Private Enterprise

CHAPTER 1-3

So enthralled was Colin by this story of village Hampdenism that he had eaten all the goose-fat slices and drunk the rich cocoa without noticing.

“That’s right, Mr. Colin. You do as Nanny says and you won’t go wrong,” said Nanny approvingly.

Then they made a tour of Nanny’s little dairy, her hens, her bees, her vegetable plot exquisitely kept by her husband, her jam, her dried apple rings, her little laundry. Here Nanny paused.

“Whenever I do a bit of washing, Miss Lydia,” she said, “I think of the summer Mr. Tony and Mr. Eric and Mr. Percy were here. They all helped me turn the mangle and I had a lovely time washing their shirts and underpants and mending their socks. I often wish they were here, Miss Lydia. Have you any news of them?”

Lydia said she thought Tony Morland had been in the East and was now demobilized.

“I don’t know where Swan and Hacker are now. Do you, Colin?” she asked.

Colin said he thought Hacker had been in some Ministry or other during the war and was now a Fellow of his own college, Lazarus. Of Swan no one had any news.

“Oh, Nanny,” said Lydia. “Colin has a friend that wants a little house or a cottage somewhere about here. If you hear of anything I wish you’d let me know.”

Nanny, eyeing her ex-charge piercingly, said was it a lady or a gentleman, as of course it all depended.

Colin feeling himself getting hot, much to his own annoyance, said it was a lady. The widow of an army friend, he said, and he was sure Nanny would like her.

“They say liking goes by favour,” said Nanny oracularly. “Still, if she’s a real lady, sir, I’m sure we’ll find something.”

“I should have thought that was exactly the way not to find anything one wanted,” said Lydia with what was for her unusual bitterness. “The more one’s a lady or a gentleman, the less chance one has.”

“Now, that’s quite enough, Miss Lydia,” said Nanny. “You know it says in the Bible that you don’t see the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging their bread.”

“Nous avons changé tout cela,” said Colin, addressing a distant imaginary audience.

“Look at Geraldine Fairweather,” said Lydia. “She’s got two babies and can’t get any help. And three of the Dean’s grandsons are demobbed and can’t get jobs. And Noel knows millions of young lawyers that are back from the war and have to live on their parents. And I know heaps of girls that were Wrens and things and can’t find work. And all their people were pretty righteous.”

“I suppose,” said Colin, “that there is a difference between being righteous and being a lady or a gentleman. As a matter of fact there are uncommon few people in the Bible that one would want as paying guests, or to marry into one’s family. Come to that, of course, there are very few people anyhow now that one wants to see much of. All the nice people seem to have got into holes or been submerged. I don’t know.”

“That’s quite enough, Mr. Colin,” said Nanny. “Now don’t you worry about the lady, sir. I’m sure we’ll find her a nice little house and a nice steady woman to look after her. Is she bedridden?”

“Lord, no!” said Colin, startled. “She’s quite young. If she can get a bit of rough help she’ll manage splendidly. She loves the country and dogs.”

Nanny’s icy silence made her disapproval of young widows who liked the country and dogs and were befriended by Colin all too plain. But in a few moments her kind heart reasserted itself and she began to plan a spider’s web of inquiries all across the country via the Women’s Institute. Then Colin and Lydia said good-bye to her. Colin said he would walk about the place till he found Noel. Lydia recommended him to go to the bailiffs cottage and then returned to the house and her duties.

Northbridge Manor included a small farm with a good dairy herd, some pasture, some arable land, and a small wood. Old Mr. Keith, a wealthy Barchester solicitor, had never attempted to manage the property himself, nor had his son Robert who inherited the place. For the last few years the management had been in the hands of a middle-aged naval man who had left the service after the 1914 war to take up farming, rejoined for the 1939 war and been invalided out of the service after Dunkirk. When Noel and Lydia bought the place back from her elder brother they were very glad for him to stay on, and Mr. Wickham was glad to stay, and had been accepted by the countryside and the Close and elected to the Country Club. He came to supper at the Manor on most Sundays, for Noel was usually at home for the week-end and Lydia hardly ever went away. And once a year he was with great difficulty forced to take a holiday which he spent in Norfolk, watching birds with great affection and interest all day, sometimes through a telescope, sometimes in a flat-bottomed boat with a kind of camouflage of rushes, and sitting up all night in the middle of a fen in gum-boots and lovingly shooting hundreds of birds as they flew over at dusk and dawn. But such are bird-lovers, a peculiar race, apart from the ordinary run of mankind, self-sufficing, slightly inhuman, absorbed, their eyes almost as distant and expressionless as those of the birds they adore and kill.

