Читать книгу The Wind that Shakes the Barley - James William Barke - Страница 7

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The dark eyes that now watched John Murdoch writing his thin spidery letters on the blackboard betrayed no emotion, gave no sign how much Robin disliked and feared him.

He disliked him for his prim pedantic way of speaking, disliked him for his thin angular jerky motions. And he feared him for the knowledge that was stored in his long knobbly head.

And John Murdoch, as he surveyed his dozen pupils in the bright light of that first May morning, did not warm towards the pupil to whom, for his father’s sake, he would have to direct special care and attention. He knew at once that he would have to thrash this boy for his smouldering dourness and he knew that thrashing would do little good.

So different was his younger brother, Gilbert. Ah! here was a pupil who would well repay attention—a bright amenable boy who would mould and enjoy the moulding.

At the end of the week, what night he was lodging again with William Burns, he had to admit he did not know what to make of Robin.

Strolling down to the Brig of Alloway in the lengthening dusk of the May evening, he delivered himself of cautious and yet encouraging sentiments.

“It is, you will understand, my dear sir, premature to give an exact opinion. I am much encouraged with Gilbert who has all the potentialities for a superior scholar.”

“And Robin?”

“Now there, sir, I am just a point perplexed. Oh, he is a fine boy, and I do not for a moment doubt but that he will turn out well. But there is at present an element of opposition in him that somewhat eludes my comprehension.”

Seeing the cloud that gathered on William’s brow, the young dominie stroked his long nose.

“Not, sir, that it is more than a trifle. I am persuaded that the mood is of the moment and will pass over when he has settled into my routine.”

“What you have to say, Mr. Murdoch, does not surprise me. Robin is given to strange unaccountable moods. He has never been as robust as I would have wished him. But I find he reads very well.”

“Excellently well, sir: excellently well.”

“But we must have no moods and sulks, Mr. Murdoch. The remedy for that is in your hands and I will not gainsay you. There must be respect for your authority—as there is for mine.”

Murdoch felt very uncomfortable even though he felt relieved. He had been afraid that William might have been asking questions and he was by no means certain of the answers Robin might have made.

“And you think you will take to our school, Mr. Murdoch?”

“Indeed, sir, I find my attachment to it growing in strength and affection with each passing hour. But for the transient shadow of Robin’s mood I should not be guilty of the hyperbolic case, sir, were I to affirm that I am exceeding content.”

They leaned on the arch of the bridge for a few moments and Murdoch noted the first of the skimming swallows.

But Murdoch’s contentment was superficial. Like the swallows, he wanted to stretch his wings and discover the contours of a larger world. Ambition buoyed him up and beckoned him on. Like the swallows too, he would be but a bird of passage. But first he must test himself here in Alloway and measure his ability, which he was incapable of doubting, against the approval of William Burns.

As they turned from the bridge James Young met up with them. They saluted him gravely. But James was an Ayrshire man and not given to coffee-house conversation.

“Aye ... a grand nicht... You’re having a sair strissle wi’ thae callants at the scule, Mr. Murdoch. How d’you find thae thick-skulled laddies o’ mine?”

“Your sons, Mr. Young, are showing a commendable attitude of diligence.”

“Ah well, Mr. Murdoch, just belt into them if they tak’ the gee in the shafts o’ learning. What do you say, William?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your advice, James. I was just giving Mr. Murdoch the same. But Rome wasn’t built in a day: we must give Mr. Murdoch time to settle down.”

“Aye ... it’ll tak’ a day or twa. Still, education’s a grand thing to have by you so that you can lay hands on it when you feel the need for it.”

“If I am not overbold, sir, may I take you up on that observation and add that without education we are as the beasts in the field or as the savage in his untutored blindness.”

“Aye ... they’re fell unchancy brutes the savages by all accounts, Mr. Murdoch. And yet, man, I’ve kenned savages in Carrick that could neither read nor write and yet they left a hantle o’ the yellow Geordies an’ a weel stockit mailen gin the clods were happered down on them. Aye, man, I’ve kenned mony a creashy Carrick farmer ...”

