FIDDLE O' DREAMS

I

THE thatched cottage made a fantastic interruption in the midst of the drab street. You came upon it after traversing many lengths of just such street, all laid out in parallel blocks, all of one pattern, and all labelled on the name-plates at the comers, not streets, but roads. The streets had been built just long enough ago to have grown grimy rather than raw; and the grime had fallen on houses and tenants alike. Perhaps it was rather that as the houses had grown smokier the tenants had changed for the worse, and less cleanly successors had come to match the houses and to deepen the grime.

      Iron palings, miles of them, of the same pattern every o.ne, enclosed small and barren forecourts before all the houses in the neighbourhood, save only for this one thatched cottage. Here was a break of low white wooden fence, kicked and despitefully used externally, and enclosing the dusty remains of a quick-set hedge. Within the hedge flowers were visible in the summer days and were stolen in the summer nights; stocks and wallflowers and lady's-purse and candytuft; as they had grown year by year beyond memory when there was no grime in this part, and the hedge had bordered Bell Brook Lane. Now Bell Brook Lane, straightened and prisoned in brick, was called Cobden Road, and the brook was usefully carried through a sewer.

      Even on the thatched cottage some trace of grime had fallen, though it had been stoutly resisted for many years; and the thatch was a little less tidy than it used to be when the tenant kept it in repair with his own hands, and showed a pride in the band of fancy thatching that spanned the roof half-way between ridge and eaves. For the tenant, who was landlord too, had grown old among his wallflowers and behind his crooked little casements — old and lonely. Through all the years while the fields were green about him he and his wife had kept their habitation gay with flowers and clean with fresh paint; and still the same when the noise and stink of London had begun to creep into this comer of Essex. The tide of brick and grime had washed nearer and nearer, pushing a scum of brickbats and cankered meadows before it; but Golden Lea and his wife had stood their ground and kept their place as it had always been kept. The cottage had been his father's before him, as also had his trade as wheelwright. But with the nearing of the town the trade had withered, and the boys had gone abroad. As for the old people, though the trade was gone, something was left to live on, and they entrenched themselves in their cottage and its garden; and the hamlet and its fields and hedges shrivelled about them.

      The smoke and the blight came on inexorably and lapped them in. The hedges were torn from the sides of Bell Brook Lane, and the trees were cut down. For a while — a short while — there was a smell of lime and a dust of lime and brick, and there was no venturing forth after dark for fear of stumbling among heaps and poles, and falling into holes; and then the line of lime and bricks and blighted fields swept on to the country beyond them, and they lived in another world.

      Anxious little men opened new little shops, and shut them soon and vanished. Bigger shops were built in the main road half a mile off, and the main road itself was torn up and laid with tramlines, and set with iron posts and wires under which electric cars roared and clanged. In a place where Golden Lea as a boy had found a wheatear's nest in a rabbit-hole, a soap-works rose, with tall chimneys and a choking stink. And the tide of streets was carried so far beyond Cobden Road that there was no finding a patch of turf, even at the end of a long walk. The drab street was everywhere; and at the streetcorners mean-faced men preached lies, envy, and malice.

      Golden Lea and his wife grew white and bent, the woman sooner than the man. Still he tended his garden bravely, and painted the fence more frequently, as it needed. But she turned her face inward, away from the streets. If she looked out of window it was from the back, where some part of the old church could be seen, standing its ground still, like the cottage. And it was so the old woman sat, looking through the window, when it came to pass that Golden Lea, for the first time in his life, spoke to her and got no answer.

      "Jenny," said the old man, "the lavender is dead." And then again he said: "Jenny!"

      But she had answered another and a silent call.

II

      And now it was that the cottage lost its brightness, and the thatch grew less tidy; for now the old man's face was averted in its turn. The hedge straggled and withered, and the vine that for years had ceased to bear fell away from the wall. London sparrows were free of the rotted and broken bee-skeps at the far end of the dank garden, and Golden Lea was so little seen that it seemed reasonable among the neighbours, when they had time to think of anything but their own concerns, to call him the old miser.

      So things were in the drab and smoky street on a day when out in green Essex, miles away, the cuckoo was calling and the white was breaking on the thorn. Here the day might have been of any season, save for the hint now and then, of a patch of blue in the grey sky. And here came, wandering up the street from nowhere, a fiddler, strange and gaunt.

      Scant but long and curly grey locks straggled over his humped coat-collar, from under the brim of a high-crowned hat. His threadbare and skimp coat hid nothing of the crank boniness of his frame, and the dust of country roads was thick on his boots and trousers. Black and piercing eyes, eyes that seemed younger than the strange great-boned face they were set in, peered over high cheekbones, and from the sides of a great ho9ked nose. High-shouldered and shambling, he came up the street gazing right and left on the grim little houses that were so much alike, till he came to the thatched cottage. Here he stopped, regarding the cottage with much attention. Then he advanced to the low white gate and put his fiddle under his chin.

