Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 12

On a February evening, when sleet lashed the window in tides of deepening violence, and spat upon the flames, and sluiced under the ill-fitting outer door, was debated with pomp and circumstance the question of whether or not Martha should go to the University. For days the wind had streamed up-valley; a dull, grey wind, rude and stubborn, that subdued the whole landscape to its own east temper. The howl of it was in the ear at night, long after dark had hid its bleakness from the eye. Gulls screamed and circled overhead − a wild skirl against the drone of the firwood. Spring was late. Hardly a peewit, not a lark, to hear. A drab disconsolate world.

Martha had pushed against the sodden wind four miles and a half that morning, her heavy bundle of books tied on behind her cycle. She was eighteen now and in the highest class at school; but the bursaries on which she had carried herself so far ran to no unnecessary railway fares − not in the Ironside family, where a penny saved had a trick of turning to a penny squandered − and in most weathers she cycled back and fore to town night and morning.

That morning Emmeline had said:

‘Ye’ll nae get in dry. It’ll be a doonpour. Yon win’s nae for naething. Hae. There’s yer coppers.’

She gave her daughter the pence for her return fare to town. Martha had never had money of her own. She handed over all her bursary money to her mother and had to ask back what she needed. She very seldom asked back. It was too unpleasant being made to feel an undue drag upon the house. Not an exercise-book was purchased but it was audibly grudged. Martha felt a felon when her teachers ordered her to buy a pencil. Her journey home at night was sometimes spent devising ways and words to approach the theme of another new text-book; she would sit all through suppertime with a sickening twinge pulling and twisting inside her body; her back would not hold up; when she washed the supper dishes her knees were sagging. Emmeline had no understanding of her own tyranny. She objected for the sake of objecting.

Martha put the train fare in her pocket and looked at the sombre sky. It had been just as heavy for days and she had escaped a wetting. She pulled her cycle from the shed and raced along the beaten path that crossed the field. The field was lately ploughed. At every dozen steps she stumbled off the narrow path (moist enough itself in the sodden weather) into the heavy upturned earth. Clods hung upon her boots. She raced on, to gain the road before her mother saw her go. The pennies in her pocket jigged to a dance tune. They meant a candle (if the candles could be bought before her mother knew the pence were saved), and a candle meant peace to work at night in her own chill room.

She dared not buy the candles in town lest at the last minute the storm broke and she had to return after all by train. At half-past four the wind still screamed up-country; no change since morning, and Martha set off to cycle home. She intended to dismount and buy her candles in the last shop on the outskirts of the city; but the wind, and her own fear of being caught in rain and her mother’s anger, drove her at such a frantic speed that she was already past the shop before her mind snatched at the necessity for dismounting. It would have been foolish to turn back and fight the wind − the candles could be bought at Cairns. The shop was far behind her by the time her mind had worked itself to that resolve, so irresistible a vigour was in the wind that pushed her on. She let herself go to its power, pedalling furiously on her old machine that had no free-wheel and one inefficient brake.

A long stretch of unsheltered road lay ahead, running beneath a low sky that sank farther and farther as she advanced. Suddenly the grey wind turned dirty-white, drove upon her in a blast of sleet. It chilled her neck, soaked her hair, dribbled along her spine, smothered her ears; the backs of her legs and arms were battered numb; her boots filled slowly with the down-drip from her skirt and stockings; once or twice she looked at the handle-bars to make sure that her hands were there. She had dismounted when the sleet began, to unfasten her books from behind the bicycle; her person might be soaked, but not her precious books. She rammed them in the bosom of her coat, that gaped and would not fasten over the unwieldly bundle. When she mounted again she had to pedal furiously in spite of her hampered and clammy limbs, because to pedal furiously was easier than to hold back against the sweep of the wind; but as the sleet continued to fall and filled the road with slush and semiliquid mud, her pace slackened, till at last she was pushing with effort over the pasty ground, her front wheel bumping, splashing, squirming by reason of her inability to guide it. Darkness had come down too soon. She had a lamp but no means of lighting it, nor could it easily have been lit in the violence of the weather. A passing cart filled her with nameless dread; a chance pedestrian loomed horribly distorted through the sleet; there were no recognizable sounds. The beat of the storm upon her back had plastered her shoddy clothing to her skin. By the time she rode through Cairns, its early lights diffused and smudgy in the thickened air, she was too numb to think, even to picture the possession of a candle, much less procure it. She rode like an automaton.

