The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (29 page)

'We'll manage,' Mrs Fuller said again.

'We'll manage,' Sally echoed.

After a moment Fuller stood up, rising slowly and heavily like an old man.

'Damn beasts gotta be fed, come what may.' he said, and went out into the yard.

'Well, that's the worst yet,' Mrs Fuller said, lifting the saucepan lid and peeping at the dumpling. 'Things'll mend now. You and me'll drive into Baildon as soon as there come a decent day, Sally, and take a look at this place my cousin found me. This dumpling's ready to dish. He'll fare better when he's got a good bite inside him.'

In the byre that had once been the kitchen Fuller stood still, staring with sick eyes at the rack which had worked his ruin. Slowly, with the movements of a sleepwalker, he reached out and took up a halter and set about the only thing that was left for him to do in this world.

Mrs Fuller's spirit was equal to this last challenge. If it could be managed, Steve was going to have proper burial, in consecrated soil, and with all the rites. She managed very well. As soon as the limp body had been laid in its bed Sally was sent through the snow, which had settled in for the night, to tell the rector that Fuller had taken a chill and that Mrs Fuller didn't much like the way he was wheezing and that Fuller himself was nervous and thought he was going to die. They'd all be much obliged if the rector would call and talk to him, not tonight, tomorrow. This message, carried from the back door to the cosy study where the rector was brooding over the commissioners' decisions and drinking port wine, distressed him very much. He disliked all thought of illness and of death. He seized upon the one cheerful note in the appeal, 'not tonight, tomorrow', and sent back,a reply that he would make a visit tomorrow if necessary, but that he sincerely hoped--and that was true--that Fuller would be much better by morning. Morning, with snow still falling, brought another message to say that Fuller was dead.

Mrs Fuller dug into the 'egg and butter' money, which she had been saving towards setting up her little shop, and gave Steve a funeral which set a standard for all time in the six parishes and became a byword; seventy, eighty years later people in an attempt to convey a description of splendour would say, 'Grand as Fuller's funeral.'

Having managed that, Mrs Fuller retired from management. She talked no more of the little shop and made no

alternative plans.

'You'll hev to fend for you and yours now, Danny,' she said. 'If you want me I'll come with you; if not, I can allust go and live with Annie Jackson.'

The responsibility thus thrust upon him, combined with the shock of coming home and finding his father dead, and the remorse of having been absent--drinking at the village inn--at a moment when his presence might have prevented a tragedy, sobered Danny entirely. He'd thought that the worst thing of all had happened to him when he found himself married to a girl whose brief attraction for him had waned--he was morally certain that the baby who bore his name was not of his getting --and he'd tried for half a year to escape the reality of his life, leaving everything but his share of the manual work to his father and mother. Now decision and management must be shouldered.

'Father--and he was the best farmer in six parishes-- couldn't find land to hire,' he said, 'so I doubt if it's much use my trying; but maybe I could get a job like Mr Had-stock up at the Manor if I tried. And of course you'll come with us, Mother. You can mind the baby and Sally can get a job too. We'll manage.'

Nobody noticed that he had used the words so often on Mrs Fuller's lips; but in the speaking of them Danny entered into his manhood.

Fuller was not the only casualty of the enclosure bill. Old Clem Bowyer, he who had refused to sign, saying that he was too old for changes, received by word of mouth the news of the assignment to him of a neat packet of land, and of the share which he must pay towards the expenses of the commissioners and the fencing. He had the details repeated to him three times so that they were fixed in his mind and then went home and said to his daughter, who kept house for him: 'I fare sorta tired, Martha. Reckon I'll go to bed early.' She was a good daughter; she took him a brick, hot from the oven, wrapped in flannel to warm his feet and a great pewter mug full of hot black-currant tea to warm his innards, and Clem turned his face to the wall and slept very well. But he did not attempt to rise in the morning. As soon as he woke he thought about all the changes and the expenses and he knew he could not face them.

'I fare sorta tired, Martha,' he said when his daughter came to see why he was not stirring. 'Reckon I'll bide where I be today.'

He never left his bed again and in ten days was dead.

