not always perfectly certain which was which, and to the day of his
death he never knew their names. There were real corners in those
kitchens of theirs, where the old could gather themselves into the
shadow unobserved. The kitchen at Marget’s was exactly the same size,
but it had no corners that he could ever find; only bare walls set
rigidly each to each, where naughty children could be sent to sulk,
and dust might settle and gather at its will. The other kitchens had
space and they had peace. Those of their occupants who thought them
poor and mean found themselves suddenly proud in possession after he
had gone. It was as if he had placed a charm on the table before he
went away.
But he was not often able to seek these hiding-places from the storm.
Marget was one of those souls jealous of a burden they do not want
but will not share. Even while she resented his presence under her
roof, she resented equally that he should be happy anywhere else. He
was welcome to hate her as much as he chose, but she demanded that
he should hate other folk as well. If he was hers to see to, she
would have him all to herself, and nobody should take him from her
even for half an hour. Besides, she lacked the full flavour of abuse
when he wasn’t about the house. In the dark kitchen, in spite of his
size, she could not always be sure that he was there. She might trip
over something and snarl, “Drat you! Mind your feet!” before she
discovered that it was only a stool.
So it was not very often he could get away; she hunted him down too
rigorously for that. And even out of her sight he was conscious of
the obsession of her thought. Even during those snatched moments,
seldom as they came, there lurked round every corner the possibility
of her face. It was only in sleep that he ever really escaped, and
even then he awoke sometimes to find her watching him from the
door—her gnawed and useless bone that she still would drag to her
cave.
She said such terrible things, too, to the silent knitters of his
peace. Suddenly the little kitchen would be full of battering,
brazen-sounding speech, carrying so far along the street that folk
would hear it and come out. When Marget emerged with her bone between
her teeth, they would be standing in little knots or edging towards
the door. Little boys came out of nowhere as they always do, and
sometimes a passing carriage would be brought to a halt. Through it
all Marget would swim on a powerful stream of abuse, while he went
quiet in her clutch, his fiddle gathered close. Sometimes people
laughed, and he heard, and that was worst of all.
Only at night had he respite for a while. Two of the children slept
in his little room, and even they, incredibly curious as they were,
were forced to close their peering eyes at times. The old man, kept
awake when he might have slept, could not always sleep later on, and
often sat for hours by his window, looking out into the night. Up
there, it almost seemed as though he were in the chestnuts over the
road, only out in the branches where the birds slept it was cool,
and full of a rocked and murmuring peace. Sometimes, though, on the
stillest nights, not a leaf moved or shook on the giant boughs, but
more often there was a little breeze that whispered busily all the
time. There was a wind, too, that did nothing but sigh, and another
that hissed in angry little gusts. The one that sighed meant that
thunder was about, and the fretted one was the herald of change and
rain. And another wind rolled in a long, soft soughing all the way
through the trees, like the long, smooth waves of a very far-off
tide. It would swell and rise while he listened for it to break,
but always it ebbed and died without breaking at all. Sometimes it
stopped in the midst of the downward curve, like a sentence softly
suspended without cause. He liked this wind because it took him back
to the marsh, but best of all he liked the big gales that came to him
straight from the west. The wind that thrashed and tramped on the
great trees, that hammered the little window of his room and sent
great draughts down chimneys and through keyholes, and flung the blue
slates spinning into the street, came to him straight from the place
where he belonged. Sometimes, when it was very dark and wild, he was
sure the street was full of the sea. He thought of it rolling and
pushing at all the doors.... There was a meadow beyond the chestnuts
over the road, and often he heard the water under the wall, like the
tide that beat at the banks along the marsh.
He was fond of that meadow beyond the trees, with its shimmering
levels golden in the sun, yet cool to the eye because of the shadow
in between. At first he spent his time by the leaning wall, talking
to people as they came along, but that was another thing Marget
couldn’t abide. Strangers stared at his violin, and asked questions,
and that vexed her pride. It was like a beggar-man, she said, to be
seen with a fiddle in the street. Folks would be giving him coppers
before so long, and shaming them all and pulling them all down.
