The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (2 page)

Today he stared at a desecrated shrine. The kitchen had been stripped, its floor lay knee deep in straw; across the far end where the dresser had stood beside the door which led to the inner part of the house there was a brand-new manger, and the madman, Fuller, was standing in the manger, fixing over it a great wide slatted rack which jutted out and covered almost half the ceiling space. He .was hammering so vigorously he had not heard Sir Charles arrive and at the words, 'What the devil are you about, Fuller?' he gave a start and almost swallowed the nails that he was holding between his teeth. Then he spat them into his hand, jumped down from the manger and came stumbling through the straw, a big-boned, gangling fellow, deceptively mild of eye and manner. He raised the hand which held the hammer to the lank, sweat-damp hair that lay in a bull-pow on his forehead.

'Good day, sir. I'm sorry, didn't hear you come.'

'I asked what the devil you are about, Fuller?' He knew that the answer would be displeasing, since it involved change, so the question might as well be brusque.

'Well,' Fuller said deliberately, 'I'm fixing up a place for my beasts. This year I aim to coddle one or two of my best through the winter.' He jiggled the nails in his left hand, but his light blue eyes, the colour of a speedwell, did not waver from their deliberate stare.

'I had a good hay yield and Fred Clopton had more turnips than he wanted, so he sold me a load and I reckoned I'd try this here winter-feeding.'

'And that demanded that you turn your kitchen into a byre?'

'What else could I do? Pigs need the sty, horses need the stable; mustn't build on my hired acres--you pointed that out yourself, sir, last time I mentioned the matter. Where else can I put my beasts?'

'That,' said Sir Charles, 'is the question, Fuller. When every farmer gets these crazy notions and must keep his beasts through the winter, where will they all go? In a year or so the whole country'd be packed full of bullocks like Baildon market at Michaelmas. You never thought of that, did you? No! None of you fellows can ever see beyond your noses, and your noses are all snouting out quick profits and nothing else.'

Something sparked in Fuller's pale eyes as he formed, in his mind, the answer to the accusation and the refusal of the argument; but he knew his landlord. Sir Charles could be impervious to reason, but open, occasionally, to appeal. So the farmer said mildly: 'I only wanted to hev a try, sir. For one thing, I'd hev my muck; 'tis all good wheat straw I've put down, and by winter's end I'd hev a good heap of muck. My top end of Layer Field is hungry for muck.'

'Your piece of that field, like everybody else's, gets its fair share of dunging when the cattle turn in there after harvest, Fuller. You're just being selfish, trying to get ahead yourself at the expense of everybody else.'

Fuller shook back the limp lock of hair and there was in the quick jerky gesture something resembling that of a horse, fly-tormented.

'Who'm I hurting, sir? Who'll be a penny the worse for my trying to do things better fashion?'

I shall,' said the Squire promptly. Nodding towards the erst-while kitchen, he asked with a glint of humour, 'You don't imagine that you are improving my property, do you? Turning the trimmest little kitchen in Suffolk into a byre. And there's another thing! What about your poor missus, where's she going to bake and brew? In the parlour?'

'For the time being. She was agin it at first but I talked her round and she's willing for me to hev a try.'

'Well, I ain't. So you can clear all that nonsensical rubbish out, my good man. I shall be by on Tuesday, and I shall want to see that kitchen just as I always have seen it.'

'Ah,' said Fuller, now provoked past caution, 'thass just it. Same as things was in the beginning so they must be for evermore, amen. Thass why Clevely lags behind so; thass why us who would get on hev to be hobbled to the old ways that even them old monks knew was backward in their time when they put a fence round Flocky.'

Sir Charles let go the rein and planted both his plump hands on his knees, sitting forward as though in a chair. The red colour deepened in his face and invaded the whites of his eyes.

'That'll do,' he said sharply. 'I can tell which way the wind blows. You're hankering after enclosure like all the other selfish cantankerous fools. I happen to remember when Greston was enclosed; Mr Montague, the parson, and half a dozen farmers did very well out of it, and forty decent poor men were thrown on the parish. That is not going to happen here!'

The enclosure of the neighbouring village of Greston-- which had been mismanaged--was his stock argument against the innovation which he detested; and he used it so much, always quoting the forty poor decent men who had become paupers, that unwittingly and unintentionally he was building himself a posthumous reputation as the poor man's friend.