At the foot of the long brae to the cottage she stumbled from her machine. Light had gone from the earth. The sleet drove now upon her side as she battled uphill pushing her bicycle. Thought began to stir again when she reached the puddle at the gateway of the field. She went straight ahead through the puddle because it mattered little now how much wetter she became; and with that she began to wonder what reproach her mother would have ready. She had not even candles for consolation; and Emmeline would say next morning, ‘Ye’ve got yer money for the train.’ She tumbled her cycle into the shed and pushed open the house-door, standing dazed a moment on the threshold.

Emmeline’s back was towards the door, as she bent over the fire and stirred the so wens for supper. Without turning, when one of the children said, ‘Here’s Matty come,’ she complained to her daughter.

‘Ye’ve ta’en a terrible like time to come up fae the station.’

Martha’s heart fluttered and thumped, and pulses beat hot and hurried in the chill of her temples. So her mother had not been in the shed and did not even know that the cycle had been taken out!

‘It’s a terrible night. I’m wet through,’ she said. But the wetting had suddenly become of no importance. Her mind did not even run forward to the pennies she had gained; the mere relief from an immediate onslaught by her mother’s tongue was joy enough. She went in a sort of stupid excitement to remove her dangling clothes; but she had to call Madge through from her Pansy Novelette to help her strip.

Geordie came in, soaked too. The fireplace was hung with dripping garments and the iron kettles perched with sopping boots. The steam of them eddied about the room, mingling with the wood-smoke blown back from the chimney. Emmeline worked herself into a lather of vituperation at the weather and the folk, but gave the latter none the less their so wens in ample measure, smeared with syrup and piping hot. She set the boys to feed the fire with branches and logs of pine. Every now and then a resinous knot spluttered and sang, flared out in blobs and fans of flame. Emmeline made no economies with fire. She loved heat. The little kitchen was shortly stuffed with a hot reek − the reek of wood and folk and so wens, wet clothes, steaming dishwater and Bogie Roll.

For once Martha did not regret her lack of candles. She was shivering violently from her exposure and glad of the heavy heat of the kitchen. She sat at the deal table, catching her share of light from the lamp upon her open schoolbooks. Geordie was playing Snakes-and-Ladders with the bairns − Madge and the eight-and nine-year-old boys. There was no Dussie now. Something less than three years after her arrival, Mrs. Ironside had polished her one day according to her lights and taken her away. Her folk reclaimed her. Dussie was in a whirl of excitement. She had tangled the processes of washing and dressing with fifty plans for interminable futures, and Martha was to share her fortune and her favour. They had not seen her since.

A three-year-old girl was asleep in the kitchen bed, to be carried ben the hoose in Madge’s ruddy arms when she herself retired. Madge was twelve, a strong-built girl, not tall, no great talker, knowing and not sharing her own mind.

In spite of the driving sleet, which had sting enough to keep most folk by their own firesides, Stoddart Semple lounged in the ingle nook and smoked his filthy cutty. He was a grey cadaverous man in the middle fifties, who did for himself and doggedly invaded his neighbours’ homes. ‘Stoddart’s takin’ a bide,’ folk said. They growled at him but seldom put him out. He was good to laugh at.

Emmeline, still standing, a dish-towel lumped beneath one arm, and her elbows dug into the back of her husband’s chair, was having her turn of the Pansy Novelette.

Geordie could rattle the dice with the best when it was a matter of Snakes-and-Ladders or so, and was unaffectedly happy in his slow deliberate play with the bairns; but jerking back his chair he chanced to dislodge Emmeline’s elbows, and drove her fists against her chin, her teeth closing upon her tongue.

‘Tak care, will ye?’ said she. ‘Garrin’ a body bite their tongue. …’

‘Haud oot ower a bit, than,’ said Geordie, and he slapped his knee and roared with laughter. The game was upset, and the boys began a monkey-chase about the room. Madge climbed on a creepie to see over Emmeline’s shoulder on to the jewelled-and-ermined pages of the Pansy Novelette, which Emmeline was still reading voraciously, bending as often as the boys scuttled within her reach to flick them with the dish-towel.

Martha all this while sat at another board, playing a different game: a game of shifting and shuffling and giving in exchange. Its most fascinating move consisted in fitting four flighty little English sentences into one rolling Latin period. Martha bent her energies upon it, too absorbed to heed the racket around her. Even when a bear beneath the table worried her knees, she only moved aside a little impatiently, saying nothing.

Martha had grown up quiet. After all the flaring disquietudes of her childhood, she had settled into a uniform calmness of demeanour that was rarely broken. Her silences, however, were deceptive. She was not placid, but controlled. She had the control that comes of purpose; and her purpose was the getting of knowledge. There was no end to the things that one could know.

