The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [93]
It was let for £3 18s.; they had asked £170 for it; there was tithe and property tax on top of that. Lady Peabury knew this.
“Any of us could have bought it at the time of sale,” said Mr. Metcalfe rather sharply.
“It always went with your house.”
In another minute, Mr. Metcalfe felt, she would be telling him that he had behaved very badly; that he had always seemed a very decent man.
She was, in fact, thinking on just those lines at the moment. “I daresay it’s not too late even now for you to make an offer,” she said.
“We are all equally threatened,” said Mr. Metcalfe. “I think we ought to act together. Hodge won’t be any too pleased when he hears the news.”
Colonel Hodge had heard, and he was none too pleased. He was waiting at the Hall when Mr. Metcalfe got back.
“Do you know what that scoundrel Westmacott has done?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Metcalfe rather wearily, “I know.” The interview with Lady Peabury had not gone off quite as he had hoped. She had shown no enthusiasm for common action.
“Sold his field to a lot of jerry builders.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Funny, I always thought it was your field.”
“No,” said Mr. Metcalfe, “never.”
“It always used to go with this house.”
“Yes, I know, but I didn’t happen to want it.”
“Well, it’s put us all in a pretty nasty fix, I must say. D’you suppose they’d sell it back to you now?”
“I don’t know that I want to buy it. Why, they’ll probably want a building-land price—seventy or eighty pounds an acre.”
“More, I daresay. But, good heavens man, you wouldn’t let that stop you. Think how it would depreciate your property having a whole town of bungalows right under your windows.”
“Come, come, Hodge. We’ve no reason to suppose that it will be bungalows.”
“Well, villas then. You surely aren’t sticking up for the fellows?”
“Certainly not. We shall all suffer very much from any development there. My belief is that it can be stopped by law; there’s the Society for the Protection of Rural England. We could interest them in it. The County Council could be approached. We could write letters to the papers and petition the Office of Works. The great thing is that we must all stand together over this.”
“Fat lot of change we shall get out of that. Think of the building that’s gone on over at Metbury.”
Mr. Metcalfe thought, and shuddered.
“I should say that this was one of the times when money talked loudest. Have you tried Lady Peabury?”
For the first time in their acquaintance Mr. Metcalfe detected a distinctly coarse strain in Colonel Hodge. “I have discussed it with her. She is naturally very much concerned.”
“That field has always been known as Lower Grumps,” said the Colonel, reverting to his former and doubly offensive line of thought. “It’s not really her chicken.”
“It is all our chickens,” said Mr. Metcalfe, getting confused with the metaphor.
“Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it,” said Colonel Hodge. “You know how I’m placed. It all comes of that parson preaching Bolshevism Sunday after Sunday.”
“We ought to get together and discuss it.”
“Oh, we’ll discuss it all right. I don’t suppose we shall discuss anything else for the next three months.”
No one in Much Malcock took the crisis harder than the Hornbeams. News of it reached them at midday by means of the village charwoman, who dropped in twice a week to despoil their larder. She told them with some pride, innocently assuming that all city gentlemen—as she continued to regard Mr. Hornbeam, in spite of his home-spuns and his beard—would welcome an addition to their numbers.
Nervous gloom descended on the Old Mill. There was no explosion of wrath as there had been at the Manor; no moral condemnation as at the House; no call to action as had come from the Hall. Hopeless sorrow reigned