Colin went by the side door into the agent’s office where he found Noel and Mr. Wickham talking about their possible entries for the Barsetshire Agricultural Show in the autumn.

“Cheerio, Keith,” said Mr. Wickham. “A spot of navy rum? A pal sent me some from Bombay. Queer place to get rum from, but you never know.”

“On any other morning there’s nothing I’d have liked better,” said Colin, “but I’ve just been to see Nanny Twicker and she made me drink a cup of very strong sweet cocoa and eat two huge pieces of bread and goose dripping.”

Mr. Wickham said navy rum would settle anything. He had a pal, he added, who used to top off a binge with a spoonful of Epsom salts in hot rum and water and always came up bright and smiling. Rum, he said, navy rum, was the thing, but if Colin didn’t feel like it, what about a finger of whisky? Whisky, he said, wasn’t rum, but its settling properties were notorious wherever the Flag flew. Colin thanked him very much but said he had made a promise to himself not to drink anything before lunch.

“Well, if you won’t, you won’t,” said Mr. Wickham. “Merton?”

Noel also declined.

“Then,” said Mr. Wickham, who had already opened a well-stocked corner cupboard, “it will have to be a Johnny Woodser.”

He poured some rum into a tea-cup and drank it.

“What is a Johnny Woodser?” Noel asked.

“I don’t know who he was,” said Mr. Wickham, “but when I was at Sydney in the last war I heard his name a lot. He was a fellow called Johnny Woods who wasn’t sociable and always kept his drink for himself, so if any fellow stood himself one and didn’t shout his pals he was called Johnny Woods and the drink was a Johnny Woodser. I daresay there never was such a person. Mythical, you know. Like the old gods and goddesses, what? Well, one more for luck.”

He poured himself a second drink, drained the tea-cup, and put the bottle in the cupboard.

“And now, what about that heifer?” he said.

Had Colin not been used to the agent’s peculiarities he might have thought eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning a bad moment to drink two very large navy rums, especially when the choice of the local representative at the Barsetshire Agricultural was under discussion. But experience had taught him, and taught Noel and Lydia, that Mr. Wickham had a power of absorbing rum, gin and whisky without being even faintly affected by them, only equalled by the amount of whisky, gin and rum that came to him not only from pals in every corner of the globe, but from mysterious sources all over England and most of Scotland, for it was Mr. Wickham’s proud boast that he had never visited a pub without making a pal of the proprietor. Every year when he went to Norfolk the little post office at Duchess Loose (said by philologists to be a corruption of Dutchie’s Sluice, so named in the years of Dutch draining) had to engage the services of the village i***t (for the old civilization had not yet been throttled by Progress at Duchess Loose and each little village jealously conserved its i***t, thinking but poorly of the idiots in rival hamlets) to help to carry down to the station the birds that Mr. Wickham had shot overnight and was despatching to his friends, which gifts came back to him in the shape of drink from Christmas to Christmas every year. Noel had at first been a little shy of asking the agent to supper, for his own stock of drink was scanty and he felt he could not entertain Mr. Wickham as he would wish. But, as Mr. Wickham cheerfully explained to him, he only drank for courtesy and good comradeship when he dined out, preferring to do his serious drinking at home, so Noel found it simpler to fall in with the agent’s views, give him the glass of sherry or claret that he could provide and accept without false pride the drinks he offered in his own cottage.

“You’d better come and look at her,” said Mr. Wickham. “She’s as nice a heifer as we’ve had here.”

He shepherded his guests to the door and led the way down the garden.

“I’ll come with pleasure,” said Noel, “though you know as well as I do that you’ll send whatever you like.”

“Of course I shall,” said Mr. Wickham. “It’s no use keeping an agent and barking yourself. But I’d like you and Keith to look at her. Mrs. Merton was down at the farm on Friday and I asked her to pick the likeliest heifer and, by Jove, if she didn’t pick Verena at once. She’s got the Nelson touch about heifers.”

“What an unusual name for a cow,” said Colin.

“After the Rector’s wife,” said Mr. Wickham. “Not that she knows anything about cows, but she knows Duchess Loose, and that’s enough. She was as bucked as anything when I asked if I might call the heifer after her. I wondered afterwards if I ought to ask the Rector to christen her, the heifer I mean. I don’t mean really christen, but just give his blessing on the whole thing, so that he’d feel he wasn’t being left out of it.”

“And did he?” asked Noel, amused.

“Well, I thought it over,” said Mr. Wickham, “with a good tot of navy rum to help the brain to function, and I came to the conclusion I’d better leave it alone. Queer birds, clergymen. You never know with them. Daresay it’s the clothes they wear or something. But I asked old Tubby.”

“You asked who, or do I mean whom?” said Noel.