It was gloomy there. In the gloom, Grendon worked. He dropped his bucket when he saw Gregory there, and came forward threateningly.
“You came back? Why don’t you stay away? Can’t you see the notice by the gate? I don’t want you here no more, bor. I know you mean well, and I intend you no harm, but I’ll kill ‘ee, understand, kill ‘ee if you ever come here again. I’ve plenty of worries without you to add to them. Now then, get you going!”
Gregory stood his ground.
“Mr. Grendon, are you as mad as your wife was before she died? Do you understand that you may meet Grubby’s fate at any moment? Do you realize what you are harboring in your pond?”
“I ent a fule. But suppose them there things do eat everything, humans included? Suppose this is now their farm?
They still got to have someone to tend it. So I reckon they ent going to harm me. So long as they sees me work hard, they ent going to harm me.”
“You’re being fattened, do you understand? For all the hard work you do, you must have put on a stone this last month.
Doesn’t that scare you?”
Something of the farmer’s pose broke for a moment. He cast a wild look round. “I ent saying I ent scared. .I’m saying I’m doing what I have to do. We don’t own our lives. Now do me a favor and get out of here.”
Instinctively, Gregory’s glance had followed Grendon’s. For the first time, he saw in the dimness the size of the pigs. Their great broad black backs were visible over the top of the sties.
They were the size of young oxen.
“This is a farm of death,” he said.
“Death’s always the end of all of us, pig or cow or man alike.”
“Right-ho, Mr. Grendon, you can think like that if you like.
It’s not my way of thinking, nor am I going to see your dependents suffer from your madness. Mr. Grendon, sir, I wish to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”
For the first three days that she was away from her home, Nancy Grendon lay in her room in “The Wayfarer” near to death. It seemed as if all ordinary food poisoned her. But gradually under Doctor Crouchorn’s ministrationterrified perhaps by the rage she suspected he would vent upon her should she fail to get bettershe recovered her strength.
“You look so much better today,” Gregory said, clasping her hand. “You’ll soon be up and about again, once your system is free of all the evil nourishment of the farm.”
“Greg, dearest, promise me you will not go to the farm again.
You have no need to go now I’m not there.”
He cast his eyes down and said, “Then you don’t have to get me to promise, do you?”
“I just want to be sure we neither of us go there again.
Father, I feel sure, bears a charmed life. It’s as if I was now coming to my senses againbut I don’t want it to be as if you was losing yours! Supposing those things followed us here to Cottersall, those Aurigans?”
“You know, Nancy, I’ve wondered several times why’ they remain on the farm as’ they do. You would think that once they found they could so easily defeat human beings, they would attack everyone, or send for more of their own kind and try to invade us. Yet they seem perfectly content to remain in that one small space.”
She smiled. “I may not be very clever compared with you, but I can tell ‘ee the answer to that one. They ent interested in going anywhere. I think there’s just two of them, and they come to our little old world for a holiday in their space machine, same as we might go to Great Yarmouth for a couple of days for our honeymoon. Perhaps they’re on their honeymoon.”
“On honeymoon! What a ghastly idea!”
“Well, on holiday then. That was Father’s ideahe says as there’s just two of them, treating Earth as a quiet place to stay.
People like to eat well when they’re on holiday, don’t they?”