red and white beasts went slowly droning round. The auctioneer’s
voice, with incredible speed, hammered and coaxed and demanded over
his head. There was a ring of backs all around the rope, broad
or narrow, and straight or crippled and bent. There were rich
and poor backs, feeble and strong, shy and aggressive and hopeful
and depressed, and nearly all of them were somehow rather sad.
There was every sort of jacket upon the backs, and every kind of
collar about the necks. The gulf of the generations yawned between
the wideawake and the Trilby hat; shades of degree were marked by
the bowler and the cap. There were faces, of course, as well as
backs, weather-beaten and shut, with unrevealing mouths. The voice
swept over their still indifference like a storm of rain over
empty sands. Only their eyes, weighing as they stared, followed
the animals turning in the ring.... The voice beat at them and
pressed and begged, calling a possible bidder by his name, and
picking up bids without checking in its stride. By a chain of almost
invisible signs the prices shaped themselves and mounted and grew.
Even when competition was keenest, the faces rarely changed, and
always after a spurt of laughter they set in the old lines. But
all the time the backs were speaking aloud, the patient, pressing,
fervently-interested backs. The hours passed, and clouds went over
the sun, and the bored and scornful-eyed cattle turned and turned....
Furniture sales, too, had always been one of his old joys. There was
something dramatic about household goods, torn from their setting
into the uncovered day. Bow-fronted chests of drawers, and china
and candlesticks, and old arm-chairs ... there seemed to be folks
still sitting in those chairs. At least, it was queer how chairs,
like clothes and hats, kept the look of the people who had used them
most. Perhaps it was never quite safe to sit in a chair that hadn’t
always been your own; he had often thought about that when the chairs
went up at the sales. Sometimes, against the leather or the oak, he
was certain he saw a shadowy old form, which even a burying of the
highest class had not been able to carry quite away.
Once he had bought a chest of drawers with a still mahogany face
and rounded knobs of glass. They looked like eight little pools in
a shining wood, and he bought it because it made him think of that.
The drawers pulled in and out on a grain of silk—his missis had tried
them without looking at the knobs—and things that were put away in
them came out again sweet and clean. It was a queer collection that
found home in them at last, but he seemed to remember everything and
its place. There were the clothes that the two of them had worn when
they were wed ... Grandfather’s silk handkerchief and grandmother’s
silk shawl. Funeral cards and a jubilee mug, and corals from over
the sea. An old bow with a cracked back, and an umbrella that was a
present from some squire. Rings of hair, still glossy and bright, too
lovely in colour and texture to have come from any but a baby’s head.
Horn spectacles in a carved box, and old knitting-pins with carved
hafts; and fiddle strings, coil upon coil, that he had never had the
courage to burn.... There were things of his wife’s, too, that he had
put away when she was dead, though he had never succeeded in putting
away the shoes. They gave the lie to her death merely by being about,
and saying contentedly that she would be coming in. Old shoes, he
thought to himself, like hats and chairs, had the secret of keeping
what lovers seemed to lose.
He felt much the same about mirrors as he did about old chairs. Who
knew how much they had kept of what they had seen, or how much of
it they might suddenly reveal? Layer upon layer of pictures must be
sunken in their depths, rosy and white faces, mad eyes and cloudy
hair. The depth of a mirror was the height of the firmament itself;
you had only to turn it up to the sky to notice that. There was room
in it to make hiding-place for countless tragedies of lives. Each
time a blind was drawn it took something from the day, and at night
who knew what it saw beyond the immediate circle of the lamp? Nobody
could look into it without adding something new. A figure, crossing
the room, passed through its magic water and emerged, yet surely left
a ghost of itself behind. Those that looked long enough saw strange
old things, it was said, but who could tell that any saw the truth?
Minds and mirrors together could make magic enough to frighten half a
world. And there were times when most folk, if it came to that, found
even their own faces rather strange. Behind the presentment that they
called themselves, eyes that were dead looked at them through their
own, and smiles that belonged to others came to their lips.
There was a different set of backs at the furniture sales, less
patient and more excitable, though not less keen. Mostly they wore
bead mantles and cloth jackets and fur ruffs, and were topped by
side-away bonnets and hats that wouldn’t let you by. They twitched
and argued a good deal, and let their faces say more than the faces
of other crowds. But they were speaking backs, all the same, under
mantle or jacket or plaid blouse. They, too, told the tale of youth
or age, and the hope that hangs on gold in a stocking foot.
