Constance Holme

“ Thomas said, “Ay, make it a reel!” in a gruff, shy voice, the voice of the youth whose only way of expression was through his dancing feet. All of them felt the thrill of the word each [Pg 270] time that it was said, the lilt and beat of the tune in their brains and heels. The old feeling came back that life was only lived from dance to dance. The ecstasy came back, the almost insolent sense of power; the passion of motion, the thrill of mutual purpose and touch. The very air of the kitchen seemed to change and become mistily lamp-lit, throbbing to many hearts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now he was just the simple old man who had lived at the sea’s edge with a fiddle under his arm. Marget’s voice was no longer in his ears, but the voice of the peewit and gull and the rush of the incoming tide. And Bob, too, was changed from a dull epitome of mistakes to a soul who remembered the pride and spring of life. If Kit had turned to look at him just then, he would have seen him a moment in his splendid youth, with the wrestler’s steady eye and muscular grace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She and Thomas were doing a beautiful thing, but little, sordid thoughts kept creeping in. Somewhere at the back of their minds they were gloating over Marget all the time. Of course she was bound to be jealous of their better luck—the unlovable woman with the wretched house. It must have irked her to see Kit driving off, knowing how glad he was to get away. She was bound to envy the bride with her pleasant home, her brand-new furniture and four-pronged forks. Those who sit in the sun are so sure of the envy of those in the shade. ”

“ From his window at Marget’s he had often watched the swifts darting and dipping in the evening light. The tiny whir of their wings across the pane had come to him in a [Pg 242] series of little shocks. The long, pointed wings were like little slender swords, crossing and darting and never getting home. Now, if he looked from the farm-window, he would see the birds of the marsh, the long legs of the heron and the stately swing of the gull. The redshank and the curlew he would see lonely on the sands ... yet here he was busy thinking of Marget’s and the swifts. ”

“ The folk in the cave were not afraid, because for them the cave was the whole world. So heedless they seemed, and young, so fleet-passing and yet so strong. Death slew them, and yet they came in the same form, with the same faces and voices and transmitted ways. Life must surely be stronger than death, while the stamp of it stood so long....
When he forgot the cave he thought of their home-going in the dawn, of lights in misty shippons and the ivory gleam of milk. The mountains were fresh-made again, gentle as all new-born things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As he sat waiting for them to come and take him away, he was conscious of the discomfort and even terror of change. He felt both the reluctant weariness of the old—for whom every shift on the road may be the last—and the fear of the dreamer that his dream may prove untrue. The idealist always shrinks from fulfilment just at the last, and Kit was shrinking and suffering all through. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thomas, trained in sound methods on a well-kept farm, seemed already to have changed the character of this. It was almost as if it had pulled itself together under the mere glance of his disapproving eye. Roots looked healthy, the corn was even and getting ahead; the hedgerows were clear of nettles and the meadows of thistles—on the whole. The hay was doing well and was thick at the roots; they hoped to be cutting in a week. The old man would be pleased with the new machines, the cutter and tedder in their brilliant coats of blue. There were the horses, too, bargains and rare good beasts. ”

“ Bob had already lost the exhilaration of setting out, and there was no place for this drooping failure in Kit’s mind. Besides, here on the marsh the past was so alive that voices barely found their way to his ear. No human speech, indeed, could have the colour and flow and flight of this epic spoken by his own soul. There was wistfulness in his memories but they were not sad, because only evil memories are sad. Beauty grows like a rose over every other, even pain ”

“ In the dark well where it was so difficult to see he felt always about him creeping fingers and prying eyes. In the narrow room which had neither corners nor dreaming-places for the old, there seemed always a host of spies that crouched and peered. When he drowsed in spite of himself on a hot afternoon, he would start awake to find stealthy hands grasping at the treasure on his knee. Instinct told him, as a rule, when the enemy was about, but sometimes the fiddle warned him with a speaking string. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For every mother there is a Piper drawing her child away, as even Marget was coming to understand. Perhaps she had seen his reflection in the red-haired baby’s face, and suddenly saw it again now. In any case, she brought the show to an end, clouting both player and dancer over the head, and making away with the fiddle up the stair. Through this enveloping cloud Kit heard the door burst open at his back, and saw a shining thing flung quivering on the bed. ”

“ The marsh was lonely, of course, but Nature was always there, growing her grass and plants and flowers, her acorns and cones fashioning into trees, her thorn hedges throwing up every year their close and towering screens; and, after Nature, man, with his cattle and thin ploughs, his barns and shippons, his clustered chimney-stacks. But out on the sand there were only sand and lost shells, and the goalless footprints of flown birds. It was enemy ground, where neither blown seed nor human hearth might take hold. The marsh had a peace of its own as well as its fear ”

“ 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. ”

“ Raising herself with a jerk, she flapped down the stair with the noise of a dozen carpet-beaters in full swing. Nobody ever expressed as much as Marget with a pair of down-trodden slippers loose at the heels; yet nobody would keep them when she was gone, pathetic and reverenced by a bed.... Kit thought of his winged thing she had beaten down, and looked to see feathers scattered under her feet. Her face was changed both in colour and shape by the unknown terrible things that lived in her brain. ”

“ Without Agnes, he would let the farm go without even raising his hand. Without Agnes, he would let his father go, too.
There being little else he could do for the old man, Bob was roused to fight for him to the last. It was his brother’s duty, he pointed out, a duty that would have been a pleasure to other folks, not so far. Nobody could have had a better father, as they knew right well, and he was entitled to the little they could do. It wasn’t as if Thomas hadn’t the brass—what, he had more than once told them about it himself! ”

“ 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.
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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. ”

“ There were always growing things to see in the dykes, marsh-buttercups on some pool, purple vetches on some hedge. Somewhere a farm would stand up between its orchard and fields, and meet him always with a new surprise. Houses never outstared you on the marsh, for all its long distances and unbroken sweep. They grew upon you by degrees, coming, yet keeping themselves in reserve, like faces peeping welcome round a porch. ”

“ Sheep in the hedge-bottoms rose and scuttered away, the sound of their going ghostly in the dark. Cattle, lying heavy on the land, turned unaffrighted eyes at their approach. The night air pressed close, warm and a little damp, and there was dew on the long hedge-grass as well as the honeysuckle boughs.
“I doubt it’s over late for the farm,” Agnes murmured once. “Eh, if we could nobbut set the clock back a year!”
“There’s a chance we might get it yet,” Thomas replied, but with the new caution he had learned from life. Self-confident Thomas had grown to be careful how he tempted fate. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He just stood there, fiddle and scone in hand, staring about him like a puzzled child. Then the parson came along and wished him a pleasant ride, and shook the hand that wasn’t holding the scone. Everybody seemed glad for him that he was going home, that he was getting away from Marget, after all. Folks were nearly always glad when they saw others going home. They felt kindlier towards them then than at any other time, he thought. Folks away from home were a kind of public trust. The world was worried about them until they were safely back. ”