4
She was a fair, clear-eyed girl, with the figure and complexion of one who had devoted considerable attention to outdoor sports. She was wearing a man’s Norfolk jacket (men’s clothing was so plentiful), and a skirt that barely reached her knees, and did not entirely hide cloth knickerbockers which might also have been adapted from a man’s garment. Below the knickerbockers she displayed thick stockings and sandals. Her splendid fair hair furnished sufficient protection for her head, and she had dressed a pillow of it into the nape of her neck as a shield for the sun.
Thrale looked at her with a frank curiosity as they made their way up the town to a seedsman’s shop. She had left the horse and cart there, she explained, while she explored other streets of the town.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Eileen, of Marlow,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be another Eileen there, so one name’s enough.”
“Is that how your community feel about it?” he asked.
She smiled. “We’re beginning,” she said.
He pondered that for a time, and then asked, “Who were you?”
“Does it matter?” was the answer.
“Not in the least,” said Thrale. “Never did much so far as I was concerned, but I have a memory of having seen your photographs in the illustrated papers. I was wondering whether you had been actress, peeress, scandal; or perhaps all three.”
She laughed. “I’m the eldest daughter of the late Duke of Hertford,” she said, “the ci-devant Lady Eileen Ferrar, citizen.”
“Oh, was that it?” replied Thrale carelessly. “Where’s this shop of yours?”
The loot was heavier than Eileen had anticipated. The shop had been ransacked, but they found an untouched store, containing such valuables as beans, potatoes and a few small sacks of turnip seed at the bottom of a yard. When these had been placed in the cart, they decided that the load was sufficient for one horse.
They took the longer road to Marlow, through Bourne End, to avoid the hill. Eileen walked at the horse’s head, with Thrale beside her wheeling his bicycle, and during those two hours he learnt much of the little community which he proposed to serve for a time.
It seemed that in Marlow—and the same thing must have happened in a hundred other small towns throughout the country—a few women had taken control of the community. These women were of all classes and the committee included an Earl’s widow, a national schoolmistress, a small green-grocer, and an unmarried woman of property living half a mile out of the town. These women had worked together in an eminently practical way; at first to relieve distress, and then to plan the future. They had wasted little time in discussions among themselves—none of them had the parliamentary sense of the uses of debate. When they had disagreed, they had had plenty of scope to carry out varying methods within their own spheres of influence.
Their first and most difficult task had been to teach the members of their community to work for the common good, and that task was by no means perfected as yet. Co-operation was agreeable enough to those who had nothing to lose, but the women in temporary possession of the sources of food supply were not so easily convinced. In many instances the committee’s arguments had been suddenly clenched by an exposition of force majeure, and property owners had discovered to their amazement that they had no remedy.
But the head and leader of Marlow was a farmer’s daughter of nineteen, a certain Carrie Oliver. Her father had had a small farm in the Chilterns not far from Fingest. He had been a lazy, drunken creature, and from the time Carrie had left the national school she had practically carried on the work of the farm single handed. She liked the work; the interest of it absorbed her.
The Marlow schoolmistress had remembered her when the committee had first faced the daunting task of providing for the future. They had been more or less capable of organizing a majority of the women, but no member of the committee knew the secrets of agriculture and stock-breeding, and in all Marlow and the neighbourhood no woman had been found who was capable of instructing them in all that was necessary.
A deputation of three had been sent to Fingest, and had discovered Miss Oliver in the midst of plenty, cultivating her farm in comfort now that she had been relieved of her father’s unwelcome presence.
She had been covered with confusion when requested to leave her retreat and take command of a town and the surrounding twenty thousand acres or so within reach of the new community.
“Oh! I can’t,” she had said, blushing and ducking her head. “It’s easy enough; I’ll tell you if there’s anything you want to know.”
The deputation had then put the case very clearly before her, pointing out that in Miss Oliver’s hands lay the future of a thousand lives.
“Oh, dear. I dunno. What can I do?” Carrie had said, and when the deputation had urged that she should return with them and take charge forthwith, she had replied that that was quite impossible, that there were the cows to milk, the calves, pigs and chickens to feed, and goodness knew how many other necessary things to be done before sunset.
The deputation had said that cows, calves, horses, sheep, pigs and chickens might and should be transferred forthwith to the neighbourhood of Marlow.
It had taken three days to convince her, Eileen said, and added, “But she’s splendid, now. It’s wonderful what a lot she knows; and she rides about on a horse everywhere and sees to everything. The difficulty is to stop her getting down and doing the work herself.”
Thrale understood that, exceptional male as he was, his position in Marlow would be subordinate to that of Miss Oliver.
“Does she understand agricultural machinery?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” returned Eileen. “But she hasn’t time, you see, to attend to all that, and it’s so jolly difficult to learn. I’ve been doing a bit. I’m better at it than most of ’em. But when I saw you it struck me how ripping it would be if you’d come and take over that side. Men are so jolly good at machinery. We shouldn’t miss them much if it weren’t for that.”