“It is not the readers of the Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette,” Mr. Parfitt had written on that cardinal date, “who have made this war. No Mouse Breeder, I emphatically proclaim, has desired it. No! Absorbed in their harmless and indeed beneficent occupations, they have had neither the wish nor the leisure to disturb the world’s peace. If all men whole-heartedly devoted themselves to avocations like ours, there would be no war. The world would be filled with the innocent creators and fosterers of life, not, as at present, with its tigerish destroyers. Had Kaiser William the Second been a breeder of rabbits or mice, we should not find ourselves to-day in a world whose very existence is threatened by the unimaginable horrors of modern warfare.”
Noble words! Mr. Parfitt’s righteous indignation was strengthened by his fears for the future of his paper. The war, he gloomily foreboded, would mean the end of rabbit breeding. But he was wrong. Mice, it is true, went rather out of fashion between 1914 and 1918. But in the lean years of rationing, rabbits took on a new importance. In 1917 there were ten fanciers of Flemish Giants to every one there had been before the war. Subscriptions rose, advertisements were multiplied.
“Rabbits,” Mr. Parfitt assured me, “did a great deal to help us win the war.”
And conversely, the war did so much to help rabbits that Mr. Parfitt was able to retire in 1919 with a modest but adequate fortune. It was then that I took over control. And in spite of Mr. Bosk’s contempt for my ignorance and incompetence, I must in justice congratulate myself on the way in which I piloted the concern through the evil times which followed. Peace found the English people at once less prosperous and less hungry than they had been during the war. The time had passed when it was necessary for them to breed rabbits; and they could not afford the luxury of breeding them for pleasure. Subscriptions declined, advertisements fell off. I averted an impending catastrophe by adding to the paper a new section dealing with goats. Biologically, no doubt, as I pointed out to the directors in my communication on the subject, this mingling of ruminants with rodents was decidedly unsound. But commercially, I felt sure, the innovation would be justified. It was. The goats brought half a dozen pages of advertisements in their train and several hundred new subscribers. Mr. Bosk was furious at my success; but the directors thought very highly of my capacities.
They did not, it is true, always approve of my leading articles. “Couldn’t you try to make them a little more popular,” suggested the managing director, “a little more practical too, Mr. Chelifer? For instance,” and clearing his throat, he unfolded the typewritten sheet of complaints which he had had prepared and had brought with him to the board meeting, “for instance, what’s the practical value of this stuff about the use of the word ‘cony’ as a term of endearment in the Elizabethan dramatists? And this article on the derivation of ‘rabbit’”—he looked at his paper again and coughed. “Who wants to know that there’s a Walloon word ‘robett’? Or that our word may have something to do with the Spanish rabear, to wag the hind quarters? And who, by the way,” he added, looking up at me over his pince-nez with an air—prematurely put on—of triumph, “who ever heard of an animal wagging its hind quarters?” “Nevertheless,” I said, apologetically, but firmly, as befits a man who knows that he is right, “my authority is no less than Skeat himself.”
The managing director, who had hoped to score a point, went on, defeated, to the next count in the indictment. “And then, Mr. Chelifer,” he said, “we don’t very much like, my fellow directors and I, we don’t much like what you say in your article on ‘Rabbit Fancying and its Lesson to Humanity.’ It may be true that breeders have succeeded in producing domesticated rabbits that are four times the weight of wild rabbits and possess only half the quantity of brains—it may be true. Indeed, it is true. And a very remarkable achievement it is, Mr. Chelifer, very remarkable indeed. But that is no reason for upholding, as you do, Mr. Chelifer, that the ideal working man, at whose production the eugenist should aim, is a man eight times as strong as the present-day workman, with only a sixteenth of his mental capacity. Not that my fellow directors and I entirely disagree with what you say, Mr. Chelifer; far from it. All right-thinking men must agree that the modern workman is too well educated. But we have to remember, Mr. Chelifer, that many of our readers actually belong to that class.”
“Quite.” I acquiesced in the reproof.
“And finally, Mr. Chelifer, there is your article on the ‘Symbology of the Goat.’ We feel that the facts you have there collected, however interesting to the anthropologist and the student of folk-lore, are hardly of a kind to be set before a mixed public like ours.”
The other directors murmured their assent. There was a prolonged silence.