Kit held to his talking-ground for a while, but after one dreadful
episode he gave way. Sometimes people asked if the old man were dead,
the old man with the fiddle beside the wall.
He liked the meadow best of all in the dawn, when it took on the look
of parkland wrapped in early mist. Right across, through a break
in the chestnuts, he could see another tree stand up, a tree that,
because of the haze, looked tiny as a toy. The shadow of it, black
when the sun got up, was at first no more than a darker veil of mist
along the sward. There was magic about this little vignette in which
there was only a tree. It was so tiny and grey and tender, so light,
so delicately soft. Yet, small as it was, it suggested infinite
space, stretches of wander-room, pleasaunces without end. There were
no barriers about it that had to be pushed away. You knew that from
under its branches you could see the world.
Even when the sun was up at last, and the tree was strong wood and
the earth firm soil, when the leaves had found colour and the boughs
taken their shape, the little vista kept its promise still. Still it
was growing in enchanted air, amid the far distances of the soul’s
desire.
And then the house around him would come awake. The children would
fight each other in their beds. All through the house would pierce
the edginess of Marget’s morning voice....
He lost his vignette when the chestnuts lost their leaves, and
through the stripped boughs the picture was not the same. But the
chestnuts themselves were enough for him, just then, with their
straight-grown limbs cut black against the sky, and every delicate
filament of twig sparkling and dazzling with the frost. In the
winter, too, he could see the moon through the trees, a flat and
silver face laid to the open spaces as to a pane. Star after star he
saw balancing on a bough.
At the end of the village was the river that he had known only where
it ran out over the sand. It was dear to him, because it went
towards the marsh, but otherwise it was not the river he knew. Out
there it was silver or thin blue, sometimes a dull and hurrying
grey, but always it held the mirror of its face wide open to the
sky. Here it was black, because of the high banks and the old bridge
and the big trees leaning right across. It was a glorious black,
velvet-smooth, with underneath it the colours of weeds and stones and
darting fish, and the reflection of other colours overhead. There
were trees in the water, too, as real as those above; he could not
always tell which was which. They had the same vivid, wide-spreading
green, the same ribbed and splendid trunks. It was like looking down
into a forest from a bird’s wing, only the forest was overhead as
well. It seemed as far to look down as it was to look up. He thought
the mirror-picture the daintier of the two—cleaner, as it were, for
the water washing over its face; like the forests one sees through
the polished glass of a dream. There was only one other difference
that he could see. When the trees above stood perfectly still, the
trees in the water seemed to wave and dance. But it was only the
ripple across the river’s face. Beneath it the painted picture was
still and serene.
He was fond of the bridge, too, and liked to wait for the sun dipping
under its curve, but it was not often that he had a chance of that.
The children were in league with Marget to hunt him down, and could
spy him out in the most unlikely spots. Then they would harry him
back along the street, beating at him with dirty little hands, and
though he felt dreadfully ashamed and hurt, it was better than being
fetched by Marget herself. “Grandpa” added zest to the children’s
lives, gave them a sense of drama, a heady taste of power. Their days
would lack a certain excitement when Marget’s bone was gone.... In
the end he gave up the bridge as he had yielded the wall, because the
pleasure was not worth the risk. The river under the bridge was not
his own river, after all. Safe in his mind he had it where he liked
it best, pale on the brown waste as it swam to sea.
There were other things strange to him in Marget’s house, besides the
absence of room and peace. He found, for instance, that he could not
love the tables and chairs. He could not even love his rickety bed,
which carried him homeward when he slept, and was the stall to his
fairyland through the trees. Certainly he could not love Marget’s
pots, which were never whole or clean, or the kettle which poured
boiled cockroaches from its spout. Nor could he like the propped-up
chests of drawers into which it was never safe to put a hand, for
fear of upright needles or relics of bacon fat. It was not wise to
look too closely at the kitchen sink or into the few battered pans
used by the children in their play. The clock was stuffed with rags
and boots, and had a sinister face which he disliked. The oilcloth on
the stairs was full of holes.
