“Damn you, Ben, that is the last straw. I have sat here listening to your mumbling with a patience and good temper wasted upon a very thankless fellow. You know best what you owe me and mine.”
He paused. Fishpingle bowed superbly.
“I do, Sir Geoffrey.”
“You are never so irritating as when you force me to say things intensely disagreeable. I hate to rub it in, but I am Squire of Nether-Applewhite and you are my butler. As my butler I expect you to consider my wishes, and to carry them out to the best of your ability.”
“I have tried to do so, Sir Geoffrey.”
“Up to a point—up to a point. I admit it. Let us have the facts, say I! And then deliver judgment on them. You have aided and abetted two servants in this establishment who are flagrantly disobeying me. And you have aided and abetted Master Lionel, with the knowledge and therefore with the deliberate intention of upsetting other plans which I had confided to you. If I am wrong, pray correct me.”
Thus the magistrate, using the words and gestures of authority. As he spoke a quaint benevolent despotism illuminated his sturdy face. How kind he could be to his dependents when they kow-towed to his rule both wife and butler knew. And the memory of countless petty sacrifices which had truly endeared him to “his people” moved Fishpingle profoundly. But his own intimate knowledge of those people, a knowledge so seldom gleaned by the Overlord, the vivid, intimate experience of fifty years, had taught him inexorably that such powers as the Squire and his like exercised were a wastage of vital force, misdirected energy which, in the fullness of time, must defeat its own purposes. And this, he had slowly come to realise, was the underlying tragedy of the countryside. With this realisation marched its corollary. The authority of the squire, vested by immemorial custom in him, was, in turn, passed on by him to the farmers who used it or abused it according to their lights. And the farmers, with rarest exceptions, united energies to maintain ever-weakening positions against those beneath them. If prosperity followed a generous use of such power, the result, even then, was disastrous to the labourer and his family. He lost initiative, foresight, any desire to rise and better his humble condition. When he rebelled, when he decided to tear himself loose from emasculating influences, what could he do? Emigrate. And England loses a Man.
Fishpingle had studied carefully the books and pamphlets lent to Lionel. As he admitted, they were one-sided, a compilation of hideous grievances, valuable as such, almost valueless from the point of view of reconstruction. The “three acres and a cow” school filled this wise old man with derisive contempt. To divide great estates into small holdings of individual ownership might seem a sound solution to economists who wrote incisive articles in rooms littered with works of reference. The man on the spot was not so optimistic. He had seen the experiment tried with allotments. The labourer lacked knowledge; he muddled about with soils, just as his wife muddled about in the kitchen, spoiling good food. No reform, so Fishpingle believed, could come from below. Light must shine from above.
If the Squire could be led to see clearly the issues he had raised.
If Authority, in fine, could impose its own limitations?