‘How shall you prevent it?’
‘If my shares in the common are not enough to do away
with their majority, they will at least reduce it to precious little; and then I should lay handsome odds, say eleven to three, that the weight of my position will swing the balance
* will turn the scale.’
‘Sure, a post-captain in the Royal Navy is a most imposing creature; but is not Captain Griffiths of the same rank and somewhat greater seniority?’
‘Certainly. But he is not lord of the manor and I am.’
‘Heavens, Jack, I had no notion of it, no notion at all. So they still exist? The office or perhaps I should say the eminence I had heard of, but supposed it to belong to the distant past, when lords exercised the droit de seigneur with the utmost rigour, and the high justice and the low, with a private pair of gallows. So they still exist? I am amazed, amazed.’
Even now, after all these years, the extent of Stephen’s ignorance by land as well as by sea, of course, could astonish Captain Aubrey. He looked affectionately down, and in the simplest words explained the nature of his function. ‘It amounts to little nowadays, after all the modern passion for paring down and changing for the sake of change: the lord of the manor has few rights left apart from what the manor courts leave him, and the occasional escheat; but logically or not he does retain a certain standing, and it is rare for a committee to go against his opposition. And then again, he does have some powers coming down from earlier times: I may not be able to lie with the commoners’ brides on their wedding night, but I do open the fair in the Dripping Pan
* by the charter it cannot start without I am there, or at least my deputy – and I do kick the first football of the season and bowl the first ball when cricket comes round, unless I am at sea.’
They had been rising steadily through his account of lordship of a manor and now, from the top of a grassy bank he waved down to a shallow amphitheatre – it was too large to be called a deli – with a fine sward kept trim by sheep and rabbits and now by a small, remote flock of snow-white geese tended by a girl. ‘You would not think so to look at it now,’
he said, ‘but on Old Lammas Day you can hardly get along for stalls and tents – Aunt Sally, the great rat of Tartary, two or three bearded ladies, boxing-booths, where our lads get finely battered by knowing old bruisers from Plymouth
* such fun. And this is where we have our football in the winter and cricket in the summer, as well as leaping and foot races. In good years we field an eleven that can beat teams of fifteen and even seventeen from most of the nearby villages. Down there, a little south of east, do you see – no, to the left – there is the lane the fair people come up on the days before Old Lammas. It will take us a little out of our way, but I should like to take you down and across; there is something in the south pasture that may please you; and’
* looking at his watch – ‘we have plenty of time before Welland comes to see me.’
As they dropped, Bess started a hare that ran straight from them, going awkwardly down the slope with the dog so close that neither man chose to fire. Ten yards almost touching and then the hare, now out of range, jigged to the right, changed to her natural uphill pace and fairly raced away, a pleasure to behold, Jack hailooing after her, echoed by the shrill voice of the goose-girl, and Bess bounding like a cricket-ball, but with no effect, hopelessly outrun. The hare vanished over the high bank. Bess returned, gasping, and soon after they reached the lane.
‘You can still see the mark of their carts, in spite of the rain,’ observed Jack. ‘And before the last heavy fall you could just make out the print of a camel, a camel, a camel with two bunches that carried the tent belonging to one of the bearded ladies, a present from the Arabian queen, she said.’
‘There is something magic about a fair,’ said Stephen. ‘The smell of trampled grass, the flaring lights . . . you still have wheatears, I see.’
‘Yes, but they will soon be gone, and we with them.’ A wood-pigeon, flying straight and high, crossed over. ‘Your bird,’ said Jack.
‘Not at all,’ said Stephen.
Jack fired. The bird came down in a long swift glide, its wings still spread. ‘I am glad to have hit something, however,’ he said. ‘That is one of the droits de seigneur, you know.
In theory only the lord of the manor can shoot, though he can always give his friends a deputation.’
They talked about preserving game, poaching, keepers, and deer for half a mile, and then, when another lane branched off, winding through deep furze on either side, they followed it and so reached a white line of post and rail. Jack said, ‘This is the limit of the common.
Beyond the fence our south pasture begins, demesne land. You have only seen a small corner of Simmon’s Lea – another day I hope to show you the mere and beyond – but it gives you an idea…’
‘A wonderfully pleasant idea, a delightful landscape indeed; and in the autumn, the late autumn, you will have all the northern duck down here, to say nothing of waders, and with any luck some geese.’
‘Certainly, and perhaps some whooper swans. But I really meant an idea of what these unhappy commoners are signing away. You may say they do not value the beauty…’
‘I say nothing of the kind: would scorn it.’
‘But they do value the grazing, the fuel, the litter for their beasts, the thatch and the hundred little things the common
can provide: to say nothing of the fish, particularly eels, the rabbits, the odd hare and a few of Griffiths’ pheasants. Harding does not see them, so long as it is villagers, and on a decent scale.’
For some time they had been hearing an odd continuous sound that Stephen could not identify until they came to the gate itself; while Jack was opening it Stephen looked back along a straight piece of the lane, and there he saw a woman leading an ass harnessed to a sledge piled high with furze; she was wearing a man’s old, very old coat and gloves and it was evident that she had cut it herself. Jack held the gate for her, calling out, ‘Mrs Harris, how do you do?’
‘And yourself, Captain Jack?’ she replied in an equally powerful voice, though hoarser.
‘And your goQd lady? I will
38not stop, sir – I fairly dreaded that old gate – for the ass is so eternal sullen I should never get him to move again, if I let up to open it.’ Indeed the ass’s momentum slackened in the gateway; but with a singularly vile oath she urged him on and through.
‘We are going to look at Binning’s meadow,’ called Jack after her, as they turned away to the left.
‘You will see the mare right comely,’ she replied.
‘Jack,’ said Stephen, ‘I have been contemplating on your words about the nature of the majority, your strangely violent, radical, and even – forgive me – democratic words, which, with their treasonable implication of “one man, one vote”, might be interpreted as an attack on the sacred rights of property; and I should like to know how you reconcile them with your support of a Tory ministry in the House.’
‘Oh, as for that,’ said Jack, ‘I have no difficulty at all. It is entirely a matter of scale and circumstance. Everyone knows that on a large scale democracy is pernicious nonsense
* a country or even a county cannot be run by a self-seeking parcel of tub-thumping politicians working on popular emotion, rousing the mob. Even at Brooks’s, which is a hotbed of democracy, the place is in fact run by the managers and those that don’t like it may either do the other thing or join Boodle’s; while as for a man-of-war, it is either an autocracy or it is nothing, nothing at all – mere nonsense. You saw what happened to the poor French navy at the beginning of the Revolutionary War…’
‘Dear Jack, I do not suppose literal democracy in a ship of the line nor even in a little small row-boat. I know too much of the sea,’ added Stephen, not without complacency.
‘…while at the other end of the scale, although “one man, one vote” certainly smells of brimstone and the gallows, everyone has always accepted it in a jury trying a man for his life. An inclosure belongs to this scale: it too decides men’s lives. I had not realized how thoroughly it does so until I came back from sea and found that Griffiths and some of his friends had persuaded my father to join with them in inclosing Woolcombe Common: he was desperate