      His great knotted fingers spread wide over the neck and fingerboard, so that the fiddle, under his long whimsical face, seemed grotesquely small. But when he drew his bow across the strings, all the breath of that poor street was hushed at the sound.

      To the ears of Golden Lea in his cottage came a voice from a lost world. The fiddler played The Wind that Shakes the Barley; but only once had the old man heard it so played before; so that it grew upon him that this was a poignant dream, and he sat motionless lest he should disturb it. Sweet and clear and blithe ran the air, till the old man thrilled to an agony of fear that the dream must break; when with a turn and a long, swinging note the fiddle suddenly dropped into To-morrow shall be my Dancing Day.

      Surely no dream, this. The fiddle laughed and turned and lilted and sang like a human thing. This the old man had heard, too; but it was fifty years ago — more. Yet the wizard music so reached his soul that he heard the very words again, the words forgotten a lifetime back:

To-morrow shall be my dancing day, I would my true love may so chance To hear me sing from far away To call my true love to my dance. Sing O! my love O! My love, my love, my love! And this have I done for my true love!

      He rose and looked from the window, and there stood the strange fiddler, his long, knotted fingers spidering over his instrument, and his black, piercing eyes fixed on Golden Lea's. As their gaze met the voice of the fiddle rose merrier still, and the old man turned, unresisting the command of its call, and came into the garden.

      Then the frolic music sank and changed, and sweeter and clearer than all came a strain of so plaintive a sadness that the old man paused on his way, and a poor needle-woman in an upper room nearby bent her head on her work and wept. This melody the old man knew also, and though he could not have told when last he heard it, the fiddle sang clear as words:

O the trees are growing high, and the leaves are long and green, The time is past and gone, my dear, that you and I have seen!

      He came forward to the gate with his eyes on the strange fiddler, who let his bow sink and draw off the strings till you could not guess when the music ceased. And the fiddler looked down on the old man with so odd a regard that it might have been a father indulgent of his child's whims, or a kind friend healing another's infirmities, or merely an elf at a prank.

      "Surely," said the old man, "surely it was you who played the fiddle at my wedding."

      "Do you remember me, then?" The fiddler's voice was clear as a note of his fiddle, but low and far, like a bell in the distance.

      "Remember?" the old mail replied. "When I hear your fiddle I can remember more than ever I knew. That was many years ago; you must be a very old man."

      "I am old — much older than you think. But do I seem to grow older?"

      "Not a day — not a day; and that was more than fifty years ago. It is hard to believe my senses; when I first heard you I thought I was dreaming."

      "And when are you dreaming?" asked the strange fiddler. "And when not? Do you know? What have you been dreaming all these years? What are you dreaming now?"

      "I don't think I am dreaming now," said the old man.

      "No — and why should you? More than two thousand years ago a man in China dreamed he was a butterfly. He fluttered from flower to flower, intent only on the concerns of a butterfly, lost to all sense of the concerns of a man. Suddenly he awoke, and found himself a man. But he said: 'Am I a man who dreamed himself a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who is now dreaming itself a man?' He was very wise, but he could not answer that question."

      "Bless me," said the old man, "you say strange things. But I should like to hear your fiddle again."

      "And so you shall," the fiddler replied. "You shall hear it, but not now. I do not like these streets, and I hardly know why I came. You shall hear my fiddle in your dream — your other dream."

      "I cannot understand you," said the old man, looking very earnestly into the fiddler's face; "and yet I cannot believe you would laugh at me. Who are you? Did I. ever know your name?"

      "No, you never knew my name, and if I told you it would .only puzzle you more. I am a butterfly — or a man — blown in from the fields and lost in these streets. I am going back to the lanes and the meadows; but you shall hear my fiddle again, in the other dream — the dream that is coming!"

      He turned and was gone; and the old man, full of wonder and strange new hopes, went back to the cottage. For nothing on earth now seemed more desirable than to hear that fiddle again. He remained restless and longing, and found himself listening intently to every sound from without. More than once he looked out of the window through which he had first seen the fiddler; but there stood the mere white gate, and beyond it, across the street, nothing but the poor little grimy houses that were all alike.

      And so the night fell, but brought him little rest. Unlike his habit, he lay wakeful, listening. He strove to put aside the fancy and compose himself to sleep; but the longing was beyond his command, and still he listened. The hours were long, and soon, he judged, it must be morning. Presently, indeed, it grew lighter about him; and with that he had his wish, for in the distance he could hear the fiddle.

      Instantly he rose, and dressed with such speed that he was at the latch, of the door ere the fiddler had reached the garden gate. The morning was gay and sunny, and as he came into the garden Golden Lea saw that the lavender was alive, and opening its little buds to scent the early air. The nests were awake, thrushes sang loud and clear, and the old man was at the garden gate in time to meet the fiddler in Bell Brook Lane. For the dream of drab streets was gone, and Bell Brook Lane was green and winding, and a hundred thousand dewdrops gemmed the hedges and the gardens.

