Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 14

Luke came in upon a day in August.

Martha was wandering in the wood.

‘It’s a queer like thing that ye canna bide at hame,’ Emmeline would say querulously, ‘an’ nae a stockin’ fit to ging on to the bairns the morn’s mornin’. Faur hae ye been?’

‘In the wood,’ Martha would answer, with the same miserable sense of disaster wherewith she had confessed to tumbling in the mire on her return from Crannochie.

‘That’s richt, ma dear,’ said Aunt Josephine, if she happened to be by: and her voice had the quiet decisiveness that suggested something absolute and took the wind from the best-sailing of squabbles. ‘They say trees is awfu’ gweed for ye.’

She was wandering then in the firwood on the August afternoon when Dussie reappeared: Dussie come back, true to her old fore-visioning, with fortune at heel! − If this were indeed the guise wherewith she ushered fortune in, lanky and sober-suited, a plain unsmiling youth.

Fortunate, by tale of her own appearance. Dussie had a costly look. A silken shimmer on her gown, like the play of flame when she moved and every detail exquisite, from the burnished mass of her hair to the burnished buckles of her pretty shoes: for Luke Cromar had cobbled shoes and knew a good thing in footwear when he saw it; and liked it too, upon his wife.

For nineteen-year-old Dussie, tiny, radiant, absurdly finished and mature, was a bride of five weeks’ standing. She had run away from the aunts who had taken her, and married Luke.

‘And of course he had no right to marry me,’ she said. ‘Not so soon. He’s only a student − students aren’t supposed to get married. But he’ll be a doctor next year.’

With that Martha looked at the lanky youth. Hitherto she had paid no attention to him. How could she, with Dussie running on like that? But she gave him now her grave consideration, and he returned her a scrutiny as grave.

‘It’s a holy pilgrimage,’ he said. ‘All the haunts of her childhood. A devotee’s processional.’

Was it some sort of joke, Martha pondered, walking by them out of the wood. Dussie certainly had laughed extravagantly, though on her life she could not tell whether Mr. Cromar had meant it for a joke or not; and he was very earnest when he asked if they might see the cottage.

Martha asked them in. Dussie, quick to catch her hesitation, cried ‘No!’ But Luke was quicker and said, ‘Of course we’re coming in.’ So in they came.

Martha’s trepidation had cause. Emmeline was complacent that afternoon and therefore tolerant. The tolerance was manifest. Dirty dishes, a bit of pudding, old cast clouts and old rotten rags, broken bark, twigs and jags of firewood, a sotter . … Emmeline herself had just completed the current instalment of the serial story in the People’s Treasure. An insatiable reader, like her daughter: but seeking apocalypse in fiction, not in fact. Peeragesque, her novels. Or if there were not titles enough (bold, bad and foreign in default of English) to go round, let them at least portray the Fortunate, their reversals be from misery to style: and never, dear fate! depict a ploughman, or a ploughman’s wife and family.

She had just remarked to Madge, ‘I bet you she’ll mairry yon chap an’ come oot a great swell yet,’ when the door opened and the visitors arrived.

Married she was, though not the she of the novelette. Remember her? Well, to be sure! One didn’t keep a black besom under one’s roof three years and forget her in such a suddenty as that. And, looking her up and down,

‘Ye’re nae muckle bookit, onyway,’ she said. Martha was a good four inches taller. A scoring point for Martha, and scoring points had been hard to find: would be hard still, she realized, studying Dussie more closely. Martha, clothe her how you would, would never look like that. Martha’s figure went straight up and down, her blouses were always in bags or escaping at the waist, her skirts drooped, her hair was stribbly and in moments of preoccupation even yet she sucked its ends. Emmeline had a sudden movement of furious hatred against this shapely apparition that rose in her own house to mock her for her daughter’s lack of presence. It was imperative to disparage Dussie for the sake of her own self-respect.

‘A terribie-like chase ye were in to get merriet,’ she said. ‘But you aye did a’thing by stots an’ bangs,’ − and added, her eye on the husband,

‘But what a tang’l! Ye micht a’ chosen ane wi’ mair beef on him fan ye were at it. Like a forty-fittit Janet up on end.’

Dussie’s lip stiffened. Their call was brief.

‘Yes, we must go on, mustn’t we?’ said the bridegroom. ‘There’s that wonderful Aunt Josephine. We have to see her.’

Aunt Josephine! Martha felt relief. Of course, they would go there, all three of them. Aunt Josephine’s hospitality was equal to any strain. Martha had been wretched; the sloven kitchen, her mother’s rudeness, Dussie’s pretty hauteur, sank her in embarrassed shame. The young man’s voice revived her. But there he was taking leave of Emmeline with a grave courtesy that was embarrassing too. Beef or no beef, the forty-fittit Janet up on end had manners. Martha was not accustomed to men who were polite to her mother. She felt incredibly shy.

