Under their stone-tiled roofs the villagers derived substantial comfort from all these aliens. Foreign visitors impressed by the charges of London restaurants and the splendour of the more accessible ducal palaces often express wonder at the wealth of England. A half has not been told them. It is in remote hamlets like Much Malcock that the great reservoirs of national wealth seep back to the soil. The villagers had their Memorial Hall and their club. In the rafters of their church the death-watch beetle had been expensively exterminated for them; their scouts had a bell tent and silver bugles; the district nurse drove her own car; at Christmas their children were surfeited with trees and parties and the cottagers loaded with hampers; if one of them was indisposed port and soup and grapes and tickets for the seaside arrived in profusion; at evening their menfolk returned from work laden with perquisites, and all the year round they feasted on forced vegetables. The vicar found it impossible to interest them in the Left Book Club.

“God gave all men all earth to love,” Mr. Metcalfe quoted, dimly remembering the lines from a calendar which had hung in his office in Alexandria, “but since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove, Beloved over all.”

He pottered round to the engine-house where his chauffeur was brooding over batteries. He popped his head into another outbuilding and saw that no harm had befallen the lawnmower during the night. He paused in the kitchen garden to nip the blossom off some newly planted black-currant which must not be allowed to fruit that summer. Then, his round finished, he pottered in to breakfast.

His wife was already there.

“I’ve done my round,” he said.

“Yes, dear.”

“Everything coming along very nicely.”

“Yes, dear.”

“You can’t see Pilbury Steeple, though.”

“Good gracious, Beverley, why should you want to do that?”

“It’s a sign of rain when you can.”

“What a lot of nonsense. You’ve been listening to Boggett again.”

She rose and left him with his papers. She had to see the cook. Servants seem to take up so much time in England; she thought wistfully of the white-gowned Berber boys who had pattered about the cool, tiled floors of her house in Alexandria.

Mr. Metcalfe finished his breakfast and retired to his study with pipe and papers. The Gazette came out that morning. A true countryman always reads his “local rag” first, so Mr. Metcalfe patiently toiled through the columns of Women’s Institute doings and the reports of a Council meeting on the subject of sewage, before he allowed himself to open The Times.

Serene opening of a day of wrath!

Towards eleven o’clock Mr. Metcalfe put aside the crossword. In the lobby by the garden-door he kept a variety of garden implements specially designed for the use of the elderly. Selecting from among them one which had newly arrived, he sauntered out into the sunshine and addressed himself to the plantains on the lawn. The tool had a handsomely bound leather grip, a spliced cane handle and a head of stainless steel; it worked admirably, and with a minimum of effort Mr. Metcalfe had soon scarred a large area with neat little pits.

He paused and called towards the house, “Sophie, Sophie, come and see what I’ve done.”

His wife’s head emerged from an upper window. “Very pretty, dear,” she said.

Encouraged, he set to work again. Boggett passed.

“Useful little tool this, Boggett.”

“Ur.”

“Think we ought to sow some seed in the bare patches?”

“Noa.”

“You think the grass will grow over them?”

“Noa. Plantains’ll come up again.”

“You don’t think I’ve killed the roots?”

“Noa. Makes the roots powerful strong topping ’em off same as you’ve done.”

“Well, what ought I to do?”

“Bain’t nothing you can do with plantains. They do always come up again.”

Boggett passed. Mr. Metcalfe looked at his gadget with sudden distaste, propped it petulantly against the sundial, and with his hands in his pockets stared out across the valley. Even at this distance Lady Peabury’s aubretias struck a discordant note. His eyes dropped and he noticed, casually at first, then with growing curiosity, two unfamiliar figures among Westmacott’s cows. They were young men in dark, urban clothes, and they were very busy about something. They had papers in their hands which they constantly consulted; they paced up and down the field as though measuring it; they squatted on their haunches as though roughly taking a level; they pointed into the air, to the ground, and to the horizon.

“Boggett,” said Mr. Metcalfe sharply, “come here a minute.”

“Urr.”

“Do you see two men in Mr. Westmacott’s field?”

“Noa.”

“You don’t?”

“’Er bain’t Mr. Westmacott’s field. ’E’ve a sold of ’er.”

“Sold it! Good heavens! Who to?”

“Couldn’t rightly say who ’e’ve a sold ’er to. Gentleman from London staying at the Brakehurst. Paid a tidy price for ’er too I’ve a heard said.”

“What on earth for?”

“Couldn’t rightly say, but I reckon it be to build hisself a house.”

Build. It was a word so hideous that no one in Much Malcock dared use it above a whisper. “Housing scheme,” “Development,” “Clearance,” “Council houses,” “Planning”—these obscene words had been expunged from the polite vocabulary of the district, only to be used now and then, with the licence allowed to anthropologists, of the fierce tribes beyond the parish boundary. And now the horror was in their midst, the mark of Plague in the court of the Decameron.

After the first moment of shock, Mr. Metcalfe rallied for action, hesitated for a moment whether or not to plunge down the hill and challenge the enemy on his own ground, and decided against it; this was the moment to act with circumspection. He must consult Lady Peabury.

It was three-quarters of a mile to the house; the lane ran past the gate which gave access to Westmacott’s field; a crazily-hung elm gate and deep cow-trodden mud, soon in Mr. Metcalfe’s imagination, to give place to golden privet and red gravel. Mr. Metcalfe could see the heads of the intruders bobbing beyond the hedge; they bore urban, purposeful black hats. He drove on, miserably.

Lady Peabury was in the morning room reading a novel; early training gave a guilty spice to this recreation, for she had been brought up to believe that to read a novel before luncheon was one of the gravest sins it was possible for a gentlewoman to commit. She slipped the book under a cushion and rose to greet Mr. Metcalfe.

“I was just getting ready to go out,” she explained.

Mr. Metcalfe had no time for politenesses.

“Lady Peabury,” he began at once, “I have very terrible news.”

“Oh dear! Is poor Mr. Cruttwell having trouble with the Wolf Cub account again?”

“No; at least, he is; there’s another fourpence gone astray; on the credit side this time, which makes it more worrying. But that isn’t what I came about. It is something that threatens our whole lives. They are going to build in Westmacott’s field.” Briefly, but with emotion, he told Lady Peabury what he had seen.

She listened gravely. When he had finished there was silence in the morning room; six little clocks ticked among the chintzes and the potted azaleas. At last Lady Peabury spoke:

“Westmacott has behaved very badly,” she said.

“I suppose you can’t blame him.”

“I do blame him, Mr. Metcalfe, very severely. I can’t understand it at all. He always seemed a very decent man….. I was thinking of making Mrs. Westmacott secretary of the Women’s Institute. He had no right to do a thing like that without consulting us. Why, I look right on to that field from my bedroom windows. I could never understand why you didn’t buy the field yourself.”

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.