In a Green Shade | Page 5

a witch. We had one in this village a few years ago, and
she may be here still, though I haven't come across her. She laid a
malison on my chauffeur's potatoes--I had one once--and (as he told me)
blighted the year's crop. He was digging in his garden when she, a

dark-browed old woman with a beard, leaned over the gate and asked
him for some kindling wood. He, a Swiss, who may not have
understood her, waved her away, saying that he was busy. "You will
get no good out of those taters," said she, and slippered away. That was
five years ago.
John Halsham is fond of describing himself as a Tory, and perhaps
really is one of those almost extinct mammalia. I had thought Professor
Saintsbury the only one left. He, I understand, thinks that the Reform
Act of 1832 was a great mistake, and dislikes Horace Walpole's Letters
because their writer was a Whig. Then there is Mrs. Partington's
nephew, who muses perhaps without method, but certainly not without
malice, in Blackwood once a month. He is more Jingo than Tory. He
has to bite somebody. I was amused the other day to consider his
girding at Sir Alfred Mond, chiefly on the score that he had a German
grandfather. It did not seem to have occurred to the man that the same
terrific charge could be brought against a much more august Personage,
and with much the same futility. Surely it is more to the purpose that he
will have an English grandson, That is the worst of musing when you
neglect method and surrender to malice.
Toryism, which is a parasitic growth of mind, needs a relic to which it
can cling, not a person. In the country the Church will not provide it,
nor any longer the brewing interest. The air has been let into the one,
and the water which they call mineral into the other. There remain the
throne and the squirearchy, and of these the throne is much the stouter.
For the throne is remote enough to be an object of veneration, separable
from its occupant; but when the great house and the old acres are held,
and not filled, by a new man, the villager, who sees more than he is
supposed to see, is by no means concerned to uphold them. Most of the
villages have been Radical; now they are all going "Labour." The
elections, if there are to be some soon, will be very interesting, and I
think surprising to Mr. George and his assortment of friends.
However--another strike or two like that recent abortion on the railways
will dish the Labour Party and Trade Unionism as well--at least in the
country. Down here we are new to the movement, but have gone into it
keenly, without losing our heads. Indeed, I think we are finding more in
our heads than we suspected. We keep to our code; and when we find
that other men don't, we begin to doubt of Unionism. One of the very

best of our men said in my hearing at the time that if the railway strike
were the kind of thing we were to expect, he, for one, would have no
more to do with the Labourers' Union. As I have said once before, I
think, responsibility (which the Union is giving us) deepens our men
and quickens them too. The time is at hand when they will begin to feel
their power. I have no fears. I have long known them to be the salt of
the earth. If the quotation would not be from one of my own works, I
would quote now.
It is an old discussion, but all my travels have convinced me that a bad
peasantry is the exception. Such exceptions there are, though I don't
mean to give them. If Zola had not made himself ridiculous in the act,
so ridiculous as to show himself negligible, he would stand as the
greatest traducer of his adopted country that France has ever harboured.
But he was a specialist in his particular line of disgustfulness, and saw
in rural France what he took there with him. They say that the
Bulgarian peasant is a savage brute, "they" being the Greeks, of course.
I would not mind betting a crown that he is nothing of the sort.
In manners, to be sure, peasantries differ remarkably. Here in the West,
from Wilts to Cornwall, our rustics are sweet-mannered. They are
instinctively gentlemen, if gentlehood consist, as I believe, in having
regard for other people's feelings. But in the Danish parts of England,
to be plain, manners are to seek. That means from Bedfordshire pretty
well up to Carlisle. North-east of that again, in Northumberland, you
have delightful manners.
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