Of course, he did not hate the things just because they were old. The
house on the marsh, as Agnes knew, had been very neglected before
the last. The old things around him were falling to pieces under his
eyes, but they were not being kicked and battered to their end. They
were really old, peacefully grown old, not abused into miserable age
before their time. There were dust and cobwebs and broken furniture
and torn clothes, but the sun or the wind was cleansing the place
every hour. There was no dirt in dark corners or refuse under the
stairs. There were no slimy walls or messes in doubtful pots. In the
old chests of drawers were no mysteries save those that a tidy old
woman’s hands had folded away. The things had been lovable in that
house, because in spirit they were clean. They had lived an honest
life, and they were not dying an obscene death. Always about the
furniture lingered the sweetness of the tree.
Perhaps he might have grown fond of his own chair, but then he
never had a chair of his own. Marget’s chairs were as restless as
herself; you never found them twice in the same place. And age, as
Kit very quickly learned, was last and behind that in that house. If
he happened to show a liking for a seat, he was sure to be ousted by
some elbowing child. Quite soon he learned to wait until the rest
had settled down, and to fit his old bones into anything that was
left. Only Bob, when he was at home, would find his father the most
comfortable chair.
He had no place at the table, either, and he was always served last,
and sometimes Marget seemed to forget him and he had to go without.
Even when she chose to remember, he could not always eat what she had
cooked. That meant that he was hungry most of the time, and because
he was hungry the time was very long.
He had come to the cottage, as Thomas knew, without any bitterness
in his heart. Leaving the farm had meant the end of all things, of
course, but as long as he wasn’t bitter there was room for hope, and
he had always been able to beautify what he touched. Never once, even
in his mind, had he reproached Thomas for condemning him to this.
Thomas would have helped him, had it been possible, he felt sure. The
lads were all good lads, alive or dead, and there had never been
anything wrong between him and them. Marget made a point of telling
him very soon that Thomas could have saved him if he had liked,
but it passed Kit by like a wasp in a gale of wind. She was always
abusing Thomas and Kit’s old friends on the marsh. All the things
that were wrong about him came solely from living on the marsh.
They were a low lot down there, so Marget said, living like savages
all the week, and only at market seeing their fellow-men. They bred
wastrels and do-nowts like himself, cracked on fiddling and the like,
whom other folk had to keep in their last years. And again she would
harp on Thomas and his crime, but she never succeeded in making him
understand. Her talk about the marsh and its folk conveyed nothing
to old Kit. It was like somebody talking of a country they had never
seen.
And such a little kindness would have made him content. He was away
so much in his own mind that he did not need very much from the
folk with whom he lived. And instead of a little kindness he had
had a great deal. Women had thought for his comfort all his life,
children had always run to him before; and it took him a long time to
grasp that things were changed. He had come into the cottage with a
trustful smile, but his smile was one of the things that went first.
He never forgot that first tempest in Marget’s terrible voice, and
the hostile looks of her sly and peering brood. And yet the fact that
he could not love them had grown upon him only by degrees. He had
never lived with poverty coupled with hate, and he could not grasp
its indications for long. But he never learned to love any one of the
crowd, any more than he learned to love the chairs.
Bob was as kind as possible when he was at home, but that was so
seldom that he did not count. Slack in everything else, he had at
least grown smart in keeping out of the way. Even Marget, who knew
the backways of truth as well as anybody on earth, could not always
discover where he lied. So he was not often at hand to come between
his father and his wife, though he stood up for the old man when he
was there. But under the roof where Marget ruled only the strongest
soul could call itself its own. Bob seemed to fade, to be far-off in
the little room with the narrow walls, where Marget towered to the
ceiling and covered the whole floor. Yet she was only a middle-sized
woman, after all, where he was six foot and broad, but a word from
her tongue was like a slap from a clout, the look in her eye was like
the dig of a pin. Her scurrying slippers, flapping at her heels, left
no calm place where her footsteps had not been.
