III

Once they were past the turn, Bob let the horse slip into a walk, and moved in his seat with something like relief. Now they were out of reach of the following eyes, and especially of Marget’s terrible eyes. Even they, piercing as they were, could not bore through stone and rising earth. The remains of his youth awoke at this touch of adventure and escape, and he looked about him from side to side, and whistled as if compelled by the rhythm of the hoofs. The old man stirred, too, and looked about, and suddenly, with a half-mechanical lifting of the hand, he began to eat his buttered scone. He forgot it again, however, after a couple of bites, because his memories crowded in too fast.

“Houses never outstared you on the marsh”

“Shore-grasses never really still”

They came to the twilight spot on the river bank where he had played until Marget found him out, but he barely looked at it as he drove past. He was a different person to-day from the shabby fiddler who had played through stolen hours to an idle ring. A charm had begun to work after he reached the turn, sothat he was no longer the down-trodden creature rated by a shrew. Now he was just the simple old man who had lived at the sea’s edge with a fiddle under his arm. Marget’s voice was no longer in his ears, but the voice of the peewit and gull and the rush of the incoming tide. And Bob, too, was changed from a dull epitome of mistakes to a soul who remembered the pride and spring of life. If Kit had turned to look at him just then, he would have seen him a moment in his splendid youth, with the wrestler’s steady eye and muscular grace. He remembered him conqueror in many a ring, and wondered what had become of his cups and belts. They were not at the cottage, he felt sure of that. Marget would have been sure to say they were “in the road,” and at least he would have seen the children using them in their play. Bob’s exploits were never mentioned in that house, because Marget was of opinion that wrestling was low. Probably the trophies had gone long since to provide other things more necessary if less proud. But in the old days there had been a grand show of them on the dresser at the farm, polished glories that, when the dusk came, made silver points of light both above and within the oak.

The river still ran by them on the left, and beyond it was the climbing sweep of the park,with the belts of wood binding it east and west. Once, coming home in the dawn from a dance on the far side, he had found a little fawn in a dim glade. It was said to be lucky to find a new-born fawn. Over the hill-top the wishing-trees used to stand, but he had never been back there since they were cut down. Things couldn’t alter as long as you didn’t go back. They stayed the same while you kept them so in your mind.... The further wood was slowly growing black, because of the hill between it and the west. At the foot of the wood was the long, clean-coloured house, with its pillars and flat windows and wide, stately steps. Kit saw his own life clearly when he looked at the house, because the lives within and around the house were bound together like a bundle of sticks. Through all his memories the romance of a higher class ran like a silken thread through a homespun cloth. High and low, they had seen together so much that was the same. They had watched death and life changing the country-side, and awakened each morning to the gift of the same day. They had done many things together, too, and where one had done them alone, the one that looked on seemed still to have his share. Glancing back from a great age, it was hard to tell where the lives really drew apart. Rich or poor, they belonged to thesame scheme of things, and had their final share in the same earth.

He could not have told you how many squires he had known. The old family had died off fast, and in the multitude of their names he could not be certain which had gone churchwards first. He was always put to it when asked to say whether Philip Edmund or Edmund John had died before the succession honours were barely his; whether John Philip or merely John had lived to the striking age of fifty-one. One who had lived to be really old had died when Kit was a lad; a fine, old-fashioned autocrat who knew his place. Folks saluted on all sides when he walked up the street, and the women had had to go in and shut their doors. Perhaps he was at his best in the church over the hill, with its hacked Crusader monument and its floor paved with names. All who served him had to come to church, wearing the livery of their class. Even the keepers from over the sands had to be there, crossing the river-channel when they could. The head keeper wore a scarlet coat, he thought, and the others green, and the men with the hound-dogs, blue. Coachmen and grooms came in livery, too, with buttons that shone like little moving moons. Through the deep, diamond-paned windows you could see the churchyard full of gold laburnum trees, and oldhouses with their feet among the tombs, and luminous patches of morning sky. Those who had been rich or poor in their lives shared the gold of the laburnum equally in death. Nobody nodded in the sermon under the Squire’s eye, or moved a foot to the aisle until he had left the church.

Now they were passing the agent’s house on the right, a creepered dwelling facing river and hill. It was many a long year since he had been inside, but a certain room was always clear in his mind. He had gone to ask for the farm when his father died, and taken with him the lass he meant to wed. They had sat stiffly on the leather chairs, speaking their parts as bravely as they could. Ann had been far the smarter of the two, spoken up better and known what she was about. Likely enough they had got the farm because of her, but he wasn’t the only man who had to own to that. She was always the better horse, as everybody knew....

Now, when he thought of the room, it was like a picture in a book, and the shy young couple seemed like pictures, too. Yet all his life he had thought of Ann as she was then, with her dark stuff gown and the colour bright in her cheeks, and his real self was still that daft young man, twisting his cap on the edge of an office chair. Folks said you lived your life before you weretwenty-five, and that all the rest was simply looking back. Marget would have it he had changed, but change couldn’t touch that picture in his mind. Ann and Kit still sat on their leather chairs, smiling at him, steadfastly alive.

The plantation further on which he had seen cut down, was grown again just as tall and thick. The road was dark and damp under the trees, cool in summer and muddy in the wet. Down this hill he had once seen timber-waggons running away. It must have been winter because it had snowed in the night, and the sky was black and the road just sprinkled white. The river was the colour of the blade of an axe, and running as if it was out of control, too. The children were coming from school when the first waggon got away, with a team of three horses and a load of larch. The long, clean poles, straight as a ship’s masts, swung like an anchored boat to the incoming tide. The driver was running close in front of the wheel, lying back on the reins and shouting all the way. The children scattered like feathers thrashed from a bed, and collected again to watch the waggon take the turn, skidding and swinging broadways to the road. The other waggon braked along the wall, driving a furrow in mortar and moss and fern. Kit remembered it all as if it had been last week,—the fine bite in the air and thethundering hoofs, the musical clink of the brasses and the fierce clanking of the chains, the swing and heave and weight and length of the load, the great horses, the nerve and strength of the men.... When you were old you liked to think of these things, to remember that not everybody grew old at the same time. Once he had seen Bob lift a trap through a gate with the help of the cowman from the Hall. The broad shoulders and strong wrists had raised the wheels like toys, and the Squire had sat in the trap above their heads and laughed. And there were still men to do these things though Bob had fallen out. Youth was still in the world, and hands were firm on a rein....