Then, at the dances, there had been other backs again. The faces
went by him under the lamps, but each was turned away from him
towards another face. They swam in his gaze like faces drifting in a
stream, and became one face of earnest, glowing youth. It was only
the backs he remembered when all was done, the necks and the shining
hair of the lasses, and the broad, strong shoulders of the lads.
Weddings and clippings, of course, meant crowds as well; hot-pot
suppers and Primrose gatherings ... whist-drives ... annual fairs.
Election crowds, when folk gathered in the streets, and broke one
another’s heads or other people’s glass. Church, where folks knelt
in long, straight shafts of sun, or looked through the cool windows
and thought of the waiting hay. Then there were buryings, buryings
without end, at which he had walked in crowds with uncovered head
or lent a shoulder to the coffins of innumerable squires. Some day,
sooner or later, everybody walked in that particular crowd.... And
once he had even seen a London crowd, but that was very long ago. A
lawsuit over some foreshore rights was making a stir, and Kit had
been called as a witness in the case. The crowd up there was past all
knowledge and sense, and nobody knew each other or jerked a head. A
policeman found him at a pavement edge, waiting, he said, for people
to “get by.”
The last crowd of all had been Marget’s cottage crowd, where there
had been no room for him and little breath, but now he was coming
back from it as he had come from all the rest, from press and
clamour and hurry into unpeopled peace. He had escaped on to the
edge of the sand, where always the hunted stag turns to safety and
the sea. Now he could look along the flat which rested the eye, and
breathe the far-travelled air which only the west wind had breathed
before. There were evening and sun and shadows, and fields, and
deep-rooted mountains, and slow beasts. There was a breeze stirring
the shore-grasses that in all their lives never know what it is to be
really still, and on the top of the bank others quivered and bent,
and straightened and bent and quivered again. Bending, they looked
like delicate strokes of a slanting pen, slashed on the golden page
of the open west. The railway arches over the sand looked like great
black doors shut between him and the coloured park that lay behind.
Only the one through which they had come stood open wide, showing
the ribbon of road laid flatly through. Beyond, where it fled away
from the open marsh, it coiled into shadow by wall and stooping tree.
When night came, that door, too, would close, so that Marget, however
she tried, could never pass. He would remember that when he went
upstairs to bed, and sleep steadily unafraid in the house at the
sand’s edge. If the moon chose to look in, he would not care for the
moon. It would have none of the terror of Marget’s peering eye, that
had sometimes awakened him as he lay and dreamed.
Yes, he was coming back as he had come before, and not even in dreams
would he come like this again. Into this last, long, beautiful
journey he had gathered his life, and men—old men—were not allowed
to do that twice. Now in the house on the edge of the sands he would
stay quietly until he died. Thomas and Agnes would want to take him
out—to market and church and Milthrop Cattle Fair, but however they
urged he did not mean to go. He had the fairs and the rest of them in
his mind, and did not need to go looking for them afield. Besides,
if he went, he would only find them strange, a confusion of strange
faces and still stranger backs. Thomas and Agnes would fret and think
he was getting moped, but after a bit they would let him have his
way. He would watch them trundle away and wave his stick, and they
would stop and call to know if he had changed his mind. But he would
never change his mind or leave his recovered inheritance for an hour.
Somewhere there was a point where the mind never changed again, but
stayed as still as the earth in a new-dropped wind. And the point
where he would stay in that poised stillness would surely be the home
of all his dreams.
They would go, and he would see to the house, and when there were
barns to see to, he would see to the barns as well. He had always
been a rare hand at keeping them happy and good, and if he had failed
with Marget’s brood, that had been only an accident by the way.
Marget’s children, after the first, had seldom been children to his
mind. They had been enemies, torturers, mockers, and trained spies.
Only once, in the Little Game, had they ever been part of the company
he loved, and very soon afterwards he had cast them out. But no child
born on the marsh would ever be such as they; the house would prevent
it—the peaceful, noble house. They would be friends all right, he
and those real children bred to the sound of the sea. Thomas and
Agnes could trust them to him all right. All day he and the fiddle
would hear their feet, pattering after them on the garden path, and
climbing laboriously up the uncarpeted stair. All day the little
shrill voices would follow the curlews out to sea, and at night the
house would be filled with the hush of a house where children sleep.
And on that last early morning, when he came to die, he would hear a
little child waking close at hand....
No, he would never be lonely again in all his life, or dull and moped
because he was left behind. There were so many things waiting for him
to find them again that he would need another life to seek them all.
