he had done before. “I’d not change to the marsh if I was dead and
riz!” he said. “I’d not change to the farm if Squire offered me the
Hall. And I’d be Kit Sill and for evermore Kit Sill, if I was coming
from Heaven an’ nobbut from next door!”
Bob said drearily that likely his father knew his own business best.
His own belief in the ultimate rightness of things had long since
gone by the board, and he found it strange that Kit’s should be
lingering still. The artist’s faith that yet all things shall be well
had flamed for only a period in Bob. Marget had soon set herself to
work to trample it out. Yet here was old Kit still brandishing the
torch. But then Kit had only suffered for the space of a couple of
years.
In spite of his admission, however, he seemed unable to let the
subject drop. It was almost as if Marget must be whispering into his
ear. “You’ll think on Marget said you could come back?” he wandered
on. “She’s likely taken to you a deal better than I thought. If
happen you don’t feel like settling at the farm, you’ve nobbut to say
the word and come back.”
“I’ll settle, thank ye,” Kit said. “I will that.” Bob ought to have
known, he thought, that it was simply a waste of time to talk like
that. Marget was an outsider, of course, but Bob had once belonged.
“Don’t fret yourself,” he said. “I’ll settle all right. I’ll bide.”
“Farm’s that smart it don’t know itself,” Bob said, “what wi’ new
paint and paper and furniture as good as Squire’s. What, there’s a
rug afore t’kitchen fire as’d likely make a carpet at our spot, I’m
sure! There’s curtains to all the winders—some on ’em real lace; and
parlour’s over grand to set in by a deal. They’ve been to a sight o’
pains fixing your old room an’ all. You’d think as the King hisself
was coming to stop on the marsh.”
Kit listened to him, but only with half an ear, wondering why Bob
should suddenly have so much to say. He knew nothing about the house
of which Bob spoke, and didn’t want to know anything, if it came to
that. The house he was going to see to-day was quite a different
spot. It was empty and shabby and rather short of brass, but it was
full of the soft tones that make for peace. There was no colour in
it that the sun had never kissed, or wood that the years had not
mellowed in its place. The worn surfaces knew his hand, and the
uneven flooring had never troubled his feet. What, there was a sunk
flag at the kitchen door that had never tripped his toe in fifty
years!...
“Thomas mun ha’ done well for himself,” Bob was drawling at his side.
“He mun ha’ laid by a deal more than we ever thought. I reckon he
could ha’ taken the farm all right yon time as they went and turned
you out. But they said the lass wasn’t for wedding him just then,
and he was feared he’d loss her if he come away. She should think
shame of herself, she should, for putting us all about.”
“Nay, nay,” Kit put in, “she did right to take her time. It’s an
easy enough business getting wed, but none so easy to bear wi’ when
it’s done. And she’s a good lass, they say, for all she give him
sneck-posset at the start. She’ll do well for me, Thomas said; she’ll
see to me like her own. I reckon I waint come off so badly, after
all.”
Bob thought gloomily of the bearing with things which he had brought
upon himself, and of the wife that was neither a good lass nor kind,
but at the same time some remnant of feeling ranged him on Marget’s
side. He, too, couldn’t help feeling sore because the old man was
going away. He was not jealous as she was jealous, because her bone
was being touched, but it hurt him that others should do for his
father what he wanted to do himself. It was his place to be at the
farm and to give his father a home, and, Marget apart, it would have
been his pleasure as well. But both duty and pleasure were in this
case out of reach, and it was his younger brother who had the right,
as well as the place and the brass and the luck of a kindly wife. The
last humiliation was that he should be here, driving the old man to
the home that he preferred. Thomas had offered to fetch his father
himself, but Bob’s pride had suddenly flickered, and he had refused.
Now, however, he cursed himself for not letting Thomas have his way,
because it seemed that he came with his failure in his hand—with
a tacit admission that he had nothing to give. He wondered if Kit
thought of it like that, and felt the slow blood rise and burn his
cheek.
