Part 12

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.

It was strange that he should have the fear of the sea so strong on him to-night, when all around him was calm and evening gold. He had never been afraid of the sea when he had it under his feet. Once he had gone to play at a dance across the sands, and had sailed home again at break of day. He had come away from the hot room with the dancing still in his brain, and gone down to the forsaken, dream-like shore. It was black under the chestnuts roofing the narrow path, but a grey light stood over the tide that seemed to grow upward from the sea. The water broke crisply and coolly at his feet as he stumbled over the beach and came to the sand. Near to him, like a figure flung on a cloud, a man was holding a vague and ghostly boat, and out on the dim tide where it merged into the air, a shadowy ship pulled at a shadowy rope. She, too, was the merest phantasm of herself, with her spidery cords and nebulous mast and spars. It was impossible to believe that she could support the pressure of a foot, so that the life and lift in her as he scrambled aboard came with a shock of exquisite surprise. His body and brain felt heavy as lead against the lightness of her build, and yet the effect of his weight was merely an increased impression of her buoyant strength. His mind, that was still full of whirling sounds, swayed to the water-floor on which she rode. From the elastic spring of her under his feet, it seemed as if she must leap into the air as soon as she was released. Turned as she was on her anchor to meet the tide, she swung on her heel the moment she felt the sail, and was off like a racer before the flag is down. The boat dropped from them and became a blur, and the line of shore was blurred, and the climbing town. The few dim lights that burned were still to be seen after the shapes of the houses had been painted out, showing mistily yellow above the sea, like lamps in the long slits of a castle wall. Then they, too, went as if suddenly blown out, and only the cap of pine that crowned the hill spoke to the presence of earth against the sky. Kit was a crouched shadow in the boat, staring ahead of him for a sight of the marsh, but the great, grey wing of the sail seemed spread across the world. The wind was behind them and they fled hushed, as shadows of clouds move silently on the sea. The motion was easing as sleep, and healing as still prayer. He thought of the dancing figures in the town which had seemed so beautiful to him while he watched, yet were earthy and clumsy and slow compared with this. Even the music—even the fiddle itself—seemed noisy beside that delicate wash at the keel. This was the peace of the sea of which men spoke, this great and painless detachment from things of the earth. In the wide spaces how easily God was found! On the water, as in the mountains and on the Hill of Light, it was good for men to be there. Sometimes he slept for a few moments, and awakened again and slept, but the man at the tiller neither moved nor slept. He was like a statue set in the low stern, with the straight shadow of the helm stretching between them like a bar. His eyes were lifted a little towards the sail, and the slack of the sheet lay in his quiet hand. Each time that Kit awoke the grey had changed, because of the light over the hills that as yet he could not see. The light came into it as out of an emptied cup, like a white wine teemed in a sombre, misted pool. Slowly, as the land came back to the sea, he could see the lake mountains piled into the sky, all turned to wait for the coming light from the east, but even before he could trace them he was sure they turned. It was strange to look into the blackness where he knew them to be, and think of the dark shapes waiting in a crowd. So huge they were, and solid and old, homes alike for the short-living and the long dead. Perhaps they saw, whom others, through the mist of morning, could not see. It was like being watched by giants with many eyes.

But he was altogether alone when he forgot the hills, because the steersman was only a part of the boat. Even the wind had nothing to say in this silent world, and the water was like a monster moving floor, rushing them poised on its expanse. So light they felt, he and the boat, and yet through every plank he could feel the passionate quiver of taut strength. The sail whitened as the light whitened, and the mast grew yellow instead of grey. Then a level line cut across the threads of rope, and behind it arose the misty country of the marsh.

The sun came, bringing the clean first colour of all, that for its purity alone is sufficient miracle and joy. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster all the time it lifted the earth out of the many-shaded grey. Here and there and then there the land showed itself awake, glowing in great breadths in this place and then in that. Not all at once was the colour painted in, but gradually, as if waiting for the eye to catch the effect of green stretches and white walls, and the sudden blue-grey of jutting rock. The mountains weighed heavier and heavier upon the earth, showing their great bones and russet bracken slopes.

