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.