He tried to comfort himself with the thought that things would be
easier at home, now that the burden and bugbear had gone away. Of
course, they would miss the money to some extent, but there would be
one mouth less to feed, as well as more room in the kitchen and less
friction—perhaps—at meals. Marget would have no more tales to tell
him at night of the bother his father had given her in the day. He
would not have to lie in the dark and listen to his crimes—how he had
torn his jacket or got lost, or sniffed at his pudding or broken a
chair. He would not hear her beating the old man with her tongue, in
default of the blows that she dealt her weaker prey. And at least he
would be free of the dread that tragedy might be the end—some sudden
violence, perhaps, or the river under the trees. He could sleep now
without hearing the old man’s cough; it would be somebody else’s
job to see to that. He could go to work unhaunted by the old man’s
boots, gaping and sagging and leaking in the wet. Thomas would see
to the boots and Agnes to the cough, and to other little things like
socks and shirts. Kit would be housed and fed as he had not been for
years, and he could play his fiddle again on his old marsh. Bob knew
what that special deprivation must have meant; he was true enough
son of Kit to guess at that. Things seemed to be looking up for them
all round, and he knew he ought to be glad if he couldn’t be proud.
At least the burden was off the failure’s back, which had more than
enough to carry, as it was. But all that he really felt was jealous
shame, and a hope that Thomas, too, might somehow fail.
He need not have been afraid, however, that Kit was despising him in
his heart. He had forgotten him completely as he drove, as well as
the ghost of Marget at his back. If he thought of him at all, it was
as a boy, trudging to school or running about the marsh. Sometimes,
indeed, he went back so far that Bob had not even begun to exist.
Perhaps he lingered longest at that stage, because the mind is coming
full circle at the last. Youth must inherit heaven as well as the
earth, because most of us are made young again at the end. Bob’s
words came out of a mist that covered the immediate past, like the
gulls he had often heard crying over a foggy sea. He slipped right
away from it through the years, as the swifts dipped and dropped
about the steeple under the hill. But no matter where he was, the
things around him were always good. The steady sun warmed him and the
air was cool in his throat. His eyes rested themselves on hedge and
dyke, and line upon long line of sand; but all the time he saw as
much with his heart as with his eyes.
All the days that had found him on that road were present with him
to-night;—golden days, such as this, and the quiet, grey days that
seemed scarcely to draw a breath from dawn to dusk. On those days the
whole world was grey, not as if hidden by a veil, but grey-washed by
a broad yet feathery brush. Wet days, many and long, when the rain
blowing in from the sea was as level as the sun; mornings, fiercely
cold, with the north wind dropping straight from the high snows;
evenings, drenched with mist and haunted by pale sheaves, peering
over the road at the lapping tide. Moons world without end he had
seen stand over the marsh, the first moon of the year, light and thin
as the edge of a tossed coin, to the great harvest moon that was not
like an English moon at all. There was something in the nature of
Divine revelation about the moon that came with the sheaves, a touch
of the mystical meaning that shone so plain from the Bethlehem Star.
It was not only that it was so big and bright, as if it had really
eaten all the rest. It had a tremendous personality of its own, a
calm force that could be felt. You were never alone on the marsh
while a moon walked with you there; but when the harvest moon rose
up, it was like a majestic stranger in a room.
Days of storm, when he had to fight his way at his horse’s head; and
whirling snow-days, with the ditches level with the road. Summer,
when the tall grasses almost hid the dykes, and the tall hedges all
but hid the fields. Spring, with a wail beside that of the curlew in
the air, and lambs like new flowers all over the coloured carpet by
the sea.
Nights, too, that would never in any world come back to him again ...
and dawns when, returning from some dance, he had run from the sun
that was hunting him over the hill. Out to sea all was still dark,
and the road before him unsubstantial as a cloud. There might be sea
to each side of him for all he knew, for land that has once belonged
to the sea has always the feeling of sea-ground in the night. The
music he had made was still in his brain, making itself again to the
horse’s hoofs and the beat of a hidden train along the coast. The
fiddle inside his coat was thrilling and singing like his brain. Not
for long after they reached home would either of them be still.
