Читать книгу Land Of The Leal - James Barke - Страница 16

Sam MacKitteroch was a very different schoolmaster from John Gibb. His school was different. He was entirely dependent on his scholars and charity for his living. Mostly the scholars brought him a peat two or three times a week but sometimes they would bring him an egg or a farrel of scone. Sam got his oatmeal from John MacMeechan of Achgammie. Sam had trained a son, Robert, in the craft of the sailing ship and had coached him with his chief’s and master’s certificate. In gratitude, Robert had left instructions that during his voyages Sam was never to know want. Robert MacMeechan had gone to sea with Richard Ramsay and both owed much to Sam MacKitteroch that they qualified as masters so quickly.

No one could have disliked Sam. He was old and he was gentle in his methods. He would rather impart thoroughly one bit of knowledge to a scholar than cover a wider field indifferently.

John MacMeechan gave him the use of an old barn in which to conduct his class. There were seldom more than twenty scholars. They sat on planks at the end of the barn as near to the peat fire as they could get. And in winter when it got too cold Sam dismissed the class – maybe keeping a few of his keener pupils so that they could sit close up to the fire and enable him to warm his old bones too.

Sam had a soft pleasant voice that soothed and caressed and yet there was authority behind it. He did not believe in his pupils learning by heart. Knowledge did not come that way. Wisdom lay in understanding. He did not much care whether they could repeat accurately the answers in the Catechism so long as they understood the nature of the question and the meaning of the answer. He always mistrusted and tried to discourage the quick and accurate reply. Often as not he would say:

‘Aye: now that’s quite right, John: but just tell us what that means in your own words.’

And as often as not the scholar shewed by his answer that he did not understand the true nature of the question.

The Bible lesson was conducted in the nature of a service. They began with the Lord’s Prayer and finished with the Apostles’ Creed. Sam would read a chapter of the Old Testament, reading it slowly and with great dignity. It was not that Sam was nearing his end that made him specially reverent. All his life he had had a great reverence for the Good Book: and he had always prayed – even when his youth had been wildest and most riotous. He believed that if people kept the image of their Maker constantly before them their lives could never go very far wrong. So successful indeed was his method of imparting religious instruction that not one of his scholars in after life ever failed to have that image somewhere before them. They might cease to go to church: they might even in exceptional circumstances neglect to have their children baptized. But they never forgot the God of Sam MacKitteroch – the Father, the Maker of Heaven and Earth …

Sam was a much better scholar than John Gibb, even though he had never been to college. There was something a trifle old-fashioned in his arithmetical methods and he had certain peculiarities in the matter of spelling – he never used a capital at the first person singular – but literary composition was Sam’s weakest subject and the one he reckoned least useful to his scholars. As long as they grasped some elements of arithmetic and were able to read and write – even if only their names – something had been achieved.

His attendance was much more broken and irregular than John Gibb’s and his equipment was more primitive. He had only a small-scale map of the world, indicating British possessions in red, certain main trade routes, the equator and the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. But mean and inadequate as the map was, he made it live through his vivid descriptions.

Sam MacKitteroch’s school was a pleasant affair. He had no strap and he never had occasion to wish he had. His scholars applied themselves or not as they felt inclined. He prescribed no home work. He knew what their homes were like: how impossible conditions were for home study. But occasionally he would visit a home, usually a farm-house, and coach a boy for an hour in Latin so that he might qualify for entrance to college and in due course qualify as a doctor or a minister. Sometimes a successful student would come back and call on Sam and on parting would slip him a sovereign or two in appreciation of the service he had done him.

David Ramsay soon became one of Sam’s favourite scholars. David had a great admiration for the old man and applied himself diligently to his studies. David liked the geography lessons which, in addition to giving much factual knowledge, were a mixture of the science of navigation and the travellers’ tales.

David decided that as soon as he grew up he would go to sea like his brother Dick – even as old Sam himself had done. It was not that Sam romanticised the sailor’s lot. Far from it. Indeed he gripped them with tales of hardship, starvation and shipwreck. Yet there was glory in a shipwreck as Sam described it – the essential quality of drama was there.

It was this drama, this heightened colour of experience that young David fed on. He would often find an excuse to wander as far as Corsewell Point to catch a glimpse of the rigged ships sailing down the Northern Channel. He would sit on the heughs and follow them in imagination as far as the Horn or maybe Australia. He was grateful to Sam for having sketched the world for him: made it familiar to his mind’s eye so that the horizons of his mental voyages were boundless.

