Chapter II (1)

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.

Even with her hand pressing upon it, it had taken months to die. It had never really flickered out until he had ceased trying to find one of them to love. He had tried each of them in turn, from the rating, jibing mother herself to the red-haired baby screaming on the hearth, and then he had suddenly let them all go. Perhaps it might never have died at all if Marget had allowed him to play his fiddle from time to time, but it was the first part of him at which she struck. The sound of it seemed to send her out of her mind, and even the baby greeted it with yells. Certainly, its unearthly, quivering note, peculiarly thin and sweet, made an almost heart-breaking wail in the little house. He did his best to obey, but it was a long time before he learned to keep his fingers from the strings. Often he found himself playing without knowing that he had begun, and awoke to a chorus of abuse and screams. He would play in the night, too, forgetting that it was night, and then even the neighbours would start knocking at the walls. There was always music singing in his mind, so that he did not always know when the fiddle was singing, too. He used to wonder, when they made so much to-do, how it was they did not hear the other music as well. But even the red-haired baby did not seem to hear that. Anyhow, if it did, it did not scream.

When he found that he could not play in the house, he tried to find somewhere to play outside—down by the river, for instance, close to the bridge. He had a rather wonderful time down there until Marget scented him out. Sitting on a great root at the water’s edge, he would play to the forest above and the forest beneath, until folk came along walking through the one, while their reflections walked through the other, down below. They used to seat themselves on the tree-trunks near or stand about him in groups, while he played them varsovianas and schottisches and reels. Of course there were always children, but others came as well, and sometimes there was quite a crowd. The music would run to the village across the fields, though never as far as Marget’s open door. But over the river and up the park it went as far as it liked, and as far as it liked with the river down to the sea. On the grass at the river’s edge the sun threw patches never twice alike, and the listening faces looked paler under the trees. Kit, in his old clothes, was just a bit of the trunk on which he leaned, except for the flying movements of his hands. Beside him was the velvety water, deep black, shot and shivered by gold patines and leaf-dances and lacy patterns and bright gleams.

Sometimes, when he was tired, he talked to the crowd, telling them of old dances and melodies and old times. They left the tree-trunks, and came nearer by degrees, the lads with their hands in their pockets and the children with fingers in their mouths. He looked round at their friendly eyes, and thought how nearly all eyes changed when a fiddle was played. If anybody laughed or jeered at first, he was an open or a sneaking worshipper before long. Sometimes the women who lived near brought him a cup of tea and a snack to eat, and nothing he ever had at Marget’s heartened him half so much. And on especially blessed days when the tunes went like so much unwound silk, there came somebody who remembered Fiddlin’ Kit.

It was after one of these days, taking him clean back to happier times, that he brought a horrible vengeance on himself. One afternoon, when the children were coming home from school, he went out to the forbidden footpath under the chestnuts and played. He forgot all about the cottage just across, and Marget of the music-hating heart. He forgot that he was only a beggar-man and that somebody paid his keep. He only remembered that he was Fiddlin’ Kit, at sight of whom folk had always danced, and the feet of the children stirred his ancient blood. The young feet, the feet of the coming generation of dancers, always stirred his blood. From the end of the village they came skipping down the road, singing a little tune they had learned in school. Most of them came in twos and threes, linked together by twining arms, or trailing a little cloak by its hem in the dust. Some whispered great mysteries in others’ ears. Some held a little school on the kerb, as if they had not already had enough, and in the midst of the lesson gathered themselves up and ran. And all the time, here and there, some of them sang, and the tune that they sang got into the fiddle and played. Kit, down the long perspective of the street, saw the white school from which they had come, and the tune, as it were, coming with them out of the door. He had known the song long ago, and he never forgot a tune. It was only in nature that the fiddle should sing, too.

