Private Enterprise

CHAPTER 1-5

“How’s Mrs. Bunce’s rheumatism?” Lydia shouted.

“Main bad, Miss Lydia,” said old Bunce. “When I do hear her groaning about the house of a morning I do laugh till my cough fair chokes me. Main bad my cough is, but I’ll carry it to my grave with me, Miss Lydia, and that’s more than our Effie will do with her load of trouble. Mother and our Effie had a rare old turn-up last night. Couple of gert sillies. If I’d a made a song and dance about all my bits of trouble when I was young, I wouldn’t be here now.”

And upon this old Bunce, who was well known to have assisted materially in increasing the population in his younger days, fell into a fit of wicked reminiscent chuckling which rapidly developed into a terrifying cough. The grandchild of shame, using most unsuitable language for one so young, threw a handful of mud at its grandfather who gave it another hearty cuff. The child yelled. Effie Bunce came down from the cottage, slapped the child, said a few highly unfilial words to her father, and sketched a kind of rough salute or obeisance to the punt.

“Hullo, Effie, how are you?” Lydia shouted, as Colin began to push the punt up-stream again.

Effie, apparently pleased by their informal afternoon call, shouted across the water that she was fine and not to take no notice of father because he wasn’t nothing but a gormed old fool. As the punt swung round the bend in the river the child of shame could be seen hitting with malicious vehemence at its mother’s legs, while Effie’s voice, hurling abuse in a mixture of American filmese and the authentic language of King Alfred, came to them across the water.

“At least,” said Lydia rather proudly, “that’s something this Government can’t spoil.”

This was one of the moments when Noel Merton suddenly felt the immense guilt that still exists between the city-bred and the true countryman. A boyhood in Barchester, by now so large as to be almost entirely urban in its outlook, and a life of hard concentrated work in London, made a gulf between himself and the world of Bunce which neither his goodwill nor his intellect could span. For the friendly, practical, unillusioned attitude of Lydia and Colin he felt admiration and some envy. Never would he be entirely at his ease with the Bunces of this world. Among townspeople, among the well born, well placed, or highly intelligent people of his own world he could move in complete freedom and security. But never, he knew, in spite of his position as a landowner and his serious attention to his county duties during the Law Vacations and at week-ends, never would Bunce look upon him as anything but Miss Lydia’s husband.

“It’s a pity there aren’t more like old Bunce in the Government,” said Colin. “We need a more eighteenth-century set to see us through this mess. If they were gentlemen in the proper sense of the word, if they drank and gambled and whored—excuse me, Noel, and I do hope I pronounced it properly, but one always feels a bit nervous about it—and put people in the pillory or cut their ears off and encouraged child-labour, I’d feel some faint hope for England. But as their one idea appears to be that everyone should do no work and be highly paid for not doing it, I don’t see where we are going.”

“What I really mind is their trying to burst up the empire,” said Lydia, whose deep if undigested patriotism made her use words which her more sophisticated friends were too self-conscious to tolerate. “I mean like leaving Egypt and trying to give India to the natives. If they try to do anything to Gibraltar I shall put on a striped petticoat and a muslin fichu and murder them all in their baths, because traitors ought to be murdered,” said Lydia, the single-minded.

Chaotic though Lydia’s speech was, her loving husband and her very fond brother had to admit that she had evoked the figure of Charlotte Corday in a very striking way.

“I believe you would, Lydia,” said her husband, gazing upon her with deep admiration and the affection that her mere existence perpetually kept warm in his heart. “And I’ll get you off. I am not quite sure though,” he added, “whether a husband is allowed to defend his wife on a capital charge. You might look that up for me, Colin.”

“Our sort are the worst traitors,” said Lydia, pursuing her own peculiar train of thought. “I mean the ones that aren’t our sort don’t know any better and of course they want to show off by making a lot of laws and making children stay at school till they are too stupid to learn anything sensible. But the ones that were properly brought up like us are the real betraying ones. I expect their wives are frightfully ashamed of them.”

“What worries me,” said Noel, “is the deliberate extinction of the upper middle class. We aren’t running to seed yet, as some of our betters are. There are some very honourable families of old title who really need suppressing altogether, because all the brains and vigour have gone to the women, and the men are spineless or fanatics. But I think we have still a few generations of good work to do. The people in power know it, and they are frightened of words like patriotism, or integrity, or incorruptibility. So they hope to tax us till we die out. I daresay they will.”

“Meanwhile,” said Colin, who as punter had the advantage of seeing where they were going, “here are the Rectory steps, and owing to being out of practice I am probably going to make a very bad landing and fall into the water, and then you’ll have to get me out.”

