After the Rain by John Bowen Page B

persuade intelligent people to practise birth control, one cannot teach contraceptive methods to idiots, and large families have persisted among people of low intelligence. In other words, men have increased their numbers while lowering their quality; idiots have increasingly outnumbered the intelligent, and, under a system of democracy, had asmuch political power.” He took off his spectacles to polish them, and I noticed that his hands were trembling. “Lunacy!” he said. “It was lunacy.”
    “I see.”
    “The Flood has wiped all that out. Only intelligent people will survive it, and such of the stupid people as they choose to carry with them.”
    “Why carry any?”
    “For the rough work. You observed Mr. Ryle’s physical proportions. He will be very useful to us when the waters subside, and we begin our settlement. And with careful cross-breeding——”
    “What if they never subside at all?”
    “Of course they will subside,” Arthur said angrily. “Of course they will. Do you imagine Natural Selection intends to replace us by fish?”
    *
    In fact, I did find a way to use Glub in the cooking; it turned out that I was a good cook of the sort which improves by experimenting. Glub Grits pounded together made a substitute for breadcrumbs, and I invented a kind of oil by crushing the scales and viscera of fish. The day we had fried fillets of cod, my claim to be a graduate of the École Gastronomique was recognized.
    I have said something already of Arthur and Hunter, something of the Otterdales. The others of our party were Harold Banner, Tony Ryle and Gertrude Harrison, who used to teach Voice and Dramatic Art to private pupils in an Earl’s Court mews flat.
    Banner, the clergyman, had been rescued with theOtterdales. He had become their lodger in the early days of the Flood when his own rectory, a Nissen hut in the churchyard, had become uninhabitable, and he had remained with them. I understood that they had spent several days together in a rowing boat. Wesley would not row, because to save himself would have been contrary to God’s will, and Banner had not allowed Muriel to do so. His hands were raw when the raft picked them up, and still bore the scars. He told me that, during his university days when he went in for this kind of thing, the blisters had always turned into callouses eventually, and he had supposed they would do so again.
    Tony Ryle did not tell me much about himself at that time. I gathered that he had worked for a printing firm as a machine-minder. He had always been interested, he said, in improving his physique. To “improve one’s physique”—and not to body-build—is, I discovered, one of the body-builders’ stock phrases. The key word is “proportion”; if you don’t improve your physique proportionately, you might as well not improve it at all. In fact Tony had concentrated the area of his improvement on the chest, back and shoulders, and, although his legs were sturdy and well-shaped enough, one felt that their only purpose was to support the massive and knotted triangle of his trunk.
    Most human beings want to be admired. Some men can sing, play the piano in pubs, add up columns of figures in record time, write plays or sonatas, paint, grow giant vegetable marrows; but all these activitiesdemand, not only application, but some sort of inborn talent. Body-building requires only a body, and the slighter it is to begin with, the better: “I was a Seven-Stone Weakling” is the beginning of the body-builders’ Cinderella story. Tony had never been a seven-stone weakling, but he had thought people laughed at him when he went bathing at the local open-air pool; “I never had no chest,” he said, “I was sort of puny really.” He was not sort of puny any more. Even on the raft he had made himself some weights and a piece of board, and he used to go down to the hold every day to practise. When Sonya found this out, she insisted on practising too, and Arthur encouraged them;