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.