Bob pulled up on the bridge before he turned to the marsh, to let him look at the river from either side. And first he looked at it sliding through the park, between grass banks and bulrushes and dreaming, stooping trees. Through the trees he saw flashes of red and white that were cattle coming down to drink, and where the sun had left the water black there was the sudden whiteness of still swans. The ghosts of themselves gleamed at them from beneath, and when the cattle stooped to drink there would be coloured cattle in the water, too. The fish were rising as the shadows grew, stirring the river with their delicate rings. It was hard to rememberin the peace that all water had its toll, even this calm dreamer shedding its gold coat. Yet it, too, had its weeds that could drag a swimmer down, its black spot of tradition where the brothers had been drowned, pools where the lonely had sought a greater solitude still. But to-night the peace of the evening was glad peace, because of the Tyranny of Marget overpast.

On one side of the bridge the river was making ready for the night, but on the other it was still sunny and awake. It had still to get out on to the sands, to catch the last drop of gold as it fell from the lingering day. There were no bridges or banks to gather it into shade, or trees that hushed the water with shadow long before the sun was under the sea. Once safely out it ran in a glinting length in which nothing was mirrored but the sky. This was the river he knew best, that was never afraid of the lonely flat or the Terrible Friend that was the tide. In the park and the village it was cluttered and darkened by the growing things on its banks, like the minds of folks who lived in a close street. Here, on the edge of the world, nobody’s shadow could tread on your heels. He drew a breath of relief as they turned for the moss-road, and took another bite from his buttered scone.

The moss-road, running close beside the sands, with the sea-wall on its left like a ruled fence,had grassy borders dropping to grass-grown dykes. Beyond the hedge to the right the fields lay level and square, planned for the easy handling of the plough. The long lines of the roots were at right angles to the long line of the road, and when there was wind over the young corn it billowed across it in unbroken waves. Marsh and sands were full of these darting lines with their sense of flight, as if they were arrows shot from the bow of the eye.

Dropping behind them to the south was the hamlet above the beach that had once been known as a port. All its white faces were snowy in the sun, but there were no sails slipping to rest in front of it to-day. Yet it was not so long since ships had sailed from there to trade with Spain. Kit remembered the old merchant who had owned the ships, with his comb of white hair, round spectacles and benevolent grey eyes. The Spanish trade had died with him, and seemed like a fairy tale to-day. He had been everybody’s friend who needed a friend, and there had been hands in his pockets all his life.

The sky in front of them seemed packed to the sun with hills, the crowded purple mountains threaded with the dales. They looked empty as hills of the moon from across the bay, but Kit had many friends along their flanks. The folk there knew to the full what winter meant, andrain falling like rods from the high tops, and nights that were endless, whether wild or still, and becks at the flood and the great drama of the snow. From the marsh the hills were soft as blue clouds poised light on each other’s backs, but Kit knew that their bodies were strong soil and their bones of iron. He knew the rough grass that clothed them as Nebuchadnezzar was clothed with hair. He knew the exalted joy of mounting on their backs, like riding some mighty horse across the earth. He knew their crag-faces and screes, their smooth, green slides and rocky ghylls. He knew their moorland and moss-hags, their bog-pools and lost tarns. He knew the lone, white-fronted farms, and the becks rushing at their doors. And in the midst of the loneliness he had only to climb some peak, and find himself at home because looking out to sea.

He had often gone up to play in the dales, and of all his dances he had liked these best. First of all came the journey, which was always an adventure in itself. Some sudden turn from the high road to the north, and he was plunged in a twisting lane between the hills. Already, perhaps, it would be dusk, because of the barrier to the west, which grew and darkened and grew as the shadows gathered and trailed. He himself was small as a gnat on the thread of road,between the monsters soaring on either side. There would be water talking out of the shadows here and there, hidden streams and falls with the last light flashing on their manes. Always he heard the water-talk when he went into the dales, because it was so different from the voice of his own sea. And, greater than the water, was the stillness, that nothing was ever big enough to break, neither the shrill dogs nor the shepherds’ whistle nor the cry of the sheep. Even thunder and wind could only trouble it for a time, like the floating of furious smoke across a glass. Behind them you felt the imperturbable patience of a greater strength. It was a different stillness from the empty silences of the marsh. It was the live stillness of great bodies, crowded side by side, whom even Nature seemed powerless to stir.

His journey’s end was always some farmhouse, where he had a meal before starting for the dance. From these dwellings, which he often saw only by night, he carried pictures of shadowy rafters and firelit walls, blind staircases to which he trusted himself as to a horse knowing its way, and clean, bare rooms upstairs where a lighted candle seemed to bring the mountains into the house itself. After the meal he groped his way at a lantern’s tail to the festive barn. He could trace the hedges by theshadowy line along their tops, and smell the smell of earth that is damp in the night, and hear the sheep-wail out of the void. And then, in the midst of the dark, that was either smooth blackness or full of looming shapes, the door of the barn would open a yellow port-hole to the night. He left the night with regret, although he grew in stature as he went in, and the fiddle, too, increased in weight and power. Out in the dale it had seemed a tinkling thing, but once inside its voice was proud and strong. On the rough platform or the corner chair where they spent the night, he and his fiddle came proudly into their own.

Sometimes he got to the barn first and had time to look about the great, bare place that to-night was the heart of the dale. The knotted floor was well swept, and slippery with shredded wax. Forms were set along the walls, with clean paper at their backs, and high above that were the glistening, steady lamps. There were food and drink on tables at the end, white cloths and bright tea-urns and polished cups and plates. Far over all was the darkness of the roof, untouched by the light as the dale through the big doors. Outside the door, the opening had shone gold; on this, it was only a gaping square of black.

