Роберт Шеррифф - The Hopkins Manuscript

I was ashamed – then proud. Ashamed that I should think of leaving those others to bear the awful burden: proud that I was numbered amongst the select and trusted few. I pictured the Prime Minister of England, planning the great subterranean strongholds to salvage a drop or two of British blood to build the Empire again. The Prime Minister! – and me! We knew – while untold millions were ignorant!

With a surge of renewed pride I strode across the bridge and was just in time to catch the 9.18. I had felt no desire for my usual little dinner in Soho, and the 9.18 was, on the whole, a better train than the 9.52. It did not stop at Basingstoke, where frequently the 9.52 had a tedious delay to take off empty milkcans.

I was lucky to secure a compartment to myself, and settled down to read the latest number of the Poultry Times.

I was very pleased indeed to find an authoritative article recommending at last the tubular metal perches that I had advocated so persistently for the past seven years. It is my firm conviction that a hen’s laying capacity is undermined by long hours of sleep upon a cold perch.

By a simple device of a small, inexpensive boiler it is possible to keep a steady flow of warm water through these metal perches. This not only warms the feet of the fowl and prevents loss of vitality, but my experiments have proved that the fowl sleeps longer and more soundly – awakes refreshed and full of strength and lays, within ten to twenty minutes of rising, an egg of far greater quality than one generated under vitality-lowering conditions.

I advocated this in a long letter to the Mulcaster Wednesday Echo. The letter was published, but the only result was a ribald and indecent reply (which the Editor should never have published) suggesting that hot chicken perches would cause the eggs to hatch inside the hens, causing them unnecessary embarrassment and discomfort.

I never took the Echo again – and now here before me, in no less a paper than the Poultry Times, was my own idea, smugly presented under the pseudonym of ‘Ego’.

It only went to prove the unspeakable meanness and dishonesty into which a man can be led by professional jealousy.

I am very much a creature of habit. It was my invariable custom to say: ‘Good morning, Mrs Buller,’ when my housekeeper brought my tea at eight o’clock – and ‘Thank you’ as she placed the morning newspapers upon the counterpane beside me.

It was a simple little ritual, so deeply engraved by years of habit that frequently I spoke the words in my sleep. I know this to be a fact, because upon apologising to Mrs Buller one morning at breakfast for not acknowledging my early cup of tea she assured me that I had said ‘Good morning’ and then ‘Thank you’ just as usual, although my eyes had been closed.

But if ever that habit were broken it was upon the morning after the fantastic meeting of the British Lunar Society. So drugged was I by the deep, unwholesome slumber which had come to me at dawn that the first sound to penetrate my bemused brain was the clock in Beadle Church tower striking nine, and the first sight to greet my aching eyes was a stone-cold cup of tea on my bedside table with an unappetising pink-brown scum upon it.

Even so I could not move. One leg of my pyjamas, grim token of a restless night, was rucked tightly above my knee, but I had neither the energy nor the inclination to adjust it. Vaguely I knew that something had happened, but I was far too tired to reason what it was.

I think that my uppermost, conscious mind was trying hard to persuade me that I had experienced a most unpleasant nightmare and that I had only to arouse myself, jump out of bed and pull back the blinds to make everything all right and normal again. The nightmare, said my befuddled, conscious mind, would vanish with the daylight as the meadow mists before the morning sun.

But all the while my innermost, subconscious mind was warning me that nothing so simple as a nightmare had occurred – that very soon I must summon the energy to face a most unpleasant truth.

When the chimes of Beadle tower came clear-cut across the valley it meant that the wind was from the north. I was pleased about it this morning because it would dry the scythed grass in the meadow and enable us to stack it before the leaves began to fall. I was pleased – but I knew that I was silly to be pleased, and tried to wonder why.

I think it was the sight of my blue serge suit, lying carelessly, almost flauntingly across the armchair, that brought me to full consciousness and reasoning. It was a suit reserved for special occasions, and I usually folded it neatly and hung it in my wardrobe before retiring. The crumpled carelessness of those sprawled clothes reminded me of the large double whisky I had taken upon my return home, and with a cruel lash-cut of recollection the whole incredible business of the night before came back to me.

In the spring of the year the world would end, and that was why I had been silly to think about stacking the meadow grass. Fully awake I lay there for a while, my eyes upon the bright crack of sunlight that filtered through the drawn curtains.

I lay there and wondered what I ought to do. Seven months of life remained to me – two hundred days. A lot could be done in two hundred days. How ought I to change my mode of life to get the best from those precious remaining hours? It would give me pleasure, and others pleasure, if I were to give my money away. There would be no point in giving it to charity in a lump sum, for it would simply remain invested. I could draw it in the form of half-crowns and go around giving it to poor men and poor women and poor children, and receive a hundred surprised, grateful smiles a day for the rest of my short life on earth. The idea appealed to my impulsive nature, but after reflection I discarded it. It was my duty to avoid arousing any kind of suspicion, and if I were to give my money away people would naturally wonder why, and possibly guess the truth. I could not risk divulging the Secret in this way. Besides which, if anything miscarried and the world did not end after all, I should simply feel a fool. I could hardly expect my money back.

No. I must do my duty by carrying on exactly as if nothing had happened. Not by one hair’s breadth would I deviate from the routine of life which I had so carefully constructed for myself. I got up and shaved: I took my bath and dressed and breakfasted.

I gained fresh confidence as I stood admiring the view from my breakfast-room window. I was happily placed in this lovely, secluded backwater of England. There were scarcely a hundred people in the village and the nearest town was over six miles away. If panic came it could scarcely touch us here. If famine descended upon us, my vegetable garden and poultry farm would amply supply the needs of Mrs Buller and myself. Even if mankind ceased work in the face of approaching death, my pullets would carry on until the end: my pullets would keep up their average of seventeen eggs per day until their very nests were whisked to eternity.

But even with the knowledge of our President’s words so vividly in mind, I believed in my heart of hearts that nothing very serious would happen to the earth. The moon would go back to its place: it would not hit us – could not hit us, for reason told me that the Divine Power that controlled our destinies would not so suddenly and callously lose interest in us. God would not permit His handiwork to be blasted to senseless destruction. I could well imagine a certain hysterical type of preacher crying out that God was destroying us because we had proved ourselves unworthy of Him, but I had no patience with this silly stuff. If God could create us then God could control our brains and minds: if we had failed it was because He had been unable to make better creatures of us, and that was His fault – not ours. God must have as much reason and as much sense as the visible beings that He had created, and it was most unlikely that He would advertise His own shortcomings by destroying us.