Читать книгу The Wind that Shakes the Barley - James William Barke - Страница 6

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The village of Alloway straggled back from the banks of the river Doon to where the ground was firmer and drier; and here William Burns decided to make his home. He had acquired the right to labour some seven acres of rough ground lying back from the main road that meandered out of Ayr town on its winding way to Kirkoswald, Maybole and the South. Here he pegged out a small rectangle, brought boulders and clay and began bigging himself a shelter from the elements.

The Alloway folks had kindly dispositions for they were not given to overwork. They helped William in odd lethargic moments since it amused them to see a man so tireless and energetic. But of course: the man was a stranger and not in his right mind.

“Damned,” said John Tennant, the village blacksmith, to James Young, his horse-dealing neighbour, “it’s no’ canny to see a man working himself harder nor a dumb brute.”

“Aye, you’re right there, Jock: it makes the sweat break on you to watch him.”

“Ah weel, Jamie, he’ll no’ break sweat; for bedamned! if he hasna sweated away every ounce o’ flesh under his hide till there’s nothing left but the bones and the muscle-strings to work them. But dinna tire yourself watching him; for it’s a sair sicht.”

When the puddled clay had been well packed into the rough stones; when the roof tree had been set in place and the thatch well roped against the west wind (forever soughing with its slobber of grey rain), William Burns brought his lass to inspect his work.

“It’s not a bad house, Agnes. There’s not another like it this side o’ Ayr. It will need a week’s firing before we think of moving in. But ... you like it?”

“It’s more nor I bargained on, William. It’s a better house nor I was brocht up in at Kirkoswald. It’s a palace of a place set by the cot-houses of the farms here... And the ingle-neuk! That’s a fireside ony woman in Ayrshire would be proud of. You’ve made a real snod job o’ it, William.” Then she added shyly: “Were you ettlin’ for us to be settled in afore the New Year?”

“I was, Agnes. We’ll be married and settled in by the middle of December. Aye: we’ll be tight and cosy here, Agnes, I hope your brothers will like my house...”

They hadn’t many words for each other. They were past the daffing days of youth. Indeed there had been no daffing in William’s days. The chill of penury had more than damped his youthful ardour. He had been reared to poverty and hardship, to the endless moil and toil in the rachle of clay and stone on the bare braes of his native Clochnahill, swept by the haars from the North Sea and chilled by the blasts from the bleak North.

His young years had been bleak with the aftermath of the ’45. The hope of the Stewarts had almost bled to death on Drummossie Moor. The remnants of that hope and the greater hope of Scotland’s independence had been butchered by the soul-calloused Cumberland, hard tempered in the art of human butchery.

The Earl Marischal had backed the Stewarts and lost. The Burns folk had been cast adrift from his feudal mercies and ever since had fought a losing battle to grub their bite of thin nourishment from the soured north-east clay.

In the end there had been no alternative: William and his brother had packed a farrel or two of bannocks in a cloth and with a few precious bits of small silver and a scatter of groats had gone trudging down the Howe of the Mearns to seek a crust of barley bread in the kindlier South.

They had tramped down through Perth and crossed the Tay and trudged on through the bare patches of Fife till they had stood on the shore of the gloomy Forth and had seen the reek of the Capital hang like a black cloud above the ridge of its rock even as royal Jamie the Saxth had seen it before he had gone slobbering South glad to be free of the stink and stench of its narrow wynds and closes.

But William Burns had seen the reek-cloud as a pillar of smoke guiding the destiny of his steps towards employment.

There he felt that the green finger of his gardening knack would enable him to find a buyer. Auld Reekie was throwing her legs from under her lousy blanket. Her family was growing and a few of them were reaping the rewards of the Union with England. New houses were going up: a new town for the rich merchants; and there was a general laying-out of gardens and open spaces.

So William Burns sold his labour in Edinburgh and tasted the first fruits of wage-slavery. But he was a peasant brought up to the land and calling no man master save in the way of feudal right. He soured at the meanness of his petty slavery and hankered after a plot of land somewhere where he could work as he pleased, work for his own economic salvation and sustain the pride of his manhood.

So he scraped and hoarded his groats together; and eventually, without a backward glance at the Sodom of Scotia’s darling seat, turned his dour Presbyterian face towards the West country.

And by and by he met with one, William Fergusson of Doonholm, Provost of Ayr in the Baillery of Kyle; and from him he rented a few acres and set to gardening on a market basis.

But as always when Adam delves Eve must spin and William needed a wife that he might settle and prosper now that he had fulfilled his ambition and won free from the haggle of day labour.

