“Bacon!” ejaculated Harry.
“Of course. If little pigs pay, big hogs pay; if it pays people to buy big hogs, it will pay us to kill, cure, smoke and retail ’em.”
“We can’t do anything this side of Michaelmas. Lease isn’t up till then,” said Harry, hardly convinced.
“No; but we can do an awful lot of thinking.” . . .
. . . And, thinking, thought expanded. With fourteen thousand pounds of capital; and the key-industry of life—what couldn’t a man accomplish? Peter sent for books, pamphlets; buried himself in statistics;—and the more he read the more he convinced himself that the secret of farming was no secret at all. Farming was just like any other business: it depended on two questions—“How cheaply can I produce? How dearly can I sell?”
“Machinery and marketing,” said Peter. “Same old problem.”
The spectre of “labour” did not frighten him. Eliminate the middle-man, and there would be enough surplus profits, in the particular business of farming, to give “labour” all it wanted. “Provided,” added Peter, “that ‘labour’ will do its job.” Besides, the Tebbits-Jameson farm would be run on co-partnership lines, as the Nirvana factory was to have been. “Share and share,” said our Mr. Jameson, “I’ll do my job if they’ll do theirs. . . .”
At which exact point in his schemes for the future—Peter Jameson fell head over ears in love with his own wife!
How the thing happened: whether he had always been “in love” with her and only just discovered the fact; whether the example of Francis and Beatrice, emerging from the seclusion of honeymoon, influenced him; whether leisure, returning health, heredity, environment, or his growing affection for Sunflowers first started the wheels of passion—it is impossible to say. Remains the fact that he did fall in love with her, head over heels, madly, crazily and unreasonably in love. To elaborate a slang expression much in vogue at the time, “he dived in at the deep end.”