Marget, staring crossly at neglected plants in the ill-treated patch behind the house, heard both fiddle and voices lilting over the roof. They climbed the slates and swung off the chimney-tops to drop in delicate sweetness on her head. She thought of Kit, of course, in the first breath, but remembered that she had left him nodding in the house. The red-haired baby, she knew, had had him under its eye. She glanced suspiciously down the cottage backs, wondering which harboured this nuisance to the rest. The Martin boy had a fancy for fiddling, she believed; she had caught him talking to Kit about it in the road. Then there was that lass of Simpson’s that thought she played—the one that was going to service before so long. Folks never seemed to care whether the neighbours liked the noise, though they were fit to swear if the red-haired baby cried. There was more than one that she wanted a word with about that, a word flung in like a bomb at a cottage door. This dratted fiddling might give her her excuse, so she picked up her vegetables and hurried down.

She thought of Kit again as she flapped along, and again told herself that it was somebody else. He was safe enough under her thumb, by now, the silly old man. He had given her a deal of trouble at first, fiddling in other folks’ houses when he might not fiddle in hers, but of course she had easily traced him by the sound. Then she had stolen upon him unawares, breaking the harmonies like so much silvered glass, and after a time or two he had never done it again. Besides, this playing came from the street, and if she was sure of anything she was sure she had cured him of that. It was much more likely to be some fiddling tramp, who would be knocking for ha’pence at her door. She slipped as she ran down the steps to give him the best of her tongue, and the potatoes flew out of her apron left and right. It took her some minutes to pick them up again, and as she was doing so the music changed. Now it was playing a dismal little tune, and little voices began to sing it in breathless little jerks. On the top of the tune she heard laughter and applause, and then fiddle and voices went on their way alone. Puzzled, she scrambled up with grubby hands, bunched the potatoes in her grimy apron and opened the cottage door.

The old man stood on the footpath under the trees, his ear bent to the fiddle as he played. His eyes, looking gravely before him at the scene, were as intent as if the fate of nations hung on his bow. The street was full of folk as far as she could see, and in the midst of them the children were playing “London Bridge.” Under the trees and over the sun-flecked road they moved slowly and solemnly to the tune, and between the laughing folk on either side their faces looked serious and sad. There were babies among them, for this is the little children’s game, and even the babies’ faces were sad. They stood facing each other in rows across the street, keeping themselves up by the grasp of their little hands. Sometimes they lost their balance and fell down, but they were so intent on the game that even as they bumped their faces never changed. Suddenly Marget discovered some of her own offspring in the crowd, and that the younger ones were even taking part. Last of all she saw the red-haired baby among the rest, clenching determined fists and setting a firm mouth.

“_London Bridge is broken down,
Broken down, broken down.
London Bridge is broken down,
(My fair Ladye!)_

_Build it up with pins and needles,
Pins and needles, pins and needles.
Build it up with pins and needles,
(My fair Ladye!)_

_Pins and needles rust and bend,
Rust and bend, rust and bend.
Pins and needles rust and bend,
(My fair Ladye!)_”

Marget made a rush as soon as she got her breath, but the crowd closed in before her and held her back. She could see the smiling faces all along the street, people staring over the shoulders of others or peering over their heads, leaning out of upstairs windows and sitting along the wall. There were even faces peeping down from the trees, and drawn up close to the kerb was the Squire’s carriage and pair. The horses’ heads were turned away from the scene, but the Squire and his wife were leaning over the hood. Even the coachman was screwing his neck as far as it would go, and as for the footman, he had forgotten himself right out, and had turned about and was kneeling on the seat. And in the midst of the smiles and amusement and applause the babies bobbed and moved with never a smile, and the old man played as if he played before kings.

“_Here’s a prisoner we have got,
We have got, we have got.
Here’s a prisoner we have got,
(My fair Ladye!)_

_What’s the prisoner done to you,
Done to you, done to you?
What’s the prisoner done to you?
(My fair Ladye!)_

_Stole my watch and broke my chain,
Broke my chain, broke my chain.
Stole my watch and broke my chain,
(My fair Ladye!)_”

It was the first and only time that Marget’s children got anywhere near his heart. Even the elder ones had forgotten to be cross and ugly under the spell of the game. They laughed and skipped as they watched, and sang the tune and clapped their hands with the rest. As for the red-haired baby, Kit’s eyes followed it all the time. He had given up the red-haired baby latest of all, and now it seemed he had captured it at last. It seemed to him for the first time to have a look of his own babies, who were either dead or lost in the likenesses of men. He watched it stumbling over its own feet and taking headers over its dirty gown. In the house it would have screamed until it choked, but now it picked itself up without a sound, and the solemn intensity never left its face. He watched it tail up behind the rest until it was circled by the gaolers’ arms, and saw its eyes widen as sentence was pronounced.

