat, stared, smiled and looked content.
And so the baby, Lexington, left the city of New York when he was thirteen days old and travelled southwards to live with Great Aunt Glosspan in the State of Virginia.
Aunt Glosspan was nearly seventy when she took Lexington to Virginia, but you would never have guessed it. She was as youthful as a woman half her age. She had a small, but still quite beautiful face and two lovely brown eyes. But she was a strange old woman. For the past thirty years she had lived alone in a small cottage high up on the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, several kilometres from the nearest village. She had three cows, some fields for them, some land for growing vegetables, a flower garden and a dozen chickens.
And now she had little Lexington, too.
She was a strict vegetarian and thought that eating animal meat was not only unhealthy and disgusting, but cruel too. She lived on foods like milk, butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, nuts and fruit, and she was happy to think that no creature would ever be slaughtered for her sake.
She did not know very much about babies but that didn't worry her. At the railway station in New York she bought some things for feeding the baby and a book called The Care Of Infants. What more could anyone want? When the train started moving, she fed the baby some milk and laid it down on the seat to sleep. Then she read The Care Of Infants from beginning to end.
Strangely there wasn't any problem. Back home in the cottage everything went well. Little Lexington drank his milk and cried and slept exactly as a good baby should, and Aunt Glosspan was filled with joy whenever she looked at him and she kissed him all day long. By the time he was six years old, young Lexington had become a most beautiful boy with long golden hair and deep blue eyes. He was bright and cheerful, and already he was learning to help his old aunt in all sorts of different ways around the farm, collecting the eggs from the chicken house, making butter, and digging up potatoes in the vegetable garden. Soon, Aunt Glosspan told herself, she would have to start thinking about his education.
But she could not bear the thought of sending him away to school. She loved him so much now that it would kill her to be separated from him for long. There was, of course, that village school down in the valley, but it was a horrible-looking place, and if she sent him there, she was sure they would start forcing him to eat meat as soon as he arrived.
'You know what, my darling?' she said to him one day when he was sitting in the kitchen watching her make cheese. 'I'll teach you myself.'
The boy looked at her with his large blue eyes, and gave her a trusting smile. 'That would be nice,' he said.
'And the first thing I should do is to teach you how to cook.'
'I think I would like that, Aunt Glosspan.'
'You're going to have to learn some time,' she said. 'Vegetarians like us don't have nearly so many foods to choose from as ordinary people, and so they must learn to cook doubly well.'
'Aunt Glosspan,' the boy said, 'what do ordinary people eat that we don't?'
'Animals,' she answered with disgust.
'Do you mean live animals?'
'No,' she said. 'Dead ones.'
'Do you mean that when they die they eat them instead of burying them?'
'They don't wait for them to die, dear. They kill them.'
'How do they kill them, Aunt Glosspan?'
'They usually cut their throats with a knife.'
'But what kind of animals?'
'Cows and pigs mostly, and sheep.'
'Cows!' the boy cried. 'You mean like our cows?'
'Exactly, my dear.'
'But how do they eat them, Aunt Glosspan?'
'They cut them up into little bits and they cook them. They like the meat best when it's all red and bloody and sticking to the bones. They love to eat cow's flesh with the blood running out of it.'
'Pigs too?'
'They love pigs.'
'Lumps of pig's meat,' the boy said. 'Imagine that. What else do they eat, Aunt Glosspan?'
'Chickens.'
'Chickens? Feathers too?'
'No, dear, not the feathers. Now go outside and play, will you?'
Soon after that, the lessons began. There were five subjects, including reading and writing, but cooking was the most popular with both teacher and pupil. In fact, it soon became very clear that young Lexington was a talented cook. He was clever and quick. In so young a boy, this surprised Aunt Glosspan and she could not quite understand it at all. But she was very proud of him and thought that the child would have a wonderful future.
'How good it is,' she said, 'that I have such a wonderful little fellow to look after me when I'm old.' A couple of years later, she left the kitchen for ever, and put Lexington in charge of all household cooking. The boy was now ten years old, and Aunt Glosspan was nearly eighty. Alone in the kitchen, Lexington immediately began experimenting with dishes of his own invention. There were hundreds of new ideas in his head. Hardly a day went by without some wonderful new dish being placed on the table. There were many delicious inventions. Aunt Glosspan had never tasted food like this in all her life. In the mornings, before lunch, she would go outside the house and sit there in her chair, thinking about the coming meal. She loved to sit there and smell what came through the kitchen window.
Then he would come out, this ten-year-old child, a little smile of pleasure on his face and a big steaming pot of the most wonderful food imaginable in his hands.
'Do you know what you ought to do?' his aunt said to him, eating the food. 'You ought to sit do
wn and write a cookbook.
He looked at her across the table, eating slowly.
'Why not?' she cried. 'I've taught you how to write and I've taught you how to cook, and now you've only got to put the two things together. You write a cookbook, my darling, and it'll make you famous all over the world.'
'All right,' he said. 'I will.'
And that same day, Lexington began writing the first page of that great book on which he worked for the rest of his life. He called it Eat Well And Healthily. Seven years later, by the time he was seventeen, he had recorded over nine thousand different recipes, all of them original, all of them wonderful.
But now, suddenly, his work was interrupted by the death of Aunt Glosspan. She was ill during the night and Lexington found her lying on the bed screaming with pain. She was a terrible sight. The boy wondered what he should do. Finally, to cool her down, he fetched a bucket of water from the river and poured it over her head, but this only made her worse, and the old lady died in an hour.
'This is really too bad,' the poor boy said, pinching her several times to make sure that she was dead. 'And how sudden! Only a few hours ago she seemed in the very best health. She even ate three large portions of my newest mushroom dish and told me how good it was.'
After crying bitterly for several minutes, because he had loved his aunt very much, he carried her outside and buried her in the garden.
The next day, while he was tidying up her things, he found an envelope that was addressed to him in Aunt Glosspan's handwriting. He opened it and took out two fifty-dollar notes and a letter. The letter said:
Darling boy, I know that you have never been down the mountain since you were thirteen days old, but as soon as I die you must put on a pair of shoes and a clean shirt and walk down into the village and find the doctor. Ask the doctor to give you a death certificate. Then take this to my lawyer, a man called Mr Samuel Zuckermann, who lives in New York City and who has a copy of my will. Mr Zuckermann will arrange everything. The money in this envelope is to pay the doctor for the certificate and for the cost of your journey to New York. Mr Zuckermann will give you more money when you get there, and it is my wish that you use it to continue your work on that great book of yours until you are satisfied that it is complete in every way. Your loving aunt, Glosspan Lexington, who had always done everything his aunt had told him, put the money in his pocket, put on a pair of shoes and a clean shirt, and went down the mountain to the village where the doctor lived.