But the lads and lasses were waiting, as a rule,clear-skinned, dark-haired folk with still, grey eyes, and feet that were tapping the floor before he had tuned. He thought about them as he played with a steady swing, of their lives and the lives that had made them what they were. He thought of their old names, and the way they bred so true to type and strain. He thought of the long silences in which they spent their days, of their courtesies and roughnesses, their simple-mindedness and reserve, their inherited knowledge of the lonely places of the earth. He thought of their houses, with rafters and wide hearths, their worn flags and sudden steps, their deep sills and oak stairs. He thought of the windows which, at break of day, held pictures never seen on any wall. He thought of the hills where they walked, that were rich with Viking names and cradled the Viking dead. He thought of the secrets of the hills, of their mysterious dangers and almost-forgotten rites. It was a hundred years, perhaps, since they lighted the last fire on Baal’s Hill; less than seventy since the wildfire had gone round. The fire-charmers were barely dead, or the tooth-charmers, or the old women who knew the herbs. Folk lived long in the dales, and the old secrets longer still. Gods were not of necessity fled because the sacrifice was past. There was still that feeling up in the wastes that out of nothingsomething might appear. There were lakes in which drowned bodies never rose, and terrible winds which could slay you in a breath. Folks said there were spirits who hated the railways crossing the moors, and were glad when the big trains came to harm in the night. Things were as strange as when there were devils on Cross Fell, and the idol lay in its bed at Kirkby Thore. The dale-folk were wonderful to Kit, because of the mysteries in their blood, but often he found them rather pitiful, too. Often they seemed to him, as he played, like children dancing in a lighted cave. He thought of the cave as set in a blackened void, with giants of darkness stooping over its roof. The folk in the cave were not afraid, because for them the cave was the whole world. So heedless they seemed, and young, so fleet-passing and yet so strong. Death slew them, and yet they came in the same form, with the same faces and voices and transmitted ways. Life must surely be stronger than death, while the stamp of it stood so long....

When he forgot the cave he thought of their home-going in the dawn, of lights in misty shippons and the ivory gleam of milk. The mountains were fresh-made again, gentle as all new-born things. He saw the folks sitting at their meals, and heard them call to each other in the yards. He saw them dipping and clippingyear by year, or high and alone with their dogs among the drifts. He thought of them kneeling in the little church, with Philip, Lord Wharton’s Prayer-Books in their hands. He thought of bridals under the axe-hewn beams, of corpse-roads over the fells, and arvel-bread....

Suddenly Bob spoke, making him start, for there had been years as well as miles between them as they drove. “You’ll be right suited to be back,” he said, flicking the dull horse with a listless whip. “It was a sad pity you ever had to quit.”

Kit said “Ay, ay,” rather vaguely, for he wanted to be left alone with his thoughts. Bob had already lost the exhilaration of setting out, and there was no place for this drooping failure in Kit’s mind. Besides, here on the marsh the past was so alive that voices barely found their way to his ear. No human speech, indeed, could have the colour and flow and flight of this epic spoken by his own soul. There was wistfulness in his memories but they were not sad, because only evil memories are sad. Beauty grows like a rose over every other, even pain; perhaps especially over pain. While he walked in his memories he was young and brave, unclogged by poverty, uncrippled by age. And how, in any case, could he be sad, who was going at long last to his home?

“They wanted you right off,” Bob went on. “They never give me no peace till I’d fixed a day.”

“They’re right kind,” Kit murmured, not thinking of them at all. He took another bite of the scone and tried to see the land around, instead of lighted caves and valleys in the dawn. “I think a deal o’ the spot,” he added, after a while. “I doubt I’d got too old to change.”

“Ay, but there’s changes at the farm an’ all,” Bob said, with a note of warning in his voice. “’Tisn’t in nature for things to stop the same. There’s bound to be changes when different folks get hold.”

Kit said “Ay, ay,” again, and munched stolidly at the scone. Marget had said things like that, and now she was saying them again through Bob. But he had left Marget ever so far behind, and out on the marsh she could not make him afraid. There couldn’t be changes in the place where he was at peace, because permanence was the essence of all peace. Bob should have known that, but Bob had forgotten peace. Bob, as his shoulders dropped, had found Marget still at his back. Not even on the marsh could Bob escape.

“’Tisn’t in nature,” Bob was saying again. “Folks is that different, they’re bound to make things different, too.” All his sentences seemedlike tame echoes of Marget’s biting speech. “I don’t know as it ever does for folks to gang back.”

“Ay, well, I can nobbut try,” Kit said, sitting up and speaking with sudden force. “As for the changes you’re making out, I reckon they waint bite. There’s nowt can change that much in a couple o’ years, not things as is fairly set. There’s no change on the marsh as I can see, for all the sea’s frettin’ at it still; and danged if Jim Bell grandmother bedstead baint mendin’ yon fence yet!”

“Marsh don’t change overmuch, but it changes, all the same. What, they say, don’t they, as it all come out o’ the sea? Yon’s change enough, surely, when you come to think on? And folks change a deal faster than land and suchlike. I reckon you’ve changed yourself, these last two years.”

They were only Marget’s words, like the rest, but just for the moment they struck a little chill. It was likely enough that he had altered, as they said, when you came to think what those two years had meant. He had thought himself at the end of change when he left the farm, except for the change that is the beginning of things. If there were any currents left in his life’s stream, they had seemed too weak to carry him off his feet; yet now they were stirring andlifting him again. But if it was true that there were changes in himself, they could only be superficial, after all. Marget’s branding-iron could not permanently have disfigured his soul. At least he was sure that folks going home turned again into their old selves. When they went in at the door they forgot at once everything that had pushed its way in between. The real things were there, as they found; the real selves, the real souls. The rest was incidental as garments flung away. The old feeling took them that they were looking forward instead of back, happy because of the future instead of the past. Yet really they were happier than they had been before, because of the extra gladness of coming home. They would hardly know themselves when they looked in the glass, because the faces and feelings did not match. The place was full of things that took them back—like the smell and feel of things, and the sun on the floor. No matter what life had managed to do to them, it faded now. These were the real things where their real selves had stayed. They were the same, in spite of the years, abidingly, patiently, blessedly the same.

He was so certain about it all that he spoke even more forcibly than he had done before. “I’d not change to the marsh if I was dead and riz!” he said. “I’d not change to the farm ifSquire offered me the Hall. And I’d be Kit Sill and for evermore Kit Sill, if I was coming from Heaven an’ nobbut from next door!”

Bob said drearily that likely his father knew his own business best. His own belief in the ultimate rightness of things had long since gone by the board, and he found it strange that Kit’s should be lingering still. The artist’s faith that yet all things shall be well had flamed for only a period in Bob. Marget had soon set herself to work to trample it out. Yet here was old Kit still brandishing the torch. But then Kit had only suffered for the space of a couple of years.