Sam MacKitteroch and Andrew Ramsay often exchanged words about the boy.

‘That boy of yours, Andra: he’s a bright lad. I never passed a more intelligent boy through my hands.’

‘Aye: he’s like his brother Dick. They’re the only two that take after me, Sam.’

‘You’ve reason to be proud of them, Andra. But David has a way with him that Richard never had. I misdoubt but he’ll turn out as strong as Richard – I wouldna say he’d stand up to the sea as well—’

‘And you think his mind’s bent on the sea? Well, what else is there for him but the fishing or the farm?’

‘You don’t see your way to put him to the college, Andra? He’s the makings of a grand doctor in him.’

‘Aye: I’ve thought of it, Sam. I doubt if I could see him through. The rest of them will get married as soon as they can. I couldna blame them, Sam – that’s all they’ll ever be good for. And once they’re married their hands will be full and they’ll hardly have time to straighten their backs. And if I set the laddie to the college I would like to see him through with it.’

‘Aye – ye’d want to see him through and set out on his own once ye started. Better never to send him at all than disappoint his life by taking him away after he’d gotten a taste of it.’

‘That’s it, Sam. I’m no’ getting any younger. Work’s no’ what it used to be. Damnt, Sam, but it’s hard.’

‘Well, well, Andra: there’s no use in mourning. Things maun aey be some way. No doubt but the boy will find something to his bent – but guid kens I would rather see him apprenticed before the mast than taking a pair o’ horse wi’ John MacMeechan.’

‘No, no: Achgammie will never break his spirit: that would just kill the boy. No, no: I’ll find a road out for him somehow – even if it means the sea. He’s all I’ve got to live for now. It’s little enough I see o’ Dick without losing David.’

Sam MacKitteroch did not reply. He himself was alone in the world and had never married. And though he did not know what it meant to be a father he regretted deeply that he had never had a son. This was one reason why he was so gentle and painstaking with his scholars.

It was the first time Andrew Ramsay had ever admitted how much he cared for his youngest son – and how much he regretted the sea-going of Richard. Dick had had brains, initiative and courage. He had never taken life lying down but from his earliest days had endeavoured to strike out for himself.

Andrew had thought that the other boys would be the same. But they had disappointed him. Not that he ever felt inclined to blame them. Rather did he blame himself: their dullness and stupidity oppressed him with a sense of guilt.

And then, at the last, had come David, the bright-eyed. Now the years he had missed the company of Richard were being compensated. And yet he felt that the compensation was coming too late: that his efforts to give David a start in life would be inadequate. He had been an idler: he had let opportunities for material advancement slip. He could have made a greater effort and managed to save a pound or two. But – he had not. He had to face the fact. Now the best years of his life were past. He had lost custom: he had alienated custom: he had let life take its course. And all the while he had maintained his self-respect by fostering his innate radicalism: self-satisfied in his role of parish-pump philosopher.

Still, even now it was not too late: he would think out some plans for assisting the lad who was so truly his own son: his Joseph.

Of all his brothers, David liked Richard best. He had only one memory of him – when he had come home for a short week-end the previous winter and had given him a bag of sweets and a ride on his back. But even during the short time he had been at home David sensed a difference between Richard and all the others and had been conscious of a bond between them.

There was no bond between himself and his two older brothers, Adam and Samuel. They were at the fishing, mostly at nights. Sometimes they talked to him: never with him.

Alexander and John worked on Achgammie. Alexander, who was twenty-two and earning as much as he ever would, was thinking of getting married after harvest. John had feed himself to a Newton Stewart farmer and was as good as married as far as his home at the Suie was concerned.

William, having reached the age of twelve, was working a pair of horse on Achgammie: he was so tired when he came home at nights that he took his supper and went straight to bed.

David’s contact with his brothers and sisters was brief and casual. Occasionally his sisters, Bell, Mary and Sarah, who were in service, would come home on a Sunday. But their appearance and talk was that of strangers to him. Only with his sister Agnes did he feel any real bond or blood-tie. But Agnes too was now in service: she had gone at the May term as kitchen lass to the farm of Achnotteroch. David felt her loss very keenly: she had been more to him than his mother – and much more to him than his brother Peter who was only two years older. Peter was dull-witted: and yet he was ill-tempered and selfish. Sarah Ramsay had long differentiated between them. She saw how her husband doted upon David and she saw how closely David resembled his father and his brother Richard. She drew to Peter, the true child of her womb, and revenged herself on her husband through her youngest born.

