“What is the point of that?” A. R. Woresley said.
“Go back just sixty years,” I said, “to around 1860, and pretend that you and I were living then and that we had the knowledge and the ability to store sperm indefinitely. So which living geniuses, in 1860, would you have chosen as donors?”
“Dickens,” he said.
“Go on.”
“And Ruskin . . . and Mark Twain.”
“And Brahms,” I said, “and Wagner and Tschaikovsky and Dvorák. The list is very long. Authentic geniuses every one of them. Go back further in the century, if you like, to Balzac, to Beethoven, to Napoleon, to Goya, to Chopin. Wouldn’t it be exciting if we had in our liquid nitrogen bank a couple of hundred straws of the living sperm of Beethoven?”
“What would you do with them?”
“Sell them, of course.”
“To whom?”
“To women. To very rich women who wanted babies by one of the greatest geniuses of all time.”
“Now wait a minute, Cornelius. Women, rich or not, aren’t going to allow themselves to be inseminated with the sperm of some long dead stranger just because he was a genius.”
“That’s what you think. Listen, I could take you to any Beethoven concert you like and I’d guarantee to find half a dozen females there who’d give almost anything to have a baby today by the great man.”
“You mean spinsters?”
“No. Married women.”
“What would their husbands say?”
“Their husbands wouldn’t know. Only the mother would know that she was pregnant by Beethoven.”
“That’s knavery, Cornelius.”
“Can’t you see her,” I said, “this rich unhappy woman who is married to some incredibly ugly, coarse, ignorant, unpleasant industrialist from Birmingham, and all at once she has something to live for. As she goes strolling through the beautifully kept garden of her husband’s enormous country house, she is humming the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica and thinking to herself, ‘My God, isn’t it wonderful! I am pregnant by the man who wrote that music a hundred years ago!’”
“We don’t have Beethoven’s sperm.”
“There are plenty of others,” I said. “There are great men in every country, in every decade. It’s our job to get them. And listen,” I went on, “there’s one tremendous thing in our favour. You will find that very rich men are nearly always ugly, coarse, ignorant, and unpleasant. They are robber bandits, monsters. Just think of the mentality of men who spend their lives amassing million after million–Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Krupp. Those are the old-timers. Today’s batch are just as unattractive. Industrialists, war profiteers. All horrible fellows. Invariably, they marry women for their beauty and the women marry them for their money. The beauties have ugly, useless children by their ugly, grasping husbands. They get to hate their husbands. They get bored. They take up culture. They buy paintings by the Impressionists and go to Wagner concerts. And at that stage, my dear sir, these women are ripe for the picking. So in steps Oswald Cornelius offing to impregnate them with guaranteed genuine Wagner sperm.”
“Wagner’s dead, too.”
“I am simply trying to show you what our sperm vault will look like in forty years’ time if we start it now, in 1919.”
“Whom would we put in it?” A. R. Woresley said.
“Whom would you suggest? Who are the geniuses of today?”
“Albert Einstein.”
“Good,” I said. “Who else?”
“Sibelius.”
“Splendid. And what about Rachmaninoff?”
“And Debussy,” he said.
“Who else?”
“Sigmund Freud in Vienna.”
“Is he great?”
“He’s going to be,” A. R. Woresley said. “He is already world famous in medical circles.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Go on.”
“Igor Stravinsky,” he said.
“I didn’t know you knew music.”
“Of course.”
“I’d like to propose the painter Picasso in Paris,” I said.
“Is he a genius?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Would you accept Henry Ford in America?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “That’s a good one. And our own King George the Fifth.”
“King George the Fifth!” he cried. “What’s he got to do with it?”
“He’s royal blood. Just imagine what some women would pay for a child by the King of England!”
“You’re being ridiculous, Cornelius. You can’t go crashing into Buckingham Palace and start asking His Majesty the King if he would be good enough to provide you with an ejaculation of semen.”