Goerdie was still in his cups, metaphorically speaking, an honest joke suiting him as well as a dram; and Mrs. Ironside was grumbling still: ‘Garrin’ a body bite their tongue … I never heard …’; when Willie sprang on the top of the table and upset the bottle of ink upon Martha’s Latin version. She had written half of it in fair copy, in a burst of exasperation at the refusal of the second half to take coherent form. Now she sprang to her feet and watched the black ruin, staring at the meandering of the ink.

‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ said Emmeline.

Emmeline had stuffed the novelette under her chin, pressing it there, head forward, to keep it in position, and had lunged out after Willie, flicking at his ear with the dish-towel. The lurch she gave as he dodged jerked the book on to the floor and Emmeline herself against the table; and the dish-towel flicked the ink.

‘Blaudin’ ma towel an’ a’,’ she grumbled; and then,

‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ she said to Martha.

Martha gulped. She suddenly wanted to scream, to cry out at the pitch of her voice, ‘I haven’t time, I haven’t time, I haven’t time! What’s a kitchen table in comparison with my Latin, with knowing things, with catching up on the interminable past! There isn’t time!’

She set to work cleaning up the mess.

Then tears scalded her. Through them, blurred, ridiculous, all out of shape, fantastically reduplicated, she was watching her mother pick up the Pansy Novelette, bunch the towel beneath her arm again, and read.

Martha felt her mouth twist. The reeking air of the kitchen choked her. Its noises hammered and sang through her brain. The room was insufferably tight. She pushed viciously with both hands at the wet cloth she was using, smearing the table still further with pale blue stains. She licked a tear from her upper lip. Quite salt. Another − she licked that too. Her eyes and cheeks were fired where they had run. … And the intolerable waste of mood! She had been saturated with the spirit of Latin prose − it had soaked in. Words, phrases, turns of speech, alert and eager in her brain, drumming at her ears, clamouring in an exultant chaos. And that last triumphant mastery, forcing on the chaos order and a purpose − the god’s security. Gone now. Spilt like the ink, as irretrievably. A worse waste even than the time.

‘Ye’re skirpin’ a’ ower the place,’ said Emmeline.

Martha flung the cloth into the basin of water.

‘Oh why can’t you do it yourself!’ she cried. ‘Mother! You’ve more time than I have. You’re just reading. Just rubbish. − Oh, it doesn’t matter − I didn’t mean − you needn’t be angry anyway. It is just rubbish. And I’ve all my Latin to do for tomorrow.’

‘Latin?’ said her mother.

‘I’ll never get it done tonight now.’

‘Latin,’ said Emmeline again. ‘Fat sorra div ye need wi’ Latin for a teacher? Ye’re nae to larn the geets Latin, I’m hopefu’, an’ them disna ken ae year’s en’ fae the t’ither.’

Martha moistened her lips. The hot salt tears had shrivelled them.

‘I need it to get a bursary,’ she said.

‘Oh, that’s something new,’ said her mother. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard o’t.’

Stoddart Semple glowered at Martha. He was a long loose man, ill-shakken thegither. Useless laps of skin sagged round his mouth. ‘Nos et mat …,’ he mumbled, forgetting the conclusion. Then he broke into a tirade against learning. Abject the people who value what we valued once and today despise. Stoddart had hankered once after knowledge; once he too had stormed the fastnesses of understanding. The fastnesses unfortunately had stood fast. His father, who had jogged for a lifetime behind his shaltie selling smokies and finnan haddies to the country wives, and had jogged more pence into his pocket than wisdom into his head, satisfied the boy’s ambition and sent him to college. Strangely, not a professor among them could be found to endorse young Stoddart’s opinion of his brains. Old Semple would have bribed them cheerfully, the whole Senatus, Sacrist and all, to let the laddie through: but he died before it became plain that the laddie had stuck; and the old man’s transactions began and ended with fish. Stoddart sold the fish-cart and the decrepit horse, counted (in an evil day) his father’s savings, and from that day onward never did a stroke of honest labour. He lived alone in his father’s cottage, meditating projects to astonish the earth: soon he would have been glad to astonish even the parish. The parish had little use for a fine phrase, and did not know what to do with learning authenticated by no official stamp. Had he passed his examinations they might have listened to him, even without understanding; once he had been ploughed, they were at liberty to laugh. He let them laugh, but in a fury of contempt. He grew increasingly morose, striding by in a sort of bickering speechlessness. He shunned society: then mooned; then slouched, body and mind settling to a habit of slackness; his features coarsened; he seeded and grew stringy. His grudge against ungrateful man blackened and rotted his powers. The devotee’s indignation at the disdaining of his god had turned to a black and brooding madness on this one subject of himself.

