Part 6

Again, as she waited, she felt a wish to go to the gate. There was no reason, really, why she shouldn’t run down. The old man would likely be glad of another arm. Folks getting up in years were easily upset, and joy was often a bit terrible to the old. He would be ready for bed before so long ... and she would wake in the night and wonder whether he slept. She forgot the gate in thinking of the room, and how it would never be quite the same again. Surely there was no harm in taking a last peep? Those folks at the gate wouldn’t be up yet. She would hear their voices coming up the field, and could be down in time to meet them at the door. She looked again and found nothing and made up her mind. She disappeared up the carpeted stair.

II

Christopher Sill sat in the kitchen at Marget’s, waiting to be taken away. He was a tall old man, with broad shoulders that were now bent, blue, inward-looking eyes and quiet ways. In spite of his size he gave an impression of lightness which was partly the frailty of age and partly the spirit within, but he was too big for the kitchen, which was smaller than even his wash-house had been at home. No matter how he compressed himself, or shrank into corners and held his breath, he seemed perpetually in the way. His feet, too, which had been his innocent pride, once so light in the dance, and still quite neat in spite of their clumsy boots, were, so it seemed, the largest in the world. Either Marget or the children were for ever catching them as they passed, and in addition to kicks from other clumsy boots, he had to bear the onus of every mishap. Apparently his feet were responsible for every broken pot, for a spilt pan, for the children’s torn clothes, for the unsteady baby’s every fresh bruise. Tumbling over Gran’pa was the accepted cause of each new piece of damage and any sudden, ear-piercing howl. There had been room for every man’s feet in the house from which he had come, and full room for a man’s stride on the long levels of the marsh. He had never realised his actual bodily size before.

Nor had he been conscious that human beings might press too close. He had never troubled about the crowded rooms in which he had had to play, the whirling dancers and the thick, lamp-poisoned air. But he had come to them with his lungs full of the breath of the marsh, and had gone out of them to the same clean draught. And he had never minded the press below his platform or around his chair, or the women’s dresses brushing against his knees. Between himself and the crowd there had often been the bond of a friendly liking as well as the tie of a pleasure equally shared. He was depressed by a scanty gathering, and much preferred a real crush, even though in the stamping and shuffling his music was apt to be drowned. The things that the fiddle were saying reached every one of them all the same, even those who were too far from him to hear. The more happy folks there were, the more happiness there was in the room, and so it could never be too full. He had never stifled through the long night hours as here in Marget’s kitchen he stifled in the day. He and his fiddle were never alone in there, could never get themselves really out of sight. The children were always about him, shrill and curious and infinitely cross, and when Marget came into the kitchen there was simply no room for anyone else at all. She seemed to be sharply and aimlessly all over it at once, just as an ill-tempered wind seems to blow from every quarter at the same time. He shrank if she touched him or came too near, and her draggled gowns worried him as they passed.

The kitchen was dark, not only because there would have been darkness wherever Marget happened to be, but because its one small window was shadowed by the chestnuts across the road. It seemed like a little dark well to the man who had lived in a wind-freshened house with the whole of the open west to lighten his eyes. Yet there might have been something to love in it, he knew. There were other houses in the little old row, heavy with roses white and red, with trellised porches and gay little flower-beds either side of the door, where on a summer day the kitchens were little dim places of cool peace. He knew that, because he had been into them sometimes, and rested for a while in an arm-chair by the whitened hearth, while its proper tenant left him alone or knitted in silence with soothing little clicks. There were geraniums in those windows in pots, and cool, little starched lace blinds, and though the windows were small the sun reached round the pots and dropped a splash of gold on the stone floor. The pots themselves made patches of mellow colour on the sill, and there was a text on the wall which the sun always seemed to find. “Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also,” it said, and Kit knew better than anything else in the world what that text meant. There was a heap of gold in a bottom corner and a clutter of angel-crowns above, but Kit knew that real treasure had nothing to do with things like those.