      The fiddler seemed to carry a touch more of the fantastic in his guise, though it was hard to say wherein it lay; and he regarded the old man with that same kindly but inscrutable eye. He played now an air that had no name in the old man's mind, but had all the joy of all the merry music he had ever heard, and more. Sometimes he caught an echo of a tune he had known as a boy, now one, and now another; and it was always as though this was the true tune, the real tune, and all those tunes of old days had been mere uncouth efforts to recall some part of it.

      Side by side they walked up the lane, the fiddler playing unceasingly, his head aside and his eyes watching the old man with that intent look that was very kind, but seemed only half serious. The old man had no choice but to walk with him, because of his eyes and because of his music; though he would joyfully have walked in any case, for the trees stirred and whispered in the day's first breeze, and there had been no such morning since he was a boy, and scarcely then. The wild roses scented the hedges, and daisies peeped in the grass, and bluebells overhung them. Larks sang aloft, and the Bell Brook ran merrily by the lane side, and plashed over at the bank and across the path where the stepping-stones were. And the song of the lark in the sky, and of the thrush on the bough, the sound of the brook and the stir of the trees, were all so strangely a part of the fiddler's music that it seemed that he touched the chords of all the world.

      They came out on the great white road that led abroad to so many other fields and lanes, and streams and towns, and in the end, to the sea. But they turned neither right nor left, but crossed to a rising meadow. Well the old man knew it, for this was the way to the mill. Up the slope they went together, and the country opened out about them as they rose, gay with many-coloured fields, and set with a score of hamlets, and bounded beyond all by the silver of the wide river. As they neared the top the prospect broadened, and the wind was all the sweeter for the height, as it swept up from all Essex, green with meadows and bushed with trees that were pierced with here and there a steeple.

      And now they reached the mill, busy thus early, with its sails lifting and lifting; and the old man looked up at it as he would have looked in the face of some old and steadfast friend. But it was on the miller's house that he turned his eyes with the more eager gaze. There was the window, with the climbing rose about it, and the casement ajar. He lifted his arms toward it, and his soul rose within him at the hope of the face he might see there.

      But now the fiddler spoke at last, in the voice that was like a distant bell. "Not yet," he said. "You shall see — you shall see; but not yet."

      The music fell very soft, and the fiddler spoke again. "Rest," he said; "you must rest. Sleep now. Soon I will wake you again."

      He let his bow sink and sink and draw off from the strings till there was no telling when the music ceased. But as it died away, so the sunlight died with it, and the birds sang no more. The old man turned from the fiddler, but could see nothing.

      The blue sky was gone, and it was very dark. Surely he was in his bed. He rose, opened the window, and looked out. The night was dark and windy, and whether they were trees or houses about him he could not be sure. But in the sound of the wind about and above the cottage he caught some echo of the fiddler's music.

III

      And so in his dreams the old man touched his boyhood again, with all the memories of age; and the fiddler who plays to the chosen played by his side. The people of the street saw him no more, for his face was turned inward, and he grudged the time given to the dream of lonely old age. It grew to be his habit to draw his chair so that he might sit and look through the window where you saw the old church, as his wife had done. And here he slept and waked, but as the days went by he slept more and more, and more and more he walked with the fiddler and heard the music in Bell Brook Lane.

      The charwoman who came daily regarded him with great doubt, and shook her head much among the neighbours. For he would wake and ask anxiously: "Mrs. Finch, did you hear a fiddle?"

      "Why no," she would say. "I've heard no fiddle."

      "Are you sure?" he would reply with earnestness. "See if there is a fiddler at the gate."

      "Why, no," she would repeat: "nothing of the sort. There's nobody at the gate."

      "Ah well," he would say, after a pause, "be sure to tell me if you hear a fiddle."

      But one day the poor needlewoman who lived in an upper room near by heard again the fiddle that she had heard once before. The tune ran and trilled and turned merrily, and at first it seemed like The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and then like Over the Hills and Far Away. She ran to the window, though she could see nothing. But the music drew nearer, and sometimes it was like one joyful tune and sometimes like another, but always finer than them all. And then it was The Trees are Growing High; but with no sadness now, and full of glad solace, so that the poor needlewoman smiled to hear it. For the music was so gay that it gave sweet promise and a new meaning to the words it carried to her heart:

O the trees are growing high, and the leaves are long and green, The time is past and gone, my dear, that you and I have seen!

      And now it reached even the ears of. Mrs. Finch; and she ran to the old man's room, where he sat before the window that looked on to the old church. "Mr. Lea!" she cried. "There's a fiddle!"

      But she got no answer.