Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 10

When Aunt Josephine had walked off westward in her best silk boady, Martha turned back alone to Wester Cairns. Life was a queer disappointment. Its Aunt Josephines had incomprehensible transactions with the world. Its very woods were dumb. She crawled in among the bracken to rest. Its great tops swayed above her, smelling good. The earth smelt good too; and she fell asleep.

When she awoke the shadows had altered. Thin blades of sunshine had stolen into the wood, shadow had stolen over great patches of the sunny land. She had slept till evening. But Martha was as yet unskilled to read the light and did not know that she had slept so long. She rose and left the wood.

The iron gate to the field was open and two small boys lay on their stomachs beside the puddle. Beyond, a black-eyed girl was strutting, an old cloak tied round her middle.

‘Ye micht lat me by, Andy,’ said Martha.

Neither of the boys budged.

The lady in the cloak here intervened. Martha had never seen her before; and suddenly she noted that it was her own mother’s cloak that dangled from the stranger’s waist.

‘You can’t get this way,’ said Blackeyes. ‘It’s to my house.’

‘It’s nae to your hoose,’ cried Martha. ‘It’s to my hoose and it’s my mither’s cloak ye’ve got on.’

‘It’s her hoose richt eneugh,’ said Andy. ‘She bides there.’

‘She disna bide there,’ said Martha. ‘It’s nae her hoose and it’s nae her cloak. Ye’ve stealed that cloak. It’s my mither’s cloak.’

And with that Martha sprang at the puddle, leaped short, and fell in the mire on the farther side.

‘Sic a mucky mess ye’re in, Matty,’ said Andy with deep satisfaction. ‘You’ll get yer hi-ma-nanny when ye win hame. Yer mither’s in an awfu’ ill teen the day. Isna she, Peter?’

‘Ay,’ said Peter, without looking up from his mud-grubbing. ‘She’s terrible short i’ the cut.’

‘Ye’ll fair get it, Matty. I wadna hae a mither like yon. She’s a tongue, yon woman, an’ nae name feart to use it,’ went on Andy, repeating lusciously the judgements current in his home on Mrs. Ironside. ‘Hisna she, Peter?’

‘Ay,’ said Peter, intoning his portion of the antiphon from the mud. ‘She’s a tongue that wad clip cloots.’

‘An’ a gey heavy han’ as weel,’ chanted Andy. ‘She fair gied it to Peter the day as she gaed by. She fair laid till him. Didna she, Peter?’

‘I dinna care a doit,’ said Peter, altering the antiphon abruptly under stress of recollection.

Martha attended to neither. She was now on the black-browed stranger’s side of the puddle and promptly laid violent hands on the cloak. Blackeyes wrenched herself free, pirouetted out of reach, and over one shoulder, with the most mischievous little sparkle in the world, thrust out her tongue at Martha.

Martha flew upon her, her limbs dancing of themselves with indignation. The black-burnished lady raised a pair of active sun-browned arms in readiness for the onslaught, and as soon as Martha was near enough, flung them tempestuously round her neck and smacked down a slobbery kiss upon her mouth. Martha had no time to adjust herself to the astonishment of a kiss. Her lifted hand came against the stranger’s cheek with a sounding slap, and turning she ran until she reached the cottage.

On the flag by the door she paused and stared for a minute or two at the untidy thatch, the jagged break at the bottom of the door, the litter of cans and leaky pots and potato parings beside the pump. When she went in, her father was alone by the fire, in shirt sleeves, his sweaty socks thrust up against the mantel.

‘Ye’re there, are ye?’ he said to his daughter.

Martha said, ‘Imphm,’ and climbed into the chair opposite her father.

Not a word from either for a while.

Then: ‘Faither.’

‘Weel?’

‘Fa’s the lassie wi’ the black pow?’

‘It’s a lassie come to bide,’ said Geordie slowly, ‘Yer mither brocht her.’

Silence again, through which Martha’s thoughts were busy with the queerness of family relationships. Other people’s families were more or less stationary. Martha’s fluctuated. It was past her comprehension.

‘Faur’s mither?’ she asked.

‘She’s awa oot.’

