Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

‘Quite. I have some theories that I want to test. And you’re right, you ought to understand your place in them. If you come outside, perhaps I can explain.’

Sinner opened the door. Erskine went to the kitchen and poured a brandy for himself and a ‘beer’ for Sinner, which was in fact Welch’s Malt Tonic, virtually non-alcoholic, recommended for ‘convalescents, nursing mothers, sufferers from insomnia and dyspepsia’. He’d ordered two cases after it became clear that Sinner, in his current condition, couldn’t tell the difference. The boy had not, so far, demanded gin or whisky, and Erskine suspected that Sinner was not quite as oblivious to his own wellbeing as he pretended to be.

They sat in the drawing room.

‘Do you know anything at all about racial improvement?’ said Erskine.

Sinner didn’t answer. He could tell that he was about to get a lecture at least as long as Pearl’s in New York; here was the same pompous urge he seemed to arouse everywhere he went. Even some of the posh sissies he’d picked up in the weeks before he went to St Panteleimon’s had given him monologues as foreplay. It was always boring. On the other hand, he did want to find out what Erskine’s pretext was for keeping him here. He hadn’t felt any gratitude to the staff at St Panteleimon’s — they did what they did because their stodgy god told them to and they wanted to get to heaven — and he didn’t feel any gratitude to Erskine, either. He’d known a very few truly unselfish people in his life — Anna, maybe Frink, maybe one or two others — and Erskine was no more one of them than Albert Kölmel.

‘Well, you understand at least that if you want one day to produce … it doesn’t matter what … say, a dog that runs very fast — then you let certain dogs breed, but not others, depending on how speedy they are? You see? Good. But what if you have one dog that is very intelligent and watchful indeed, but is born with crippled hind legs? You can let it mate with the others, but then you may set yourself back by several generations with regard to speed. Or you can neuter it, but then you may never get another dog that is so intelligent and watchful. What do you do?’

‘Get a police horse instead.’

‘Very droll, but no: normally, you might neuter the crippled dog, let brains be damned. You do so for the sake of the other dogs and their eventual young. Carr-Sanders puts it very well.’ He’d memorised the quotation for a poorly attended lecture he’d given at the UUC, and he recited it now in a lecturer’s voice. ‘“It is the net effect which alone is relevant; the occasional production of a gifted individual from a defective stock, which is theoretically possible as a rare phenomenon, cannot compensate for prevalence of defect, especially when it is remembered that by eliminating defect and raising the average fitness we are really making the appearance of highly gifted individuals far more likely.” Although actually he’s talking about human beings there. And he’s quite right, because it’s the same with Jews, for instance. Jews, by and large, are greedy and traitorous and unpleasant, which is why so many great minds believe they ought to be driven out of civilised society. I know you won’t be offended because those are just the facts.’

Sinner frowned. As a Jewboy in Spitalfields, you heard much worse than what Erskine was saying every time you played a game of dice with your friends. You knew to ignore it, in the same way you knew no one was sincerely alleging that you made a habit of fucking chickens in the beak. But this was different, because Erskine actually seemed to assume he had his listener’s full agreement. Sinner didn’t like that. He thought back to his father’s stories — the ones told again and again until they were tiresome — about what had happened to the family back in Poland, long before Sinner’s birth. If Rabbi Berg had been here, Sinner considered, or Pearl or even Seidelman, they would have knocked Erskine down in the debate’s first round. But they weren’t, and before Sinner had a chance to make a protest of his own Erskine carried on.

‘The fact is, however, that Jews are also often very cunning and good with money, and I’d say very few Anglo-Saxon men are cunning and good with money in quite the same vicious way. A shame to lose that entirely. It comes in useful. So what to do? I believe that, under certain conditions, there is a way to use advanced selective breeding to separate the good qualities from the bad ones so that only the bad qualities need be sloughed off. You keep the Jew’s cunning — double it, in fact — but not his general vileness. Of course, the method is exceptionally complex, and, for it to succeed, the scientist or despot in charge would need to be able to plan, in advance, every single sexual pairing over at least a dozen generations — which is what I’m attempting to achieve with my insects.’

‘Couldn’t you have got some other Jew, then? Lot of us about. Nearly as many as beetles.’

‘I didn’t choose you as an experimental subject because you’re Jewish. I chose you because of your physique. If every soldier in the British Army were as strong and tough as you, then we’d be feared all over the world. But equally if every soldier was also as stunted as you, then we’d be a laughing stock. You’re like the crippled but clever dog, you see, or the greedy but cunning tribe. So what to do? Let you breed, or not? The orthodox eugenicists would say that you should not be allowed to. That your bloodline should be terminated because of a silly flaw you were born with, even though you have so much else to offer. But isn’t that unfair?’ Erskine was talking loudly and his hands were fists. ‘Very unfair? And cruel and stupid?’ He quietened. ‘So my theory differs. I call it lemniscate breeding, after the Latin for “ribbon”, because of the way an inherited trait may curve away from the general population and then back towards … well, anyway, that’s the essence.’

‘But I wouldn’t get to choose who I fucked?’

‘No. But you wouldn’t complain, because you’d be lucky to have the chance to take a wife at all. If you were weak as well as short — if you had nothing else to offer — there’d be no question of it. Or at least there wouldn’t if things were run with any sense, which at present they are not.’

‘Works out nicely for me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Works out nicely for you, too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you want a wife?’ said Sinner.

‘Yes.’

‘Kids?’

‘I am the heir to Claramore. Of course I shall get married and have children of my own. It’s quite obvious what you’re insinuating, Seth. But the theory is not merely self-serving. I can acknowledge that I’m not especially handsome or athletic or warlike, and it doesn’t matter a jot. First of all, I have my intellect. Second, and more importantly, I come from a good family. Eugenics is a radical science, yes, but we are in England, not Russia, and no one is going to start interfering with England’s good families. That would be against the founding spirit of the endeavour. I have nothing to fear from even the crudest programme of racial improvement. This theory is about the masses. Which is why I’m testing it first of all on the beetles I brought back from Poland. I want to see if I can breed a strain in which every undesirable quality is eradicated and yet every desirable quality is amplified. No compromises, no sacrifices. Do you begin to understand now?’

Sinner nodded.

‘I’m glad. It’s not often that I have the opportunity to discuss all this.’ As soon as he’d said it, Erskine realised how laughable it was to be treating Sinner as someone you could possibly ‘discuss’ anything with. ‘I’m going to my club,’ he added abruptly. At his club, he read in the newspaper about a New Yorker called Albert Fish who had been sent to the electric chair for the kidnap and murder of a little girl called Grace Budd. At the age of twelve, living in an orphanage, Fish had begun a sexual relationship with a telegraph boy, and his homosexuality had soon developed into sadomasochism and coprophagia, and after that into murder and cannibalism. He was known as the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire or the Gray Man. Once a girl in the crowd at the Oxford — Cambridge boat race had referred to Erskine as ‘that grey man’.