But David had imagination enough to escape from much of his home influence. He made no demands: he avoided quarrels knowing he would get worsted. And he did his mother’s bidding without any outward show of resentment.

But often enough he felt resentful and rebellious. He disliked washing dishes and stirring porridge. But he could not do everything and Peter had to work too. On the least pretext whatsoever he escaped from the house. Sometimes he would go to Achgammie steading – but that was Peter’s favourite haunt. Mostly he sought the shore – or sought out his father if he were not working too far away. He had no companions for the Suie was lonely and isolated.

David did not mind being alone. He had his dreams and his visions. He had a curious interest in birds and flowers and insects: and he never tired watching the incoming or outgoing of the tide. He was beginning to love the look of the land: to be conscious that he liked it and had an affection for it. Often he found himself standing on the heughs looking across the Loch to the low hills on the Cairnryan coast and the low-hanging clouds that seemed to rest there. Sometimes he would lie down in the lee of a whin bush and watch the clouds, massing, disintegrating, banking up, floating, drifting, sailing … The earth, the sea and the sky: he was beginning to be conscious of them: conscious of their beauty and their rhythm and inexplicable harmony. He began to know every hollow in the land around the Suie: began to know every rock on the shore between Achgammie and Corsewell Point. The high wall of the estate kept him from exploring to his right – and Sir Thomas MacCready’s estate ran down to the beach at low tide – a fence of netting and barbed wire cutting down across the beach to prevent sheep and cattle from straying.

But sometimes through an iron gate in the wall he would watch Sir Thomas’s imported fallow deer feeding in the entrance park to his estate. The deer with their white-spotted tawny coats were timid but not frightened or alarmed at the near presence of a human being. They were small graceful creatures, soft-eyed and sweet-tempered. But somehow, to David, they looked alien – foreign to the land they lived on. But Sir Thomas was proud of them. He was the only man in the Rhinns who had deer in his park: he felt, by this virtue, he was quite the English gentleman.

Sir Thomas sometimes took a stroll with his lady in the cool of a fine summer’s evening and he was always delighted to hear her remark on the loveliness of his imported deer that were so reminiscent of her native Huntingdonshire.

Only once had young David Ramsay seen Sir Thomas and his lady. He had seen them as he had seen the deer – through the bars of the iron grill. He had thought them both much stranger than the deer. Sir Thomas was wearing a very loud-checked knickerbocker suit and a straw hat. By his side was his lady, very slim, her dress, especially her bustle, accentuating the cramped narrowness of her waist: and in her hand she had twirled a bright yellow parasol. Their gait was slow and artificial – a mere purposeless stroll. They passed very close to the gate and though David could not make out what they were saying their accent fell very strange to his ears. Before they actually came abreast of the gate he had fled.

But he felt that, like the fallow deer, Sir Thomas and Lady MacCready were strangers and had no connection with the land he knew and loved. And he felt glad they had an estate in which they could seclude themselves. He experienced no desire to explore behind its walls: it was a reservation for strange animals, strange customs and strange people.

But David’s time for wandering and dreaming was limited. He was sorry when Old Sam closed the school for the summer and he had to go and work on the Achgammie fields for his threepence a day.

There was a shyness and a reserve in him. He did not like the coarse jokes of the men or their coarse swearing; nor did he like the crude humour of his mates on the turnip drills. The boys and girls were quick to sense this tendency of reserve in David Ramsay: they took whatever opportunity they got to tease him. But there was not much opportunity. Always one of the MacMeechan boys worked in the fields with them. Mostly it was James, a thin wiry son of his father: sparing of words, devoid of all humour and much humanity but cunning and greedy and mean.

James MacMeechan did not allow any time for talking. It had always been a puzzle to him what people got to talk about – especially when there was work to be done. For young people to talk was an impertinence – an aping of foolish grown-ups: and this was not to be tolerated.