In spite of his admission, however, he seemed unable to let the subject drop. It was almost as if Marget must be whispering into his ear. “You’ll think on Marget said you could come back?” he wandered on. “She’s likely taken to you a deal better than I thought. If happen you don’t feel like settling at the farm, you’ve nobbut to say the word and come back.”

“I’ll settle, thank ye,” Kit said. “I will that.” Bob ought to have known, he thought, that it was simply a waste of time to talk like that. Marget was an outsider, of course, but Bob had once belonged. “Don’t fret yourself,” he said. “I’ll settle all right. I’ll bide.”

“Farm’s that smart it don’t know itself,” Bob said, “what wi’ new paint and paper andfurniture as good as Squire’s. What, there’s a rug afore t’kitchen fire as’d likely make a carpet at our spot, I’m sure! There’s curtains to all the winders—some on ’em real lace; and parlour’s over grand to set in by a deal. They’ve been to a sight o’ pains fixing your old room an’ all. You’d think as the King hisself was coming to stop on the marsh.”

Kit listened to him, but only with half an ear, wondering why Bob should suddenly have so much to say. He knew nothing about the house of which Bob spoke, and didn’t want to know anything, if it came to that. The house he was going to see to-day was quite a different spot. It was empty and shabby and rather short of brass, but it was full of the soft tones that make for peace. There was no colour in it that the sun had never kissed, or wood that the years had not mellowed in its place. The worn surfaces knew his hand, and the uneven flooring had never troubled his feet. What, there was a sunk flag at the kitchen door that had never tripped his toe in fifty years!...

“Thomas mun ha’ done well for himself,” Bob was drawling at his side. “He mun ha’ laid by a deal more than we ever thought. I reckon he could ha’ taken the farm all right yon time as they went and turned you out. But they said the lass wasn’t for wedding him justthen, and he was feared he’d loss her if he come away. She should think shame of herself, she should, for putting us all about.”

“Nay, nay,” Kit put in, “she did right to take her time. It’s an easy enough business getting wed, but none so easy to bear wi’ when it’s done. And she’s a good lass, they say, for all she give him sneck-posset at the start. She’ll do well for me, Thomas said; she’ll see to me like her own. I reckon I waint come off so badly, after all.”

Bob thought gloomily of the bearing with things which he had brought upon himself, and of the wife that was neither a good lass nor kind, but at the same time some remnant of feeling ranged him on Marget’s side. He, too, couldn’t help feeling sore because the old man was going away. He was not jealous as she was jealous, because her bone was being touched, but it hurt him that others should do for his father what he wanted to do himself. It was his place to be at the farm and to give his father a home, and, Marget apart, it would have been his pleasure as well. But both duty and pleasure were in this case out of reach, and it was his younger brother who had the right, as well as the place and the brass and the luck of a kindly wife. The last humiliation was that he should be here, driving the old man to the home that he preferred. Thomas hadoffered to fetch his father himself, but Bob’s pride had suddenly flickered, and he had refused. Now, however, he cursed himself for not letting Thomas have his way, because it seemed that he came with his failure in his hand—with a tacit admission that he had nothing to give. He wondered if Kit thought of it like that, and felt the slow blood rise and burn his cheek.

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 workunhaunted 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 theimmediate 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 ofthe 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 hisbrain. 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, hefound 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 afraidof 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 homewould 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 ofcrows. 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.

Now here was Jardine, the hound-man from the Hall, who had only one hand and made shift for another with an iron hook. He had shot off his own hand when he was a lad, but he had gone on using a gun as well as before. There were hounds waiting behind him as he paused in the road, low hounds with bowed legs and fine heads, drooping ears and asking, human eyes. Long ago Jardine had got blood-poisoning feeding the pack, but Kit had quite forgotten that he was dead. There could be no real death on the night of his coming home—certainly not such a dreadful death as that. Besides, it was easy to see the man was there alive, gaitered and grey-whiskered and thin-faced and light-eyed. And of course there were the asking dogs at his heel; the dogs werewitness enough that he was alive. Yet old Forward was dead, and Rosebud, and King’s Own.... They had been dead for years, and if they hunted still it was only at nights.... There were other dogs, too, with Jardine and the pack; a pointer, for instance, somewhere in the crowd. Kit was quite pleased to see the brown and white sporting dog which nobody fancied now. Suddenly, with a thrill, he noticed a sheep-dog of his own, with a snowy patch like a star on its black chest. It did not seem to know he was in the trap, and none of the dogs paid any attention to the horse. There was a bobtail, too, full of happy smiles, and a slim little toy that had saved the Hall in a fire. Jardine had a gun on his left shoulder and a couple of rabbits hanging from his hook, and it did not seem strange in the least that he should have gone out shooting with that doggy train. He slung the rabbits into the trap by way of a welcome to old Kit, and the fiddler thanked him and nodded as he drove away. It pleased him that he should have something of the sort to carry home, and though he could not see the rabbits at his feet, he felt the weight of their bodies on his boots.

He had another long talk with Martin Hinde, who had a pedigree shorthorn herd at Withergill. Kit had muddled his stock as he had muddledeverything else, but he loved the romance of a big shorthorn success. He had loved the stock, too, when it stayed in his mind, and could stand entranced round a cattle-ring as long as most. It seemed to him, after a while, that he got down into the road, and argued with Martin about a cow just over the fence, while the cow cropped on stolidly without ever raising her head. They talked of Royals and Royal Lancashires and of local winners at the great shows; of breeders and auctioneers, and great sires whose pedigrees they knew better than their own. They commented on the passing of the ancient hour-glass at sales, and began to grow heated and loud-voiced over dual purpose and Scotch blood. They even fought the old Booth and Bates battle over again, roaring and waving sticks and dragging inBraceletsandDuchessesby the hair. Kit fancied that he could see the shadowy majesties of the herd, looming along the road at Martin’s back. Even as shadows they gave an impression of weight, of solid strength in their huge bodies and great, scornful heads, that would have been noble but for the sullen, brooding eyes. But all that Bob saw was empty marsh and sand, and an old man sitting vacantly in a trap, with the last of a buttered scone in his still hand.