On those summer days the footpath under the trees was black, so that the lasses passing in their light gowns looked like coloured pictures on a dark screen. The road was half a patterned shadow flung by the trees, and half a ribbon of dazzling limestone white. When carriages came along, the pattern changed to the horses’ backs, and the silvered harness flashed and shone in the sun. Sometimes there was a whirl of dust after they had passed, but none of it came in because door and window were shut, yet he did not feel stifled because the door stood open into the scullery at the back, and the door of that again into the garden beyond. You went up to the garden by old steps sunk deep into the bank, with moss so thick about them that the colour of it seemed to have grown into the stone itself. There were bright flowers up above, mere flecks of colour high and far away, when the sun was standing over the slanting beds. The door made a picture for him as he sat, a vivid shimmer of gold and scarlet and green, yet it was too far off to trouble his old eyes. Sometimes he stared at it until he slept, with the polished fiddle gleaming across his knee. The silent knitter would watch the fiddle with an anxious eye, waiting to catch it when it slipped. But even in sleep his fingers held it safe, because always in sleep it was with him where he went.

He used to thank the people in these houses of good rest, but he was not always perfectly certain which was which, and to the day of his death he never knew their names. There were real corners in those kitchens of theirs, where the old could gather themselves into the shadow unobserved. The kitchen at Marget’s was exactly the same size, but it had no corners that he could ever find; only bare walls set rigidly each to each, where naughty children could be sent to sulk, and dust might settle and gather at its will. The other kitchens had space and they had peace. Those of their occupants who thought them poor and mean found themselves suddenly proud in possession after he had gone. It was as if he had placed a charm on the table before he went away.

But he was not often able to seek these hiding-places from the storm. Marget was one of those souls jealous of a burden they do not want but will not share. Even while she resented his presence under her roof, she resented equally that he should be happy anywhere else. He was welcome to hate her as much as he chose, but she demanded that he should hate other folk as well. If he was hers to see to, she would have him all to herself, and nobody should take him from her even for half an hour. Besides, she lacked the full flavour of abuse when he wasn’t about the house. In the dark kitchen, in spite of his size, she could not always be sure that he was there. She might trip over something and snarl, “Drat you! Mind your feet!” before she discovered that it was only a stool.

So it was not very often he could get away; she hunted him down too rigorously for that. And even out of her sight he was conscious of the obsession of her thought. Even during those snatched moments, seldom as they came, there lurked round every corner the possibility of her face. It was only in sleep that he ever really escaped, and even then he awoke sometimes to find her watching him from the door—her gnawed and useless bone that she still would drag to her cave.

She said such terrible things, too, to the silent knitters of his peace. Suddenly the little kitchen would be full of battering, brazen-sounding speech, carrying so far along the street that folk would hear it and come out. When Marget emerged with her bone between her teeth, they would be standing in little knots or edging towards the door. Little boys came out of nowhere as they always do, and sometimes a passing carriage would be brought to a halt. Through it all Marget would swim on a powerful stream of abuse, while he went quiet in her clutch, his fiddle gathered close. Sometimes people laughed, and he heard, and that was worst of all.

Only at night had he respite for a while. Two of the children slept in his little room, and even they, incredibly curious as they were, were forced to close their peering eyes at times. The old man, kept awake when he might have slept, could not always sleep later on, and often sat for hours by his window, looking out into the night. Up there, it almost seemed as though he were in the chestnuts over the road, only out in the branches where the birds slept it was cool, and full of a rocked and murmuring peace. Sometimes, though, on the stillest nights, not a leaf moved or shook on the giant boughs, but more often there was a little breeze that whispered busily all the time. There was a wind, too, that did nothing but sigh, and another that hissed in angry little gusts. The one that sighed meant that thunder was about, and the fretted one was the herald of change and rain. And another wind rolled in a long, soft soughing all the way through the trees, like the long, smooth waves of a very far-off tide. It would swell and rise while he listened for it to break, but always it ebbed and died without breaking at all. Sometimes it stopped in the midst of the downward curve, like a sentence softly suspended without cause. He liked this wind because it took him back to the marsh, but best of all he liked the big gales that came to him straight from the west. The wind that thrashed and tramped on the great trees, that hammered the little window of his room and sent great draughts down chimneys and through keyholes, and flung the blue slates spinning into the street, came to him straight from the place where he belonged. Sometimes, when it was very dark and wild, he was sure the street was full of the sea. He thought of it rolling and pushing at all the doors.... There was a meadow beyond the chestnuts over the road, and often he heard the water under the wall, like the tide that beat at the banks along the marsh.

He was fond of that meadow beyond the trees, with its shimmering levels golden in the sun, yet cool to the eye because of the shadow in between. At first he spent his time by the leaning wall, talking to people as they came along, but that was another thing Marget couldn’t abide. Strangers stared at his violin, and asked questions, and that vexed her pride. It was like a beggar-man, she said, to be seen with a fiddle in the street. Folks would be giving him coppers before so long, and shaming them all and pulling them all down. Kit held to his talking-ground for a while, but after one dreadful episode he gave way. Sometimes people asked if the old man were dead, the old man with the fiddle beside the wall.

