And then there is this half a herring and boiled bird-seed arrangement. George Harrison has a sister of eighteen who kindly comes in to do cooking and housework for us every day. She thinks us frightfully queer, and if we bought some herrings and bird-seed and asked her to cook them for us I have no doubt she would oblige, but, though she doesn't much care what we eat, there are a lot of things she doesn't eat herself, and fish is one of them. Porridge, which, I suppose, is a kind of bird-seed, is another.
Not that Jane calls it eating, by the way. She calls it "touching," and there are any number of things that she doesn't fancy touching. She will touch enormous platefuls of bacon or sausages or almost any derivative of the domestic pig, and the same applies to puddings and cake. But beef and mutton she does not touch, nor margarine, and we have to be almost as careful that Jane Harrison has plenty of the right things to touch as about the whole of the rest of the family.
Now here again I think it would be quite possible to induce the people of England in our large industrial centres to ration themselves on boiled herring and bird-seed. We should not use those names, of course. The advertisements on the hoardings would say:--
THE BOUNTIFUL HARVEST OF THE SEA BROUGHT TO THE BREAKFAST TABLE
WHAT MAKES THE SKYLARK SO HAPPY? TRY HARRABY'S HEMP. A SONG IN EVERY SPOONFUL.
But propaganda of that sort would have no effect on Jane. She would simply say that she never cared to touch herrings and that she did not fancy hemp-seed.
When I consider the cases of George and Jane I am bound to believe either that the Russian moujiks (if this is still the right word) are more docile and tractable than ours, or else that the Soviet _régime_ will need a great deal of adaptation before it can be extended to our English villages. Or, of course, it may be possible that some of the minuter details of M. LENIN'S administration have not been fully revealed to me. I shall find out about this no doubt when I return to London. In the meantime I am banking on George and Jane, whatever the COUNCIL OF ACTION may do.
"'He brightened up a lot when his mother-in-law arrived,' said an onlooker.--"_Provincial Paper._