And then, over the chain that cuts England in two, bursting out
over the top like a man who rushes the last few feet of a climb,
the sun took the marsh and the Lake mountains in its stride. Out
of the blotted dusk soft, nebulous shapes arose. Faint colour came
into the grass, faint silver into a stream. Life flowed into the
faintly-living earth, and grew fuller and faster as it moved. He saw
the cattle stand up, and the sheep come away from the hedges that
were full of the questioning twitter of the birds. The larks went up
from the still-shadowy fields, racing the sun for the earliest word
with God. There was a gleam of marsh-marigolds in the dykes, though
still unburnished and dim. In all the waking world he and his horse
alone were sinking into sleep, and though the river was still sombre
when he reached its banks, it was drawing in light each moment from
the sky. The farm, when he saw it at last, seemed painted for him
against the tide, with the yew a black finger against a whitened
wall. All the air about it was still and sunshot and transparent and
pure. Suddenly he saw a hand open a window upstairs, and knew that
his wife had heard him on the road.
Often enough, if the night was very wild, he found her waiting
for him at the gate of the yard. The tide would be thundering and
swirling behind the bank, swaying and swishing as if pent in a great,
shaken pot. The waves tearing across the bay were swifter than any
boat, and the shock of them striking the bank was like the shock of
rolled logs against the gates of the earth. In the black dark that
was full of a million spouts the showers of spray shot up to meet the
rain. It was hard to tell where the tide really stopped, even with
that frustrated roar at the sea-wall. Any step, so it seemed, might
find them the black flood at their very feet. They had known it steal
its way into the garden before now; into the yard, and, once only,
into the house. In that upstairs room where his dream always came to
an end, they had sat and listened to the water surging below. They
could hear the furniture bumping like anchored boats, and the water
slapping and gurgling at the stair. They had scarcely said a word to
each other all the time, because of the wind that was howling round
the house. There might have been only one building in the world, and
the wind sworn to tear it down. All they could do was to sit and wait
and wonder when the gale would allow the tide to turn. They were
not really afraid of the raving and threshing of the sea, scarcely
more than a man is afraid of the bark of his own dog. They barely
troubled themselves to guess where the rising water might end. They
did not picture the room grown black with the drowned light, and
filled like a vault until the ceiling was reached....
This was the Great Storm, but there were many lesser ones, when,
gripping each other while he clung to the horse, they groped to the
stable by the lantern swung on her arm. The gulls would be screaming
in clouds above their heads, but the dark and the wind hid their
wild swinging and their cries. Only when the late dawn began and the
bigger water drew back, they would see them sweeping and plunging
about the house, filling the garden with curving shadows and faint
gleams of feathered white....
They did not meet a soul as they jogged along; none at least, that
Bob was able to see. At intervals, somebody hailed them from a field,
and the voice, after reaching them, travelled out on the sand. Hard,
brown hands went up over eyes that saw the trap all black against the
gold. Everybody on the marsh knew that Kit was coming home, and most
would have liked a look at him and a word. If all tales were true,
he must be as glad as a crowned king, and they would have liked to
tell him they were glad as well. Besides, the folks at home would be
sure to ask how he was, and whether he looked half-clemmed, as it was
said. Ay, and if he was getting daft, as Marget had put about, and
whether the same old fiddle was fiddling still. But the trap went on,
and the questions remained unsolved. Only Bob’s dull voice came back
to them over the marsh.
The old man did not hear the hails, because he was busy listening to
other talk. Now he was nodding his head at all manner of folk, and
stretching down his hand for a hearty shake. Sometimes he checked
the trap with a tug at the rein, and kept Bob waiting while he had a
crack with this body and then with that. Bob thought he was taking a
look round, and let the old man sit as long as he liked, but Kit was
doing a great deal more than look. He was puzzled to find so many
folk out and about on the marsh at the same time, but he was more
than pleased to set eyes on them again. Every single one of them
wanted a crack with the old man who was so terribly busy going home,
and his own tongue was as lish as most, for the matter of that—so
lish that it wouldn’t rest quiet in his mouth. It had been stiff and
frozen for many a long month, but now it was getting away like a
beck in spate. He seemed to himself to be talking very loud, and to
laugh a great deal, and to hear the other folks talking like a lot
of crows. It was surely a rare stroke of luck that so many should be
about just when old Fiddlin’ Kit was busy coming home! He found it as
stimulating as any dance, with figures whirling over a crowded floor.
