Читать книгу The Wind that Shakes the Barley - James William Barke - Страница 16

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The years dragged in a grey monotony of labour and semi-starvation. The sour wet soil of the Mount held the seeping rains. The crops thrived but poorly along the stony rigs. Many of the cattle beasts, unable to survive the long winter on the miserable fodder salvaged from the blighted harvests, hoasted out their tubercular lungs and died.

Robin toiled late and early, trachling in the glaur and gitter and chafing under the enforced idleness when wind and rain outside made labour an impossibility and there was little else to do but water the beasts from the well and grind a ration of grey oats on the knocking stone.

Sometimes he would turn his back on the Mount and upon Alloway and Ayr, trudge to the brow of the brae towards Balsarroch and look down into the lisk of the land falling gently away towards Dalrymple and Maybole.

Sometimes there would be a lift in the storm. The sun would come out and the seeping mists would vanish. His eye would trace the horizon from the shoulder of the Craigs of Kyle round by Dunston Hill, Gartskeoch, Farden William and Pinmerry; across the Maybole Fault till the ground swelled and rose again to come full circle from Glenalmond along the gentle slope of the Carrick Hill to the clenched fist of the Heads of Ayr...

His heart would beat and throb and swell in his breast. Tears would well in his great eyes. The world of nature was vast and heart-scalding in its timeless beauty; and the world of men was harsh and heart-searing in its remorseless indifference and remorseless cruelty, grinding down against the galled flesh of poverty the hapless sons of toil who had nothing but their bare hands and their poor tools with which to wrest a living from a cold and unresponsive soil.

The strings of his emotion were tuned to the harsher elements. Let the wind blow the salt tang of the sea up the slow slope of the brae from the mouth of the Doon. He would turn his face on the valley of the Doon as the black clouds came down and the slow soft-swelling ground was blotted out; turn his face towards the sea, hidden in the driving rain, the incessant rain, driven from that cold distant unknown and unknowable Arran Isle, land of fantastic peaks seen (when seen) in the dizzy blue of peat-reek intangibility; the incomprehensible outpost of the Gaelic land; the fantastic terra firma of the margin of the ocean, of the land of mists and an unknown tongue, forbidding as only the mind’s eye can forbid and restrain...

On such solitary walks, taken often in the heart of storm, Robin found ease for his troubled spirit and a harmony for the riot of his thoughts and emotions. Over and over in his heart and mind he pondered the question: Why was man made to mourn?