William Burns was dour but his heart was not unkindly. The spine of his East-coast manhood was strutted with an independent integrity that would not allow him to deviate from the path of his self-hewn righteousness.

He was of the race that had stood against the drilled legions of Rome when race after race had bowed to their yoke; he was of the race that had knelt in the ring after Falkirk, that had died at Flodden and that had marched to Derby—and been butchered and sold for their pains.

He was of the race that turned from Scotland, trudged to the ends of the earth whether with Park and Livingstone in the heat and treachery of Africa, Murray in Australia, MacKenzie in America or Learmonth in the vast Muscovite plains...

He was of the handful of continuing Scots, enduring against all hardship and circumstance, enduring best when enduring alone, sheet anchored in the tradition of their race and the fear of the Lord. Looking for no reward this side of the grave and looking indifferently enough on that; grimly fortified in the knowledge that though they had lost their nationhood they would, in the end of all earthly things, come to a Kingdom where only the upright could enter and only the pure in heart see God.

He, like the intrepid sons of his race, neither knew nor sought any other reward. Neither sought he any approbation other than the silent deep-hidden approbation of his conscience.

William Burns was not to know he was to father into the world the greatest of his nation’s great sons. Yet could he have known, had he lived to know, this knowledge would not have caused him to deviate from his course.

There was no meanness or hypocrisy about him and nothing of the canting moral humbuggery of the Presbyterian bigots. Yet he was essentially and fundamentally Protestant. He stood alone before his God, inexorable and unbending even as his God was. Justice measured all his actions as he hoped for mercy. But laughter never broke the line of his drawn purposeful lips. He had never—and with some reason—known anything in life to arouse laughter. And having no sense of humour saved him many a subtle heartache.

In the grey poverty and the grey labour of his days the sunshine of laughter had no place. Not only was life grim and earnest: it was an unending struggle against a flint-hearted nature and the greedy exploitation of rent and capital. Here there was but one justice: to him that had would be given and to him that had not even what he had would be taken away.

Out of the hardship of their days and the lonely misery of their nights, Scots like William Burns had created a God of their own image.

That they could endure through hellish physical torture even unto violent and agonising death was a tribute to their devotion to a purpose and an ideal beyond the hunger of their lean bellies and the clamour of their flesh and blood...

So William Burns stood on the beaten floor of his first dwelling raised by his own hands and looked towards his bride. He had chosen with particular care the partner who would share the burden of his future days. He might hope, reckoning by the psalmist’s span, for another thirty odd years of life.

It cannot be said he loved her. Love in the sense of romantic or physical avowal of the physical attributes of the mate was something William Burns did not know and, had he known, would have rejected as a sinful blasphemy.

But his attachment to Agnes Broun was deep and affectionate. If he experienced no desire for daffing in the lea of a thorn bush or beside a rig in a field of barley, it was very much to his mind that he should provide his bride with a good home—together with the means of maintaining it. Though they both accepted the poverty of their lot and knew that hardship would in all probability companion them to the grave, yet William had faith that his skill and industry would win for him (and the family he hoped for) a measure of independence—and perhaps comfort.

Agnes began to labour with her first child on the 24th of the second January of her marriage and the twenty-seventh year of her age. William was anxious: maybe for the first time in his life he experienced a tremor of fear; but the only outward manifestation he showed was in his quickened speech and movement. He called for his neighbours, Mrs. Tennant and Mrs. Young. But Jean Young, who had known many sore and difficult labours herself, had no stomach left for midwifery. She would come if Mr. Burns couldn’t get anyone else; but, well, let him try Aggie MacLure—Mrs. Tennant—who had a steady nerve and a deft hand.

By morning the worst was over and a male child was born to Agnes and William. William was relieved and happy beyond the reach of prayer. Having seen that Agnes was comfortable, he remembered his duty to God and his newly-born son and heir. He saddled the pony and splashing through dub and mire battered his way into Ayr town to the manse of his parish minister, William Dalrymple, and brought the good-natured man cantering through the dubs, with a good wind in his broad back, to christen the child Robert after his own father at Clochnahill.

William took his vows solemnly and with great sincerity. Never happy unless he was undertaking great moral obligations, he found that the obligation of undertaking to bring up his new-born son in the way of the Lord lay prouder to his heart than any other that could have been imposed on him.

Here, if ever, his word was his bond, so that there was no need other than the formal one to have his neighbours, John Tennant and James Young, to witness.