Because there was nothing to love, something had gone out of the
old man after a while. He was polite and gentle, as he had always
been, but now he grew very quiet, as though a finger was laid on
his tongue. He did not always see what was under his nose, and when
he was spoken to he did not always hear. He looked “lost,” Marget
said, and the word was truer than she knew. Of course he had always
“mooned,” as she called it, all his life, but behind the mooning the
vital spark was plain. His mind was off on its travels, but it was
sharply alive, and when it came back it brought with it fire from
Heaven. But now there was no winged spirit behind his eyes. He lived
in his dreams, but they never came down to earth.
Thomas, in one of his rare calls, noticed the difference without
knowing what it meant. “The old man’s not as lish as he was,” he said
to himself, watching his father with a troubled frown. “Likely it’s
just he’s getting up in years.... Going that seldom I’m bound to see
a change....” But years should have meant nothing to Kit, as he was
vaguely aware. At the farm the old man would have remained a happy
child, even to the last minute of his dying bed. Thomas pushed the
worry to the back of his mind, but though he could not define the
difference, he knew the cause. It was Marget who had smothered that
long-lived spirit of youth.
Even with her hand pressing upon it, it had taken months to die. It
had never really flickered out until he had ceased trying to find one
of them to love. He had tried each of them in turn, from the rating,
jibing mother herself to the red-haired baby screaming on the hearth,
and then he had suddenly let them all go. Perhaps it might never have
died at all if Marget had allowed him to play his fiddle from time to
time, but it was the first part of him at which she struck. The sound
of it seemed to send her out of her mind, and even the baby greeted
it with yells. Certainly, its unearthly, quivering note, peculiarly
thin and sweet, made an almost heart-breaking wail in the little
house. He did his best to obey, but it was a long time before he
learned to keep his fingers from the strings. Often he found himself
playing without knowing that he had begun, and awoke to a chorus of
abuse and screams. He would play in the night, too, forgetting that
it was night, and then even the neighbours would start knocking at
the walls. There was always music singing in his mind, so that he did
not always know when the fiddle was singing, too. He used to wonder,
when they made so much to-do, how it was they did not hear the other
music as well. But even the red-haired baby did not seem to hear
that. Anyhow, if it did, it did not scream.
When he found that he could not play in the house, he tried to find
somewhere to play outside—down by the river, for instance, close to
the bridge. He had a rather wonderful time down there until Marget
scented him out. Sitting on a great root at the water’s edge, he
would play to the forest above and the forest beneath, until folk
came along walking through the one, while their reflections walked
through the other, down below. They used to seat themselves on the
tree-trunks near or stand about him in groups, while he played them
varsovianas and schottisches and reels. Of course there were always
children, but others came as well, and sometimes there was quite a
crowd. The music would run to the village across the fields, though
never as far as Marget’s open door. But over the river and up the
park it went as far as it liked, and as far as it liked with the
river down to the sea. On the grass at the river’s edge the sun threw
patches never twice alike, and the listening faces looked paler under
the trees. Kit, in his old clothes, was just a bit of the trunk on
which he leaned, except for the flying movements of his hands. Beside
him was the velvety water, deep black, shot and shivered by gold
patines and leaf-dances and lacy patterns and bright gleams.
Sometimes, when he was tired, he talked to the crowd, telling them of
old dances and melodies and old times. They left the tree-trunks, and
came nearer by degrees, the lads with their hands in their pockets
and the children with fingers in their mouths. He looked round at
their friendly eyes, and thought how nearly all eyes changed when a
fiddle was played. If anybody laughed or jeered at first, he was an
open or a sneaking worshipper before long. Sometimes the women who
lived near brought him a cup of tea and a snack to eat, and nothing
he ever had at Marget’s heartened him half so much. And on especially
blessed days when the tunes went like so much unwound silk, there
came somebody who remembered Fiddlin’ Kit.
It was after one of these days, taking him clean back to happier
times, that he brought a horrible vengeance on himself. One
afternoon, when the children were coming home from school, he went
out to the forbidden footpath under the chestnuts and played.
