Читать книгу The Wind that Shakes the Barley - James William Barke - Страница 19

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It was autumn again, he was fourteen years old and just back from his schooling with Murdoch. There was an exhilarating feeling about harvest time: the reaping and bringing into the barn of the fruit of a hard year’s work.

The weather held good. Day after day the sun shone round and warm with a lazy ripening heat. It warmed his bones—and they needed warming. It thawed out his incipient rheumatism and set the blood coursing in his body, dispelling the too early accumulation of toxins and the poisons of frequent fevers.

But his blood was hot from the sun of lusty manhood beginning to stir within him. Stir and disrupt and exult, ebbing and flowing in great red waves of passionate emotion, bringing the old coarse songs to his lips with new meaning and new urgency, giving life a new and secret awareness, a new pulse and throb.

But not only the pulse and throb of the flesh, clamorous as that was.

The brain too was afire, questing and thrusting and probing; turning over and dreaming; revolving with such speed and ease that it seemed to be storing energy against a day of need.

His whole being was active, flux-like in its activity, ever breaking down and re-forming, grouping and regrouping; but building all the time, growing in awareness and quickening in sensitivity: efflorescent...

He took his heuk to the harvest field, eager to test its new-whetted blade in the yellow grain.

But here was his binding help: a bouncing bright-eyed lass much his own age and already ripening into the thumping quean who would dance the Reel of Stumpie with the best. She was neat and clean, her bare legs shining from the wash in the burn; her toes pink with their cleansing in the dew-drenched grass.

The blood hammered in his head even as he eyed her. The last time he had seen her she was but a slip of a lass; before puberty had plumped her for maidenhood and lit the radiance of sex in her.

It was this radiance that drew response as he watched her making circles with her heel in the dust of the court. Immediately he knew shame and fear for the sound of his father’s voice in conversation with Gilbert came to his ears.

He moved forward.

“Well, Nelly? It’s a fine morning.”

“Aye, Rab. I saw Mr. Burns—he said I was to wait for you ...”

“Right then, Nelly: we’ll get down to the rigs.”

He was conscious of her radiance as they strode down the brae to where the grain waved bravely if thinly, burnished against the slant of the morning sun. He talked in jerky formal sentences in an attempt to hide the emotional reflexes of his spurting blood.

“Grand weather for the hairst, the year?”

“Aye ... it’s fine. It makes you want to sing.”

“You like to sing?”

“Aye: when I feel like it.”

“And what ... do you like to sing about?”

“Och, anything that comes into my head.”

“Or your heart?”

“Och, dinna be daft, Rab.”

Daft? Maybe he was daft. There was something daft about the singing at his heart. Maybe that was why, when he read a glorious line in a length of poems, his heart throbbed in emulation.

His hand trembled as he re-whetted the sickle. Then he brought the shining blade neatly and deftly through the grain stalks close to the earth, saving the blade from blunting on the stones by his deftness.

Work had to be done. The good weather was a miracle not to be flaunted. It might rain any day now and keep on raining for weeks. And if Robin hadn’t the self-knowledge how much depended on the success of his labour there was the twisted shadow of his father lying across the harvest field to remind him.

There he stooped to the hand-scything of their thin grain: a tumult and riot of emotions with the new awareness of sex stirring and erupting in his blood; and his young soul sending out shoots through the dank mould of the Presbyterian faith: his idiot piety being overcome from within. He swept the stalks to the ground unheeding the strength of his right arm, unmindful of the energy that flowed from him.

Nelly applied herself with vigour. The daughter of the merry gow of Perclewan, whose smiddy rang to his lusty hammer blows and echoed to his equally lusty laughter, she had inherited physical vigour and good nature. She could not know if Robin was in love with her: such knowledge was beyond her immature years. But she knew in her blood he was attracted to her, that he vibrated to her sex.