'Forty idle fellows at Greston what had just kept going grubbing half a crop out of gardens and keeping a few half-starved beasts on the common lost their rights and now go out to work by the day for wages,' retorted Fuller hotly. 'And whether that be bad or a good thing is a matter of opinion.'

'Then here's something that ain't. Your notice. Fuller. I shall not renew with you next Lady Day!'

The farmer's thin face took on a grey dirty look as it whitened under the lingering summer tan, but his eyes did not meeken or waver.

'All right then,' he said. 'Sack me! Sack all but the lazy and the lickspittles! It'll come, just the same. You can't hold back the tide!'

Good-humoured again now that he had shot his bolt, Sir Charles said, 'I never thought of trying. But I can keep fellows like you from putting pigs in bed-chambers! I shall be by on Tuesday. Good day, Fuller. Come up, Bobby.'

He rode briskly out of the yard and turned back towards the main road. The interview had ruffled him a little, but only a little. He'd half known that there was going to be trouble with Fuller; now it had come, and the way he had dealt with it would put a stop to all that nonsense. It was a relief to have it over and done with; and, besides, he had got his way.

Fuller, who had not got his way--had got, in fact, notice instead--stood for a moment breathing as though he had been running, and then turned, stumbled back through the straw and leaned against the manger while sobs racked his stringy body and a few difficult tears brimmed his eyes and lost themselves in the harsh lines of his face. He wouldn't easily find another farm to hire-- the French war and the corn prices which offered such opportunities to men who could go ahead had at the same time put a premium on any sort of land. In the far north and west, they said, the ploughs were out on heaths and moorlands that had never felt the touch of the share before. Sod and blast the stubborn old devil, Fuller thought. He gave himself a shake, brushed his horny hand over his eyes and jumped back into the manger. Ignoring the threat of Tuesday's inspection, he went on hammering at the rack as though nothing had happened. The turnips had to be stored somewhere...Tuesday's row couldn't be worse than this; you couldn't be sacked twice.

Sir Charles clattered over the Stone Bridge, an ancient structure only just wide enough to take wheeled traffic, but built with nooks in its walls to allow foot passengers to step back into safety. Immediately upon its other side he was riding alongside a high wall built of the same pleasant red brick as his own house and lodge cottage. The wall and the house which it encircled had been built at the same time as the Manor, and by the same hands, for the house had been, until fifty years ago, the Dower House of the family. Sir Charles's father, like many of his neighbours, had come a cropper at the time of the South Sea Bubble and in 1721 had been obliged to sell the Dower House, Bridge Farm and several hundred acres of land. The experience had taught him nothing, he had remained a gambler, both in investments and at cards, until the end of his life; but it had its effect upon Charles, who had never invested a penny in any stock or share and had made it an inflexible rule to rise from table the moment he had lost two guineas. This habit, once the subject of disgusted comment among his 'deep-playing' neighbours, had, as he grew to be old, come to be regarded as one more endearing eccentricity, and when anyone in the six parishes said that something had cost or was worth 'a Shelmadine' everyone knew that it meant two guineas.

The high wall was broken at one point by a pair of wrought-iron gates, similar in pattern to, though of less impressive size than, those of the Manor, and when he reached them Sir Charles slowed down and sat for a moment staring through at the neglected, moss-grown drive which cut through the tangled, overgrown laurels and lilacs of the shrubbery and past the ill-shaven lawn to the house whose canopied door and window-sills and shutters were all in sad need of paint. He was saddened by what he saw. Still, it was no business of his. The Dower House had been sold to a seafaring man, a Captain Parsons, who was reputed to have made a fortune in the slave trade. He had one daughter, and a good many young men from families like the Shelmadines, recently impoverished, had made a bid for her hand. Charles Shelmadine himself had 'taken a shot at her', was in fact dancing with her at a ball in the Assembly Rooms at Baildon, with old Captain Parsons beaming his approval, when he fell in love, at first sight, across the width of the ballroom, with the beautiful, crazy creature whom he had married and with whom he had spent three enchanting, terrible years. The shames, the shocks, the anxieties, the delights and ecstasies of that brief married life, and its appalling end, would have left a mark on many men to the end of their days, but Charles Shelmadine had possessed then the rudiments of the art which in later years he perfected, of shutting out of his mind anything unpleasant about which he could not take positive action. In quite a short time he was able to think that it was a blessing that Felicity had died before his attempts to indulge her whims and demands had ruined the estate all over again. As it was, she had, in bearing the son in whom he had so much delighted, sown the seed for a bitter harvest.