The fiddle was quivering under his coat, as it always did at once if
he raised his voice. He would have taken it out and played the folk
a tune, but he was never finished with all he wanted to say. Bob was
forgotten completely, but he did not mind, because he saw and heard
nobody but the peewit and the gull.
Now here was Jardine, the hound-man from the Hall, who had only one
hand and made shift for another with an iron hook. He had shot off
his own hand when he was a lad, but he had gone on using a gun as
well as before. There were hounds waiting behind him as he paused in
the road, low hounds with bowed legs and fine heads, drooping ears
and asking, human eyes. Long ago Jardine had got blood-poisoning
feeding the pack, but Kit had quite forgotten that he was dead. There
could be no real death on the night of his coming home—certainly
not such a dreadful death as that. Besides, it was easy to see the
man was there alive, gaitered and grey-whiskered and thin-faced and
light-eyed. And of course there were the asking dogs at his heel;
the dogs were witness enough that he was alive. Yet old Forward
was dead, and Rosebud, and King’s Own.... They had been dead for
years, and if they hunted still it was only at nights.... There were
other dogs, too, with Jardine and the pack; a pointer, for instance,
somewhere in the crowd. Kit was quite pleased to see the brown and
white sporting dog which nobody fancied now. Suddenly, with a thrill,
he noticed a sheep-dog of his own, with a snowy patch like a star on
its black chest. It did not seem to know he was in the trap, and none
of the dogs paid any attention to the horse. There was a bobtail,
too, full of happy smiles, and a slim little toy that had saved the
Hall in a fire. Jardine had a gun on his left shoulder and a couple
of rabbits hanging from his hook, and it did not seem strange in the
least that he should have gone out shooting with that doggy train. He
slung the rabbits into the trap by way of a welcome to old Kit, and
the fiddler thanked him and nodded as he drove away. It pleased him
that he should have something of the sort to carry home, and though
he could not see the rabbits at his feet, he felt the weight of their
bodies on his boots.
He had another long talk with Martin Hinde, who had a pedigree
shorthorn herd at Withergill. Kit had muddled his stock as he had
muddled everything else, but he loved the romance of a big shorthorn
success. He had loved the stock, too, when it stayed in his mind, and
could stand entranced round a cattle-ring as long as most. It seemed
to him, after a while, that he got down into the road, and argued
with Martin about a cow just over the fence, while the cow cropped
on stolidly without ever raising her head. They talked of Royals
and Royal Lancashires and of local winners at the great shows; of
breeders and auctioneers, and great sires whose pedigrees they knew
better than their own. They commented on the passing of the ancient
hour-glass at sales, and began to grow heated and loud-voiced over
dual purpose and Scotch blood. They even fought the old Booth and
Bates battle over again, roaring and waving sticks and dragging in
_Bracelets_ and _Duchesses_ by the hair. Kit fancied that he could
see the shadowy majesties of the herd, looming along the road at
Martin’s back. Even as shadows they gave an impression of weight, of
solid strength in their huge bodies and great, scornful heads, that
would have been noble but for the sullen, brooding eyes. But all that
Bob saw was empty marsh and sand, and an old man sitting vacantly in
a trap, with the last of a buttered scone in his still hand.
They overtook Mrs. Holliday as they went, trudging home with a
basket on her arm. Kit suggested that they should stop and pick her
up, and Bob checked and looked round, and said stolidly that he
didn’t rightly know what his father meant. Kit, however, gave Mrs.
Holliday a wink, and pointed slyly to the empty seat; and he was sure
he felt her weight when the trap moved on, though he was careful not
to speak or look behind....
He had so seldom ridden in a trap that had an empty seat that it
made him ashamed to pass anybody in the road. He had never been
proud about taking lifts himself, and nobody had been proud about
taking them from him. He had been one of those folk who go packed
like herring to market or fair, with somebody sitting on the nearside
splashboard and the driver cosily wedged against the rail. Even if he
started from home with only a passenger or two, he would be sure to
collect others before he had gone far. Sometimes one of the squires
had clambered into the trap and held the fiddle while Christopher
held the reins. Somebody always held the fiddle when the squash was
great, and the sensitive thing was happy in their hands, because,
rough or smooth, they held it like fine glass. But the lasses held it
like the lace of a bridal veil, because of the secret things it had
danced into their hearts. Down in the road again they would beckon
Kit to stoop, and beg for a certain tune at a certain dance—“Dally
an’ dree,” perhaps, come Saturday night, or “Ask and I’ll tell you,
my lad,” at Huddleston clip. He always promised without a smile, and
he never once forgot. Always he kept the tune for the lass, however
he was begged, until the lad he was sure she wanted led her out.
