Roald Dahl - The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volume 2

"But my dear man, this could transform the entire milk industry the world over."

"It might," he said. "It might easily do that. It wouldn't do the beef business no harm either if they could get bulls every time."

"How did you hear about it in the first place?"

"My old dad told me," Rummins said. "When I were about eighteen, my old dad said to me, 'I'll tell you a secret,' he said, 'that'll make you rich.' And he told me this."

"Has it made you rich?"

"I ain't done too bad for myself, have I?" he said.

"But did your father offer any sort of explanation as to why it works?" I asked.

Rummins explored the inner rim of one nostril with the end of his thumb, holding the noseflap between thumb and forefinger as he did so. "A very clever man, my old dad was," he said. "Very clever indeed. Of course he told me how it works."

"How?"

"He explained to me that a cow don't have nothing to do with deciding the sex of the calf," Rummins said. All a cow's got is an egg. It's the bull decides what the sex is going to be. The sperm of the bull."

"Go on," I said.

"According to my old dad, a bull has two different kinds of sperm, female sperm and male sperm. You follow me so far?"

"Yes," I said. "Keep going."

"So when the old bull shoots off his sperm into the cow, a sort of swimming race takes place between the male and the female sperm to see which one can reach the egg first. If the female sperm wins, you get a heifer."

"But what's the sun got to do with it?" I asked.

"I'm coming to that," he said, "so listen carefully. When an animal is standing on all fours like a cow, and when you face her head into the sun, then the sperm has also got to travel directly into the sun to reach the egg. Switch the cow around and they'll be travelling away from the sun."

"So what you're saying," I said, "is that the sun exerts a pull of some sort on the female sperm and makes them swim faster than the male sperm."

"Exactly!" cried Rummins. "That's exactly it! It exerts a pull! It drags them forward! That's why they always win! And if you turn the cow round the other way, it's pulling them backwards and the male sperm wins instead."

"It's an interesting theory," I said. "But it hardly seems likely that the sun, which is millions of miles away, could exert a pull on a bunch of spermatozoa inside a cow."

"You're talking rubbish!" cried Rummins. "Absolute and utter rubbish! Don't the moon exert a pull on the bloody tides of the ocean to make 'em high and low? Of course it does! So why shouldn't the sun exert a pull on the female sperm?"

"I see your point."

Suddenly Rummins seemed to have had enough. "You'll have a heifer calf for sure," he said, turning away. "Don't you worry about that."

"Mr Rummins," I said.

"What?"

"Is there any reason why this shouldn't work with humans as well?"

"Of course it'll work with humans," he said. "Just so long as you remember everything's got to be pointed in the right direction. A cow ain't lying down you know. It's standing on all fours."

"I see what you mean."

"And it ain't no good doing it at night either," he said, "because the sun is shielded behind the earth and it can't influence anything."

"That's true," I said, "but have you any sort of proof it works with humans?"

Rummins laid his head to one side and gave me another of his long sly broken-toothed grins. "I've got four boys of my own, ain't I?" he said.

"So you have."

"Ruddy girls ain't no use to me around here," he said. "Boys is what you want on a farm and I've got four of 'em, right?"

"Right," I said, "you're absolutely right."

IF, in those days, you walked up from Trafalgar Square into Charing Cross Road, you would come in a few minutes to a shop on the right-hand side that had above the window the words WILLIAM BUGGAGE—RARE BOOKS.

If you peered through the window itself you would see that the walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and if you then pushed open the door and went in, you would immediately be assailed by that subtle odour of old cardboard and tea leaves that pervades the interiors of every second-hand bookshop in London . Nearly always, you would find two or three customers in there, silent shadowy figures in overcoats and trilby hats rummaging among the sets of Jane Austen and Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, hoping to find a first edition.

No shop-keeper ever seemed to be hovering around to keep an eye on the customers, and if somebody actually wanted to pay for a book instead of pinching it and walking out, then he or she would have to push through a door at the back of the shop on which it said OFFICE—PAY HERE. If you went into the office you would find both Mr William Buggage and his assistant, Miss Muriel Tottle, seated at their respective desks and very much preoccupied. Mr Buggage would be sitting behind a valuable eighteenth-century mahogany partners-desk, and Miss Tottle, a few feet away, would be using a somewhat smaller but no less elegant piece of furniture, a Regency writing-table with a top of faded green leather. On Mr Buggage's desk there would invariably be one copy of the day's London Times, as well as The Daily Telegraph, The Manchester Guardian, The Western Mail, and The Glasgow Herald. There would also be a current edition of Who's Who close at hand, fat and red and well thumbed. Miss Tottle's writing-table would have on it an electric typewriter and a plain but very nice open box containing notepaper and envelopes, as well as a quantity of paper-clips and staplers and other secretarial paraphernalia.

Now and again, but not very often, a customer would enter the office from the shop and would hand his chosen volume to Miss Tottle, who checked the price written in pencil on the fly-leaf and accepted the money, giving change when necessary from somewhere in the left-hand drawer of her writing-table. Mr Buggage never bothered even to glance up at those who came in and went out, and if one of them asked a question, it would be Miss Tottle who answered it.

Neither Mr Buggage nor Miss Tottle appeared to be in the least concerned about what went on in the main shop. In point of fact, Mr Buggage took the view that if someone was going to steal a book, then good luck to him. He knew very well that there was not a single valuable first edition out there on the shelves. There might be a moderately rare volume of Galsworthy or an early Waugh that had come in with a job lot bought at auction, and there were certainly some good sets of Boswell and Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest, often very nicely bound in half or even whole calf. But those were not really the sort of things you could slip into your overcoat pocket. Even if a villain did walk out with half a dozen volumes, Mr Buggage wasn't going to lose any sleep over it. Why should he when he knew that the shop itself earned less money in a whole year than the backroom business grossed in a couple of days. It was what went on in the back room that counted.

One morning in February when the weather was foul and sleet was slanting white and wet on to the window-panes of the office, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were in their respective places as usual and each was engrossed, one might even say fascinated, by his and her own work. Mr Buggage, with a gold Parker pen poised above a note-pad, was reading The Times and jotting things down as he went along. Every now and again, he would refer to Who's Who and make more jottings.

Miss Tottle, who had been opening the mail, was now examining some cheques and adding up totals.

"Three today," she said.

"What's it come to?" Mr Buggage asked, not looking up.

"One thousand six hundred," Miss Tottle said. Mr Buggage said, "I don't suppose we've "eard anything yet from that bishop's 'ouse in Chester , 'ave we?"