Ricky Wellman, who had also refused to sign, saying that when he was against a thing he was against it, changed his views completely when he discovered that, despite his refusal to demand enclosure, enclosure had been thrust upon ,him and that his thirty acres--now all in one piece--included two upon which Fuller had toiled so earnestly. 'I were a rare silly owd fool,' he confessed, 'trying to stand in me own light like I did.' He then took a stout knife and pried up one of the bricks near the hearth in the kitchen floor and lifted from its hiding-place the leather bag which held his life-savings. One or two of the coins were already rarities, guineas first minted in the reign of Charles II, hoarded away by Grandfather Wellman. Ricky counted them, the coins clumsily lifted and set out by his great gnarled fingers. There was enough to pay his share of expenses, do the fencing and leave plenty over; he could go in for newfangled things like turnips and clover and winter-feeding if he had a mind. Twenty years dropped away with his prejudices.

At the Bridge Farm the enclosure had a result which was logical, but quite shocking, as logical things often are in this illogical world.

In a manner ominously calm, Mrs Shipton said, 'Well, there you are, Abel Shipton. If you'd given your mind to your business and not messed away your farm and my money you'd now hev a bit of the Waste to add to it. Now Miss Parsons, being the owner, get the share of the Waste what go with this farm, and she's old and she'll die and we'll end with notice to quit same as the Fullers. Thass what chapel done for you, my man, and thass what you've done for me; and there's no getting away from it.'

There was no argument either, and Shipton attempted none. He remembered the text, 'Blessed art thou when men shall revile you...for My sake', and in silence obeyed the Biblical precept of turning the other cheek.

Next morning, all in the snow, Mrs Shipton, having fed her fowls, tramped on to where the new chapel stood, the walls reared to about the height of ten feet, as Amos and Matt had left them when the timber gave out. She looked at it a long time, remembering the duck-pen which had stood on the site; remembering the hours which Abel had wasted helping Amos Greenway to dig the foundations and begin the walls; remembering the hours--and the devoted attention--which Abel had given to the other chapel at Nettleton.

Mrs Shipton was at a dangerous age for women; the hot flush which, despite the cold, scalded her neck and face, the feeling of dizziness and nausea were no new things to her. Ordinarily she drank a cup of cold water straight from the well and sat down for a few minutes, but today she did not attempt any palliative; she stood there nursing her grudge and growing more flushed and more dizzy and more nauseated as she stared at the little chapel. Eventually she turned away and walked unsteadily into the house; and there, in the kitchen, Shipton presently found her. Not meeting her eye, he said sheepishly:

'I'm taking them pigs into market. Is there anything you wish I should fetch home?'

'No, thank you. Unless you know some place where they sell gumption.' said Mrs Shipton curtly.

Still turning the other cheek, still thinking 'blessed are the meek', Shipton turned away and went off to market. As soon as he was safely away Mrs Shipton took a really nice dry faggot and the tar bucket and the bellows from the hook where they hung by the kitchen stove; she carried them away and then she came back and shovelled out of the stove a dustpan full of growing red embers.

Mrs Shipton had more affinity with the Old Testament than with the New.

While all these events were taking place in various parts of Clevely, consternation and dismay reigned in the Waste. Of its dozen or so families only three were provided for, or even recognised as having existence. Matt Juby and Bert Sadler were granted half an acre apiece, 'To be enclosed and fenced about from that portion of the said Waste immediately contiguous to the dwellings of the said copy-holders, Matt Juby and Bert Sadler,' whatever that might mean; and Amos Greenway, cobbler, was awarded twenty acres--no reason given. The others, like the forty decent families at Greston, faced real destitution.

Human nature, consciously or unconsciously, demands a scapegoat who can bear the blame for its woes; and the scapegoat must be handy, within reach and sight. Sir Richard Shelmadine and the Parliament men were in London, the commissioners dispersed, Mr Turnbull in Baildon. The obvious scapegoat was Amos Greenway, who had written out the paper and now had twenty acres awarded him. What had he added to or subtracted from that writing? Who could know?

