Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 16

Martha snatched. There was no time to build a cosmos. Her world was in confusion, a sublime disordered plenty. Some other day, far off, she would order it, give it structure and coherence. … Meanwhile there was the snatching.

She snatched because she lived in fever. Greedy, convulsive, in a jealous agony, she raced for knowledge, panting. Supposing, in the three years of her course at King’s, she should not be able to gather all the knowledge that there was. … When, in March, she sat her first degree examination, and passed, she had a movement of profound disillusion. ‘Is this all I know? I thought I should know everything.’

She understood that a graduate may be ignorant.

By that time her panic was over. The grey Crown, that had soared through so many generations above the surge and excitement of youth, had told her that wisdom is patient and waits for its people. The greed went out of her as she looked up morning after morning at its serenity. It was like a great rock amid the changing tides of men’s opinions. Knowledge alters − wisdom is stable. It told her time and again that there was no need for haste. In the long Library, too, with the coloured light filtering through its great end window, and its dim recesses among the laden shelves − where thought, the enquiring experiencing spirit, the essence of man’s long tussle with his destiny, was captured and preserved: a desiccated powder, dusted across innumerable leaves, and set free, volatile, live spirit again at the touch of a living mind − she learned to be quiet. One morning she thought, standing idly among the books: ‘But they might come alive, without my mind.’ And she had a moment of panic. The immensity of life let loose there would be terrifying. They might clutch at her, these dead men, storming and battering at the citadel of her identity, subtly pervading her till they had stolen her very self. She so poor, and they with their magnitude of thought, of numbers. … The panic passed, and elation possessed her in its stead. She stood a long time in a dark corner, watching the people come and go, touch books, open them, read them, replace them, carry them away: and at every contact she thrilled. ‘Spirit is released.’ The great room tingled with it. Even when no one was there, it might turn back to spirit, that dried powdering of words that held the vital element. But the thought no longer gave her fear. It liberated. She walked in a company.

From the company she kept in the flesh she took less consciously material for her building. She had not yet discovered that men and women are of importance in the scheme of things: though she allowed an exception of course in favour of Professor Gregory. She owed to him one of the earliest of those moments of apocalypse by which life is dated.

‘Gweedsake!’ said Emmeline. ‘Sic a lay-aff. You and yer Professor Gregory! You wad think naebody had had a tongue in their heid afore to hear you speak.’

Martha spoke no more of Professor Gregory, but thought much. The moment of apocalypse had come in his opening lecture. She had climbed the stair, jostled a throng that pushed and laughed and shouted. Everyone was going to hear Professor Gregory’s opening lecture. Martha felt herself carried violently on by the pressure from behind. At the top of the stair, separated from the girls she knew, she was flung suddenly forward. She lost her balance and her breath. … Then she found herself held securely. She had been pitched against a stalwart in navy uniform, who quelled the impetuous rioting throng with a gesture, a glance. They surged round him, chattering and shouting, ‘I say, Daxy −’ ‘Hello, it’s old Dak −’ ‘Daxy, you’re a sight for sair e’en, man −’

Daxter, Sacrist of King’s, an old campaigner, like Odysseus full of wiles from warfare in the East, greeted them all with one eye and marshalled them with the other; and all the while held Martha firm in a little island amid the stream.

‘Now, miss, you go in.’ And the way was clear for her. The old Logic class-room was filled. Greetings were shouted. Voices ran like the assorted noises of a burn. And then two hundred pairs of feet were pounding the floor, and Martha, looking round, saw a long lean man come in, spectacled, with a smile running up his face that drove the flesh into furrows.

‘Funny smile,’ Martha was thinking. ‘Not a smooth space left anywhere.’ But she forgot the corrugations when he began to speak. He spoke like a torrent. He digressed, recovered himself, shot straight ahead, digressed again. He forgot his audience, turning farther and farther round till he stood side on to them, gazing through a window and washing his hands with a continually reiterated motion while he spun his monologue. Then suddenly he would turn back upon the class with a wrinkling smile and swift amused aside; and a roar of laughter would rise to the roof, while the feet thundered on the floor. His theme was English literature, but to Martha it seemed that he was speaking the language of some immortal and happy isle, some fabulous tongue that she was enabled by miracle for once to comprehend; and that he spoke of mysteries. …