He forgot all about the cottage just across, and Marget of the
music-hating heart. He forgot that he was only a beggar-man and that
somebody paid his keep. He only remembered that he was Fiddlin’ Kit,
at sight of whom folk had always danced, and the feet of the children
stirred his ancient blood. The young feet, the feet of the coming
generation of dancers, always stirred his blood. From the end of the
village they came skipping down the road, singing a little tune they
had learned in school. Most of them came in twos and threes, linked
together by twining arms, or trailing a little cloak by its hem in
the dust. Some whispered great mysteries in others’ ears. Some held a
little school on the kerb, as if they had not already had enough, and
in the midst of the lesson gathered themselves up and ran. And all
the time, here and there, some of them sang, and the tune that they
sang got into the fiddle and played. Kit, down the long perspective
of the street, saw the white school from which they had come, and the
tune, as it were, coming with them out of the door. He had known the
song long ago, and he never forgot a tune. It was only in nature that
the fiddle should sing, too.
Marget, staring crossly at neglected plants in the ill-treated patch
behind the house, heard both fiddle and voices lilting over the roof.
They climbed the slates and swung off the chimney-tops to drop in
delicate sweetness on her head. She thought of Kit, of course, in
the first breath, but remembered that she had left him nodding in
the house. The red-haired baby, she knew, had had him under its eye.
She glanced suspiciously down the cottage backs, wondering which
harboured this nuisance to the rest. The Martin boy had a fancy for
fiddling, she believed; she had caught him talking to Kit about it
in the road. Then there was that lass of Simpson’s that thought she
played—the one that was going to service before so long. Folks never
seemed to care whether the neighbours liked the noise, though they
were fit to swear if the red-haired baby cried. There was more than
one that she wanted a word with about that, a word flung in like a
bomb at a cottage door. This dratted fiddling might give her her
excuse, so she picked up her vegetables and hurried down.
She thought of Kit again as she flapped along, and again told herself
that it was somebody else. He was safe enough under her thumb, by
now, the silly old man. He had given her a deal of trouble at first,
fiddling in other folks’ houses when he might not fiddle in hers, but
of course she had easily traced him by the sound. Then she had stolen
upon him unawares, breaking the harmonies like so much silvered
glass, and after a time or two he had never done it again. Besides,
this playing came from the street, and if she was sure of anything
she was sure she had cured him of that. It was much more likely to
be some fiddling tramp, who would be knocking for ha’pence at her
door. She slipped as she ran down the steps to give him the best of
her tongue, and the potatoes flew out of her apron left and right.
It took her some minutes to pick them up again, and as she was doing
so the music changed. Now it was playing a dismal little tune, and
little voices began to sing it in breathless little jerks. On the
top of the tune she heard laughter and applause, and then fiddle and
voices went on their way alone. Puzzled, she scrambled up with grubby
hands, bunched the potatoes in her grimy apron and opened the cottage
door.
The old man stood on the footpath under the trees, his ear bent to
the fiddle as he played. His eyes, looking gravely before him at the
scene, were as intent as if the fate of nations hung on his bow. The
street was full of folk as far as she could see, and in the midst
of them the children were playing “London Bridge.” Under the trees
and over the sun-flecked road they moved slowly and solemnly to the
tune, and between the laughing folk on either side their faces looked
serious and sad. There were babies among them, for this is the little
children’s game, and even the babies’ faces were sad. They stood
facing each other in rows across the street, keeping themselves up
by the grasp of their little hands. Sometimes they lost their balance
and fell down, but they were so intent on the game that even as they
bumped their faces never changed. Suddenly Marget discovered some of
her own offspring in the crowd, and that the younger ones were even
taking part. Last of all she saw the red-haired baby among the rest,
clenching determined fists and setting a firm mouth.
“_London Bridge is broken down,
Broken down, broken down.
London Bridge is broken down,
(My fair Ladye!)_
_Build it up with pins and needles,
Pins and needles, pins and needles.
Build it up with pins and needles,
(My fair Ladye!)_
_Pins and needles rust and bend,
Rust and bend, rust and bend.
Pins and needles rust and bend,
(My fair Ladye!)_”