The Three Furlongers

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

"Not he!—he's probably off for the day, to fiddle to those blasted kids, if they're not too full of plum-pudding to dance. By Christopher, Janey—he's mad."

The dark was gathering stealthily—crawling up from the Kent country in the east, burying the wet winter meadows of Surrey and Sussex in damp and dusk and fogs. In the west a crimson furnace smouldered, showing up a black outline of hills. Moisture was everywhere—the roads gleamed with mud, the banks were sticky with damp tangled grass, and drops quivered and glistened on the bare twigs of the hedges.

A great sense of disheartenment was everywhere. It was Christmas day, and hundreds of hearths were bright—but outside, away from humanity and its cheerful dreams, all Nature mourned, in the curse of the winter solstice, drowned in the water-flood. Furlonger had left his hearth with its cheery flames and loved faces and warm, sweet dreams of goodwill, and was out alone with Nature, who had no warmth nor love nor make-believe, only wet winds and winter desolation.

He came to Dormans Land. The blinds were down, and through the chinks he saw the leap and spurt of firelight. He stood where three roads met, and the wind swept up from Lingfield, where the first stars had hung their lanterns. He began to play—a dreary, springless tune, that struck cold into the hearts of the few it reached through their closed windows. He played the song of Christmas as Nature keeps it—the festival of life's drowning and despair.

No children came to dance. They were happy beside their parents, with sweets and crackers and fun. They were keeping Christmas as man keeps it, and drew down the blinds on Nature keeping it outside, and the lone fiddler who felt it more congenial to keep it with Nature than to keep it with men.

Nigel stopped playing and looked around him into the gloom. He felt disappointed because the children had not come to dance. He had broken away from his brother and sister because he wanted those dancing children so badly—and they had not come. Perhaps he had better go further up into the village, since the children were not playing in the street as usual, but in their homes.

So he went up, and stood between the church and the Royal Oak. The place seemed deserted—only a great, empty car stood outside the inn. Nigel began to play, but again there was no response. The darkness came fluttering towards him from the back streets of the village, and seemed to creep right into his heart.

Then suddenly it struck him that he played too doleful a tune for the children. They liked lively airs—they found it hard to dance to those bizarre mournful extempores of his. So he started "O Caro Nome," and when that had jigged and rippled to an end, he played airs from Flotow's Martha, and then his old favourite, "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls."

The street was still empty. From a cottage close by came the wheeze of a harmonium. He stood drearily snapping the strings with his fingers. Then suddenly he realised how ridiculous he was—playing in the village street, in the damp and the cold and the dark, when he ought to be at home, eating and drinking and singing and joking because Christ was born in a manger.

He turned away—he was a fool. Why did he like seeing children dance?—why did it hurt him so that they were better employed to-day? He did not know. His life, his emotions, his heart, were like the twilight, a dark and cheerless mystery. He could not understand half what he felt in his own breast. He was himself only a child dancing in the dusk, to an unknown fiddler playing a half-comprehended tune.