On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth. I had a momentary impulse to hold
out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted both.
When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to
mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace civilities that
belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead henceforth to him, and he
to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the
touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtesy with
eyes that were impenetrable beneath the glaze and the film. We passed,
therefore, as if mutually invisible.
I can nowise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was,
that, after all these leave-takings, induced me to go to the pigsty,
and take leave of the swine! There they lay, buried as deeply among
the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very
symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort. They were asleep,
drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and
down. Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked dimly
forth at the outer world, and simultaneously uttered a gentle grunt;
not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath for that
particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary inhalation. They
were involved, and almost stifled and buried alive, in their own
corporeal substance. The very unreadiness and oppression wherewith
these greasy citizens gained breath enough to keep their life-machinery
in sluggish movement appeared to make them only the more sensible of
the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their existence. Peeping at me
an instant out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes, they dropt
asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was
still present to them, betwixt dream and reality.
"You must come back in season to eat part of a spare-rib," said Silas
Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze. "I shall have these fat
fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward, pretty soon, I tell
you!"
"O cruel Silas, what a horrible idea!" cried I. "All the rest of us,
men, women, and livestock, save only these four porkers, are bedevilled
with one grief or another; they alone are happy,--and you mean to cut
their throats and eat them! It would be more for the general comfort
to let them eat us; and bitter and sour morsels we should be!"