There came a day—it was in late February, a day of alternating sunshine and brief bitter squalls of snow— when a list of lands assigned, claims admitted and expenses
to be met was exposed on the church door, accompanied by a rough map drawn up by the surveyor who had worked with the commissioners.
On that day, late in the afternoon, Steve Fuller walked into the kitchen which had once been a parlour and dropped from his shoulders the bit of damp-spattered sacking which had been his protection against the snow. He sat down by the table, rested his elbows on it and dropped his haggard face into his hands which seemed so disproportionately large for his body.
‘If only I’d waited,’ he groaned. ‘If only I’d had the sense to wait. There it is, all in the one piece. “Tenancy at present known as ‘Fuller’s’, property of Sir Richard Shelmadine, Bart.” All in one piece, just what I allust longed for, and now to let! ‘Tain’t to be borne.’
Mrs Fuller crossed the room and laid her red puffy hand on his bowed shoulder. She was no longer quite the cheerful buxom creature from whom Sir Charles had accepted the offering of cake and home-brewed wine. There were more lines in her face and more grey hairs among the curls. But her spirit was unimpaired.
‘Don’t you fret, Steve. Don’t you fret, my dear. We’ll manage. I give Annie Jackson good warning and she’ve been on the look-out for a little shop for me; and she’ve found one, in Friargate. You give me just a year or two there, living close, and we’ll hev the money to buy us an acre or two. Danny’ll get a job. There’s a room right up in the roof, we’ll hev a lodger; Sally can help there, and with the cooking. We ain’t beat yet, Steve, not by a long chalk. Come on, don’t you fret. I got a nice dumpling just ready.’
‘I couldn’t eat a crumb,’ Fuller said. ‘I doubt if I’ll ever eat anything again. To hev it happen just like I allust wanted it, and me under notice to quit; and all on account of my own damn hastiness. I could cut off my hand what hammered the nails in that there rack and that there manger, so I could.’
Sally, who had been nursing her baby, now laid him in the old black hand-carved cradle which had rocked
seven generations of Fullers.
‘Once,’ she said, fastening her bodice, ‘I had a job at the Hawk in Hand. I dessay I could get it back if it come to a pinch.’
Fuller took no notice and Mrs Fuller hesitated before she spoke. Danny’s marriage had been a dreadful shock and disappointment to her; and to her simple nature things would have seemed easier if she could wholeheartedly have disliked the girl. If she had done so Mrs Fuller would have given her what she obscurely called ‘Bell Tinker’. When Danny had come home, back last summer, and sheepishly announced that he was going to marry Sally Ashpole and that she was going to have a baby in the autumn and that was why, Mrs Fuller had said, ‘Sally Ashpole, dirty little slut and careless too. I’ll give her Bell Tinker.’ But there was something rather disarming about the girl’s good nature, and she had a sense of humour; also the baby was a boy—though nothing like Danny to look at. Mrs Fuller disapproved of her daughter-in-law, but she could not wholly dislike her. Disapproval, however, came uppermost now as she said:
‘I’ve no doubt you mean well enough, but that wouldn’t do. We’ve allust been a respectable family, and don’t you forget it.’
‘And a hell of a lot of good we’ve done ourselves,’ Fuller said bitterly. ‘Even that damned surveyor fellow, when he went round, said my land was the best cultivated of the lot. So because I worked my guts out manuring and coddling that mucky old top end of Old Tom some other chap is going to hire the neat little holding I should hev had. ‘S enough to break your mind just to think on.’
‘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 Hadstock 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