Not much grave courtesy out of doors, however.

He had Dussie by the hand.

‘Gorgeous heap of stones. Come on!’

‘O Luko!’ she breathed, ecstatic; and away they went, stumbling and shrieking, helter-skelter between the barley and the dyke.

They stood all three on top of the cairn, breathless.

Martha said: ‘It’s very old. It’s supposed to commemorate something.’

Luke said: ‘I like this place. There’s such a lot of sky round about here.’

Dussie said: ‘But aren’t we going to see your father?’

From her point of vantage she swept the surrounding fields. How Geordie had kittled her, let her climb upon him, sheltered her from storm − Emmeline and the elements, both.

Martha was secretly glad that he was out of sight and call. It would have meant a shame the more. Her father, with his great crunkled boots, straws caught between the soles and uppers, sharn in spatters over them, his trousers tied with string, his empty speech, his roaring gales of laughter. …

They set out for Aunt Josephine’s.

Mary Annie was visiting Miss Leggatt.

The years had made little difference to Aunt Josephine. She had no capacity for growing old. Mary Annie, too, was hardly altered: she had grown so old already, so many ages were graven in her anxious face, that nine years or so could only trifle with the indentations that furrowed her.

Apologetic, she tried to creep away.

‘Noo, noo, Mary Annie,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘Ye were bidden to tea an’ ye’ll bide to tea. We’ll hae wer tea a’ thegither. It’ll be a party, ma dear’ − she enveloped Dussie, excitement and buckles and all, with her slow shining gaze − ‘just a party. Ye canna ging awa’, Mary Annie, an’ Jeannie oot. Ye canna bide yer lane.’

Fetching a profound sigh at the mention of her loneliness, Mrs. Mortimer sat down again.

Mary Annie’s man was dead. He had died three months after getting a complete set of false teeth. Unlucky all the ways of it, those teeth. He hadn’t had them three weeks when he had a drop too much. Some late in coming home, he was, and not so able to hold his liquor as he used to be … ‘an’ him spewin’ a’ the road hame, in ahin dykes an’ sic-like.’ … It was next morning till he noticed that he had shed the teeth … ‘An’ a terrible palaver there was or they got them.’ The police poking about in all odd corners. And he hadn’t had them three months when he died.

Mary Annie’s plaint against the horrible uncertainty of life started always from the teeth and returned back upon them. They symbolised for her the tragedy of life’s waste. She had wrapped them in a handkerchief and put them between the folds of the nightgown laid aside in her kist for her own last dressing. She would have given them a more prominent place among her gear had it not been for awe of her daughter Jeannie. Jeannie, and no cataclysm of nature or the soul, had tortured Mary Annie’s features into their ghastly fixedness of dark anxiety. She was preyed upon by the perennial sense that she was unworthy of her daughter.

Jeannie indeed had certain powers beyond her mother’s comprehension. In her early teens she had developed ways of her own and displeasures for which her mother could see no kind of reason. Her withering young disapproval ran across the household. Mary Annie set herself against innovation and Jeannie had no more than looked at her father.

‘I dinna see fat ye need conter the lassie for,’ said he to his wife. ‘Dinna quarrel her. Jeannie’s nae to be contered.’

Mary Annie, painfully conscious of the honour he had done her in lifting her from her estate of servant lassie at the Leggatts’ to be mistress of a four-roomed house, had sorrowfully acquiesced. Her daughter bewildered her. She was of her father’s mould, superior to the breed of servants. Her own shortcomings loomed heinous in view of Jeannie’s assured and incomprehensible managements. But one day when the girl was sixteen she had appropriated a crimson sateen bodice trimmed with black bugles, that had been her mother’s pride some eighteen years before. Never worn now, it yet retained its valour in her memory. It was like a bit of materialized experience. Mrs. Mortimer entered by chance her daughter’s bedroom (without knocking: a practice that Jeannie in vain had indicated to her as objectionable) just as the second slash was making in the crimson stuff. The girl (who did not even pay her mother the idle compliment of deceit with regard to unapproved proceedings) told her coolly that she was doing up the bodice to wear when Tammie Gleg took her next week to the Timmer Market.

‘Ye needn’t be in sic a takin’ aboot it,’ she said, the scissor poised for another cut, ‘it’s gey cheap-john lookin’ stuff.’

Mary Annie had long ceased expostulating with her daughter by word of mouth. She simply grabbed the crimson bodice and wrested it by main force from its captor. Jeannie let go, to avoid rending it, secure of her own ultimate victory. But Mr. Mortimer, to whom the sentimental value of the garment was fudge, nevertheless on this occasion sided with his wife. He had no mind to see a lass of his gallivanting in the Castlegate with a merry-andra like Tammie Gleg, ‘skraighin’ an’ chawin’ nuts, an’ nae mair sense in their heids nor the timmer spurtles.’ He forbade the occasion for the bodice, whispering behind his hand to Jeannie.

