HE little village of Nesting was within thirty miles of London, but civilisation had done very little to contaminate it. It was four miles from any railway-station, and was not on the road to anywhere. It possessed neither electricity, nor gas, nor main drainage, and its water supply was from wells. Most of its inhabitants had never been in London in their lives, and many of them had never been out of the village for a night. A narrow lane, uninviting to motorists, left the main road and, after about a mile, found Nesting; it then looked round in a despairing way and rejoined the main road further down.
The village possessed one shop, described as a grocery and general store, and controlled by Mrs. Elwood. She had sandy grey hair and mild blue eyes. She had no teeth worth mentioning, and drew in her thin underlip till it must have bumped against her tonsils. Her figure was flat with no noticeable waist-line. Personally she was not so unclean as some of the old ladies in Nesting, but cleanliness was not a hobby of hers. Had there been a competition in such things, open to the whole world, she would have taken the gold medal for General Inefficiency, and the first prize for Conversational Flow. She had a kind heart and was uniformly cheerful.
She kept no books. Her shop was in wild disorder, and she never knew where anything was. She rarely remembered the price of anything, but tried to ask enough. If she had to weigh anything, she generally found that she had mislaid the weight she required; the one-ounce weight roamed so frequently that it was understudied by a potato which had been tested to weigh one ounce or thereabouts. Children preferred the potato-weight to the cold, official variety. It gave two more acid drops for your money.
One or more of the articles she was supposed to stock would always be missing, and this gave her a strange satisfaction as evidence that business had been done.
“Bacon we are entirely out of,” she would say, almost as if she were proclaiming that she had conquered some bad habit, and would then become philosophical or at least talkative. “You may not have noticed it. but sometimes a thing lasts longer than it does others, and that is so specially about bacon. Now, that last side I had was off of Mr. Tewson, not ten minutes away. He’s black Berkshires, and breeds and kills himself. Home cures, too. And I'd sooner buy my bacon off of some pig as I knows personally. I can get it from the wholesale and put on the rail on receipt of postcard, but it's not the same thing, and you can't say it is. So when I can—and that's not always—I gets a side off of Mr. Tewson. But it never lasts me as long as I think it will, for the best things is the shortest, and all comes to an end if you keep on cutting at it. I did think of writing the wholesale yesterday, and then it crossed my mind that I might see Mr. Tewson coming out of church on Sunday morning, and then I could ask him if he had another side he could spare me, though not going into the figures till Monday, as the Fourth Commandment teaches us. So if you're passing one day next week, and are still in the same mind about bacon, I might let you have some. Now, if it had been cheese as you'd been wanting—oh, you noticed it, had you? Yes, I keeps it under the counter, being pressed for space. No need to show it, for it advertises itself. That’s a powerful-flavoured cheese, that is. When you eats that you knows you're eating something. I had a morsel of it with my supper last night, and it kept the roof of my mouth all of a tingle for an hour afterwards, just as if something had stung it.”
It may seem surprising that Mrs. Elwood ever made a living out of that shop, but she did, though it was not till after the discovery of Nesting that she became actually prosperous. If you lived in Nesting, either you dealt with Mrs. Elwood or you went four miles to the next shop. That was all to the good for Mrs. Elwood. The local products that she sold—bacon, eggs, honey, butter—were all excellent. The wild miscellany that she obtained from “the wholesale,” including straw hats, mouth-organs, and patent medicines, was not too bad for the simple and submissive natives of Nesting.