a great pewter mug full of hot blackcurrant 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 Ashpole 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.