With the passage of years he ceased himself to believe in his discredited dignity.

The neighbours saw the deterioration of face and figure, the hanging jaw, the rag-nailed thumbs, the sloven countenance; they saw refuse encumber his doors; the smell of his body scunnered them; they cackled at his clothing, sodden from exposure to every weather, matted and split. He trailed through any dubs, under any sky. A night prowler too, haunting the deep of the wood by midnight. His neighbours’ premises, perhaps, as well: who could know? Labouring folk sleep early and sleep sound. But there were suspicions anent him − queer ends of talk. A dark bulk − an indeterminate shadow − a malignant reeshle of the leaves without wind − sorry matters, but from them grew half-broken tales. A troubler of men’s imaginations, generating legend … a queer rôle for the stickit graduate. A looking-glass progression towards the object of his old ambitious desires … troubling men’s imaginations. …

The neighbours saw the change in him − his rotting look: it was not for them to know that under the external squalor seethed horribly a spiritual regeneration.

Stoddart had need of his kind.

He blundered his way back into society by virtue of an inlaid dambrod. Old Semple had been a craftsman of sorts and had begun to fashion a dambrod of two varieties of wood, each square inset with patient skill. Death made a move on his board before the man’s board was completed. It lay where chance had tossed it, till Stoddart unearthed it one morning and set to work to finish it. No craftsman, he made a sorry enough job: but the board was ready for the game and Jamie Lowden liked a game fine of a blank and blustery winter evening. Stoddart carried the dambrod to Jamie Lowden’s.

By what processes of pity, curiosity, persuasion, the dambrod gave him entry to other houses, would be hard to say: but in course of time, shambling, apologetic, he slunk his way wherever he desired: accompanied always by the board. He loved the bit of wood. He would shuffle round with it under his arm, ‘oxterin’ at it as though it were a body.’ Humbly at first, he ventured the piece of workmanship into view, claiming praise for his father’s handiwork; but careful to add that it was he who had finished it. By and by the squares that he had fashioned subtly shifted their position on the board. He was not oversure himself which he had made; and at the thought that he might really be the framer of this dark beauty or of that, he regained something of the belief in himself that he had lost. In consequence he tidied his homestead a little and cleaned his person; and became a more decent member of human society. With the passage of another year or two he was very comfortably convinced once more of his own dignity and importance: with this difference, that he had ceased to trouble very much whether others believed in them or not.

One house to which he did not carry the dambrod was the Ironsides’. Emmeline could not abide him, in his days of grandiloquence. ‘He’s fair clorted wi’ conceit,’ she said impatiently to Geordie. ‘Ye cud tak a rake an’ rake it aff’n him.’ Emmeline’s own conceit, in those early days of marriage, was at too low an ebb to allow her to enjoy the quality in others: hence perhaps her ineradicable grudge against Stoddart. When he rose out of the nadir of his degradation and Geordie brought him in aboot of an evening, she suffered his presence but gave short shrift to the dambrod. Geordie indeed, in the natural complaisance of his soul, sat to study the play: but it exacted too much of a man wearied out and sodden still with the heavy sense of wet fields and claggy soil. Geordie carried back with him to his own fireside, stored up in his own body − his stiff and aching muscles, his numbed brain, his slow and inattentive nerves − the memory of a thousand generations wearing down the long resistances of the earth. A desperate task, to shake oneself quickly free from memory that had worked itself in. Geordie was not altogether sorry when Emmeline’s tongue banished the dambrod from her kitchen.

‘Sic a cairry-on he hauds wi’ himsel an’ yon boardie,’ she said contemptuously. − ‘Wheesht, wheesht, he’s hearin’ ye,’ from Geordie. − ‘I named nae names,’ said Emmeline. ‘Them that has lang noses can tak tae them.’ Stoddart was touchy. The dambrod was effectively dismissed.

The man, however, kept coming, in spite of abuse. He was stingy with his own fuel and liked Emmeline’s lavishness with hers: especially on a night of driving bitter sleet, like the one in question.

So he slouched in the heat and, diving among recollections that had gone sour, miscalled knowledge.

Martha listening did not divine the man.

Our acquaintances have no past for us until we have a past ourselves.

She was merely irritated at his opposition. Rashly, she had precipitated her fight, and the fortune of war was against her. This henchman of darkness, sunken-eyed, slack-mouthed, betrayed her to the enemy. The wastrel forces of ignorance were in power.