He was not the first who had done so this year back, since ever the bloom of her blossoming maidenhood had flushed her cheek and set the lights dancing a merry jig in her blue eyes.

Gourlay of Whauphill farm had a son back from the school in Ayr, and he had written a verse or two to her beauty—and Willie Gourlay was not half the lad Rab Burns was—though his folk were as bien as the Burns were bare.

Meantime here was the dark, disturbing puzzle of Rab Burns...

She was working well, keeping her end up with him; but her mind was day-dreaming with Willie Gourlay and the golden days that lay ahead...

Unwatchful, her hand closed tight on a great jagged leaf of thistle.

She yelped a little for the thistle pricks dug deeply into her soft flesh.

Rab flung down his heuk.

“Let me see?”

He took her hand in his roughened paw. The paw was delicate and tender in its deftness.

“Aye... You’ll need to watch, Nelly. This damned rachle o’ stanes grows more thistles than it does barley.”

But the roughness of his tongue was only simulated. He put the palm of her hand to his mouth and drew out the pricks with his teeth.

The odour of body sweat went to his head... The nearness of her flesh, pulsing and throbbing in its virginity, played on his senses with a pain so intense and exquisite it seemed as if his sensory nerves had been exposed from their sheaths...

William Burns straightened his bowed and aching back from his labours and cast a cold censorious eye on them from across an acre and a half of stubble. Yet he might have stood by their side.

Robin dropped her hand and went back to his heuk.

Some day he would battle his way out of this dreary hell of unending drudgery; some day he would win clear of the shadow and the substance of his father’s silent disapproval—aye, and Gilbert’s accursed meal-mouthed meekness.

And he thought what a relief it would be if only he could bring himself to hate his father, or his father would put in words the measure of his disapproval. But he could not know hatred for his father: only the anguish of pity for a man who had placed himself in the yoke of thraldom that he and Gilbert and Nancy and the other children might be rescued from any corresponding servitude; that they might have some measure of education and enlightenment; that they might in the end win free from the plough-handle and the cow’s tail and know something of a life more full and free than ever slavery to the soil could bring them.

He remembered his father’s words when he had gone into John Murdoch’s at Ayr.

“Apply yourself to your lessons, Robert, and let nothing distract you. You know it’s no’ easy for me to spare you. But I’m anxious that you should get every chance to add to your learning. You may not see the wisdom in that just now, Robert—but if you apply yourself you’ll thank me in later years.”

And he remembered how he had looked momentarily into his father’s tired and sunken eyes and looked away again, swallowing hard on the rising lump of emotion in his throat. Some day he would take his vengeance on a heartless world that treated honest poverty with such callous cruelty.

He would master the world of knowledge; he would plumb the depths of the world’s poetry and scale the heights of its thought. He would master French and force the treasure from the classics with the key of his Latin...

He would defy the world despite his clouterly appearance and the hoddin grey of his poverty. His stomach might be empty but his head would be full; his body might be covered in rags but he would clothe his mind with the purple of poesy and the fine linen of philosophy.

He had crawled up and down the stony slopes of Mount Oliphant: some day he would stride in independent manhood the rich slopes of Mount Olympus...

His dreaming was gone. He looked up; for now he realised that the bubbling jet of the lark’s song had wavered and trickled back to earth.

He ran his hand over his black hair and the sun was warm on the nape of his neck.

Then his blood leapt. Here was Nelly Kilpatrick taking up from the lark, warbling her virgin-clear notes...

“What’s that you’re singing, Nell?”

“You don’t know? I Am A Man Unmarried—my favourite reel.”

“No: I haven’t heard it.”

“I thought you would have known that.”

“Keep on wi’ it, Nell, till I get the line o’t richt.”

“You never heard the words afore?”

“Never mind the words.”

“You dinna ken wha wrote them?”

“Do you?”

“They were wrote for me by a poet—a real poet.”

He dropped his heuk.

“A poet?”

“He had a notion of me.”

