Chapter IV (2)

Thomas plodded in and out with the pots, a little more hopeful when he was coming back, and a little more troubled when he went away. He said to himself again that things were wrong, that with every minute that passed they were going wrong. So far the old man hadn’t “settled” in the least, and only a blind donkey could pretend that he had. The situation which they had plotted with such care seemed to be getting completely out of hand. They saw their pleasant surprises turn to disappointments as they looked, and could do nothing but watch the change with pained amaze. There had been the chair and the mug, and the pipe and bacca and the seat, and Heaven knew how many other things besides. It was just as if they were all bewitched and upside down, and instead of righting themselves they were getting deeper under the spell. He stared at the old man standing like a stock, and felt there was something sinister in his look. He had an air of waiting for something, listening and looking out—something that was a terrible time on the road. He did not look at home in the very least—a happy old body coming home to stay. Thomas thought it was time that somebody said a word.... So after his last trip he halted and spoke....

“Yon’ll be an old fiddle, I doubt, by now?” “Nay. Fiddles is always young.”

“Old as time gangs, I mean, yon’s all.” He looked at the shining thing that he had known so well, and Agnes came to the inner door and listened, drying a pot. “It’s sung Bob an’ me to sleep many a time when we were barns. There’s whiles I wake even yet, hearing music somewheres in the dark.”

“I’ll be bound Marget’s barns isn’t fiddled to sleep!” the young wife scoffed behind their backs.

“There’s never no music at Marget’s that she can hear.... Never a note from dawn to dusk, barring what the birds make in the eaves.”

“Ay, well, we’d music to bed and board,” said his son. “An’ then, when we were grown lads, we danced to fiddle instead. Nobody could ever play up our feet like the old dad.”

“Many a lad and lass it’s danced into love.”

“Us among ’em—didn’t it, Agnes?—us an’ all! We’re married folk now,” Thomas added, “but I reckon we can dance a bit still.”

Agnes finished the pot, and her eyes brightened with a new idea. “Get Father to give us a tune,” she said, “an’ we’ll show him what we can do, right off.”

“It’s over soon, I doubt.” Thomas hesitated, taken aback. “Ay, well, why not?” he added, with a laugh. “’Tisn’t every day as’ll bring the old man home!”

“Nay, it’s over soon, as you say.” Agnes affected to withdraw. “We’d best not worrit him. He’s tired.”

“Nay, not I!” A sudden lightness and strength came into Kit’s voice, and his face brightened and he tried to smile. “I’ll be main glad,” he said, and straightened his back. All his fiddler’s pride was aroused by the implication that he was too tired to answer the call to his art. His hands went eagerly to the smooth pegs, as he started to tune. Life and meaning came back into his eyes....

“You’re bound to be a bit done, all the same. I reckon we’d best let the music be, to-night.”

“I’m as fresh as a lemon, I tell ye!” the old man said. His tone was suddenly testy, almost sharp, and the young folk smiled at each other aside.

“Ay, well, then, Thomas, shove the table back. We’ll show Father we’ve got a foot to us both yet....”

Thomas went for the big table with zest, his heart light in him now as a sail at sea. As if by a miracle the whole atmosphere had cleared, transformed in a moment by a simple speech. Now it was sane and happy and almost gay, just as they had always expected it to be. He had been nearly troubled to tears by his father’s look—that hang-dog look, that look of a trapped beast. In the back kitchen he had questioned Agnes as to what they had done ... what they had left undone ... what was wrong. He couldn’t be homesick for Marget’s after all he had suffered at her hands, and yet even at Marget’s he had never looked like that. There were changes about the place, of course—and none too soon; he couldn’t have hoped to find it just the same. And yet all the time he seemed to be looking out—waiting for something ... seeking—what?

“He’s strange—nowt else,” Agnes said in reply, hiding herself behind a cupboard door.

“Strange? In his own spot?”

“Ay.”

“Land’s sake! Whatever for?”

“Nay, I don’t know,” she answered, still hiding behind the door. “Old folks is easy put about, but he’ll not be strange long.” Her own confidence had been sadly shaken by the failure of the meal, and then suddenly she had remembered the room upstairs. They ought to have known that coming home made people sorry as well as glad, but the night when it came would bring its special peace. To-morrow they would look back and wonder what had gone awry.... But she did not want to remind Thomas of that upstairs room. He would be telling his father before he could be stopped, clumsily forestalling the first effect. So she listened in silence and let him worry away, pushing his cap further and further to the back of his puzzled head. All she did was to hide behind the door, and say in the pause that “he wouldn’t be strange long.”