‘Never heed the boady. Ye’ll get a better ane to yersel whan ye’re a bittie aulder.’

Jeannie never forgave her mother the interference. She took a terrible, if unintentional, revenge. She took to religion. In one of her turbulent adolescent moods she underwent conversion. The process was passionate and thorough, nor was there any reason to doubt its sincerity; but she early learned to master a force that might otherwise have mastered her, and use its currents for her own purposes. Henceforward the thwarting of her will became impossible. She had leadings from above and resorts to prayer in every complicated situation. She cultivated the habit of praying − aloud − for the soul of anyone who crossed her will. Mary Annie was gifted with a humble and ignorant adoration for all that had to do with religion. She had no genius for it herself. For many years it had been the secret craving of her heart to make up a prayer out of her own head, till the attempts had shrivelled of their own useless accord and been forgotten. When therefore her daughter graduated in piety, Mary Annie abased herself and worshipped. Thenceforward she was haunted by her own unworthiness of such a daughter. There was no conscious hypocrisy in Jeannie’s conduct: her life indeed was one of extreme rectitude, just as many of the innovations she brought to the home were in themselves excellent: she merely allowed herself to be deluded in accordance with her desires.

She was now a woman in the middle forties, of powerful build and marked features, that gave her the impression of a strength of character she did not really possess. She was thrawn, not strong.

Aunt Josephine was making tea.

‘Ye cutty ’at ye are!’ she would interrupt herself to say to Dussie.

‘And shouldn’t Marty get married too?’ said Dussie, preening herself.

‘There’s Andy Macpherson has a gey ill e’e aifter her, I’m thinkin’,’ said Aunt Josephine complacently.

‘Rubbish!’ cried Martha in a savage scarlet. Andy Macpherson, who sold bacon and sweeties in a grocer’s shop at Peterkirk, had considerably less to do with her present scheme of the universe than had Hannibal or Robert Peel. Her annoyance, however, rapidly subsided. A day earlier she would not even have blushed. But something in Dussie’s presence, her dancing and observant eye, troubled the waters in Martha’s soul. Only momentarily: anything so alien from her common world of ideas had little power to hold her mind.

‘You must come and see my house,’ Dussie was saying.

‘House!’ scoffed Luke. ‘Two rooms and a half, four stairs up.’

‘In Union Street,’ Dussie explained.

‘Union Street!’ echoed Martha. Funny place to live − all shops and offices. She had not thought that folk lived there.

‘Oh, right on the top,’ said Dussie. ‘Above the shops and offices. Right up at the roof.’

‘And you get out on the leads,’ − Luke added his touch to the picture − ‘grand view. All up and down Union Street. Some sky and a few gulls besides. You must be our guest next coronation procession. Splendid facilities.’

‘You must be our guest a jolly lot sooner. Waiting for any old King, indeed!’

‘Well, the Torchlight, then. That’s better than a coronation. You shall view that from our top shrubbery − no, it hasn’t any greens, just a way of speaking. Oh, but I forgot. You’ll be a student yourself by the next Torchlight. You’ll be waiting in the Quad, of course, not a spectator from the gods.’

And Martha listening had a sense of widening horizons, of vistas opening insecurely on a foreign country.

There was less foreign in the country when, a week or so later, she went to tea in Union Street, four stairs up, above the shops and offices, and Luke showed her his row of books. She was at home there, glowing visibly as she touched them, turned their leaves, read in snatches. She even found a tongue, and questioned. A listener, too. Her very listening was speech, he thought. She was eloquent by what she did not say.

‘Young Pantagruel!’ he laughed at her: and to her look of enquiry read aloud:

‘“These letters being received and read, Pantagruel pluck’t up his heart, took a fresh courage to him, and was inflamed with a desire to profit in his studies more than ever, so that if you had seen him, how he took paines, and how he advanced in learning, you would have said that the vivacity of his spirit amidst the books, was like a great fire amongst dry wood, so active it was, vigorous and indefatigable.”’

She went home with as many books as she could carry.

‘Saw ye ever the like o’ that in a’ yer born days?’ cried Emmeline. ‘Faur are ye ga’in to pit them a’? Fat were ye needin’ wi’ sae mony a’ at aince? There’s a mids i’ the sea.’

And Luke, four stairs up in Union Street, was saying to Dussie,

‘Your Marty’s worth the knowing, you know. She’s so absolutely herself. There’s such a white flame of sincerity in her. So still and self-contained too. She’s like − well, if one could imagine it − a crystal of flame. Perfectly rigid in its own shape, but with all the play and life of flame.’

He liked his simile and reverted more than once to it in thought.

For Martha, she was happy in the possession of his books and gave no thought to the owner.

In October she went to King’s.