Geordie did not think it necessary to add that she was out in search of more family. His wife’s preoccupation with other people’s babies was a matter for much slow rumination on the part of Geordie. He knew well enough that she did not make it pay. But Emmeline would undertake any expedition to mother a child for gain. She liked the fuss and the pack in her two-roomed stone-floored cottage. The stress of numbers excused her huddery ways. Some of the babies died, some were reclaimed, some taken to other homes. Martha accepted them as dumbly as her father, brooding a little − but only a little − on the peculiarities of a changing population.

Geordie himself interrupted her thoughts this evening. It had occurred to him to wonder why she had come home.

Martha explained. Roused from her brooding, she realized that she was hungry.

‘Is’t nae near tea-time, faither?’ she asked.

Geordie took his pipe from his mouth and surveyed his daughter with trouble in his eyes.

‘The tea’s by lang syne,’ he said. ‘Did ye nae get ony fae yer aunt?’

‘Nuh … Ay … I some think I had ma tea, but it was at dinner-time. I hadna ony dinner. She was ower busy wi’ the cairds to mak’ ony, an’ syne whan she heard she bude to ging to Birleybeg there wasna time.’

This preposterous situation slowly made itself clear to Geordie’s intelligence. Aunt Josephine had neglected for a new-fangled triviality like cards the great primordial business of a meal. It was a ludicrous disproportion. Geordie flung back his head against the chair and roared with laughter.

There was something elemental about Geordie’s laughter. It flooded up out of the depths of him − not gurgling, or spouting, or splashing up, but rising full-tide with a steady roaring boom. It had subterranean reserves of force, that no common joke was able to exhaust. Long after other people had fatigued their petty powers of laughter at some easy joke, the vast concourses of Geordie’s merriment were gathering within him and crashing out in mightily renewed eruptions of unwearied vigour. He found a joke wholesome until seventy times seven.

So he laughed, not once, but half a dozen times, over Miss Leggatt’s departure from the common sanities. But after his seventh wind or so, he put his pipe back in his mouth and drew at it awhile in silence. Then he hitched himself out of his chair, with the resolution of a man who has viewed the situation impartially and made up his mind.

‘Yer mither disna like me touchin’ her thingies,’ he said, ‘but we’ll need to get a bit piece till ye.’

Martha did not budge. She lay back in her chair with her legs dangling, and awaited the pleasure of her Ganymede.

‘Here’s a sup milk an’ a saft biscuit,’ said Ganymede, returning (silent-footed as became a banquet). ‘That’ll suit ye better’n the cakes.’

Martha nodded and bit deep into the floury cushion of the biscuit. She loved soft biscuits.

She lay still in the chair and nibbled luxuriously, her thoughts drifting.

Ganymede resumed his leisure. He sprawled, his stockinged feet upon the arm of Martha’s chair. They gave her a happy, companionable feeling. She moved the least thing in her corner so as to nudge them gently. Ganymede gave her in response the tenderest, most tranquil, subjovial little kick. Father and daughter shared a silence of the gods, in which all is said that need be said.

The clatter of a distracted earth broke by and by upon Olympus. Noisy voices, with anger in the flying rumours they sent ahead.

‘Here’s yer mither comin’ in aboot,’ said Geordie, disposing of his legs, ‘an’ I some doot she’s in ane o’ her ill teens.’

Geordie’s diagnosis of his wife’s spiritual condition was correct. Mrs. Ironside appeared, herding in Blackeyes. Her very skirts were irate. The three-year old bairn who hung in the wind of them was in some danger of blowing off. A baby kept her arms steadier than they might otherwise have been. Mrs. Ironside had multiplied her family by two.

Her wrath against Blackeyes was checked by the sight of Martha, motionless in the depths of her chair.

The situation was explained.

‘Ye maun jist ging back to the school, than,’ said Mrs. Ironside, eyeing her daughter.

Passionate tears broke over Martha’s cheeks.

To make herself conspicuous by marching back to school when Aunt Josephine herself had made arrangement for her absence, publicly to give report of the drab conclusion to her travels, was more than Martha’s equanimity could face. She went hot with shame at the very thought.