And then, after all, the change had come about long before there was any sign of night. Thomas couldn’t help feeling terribly set up because at last he had thought of the tactful thing to say. It was true that it was Agnes who had suggested the dance, but the opening remark about the fiddle had been his. They should have turned the talk upon fiddles long before, and then perhaps they would have had a decent meal. The old man’s trouble, whatever it had been, seemed to have slipped right away now that he was about to give them a tune. The very look of him had altered, almost out of belief. His eyes were young again and his movements were certain and brisk. He leaned against the table with the fiddle under his chin, trying the single notes with his finger and the chords with his fine bow. The fiddle answered him in a full, penetrating voice, ringing loud in the airy house that had no neighbour but the sea. He bent his ear to it and fixed his eyes on the strings, his whole being absorbed by the presence behind the voice....

“I doubt there’s not over much room.” Thomas gave the last piece of furniture a final shove. “There’s not that many on us, though, to get in each other’s road. I reckon we don’t need Harry Dixon’s barn.”

“There’s nowt like a dance in a barn.” Kit spoke dreamily, without so much as lifting his head. “There it be, all light and laughing inside, and outside all the gert night looking in through the doors. It’s summer, happen, wi’ folk coming through the meadow-grass, holding their gowns to keep’em off the dew. An’ t’others coming along the lanes, wi’ the sound o’ beck-water rushing by.”

“Ay. Yon’s how it was,” Thomas said gently. “Wasn’t it, lass?”

“Ay,” Agnes said, and sighed. “A bonny time!”

“There’s bettermer times now,” he insisted stoutly, but she shook her head. She knew already that there were no “bettermer” times.

Now they had cleared the room as much as they could, and were standing together in the middle of the floor. It had hurt Agnes a little to have to upset the room, even in so pleasant a cause as this. She had spent so long in planning it all out, and now you might have thought, from the look of things, that it was the night before a sale. The new chair, that had sat so smugly on the hearth, had been pushed into a corner to look on, as well as the little footstool that she had covered with red cloth. This was the chair’s first lesson in life, if she had known; it would never be quite such a smug outsider, after this.... But she had liked to see it neatly on the hearth, just as she had preferred the table spread with food, and this sudden dismantling hurt her homely pride. Yet the comfort and order had done nothing to cheer the poor old man who was looking for a home. He hadn’t even begun to look happy until it was done away. She felt a moment’s terrible qualm for the sanctuary upstairs....

“Now, then, folks—get yourselves set!” Kit stopped his tuning and threw up his head, his eyes roving commandingly over the room. He refused a chair and settled himself firmly against the table edge. His face had hardened a little, and his mouth was stern. He was master now, as he had always been when he played, half-god and artist, never the hireling of the crowd. Gentle as he was in everything else, he was always supremely the autocrat in this. Once he had quitted a ball at its very height, because the dancers had gone against his will. Now, as he motioned the couple into place, the sweep of his bow was like the sweep of a sword....

“Baint it fine to see him so pleased?” Agnes whispered, as she took her stand. Just for a moment they felt foolish standing there, this serious, new-wed couple with their brand-new house. But the dancing that was bred in them soon got the better of that, as well as the growing atmosphere of the past. Almost at once they threw themselves into their parts as Kit had thrown himself into his. Thomas became the fiercely-diffident youth, whose feet had always been nimbler than his tongue; Agnes, the spoilt favourite of a crowded ball. She turned to the old man with a smile that had won her many a tune before to-day.

“Be it a reel, Mr. Fiddler? I hope it’s a reel.”

“Ay, it’s a reel,” he conceded with a lordly nod, though he had settled to give them a reel from the very start.

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 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. Over the house there was no longer the clear arch of the evening light, but a roof of darkness, powdered with steady stars. The man and the girl felt dancers all around; sometimes they touched a shoulder or an arm. They were all waiting for the fiddle to begin, lasses in bright colours, and lads in their best clothes. Now and then somebody laughed or threw a challenge across the room, but as soon as the music started they would all be dumb. Through the mist showed the warm colours and shining hair, bright eyes and gleaming teeth, young, happy faces, and figures come to their first strength. They were all friends and acquaintances who were there, folks who had danced together through the round of the years. Agnes saw smiling girlish faces in the crowd, and men’s eyes that smiled and lingered on hers. Once she saw Marget, young and trim and cold; and Bob watching her, sulking by a door. She saw Thomas, the Thomas she had lost, who was no more the man she had married than any in the room. What that Thomas had given her she would never find again, the breathless vision of the unexplored. The dogged face, the brooding, pleading eyes, the touch of a spirit strange to her as yet—even the memory of them caught her by the throat. She found her heart beating and her cheek grown hot. This life in her hands to crown or throw away ... no, there was never another moment quite like that.