Now, halted by the gate of the Dower House, all these memories merely brushed the fringe of his mind, which was focused upon the question of whether or not to call upon Miss Amelia this afternoon. It had until recently been his habit to call once, at least, in a month; often he paid an extra visit. She had never married, despite her many chances; like others with her advantages, she had been very choosy and hard to please. With the passing of time she had grown domineering and sharp of tongue, but Sir Charles had derived considerable pleasure from his visits to her. She listened intelligently and sympathetically, and he had once or twice found himself telling her things which he had never told anyone else; and she understood the value of money as few women did. Lately she seemed to have grown miserly; for the last three years the house and grounds had deteriorated, and when, on a recent visit, he had exercised the privilege of an old friend and tried to bring the talk round to her personal financial problems she had been very evasive--so much so that she sounded vague and rambling. And she had offered him, instead of the Madeira which he expected in that house and considered his due, some very inferior Marsala-- without a word of apology.

No, he would not visit her this afternoon. The rumpus with Fuller was quite enough. When he had administered the well-merited prod to Greenway he'd ride on and visit the little hunchback, Jacky Fenn, and hear how he was getting on with his fiddle-playing. That would put him in perfect good humour again.

'Come up, Bobby,' he said, and they jogged along to the end of the red wall.

At this point the highway made a boundary between Clevely and the neighbouring parish of Minsham All Saints. The latter had been enclosed farther back than even Sir Charles could remember, and now, on his left hand as he rode, the hawthorn hedges were high enough to shut out the view; but on the right hand there was view enough, for on that side of the road lay Clevely Waste, a vast open space of commonland, uncultivated save for the little patches of garden and orchard lying near the hovels which fringed its edge nearest the highway. Here lived those of the Clevely villagers who enjoyed rights on the Waste but had no share in the open fields or common pasture. Here lived the self-employed, the oddjobbers and the merely idle.

In appearance the cottages presented a sharp contrast to those in the main part of the village, where Sir Charles was very particular about the whitewashing of walls and the mending of thatch. Like all other landlords, he was often forced to choose between doing indoor or outdoor repair; and invariably he did the latter, giving reason that one must keep property weather-proof. The owners of the Waste Cottages seemed not to mind about weather; one or two of the structures were fairly soundly built, but most of them looked as though, long ago, they had grown from the soil and were gradually sinking back into it. Many of them, according to legend, had been built in bygone times under an ancient licence known as 'Squatters' Rights' by which any man was entitled to his freehold if he could, between dusk and dawn, rear four walls, slap on a roof and have smoke rising from a chimney in the morning. They gave evidence of their hasty and makeshift origin. Sir Charles, since he felt no responsibility for them, did not find even the most tumble-down of them offensive to the eye; they crouched low and fitted in with the background of nibbled grass and gorse and bracken and stunted hawthorns which was the Waste. And in the same way, he thought, their inhabitants fitted in with the pattern of village life.

Fuller just showed his pig-headed ignorance when he spoke of all Waste-dwellers as idle fellows. In many ways they were useful and sometimes they were industrious. Amos Greenway, though he frittered away a good deal of time, still made and mended boots and shoes and clogs and all kinds of harness; Matt Ashpole went twice a week into Baildon with his bony old horse and ramshackle cart and was available for any odd carrying job and did a bit of dealing as well; Bert Sadler dug all the graves; old Widow Hayward took in washing, acted as midwife at one end of life and layer-out at the other, and had somehow managed to rear three sturdy sons who had all gone soldiering; Matt Juby was idle and a drunkard to boot, and Spitty Palfrey was much the same, but neither of them ever refused a casual job--mole- and rat-catching, emptying privies, work at hay and harvest time. Somebody had to do these things, and it was foolish to say that enclosure, by forcing them into regular work, would benefit the village; it was simply because they still had their Waste and could support themselves for part of the year with their geese and goats and pigs and scrawny cows that they were available when they were needed.