James habbered and havered on and neither Burns nor Murdoch sought to interrupt him. He was but scantily lettered and though he saw the need for learning in his sons he resented, without there being any bitterness in his resentment, the implication of John Murdoch that mere book-learning was an end to life in itself.

The gloaming gathered over the burgeoning rigs. Peesweeps tossed and flapped and cried as they passed the fields by the roadside; and an early bat struggled blindly in the web of the spinning dusk.

Robin, who had been roving along the banks of the river Doon in search of birds’ nests and who had sat down on a grassy bank to watch the skimming of the swallows as they flashed across the clear rippling waters, found that the words of a song his mother would be singing came unbidden to his lips:

“When trees did bud, and fields were green,

And broom bloom’d fair to see ...

Gang doun the burn, Davie, love,

And I shall follow thee.”

But even as the words formed on his childish lips he became conscious of the gloaming gathering beneath the river’s banks; so he rose up and, barefoot, scudded home through the dewy grass.

Though Robin did not make the progress with John Murdoch that was expected of him he was nevertheless making progress.

The world was opening up to him; the world of Ayrshire lying beyond Alloway and the world of Scotland lying beyond Ayrshire.

He listened to his mother singing. Agnes Broun sang not only because she liked to sing and had a fine voice for the songs and ballads of the Scots people. She sang as a bird in captivity will sing. Her life was hard; the conditions of her labour were inexorable. She sang as most of the Scots peasants did: to remind herself that life should not be a treadmill of toil.

And Robin drank in the lilt of her singing though his outward ear was apparently dull to melody. John Murdoch thought so: he could get little response from Robin in his efforts to inculcate the elements of church music.

But not only did the melody permeate the fibre of Robin’s consciousness: the words burned themselves into his memory so that he was never to forget them.

Not that he listened to his mother as he listened to Murdoch. He heard his mother as he heard the sough of the west wind sighing in the wet trees and sobbing aslant the grassy knowes; he heard his mother as he heard the lintwhite, the mavis and the gowdspink: against the background of peesweep and plover and moorland whaup. He heard his mother singing as part of his natural environment.

But Murdoch, speaking a strange tongue and possessed of an unfamiliar and unprepossessing presence, caused Robin to withdraw within himself, withhold the delicate antennae of his consciousness, so that he appeared dumb and unresponsive and intractable.

Inwardly he was not unresponsive. Inwardly he was noting everything Murdoch said. But, unlike Gilbert, he was unable to reflect brightly and sharply, with an almost spontaneous reflection, the drum rolling dicta of the young dominie.

Still panting from his running, he slipped into the cottage and by the light of the fire-glow saw the dominie seated at the ingle with his father.

His mother, dishing a bowl of brose at the table, looked up quickly and said: “Losh, Robin, where hae you been till this time o’ nicht?”

Robin heaved on an intake of breath and replied: “Nowhere.”

His father’s head turned slowly and his eyes said: That is no answer. So Robin gulped and said quickly, but with a touch of defiance: “I was doon the burn watching the swallows——”

William Burns averted his eyes. “Will we read a chapter while the brose cools, Mr. Murdoch?”

“Nothing, sir, could be more fitting.”

William Burns took down the Book and, tilting its pages to the glow of the peats, read slowly from the Old Testament.

And when the chapter was finished, Robin and Gilbert kneeled down on the earthen floor and added their fluting accents to the bass droning of the Lord’s prayer.

Then the lads sought their coggie of brose and clasping their horn spoons retired to their chaff bed in the far corner.

After the first ravenous mouthful, Gilbert said: “You werena watching the swallows ... were you, Robin?”

“I found a shelfie’s nest——”

“Where?”

“You’ve no’ to tell Davie Young or Willie Cowan?”

Gilbert drew the nail of his forefinger across his throat and made the motion of spitting.

“I’ll show you to-morrow,” said Robin, simply.

“Do I know the place?”

But Robin, his mouth full of the warm brose, shook his head so that his black locks fell over his brow.

When they had scraped their coggies clean they curled under the clothes of the chaff bed and were soon asleep.

Later on John Murdoch came tip-toeing ben and stretched himself out beside them, drawing the patchwork quilt of cloth cuttings over him.