James MacMeechan worked hard and steadily. When he had occasion to check any one he did so as if checking a dog or a horse – with a curt vicious command. For this reason his father did not like him to work horses. He ruined them, breaking their tempers, making them nervous and almost unfit for any other man to work. But he was excellent for handling the field workers and could work skilfully with a hoe, a heuk or a flail. Moreover, he had a passionless hatred of women: this was also useful. His brother William on the other hand was hot-blooded and lecherous: always looking for an opportunity to satisfy his lust. He had as filthy a tongue as any man in the Rhinns and his swearing was filthiest when there were women and young girls within hearing.

None of the MacMeechans were popular. There was a cruel hard-bitten strain in all of them. There was a meanness and dryness about the father: a frightening lack of humanity that alienated him even from his own family. Many people felt it was a pity for his wife. She had never been known to smile since her marriage. But as no one felt the urge to smile about Achgammie and since she never crossed her husband in the smallest detail her life was, by her own standard, as happy and contented as there was any need for. But she had to work incessantly to prevent herself from brooding too much on her lot.

Throughout the summer David worked in the Achgammie fields. Hay-making succeeded the thinning of turnips – and there was always weeding as a stand-by. Even when he got home, tired though he was, there was always some weeding or other work to be done in the garden.

He resented, even in his early years, when he might not have been expected to know better, the waste of the summer nights. For by the time he was finished in the garden or bringing home water from the well he was too exhausted to do anything else but crawl into bed and sleep.

Sabbath was the day of rest. After church he would escape from the Suie and make for the shore. In his work in the fields he missed the rhythm of the sea: its visible ebb and flow. But his Sabbath visits were different from his week-day ones. The Sabbath was the day of rest and to visit the shore in a care-free mood was in itself sinful. David had listened attentively to Sam MacKitteroch – much more attentively than he had listened to the Reverend John Ross. The minister was remote, austere: he spoke in a harsh voice anent the categorical imperatives of Presbyterianism. But the voice of Sam MacKitteroch was as the voice of Jacob or Abraham: the quiet all-embracing voice of Subjective Spiritual Authority. Sam had spoken of the Lord’s Day in a manner compelling recognition and obedience. David felt that God was resting – looking down on His work and noting carefully every individual action. He did not even allow himself to think as on week-days: his thoughts dwelt on God the Father and all His manifold and wonderful manifestations. It was God who made the sea to recede and return: the sun to rise up and go down: who caused the seed to grow and the rain to fall and the wind to blow … On the Sabbath then, he thought of God who had made everything and who knew and saw everything.

A seriousness, a calm thoughtfulness far beyond his years, settled upon David Ramsay on these Sabbaths. But his faith in God and in man was being built up and had not yet been tested in the fire of experience. His faith was great because it was pure, because it had all the childish purity of immature inexperience. He thought of God, of Isaac, of Abraham and of Joseph, with his coat of many colours, and of David with his harp and his sling; and he thought of his father and Sam MacKitteroch. But he did not think of the MacMeechans of Achgammie, he did not even think of his mother or his brother Peter. And the background to his thoughts was the sea and the quiet mournful land of Galloway that rose and fell and gathered itself peacefully in the hollows.

In the evening he would return home quiet and withdrawn. Before going to bed his father would read a chapter from the Book. But this was never more than an exercise in piety. David sat with his head bent for he disliked his mother’s eyes. Now that he was beginning to see his mother objectively he found he disliked her – that he instinctively shrank from her. There was no kindness in her, no softness, no quality that drew him towards her. He sensed that she was neither robust nor healthy. But her pinched face, cold passionless eyes and white drawn lips were not solely accounted for by ill-health. It was her spirit that was hard and mean and her mind that lacked all humour and imagination.

Even as he sat listening with half an ear to his father’s reading, he knew that there was no love, no bond of affection between his parents. His father never conversed with his mother: they exchanged information. But, for that matter, there was no conversation in the Suie – never anything more vital than an exchange of information. His mother would sit at one side of the fire knitting or darning – but doing this work resentfully, sighing one time and pulling viciously with her needle the next. His father would sit at the other side, elbows on knees, smoking resignedly and occasionally spitting into the fire. But all the time it was obvious to David that his thoughts were not centred on his home or on his family. Sometimes he speculated on the nature of his father’s thoughts …

But there was never long to wonder. The nights were short. Bed time came early in the Suie for the day started with the rising of the sun.

