Beautiful end

by Constance Holme

He tried to comfort himself with the thought that things would be easier at home, now that the burden and bugbear had gone away. Of course, they would miss the money to some extent, but there would be one mouth less to feed, as well as more room in the kitchen and less friction—perhaps—at meals. Marget would have no more tales to tell him at night of the bother his father had given her in the day. He would not have to lie in the dark and listen to his crimes—how he had torn his jacket or got lost, or sniffed at his pudding or broken a chair. He would not hear her beating the old man with her tongue, in default of the blows that she dealt her weaker prey. And at least he would be free of the dread that tragedy might be the end—some sudden violence, perhaps, or the river under the trees. He could sleep now without hearing the old man’s cough; it would be somebody else’s job to see to that. He could go to work unhaunted by the old man’s boots, gaping and sagging and leaking in the wet. Thomas would see to the boots and Agnes to the cough, and to other little things like socks and shirts. Kit would be housed and fed as he had not been for years, and he could play his fiddle again on his old marsh. Bob knew what that special deprivation must have meant; he was true enough son of Kit to guess at that. Things seemed to be looking up for them all round, and he knew he ought to be glad if he couldn’t be proud. At least the burden was off the failure’s back, which had more than enough to carry, as it was. But all that he really felt was jealous shame, and a hope that Thomas, too, might somehow fail.

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. Bob’s words came out of a mist that covered the immediate past, like the gulls he had often heard crying over a foggy sea. He slipped right away from it through the years, as the swifts dipped and dropped about the steeple under the hill. But no matter where he was, the things around him were always good. The steady sun warmed him and the air was cool in his throat. His eyes rested themselves on hedge and dyke, and line upon long line of sand; but all the time he saw as much with his heart as with his eyes.

All the days that had found him on that road were present with him to-night;—golden days, such as this, and the quiet, grey days that seemed scarcely to draw a breath from dawn to dusk. On those days the whole world was grey, not as if hidden by a veil, but grey-washed by a broad yet feathery brush. Wet days, many and long, when the rain blowing in from the sea was as level as the sun; mornings, fiercely cold, with the north wind dropping straight from the high snows; evenings, drenched with mist and haunted by pale sheaves, peering over the road at the lapping tide. Moons world without end he had seen stand over the marsh, the first moon of the year, light and thin as the edge of a tossed coin, to the great harvest moon that was not like an English moon at all. There was something in the nature of Divine revelation about the moon that came with the sheaves, a touch of the mystical meaning that shone so plain from the Bethlehem Star. It was not only that it was so big and bright, as if it had really eaten all the rest. It had a tremendous personality of its own, a calm force that could be felt. You were never alone on the marsh while a moon walked with you there; but when the harvest moon rose up, it was like a majestic stranger in a room.

Days of storm, when he had to fight his way at his horse’s head; and whirling snow-days, with the ditches level with the road. Summer, when the tall grasses almost hid the dykes, and the tall hedges all but hid the fields. Spring, with a wail beside that of the curlew in the air, and lambs like new flowers all over the coloured carpet by the sea.

Nights, too, that would never in any world come back to him again ... and dawns when, returning from some dance, he had run from the sun that was hunting him over the hill. Out to sea all was still dark, and the road before him unsubstantial as a cloud. There might be sea to each side of him for all he knew, for land that has once belonged to the sea has always the feeling of sea-ground in the night. The music he had made was still in his brain, making itself again to the horse’s hoofs and the beat of a hidden train along the coast. The fiddle inside his coat was thrilling and singing like his brain. Not for long after they reached home would either of them be still.

And then, over the chain that cuts England in two, bursting out over the top like a man who rushes the last few feet of a climb, the sun took the marsh and the Lake mountains in its stride. 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. In all the waking world he and his horse alone were sinking into sleep, and though the river was still sombre when he reached its banks, it was drawing in light each moment from the sky. The farm, when he saw it at last, seemed painted for him against the tide, with the yew a black finger against a whitened wall. All the air about it was still and sunshot and transparent and pure. Suddenly he saw a hand open a window upstairs, and knew that his wife had heard him on the road.

Often enough, if the night was very wild, he found her waiting for him at the gate of the yard. The tide would be thundering and swirling behind the bank, swaying and swishing as if pent in a great, shaken pot. The waves tearing across the bay were swifter than any boat, and the shock of them striking the bank was like the shock of rolled logs against the gates of the earth. In the black dark that was full of a million spouts the showers of spray shot up to meet the rain. It was hard to tell where the tide really stopped, even with that frustrated roar at the sea-wall. Any step, so it seemed, might find them the black flood at their very feet. They had known it steal its way into the garden before now; into the yard, and, once only, into the house. In that upstairs room where his dream always came to an end, they had sat and listened to the water surging below. They could hear the furniture bumping like anchored boats, and the water slapping and gurgling at the stair. They had scarcely said a word to each other all the time, because of the wind that was howling round the house. There might have been only one building in the world, and the wind sworn to tear it down. All they could do was to sit and wait and wonder when the gale would allow the tide to turn. They were not really afraid of the raving and threshing of the sea, scarcely more than a man is afraid of the bark of his own dog. They barely troubled themselves to guess where the rising water might end. They did not picture the room grown black with the drowned light, and filled like a vault until the ceiling was reached....

This was the Great Storm, but there were many lesser ones, when, gripping each other while he clung to the horse, they groped to the stable by the lantern swung on her arm. The gulls would be screaming in clouds above their heads, but the dark and the wind hid their wild swinging and their cries. Only when the late dawn began and the bigger water drew back, they would see them sweeping and plunging about the house, filling the garden with curving shadows and faint gleams of feathered white....

They did not meet a soul as they jogged along; none at least, that Bob was able to see. At intervals, somebody hailed them from a field, and the voice, after reaching them, travelled out on the sand. Hard, brown hands went up over eyes that saw the trap all black against the gold. Everybody on the marsh knew that Kit was coming home, and most would have liked a look at him and a word. If all tales were true, he must be as glad as a crowned king, and they would have liked to tell him they were glad as well. Besides, the folks at home would be sure to ask how he was, and whether he looked half-clemmed, as it was said. Ay, and if he was getting daft, as Marget had put about, and whether the same old fiddle was fiddling still. But the trap went on, and the questions remained unsolved. Only Bob’s dull voice came back to them over the marsh.

The old man did not hear the hails, because he was busy listening to other talk. Now he was nodding his head at all manner of folk, and stretching down his hand for a hearty shake. Sometimes he checked the trap with a tug at the rein, and kept Bob waiting while he had a crack with this body and then with that. Bob thought he was taking a look round, and let the old man sit as long as he liked, but Kit was doing a great deal more than look. He was puzzled to find so many folk out and about on the marsh at the same time, but he was more than pleased to set eyes on them again. Every single one of them wanted a crack with the old man who was so terribly busy going home, and his own tongue was as lish as most, for the matter of that—so lish that it wouldn’t rest quiet in his mouth. It had been stiff and frozen for many a long month, but now it was getting away like a beck in spate. He seemed to himself to be talking very loud, and to laugh a great deal, and to hear the other folks talking like a lot of crows. It was surely a rare stroke of luck that so many should be about just when old Fiddlin’ Kit was busy coming home! He found it as stimulating as any dance, with figures whirling over a crowded floor. The fiddle was quivering under his coat, as it always did at once if he raised his voice. He would have taken it out and played the folk a tune, but he was never finished with all he wanted to say. Bob was forgotten completely, but he did not mind, because he saw and heard nobody but the peewit and the gull.