“_Off to prison she must go,
She must go, she must go!
Off to prison she must go,
(My fair Ladye!)_”

The fiddle shivered and halted and the tune nearly broke. It seemed to him suddenly a rather cruel little game. It was not a game, really, but a memorial to a tradition—the tradition that the foundation-stones of London Bridge had been sprinkled with the blood of little children. The babies were right who treated it as drama and not play. Ever since the beginning of the world children had been martyrs in some cause, and in the little song was the sound of all that they had suffered through the years. When the fiddle jarred the enchantment halted, too, and into the red-haired baby’s face came panic fright. It was at that moment that Marget broke through the crowd and snatched it into her arms.

The babies tumbled about her as if she had struck them down, flung out of the magic, bewildered and alarmed. Some of them burst into loud sobs, and even above Marget’s voice came the red-haired baby’s cries. She hustled the crowd right and left with a fierce arm, that seemed mighty enough to push even the Squire’s carriage out of the way. Coachman and footman were already mere liveried backs, with a couple of crested buttons winking in the sun. “Making such a stir in front o’ folks’ doors,” Marget said, “and keeping the poor barns from their tea an’ all! It was a pity folks hadn’t summat better to do than to go dancing and singing like a German band. But there was no sense o’ decency in yon wastrel she and her husband had to keep. You might as well keep a dancing bear and ha’ done wi’ it right out!”

She reached Kit where he stood with a dropped bow, and caught hold of his arm with an angry pull. He moved mechanically at her touch, and was dragged away to the house without looking at her once. His head swam with the violent flow of her speech and the shrieks of the baby flung across her arm. Once he shrank, hearing a giggle out in the crowd. But the Squire thanked him by name as he went by.

It passed, of course—all that vast and returning storm which followed these mistakes, shaking the house like a powder-mill gone up, until the frightened neighbours hammered at the walls. He left behind him at last the shock and shame of that afternoon, forgetting it in the healing of his dreams. But for a time he kept a faint affection for the red-haired baby who had entered so passionately into his game, and at first it seemed to be attracted to him, too. It would clutch itself on to its feet by the help of his knee, and stand staring at him with great, demanding eyes, as if asking him for the magic they had made together in the street. It even tried to play the game by itself, mopping and mowing in its trailing skirt, but the fiddle never came to its aid, and very soon it ceased to ask. It forgot to lift up wondering, seeking eyes, by which even the dirtiest baby may win a heart, and became again the chief terror of the house. Always, that is, excepting Marget herself. But then Marget’s terror was on a plane of its own. The red-haired baby, at least, was human in its misdeeds, but Marget was elemental, inhuman as packing ice.

And yet, even after the link with the baby had gone, a touch of feeling for Marget stayed with Kit. He had had a glimpse of her while it stood in the gaolers’ hands, and the game had begun to harrow its little soul. Marget had looked as perhaps those other mothers had looked, as mothers always look in the grip of the great fear.... While he remembered it, he saw her with different eyes.

But even that attempt at sympathy went the way of the rest at last. Marget was as open-handed with her smacks as she was open-mouthed with abuse, and the red-haired baby came in for the hardest smacks of all. He watched long enough for that glimpse to come again, but it never did. He was one of those who make angels out of a passing smile, and even to Marget he looked to show a wing. But the feet of even his wandering trust had struck a blind alley at last, and, seeing the face of her daily life, he forgot the look that had made him drop his bow.