Every inch of the land and stone of the house would have something to
say to him when he got back. How many places he had loved would pull
at his heart until he had looked on them with his bodily eyes? There
were hedges, twists of the road, lights over hill and bay—things that
in all his life had not failed in enchantment yet. No other magic
ever held but that; no other spell grew stronger with the years.
Nature kept hold of her worshippers until they died. With a branch
of cherry or a robin’s song, the smell of hay or the fall of June
shadows pretending to be night, she could bring them back their youth
to the very last. This, out of all the treasures in the world, was
the only one that was golden to the end.
Perhaps he would never do half of what he wished, in the little
breath of time that he had left. Perhaps he would find his legs too
weak to carry him very far. They had grown cramped and shaky in
Marget’s prison-house. Perhaps his eyes, when wanted, would drop
their lids and sleep. They had slept so little at Marget’s that they
were tired.
Yet somehow he must gather his treasure again, if only between the
limits of a year. He must wait for the hoar-frost over the fields
and the yellow of winter sun through a black-limbed beech. There
were growing things, too, that he must see again—daffodils, foals,
and the plums on the south wall. The purple of Michaelmas daisies in
a mist, light on a yacht’s sails and the mysterious glimmer of hard
ice. Sea-mist that was the ghost of the sea, with the blue-topped
mountains rocks in a snowy surf; primrose evening over the sands and
the islands of desire. The smell of things, too—warm hay, wet earth,
and salt, lilac, syringa, the chill smell of coming snow. The feel of
things—turf and sand ... and, rough to the elbows, the stone of the
garden wall. The sound of things—bees in the wallflower; plover and
gull; the lone owl wheeling round the barn; the roar of the river in
flood and the swish of a little tide; the trains in the night where
they hung above the sea. And always there were the sounds about the
house—the separate voices of door and window and stair, of furniture
that never speaks until it is night, of winds in the house that go
not in or out, but sleep in dark corners until they stir again....
Perhaps the losing of well-known sounds was the loneliest loss of
all, and none so lonely and blank as the loss of a well-known step.
Then there were other sounds, as familiar as a voice, that yet in
years and years were never traced....
There were doors he wanted to open again, suddenly and alone, and,
standing on the threshold, feel all that the empty room contained.
That sudden opening of a door was one of the beautiful happenings of
life. Even outside you heard the memories speak, creeping through
chinks and slipping along the floor. Outside, they seemed to catch
you by the throat; but, once the knob was turned, they kissed your
cheek. Folks such as he could go blindfold to their homes, and
know where they were as soon as they stepped inside. They knew by
the feel and smell and sound of things, and by a warm, familiar
presence in the air. That was really why he was going home—to open
the doors again, and stand, and feel. Afterwards he would go round
and handle things ... absorbing them tranquilly, drawing the place
in. Satisfied—that was the word he wanted for it all; satisfied,
fulfilled ... at rest ... _come back_....
It was surely this great content that helped men to die when it
came to the last. After all, it only meant going a little closer to
one’s earth. No one need mind if he wasn’t carried away and laid in
some foreign spot he had never seen. It wouldn’t seem right to see
strange names round you when you awoke, and strange folk rising up
at the sound of the Trump. Why, there were some he knew who would be
so put about, they would likely never stir their coffin-lids! They’d
stick in their graves and say they hadn’t heard, before they’d go
cheek-by-jowl with off-comers to the Throne.
Would there be folk in Heaven as set on a spot as so many of them
were on earth? There were plenty who wouldn’t know how to put on time
without their own little village and its feuds. As for those who
had really loved a place, they couldn’t do anything but break their
hearts. There were folks you could never mix—not even in Heaven;
folks from places that fought like biting steggs. You couldn’t just
set them alongside in their crowns, and take it for granted things
would come out right....
They wouldn’t get far with their singing, anyhow, he thought, because
you couldn’t make real music with people who didn’t suit. He had
joined a choral society when he was young, but left it because he
could only sing with those he liked. If somebody sat beside him who
wasn’t a friend, he hated to hear their voices mingle and touch. The
other man’s voice was an enemy slaying his own, and instead of song
there was murder in his heart. Song was a personal revelation that
only a friend should hear, and if you sang with an enemy you gave
yourself away. He had had the same trouble at the dances, too, with
a concertina played by Darby Gill. The concertina itself was a real
joy, because of its big chords and its depth and swing. It gave an
actual physical push to the crowd, so that you could see the couples
swaying as it swayed, but he never played his best when it was there,
because he and the fiddle hated Darby Gill. He hoped he wouldn’t have
Darby next to him in Heaven. Anyhow, if he had, he would never touch
a string....