Fiddles, he thought to himself, as he drove, had been more loved
than anything else in the world. There were folks who loved precious
stones and sold their souls for them and gave their lives, but surely
that was a form of daftness and not love. And some loved books and
held them gently in their hands—he had seen a parson or two do that
and one of the squires. But most of the books died very soon, and if
they lived they were like folks of a great age, telling you plainly
to leave them alone with the past. Those that came again came always
in a different dress, and even the words inside were not always the
same. And some loved ships and horses and gave them their whole
hearts, but neither a ship nor a horse lived for so very long. The
ship went down in a storm, or grew rotten and gave at her seams, and
no loved animal ever came to a man twice. But fiddles went on for
ever and ever, and generally somebody loved them all the time. It
was the right sort of love, too, because nobody could love them in
any other way—the sort that touches a loved thing lightly, and yet
thrills to it all through. It was true that sometimes they got to
the wrong homes, but you did not find them in terrible houses like
Marget’s, as a rule. And it was true that most folk didn’t know how
to use them, and that most folk didn’t care, but it could only be
just a few who wanted to do them harm. Marget’s vehement hatred had
had something abnormal at its back which had hurt him infinitely
more than any insult to himself. He had never thought of the fiddle
before except as an object of tenderness and pride; never once, in
all his days, had he even seen it despised by a look. Why, the lasses
had sometimes sent it a present for itself, and more than once he
had found a flower thrust lightly under the strings. It was as much
for the fiddle’s sake as for his own that he was going home, because
there it would be safe and could sing again on the marsh. He told
everybody he met how glad the fiddle was to be going home, and they
laughed and nodded and said they were delighted, too. Many a time,
they told him, they had missed it when it was gone. Many a time, too,
they had heard it down the wind.
He checked the trap so often that Bob protested at last, and said it
was time they were getting to the farm, so after that he contented
himself with a wave and a tremulous hail. He knew his friends by
their walk long before they came up, and long before he overtook them
by the look of their backs. Men of his particular class saw so many
backs—at shows and sales, at market and at work on the land. It was
always the backs which told anything at all; the faces were careful
not to say too much. Very soon they took on that shut and silent
look, as of men who had ceased to ask loud questions of life. It was
their backs that betrayed them when they were getting done, or hinted
subtly how their banking-accounts stood.
He always thought of backs when he thought of a crowd, and in
thinking of people he generally thought of crowds. His life, like
the lives of most on lonely farms, was divided between crowds and
days spent more or less alone. The gossip that kept Marget so busy
in the street did not belong to any method of living that he knew.
The daily contact with the village and the village thoughts blurred
his image of life and obsessed his mind. Here there was no sharp
cleft between lonely and full hours, between spaces of silence and
the bargaining of the mart. Even collective work, such as harvest
or hay, meant little more than just occasional speech. It was not
association as Marget knew it, all garrulous mouths and empty, idle
hands. And the crowds that he knew were real crowds, not two or three
cronies hatless in the street. Many a time he had thought himself
back in a crowd, sitting at Marget’s in that upstairs room. Sometimes
it was a wrestling-ring he saw, with Bob as conqueror in every round.
There he saw again the swinging hype, the showy cross-buttock and
the neat back-heel, and shouted with pride when Bob felled his man,
and laughed aloud alone in his upstairs room. Marget had once burst
in to ask him why he laughed, but he had only stared at her vacantly
without reply. It was no use telling her that he was in a crowd, and
that if the crowd saw fit to laugh he must laugh as well.... It was
good to feel the press of the people all about, and the sun that was
so pleasant on the green. The champion’s belt that Bob always wore
sent out a flash from each of its silver plates....