Part 11

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....

Sometimes it was another ring that he saw in a green field, where 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.