They overtook Mrs. Holliday as they went,trudging home with a basket on her arm. Kit suggested that they should stop and pick her up, and Bob checked and looked round, and said stolidly that he didn’t rightly know what his father meant. Kit, however, gave Mrs. Holliday a wink, and pointed slyly to the empty seat; and he was sure he felt her weight when the trap moved on, though he was careful not to speak or look behind....

He had so seldom ridden in a trap that had an empty seat that it made him ashamed to pass anybody in the road. He had never been proud about taking lifts himself, and nobody had been proud about taking them from him. He had been one of those folk who go packed like herring to market or fair, with somebody sitting on the nearside splashboard and the driver cosily wedged against the rail. Even if he started from home with only a passenger or two, he would be sure to collect others before he had gone far. Sometimes one of the squires had clambered into the trap and held the fiddle while Christopher held the reins. Somebody always held the fiddle when the squash was great, and the sensitive thing was happy in their hands, because, rough or smooth, they held it like fine glass. But the lasses held it like the lace of a bridal veil, because of the secret things it had danced into their hearts. Downin the road again they would beckon Kit to stoop, and beg for a certain tune at a certain dance—“Dally an’ dree,” perhaps, come Saturday night, or “Ask and I’ll tell you, my lad,” at Huddleston clip. He always promised without a smile, and he never once forgot. Always he kept the tune for the lass, however he was begged, until the lad he was sure she wanted led her out.

Fiddles, he thought to himself, as he drove, had been more loved than anything else in the world. There were folks who loved precious stones and sold their souls for them and gave their lives, but surely that was a form of daftness and not love. And some loved books and held them gently in their hands—he had seen a parson or two do that and one of the squires. But most of the books died very soon, and if they lived they were like folks of a great age, telling you plainly to leave them alone with the past. Those that came again came always in a different dress, and even the words inside were not always the same. And some loved ships and horses and gave them their whole hearts, but neither a ship nor a horse lived for so very long. The ship went down in a storm, or grew rotten and gave at her seams, and no loved animal ever came to a man twice. But fiddles went on for ever and ever, and generally somebodyloved them all the time. It was the right sort of love, too, because nobody could love them in any other way—the sort that touches a loved thing lightly, and yet thrills to it all through. It was true that sometimes they got to the wrong homes, but you did not find them in terrible houses like Marget’s, as a rule. And it was true that most folk didn’t know how to use them, and that most folk didn’t care, but it could only be just a few who wanted to do them harm. Marget’s vehement hatred had had something abnormal at its back which had hurt him infinitely more than any insult to himself. He had never thought of the fiddle before except as an object of tenderness and pride; never once, in all his days, had he even seen it despised by a look. Why, the lasses had sometimes sent it a present for itself, and more than once he had found a flower thrust lightly under the strings. It was as much for the fiddle’s sake as for his own that he was going home, because there it would be safe and could sing again on the marsh. He told everybody he met how glad the fiddle was to be going home, and they laughed and nodded and said they were delighted, too. Many a time, they told him, they had missed it when it was gone. Many a time, too, they had heard it down the wind.

He checked the trap so often that Bob protested at last, and said it was time they were getting to the farm, so after that he contented himself with a wave and a tremulous hail. He knew his friends by their walk long before they came up, and long before he overtook them by the look of their backs. Men of his particular class saw so many backs—at shows and sales, at market and at work on the land. It was always the backs which told anything at all; the faces were careful not to say too much. Very soon they took on that shut and silent look, as of men who had ceased to ask loud questions of life. It was their backs that betrayed them when they were getting done, or hinted subtly how their banking-accounts stood.

He always thought of backs when he thought of a crowd, and in thinking of people he generally thought of crowds. His life, like the lives of most on lonely farms, was divided between crowds and days spent more or less alone. The gossip that kept Marget so busy in the street did not belong to any method of living that he knew. The daily contact with the village and the village thoughts blurred his image of life and obsessed his mind. Here there was no sharp cleft between lonely and full hours, between spaces of silence and the bargaining ofthe mart. Even collective work, such as harvest or hay, meant little more than just occasional speech. It was not association as Marget knew it, all garrulous mouths and empty, idle hands. And the crowds that he knew were real crowds, not two or three cronies hatless in the street. Many a time he had thought himself back in a crowd, sitting at Marget’s in that upstairs room. Sometimes it was a wrestling-ring he saw, with Bob as conqueror in every round. There he saw again the swinging hype, the showy cross-buttock and the neat back-heel, and shouted with pride when Bob felled his man, and laughed aloud alone in his upstairs room. Marget had once burst in to ask him why he laughed, but he had only stared at her vacantly without reply. It was no use telling her that he was in a crowd, and that if the crowd saw fit to laugh he must laugh as well.... It was good to feel the press of the people all about, and the sun that was so pleasant on the green. The champion’s belt that Bob always wore sent out a flash from each of its silver plates....

Sometimes it was another ring that he saw in a green field, where red and white beasts went slowly droning round. The auctioneer’s voice, with incredible speed, hammered and coaxed and demanded over his head. There was a ring of backs all around the rope, broad ornarrow, and straight or crippled and bent. There were rich and poor backs, feeble and strong, shy and aggressive and hopeful and depressed, and nearly all of them were somehow rather sad. There was every sort of jacket upon the backs, and every kind of collar about the necks. The gulf of the generations yawned between the wideawake and the Trilby hat; shades of degree were marked by the bowler and the cap. There were faces, of course, as well as backs, weather-beaten and shut, with unrevealing mouths. The voice swept over their still indifference like a storm of rain over empty sands. Only their eyes, weighing as they stared, followed the animals turning in the ring.... The voice beat at them and pressed and begged, calling a possible bidder by his name, and picking up bids without checking in its stride. By a chain of almost invisible signs the prices shaped themselves and mounted and grew. Even when competition was keenest, the faces rarely changed, and always after a spurt of laughter they set in the old lines. But all the time the backs were speaking aloud, the patient, pressing, fervently-interested backs. The hours passed, and clouds went over the sun, and the bored and scornful-eyed cattle turned and turned....

Furniture sales, too, had always been one ofhis old joys. There was something dramatic about household goods, torn from their setting into the uncovered day. Bow-fronted chests of drawers, and china and candlesticks, and old arm-chairs ... there seemed to be folks still sitting in those chairs. At least, it was queer how chairs, like clothes and hats, kept the look of the people who had used them most. Perhaps it was never quite safe to sit in a chair that hadn’t always been your own; he had often thought about that when the chairs went up at the sales. Sometimes, against the leather or the oak, he was certain he saw a shadowy old form, which even a burying of the highest class had not been able to carry quite away.

