Читать книгу The Wind that Shakes the Barley - James William Barke - Страница 8

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For two years Murdoch taught the Alloway bairns the rudiments of elementary education. He came and went among the Alloway cotters, sleeping here and taking his bite there; but always it was his greatest pleasure to come back to William Burns.

The more he saw of William, the more he respected and admired him. The respect was mutual. The Burns family held education in a sacred esteem. The others treated him with a slightly off-hand deference, never warming to him as did the Burns family.

Robin and Gilbert were not only his favourite pupils: they were his brightest. Gilbert was a model boy: from him he expected great things. Robin still remained a problem. He moved slowly in fits and starts, always grave and mostly moody. Yet when he did move, he moved in a way that startled the dominie. But Murdoch was no more than startled. There was something irrational about Robin and, with the irrational, Murdoch was out of his depth.

The young teacher was happy at his work. He was a success as he always knew he would be. But there was discontent in his happiness for he was ambitious and eager to conquer the world that lay outside the boundaries of Ayrshire parishes. He dreamed much of Paris...

Robin also dreamed; but his dreams were of a different kind. He dreamed of the world of the old Scottish songs and lived again in his childish way the battles fought and won and lost by the heroes of Scotland; and above and beyond all those heroes towered the epic figure of William Wallace.

Once upon a time Blind Harry, the minstrel, had toured the Scottish land reciting from his ageless memory tales of the deeds and valour of Scotland’s liberator. But that was long ago.

Then came Hamilton of Gilbertfield and put the minstrel’s now archaic Scots into the language of his day; and now in the footsteps of the minstrel came the chapmen selling their penny chaps both sacred and profane. The sacred were very sacred: the profane very profane. Between the extremes came such a series as the life and deeds of William Wallace.

To Robin, as to his family, the printed word had about it the sanctity only good black print could bestow. Nothing was too dull or too learned to remain unread. Even though Robin’s mind might stammer and halt in the maze of a dull Latinity, his whole body glowed when he came to read in more simple and poetic language of the deeds of his country’s saviour.

Thus throughout his young life the great and heroic Wallace who had tasted victory and drunk the dregs of the most bitter and humiliating defeat, who had trod a calvary of his own choosing, appeared before him as no other hero was ever to appear.

Between spells of reading and dreaming there was work to be done. No hands could be idle in so poor a household where so many tasks lay to hand.

But there was time for playing. Time for running about the braes, for paddling in the burn and for pulling the gowans fine. Time for roving about the banks of the bonnie Doon, for bird-nesting in the green shaws and along the bosky linns. Time for watching the long-eared hares leaping on the grassy knowe. Time to lie and watch the hawk hover and drop to death. Time to linger in John Tennant’s smiddy and hear strange tales and wonder at the busy life of the adult world that passed by on the highway from Ayr to Maybole.

And time, and more than time, in the long winter nights, with the door barred against the sobbing sough of the west wind, to gather round the blazing ingle and hear tales of a far-off country away to the North-east where life was strange and hard and wild: the land of his fathers.

Slowly, in vivid patches, he began to piece together the life his father had lived—and his father before him. How once the life had been fine and gay and meal had been cheap and plentiful; how the Burnses of the immediate past had gone out in the Rising following their feudal lord, the Earl Marischal; how defeat had come to those who had fought, not so much for Charlie as for the continuity of their half-Celtic, half-feudal and wholly Scottish way of life; how on the heels of bitter defeat had come poverty and hardship to the men of the North-east coast; how starvation and privation and the grim skeleton of naked want had stalked the land.

Till the end of his days Robin was to remember that terrible moment about which his father never spoke without betraying signs of a terrible inner anguish: that day he had stood with his brother on the brae of a hill and looked back over the bare rising ground to the bare steading of Clochnahill that despite all its bleak poverty had been all the warmth of a home he had ever known; where he was leaving an ailing father with his younger brothers and sisters to face the losing battle against hunger and want; the home he was never to see again in his earthly life but the home that was never absent from his inner eye; the home caught in that backward glance in a morning of anguished parting ...

But there were nights when the frost crackled in a shower of stars, and Hawkie hoasted in the byre through the partition, when his father would be busy at the mending of a brogue and his mother at the patching of a garment. Then she would be telling of happier times: of the great ploys at Hallowe’en, of the dancing and merriment at the harvest kirns, and tales of adventure and smuggling along her native Kirkoswald coast.

Young though he was, Robin noticed the difference when Murdoch occupied the seat of honour by the ingle. Then the sad happy stories of the old life gave way to a learned jaw about affairs of state. It was clear to Robin that his father had somehow managed to put behind him the old Scotland that had given him birth, that he had made his peace with the Union. Clear too that his mind thrust deeply into the contemporary jungle of events; that he enjoyed with a keen relish his comparing of notes with the pedagogue who carried such a wise and learned head on such young and narrow shoulders.

But, summer or winter, in the byre or on the braes, in the schoolroom or lying on his chaff bed listening to the seeping rain, Robin was learning: storing his mind in every neuk and crannie with a queer interpenetrating mixty-maxty of life and letters.

And his learning was the deeper and his knowledge the greater because the most vital and vivid part of it was being absorbed unconsciously.