For Martha was set upon a purpose not yet divulged. It was understood that she was to be a teacher, after a two years’ course at a Training Centre; but Martha herself was working secretly for more. She had learned as yet to be passionate on behalf of one thing only − knowledge: but for that she could intrigue like any lover. She had made her own plans for going, not to the Training Centre but to the University. So, quite unnecessarily, she was learning Latin. When her bursary was gained, it was time enough to tell.

And now, fool that she was, she had given her position away.

And to let Stoddart Semple, whom she hated, see her cry! She swallowed hot tears and listened, craning for every word, to her mother and Stoddart, disputatious, grumblers both, using Martha’s preposterous ambition to justify their own particular grievance.

‘Fat ails ye at bein’ a teacher?’ demanded Emmeline.

‘Nothing ails me. − I’m going to be a teacher. But I want to go to the University.’

‘An’ how muckle langer’ll that tak ye?’

‘Two years,’ Martha said.

Emmeline’s exasperation had a deeper basis than Martha understood; than Martha indeed was capable of understanding, for she had never breathed a Leggatt atmosphere nor been nurtured in the pietas of Leggatt respectability: except, and that dubiously, at Crannochie; for Aunt Josephine was not a thoroughbred. Her social status did not exist for Martha. She had never thought about it. But Emmeline had dreamed with undiminished ardour for twenty years of being respectable again. She had consented to let Martha be a teacher for no other end than this. And after twenty years you ask an Emmeline to wait another four instead of two to see her dream fulfilled! How could a Martha, hungry for the tartness and savour of knowledge, be expected to understand? Martha saw only a slovenly and inefficient woman, given to uncertainties of temper and meaningless indulgences, and with a cankering aptitude for objection. She had never even known that her mother was beautiful; nor that men have decreed rights to beauty that reason need not approve. Dumbly, fitfully, Emmeline was aware of a trouble within her consciousness. She had been somehow foiled − blame it on any wind you will, not on Emmeline − of the right of loveliness to queen it over the imaginations of men. Ill-trickit rascal, that godling with the bow, at whose caprice she had given her love, and been thrust away in consequence to the middle of this dull ploughed field! Emmeline hankered still after the respect men pay to beauty, though what she dreamed she wanted was the respect they pay to the respectable. She had built herself a formidable conviction of the automatic increase in reputation that would come to the family when Matty was a finished teacher. Add two years to that! − Two and two in this case made an eternity.

Mother and daughter fronted each other, antagonistic, weighing the years in a balance, but with what differing weights!

Stoddart Semple grumbled on. ‘She wants to mak hersel oot somebody,’ he said. All the rasping irritation of his own discomfiture was in the sneer.

‘Some folks are grand at that,’ said Emmeline sharply. But he took her up, not heeding the home-thrust.

‘Deed they are. You cud dae fine to be somebody yersel, Mrs. Ironside, an’ Matty’s nae far ahin ye.’

‘She wunna be’t, then,’ said Emmeline with tart decisiveness, furious that Stoddart should read her secret desires. ‘My lassie wunna ging like Maggie Findlater, terrible goodwillie to yer face an’ despisin’ the hale rick-matick o’ her fowk ahin their backs.’

‘Maggie!’ said Stoddart. ‘Maggie’s nae that ill.’

‘A muckle easy-osy lump,’ snorted Mrs. Ironside.

‘If she’d keep her mou’ shut an’ her feet in she’d be a’ richt. She taks a gweed grip o’ the grun’ yet an’ a grand mou’fu’ o’ her words for a’ her finery.’

‘Yon’s a terrible pit-on.’ Mrs. Ironside’s voice expressed the loftiest contempt that a woman who has married ill can possibly bestow on one who has married gorgeously. ‘An’ a’ the men maun be like her man to be men ava’. “Do you play golf, Mr. Ironside?” she says, most gracious-like. Imagine asking Geordie wi’ his sharny sheen if he played golf!’

Geordie came to the suface again. He had been out of depth, uneasy at every quirk in the conversation that his slow mind could not follow.

‘I dinna haud wi’ that cleverness masel,’ he had said.

Nobody was listening to him. He tried in vain himself to listen to his own thoughts pounding within him. They said nothing intelligible. Now at the relief of a tried and accepted joke he let himself go, laughing immoderately. His eye on his miry boots flung sidelong in the corner − to focus the idea − he pictured their befouled and clumsy strength companioning the natty smartness of the golfers.