“Oh?”

“Aye... Do you know Willie Gourlay?”

“No, no, Nell. Willie might have a notion o’ you—and I wouldna blame him for that. But dinna confuse him wi’ a poet. He wouldna know a poem from a paitrik.”

“I think they’re gey and bonnie—and I think you’re only jealous.”

“Do you now? Well ... sing on wi’ your reel—and gin the horse be to the fore and the branks bide hale I’ll let you have a verse for your song that’ll show you the measure o’ Willie Gourlay. Aye ... and give you a taste o’ the sweetness o’ a song.”

“I didna ken you could write verses, Rab?”

He took a quick impulsive step towards her. Then he halted and let the arms he would have embraced her with drop helplessly to his side.

“Sing, Nell, for godsake. There’s a shadow on the stubble no sun can dispel. But your singing helps me to forget it.”

Nelly thought how queer and lovable a lad was Rab Burns with his black hair and swarthy skin—and his eyes. How they had lit up a moment ago. And how the light had died in them and how sad and strange he had become, speaking strangely and without sense—or with a sense beyond her knowing.

With queer heartache she felt she might be in love with him. But such love as she knew was the faint blush of virginal emotion.

For Robin the emotion was virginal enough. Yet his emotion went deeper, for his consciousness, his apprehension, his knowledge, his awareness, his sensitivity went deeper.

He saw Nelly Kilpatrick even as his father or Gilbert saw: but he noted every detail of her lineaments to a degree to which neither his father nor Gilbert were capable.

He saw Nelly as the ideal woman. He added, in the final alchemy of summation, the quality of objectivity. Nelly became invested with all the qualities of vestal girlhood related to the Parish of Dalrymple—and to the eternal feminine.

It was too early yet to ask if this was the face that launched a thousand ships; but it was time to recognise in the lass evidence that her sex constituted Dame Nature’s greatest work.

Over the supper brose he was distant and abstracted; but no one paid much attention for every one was dog-tired with the day’s darg in the harvest field. Physically he was as tired as the others: mentally he was very much alert and active. He had much to think about. His thoughts were wonderfully lucid and luminous. He was inwardly exalted and nervously tensed.

His thoughts revolved round Nelly Kilpatrick. He saw her in every state of dress and undress; he saw her at every conceivable task; he saw her at her humble social round at kirk and market. And the more he saw her the more she became the embodiment of the ideal without ever losing her essential and distinctive personality.

He was moving towards creation though he did not know it. He had told Nelly he would show her what a song should be. He had spoken without thinking. Now he realised that he had put tongue on an ambition he had long cherished in his inmost mind. It needed but Nelly to sing her favourite reel and to add words written by Willie Gourlay for him to pick up the gauntlet and make his boast. He knew Nelly and he knew Willie. He was contemptuous of Willie Gourlay as a man: much more contemptuous of him as a poet—if he could call a mere scribbler of doggerel rhymes a poet. Nelly poured wine into his blood. And suddenly, without knowing how or why, all his reading and dreaming and seeing and thinking fused in the flash of inspiration. The flywheel of his will turned the gears of his mind; thought fashioned itself into rhyme and metre; neatly to the music’s measure the words flowed to his tongue.

She dresses aye sae clean and neat,

Both decent and genteel;

And then there’s something in her gait,

Gars ony dress look weel.

A shard of the harvest moon was showing above the mist bank of the western horizon. He walked down the hill aslant the day-old stubble, singing in his heart.

Every doubt and fear was cast off, all the poverty and hardship of his days was forgotten, the deep sorrowed lines of his father’s face did not haunt him. Nothing out of the past could discourage him now.

For now he was entering into his kingdom, the gates of bardship swung open against his coming.

There was a touch of mist among the banks and along the braes: a risping of early frost whetted the air.

Good to be alive! Good to know the goodness of the Creator! Good to know that the future was there to be lived through and experienced!