The little sordidness came creeping back. “I wish Marget could clap eyes on the old man now!”

“Ay, so do I!”

Kit waved again. “Whisht, will ye! I’m just off.”

“Right, Father! We’re ready.”

“We’re all set.”

“Now!”

He lifted his bow high, and the atmosphere tightened like a string. It was like waiting for the striking of a flame, the first touch of lips, or the dead coming out of a grave. All the grace of youth was in the curve of his arm; the certainty of his knowledge in his thrilling finger-tips. He leaned his ear to the fiddle as to a secret bound to be told. His face held expression behind expression, like the endless perspective of images in a pool, but at the back of all was the passionate gravity of the artist at his task. Old as he was, the sense of power that was strong in the others was stronger far in him. All who had ever danced to his piping waited upon his nod; feet by the hundred ached for the loosed tune. Now, now, before all the gods he was a god, as well....

And then slowly, as the note still hung in the balance, his face chilled and changed. The fiddle was as full of music as it would hold, but just for the moment it would not give it up. All those months of silence it had been singing to itself, and now the racing torrent was choking its throat. Slowly his bow sank ... slowly ... and sank....

“Nay, it’s ganged.”

“What’s ganged, Father?”

“The music.”

“It’ll come back right enough,” Thomas said in a cheerful tone. “Let’s see if I can mind the tune.” He pursed his lips to whistle, thought a moment, and began. “Yon’s it.”

“Ay, yon’s it.” He bent to the fiddle again. “I’ve got it now.” The moment that was like a sharpened string drew to its length again and snapped like a string.... “Nay, I’ve not.”

“It’s like this, you’ll think on,” Agnes put in. She started to hum the air in a gay little voice, and Kit nodded his head and listened and said “Ay.” She beat out the time with her foot, and the fiddle went up and down. Then he lifted his bow and waited ... and listened again.... “Nay, it’s ganged.”

“We’ll give him a lead, missis!” Thomas cried, and began to whistle the music very loud. At once they flung themselves eagerly into the dance, lithe, earnest figures making their neat, light steps. As they danced he whistled and she sang, until the house was filled with the tune from floor to roof. The very flags of the kitchen seemed to sway to the air; it seemed impossible that the old man could not hear. Faster and faster they speeded it up, and, as they whirled, their eyes met once and again, and then they smiled. Every moment they looked for the fiddle to join in, putting fresh life and rhythm into their feet. And instead they heard the old man’s voice crying aloud, harsh with the harshness of great pain and fear. He struck the table soundingly with his open palm.

“Whisht, will ye? Whisht! Didn’t I say it was ganged?”

Now he was straight on his feet and gazing blankly round, not seeming to see them where they had fallen apart.... “There’s nowt left o’ the things I used to know.”

“You’re out o’ practice,” Thomas murmured in an uncertain tone; and Agnes added—“It’s Marget’s blame, for never letting you play.”

“Ay, but she let me nurse fiddle on my knee, and tunes was singing in my head all the time. Now I’ve come back and they waint sing no more.”

“You’ll see they’ll sing right enough afore so long.”

He covered them again with the same unseeing eyes.

“I’d ha’ done better to stop where I were.”

Agnes put out her hand at that with a little cry. “Nay, now, Father, you mustn’t talk like that!”

“At Marget’s I see this spot as plain as plain, and my missis stirring through the rooms. I see the bits o’ sticks we bought when we was wed, and the hearth where we set together of a night. But now I’m back I can’t see any o’ they things no more.”

“Times change, dad,” pleaded his son, “but we’ll make you comfortable, I’m sure.”

“You can’t bring back the dead to the lone living. You can’t put back the laylock by the door.”

“Nay, I wish I could!” Thomas’s face fell.

“At Marget’s I had ’em both.”

“It’s your old home, think on,” Agnes said wistfully, but he shook his head.

“’Tisn’t home when the music’s all ganged.”

A silence fell on the three of them after that, the silence of helplessness ceasing from futile speech. There are things that cannot happen to our desire because we have stopped the way for them ourselves. The gains of life are all of them had through loss, and for every coin that we take at least we must put a counter down. The old and the young folks had both shut a door at their backs, and when they tried to get through to each other the doors were barred. Kit knew that, since the music had failed, there was no place for him here. The music could only live where the dream lived, and he had left it behind. He had always risked the counters of life for fairy gold, and now all that remained to him was his invisible treasure of the heart. Comfort, position, peace in his last days—all must go into the fire to serve the fine flame of his dream. He was only a vague old man who had made a muddle of life, but firmly and fightingly he was sure of that. There was nothing here for him but the shell of lovely things grown strange. That which he had made for himself he might have, but nothing else. “For what we take we must pay, and the price is cruel hard.”

