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

which to administer it; but the loplolly fellow had evidently done nothing. It was typical of Juby to allow his boys to stone other people's cows on one part of the Waste while his own coughed itself to a skeleton on another. If Juby wished to share in the Christmas dole he'd have to mend his ways.
    The Waste ended in a thicket of gorse and bramble and bracken, beyond which lay a grass-covered ridge called the Dyke, which ran in a ruler-straight line between the river bank and the ride which ran through Layer Wood. The rector, who was something of an antiquarian, believed it to be part of a Roman road which run direct between Colchester and the sea. He had been talking for twenty years of doing some digging to test his theory, but he had never had time; he never would have. The Dyke's interest for Sir Charles was that it made a firm boundary between the Waste and the cultivated land and also served as a , windbreak, since the fields lay directly to the south of it. Between the end of the Dyke and the opening where the ride which he intended to take ran into Layer Wood he halted and looked out across the two great open fields. They lacked interest at this season. The one nearest the wood, known as Layer Field, had just enjoyed its fallow year and all but a few of its many sections had been ploughed during the last few weeks so that the frost, when it came, could do its part in making the soil friable. The other, slightly larger field, called Old Tom, had been left with the stubble on it after harvest, and the village livestock had been turned into it, to lick up the fallen grains of corn, to nibble the greens tuff which sprang up through the stubble, to knead with their hoofs and manure with their dung the soil which would this year lie fallow. They were gone now; most of them to the butcher, thus fulfilling the year's pattern. Stock beasts, the cows and a bull or two were kept alive through the winter, the rest went into the brine vat. That made the Squire remember Fuller...and turning his darkening glance he looked out over Old Tom. There in the level afternoon light the even furrows lay, acres and acres of them, each man's sections divided from his neighbours' by a narrow unploughed baulk. One side of each furrow shone pale violet in the light, the other was chocolate-coloured. And they wanted to alter all this. People who called themselves 'progressive'--all sorts of people, from members of parliament down to dung-booted fellows like Fuller--they wanted to do away with the big, beautiful open fields, to chop them into little piddling pieces, fenced round and given over to pernicious ruinous experiments--no fallow year, for example. These so-called progressive fellows wanted to grow clover or turnips or some such nonsense instead of resting a field that was wearied from a corn crop. It might make money for them for a year or two, as it had Fred Clopton, but at what a price. The spoliation of the good soil which had been tilled in the sound, tried old way ever since Domesday Book. Sir Charles knew that that was true, for somewhere in the cluttered records in his library he had a copy of the particulars of Clevely as it had existed then; it was on sheepskin, and the writing was illegible, but the map was amazingly accurate and the two great fields, the common pasture by the river, were just as they were today. All those hundreds of years the fields had given a harvest, rested a year, been sown again, and nobody was going to tell him that a system that wasn't good could have lasted so long! Fuller's words came back to his mind, 'You can't hold back the tide.' It Was the threat of change, not the insolence of the remark which rankled. As a rule he ignored the thought of his own mortality as firmly as he ignored anything else which displeased or discomfited him; but he knew, of course, that one day, like everyone else, he must die. What then? How would Clevely fare when he was no longer there? He would have given a great deal to