The confines of her world raced out beyond her grasp. When he had ended she felt bruised and dizzy, as though from travelling too rapidly through air. The strong airs had smote her. But she had seen new countries, seen − and it was this that elated her, gave her the sense of newness in life itself that makes our past by moments apocryphal − the magnitude of undiscovered country that awaited her conquest. She was carried downstairs in the crowd and at the bottom met the Sacrist, who gave her a look of recognition. At the moment Martha was thinking: ‘And I shall go on travelling like that. There will be more new countries.’ And she was radiant. For sheer joy she broke into a smile; but perceiving that she was smiling straight into the face of Daxter, went hot with confusion and hurried away.

Daxter, however, accosted her as she was crossing the quadrangle some days later. Shortly she counted his greeting a normal part of her day. He claimed friendship with her as from the beginning.

‘You see, miss, you smiled to me the very first day you came.’

‘Oh,’ cried Martha, ‘but I didn’t mean to −’ and stopped abruptly, confused again. A tactless thing to say. But Daxter did not seem to be offended. He took her into his den, a narrow room at one corner of the quadrangle, the walls and table of which were covered with photographs. From the photographs ‘Daxy’ could reconstruct the inner history of the University since he had become Sacrist. Here were the giants who had been on the earth in those days. He told Martha tales, such as appear in no official record, of the immediate past of the University, and tales of his campaigns in India, making her world alive for her in new directions. One day he showed her some strips of silk. They had been part of the colours of a regiment − a tattered standard that had hung in the Chapel of King’s till its very shreds were rotting away. He had been ordered to remove it: but round its pole the silk was still fresh, and he had kept the remnant. He cut two snippets of the silk, a snippet of cream and a snippet of cerise, and gave them to Martha.

‘That’s history, that is, miss.’ And he put them in an envelope for her.

Martha carried the envelope in her pocket for nearly a week, deliberating where she might keep her treasure safe from predatory fingers. She had so few possessions and no stronghold for storing them. Madge, on the verge of the teens, had developed an inordinate interest in her appearance. She brewed herself strange scents from perfumed flowers and water, and decanted the product into an ink-bottle, sprinkling her garments lavishly with the concoction; and rubbed her lips and cheeks with purloined geranium petals. Martha caught her once sneaking out of a garden where geraniums were bedded out, and preached her a very pretty sermon on the heinousness of her deed. Madge’s only reply was to march without the slightest attempt at secrecy into the next geraniumed garden and abstract a goodly handful of scarlet petals. She was quite capable, if she caught sight of them in the bedroom, of using Martha’s scraps of silk for personal adornment. In the end Martha flattened the envelope, that was crushed and smeared from its sojourn in her pocket, and laid it between the pages of a heavy algebra text-book that stood on the high triangular shelf in the corner of the room: with hooks on its under surface to serve the girls for wardrobe. Sometimes she slipped the envelope from its hiding-place and touched the bits of silk that a regiment had followed. At such times it seemed to her that she was touching the past.

While her universe was thus widening both in time and in space, Scotland grew wider too. Hitherto her own blue valley, the city with its spires and dirty trawlers, had been her measure of Scotland. Now it grew. The North came alive. Out of it, from cottar-houses and farms, from parlours behind country shops, from fishing-villages on the Moray Firth, from station-houses and shepherds’ houses and school-houses, manses and mansions, crofts on the edge of heather, snow-blocked glens, clachans on green howes beneath the corries, where tumbling waterfalls lit the rocks; islands in the Atlantic, gale-swept, treeless; thatched cottages where the peat reek clung in stuff and fabric and carried east in clothes and books − there flocked in their hundreds her fellow-students, grave, gay, eager, anxious, earnest, flippant, stupid and humble and wise in their own conceits, dreamers and doers and idlers, bunglers and jesters, seekers of pleasure and seekers of wisdom, troubled, serene, impetuous, and all inquisitive; subjecting life to inquisition.

Out of the Islands Martha found her friends. Chief was Harrie Nevin. Harrie came from Shetland. She had the Vikings in her bearing and Martha worshipped her from a distance: until she discovered that Harrie was doing the same by her. Then they wrote each other wonderful letters. …

Martha suffered bitterly because she could not ask Harrie to her home. Harrie, with her regal port, in Emmeline’s haphazard kitchen! In compensation she was able to introduce her to Luke Cromar.