She battered the arm of the chair with her fists.

‘I canna ging back,’ she sobbed. ‘I canna ging back.’

‘You’re a queer ane,’ said her mother. ‘Ye hinna a please. Temper whan we tak ye fae the school an’ temper whan we pit ye back.’

‘She can bide aboot the doors, surely,’ said Geordie.

‘I canna hae her trallopin’ at my tails a’ day lang. An’ look at the mess she wad be in. She’s a gey lookin’ objeck as it is,’ said Emmeline, whose appreciation of cleanliness varied inversely with the godliness of her calm. The more serene she was, the more she tolerated dirt.

‘I gaed dunt intil the puddle,’ said Martha miserably.

‘Fit way cud she help it, whan she hadna had ony dinner?’ said her father: a notable man for logic of a strictly informal variety.

Blackeyes was crying, ‘It was me that made her do it,’ and Martha, suddenly remembering her parcel, jumped up and said,

‘But I got the mince.’

A pound of mince may not go far to counterbalance an increase in family, but it helps. It abated Emmeline’s aggressiveness. Mollified with mince, she put her family to rights. Martha was beddit side by side with Blackeyes, who fell asleep with one swarthy arm curved round her middle.

The newcomers were Dussie, Madge, and Jim. In August the elder children went to school again. Soon it was dark by supper-time, then by the closing of afternoon school. Winds were up. Mornings of naked frost changed to afternoons of black and sullen rain. There were nights when the darkness blared and eddied round the thatch and sang in the chimney; white nights, all sky, with the moon riding overhead and round her half the heaven swirling in an enormous broch; moonless nights when Orion strode up-valley and the furred and fallen leaves glistered on the silken roads.

The children saw nothing of these night festivities. They were jammed together in the huddled kitchen, under the smoky and flaring lamp. But one evening Geordie, from the open house-door, whence a guff of caller air flapped through the stifling kitchen, called the girls out to the night.

At Geordie’s call, Dussie was up on the instant. Martha came reluctantly, stooping back over the table to add another stroke to her map.

Outside, after the flare of the lamp and the burnish of firelight, they stepped into a bewildering January dark. Bewildering, because not really dark. Their eyes accustomed to it, they found it was a dark that glowed. No moon; infrequent stars; but when Geordie led them round the end of the house they saw the north on fire. Tongues of flame ran up the sky, flickered, fell back in the unstable pools of flame that gathered on the horizon, rose to crests again and broke into flying jets. The vast north was sheeted in light; low down and black, twisted firs, gnarled, shrunken, edged the enormous heaven. The Merry Dancers were out.

A shudder ran over Martha. Something inside her grew and grew till she felt as enormous as the sky. She gulped the night air; and at the same time made a convulsive little movement against her father. She was not afraid; but she felt so out of size and knowledge of herself that she wanted to touch something ordinary.

‘Some feart kind, are ye?’ said the ploughman, taking her hand tight in his own. Dussie clung to his other hand, rapping his knuckles, waggling his fingers, stroking his leg, sneaking a supple hand in his trouser pocket, all the while that she made lively comment on the sky. Geordie and Dussie had half a dozen private finger games before Martha had had enough of gazing upon the light.

It was Dussie who put the eager questions Geordie could not answer.

‘Weel, I dinna richtly ken fat they micht be. They ca’ them the Northern Lichts. Fireflaughts.’ Then an ancient memory stirring (a rare occurrence with Geordie), ‘I min’ fan I was a laddie there was a bit screed I used to ken. It was some like the geography, Matty, gin I could get a haud o’t. Arory … arory … bory … syne there was a lassie’s name on till’t. Fat div ye ca’ yon reid-heided craiturie o’ Sandy Burnett’s?’

‘Alice,’ said Matty.

‘Ay, ay, that’s the very dunt. Arory-bory-Alice. Weel. Noo, Matty, fat is there a’ roun’ Scotland, lassie?’

‘The sea,’ said Matty, ‘a’ the way roun’, except faur there’s England.’

Geordie stood so long considering it that Martha grew impatient. She was jumping up and down against his hand in her excitement.