It was shortly after this, too, that the Persecution of the Fiddle began, leaving him little time for dreams or anything else. All his life the fiddle had been secure as the Lady riding through Ireland in her gems, but it was in peril in a robber-country now. On the marsh he had never been afraid to lay it down where he chose, on table or chair, in the garden or the hedge-side. Somebody was sure to bring it back if it was lost, and nobody ever dreamed of doing it harm. Sometimes his own dog fetched it home, without as much as a scratch on the shining wood, and once a butcher had seen it in the grass, and turned his horse with it on the road he had come. And there was a tale that a great musician had found it on the shore, and taken it far out and played it on the sands. Kit could never be persuaded to speak of that, because it was the nearest thing to stealing that had come the fiddle’s way. Besides, he had an idea that it was never afterwards quite the same. There was a certain un-English fierceness in the lower notes, an occasional puzzling wildness in the higher. It had gained something rather wonderful and strange, but it seemed to him that it had lost something, too. Still, the fiddle itself had come back safe to the farm, with a little note of thanks that was signed by a famous name.

He kept his trick of confidence for months after he arrived at Marget’s house. The fiddle came down with him in the morning when he rose, and during the day might be found anywhere at all, from the door-mat to the mantelpiece or the flowerless flower-box on the sill. It was a miracle that it escaped being thrown on the fire, or stamped to pieces under the children’s feet. There were occasional terrible moments when it really disappeared, and nobody would help him in the search. Once it was away from him for a whole night, and he sat on his bed in the dawn, and was wholly uncomforted by his magic tree. But he did not believe that it was lost, and he was right, for during the morning a neighbour brought it timidly to the door. He learned to be careful, however, after that, and seldom let the fiddle out of his hands.

But now Marget announced boldly that she meant to destroy it before she was done. Perhaps she was really ashamed because her father-in-law had fiddled in the street; she had so little of any other shame that at least there was plenty to spare. Perhaps it was just a natural hate of a beautiful thing beyond her ken, or a grudge for that touch of terror in the red-haired baby’s face. In any case, she meant to steal the fiddle as soon as she could, and make an end of it before his eyes. She let the children share in this pleasant game, offering a reward, and setting them to catch him off his guard. She could not take the fiddle from him by force, because in spite of his age he would have given her a hard fight. Besides, there was as much pleasure in the promise of the crime as there could possibly be in the crime itself. She was always hinting at plots that couldn’t help but succeed, and her nods and winks to the grinning fry turned the old man cold. Her provisions for the doom of the fiddle were various in the extreme. She would burn it ... break it in pieces with the axe ... crucify it on the kitchen door. She would give it to the ragman to take away in a bag, or to the children to bury in the field. She would fling it into the barrel out at the back, and they would all stand round and watch it sink and drown. “And what’ll Gran’pa do wi’ his daft self then?” she would ask of the children with meaning smiles, while Kit sat still before an untouched plate. The children would echo her words and nudge each other and laugh, and he would clutch the fiddle under the table until it spoke.

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. He used to think that it knew its danger as well as he; but of course it didn’t do to trust to that. Small wonder he learned to take it with him in his dreams!

He thought once of asking Thomas to take it away, so that at least it would be safe from Marget and her gang. This was on one of the days when his fear was more than he could bear, when the hints and nudges had over-tried his mind. What troubled him most was the thought of the fiddle being drowned. He pictured it at the bottom of the barrel in the dark, a choked and silenced creature rotting out of reach. He saw himself, armed with a stick, everlastingly trying to drag it up, and for ever watching it drift down again to die. It would be like seeing some singing-bird thrust under to drown, not once, but many times before it sank. At least it would have a chance of life if it was given away; it might hear itself speak, might even come to be loved. And if they broke it to bits, at least it would die quick, but he could not endure that rotting by degrees. He would find it hard to sleep when they took it away, but if it lay in the barrel how could he sleep at all? So when Thomas, after his duty visit, rose to go, the old man followed him out into the street. In the dark he felt the fiddle thrust into his hands, and listened dully to the hurried request. “I’ll see to it, never fret,” he said, when he understood, and moved away with the fiddle under his coat; but he hadn’t gone far before Kit was at his side, begging in anxious tones to have it back. So master and fiddle returned together to the house of hinting and spies. He said to himself that they might take it from him if they could; at least he could never bring himself to send it away.