He liked the meadow best of all in the dawn, when it took on the look of parkland wrapped in early mist. Right across, through a break in the chestnuts, he could see another tree stand up, a tree that, because of the haze, looked tiny as a toy. The shadow of it, black when the sun got up, was at first no more than a darker veil of mist along the sward. There was magic about this little vignette in which there was only a tree. It was so tiny and grey and tender, so light, so delicately soft. Yet, small as it was, it suggested infinite space, stretches of wander-room, pleasaunces without end. There were no barriers about it that had to be pushed away. You knew that from under its branches you could see the world.

Even when the sun was up at last, and the tree was strong wood and the earth firm soil, when the leaves had found colour and the boughs taken their shape, the little vista kept its promise still. Still it was growing in enchanted air, amid the far distances of the soul’s desire.

And then the house around him would come awake. The children would fight each other in their beds. All through the house would pierce the edginess of Marget’s morning voice....

He lost his vignette when the chestnuts lost their leaves, and through the stripped boughs the picture was not the same. But the chestnuts themselves were enough for him, just then, with their straight-grown limbs cut black against the sky, and every delicate filament of twig sparkling and dazzling with the frost. In the winter, too, he could see the moon through the trees, a flat and silver face laid to the open spaces as to a pane. Star after star he saw balancing on a bough.

At the end of the village was the river that he had known only where it ran out over the sand. It was dear to him, because it went towards the marsh, but otherwise it was not the river he knew. Out there it was silver or thin blue, sometimes a dull and hurrying grey, but always it held the mirror of its face wide open to the sky. Here it was black, because of the high banks and the old bridge and the big trees leaning right across. It was a glorious black, velvet-smooth, with underneath it the colours of weeds and stones and darting fish, and the reflection of other colours overhead. There were trees in the water, too, as real as those above; he could not always tell which was which. They had the same vivid, wide-spreading green, the same ribbed and splendid trunks. It was like looking down into a forest from a bird’s wing, only the forest was overhead as well. It seemed as far to look down as it was to look up. He thought the mirror-picture the daintier of the two—cleaner, as it were, for the water washing over its face; like the forests one sees through the polished glass of a dream. There was only one other difference that he could see. When the trees above stood perfectly still, the trees in the water seemed to wave and dance. But it was only the ripple across the river’s face. Beneath it the painted picture was still and serene.

He was fond of the bridge, too, and liked to wait for the sun dipping under its curve, but it was not often that he had a chance of that. The children were in league with Marget to hunt him down, and could spy him out in the most unlikely spots. Then they would harry him back along the street, beating at him with dirty little hands, and though he felt dreadfully ashamed and hurt, it was better than being fetched by Marget herself. “Grandpa” added zest to the children’s lives, gave them a sense of drama, a heady taste of power. Their days would lack a certain excitement when Marget’s bone was gone.... In the end he gave up the bridge as he had yielded the wall, because the pleasure was not worth the risk. The river under the bridge was not his own river, after all. Safe in his mind he had it where he liked it best, pale on the brown waste as it swam to sea.

There were other things strange to him in Marget’s house, besides the absence of room and peace. He found, for instance, that he could not love the tables and chairs. He could not even love his rickety bed, which carried him homeward when he slept, and was the stall to his fairyland through the trees. Certainly he could not love Marget’s pots, which were never whole or clean, or the kettle which poured boiled cockroaches from its spout. Nor could he like the propped-up chests of drawers into which it was never safe to put a hand, for fear of upright needles or relics of bacon fat. It was not wise to look too closely at the kitchen sink or into the few battered pans used by the children in their play. The clock was stuffed with rags and boots, and had a sinister face which he disliked. The oilcloth on the stairs was full of holes.

Of course, he did not hate the things just because they were old. The house on the marsh, as Agnes knew, had been very neglected before the last. The old things around him were falling to pieces under his eyes, but they were not being kicked and battered to their end. They were really old, peacefully grown old, not abused into miserable age before their time. There were dust and cobwebs and broken furniture and torn clothes, but the sun or the wind was cleansing the place every hour. There was no dirt in dark corners or refuse under the stairs. There were no slimy walls or messes in doubtful pots. In the old chests of drawers were no mysteries save those that a tidy old woman’s hands had folded away. The things had been lovable in that house, because in spirit they were clean. They had lived an honest life, and they were not dying an obscene death. Always about the furniture lingered the sweetness of the tree.