Once he had bought a chest of drawers with a still mahogany face and rounded knobs of glass. They looked like eight little pools in a shining wood, and he bought it because it made him think of that. The drawers pulled in and out on a grain of silk—his missis had tried them without looking at the knobs—and things that were put away in them came out again sweet and clean. It was a queer collection that found home in them at last, but he seemed to remember everything and its place. There were the clothes that the two of them had worn when they were wed ... Grandfather’s silk handkerchief and grandmother’s silk shawl.Funeral cards and a jubilee mug, and corals from over the sea. An old bow with a cracked back, and an umbrella that was a present from some squire. Rings of hair, still glossy and bright, too lovely in colour and texture to have come from any but a baby’s head. Horn spectacles in a carved box, and old knitting-pins with carved hafts; and fiddle strings, coil upon coil, that he had never had the courage to burn.... There were things of his wife’s, too, that he had put away when she was dead, though he had never succeeded in putting away the shoes. They gave the lie to her death merely by being about, and saying contentedly that she would be coming in. Old shoes, he thought to himself, like hats and chairs, had the secret of keeping what lovers seemed to lose.

He felt much the same about mirrors as he did about old chairs. Who knew how much they had kept of what they had seen, or how much of it they might suddenly reveal? Layer upon layer of pictures must be sunken in their depths, rosy and white faces, mad eyes and cloudy hair. The depth of a mirror was the height of the firmament itself; you had only to turn it up to the sky to notice that. There was room in it to make hiding-place for countless tragedies of lives. Each time a blind was drawn it took something from the day, and at nightwho knew what it saw beyond the immediate circle of the lamp? Nobody could look into it without adding something new. A figure, crossing the room, passed through its magic water and emerged, yet surely left a ghost of itself behind. Those that looked long enough saw strange old things, it was said, but who could tell that any saw the truth? Minds and mirrors together could make magic enough to frighten half a world. And there were times when most folk, if it came to that, found even their own faces rather strange. Behind the presentment that they called themselves, eyes that were dead looked at them through their own, and smiles that belonged to others came to their lips.

There was a different set of backs at the furniture sales, less patient and more excitable, though not less keen. Mostly they wore bead mantles and cloth jackets and fur ruffs, and were topped by side-away bonnets and hats that wouldn’t let you by. They twitched and argued a good deal, and let their faces say more than the faces of other crowds. But they were speaking backs, all the same, under mantle or jacket or plaid blouse. They, too, told the tale of youth or age, and the hope that hangs on gold in a stocking foot.

Then, at the dances, there had been otherbacks again. The faces went by him under the lamps, but each was turned away from him towards another face. They swam in his gaze like faces drifting in a stream, and became one face of earnest, glowing youth. It was only the backs he remembered when all was done, the necks and the shining hair of the lasses, and the broad, strong shoulders of the lads.

Weddings and clippings, of course, meant crowds as well; hot-pot suppers and Primrose gatherings ... whist-drives ... annual fairs. Election crowds, when folk gathered in the streets, and broke one another’s heads or other people’s glass. Church, where folks knelt in long, straight shafts of sun, or looked through the cool windows and thought of the waiting hay. Then there were buryings, buryings without end, at which he had walked in crowds with uncovered head or lent a shoulder to the coffins of innumerable squires. Some day, sooner or later, everybody walked in that particular crowd.... And once he had even seen a London crowd, but that was very long ago. A lawsuit over some foreshore rights was making a stir, and Kit had been called as a witness in the case. The crowd up there was past all knowledge and sense, and nobody knew each other or jerked a head. A policeman found him at a pavement edge, waiting, he said, for people to “get by.”

The last crowd of all had been Marget’s cottage crowd, where there had been no room for him and little breath, but now he was coming back from it as he had come from all the rest, from press and clamour and hurry into unpeopled peace. He had escaped on to the edge of the sand, where always the hunted stag turns to safety and the sea. Now he could look along the flat which rested the eye, and breathe the far-travelled air which only the west wind had breathed before. There were evening and sun and shadows, and fields, and deep-rooted mountains, and slow beasts. There was a breeze stirring the shore-grasses that in all their lives never know what it is to be really still, and on the top of the bank others quivered and bent, and straightened and bent and quivered again. Bending, they looked like delicate strokes of a slanting pen, slashed on the golden page of the open west. The railway arches over the sand looked like great black doors shut between him and the coloured park that lay behind. Only the one through which they had come stood open wide, showing the ribbon of road laid flatly through. Beyond, where it fled away from the open marsh, it coiled into shadow by wall and stooping tree. When night came, that door, too, would close, so that Marget, however she tried, could never pass. He wouldremember that when he went upstairs to bed, and sleep steadily unafraid in the house at the sand’s edge. If the moon chose to look in, he would not care for the moon. It would have none of the terror of Marget’s peering eye, that had sometimes awakened him as he lay and dreamed.

Yes, he was coming back as he had come before, and not even in dreams would he come like this again. Into this last, long, beautiful journey he had gathered his life, and men—old men—were not allowed to do that twice. Now in the house on the edge of the sands he would stay quietly until he died. Thomas and Agnes would want to take him out—to market and church and Milthrop Cattle Fair, but however they urged he did not mean to go. He had the fairs and the rest of them in his mind, and did not need to go looking for them afield. Besides, if he went, he would only find them strange, a confusion of strange faces and still stranger backs. Thomas and Agnes would fret and think he was getting moped, but after a bit they would let him have his way. He would watch them trundle away and wave his stick, and they would stop and call to know if he had changed his mind. But he would never change his mind or leave his recovered inheritance for an hour. Somewhere there was a point wherethe mind never changed again, but stayed as still as the earth in a new-dropped wind. And the point where he would stay in that poised stillness would surely be the home of all his dreams.