Sane man, seeing always in relation such things as he did see.

Martha meanwhile burned in an agony of impatience. What did they mean, chattering of these indifferent occasions while she waited for her doom? If they would only let her back to work. … Wasted time! She stood and fretted, not daring to interrupt, able hardly to endure. And why should her father laugh like that and she in mortal stress?

Geordie came out of the absorption of his joke and heard his wife and his neighbour dispose of Martha’s pretensions to a University education. He ruminated soberly. In the cramped kitchen prodigious horizons lengthened out. There were vast unenclosed tracts within him where his thoughts lost themselves and disappeared. He pursued them deep within himself, past his land marks.

The noise of tongues went on.

‘Ye’re gey forcey, though,’ said Geordie.

He said it very loud, with a sharp resonance that startled Emmeline and Stoddart into silence. He jerked forward on his chair, sitting unusually upright, and spoke unusually loud all through his disquisition. The voice of a man who knew the disabilities of Providence − ‘deaf in the ae lug an’ disna hear wi’ the ither.’ … Providence against Emmeline − it needed that.

‘We’ll nae be nane waur aff wi’ Matty at the college than we are e’noo whan she’s at the school, will we?’ He boomed the question at them as though they too were a little deaf.

‘But we’ll be a hantle better off, it’s to be hopit, whan she’s a finished teacher.’

‘Weel, but that’s nae the pint. We are as we are an’ we’re nae that ill − we micht be a hantle waur. But we wunna be a hantle waur wi’ Matty at the college. It wunna mak nae differ.’

Emmeline felt a little giddy. Geordie argumentative! A new departure.

Being set on concealment of the true reason for her obstructionist policy, she could not immediately find another plausible enough to check him with.

‘We’ve gotten a’ we need,’ he was saying. ‘We’ve aye a tattie till wer dinner.’

‘O ay, it’s aye the meat you look till. Ye’re a grand hand at yer meat, I will say that for ye. But there’s mair things nor meat in this world.’

Emmeline laid a violent emphasis upon this, as though she were quite willing for her husband to circumscribe his activities at eating in a world to come.

‘Ye wunna beat a tattie,’ said Geordie, ‘an’ ye wunna ging far wantin’ ane. − Nae in this warld,’ he added, as though he were willing in his turn for his wife in her next existence to be freed from the encumbrance of food.

Martha crushed the ruined sheet of paper suddenly in her fists and began plucking it to pieces with a series of savage staccato rents.

‘Jist you write it ower again, lassie,’ said her father. ‘There’ll aye be a tattie for ye or ye’re dane.’

Emmeline broke into abuse. She was defeated by one of the few loyalties she retained. Queer, she never taunted Geordie with her loss of status, nor deaved him with her dreams of respectability to come. Queerer still, she had no motive but her love for him. Her fury against Stoddart Semple increased. He had her inner argument pat. She tongued him therefore with virulence, cutting across his rumbling sentences.

‘It’s a mou’bag that you wad need. A body canna hear themsel’s speak in their ain hoose.’

At that moment the wind flared in the chimney, driving the smoke down gustily into the room. Emmeline snatched noisily at the interruption.

‘See to yon flan,’ she cried, seizing the poker and beating at the fuel as though she would batter the smoke back up the chimney. ‘We’ll be smokit ooten existence. Haud back yer chairs a bit.’ And she swung the poker with a virago brandish that made both Geordie and Stoddart scrape back their chairs. The feathery ash from the charred wood blew in their faces.

Balked of serenity, Emmeline took refuge in cleanliness. The kitchen was certainly not out of the need of it. Slush and smoke together − smuts and soot and dribbled snow − clods of earth tumbled from drying boots − dubs and dung and crumbs and ink arid dishwater not yet emptied out, tea-leaves swimming in it, and the rind of bacon flung on the hearth and dissolving in greasy dirtiness among the ashes − a very slattern among kitchens. Emmeline flung herself upon the dirt like a tornado.

‘As black’s the Earl o’ Hell’s waistcoat,’ she grumbled, sousing the floor.

She splashed and soaped and scrubbed. The steam from her soap suds thickened the air. She lunged with her scrubbing-brush towards Geordie’s seat and he moved farther and farther back before the soapy flood; she dived towards Stoddart and he retired with an edgy and raucous creak from the legs of his retreating chair.

