The belt moved on. Lexington went with it. Everything was still upside down and the blood was pouring out of his throat and getting into his eyes, but he could still see after a fashion, and he had a blurred impression of being in an enormously long room, and at the far end of the room there was a great smoking cauldron of water, and there were dark figures, half hidden in the steam, dancing around the edge of it, brandishing long poles. The conveyor-belt seemed to be travelling right over the top of the cauldron, and the pigs seemed to be dropping down one by one into the boiling water, and one of the pigs seemed to be wearing long white gloves on its front feet.
Suddenly our hero started to feel very sleepy, but it wasn't until his good strong heart had pumped the last drop of blood from his body that he passed on out of this, the best of all possible worlds, into the next.
The Champion of the World
All day, in between serving customers, we had been crouching over the table in the office of the filling-station, preparing the raisins. They were plump and soft and swollen from being soaked in water, and when you nicked them with a razor-blade the skin sprang open and the jelly stuff inside squeezed out as easily as you could wish.
But we had a hundred and ninety-six of them to do altogether and the evening was nearly upon us before we had finished.
'Don't th
ey look marvellous!' Claud cried, rubbing his hands together hard. 'What time is it, Gordon?'
'Just after five.'
Through the window we could see a station-wagon pulling up at the pumps with a woman at the wheel and about eight children in the back eating ice-creams.
'We ought to be moving soon,' Claud said. 'The whole thing'll be a washout if we don't arrive before sunset, you realize that.' He was getting twitchy now. His face had the same flushed and popeyed look it got before a dog-race or when there was a date with Clarice in the evening.
We both went outside and Claud gave the woman the number of gallons she wanted. When she had gone, he remained standing in the middle of the driveway squinting anxiously up at the sun which was now only the width of a man's hand above the line of trees along the crest of the ridge on the far side of the valley.
'All right,' I said. 'Lock up.'
He went quickly from pump to pump, securing each nozzle in its holder with a small padlock.
'You'd better take off that yellow pullover,' he said.
'Why should I?'
'You'll be shining like a bloody beacon out there in the moonlight.'
'I'll be all right.'
'You will not,' he said. 'Take it off, Gordon, please. I'll see you in three minutes.' He disappeared into his caravan behind the filling-station, and I went indoors and changed my yellow pullover for a blue one.
When we met again outside, Claud was dressed in a pair of black trousers and a dark-green turtleneck sweater. On his head he wore a brown cloth cap with the peak pulled down low over his eyes, and he looked like an apache actor out of a nightclub.
'What's under there?' I asked, seeing the bulge at his waistline.
He pulled up his sweater and showed me two thin but very large white cotton sacks which were bound neat and tight around his belly. 'To carry the stuff,' he said darkly.
'I see.'
'Let's go,' he said.
'I still think we ought to take the car.'
'It's too risky. They'll see it parked.'
'But it's over three miles up to that wood.'
'Yes,' he said. 'And I suppose you realize we can get six months in the clink if they catch us.'
'You never told me that.'
'Didn't I?'
'I'm not coming,' I said. 'It's not worth it.'