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.
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, merry, devil-may-care young scamp he’d been before the Methodists got hold of him.
At that time, had Amos been one of his tenants Sir Charles would have given him notice; for next to, if not equally with, progressive farming the Squire abhorred Dissent. But the cobbler was a freeholder, so Sir Charles had shown his complete disapproval in the one way open to him: he took away his custom. Whether Amos noticed was doubtful; Sir Charles did, for it seemed that no cobbler in any nearby village could make a decent pair of boots, and even when he transferred his custom to Baildon be never attained a really easy fit. And then, one
evening, Amos Greenway, trudging home through Layer Wood from one of his Methodist meetings, had seen a light, a flickering blaze, and gone towards it to find a lonely keeper’s cottage all aflame. The keeper was out doing his duty, and his wife, with a child in her arms, was at the foot-square bedroom window screaming into the lonely night. Amos had yelled, ‘Push him through. I’ll catch him,’ and had done so. Then, laying the child aside, he had fought his way in and dragged out the woman.
Next day, when the news reached him, Sir Charles had walked straight to the cobbler’s cottage and said, ‘I hate Dissent, as you know; but I honour a brave man, Greenway. My custom is yours in future.’
Amos, all blistered and hairless and plastered with old Widow Hayward’s herb poultices, had said simply, ‘It will be welcome, sir.’ Then he added something about having often preached about brands snatched from the burning and now knowing what they felt like.
Since then Sir Charles’s boots had fitted better, but there was no denying that Greenway became more and more dilatory as time went on and Methodism encroached upon his time. Once he had left his work, which included stitching a stirrup leather for his Squire, and gone sixty miles to hear John Wesley preach, walking every step of the way. Now he was late with this last job, and Sir Charles intended to take no excuses.
Between the road and the cottage wall was a little bed of marigolds, almost past flowering. The door to the room which Amos used for his work was half open, and just inside a large cat, almost the colour of the marigolds, lay basking in the last of the sun’s warmth. Sir Charles leaned sideways and rapped smartly on the door with the handle of his crop. The cat sprang up in an offended manner and backed into the flowerbed, where it stood glaring at him with its yellow eyes, moving its tail from side to side.
The door opened wide, revealing, not the angular figure and dreamy countenance of the cobbler, but the small neat figure of a girl, who made her bob, and then looked up at him with a timid, wavering smile.
He prided himself upon knowing the name, as well as the history, of every living soul in Clevely, and liked to prove it by using the names freely, surprising young people, particularly when he caught them up to mischief, by saying, ‘You’re Samuel Thomas Jarvey, ain’t you? Samuel John is the one with bow legs.’ It irked him this afternoon that he had to wait a perceptible moment before bringing this girl’s name to mind. It was out of the Bible, he remembered that much, but not a girl’s name at all. Something ridiculous like Jordan or Galilee I Ah, he had it.
‘Good day, Damascus. Y’father about?’
‘No, sir; I’m sorry. He’s over to Nettleton.’
‘Well, I hope he finished off my boots before he went galloping about the countryside. Methodist business again, I’ll be bound.’
He spoke sternly and was not surprised or displeased to see an expression of acute distress come into the girl’s face. He was, however, surprised when, after a second during which it looked as though her eyes might jump out of her head, she said quietly: