Читать книгу The Wind that Shakes the Barley - James William Barke - Страница 13

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Workaday life on Mount Oliphant was brutal. Had the brutality been their father’s then Robin and Gilbert could have eased themselves in hatred of him. But it came from the soil, from the weather, from poor seed, from inadequate fertilising and lack of gear and labour. Above all from the lack of money that would have provided for their wants and necessities.

From the first William did everything he could to ease the burden on his family; but month by month and as year ran into year he was compelled to call on their immature strength for help.

Robin gave his help willingly and without reserve; and on him the burden fell harder than on the younger Gilbert.

Yet through it all William never relaxed his effort to afford them some measure of education. In the winter nights by the light of the dip candle he would take them in arithmetic and grammar and explain a passage from his Manual. And he never failed to read his Bible chapter and to say his prayer.

Every Sabbath the family trudged into Ayr to the morning service of William Dalrymple. William Burns liked his sermons since they were of a milder temper than the sermons of the stricter Old Light Calvinists.

William Burns’s natural humanism (albeit it was still a humanism rooted in Calvin and the Old Testament) was drawn to the New Light theology. But the bastions of the Scottish Kirk (compounded of the fundamentalism of Calvin with its battle cry: All Power to the Presbytery) were not to be breached by the polemics of liberally-minded pastors whose thoughts were but timidly reflecting the issues of a deeper struggle—a struggle that had not yet come fully into the open.

Robin had heard Murdoch and his father debate the fundamental issue between the Old Light and the New Light theology; and the essential outlines of the controversy were firmly fixed in his young mind.

He could recognise, in his own way, the arbitrary God of the Old Lights sending some to heaven and many more to hell, not for any good or ill they might have occasioned, but purely (and hence arbitrarily) for His own glory.

Robin did not warm to this cruel, arbitrary and capricious God. He warmed more to the God of the New Lights who recognised man’s strengths and weaknesses and weighed in the balance of their sins their faith and their good works.

He was always overawed when he entered the crowded kirk in Ayr and found himself crushed in the narrow wooden boxes. Sometimes the kirk was warm and stuffy—especially when there were many standing. Bodies stank and sweated and the air was rank with the smell of the human herd. Sometimes it was cold and draughty and the herd crouched in upon itself and coughed and hoasted and was ill at ease.

But no matter what the conditions were Robin’s dark eyes burned with observing interest under their drawn brows.

Here and there a prosperous merchant, a rich farmer or a well-to-do laird was dressed in good broad cloth; but mostly the congregation was clad in sober homespun, the hoddin grey of the peasant and the artisan.

Here and there a woman might drape herself in the generous if severely elegant folds of a silken shawl—here a mulberry, there a russet brown, betimes a flaming scarlet, but more often a glistening black. As a rule, however, the shawls were of good plain Kilmarnock plaiding.

Some had bonnets trimmed with lace and some had plain bonnets set squarely upon their heads. But most had mutches with a frill or a facing and tied under their chins with a bow of ribbon.

Robin noted all this going to or coming from the kirk for no detail escaped him. But he commented to no one and kept his thoughts to himself.

Not that Robin’s interest was solely taken up with the surface appearance of things. From the bleak poverty of Mount Oliphant and from the unique angle of its comfortless isolation he noted much in the morals and manners of the parish of Ayr. The gulf between the mass of the poor peasantry and the more prosperous land owners, lairds, tradesfolk and petty burghers yawned deep and wide before him.

And he never failed to feel ill at ease when some young lass was on the cutty stool exposing her sin of fornication. It is true that William Dalrymple dealt less harshly with this sin than a stricter Calvinist would have done. But, Old or New Light, fornication was fornication and the guilty (unless they were of the gentry and in a position to bribe the Session) had to exhibit themselves on the stool of repentance for at least three Sundays and hang their heads in shame while the nature (and details) of their offence was recited from the pulpit and they were exhorted in the paths of virtue.

No soul in Scotland was too innocent and no mind too tender to go in ignorance of the sins of the flesh however vicious or unnatural such sins might be. No young mind was shielded from the shame of sodomy; nor was there any protection against the lurid details of incestuous practices. And since the stool was seldom free of a penitent fornicator, youth could hardly escape the conclusion that the pleasures of the flesh must be more powerfully potent than the virtues of the spirit.

Indeed Robin and Gilbert in their moments alone were wont to discuss the more curious aspects of the cutty stool offences, so that long before they themselves reached adolescence they possessed a complete if grim theological picture of the physical aspects of sexual morality.

But if Robin felt shame for the moral offenders he often writhed at the exhibition of petty and callous class snobberies within the walls of the parish church, as when a young lout in broad cloth would order a serving lass from his bench so that he might be seen to worship without the contamination of the lower orders.

But the mass of parish humanity he saw only in its Sabbath mood of kirk-going. By the afternoon the Burns family were trudging back to Mount Oliphant where isolation enveloped them for another six days.