“Tide’ll be turning soon,” Bob said, and though Kit had forgotten
him long since, he did not start, because the sea is always at the
back of the marsh-dweller’s mind. Even the village-folk had known the
tides by wind and sky, though some of them never went down to the bay
in years. Kit and his son, of course, knew them as they knew their
meals. They could have told you, every day, what time the returning
water drew itself from the deep....
It came to him suddenly that for two years he had never seen the
sea, not even heard it except through the sound-carriers of the
wind. The thought of it set his heart leaping, and to his shame
and astonishment he found that he was afraid. He seemed to himself
to be quite defenceless on the open road, with only the bank to
stop what was coming out of the west. His terror degraded him in
his own eyes, and he was as afraid of the fear as of the object of
the fear. Perhaps it was because he was old that he was afraid, or
because he had missed the daily miracle for so long. At all events,
he trembled and gazed, and felt his hands turn cold, and longed to
be at the farm. It was amazing that folk who knew what the sea could
do should drive so slowly in the line of the dormant tide. If there
had been any sign of the tide he would have clutched at the reins,
and frightened Bob to death by shouting at the horse. He looked at
the land and wondered why panic wasn’t abroad, and why the stock,
with its sure sense of coming ill, didn’t stare and cower. Once that
far, smooth water had lifted and turned, there seemed no reason why
it should ever stop. He knew only too well, of course, that it did
not always stop. He himself had seen it under an angry moon, lift and
lift into a huge and white-topped wall, and sweep the marsh into a
tumbling sea....
“We’d best be getting on,” he said in a sharp tone, and Bob heard the
fear in his voice, and glanced at him in surprise. The old man must
be getting tired, he thought; he had seemed so quiet and contented at
the start. He did his best to encourage the slow horse, but they only
jolted a little more, and seemed no nearer to the farm. Presently he
spoke again, as if he had come to some slow conclusion of his own.
“Tide’s low, just now,” he said, as if to himself, and at once felt
his father relax and settle back. “You’ll hear next to nowt on it
to-night. I reckon it’ll gang nigh as soon as it comes....”
The old man gave him no answer to his careful speech; only he sighed
suddenly and then sat still. He told himself that he might have known
as well as Bob, if he hadn’t frightened himself out of his daft wits.
He looked at the west and knew that no tide could come out of it to
his hurt—out of that fragrant stillness and that golden air. And yet,
in spite of his fear, he wanted to see a tide before he died—one of
those splendid surges rollicking up the bay. Each roller seemed to
travel faster than the one in front, and over-rode it in a shower of
spray. The salt in the air was so sharp that it stung the eyes, and
the life in it blew the spirit out of its shell; but he wasn’t strong
enough to face that yet. There was a summer tide that he wanted to
see, too, a full, blue tide with a ripple all over its face, breaking
in long, crisp waves along the sand. This tide was the most human
tide of all, a live, beautiful thing that you could almost clasp....
The waves, where they broke on the sand, were like slender bars of
amethyst crested with snow.... But the tide that was coming out of
that quiet west would never break; it would barely even lip at sand
or wall. Hardly the wisest would know the moment when the deep sea
sent it out. There would be no bull-roar to herald its approach,
topped by the vicious hissing-note of surf. It would not even whisper
when it rounded the point, and scarcely a line would come on the sand
to show that it was there. A sleeping water, shallow and very smooth,
it would steal and spread like the shadow of a cloud. Without fear
and without hurry it would come, like the light that spreads before
the sun has topped the hill. If the moon came up, there would be a
golden glass where there had just been sand; but if there was no
moon, only the river would know about the tide.
“Tide’s low,” Bob said, and the peace of the evening came back.
But, beautiful as the journey had been, he was beginning to wish that
it would come to an end. That sudden shock seemed to have drained
his strength and left him afraid of the fear within a fear. He would
have nothing to say to the house if he was tired, and no number of
perfect after-days could make up for the wonder of that first glad
hour. He might even miss the first sight of it, perhaps, if his eyes
should remember that they were really old. His brain might be numb or
vacant at the first crossing of the door. It might be only a tired
old man that would stagger in, thinking of nothing but supper and
then bed....
He tried to rest his eyes by shutting them for a while, but found
that he suffered more from the jolting of the trap. Every jerk of
the horse seemed to startle his heart and hurt his bones, as well as
stirring again the thought of that sleeping fear. And yet, as soon as
he opened his eyes, his mind was off once more. Even the grass could
not grow, nor the road wind, without setting his memories running out
of the past.