Ill-feeling, though running high, took no outward form for two days; partly because a kind of paralysis had overtaken the Waste, but chiefly because the selection and persecution of the scapegoat demands the services of a high priest, and Matt Ashpole, obviously the choice for that role, was not sober enough to stand up at any moment during those forty-eight hours. So Amos went, unmolested, down to Bridge Farm and viewed the smouldering remains of his chapel, and came home and knelt down by his work-bench and addressed his God in words which, if the Deity had any memory at all, must have reminded Him sharply of another faithful servant named Job.

While Amos wrestled with his God, and Matt Ashpole lolled in drunken stupor, too far gone to notice that his lurcher bitch was whelping again, and the other Waste-dwellers gathered in little groups and bewailed their fate, nobody noticed that Dicky Hayward, the one-armed ex-soldier, had disappeared; and when, more than a week later, news drifted in from Nettleton, which was on the coach road, that the coach from London had been held up and robbed on the other side of Colchester, nobody connected that with Dicky Hayward or spared any sympathy for the passengers, who had--so said the rumour--been robbed of watches, jewellery and cash worth ninety pounds. Everybody was interested, and envious, when, a few days after that, Dicky reappeared, stolid-looking as usual, and said that he had got himself a job as footman with one of the officers of his old regiment who had now retired and was off to settle in America. His old mother was going with him; and that news did make a stir. In future the Waste-dwellers, when they starved to death, would have no one to lay them out; nor, if miraculously they should survive and go on breeding, would they have the services of a midwife. But they thought Dicky lucky and told him so, and he gave no sign of what he knew-- that he had not been lucky, merely enterprising and desperate.

At the end of the second day after the posting of the enclosure results Matt Ashpole was sober--for the simple reason that his supply of liquor was exhausted and he had no money to replenish it. He noticed the puppies for the first time and said, 'Pore owd Ripper, had to manage all on your own. Done well too--though how we're gonna feed the little buggers this time beats me.' He then took his old gun and said in quite another voice, 'Now I'm gonna talk to Amos.'

By the time he arrived at the cobbler's door almost every male dweller on the Waste was behind him; even Matt Juby and Bert Sadler thought it wise to join the group. On the fringe a number of little boys hovered, and two girls. There were no women in the crowd; Mrs Ash-pole had spoken for the whole of her logical sex when she said, 'S'pose you do for Amos; what'll that get you? You'll swing and his twenty acres'll drop back into Squire's hand as like as not.' Naturally Matt took no notice of that.

They came to the cobbler's door. Amos was not working--he had done no work since the previous day when he had seen the ruins of his chapel--he was reading his Bible, searching for comfort and understanding; and since he read in the kitchen it had been impossible for Julie to make herself a cup of tea all that day. When the knocking came on the door some slight hope stirred in her; the knocker, whoever he was, might hold Amos engaged just long enough for her to make a brew...the kettle was boiling.

Amos went to the door.

'So there you are, you Methody twister,' Matt said at once. 'We're come to hear how you account for writing yourself into twenty acres while the rest of us get nowt.'

'Ah' and 'Thass right' said the crowd.

'I can't account for it,' Amos said, bringing his mind back to mundane matters. 'No, there's no accounting for that, so far as I can see.' No accounting for anything in a world where it could happen that one day, a man received enough wealth to ensure that the chapel would be roofed, and on the next news that the chapel was burned down. 'I can't account for it at all,' Amos said again.

No impartial observer could have failed to see that, so far from being elated by his unaccountable award, Amos looked ill and sick at heart; all the harsh lines in his face were graved deeper, a patchy pallor lay around his mouth and eyes, and his lids were red with sleeplessness. But there was no impartial observer in that crowd, and all anyone saw was the man who had, not very willingly, drawn up the paper from which they had gained nothing and he twenty acres for which he now said he could not account.

'You was the one said let Seizer hev what was Seizer's, ain't you?' Matt said accusingly. 'And beyond doubt thass what you wrote, you------! And got all us bloody iggerunt lot to sign it. They give you twenty acres for your services, you crooked sod, you! I see it all as clear as------day!' He believed that he did. He'd taken no solid food during his two-day drinking bout and now, half light-headed with fasting, was in a state to believe anything.