When Marget had her will of them both at last, it was his habit of old time that delivered them into her hands. A man from the marsh came along the street and hailed Kit through the window as he passed, and Kit rose and ran out as if an angel had beckoned through the pane. Marget heard him chattering in the street, and found the fiddle lying on a chair. He did not see her or even feel her near, stooped like a vulture over its watched-for prey. The strings jarred together as she took the fiddle up, but he never heard them or even turned his head. He went on talking and laughing in the street long and long after the fiddle had disappeared....

The week that followed was just seven days and nights blotted clean out of his tale of life. He never spoke of his loss, nor did he even begin to make a search. He said nothing even in the first shock of finding the fiddle gone. He just stood and stared at the chair where it had lain as one stares at a shell where the spirit has once been. The sense of irrevocable loss was as clear about the chair as about the heedless dead with their shuttered eyes. Kit had always been queer about furniture, as Thomas knew, and one of Marget’s unmeaning chairs said something to him at last.

He did not know whether he spoke or ate during that dead week, but for the most part he was silent and refused his food. Still, his absent-mindedness was an old tale by now, so Marget got little satisfaction out of that. The only difference was that he would not sit in the kitchen any more, and no amount of abuse could fetch him back. Perhaps he was afraid of the chair that was like a coffin in his eyes; at all events, he refused to sit in it again. Instead, he sat in his bedroom on his bed, staring for ever at his magic tree. But there was no magic about it now, because the fiddle had gone away, and without it the fairy glades would never let him in. Yet still he sat there, staring and staring, while the sun climbed the morning hills, touched the house in passing with a golden wing, and fled away to break into colours in the west. Always he sat with his fingers lightly clasped, as if something were lying within them on his knee.

So, as it happened, Marget found her vengeance a poor thing, after all. The scene that she had looked for hung fire and never came off. There was nothing exciting in the way of pleading and tears; nothing, in fact, except this absolute blank, risen like a fog between her victim and herself. Even the children felt that the situation had fallen flat. Instead of “carrying on,” as they had hoped, Gran’pa had been as dull as a dead fish. He hadn’t even spoken, nor did he mean to speak. He had not given them any sort of scope for their peculiar powers. Why, you might almost have thought that he didn’t even know!

Marget began to brag of her guilt at last, but it was impossible to tell whether he took it in. He did not seem to notice her vivid accounts of how the fiddle had met its end. Sometimes she was exasperated into contradicting her own tales, but as none of them seemed to reach him that did not matter very much. She was chiefly puzzled, however, because he never tried to get the fiddle back. The cheerful hide-and-seek that she had planned couldn’t be played because the principal person concerned in it wouldn’t take part. He never went to the water-butt to peer into its depths. He never poked about the ashheap or raked the fire. He did not even dig about the garden, as if hoping to find it among the flowers. He knew Marget would never give it as clean a burial as that. All that he did was to shut himself up and stare, until even she began to feel uneasy in her mind. It would be a poor victory if he was too crushed to care, and in any case she did not want him helpless on her hands. Daft as he was, he was of use to her sometimes, a caretaker for the house when she wanted to be out, a stick to frighten importunate beggars, a hodman to lift a load; and always a peg upon which to hang her tongue. If she drove him clean crazed, he would be a greater burden than before, and certainly it looked as though that might be the end. So it came about that, after a week, there was a miracle for which he had not even prayed.

He was sitting as usual on his bed, holding between his hands the thing that wasn’t there, when down in the kitchen he suddenly heard its voice. He hardly knew it at first—it was so raucous and strange, a voice that wept and screamed, and tried to keep silence but was forced to speak, and was like to destroy itself with its own rage; yet in all its wrath and pain it was still the voice he loved. He tried to get up to go to its help, but even the beginning of the miracle held him chained. He could only sit still and tremble ... and wonder and wait....