It had not occurred to Martha that knowing Luke was a matter for public congratulation; but the girls who saw him leave a group of talkers in the quadrangle at Marischal and dash across to Martha when he saw her pass, put her right as to that. She perceived that knowing Luke gave her a social status in University affairs; but rated that at less worth than simply knowing him.

University affairs, indeed, made much of Luke. He was in everything. He was President of the Student’s Representative Council and on half a dozen other committees as well. And in the flat, four stairs up, Dussie waited for him and entertained his guests. They lived on little. Luke had been an apprentice shoemaker, an orphan boy who had dreamed while he cobbled shoes of mending all the philosophies of the world. A legacy had enabled him to go through college. But Dussie played eagerly at economy. Gracious, petulant, fresh as rain, she was the delight of all his friends. She made a hundred mistakes, but proclaimed them aloud with such a bubbling candour that they were only so many assets the more to her popularity. The men loved to hear her own rapturous recital of her indiscretions, her social faux pas.

In the summer they held tea-parties on the leads − ‘Luke’s sky-highs,’ Kennedy called them; and the name caught.

Martha came to few of their parties, though Dussie, whose childhood’s adoration had lost none of its vehemence, would have had her come to all. She was too shy, too awkward, and her Sunday blouse and skirt were out of place. Besides, time was short. Piles of stockings to darn, of dishes to wash, ate too far into it. Emmeline, it was clear, regarded the time she spent on books as leisure, her recreation. To have pen and paper about, and open note-books, protected her: but when her pulses raced to the choruses in Atlanta, or, rapt away by thought, poring over The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, she stared out motionless upon the strangeness of its landscapes, Emmeline’s voice would break in:

‘Is that yer lessons ye’re at?’

It took many skirmishes with her conscience to convince her that she was justified in saying yes: and by that time Emmeline was convinced to the contrary. A ‘poetry book’ was for fun, and its reader might legitimately be interrupted. The English Parnassus she recognized as a lesson book. It had been bought, not borrowed from the Library at King’s; and on winter nights that were too chill for her bedroom, Martha carried The English Parnassus to the kitchen; she read it from cover to cover, fairly secure from onslaught.

Her leisure therefore she would not devote to parties: where, to say the truth, she was not over-happy. She went however to the Friday evening Societies − to the ‘Lit.’; and to the ‘Sociolog,’ because Luke was its President and had made her a gift of a membership card.

‘Raw ripe red wisdom every Friday at seven,’ he proclaimed.

She sat astounded at the discussions she heard. Wages, industrial unrest, sweated labour, unemployment, mental deficiency, syndicalism, federation − words to her! She had given so little of her thought as yet to the present; and it amazed her increasingly to hear her fellow-students, some glib, some stuttering, some passionate, some sardonic, talk of these matters. We are the people, they might have cried.

In particular she stared cold-hearted at the ‘Vice’. The Vice-President was a girl: Lucy Warrender by name. No matter what the theme, Miss Warrender talked with authority. She had already an Honours degree in Philosophy and was studying now for History and Economics. She seemed to know existence to its ends. Martha gulped in sheer terror sometimes when she heard her talk: so competent, flawless, master of her purposes.

‘Oh, a mine of information,’ Luke called her, when Martha stammered her dismay. Was it praise or disparagement? She could not tell: and when, puzzling it out, she looked at him, his long face told her nothing.

But astonishing as were some of the things she heard, Martha took them all in. One must not throw away a fact. Knowledge grew sweeter the more one ate of it. Sharp-flavoured too, though, acrid at times upon the palate.

This widening world of ideas grew more and more the true abode of her consciousness. The cottage did not reabsorb her afternoon by afternoon: it received her back. She was in its life but not of it. Its concerns did not concern her nearly. Still less did she feel herself concerned with her neighbours, the Andy Macphersons and the Stoddart Semples. She had no point of contact with these: or thought so. In this she was mistaken. The contact was there, though she did not feel it.

Its existence, however, might have been detected, less than a month after her session began, on a day when Aunt Josephine Leggatt walked down from Crannochie to Wester Cairns.