Perhaps he might have grown fond of his own chair, but then he never had a chair of his own. Marget’s chairs were as restless as herself; you never found them twice in the same place. And age, as Kit very quickly learned, was last and behind that in that house. If he happened to show a liking for a seat, he was sure to be ousted by some elbowing child. Quite soon he learned to wait until the rest had settled down, and to fit his old bones into anything that was left. Only Bob, when he was at home, would find his father the most comfortable chair.

He had no place at the table, either, and he was always served last, and sometimes Marget seemed to forget him and he had to go without. Even when she chose to remember, he could not always eat what she had cooked. That meant that he was hungry most of the time, and because he was hungry the time was very long.

He had come to the cottage, as Thomas knew, without any bitterness in his heart. Leaving the farm had meant the end of all things, of course, but as long as he wasn’t bitter there was room for hope, and he had always been able to beautify what he touched. Never once, even in his mind, had he reproached Thomas for condemning him to this. Thomas would have helped him, had it been possible, he felt sure. The lads were all good lads, alive or dead, and there had never been anything wrong between him and them. Marget made a point of telling him very soon that Thomas could have saved him if he had liked, but it passed Kit by like a wasp in a gale of wind. She was always abusing Thomas and Kit’s old friends on the marsh. All the things that were wrong about him came solely from living on the marsh. They were a low lot down there, so Marget said, living like savages all the week, and only at market seeing their fellow-men. They bred wastrels and do-nowts like himself, cracked on fiddling and the like, whom other folk had to keep in their last years. And again she would harp on Thomas and his crime, but she never succeeded in making him understand. Her talk about the marsh and its folk conveyed nothing to old Kit. It was like somebody talking of a country they had never seen.

And such a little kindness would have made him content. He was away so much in his own mind that he did not need very much from the folk with whom he lived. And instead of a little kindness he had had a great deal. Women had thought for his comfort all his life, children had always run to him before; and it took him a long time to grasp that things were changed. He had come into the cottage with a trustful smile, but his smile was one of the things that went first. He never forgot that first tempest in Marget’s terrible voice, and the hostile looks of her sly and peering brood. And yet the fact that he could not love them had grown upon him only by degrees. He had never lived with poverty coupled with hate, and he could not grasp its indications for long. But he never learned to love any one of the crowd, any more than he learned to love the chairs.

Bob was as kind as possible when he was at home, but that was so seldom that he did not count. Slack in everything else, he had at least grown smart in keeping out of the way. Even Marget, who knew the backways of truth as well as anybody on earth, could not always discover where he lied. So he was not often at hand to come between his father and his wife, though he stood up for the old man when he was there. But under the roof where Marget ruled only the strongest soul could call itself its own. Bob seemed to fade, to be far-off in the little room with the narrow walls, where Marget towered to the ceiling and covered the whole floor. Yet she was only a middle-sized woman, after all, where he was six foot and broad, but a word from her tongue was like a slap from a clout, the look in her eye was like the dig of a pin. Her scurrying slippers, flapping at her heels, left no calm place where her footsteps had not been.

Because there was nothing to love, something had gone out of the old man after a while. He was polite and gentle, as he had always been, but now he grew very quiet, as though a finger was laid on his tongue. He did not always see what was under his nose, and when he was spoken to he did not always hear. He looked “lost,” Marget said, and the word was truer than she knew. Of course he had always “mooned,” as she called it, all his life, but behind the mooning the vital spark was plain. His mind was off on its travels, but it was sharply alive, and when it came back it brought with it fire from Heaven. But now there was no winged spirit behind his eyes. He lived in his dreams, but they never came down to earth.

Thomas, in one of his rare calls, noticed the difference without knowing what it meant. “The old man’s not as lish as he was,” he said to himself, watching his father with a troubled frown. “Likely it’s just he’s getting up in years.... Going that seldom I’m bound to see a change....” But years should have meant nothing to Kit, as he was vaguely aware. At the farm the old man would have remained a happy child, even to the last minute of his dying bed. Thomas pushed the worry to the back of his mind, but though he could not define the difference, he knew the cause. It was Marget who had smothered that long-lived spirit of youth.