The kiss of the sun on the sail seemed to waken the statue into life, showing him wiry and lithe, with the blue of a warmer water in his eyes. After the marsh stood up he came about, and at once the world was all struggle and noise, straining and drumming canvas overhead, and hissing and bubbling water under the bow. The boat felt stiff from stem to stern, a passionate live thing set against control. She leaned over, as if bent on ridding herself of her human freight, and let the water line up and slap itself over their feet. The sail was gleaming now, and the bay deepening into blue, and suddenly Kit saw the dazzling front of his home, with the yew sharp-cut and black against its side. It had the rippling tide before it and the shining river behind, and where there was neither river nor tide there were green fields and thick hedges and white roads.... Faint at the upstairs window, he thought he saw a face....

Now they had found the channel and were coming at the house, rushing and winged as they had been before, such a flying thing of the deep as Agnes had once seen. It seemed to Kit, as it had seemed to her, that they would ride on that moving water straight into the house itself. The boat raced towards it as a horse towards a fence, only smoother and swifter and keener than any horse. He clambered out to the bow and knelt on the seat, and felt the ride and lift of her over the carrying sea. Kneeling, he thought of ancient figureheads, and knew what they had felt and why they stood for the whole exultation of the world.... It was plain to him what he should do when they rose at the house. The flung-back casement upstairs was like a sign, and behind it the face still glimmered and watched and leaned. Straight out of the boat, as she lifted under his feet, he would step unhurriedly into the room....

He rose from his knees and stood erect, supremely prepared, and fell in a clutching heap as they came about. For a moment he sat still, grasping at his wits, confounded by violent defraudation and shock. Now they were hove to under the farmyard wall, but it did not seem to him that they had really arrived. The boat seemed limp and broken, injured though not dead, a flapping, fretting thing checked in its flight before the goal was reached. He felt a blinding spasm of rage as if he had been robbed, and even when he stood on the shore and watched the boat beat back, he was still cheated and angry in his heart. Now he was conscious that he was very tired, just a weary player coming home in the dawn. He turned at last and walked slowly to the house, and was glad of the open doorway in his path. As he walked he looked at the window upstairs, but without either exaltation or desire. He had been so near perfection, as it seemed, and at the impossible moment it had escaped. The room was still there, but his passionate impulse towards it had died down. In youth one seeks one’s sacred place on wings; it is only in later life that it is sweet to climb to it by a homely stair.

Bob had stopped the horse and scrambled down, and was busy with the latch of a gate. Kit brought himself back to the present with a jerk, though the floor of the trap was still the light, curving timbers of the yacht. In front of him was a long, green road, a wide alley hedged on either side, with the dykes beside the hedges so full of growth that they looked almost level with the level road. The hedges themselves, as far as he could see, were pink with little rose-faces and purple with vetch. Now they were nearly home; the green road always meant that they were nearly home. Bob took the horse by the head and called to his father to take the reins, and he gathered them up shakingly, glad, after so long, to feel the touch of the rough leather against his hands. But all the time he was troubled by a sense of something amiss, in spite of the green road that meant the journey’s end. He wondered why he had lived again that vivid experience on the boat. The shadow of that disillusionment long ago seemed stretching also across this perfect hour.

And then gradually his mind cleared again, and set the warning and creeping trouble aside. There came back to him like a repeated song the sweetness of this tranquil evening return. The grass crushed softly underneath the wheels, and on the quiet road there was peace for the creaking bones of the ancient trap. He felt warm in the sun and soothed and freshened by the tender air. The light was gold on the dark coat of the horse, and on Bob’s stooping shoulders and bent head. Yet behind all the comfort of renewed content he felt continually that he was very tired. The journey had been a long one—longer than he had thought; perhaps he would never have come if he had known how long. Those mind-travels of his had been easier by far, when his body was left behind and nothing jolted or jarred. He was perfectly certain that he could never face it again, but then he was done with all his journeying now. He was at home; he had escaped Marget; he was at home. It did not matter how tired you were when once you had reached home.

The green road ran out from between its hedges close in front, and seemed to be lost in a stretch of open field. It looked, like the rest of the old man’s span of life, as if it ran smoothly to the end, yet all the while the river lay between field and road. Often enough, folks coming home in the dark had gone over the sheer drop into its hidden bed. Kit tightened the reins nervously when he came to the bank, and Bob felt the tug on the bit and glanced behind. The old man was out of himself to-night, he thought, and as full of the shakes as a piece of doddering grass. First of all, he had boggled at the sea, and here he was taking steck at the river, too! He turned the horse to the left, and stopped again, at a meadow gate. Thomas was waiting at the meadow gate.