The birth of Robert had passed off without any alarms or excursions and the event had disturbed the dull tenor of Alloway’s lethargic ways even less than any other birth might have; for nobody got drunk and not even William or his intimate neighbours as much as wet their dry Presbyterian whistles with a drop of whisky, nor did they slocken their honest drouth with a draught of tippenny—the common ale of the day.

But a few days after the baptismal service when Agnes was beginning to move shakily about the house a great blustering gale came tearing in from the sea and raged and ravaged through Carrick, Kyle and Cunninghame, bowing down the stunted trees and tearing away thatched roofs whose unfortunate moorings had gone rotten with age and the all-prevalent dampness.

Maybe William (who was, after all, but a skilly amateur) had not been over-knacky with the setting of his fire jambs or the balancing of his stone lintel. Under the strains and stresses of the storm his gable wall collapsed and the entire structure was like to tumble about his ears.

William would not have minded that, so great was his mortification and wounded pride. But he could not have the house falling about the ears of his wife and infant son.

He rose and proofed himself against the lashing rain, wrapped Agnes in his own warm plaiding and, happing the wailing infant under his cloak with an armful of blanket, ventured into the storm to seek safety and shelter with the good neighbourly Young.

Folks were superstitious, always looking to either hand and over their shoulders for signs and omens and ever reading sinister meanings into ordinary happenings.

Many an auld tongue wagged knowingly, telling Agnes how her first-born had had a stormy entry into the hard and stormy world and that for a surety he would have a stormy out-going with a stormy passage in between: as if the wild west wind had never blown in the gable of a clay biggin in Cunninghame, Kyle or Carrick in all its endless centuries of blowing.

William muttered darkly against the bletherin’ auld wives of the West country with their all-but-pagan conception of the ways of the Almighty.

But even as he muttered he doubted. There was a thousand years of Scottish blood in his veins and much of it Gaelic blood. Maybe there was something at the back of all their blethers.

Whatever lay behind the inscrutability of the dark universe, he set to with determination and made good and doubly siccar the damage to his clay cottage—even as the gale blew out its last breath in gusty sobs.

Never again would a child of his lie at the mercy of weak and faulty workmanship.

There were folks in Alloway who hoped William Burns had been taught a much-needed lesson and that the fall to his pride would do him good. There were many folks who found the dour taciturn superiority of William Burns hard to thole. Damned, they thought in their soft lazy way, why did a man need to have such a stubborn pride in him merely because he came from Aberdeen-way and was well thought of by the dirt of gentry? A man who couldn’t unbend and take a drink and lift a lawless leg on occasion was a poor creature for all his hard-won and harder kept seven acres and his grand job with the Provost of Ayr. Damned, they finally concluded, life had no savour or salt to it that way at all: a man might as well be dead with his bones rotting in Alloway Kirkyard and his soul burning in hell—where doubtless it would burn any the ways of it.

In his evenings, when all labour had been cast aside and everything that could be accomplished by way of work had been done; when Agnes, tired and worn out, had gone to bed to snuggle her first-born and give him his supper suck, William carefully placed a sheet of rough paper on the end of the table, put a point to his goose quill and laboriously and awkwardly set down the first question and the first answer in his manuscript on which he had already scrawled the title—Manual of Religious Belief.

He was determined above all else that not only would he implement his parental vows to the letter but that, in the essential spirit of Protestantism, this child Robert and such brothers or sisters as he might yet have, would grow up blade true to the faith of the covenant between God and man and spotlessly free from the bawdy heresies of the ignorant and licentious damned who, in their silly ignorance, thought that the paths of glory led but to the grave, instead of through the grave, the grave of all worldly things and the more worldly flesh.

The child Robin was perhaps a trifle more delicate than either his father or mother would have liked. But his mother hadn’t long to nurse him. Not that she had much time on her hands; for the market garden was but a poor crofting and she had to attend to the cows and the pony and the chickens and work about the seven acres carrying manure and labouring generally to her husband in the spring evenings when he came home from his gardening at Provost Fergusson’s estate along the banks of the river Doon.

Not only had she little time to nurse her precious first-born. Before he was a year old she had again conceived.

A large family was an economic necessity if a man wanted to eke out a living on the land and could not afford to hire labour. William Burns was not the man to bring children into the world for the sensual pleasure they might bring him: he was much too hard-bitten a Puritan to indulge in wanton conjugal hedonism. He undertook their begetting, as he undertook everything to which he set his mind, with a high and premeditated seriousness.

But if there was no song in his throat at the pleasures of parenthood there was a deep and enduring pride.