But often enough Andrew Ramsay’s thoughts centred on his home and his family. How often did he wonder about Sarah MacCalman? She had not been his only love – far from it. There had been Jessie MacKnight, Lizzie Kirkton, Meg Dodds … any of them might have made a better wife for they could not have made a worse. All of them had been stout buxom lassies full of life and laughter. And Jessie MacKnight had been comely and high-spirited. But they were all young then and even Sarah MacCalman, in a pale delicate way, had not been unattractive.

Sarah alone had yielded to him. That had been his undoing. He had clipped and cuddled with Jessie and Lizzie and Meg. But only Sarah had yielded – only with Sarah had the ultimate barriers been overcome. He had been young and hot blooded. There had been nights when he had courted Jessie only to leave her in an unbearable tension of physical passion …

How often did he recall that first night when after a precious hour with Jessie he had met Sarah on his homecoming and found that she offered no resistance? And how easy, how fatally simple her first conception had been or appeared to be. Sometimes he wondered … And yet … she had been a virgin …

He had married her: there had been no alternative – for him. Then how quickly had disillusionment come: how quickly had he realised the enormity of his mistake.

Even now, across the years, the words of Jessie MacKnight were terrible to recall:

‘If ye had only waited, Andra, there’s nothing I wouldna have given you.’

Aye: if only he had waited. And what kind of life would he have had with Jessie? What kind of children might she have borne him? A world of difference between hers and Sarah’s – but what kind of world? There had been Richard – now there was David. But a family of Davids or Richards? That might have been possible. His daughters might have been like Jessie – and laughter might have broken against the walls of his home.

Aye: ten thousand times had he thought how it might have turned out – if only he had waited. His life had turned sour thinking of the might-have-been. But life took no heed of might-have-been. Life was – in all its terrible inexorability.

Some day he would have a word with his son David and tell him, warn him of the dangers of not waiting. Caution him to be certain – certain almost as of death – before he made the irrevocable step of marriage. For once the ox had been led to the slaughter …

But for Richard he might not have gone on – might never have slept with Sarah again. But there had been Richard and he had hoped there might be another …

His life had been passed hoping for this and for that. Regretting his marriage, his lack of activity, sighing for the life he might have lived but had not. Above all he regretted his lack of activity.

What activity could have been possible in his corner of the Rhinns? The farmers dominated the life of the countryside and the farmers in their turn were dominated by the landlords. The people had no life. Their best hours were given to the labour of the land. When their work was over they retired to their cot-houses – miserable one-roomed boxes, many of them built of turf-sods without windows of any kind – and there partook of their porridge or gruel and crawled into bed or threw themselves down on a bunch of straw or hay in a corner.

There was no communal life – they might foregather once a week under the one kirk roof – but they each came their several ways and departed their several ways. Only at certain times in their labour were they drawn together – at harvest or threshing or at the potato gathering – drawn together and yet separated by the incessant toil. At meal times sitting in the lee of a dyke they might exchange opinion and banter.

But Andrew Ramsay was isolated from the farm workers. He laboured by himself. He had not the common bond of agricultural labour. His isolation depressed him. He enjoyed contact with his fellow-men – and there was only Sam and the minister. Their talk, in the end, was futile enough. Especially their politics. For how could they translate their political ideals into action? They could theorise – indeed they were always theorising. But their theorisings concerned movements and events far removed from their influence. The Civil War in America – or the latest speech of William Ewart Gladstone – or the Mayor of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. There was nothing that could be done – except talk. And yet, an inheritance from the Chartist fervour of his father, Andrew Ramsay had often thought what a significant achievement it would be to organise the farm and agricultural workers of the Rhinns into a Union – so that they could impose their conditions on the farmers. He had devoted much thought and speculation to the idea – but always in the end he had been frustrated by the impossibility of its realisation.

He was a rebel without an immediate objective. There were not many of his kind in Galloway though they were to be found in plenty in the growing industrial cities. This was his tragedy – that he could not find a way to his fellow-men; that he could not realise his ideals in practice.

He felt he was living before his time. He believed that some day, and some day soon, his ideals would triumph; that man to man the world over would be brothers. A day would surely dawn when men, women and children would cease to be slaves of the men who owned the land; that the land would become theirs to enjoy. But that day would not just dawn – that day would have to be striven for, worked for, planned for and finally fought for. The earth was the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. But not even the children of Israel had entered without pain and travail the land the Lord had promised them.