Ne'er Do Well Read Free

alive.”
    â€œNow, now,” said I. “I get along very well. And our two farms are very easy to run.”
    â€œWe live,” said Mansel, “at an unfortunate time. We’ve seen the great days pass and the pinchbeck days come in. That’s always a sorry spectacle. Plenty of Romans felt as we do, you know. And then the last crash came, and the dark ages supervened.”
    â€œThat’ll learn ’em,” said Baldric.
    â€œYes,” said Mansel, “it will. Free wigs will be off. As for a forty-hour week, whoever wants to survive will have to fight for his life – for three or four hundred years.”
    â€œThe pansy,” I said, “the pansy won’t like being learned. He’ll probably ring up the police.”
    â€œNo doubt,” said Mansel drily. “But he will get no reply.”
    â€œWe must go down,” said Natalie, “with everything ‘all correct’.”
    â€œThat’s right,” said Jenny. “We feel exactly the same.”
    I nodded.
    â€œOne’s house in order, hay carried, animals watered and fed. Of course it won’t matter at all, except to us.”
    â€œAnd why,” said Natalie. “Why will it matter to us?”
    â€œSelf-respect,” said Mansel. “We’re all the same. If I were told that I was to die at four, I should arise at three, to bathe and shave. But I have a feeling that this time we shan’t be warned.”
    â€œIn the twinkling of an eye?” said Baldric.
    â€œThat’s my belief.”
    Baldric frowned.
    â€œAnd the roof of Odd Acre’s new barn is only half on.”
    â€œI think you’ll have time for that. I don’t think it’s coming just yet. I may be wrong, of course. It may come tonight. But somehow I don’t think it will. But when it comes, I think it’ll come in a flash.”
    â€œAnd fall upon us?” said Jenny.
    â€œYes, my sweet. Get us, and they’ve got the lot. Wipe England out, and the rest will be at their disposal.”
    Baldric nodded.
    â€œMachines do not a warrior make.”
    â€œNor boasts a man-at-arms.”
    Mansel continued, smiling.
    â€œAnd we’re painfully vulnerable. But, as I’ve said, I don’t think it’s coming just yet. I’ve nothing to go on, of course.”
    â€œBut it’s bound to come?” said Natalie.
    â€œThat’s my belief,” said Mansel. “America will almost certainly turn the switch. Trip over the wire, if you like. But the dump is there, waiting. The end of this civilization is overdue. We’ve flouted the laws of Nature for several years. As for the laws of God…”
    â€œJonah,” said Baldric, “I’m with you all the way. Nine of the ten Commandments are simply ignored today. The only one honoured is the second – which people can’t be bothered to break.”
    â€œAnd we can do nothing,” said Natalie.
    â€œWe can go on behaving. I can’t think of anything else.”
    â€œAn Act of God,” said I, “could stop the rot.”
    â€œIt could, indeed – if its effects were wholesale. They would have to be so crippling that over-civilization would go by the board. So there’s really not much in it. We’ve got to get back to the laws of God and of Nature. When the world obeys those laws, the world will be happy again.”
    With that, we left the house, to return to husbandry: for our pleasant host and hostess drove us about the estate. During the tour, my admiration for the Baldrics rose very high. Only devotion to duty could have produced such results – a very rare devotion; but that was theirs. And men and beasts were plainly so pleased to see them wherever they went. Let me at once admit that without their inherited wealth they could not have so maintained the Buckram estate: but when it is remembered that they could, had they pleased, have kept a most handsome home