He had a horror of the poverty that had dragged down his father and broken up his family. He was determined he would never drag his own family down into the morass of poverty and suffering. Yet the fear that he might somehow fail in this gnawed at his vitals like a fatal cancer.

Education was the one certain specific against poverty as sure as the fear of the Lord was the certain specific against sin. His family might be poor; but if only he could provide them with education, they would be equipped to battle with life above the level of the clay from which they delved their bread.

Had he not had the truth of this seared into his flesh and burned into the very marrow of his bones? Had he not suffered from his boyhood even as his father had suffered from the want of that education that would have given their labour a value beyond the pittance of unskilled day-wage drudgery?

At whatever cost then he would provide his children with the best education he could afford. Nor would he spare himself any pains in bestowing on them his own hard-won knowledge.

So as his family grew and Robert and Gilbert—more like twins than brothers—began to scamper about and wear out the patched and re-patched seats of their duds, William decided it was time a proper school was set up in Alloway.

He went round his neighbours and spoke solemnly and with the air of unchallengeable authority on the benefits of education second only to the benefits of religion. Nay, was not religion itself and the revealed word of God little better than the darkness of superstition without the light of education to reveal the just proportions of its truth and beauty?

The neighbours who were now familiar with William’s inner worth were won over to his scheme. First they must agree among themselves to make good a dominie’s annual fee of five pounds. They must agree to provide him with the shelter of four walls and a roof wherein he might hold his school. Lastly, they must undertake to see that the good man did not starve in any literal sense since this would bring their project to ruin.

A few of them demurred at the expense of the project. Times were so bad that no one indeed remembered when they had ever been good; and the ways of nature and God were as uncertain as they were inscrutable.

But William’s thin dun face, like a slab of his famous North-country granite, was set against any defeatism. A sufficiency of neighbours consented as would guarantee the minimum requirements of the scheme. William thanked them solemnly and undertook to find a suitable dominie.

He had some trouble finding such a man. Dominies were hard-pressed, ill-paid devils and most of them had a failing for the bottle and were not over-fastidious about the moral code; and William was adamant about both.

He wanted a dominie out of the ordinary run. He wanted a young man who would see life and the significance of education as he saw them: a man after his own heart.

After much cautious enquiry (and some assistance from John Tennant) he heard of a young man of the town of Ayr who seemed to have all the essential qualifications. He made the necessary appointment and rode into Ayr to keep it.

William eyed the prospective dominie keenly across the tavern table. He plied him question after question.

John Murdoch was nervous but he did not betray himself. This quaint swarthy-skinned man with his slow deliberate and formal English was no rustic Ayrshire clod-hopper native to the Ayrshire clods. This man was something of a genius in his stern almost forbidding way. He knew what he was talking about. He knew the value of good teaching: it would be half the battle to have his keen interest and support.

So John Murdoch, coming into his nineteenth year, keen, ambitious and born to pedagogy, shook William Burns warmly by the hand as they clasped to close the deal.

There remained the final test. William’s eyes screwed up from their recessed sockets and went out through the back of Murdoch’s skull. He wavered for a moment, fearing the worst.

“You will join me in a drink, Mr. Murdoch, so that the bargain may be sealed in our Scots fashion?”

Murdoch coughed to gain time. There was a trap here—or was there? Best to temporise—and in his best pedagogic manner.

“My thanks to you, sir, for the honour you pay me. It is an honour that I may not lightly disregard. Nevertheless I make bold, my dear sir, to convey to you the intelligence that I do not normally indulge in any form of stimulating beverages. Pray, sir, that you do not misunderstand me. I am not, I hope, a bigot; nor would I have you think that I am so dull of wit, or lacking in a proper experience of the world, as to draw no fine line of discrimination betwixt abstention and a proper abstemiousness. And so, if I will be pardoned for any seeming discourtesy—which, did it arise, I hasten to assure you would be accidental—I will join you in sealing our bargain—which as you rightly say is our Scots fashion—in a small ale or tippenny.”

William was fairly staggered by this speech and Murdoch panted for shortness of breath. But he showed no sign of wonder or surprise. He ordered the tippenny in a casual off-hand manner. He resumed conversation in a more friendly and less formal manner.

“I have two sons, Mr. Murdoch: Robert aged six and Gilbert aged five. It is customary, perhaps, that a parent should have a favourite—we have the authority of The Book itself on that point. But I have no favourites.”

“A good principle, Mr. Burns...”

“Nor do I want you to have any favourites. Judge them by the book. I am not a harsh man, Mr. Murdoch. I am not a bigot in matters of religion, though I am none the less strict in my precept and example for all that. So do not you be wrongfully sparing of the rod; neither be you given over to brutality out of the evil of ungovernable temper.”