By the time the chair was marooned against the wall Stoddart bethought himself and took his leave. Geordie tip-toed across the dripping floor and reached for his boots. Hospitality hardly requires of a man that he conduct his neighbour home (if the neighbour be so ill-advised as to visit him in such conditions) through pitch-black ploughland, an edged south-easter and a barricade of sleet. But Geordie pulled to the outer door with a terrific bang, settling the business of that impudent baggage the wind that threatened to wrench his own door-handle out of his hand with its blufferts, and steered Stoddart across the field by the elbow, roaring at him in gusts between the palavers of the gale.

‘They tell me she’s byordinar clever. … Faith, it beats me a’ thegither fat way a bairn o’ mine can ’a gotten brains. … Man, it’s a sort o’ judgement on a body. There ye ging, a’ yer life long, rale pleased an’ comfortable. Naething to gie ye a shog ooten yer ain road. An’ then yer ain lassie, that’s the fruit o’ yer ain loins. … Man, it beats a’.’

In the kitchen Martha fumed miserably. She was troubled with a raging conscience. She was wrong. Of course she was wrong to burden the family for two extra years. − But might her father’s authority be considered final? Was her fight really won? − She had not fought at all, then! − stood mute and foolish. She underwent a rush of self-contempt. And in spite of conscience and contempt together she was throbbing with exultation. Back to work, quick − master the throb before it mastered her; though how could she work with her mother nyattering like that?

‘That’s jist yer faither a’ ower,’ Emmeline was grumbling. She had already raised Geordie’s aberration into a universal law governing his being. ‘That thrawn there’s nae livin’ wi’ him. Aince he taks a notion intil his heid, naething’ll move him. He wad argy-bargy ye intil the middle o’ next week. Ye micht as weel ging doon on yer knees an’ speak to a mole that was crawlin’ on the grun’. He taks a bit o’ understandin’.’

Martha bent grimly to her Latin. But inspiration had fled. The four shabby sentences declined to be made less than four. The prose was completed, with much searching of the heart and the vocabulary.

Geordie came in again. Wind, water, earth, came with him, spluttered in his tracks. Emmeline dabbed at the filthy runlets − ‘as muckle dirt’s wad fill a kirk. I never saw. …’

The boys were beddit. They slept in the middle place, a sort of box between the rooms. Madge was sent packing. Martha pulled her books together and went too.

Emmeline’s resentments were messy, but brief.

Next day Martha went to town − in a bitter downpour − by train. Her mother gave her the fare without demur: but she missed the early train home and it was already past the family meal-hour when she returned. There was sign of neither family nor meal. Emmeline on her knees, in splendid isolation, scoured the floor as though it had not felt water for a twelvemonth.

‘Where’s father?’

‘Awa’ to the wall for peats.’

Finality in that reply. Martha’s heart sagged. She went through to the bedroom.

There she found Madge, curled on the bed, her shoulders hunched, devouring her penny trash. Her grunt was inarticulate; she did not lift her eyes from the page. She had an end of candle stuck in Martha’s candlestick.

‘Where did you get the candle?’ cried Martha sharply. Was it hers? Had Madge stolen it? secreted it?

Madge smirked: not audible enough for one to say, giggled.

‘It’s nae yours, onyway. − Ye needna stand there and glower,’ she added, raising her head. ‘I‘ve tell’t you, it’s nae yours. I suppose I can hide things as well’s you.’

But where did she get it? Martha continued to ponder, still glowering at the child. One fragment of her brain said reasonably: Of course she can; and another cried in fever: She mustn’t criticize me − she’s much too young. The voices in her head circled and intersected; shortly she became aware that they were laced by actual voices, coming through the shoddy wall. She listened − noises too: the stir of industry. Her father and the boys must be in the lean-to against the house-end. She dashed out through the rain and pushed the door. Inside was a reeking, buzzing warmth − an oily lantern, unwashed and sweaty skins, stale air, animation, laughter. Geordie was cleaning Martha’s neglected bicycle. The boys were also engaged on the bicycle; wreathing a towsled bit of rope through the spokes of the front wheel and ripping it smartly out again. A terrific display of industry. The flaring and smoky light from the open lantern, shifting, smearing, exaggerating what a moment ago it had suppressed, suppressing what it had exaggerated, gave their actions a fantastic air of unreality. Baby Flossie, hoisted aloft on a barrel and some boxes, a little insecure but in great content, presided over the scene like some genius of the place − an immature deity whose effort at creation had resulted in grotesquerie. She was like a grotesque herself-a very tiny baby, ‘an image’ Emmeline contemptuously called her: and there she squatted on her barrel, preternaturally solemn, a little above the level of the lantern, that juggled her features all askew so that she seemed to wink and leer upon the workers. But then of course the workers (Geordie excepted) were labouring a little askew.