They would go, and he would see to the house, and when there were barns to see to, he would see to the barns as well. He had always been a rare hand at keeping them happy and good, and if he had failed with Marget’s brood, that had been only an accident by the way. Marget’s children, after the first, had seldom been children to his mind. They had been enemies, torturers, mockers, and trained spies. Only once, in the Little Game, had they ever been part of the company he loved, and very soon afterwards he had cast them out. But no child born on the marsh would ever be such as they; the house would prevent it—the peaceful, noble house. They would be friends all right, he and those real children bred to the sound of the sea. Thomas and Agnes could trust them to him all right. All day he and the fiddle would hear their feet, pattering after them on the garden path, and climbing laboriously up the uncarpeted stair. All day the little shrill voices would follow the curlews out to sea, and at night the house would be filled with the hush of a house where children sleep. And on that lastearly morning, when he came to die, he would hear a little child waking close at hand....

No, he would never be lonely again in all his life, or dull and moped because he was left behind. There were so many things waiting for him to find them again that he would need another life to seek them all. Every inch of the land and stone of the house would have something to say to him when he got back. How many places he had loved would pull at his heart until he had looked on them with his bodily eyes? There were hedges, twists of the road, lights over hill and bay—things that in all his life had not failed in enchantment yet. No other magic ever held but that; no other spell grew stronger with the years. Nature kept hold of her worshippers until they died. With a branch of cherry or a robin’s song, the smell of hay or the fall of June shadows pretending to be night, she could bring them back their youth to the very last. This, out of all the treasures in the world, was the only one that was golden to the end.

Perhaps he would never do half of what he wished, in the little breath of time that he had left. Perhaps he would find his legs too weak to carry him very far. They had grown cramped and shaky in Marget’s prison-house. Perhaps his eyes, when wanted, would drop their lidsand sleep. They had slept so little at Marget’s that they were tired.

Yet somehow he must gather his treasure again, if only between the limits of a year. He must wait for the hoar-frost over the fields and the yellow of winter sun through a black-limbed beech. There were growing things, too, that he must see again—daffodils, foals, and the plums on the south wall. The purple of Michaelmas daisies in a mist, light on a yacht’s sails and the mysterious glimmer of hard ice. Sea-mist that was the ghost of the sea, with the blue-topped mountains rocks in a snowy surf; primrose evening over the sands and the islands of desire. The smell of things, too—warm hay, wet earth, and salt, lilac, syringa, the chill smell of coming snow. The feel of things—turf and sand ... and, rough to the elbows, the stone of the garden wall. The sound of things—bees in the wallflower; plover and gull; the lone owl wheeling round the barn; the roar of the river in flood and the swish of a little tide; the trains in the night where they hung above the sea. And always there were the sounds about the house—the separate voices of door and window and stair, of furniture that never speaks until it is night, of winds in the house that go not in or out, but sleep in dark corners until they stir again....

Perhaps the losing of well-known sounds was the loneliest loss of all, and none so lonely and blank as the loss of a well-known step. Then there were other sounds, as familiar as a voice, that yet in years and years were never traced....

There were doors he wanted to open again, suddenly and alone, and, standing on the threshold, feel all that the empty room contained. That sudden opening of a door was one of the beautiful happenings of life. Even outside you heard the memories speak, creeping through chinks and slipping along the floor. Outside, they seemed to catch you by the throat; but, once the knob was turned, they kissed your cheek. Folks such as he could go blindfold to their homes, and know where they were as soon as they stepped inside. They knew by the feel and smell and sound of things, and by a warm, familiar presence in the air. That was really why he was going home—to open the doors again, and stand, and feel. Afterwards he would go round and handle things ... absorbing them tranquilly, drawing the place in. Satisfied—that was the word he wanted for it all; satisfied, fulfilled ... at rest ...come back....

It was surely this great content that helped men to die when it came to the last. After all, it only meant going a little closer to one’s earth.No one need mind if he wasn’t carried away and laid in some foreign spot he had never seen. It wouldn’t seem right to see strange names round you when you awoke, and strange folk rising up at the sound of the Trump. Why, there were some he knew who would be so put about, they would likely never stir their coffin-lids! They’d stick in their graves and say they hadn’t heard, before they’d go cheek-by-jowl with off-comers to the Throne.

Would there be folk in Heaven as set on a spot as so many of them were on earth? There were plenty who wouldn’t know how to put on time without their own little village and its feuds. As for those who had really loved a place, they couldn’t do anything but break their hearts. There were folks you could never mix—not even in Heaven; folks from places that fought like biting steggs. You couldn’t just set them alongside in their crowns, and take it for granted things would come out right....

They wouldn’t get far with their singing, anyhow, he thought, because you couldn’t make real music with people who didn’t suit. He had joined a choral society when he was young, but left it because he could only sing with those he liked. If somebody sat beside him who wasn’t a friend, he hated to hear their voices mingle and touch. The other man’s voice was anenemy slaying his own, and instead of song there was murder in his heart. Song was a personal revelation that only a friend should hear, and if you sang with an enemy you gave yourself away. He had had the same trouble at the dances, too, with a concertina played by Darby Gill. The concertina itself was a real joy, because of its big chords and its depth and swing. It gave an actual physical push to the crowd, so that you could see the couples swaying as it swayed, but he never played his best when it was there, because he and the fiddle hated Darby Gill. He hoped he wouldn’t have Darby next to him in Heaven. Anyhow, if he had, he would never touch a string....

“Tide’ll be turning soon,” Bob said, and though Kit had forgotten him long since, he did not start, because the sea is always at the back of the marsh-dweller’s mind. Even the village-folk had known the tides by wind and sky, though some of them never went down to the bay in years. Kit and his son, of course, knew them as they knew their meals. They could have told you, every day, what time the returning water drew itself from the deep....

It came to him suddenly that for two years he had never seen the sea, not even heard it except through the sound-carriers of the wind. The thought of it set his heart leaping, and tohis shame and astonishment he found that he was afraid. He seemed to himself to be quite defenceless on the open road, with only the bank to stop what was coming out of the west. His terror degraded him in his own eyes, and he was as afraid of the fear as of the object of the fear. Perhaps it was because he was old that he was afraid, or because he had missed the daily miracle for so long. At all events, he trembled and gazed, and felt his hands turn cold, and longed to be at the farm. It was amazing that folk who knew what the sea could do should drive so slowly in the line of the dormant tide. If there had been any sign of the tide he would have clutched at the reins, and frightened Bob to death by shouting at the horse. He looked at the land and wondered why panic wasn’t abroad, and why the stock, with its sure sense of coming ill, didn’t stare and cower. Once that far, smooth water had lifted and turned, there seemed no reason why it should ever stop. He knew only too well, of course, that it did not always stop. He himself had seen it under an angry moon, lift and lift into a huge and white-topped wall, and sweep the marsh into a tumbling sea....