“You wrong me——”

“No: I don’t wrong you, Mr. Murdoch; but you are a young man; and, if I have not misjudged you, an ambitious one. I’ve lived much longer than you have and seen much callousness and suffering. Now I’m depending a lot on you. My boys are good boys and I have done what I could to bring them up in the fear of the Lord. I do not doubt but they have something of the grace of God about them. I have prepared a manual for them by way of helping them—and myself for that matter—in questions of a religious nature. Maybe, Mr. Murdoch, I could depend on your scholarship in assisting me to cast the book in more polished and grammatical form?”

“Most certainly, Mr. Burns. Indeed, sir, you place my talents in very great obligation to you for the honour you pay them. I shall be only too happy to assist you to the limit of my powers. Although perhaps I ought to point out that, though my devotion to religion comes before my devotion to English grammar as the basis of all real eloquence in forming an English style, yet my religious convictions lean rather to the New Light doctrine.”

“Well ... I don’t think we will quarrel much over that, Mr. Murdoch, though, for myself, I think it is the Light that matters not so much its Oldness or its Newness.”

“Very neatly expressed, sir. As neat an epigram, sir, as I can recollect having been turned in Ayrshire.”

“I don’t think we’ll fash ourselves overmuch with epigrams, Mr. Murdoch, though I am not insensible to your compliment. Now let’s get down to some practical business details for I have not much time on my hands.”

So they discussed the books they would need. It seemed they wouldn’t need many; but nothing but the best and most reliable would serve. The Spelling Book, of course; the Old and the New Testament; Mason’s Collection of Prose and Verse and Fisher’s English Grammar.

William was impressed. This youth took his pedagogy with a high and proper seriousness. He took his leave of him and rode back to Alloway feeling pleased with himself.

Murdoch watched William go down the narrow cobbled street and then returned to Simson’s Inn. In a short time his colleague in pedagogy arrived to hear his news. He was older than John and much less pedantic; but for all that he, like his comrade, had sedulously sloughed his tongue of the Ayrshire idiom and dialect and tried to emulate the formal methods of the new breed of polite Anglicisers.

Andrew Gray liked his drink. Instead of ale he brought to the table where Murdoch sat a drop of spirit.

“Good morning, my fine friend: I trust your intelligence is of an encouraging complexion?”

“It could not be better, Andrew... Andrew: I have just said good-day to the most remarkable man in Ayrshire—perhaps in Scotland—William Burns, a peasant of sorts in Alloway.”

“A rustic?”

“Yes and no. He is from the North-east coast—somewhere about Aberdeen I gather. But a rustic, Andrew, of the most remarkable accomplishments. Self-taught, of course; but not to be despised on that account. His mode of speech and command of the English language is truly phenomenal. And he has intelligence. I tell you, Andrew, I never suffered such an ordeal. Questions—and always more questions. He will be satisfied with nothing but the best. He wants me to go down to Alloway and teach his two boys, together with the children of such neighbours as have agreed among themselves to stand good for the expense of the business.”

“And can you trust his word for the expense?”

“Implicitly, my dear Andrew: implicitly. His word is his bond, and his word is irreproachable, quite beyond suspicion. I shall be on tip-toe all the time, for I can see that he will not be deceived with slipshod work of any kind. Indeed, if I can pass muster for a year or two at Alloway I shall have no fear in passing muster anywhere—I mean London or even Paris. This is all very different from what I expected.”

“You expected a clod-hopping rustic who wanted his brats and his neighbours’ brats to be drilled in their A.B.Cs. and their tables? Wait till you’ve seen the place, John, before you allow your enthusiasm rein. There must be something amiss with your learned rustic—or he wouldn’t be a rustic.”

“But he isn’t just a rustic—and I am certain he will not always remain one. I suspect he is of good family and may have suffered from the effects of the late rebellion.”

“Ho! A Jacobite?”

“No, no, my dear Andrew. Not a Jacobite. As sound a Hanoverian as you could wish. Sounder than most, I’ll wager. You must promise me to come down to Alloway when I am settled and I shall introduce you to him.”

Andrew Gray signalled for another drink.

“I can only congratulate you, John, on your appointment. I hope you prosper—as indeed I know you will—and I hope your learned rustic maintains your elevated opinion of him. In the meantime what say you to some mutton broth?”

“Capital! A moment ago I felt my appetite had completely left me. Now I am most sharply aware of a prodigious craving for sustenance.”