‘She’ll kick up a waup for a whilie,’ Geordie said when he saw his daughter, ‘but it’ll wear by. She’ll keep’s ooten languor an’ inen anger.’

He wiped his oily hands on his buttocks, picked up Flossie and happed her in his coat, and extinguishing the lantern made for supper.

‘Ay, ay, it’ll wear by,’ he said.

In spite of a sore throat and aching limbs, Martha did her lessons that night in the cold. She held an illumination, lighting two candles to elucidate the sine of A + B. Madge’s candle-end was gone: she must have secreted the stump for future use. Martha pushed one of her candles into the candlestick and fixed the other by its own melted end to a broken saucer.

Madge poked her head in.

‘You’ve got to come ben. You’ll be perished.’

‘I’m not coming. I’m quite warm.’

‘A’ richt, then, dinna.’

She remained staring for a minute at the twin candles, but said nothing and went away. She could keep her own counsel and was quite willing to keep Martha’s also.

Martha was glad of the feeble heat the candles gave. There was warmth also in the recollection of her father’s words, ‘Ay, ay, it’ll wear by.’

It wore by. In very short time Emmeline had comfortably persuaded herself that a daughter with a University degree was a grandiloquence worth the waiting for. She took care, however, to hide her persuasion: in case of need still protestant.

When some months later Martha’s examination was over and she had gained her bursary, Geordie sat a long while in his shirt sleeves, unbraced after supper, gripping the newspaper that had published the results, ‘aye takin’ the t’ither keek at her name.’ Emmeline too was moved by the sight of her daughter’s name in print. They would see it at Muckle Arlo! She pictured Uncle Sandy Corbett spreading out the paper and reading it aloud. Aunt Leebie would sniff, no doubt, and Aunt Jean receive it in silence: but they would know!

‘Ye can jist snifter awa’ there’ − she addressed an imaginary Aunt Leebie − ‘but ye canna say ye hinna seen’t.’

‘She’s got ma sister Sally’s gump.’ Geordie’s voice broke across her pleasant reverie. ‘She’s rale like Sally whiles.’

‘Sally!’ screamed Mrs. Ironside, her fancies scattering like a pack of cards. ‘Her that disna richt ken gin she’s merriet or no.’

‘Merriet or nae merriet,’ said Geordie, ‘she had a sicht mair gumption nor ony ither o’ fowk.’

Sally Ironside’s life, indeed, had demanded, or perhaps developed, gumption. For nine brief days she had been the speak of the place. She had left home at the age of thirty, with neither wealth nor looks to commend her, and gone through a marriage with the man whose taste in womankind had roused the astonishment of all Peterkirk and Corbieshaw and Crannochie.

‘If Sally Ironside’s gotten a man, an’ her thirty an’ nae a stitch o’ providin’, there’s hope for me yet,’ said one old crone to another.

‘There’s queerer things happened,’ answered she. ‘But fat’s the notion in nae settin’ aboot it the proper gait, tell me that, will ye? A gey heelster-gowdie business, this rinnin’ awa’ to get yer man.’

Eighteen months later, the sole addition to her worldly gear the bairn in her arms, Sally found herself on the street, her husband having given her to understand that their marriage was a form only, and invalid. Sally disputed nothing; nor did she offer any interference − legal or moral − with his subsequent marriage to a lassie with siller. Ten years later she paid a brief visit to her old home at Peterkirk, in the garb of the Salvation Army. She was well-doing and self-respecting, but what sieges and stratagems she had carried on in the interval against a callous world only Sally herself could tell. She did not choose to tell too much. The bairn had died. ‘Good thing,’ said Sally briefly.

Questioned as to her marriage, she acknowledged her private suspicion that the ceremony had been valid enough but that the man had taken advantage of her ignorance to get rid of her. She had no marriage lines and did not even know the name of the place where the marriage took place.

‘He had a perfect right to tire of me,’ she said.

Urged to set enquiries afoot, to seize what chance there was of being proved an honest woman,

‘Honest fiddleyorum!’ said Sally. ‘I’m honest enough in myself, I hope, and a name won’t make me any honester that I can see. I’m best quit of him − to start speirin’ might only raise the stew. Besides if it turned out I was his true wife, it would be a gey-like pliskey on the lassie wi’ the siller.’

‘Like Sally!’ screamed Mrs. Ironside. …

She added, by and by,

‘It’s fae the Leggatts, onyway, she gets the brains. Your fowk’s a’ feel.’

Which was a proposition Geordie did not take upon himself to contradict.