‘An’ fat aboot the Arory-bory-Alices, faither?’

‘Weel, I canna get a richt haud o’t,’ said Geordie deliberately, ‘but it gaed some gait like this: On the sooth o’ Scotland there’s England, on the north the Arory-bory − Burnett’s lassie, the reid-heided ane − Alice; on the east − fat’s east o’t?’

‘The sea,’ said Martha, turning eastward, where a span of sea, too dull a glint under the Dancer’s light to catch an ignorant eye, notched their eastern view.

‘Weel, aye, but it wisna the sea. It was something there was a hantle mair o’ than that.’ Geordie’s thoughts, like Martha’s, glanced upon their private notch of sea. ‘I some think it was the sun − the risin’ sun. Ay, fairly. That’s fat it was. Noo, the wast. Fat’s wast o’ Scotland, Matty?’

‘The sea,’ said Martha again.

‘It’s nae that, though, i’ the bit rhyme. It was a bigger word nor that.’

‘Ye cud ca’t the ocean − that’s a bigger word,’ suggested Dussie.

‘It’s the Atlantic Ocean,’ Martha said.

Geordie could get no further with the boundaries of Scotland: but his assertion of the northward edge was too obvious at the moment to be doubted. They stood on Scotland and there was nothing north of them but light. It was Dussie who wondered what bounded Scotland when the Aurora was not there. Neither Martha nor Geordie had an answer.

Some weeks later Geordie had a shaking and shuffle of excitement in the middle of the kirk. He nudged Martha with signs and whispers she could not understand. She held her eyes straight forward and a prim little mouth, pretending not to see or hear. It was dreadful of her father to behave like that in church. Once out on the road again,

‘Yon’s the wordie, Matty − fat’s the meenister was readin’ aboot. Eternity. That’s fat wast o’ Scotland. I mind it noo.’

Martha said it over and over to herself: Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by Eternity.

Eternity did not seem to be in any of her maps: but neither was the Aurora. She accepted that negligence of the map-makers as she accepted so much else in life. She had enough to occupy her meanwhile in discovering what life held, without concerning herself as to what it lacked.

She repeated the boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers in Spain. Up to her University days she carried the conviction that there was something about Scotland in the Bible.

The Merry Dancers danced in storm.

Huge galleons of cloud bore down upon the earth, their white sails billowing on the north horizon. Swiftly their glitter and their pride foundered in a swirl of falling snow. The air was darkened. The sun crept doubtfully back to silence. Shifty winds blew the road bare and piled great wreaths at corners and against the dykes. An unvarying wind chiselled knife-edged cornices along the wreaths. Thaw blunted them, and filled the roads with slush. Rain pitted the slush and bogged the pathways.

The children went to school through mire. There was no scolding now for mucky garments; boots were clorted and coats sodden and splashed. Their ungloved hands were blue and swollen with chilblains.

There was east in the spring. Summer winds tumbled the sky. Dykesides smelt of myrrh and wild rose petals were transparent in the July rain.

Dussie and Martha were each a year older. So was Madge. She was not communicative. Her conversation was yea and nay − except to Geordie, and her own small brother Jim, to both of whom she would occasionally impart much astonishing information. Geordie received it with composure, Jim with fists or chuckles according to the edge of his appetite.

In August Mrs. Ironside brought home another baby boy.

One result of this was that Madge, who because she took frequent colds had hitherto slept in the unfreshened kitchen, was sent to share the west room with the other girls. Dussie and Martha found her inconvenient. She interrupted their disclosures to each other regarding the general queerness of life. Not that she seemed to be paying any attention; but one day Martha overheard her solemn and detailed recital to baby Jim of one of their dearest secrets. Martha had shaken her till her yells resounded from the Quarry Wood; and Emmeline had shaken Martha till she was sick and had to have castor oil.

It was some consolation for the castor oil that Dussie heartily approved her action. Dussie also commandeered two sweeties from Andy Macpherson and raced home with them triumphantly to Martha as an aid to the castor oil in its kindly office.

Dussie and Martha had things to tell each other that were not for the ear of infants.