His deeds belied his words, and in another minute the punt lay-to neatly at the bottom of the Rectory garden.

“I suppose,” said Lydia, as they landed, “we’d better put the cushions and the paddle in Mr. Villars’s boatshed. One never knows.”

It was, her hearers felt, too sadly true. Nothing was safe now. Being a half-holiday it was quite on the cards that a boatload of the conceited, half-educated oafs and louts from Barchester might pass and help themselves to portable property. Or the village school, red forcing-ground for revolution, might steal what it could carry and throw the rest into the water. In neither case would the police dare to prosecute, for very few magistrates dared or wished to support their own police.

“Blast,” said Colin. “But I expect you are right.”

So all stealable parts of the punt were carried into the Rectory boatshed and Colin took the precaution of putting the key in his pocket.

The Rectory garden sloped pleasantly down to the river with the handsome church in the background. Outside the drawing-room window they found Mrs. Villars pulling up weeds and grass from the flagged terrace. She was pleased to see her visitors. Northbridge Manor and the Rectory had always been on friendly terms and during the war, with her own house full of billeted officers, her sons away and the Manor taken over by a business firm, she had missed the friendly intercourse with the Keiths. Now the Rectory was her own again and the Mertons were established as neighbours, and though her sons could not often visit her, she was content.

“I will not,” said Mrs. Villars, who had got up from her knees, taken off her gardening-gloves and apron and given herself a general shake, “offer you tea on the terrace, because if I did the sun would go in at once. There is a fire in the drawing-room.”

She stood aside for her guests to go in by the french window. The drawing-room was full of the afternoon sunshine, a large wood fire was burning and everything looked worn yet comfortable.

“If you would shut the window,” said Mrs. Villars to Colin, “I think we shall be safe. Ever since this peace one cannot trust the sun for a single moment. Gregory is in the study, supposed to be writing a sermon for tomorrow, but I think he is really asleep. At least I went in a quarter of an hour ago and he was pretending to read The Times. The Bishop was speaking in the House of Lords yesterday and Gregory thought he might find something useful in his speech.”

“Does the Bishop ever say anything useful?” said Colin.

“What Mrs. Villars meant,” said Lydia, “was that the Bishop might have said something silly like loving the Germans.”

Her explanation appeared perfectly clear to her hearers, who were all anti-Palace to the death.

Mrs. Villars then rang for tea, a proceeding which impressed her guests deeply, and the faithful though rather tyrannous parlourmaid Foster brought it in, followed by the Rector. Conversation flowed mildly on such original subjects as the defects of the Government, how nice it was that Mr. Churchill had not taken a title, the probable shortage or complete disappearance of coal, electricity, gas, coke, candles, oil and matches during the ensuing winter, and, as always, food rationing.

“I know,” said Mrs. Villars, staring straight into infinity in a sibylline way, “that the next thing they will ration is bread.”

“And how do you know, my dear,” said her husband.

“Because they said they wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Villars.

A discussion then arose as to whom one meant when one said “they.” Lydia, the single-minded, said she meant the present Government. Mr. Villars said that if he took the trouble to examine his own thoughts, which he rarely did because he had other things to think about, he would probably find that “they” was the equivalent of person or persons unknown. Mrs. Villars said there were all sorts of different theys and the ones she was talking about were, she supposed, the people who were responsible for all this rationing. But not, she added, Lord Woolton, because he had done the rationing so well and so fairly that one couldn’t possibly call him They.

“ ‘There is example for’t: the lady of the Strachey married the yeoman of the wardrobe’: Twelfth Night,” said Colin and then apologized, adding that he didn’t know why he said it and hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant.

“Everyone knows why you said it,” said Lydia. “It’s because Mrs. Villars was talking about Lord Woolton. That’s cause and effect or conjunctivitis or something of the sort. But if it’s in Shakespeare it must mean something, because what he says always means something, even if you can’t understand it. I expect he didn’t always understand what he was saying either. I mean a thing like what Colin said must mean something, because if it didn’t there would be no sense in saying it.”

“After Mrs. Merton’s masterful exposition of the subject,” said Mr. Villars, “I feel that there is hardly anything to add. I would merely suggest that Mr. Keith, though his remark has thrown no light at all upon a quotation which is one of the permanent puzzles to Shakespeare scholars, has at least given what journalists call a new slant on the question.”

Colin hastened to disclaim any kind of theory as to the literary or historical meaning of the quotation, adding thoughtfully that the worst of the name was that there were no rhymes to it, so one could not write scurrilous lampoons in rhymed couplets.