The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) Read Free Page B

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.
    The cobbler's cottage stood at the far end of the strung-out line, and it was one of the more solidly built ones. In time past it had been cared for, with flowers beside the door, a step white with hearthstone, and a neat potato patch at the side. Even now recent neglect had not quite reduced it to the general level. Julie Greenway, when she married Amos, had been a very superior sort of woman, daughter of a small yeoman farmer at Notley, and herself apprenticed to the dressmaking. An old unmarried aunt of Sir Charles had lived at the Manor until her death and Julie Greenway had made all her dresses, and once she had come to do a fitting and had heard that a dairymaid was ill and had offered to make the butter, saying that it would be a treat to get her hands on a churn once more. Damned good butter it was too. If Julie had married a farmer she'd have been another Mrs Fuller, or another Mrs Clopton--Mrs Abram, of course, not Mrs Fred with all that pianoforte nonsense! But it had been easy-- twenty-three years ago--to see why she married a cobbler. A good-looking,