And Thomas and Agnes, with their unaccepted oblation of satisfaction and thanks? They, too, had taken, and would have to pay....

“You’ll settle after a bit,” Thomas argued, but his voice was flat.

“I’ll never settle, not I.”

“It’s early days to say that.”

For the first time Kit looked him firmly in the face.

“I’m going back to Marget,” he declared aloud.

Agnes uttered a sharp cry, and Thomas flushed. “Nay, Father, you’re not,” he answered, setting his mouth.

“Ay, but I am that. I shouldn’t ha’ come. Folks as gang once should bide away.”

“What, she’s as bad to you as an old witch!” Agnes broke out. “She’s been bad to you all along. She doesn’t do right by you at all.”

“I care nowt for that if I have the rest.” The stress and anguish had gone out of his face, as well as the look that sought and couldn’t find. He looked older and frailer, but he looked certain and secure. The little strength that he had was going fast, but he would never have to try it like this again. He took a firm step towards the door, but Thomas put himself in between.

“Nay, then, you’ll gang none!” he said through his shut teeth. The dark flush rose in his face to the roots of his hair. His voice was suddenly brutal, fierce and coarse. “What-like fools d’ye think we’ll look?” he cried; “and after all the trouble we’ve took an’ all?”

“I’ve got to gang,” Kit told him, looking him in the eyes.

“Well, you waint, an’ that’s flat!”

“Let me gang,” the old man begged.

“Couldn’t you bide just the one night?” Agnes coaxed. She came across to him and laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll feel a deal better in t’morn, I’m sure, and it’s real comfortable upstairs.”

“I’m feared to gang upstairs....” He shrank away from her, letting her hand drop. His eyes hated her—hostile, terrible eyes. He returned to the door. “Now, lad, get by.”

“Nay.”

He let himself go then, and became all fear and rage, a wild old creature fighting and raving to be free. “I’ll not bide—I waint!” he cried, his voice rising and cracking as it rose. “I can’t bide. I mun seek they things as is gone an’ lost!” He clubbed the fiddle and came at his son with it raised in the air. “Mun I crack fiddle over thy danged head?”

“Let him be, the poor old man!” Agnes cried, weeping aloud, but Thomas’s attitude had already changed. The futile act of defiance had shown him plainly the nature of his father’s need. He must be out of himself to risk his precious fiddle like that! He felt ashamed of himself, too, for bringing that evil into his kindly face. He moved away from the door, his expression softened, almost shocked. “Don’t take on,” he said gently. “You shall gang if you want.”

“I can gang to Marget?” Kit demanded, hard of faith.

“Ay, if you’re that set.”

“We’d best be off, then, or we’ll be missing Bob.” He was still shaking a little in every limb, but now it was with excitement and relief. Close to the door, “Where’s t’bundle?” he asked, wheeling round in a sudden scare. Marget would give it him, he knew, if he left the bundle behind. When he had left Marget’s he had seemed half-dazed, hypnotised, as it were, into going against his will. Now he was all bustle and business, thinking for himself, straining every nerve to get away....

“Here’s t’bundle.” Thomas took the red handkerchief from his wife.

“You’ve gone and hid my hat!” Again his voice rose.

“Nay, it’s here.”

The sun was leaving the kitchen at long last, but it was still smoothly golden on the sands. In garden and orchard the shadows were growing long, and the yew had a passing brother on the ground. Out at sea there was a new life stirring, a new tide coming out of the deep, but where Agnes stood in the kitchen a vapoury shadow grew, pointing and reaching and deepening towards the stair.... Suddenly she ran to the old man and caught him round the neck.

“Eh, if you would nobbut try!” she said, with tears. “I can’t abide to think o’ you going back to yon hard woman and poor house!”

He waited patiently while she held him, but his eyes moved on. “It’s never a poor house,” he said, “where folks find their dreams.... Good-bye, my lass,” he added, kindly enough, and hurried out, and did not stumble as he crossed the door. Thomas had to lengthen his stride to catch him on the path.

“I’ll be best wi’ Marget,” Agnes heard him say, and almost at once she heard him say it again. She watched him until he was through the garden gate, but he never once looked back. Out of the sea-window she saw the tide come in.

“_Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast ... nothing but well and fair._”

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