“At the farm I had everything ready. I scooped out the bull’s semen from the bag and mixed it with my special solution of milk, egg yolk, and glycerol. I filled two hundred and fifty of my little rubber straws with half a cc each. This was not as difficult as it sounds. I always have the straws lined up in rows on a metal rack and I use an eye dropper. I transferred the rack of filled straws onto ice for half an hour. Then I lifted it into a container of nitrogen vapour for ten minutes. Finally, I lowered it into a second vacuum container of liquid nitrogen. The whole process was finished before my brother arrived back with the cow. I now had enough semen from a prize Friesian bull to fertilize two hundred and fifty cows. At least I hoped I had.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
“It worked fantastically,” A. R. Woresley said. “The following year my brother’s Hereford cattle began producing calves that were one-half Friesian. I had taught him how to do the hypodermic insemination himself, and I left the canister of frozen “straws” with him on the farm. Today, my dear Cornelius, three years later, nearly every cow in his herd is a cross between a Hereford and a prize Friesian. His milk yield is up by something like sixty per cent and he has sold his bull. The only trouble is that he’s running out of straws. He wants me to go with him on another of those dangerous journeys to Lord Somerton’s bull. Quite frankly, I dread it.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take your place.”
“You wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Just grab the old pizzle and bung it in the bag,” I said. “You can be waiting back at the farm all ready to freeze the semen.”
“Can you manage a bicycle?”
“I’ll take my car,” I said. “Twice as quick.”
I had just bought a brand new Continental Morris Cowley, a machine superior in every way to the 1912 De Dion of my Paris days. The body was chocolate brown. The upholstery was leather. It had nickel fittings, mahogany cappings, and a driver’s door. I was very proud of it. “I’ll get the semen back to you in no time,” I said.
“What a splendid idea,” he said. “Would you really do that for me, Cornelius?”
“I’d love to,” I said.
I left him soon after that and drove back to Trinity. My brain was humming with all the things A. R. Woresley had told me. There was little doubt he had made a tremendous discovery, and when he published his findings he would be hailed all over the world as a great man. He was probably a genius.
But that didn’t bother me one way or the other. What did concern me was this: How could I myself make a million pounds out of it all? I had no objection to A. R. Woresley’s getting rich at the same time. He discovered it. But yours truly came first. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that there was a fortune waiting for me just around the corner. But I doubted it was from bulls and cows.
I lay awake in bed that night and applied my mind assiduously to this problem. I may seem, to a reader of these diaries, like a pretty casual sort of fellow where most things are concerned, but I promise you that when my own most important interests are at stake I am capable of some very concentrated thinking. Somewhere around midnight an idea came to me and began whizzing around in my head. It appealed to me at once, this idea, for the simple reason that it involved the two things in life that I found most entertaining--seduction and copulation. It appealed to me even more when I realized that it involved a tremendous amount of seduction and copulation.
I got out of bed and put on my dressing-gown. I began making notes. I examined the problems that would arise. I thought up ways of overcoming them. And at the end of it all I came to the very definite conclusion that the scheme would work. It was bound to work.
There was only one snag. A. R. Woresley had to be persuaded to go along with it.
8
THE NEXT DAY, I sought him out in college and invited him to dine with me that evening.
“I never dine out,” he said. “My sister expects me home for dinner.”
“It’s business,” I said. “It’s your whole future. Tell her it’s vital, which it is. I am about to make you a rich man.” Eventually he agreed to come.
At seven p.m., I took him to the Blue Boar in Trinity Street and I ordered for both of us. A dozen oysters each and a bottle of Clos Vougeot Blanc, a very rare wine. Then a dish of roast beef and a good Volnay.
“I must say you do yourself well, Cornelius,” he said.
“I wouldn’t do myself any other way,” I told him. “You do like oysters, don’t you?”