“We’d best be getting on,” he said in a sharp tone, and Bob heard the fear in his voice, and glanced at him in surprise. The old man mustbe getting tired, he thought; he had seemed so quiet and contented at the start. He did his best to encourage the slow horse, but they only jolted a little more, and seemed no nearer to the farm. Presently he spoke again, as if he had come to some slow conclusion of his own. “Tide’s low, just now,” he said, as if to himself, and at once felt his father relax and settle back. “You’ll hear next to nowt on it to-night. I reckon it’ll gang nigh as soon as it comes....”

The old man gave him no answer to his careful speech; only he sighed suddenly and then sat still. He told himself that he might have known as well as Bob, if he hadn’t frightened himself out of his daft wits. He looked at the west and knew that no tide could come out of it to his hurt—out of that fragrant stillness and that golden air. And yet, in spite of his fear, he wanted to see a tide before he died—one of those splendid surges rollicking up the bay. Each roller seemed to travel faster than the one in front, and over-rode it in a shower of spray. The salt in the air was so sharp that it stung the eyes, and the life in it blew the spirit out of its shell; but he wasn’t strong enough to face that yet. There was a summer tide that he wanted to see, too, a full, blue tide with a ripple all over its face, breaking in long, crisp waves along the sand. This tide was the most human tideof all, a live, beautiful thing that you could almost clasp.... The waves, where they broke on the sand, were like slender bars of amethyst crested with snow.... But the tide that was coming out of that quiet west would never break; it would barely even lip at sand or wall. Hardly the wisest would know the moment when the deep sea sent it out. There would be no bull-roar to herald its approach, topped by the vicious hissing-note of surf. It would not even whisper when it rounded the point, and scarcely a line would come on the sand to show that it was there. A sleeping water, shallow and very smooth, it would steal and spread like the shadow of a cloud. Without fear and without hurry it would come, like the light that spreads before the sun has topped the hill. If the moon came up, there would be a golden glass where there had just been sand; but if there was no moon, only the river would know about the tide.

“Tide’s low,” Bob said, and the peace of the evening came back.

But, beautiful as the journey had been, he was beginning to wish that it would come to an end. That sudden shock seemed to have drained his strength and left him afraid of the fear within a fear. He would have nothing to say to the house if he was tired, and no number ofperfect after-days could make up for the wonder of that first glad hour. He might even miss the first sight of it, perhaps, if his eyes should remember that they were really old. His brain might be numb or vacant at the first crossing of the door. It might be only a tired old man that would stagger in, thinking of nothing but supper and then bed....

He tried to rest his eyes by shutting them for a while, but found that he suffered more from the jolting of the trap. Every jerk of the horse seemed to startle his heart and hurt his bones, as well as stirring again the thought of that sleeping fear. And yet, as soon as he opened his eyes, his mind was off once more. Even the grass could not grow, nor the road wind, without setting his memories running out of the past.

It was strange that he should have the fear of the sea so strong on him to-night, when all around him was calm and evening gold. He had never been afraid of the sea when he had it under his feet. Once he had gone to play at a dance across the sands, and had sailed home again at break of day. He had come away from the hot room with the dancing still in his brain, and gone down to the forsaken, dream-like shore. It was black under the chestnuts roofing the narrow path, but a grey light stood over the tide that seemed to grow upward fromthe sea. The water broke crisply and coolly at his feet as he stumbled over the beach and came to the sand. Near to him, like a figure flung on a cloud, a man was holding a vague and ghostly boat, and out on the dim tide where it merged into the air, a shadowy ship pulled at a shadowy rope. She, too, was the merest phantasm of herself, with her spidery cords and nebulous mast and spars. It was impossible to believe that she could support the pressure of a foot, so that the life and lift in her as he scrambled aboard came with a shock of exquisite surprise. His body and brain felt heavy as lead against the lightness of her build, and yet the effect of his weight was merely an increased impression of her buoyant strength. His mind, that was still full of whirling sounds, swayed to the water-floor on which she rode. From the elastic spring of her under his feet, it seemed as if she must leap into the air as soon as she was released. Turned as she was on her anchor to meet the tide, she swung on her heel the moment she felt the sail, and was off like a racer before the flag is down. The boat dropped from them and became a blur, and the line of shore was blurred, and the climbing town. The few dim lights that burned were still to be seen after the shapes of the houses had been painted out, showing mistily yellow above the sea, likelamps in the long slits of a castle wall. Then they, too, went as if suddenly blown out, and only the cap of pine that crowned the hill spoke to the presence of earth against the sky. Kit was a crouched shadow in the boat, staring ahead of him for a sight of the marsh, but the great, grey wing of the sail seemed spread across the world. The wind was behind them and they fled hushed, as shadows of clouds move silently on the sea. The motion was easing as sleep, and healing as still prayer. He thought of the dancing figures in the town which had seemed so beautiful to him while he watched, yet were earthy and clumsy and slow compared with this. Even the music—even the fiddle itself—seemed noisy beside that delicate wash at the keel. This was the peace of the sea of which men spoke, this great and painless detachment from things of the earth. In the wide spaces how easily God was found! On the water, as in the mountains and on the Hill of Light, it was good for men to be there. Sometimes he slept for a few moments, and awakened again and slept, but the man at the tiller neither moved nor slept. He was like a statue set in the low stern, with the straight shadow of the helm stretching between them like a bar. His eyes were lifted a little towards the sail, and the slack of the sheet lay in his quiet hand. Eachtime that Kit awoke the grey had changed, because of the light over the hills that as yet he could not see. The light came into it as out of an emptied cup, like a white wine teemed in a sombre, misted pool. Slowly, as the land came back to the sea, he could see the lake mountains piled into the sky, all turned to wait for the coming light from the east, but even before he could trace them he was sure they turned. It was strange to look into the blackness where he knew them to be, and think of the dark shapes waiting in a crowd. So huge they were, and solid and old, homes alike for the short-living and the long dead. Perhaps they saw, whom others, through the mist of morning, could not see. It was like being watched by giants with many eyes.

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