Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 18

Aunt Josephine, hodging steadily along the soft road in the direction of Wester Cairns, met Stoddart Semple lounging by the dyke.

Stoddart had never forgiven his February dismissal into the sleet. Having backed, in that dispute, the side that lost, he went away convinced of Martha’s uppishness; and as Martha did not like the man, tasted moreover no salt in the jokes he relished with her father, and never stopped to give him a crack by the roadside, he supposed himself in her contempt when it was merely she who sat in his.

Meeting Miss Leggatt, he began to grumble sourly.

‘Ye’ve gotten a lady in the family noo.’

He put a bitter emphasis on the lady and stopped to look at Miss Leggatt.

‘I see the muckle feet o’ her takin’ awa’ doon the road,’ he added.

‘If it’s Matty ye’re meanin’,’ said Miss Josephine − and she said it without the shadow of an alteration in mien or accent − ‘she’s been a lady sin’ ever she was the littlin.’

‘A bonny penny she’ll be for books,’ he grumbled.

‘I wadna say. Ye get naething for naething in this warld.’ Miss Leggat was quite unmoved at his grievance. She told him with an amiable serenity, ‘An’ naebody’s biddin’ you pay. Ye needna talk as though they hadna a penny to rub on t’ither.’

Once launched, he could not leave the theme. There was east in his weather. The old sore itched. He scratched. Moreover he was curious. He wanted to know many things − matters of price, for instance, and such gossip as he could glean regarding the terrible long chiel that came about the doors sometimes, and his wife, that was here when she was a bairn. He had questioned Geordie, to be sure, but Geordie’s knowledge did not go very far.

‘He’s a terrible ane to speir,’ Aunt Josephine said to Emmeline. She had given him little satisfaction by her answers.

‘Speir!’ cried Mrs. Ironside. ‘He wad speir the claes aff’n yer back an’ than speir faur ye tint them.’

She resented his prying into Martha’s affairs, and − remembering February − stiffened her resolution to see the girl through her Odyssey.

‘I’ll show him,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Speirin’ indeed.’

She ‘showed him’ a few days later. Martha fell sick. She recovered, but dragged her limbs.

‘The cyclin’s ower muckle for ye,’ said Emmeline. ‘Ye’ll get a season ticket in the train.’

Thenceforward Martha went by train, tramping down the rough brae morning by morning.

The cross-country road, through the bright winds of October, had been pleasant: but she was glad enough to put away the cycle in these faint November days. December came with rain, black pitiless unceasing rain, that hurled itself upon the fields for days together, paused sullenly, and spewed again upon a filthy earth. It was on such a day of rain that Martha went with Luke and Dussie to her first opera. Luke insisted on coming home with her, although she warned him that he could hardly hope to catch the last train back to town.

‘No matter,’ he said. ‘I like a soaking now and then. Good elemental feel it gives you.’ And he steadied her by the elbow at the turn of the road.

The road was swimming. A flat of slimy mud lay across the bottom of the brae. Cataracts poured ceaselessly into it, carrying soil from the brae. The wind drove from the east.

‘Just an April shower,’ he said, crossing to the weather side of her as they turned.

She looked at him, swiftly. She could not see him. It was too dark. But she had an uncanny impression of having seen his smile. Oh, it was in his voice! − that smile that she had not been able to locate. He had a laughing voice.

They were both laughing as they stumbled among the mud and the loose stones. Weather was a joke, it seemed! And the stormy chords from Tannhäuser beat upon her sleep, mingled in a colossal harmony with the beat of the elemental storm, through which his laughing voice recurred like a song.

January changed the wind. The stir of spring was in the world almost as soon as the year came in. Soft airs, faint skies plumed with shining wisps of cloud, blossom on the whins, bursting willow catkins, blackbirds fluting, a gauze of gnats against the sun, and everywhere the strong clean smell of new-turned earth − a wholesome kindly world: too mellow perhaps; without the young astringency of spring.

But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums − blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acutenesses of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk reefs among the furrows.

‘We’ll hae wer sax weeks’ snaw in March the year richt eneuch,’ said Geordie, beating his arms across his chest to quicken the circulation.

Baby Flossie wailed miserably and sucked her frozen fingers. They were hottest in her mouth. When Emmeline caught them there she pulled them out and smacked them till they tingled. That heated them too.

Martha, buffeted in the bitter winds, struggling to keep her footing on the rutted ice of the brae, arrived listless at the lecture-room. Often her fingers were dead. She could not write notes. She sat, in the chill room that gathered a clammy warmth from a hundred breaths, heavy-headed, her interest subdued: but by noon, when Professor Gregory lectured, she was alert again, fleet-footed after knowledge. No ice, no battering winds, could hold her from that pursuit.

The spring term had ended before the frost gave.

One afternoon the wind veered. It rushed out of the south-west, hot and sweet, like the breathing of a cow against one’s face.

‘The snaw’s gotten a fleg,’ said Geordie jubilantly. He leaned against the door-post, a thumb in his arm-hole, watching the wind lick the surface of the world clean. Martha, plodding home with a bagful of groceries, looked at him listlessly and made no answer. She was heavy-eyed and round-shouldered. Knowledge is inexorable to its devotees and sets its own price high. The mild air softened her resistance to her own weariness. Her month’s vacation dragged.

And meanwhile the sun was gathering strength. The earth was steaming like a wet clout held to the fire, with a steam so thick, and close that it floated over the fields like heavy morning mists on an autumn valley. The fog-horn boomed; and the slopes beyond the river were out of recognition, flat and pale.

The sun gathered strength. The roads blew dry. In three days’ time the dust was flying. The plough land changed its colour − sharp sandy brown at last, ready for the seed. Larks sprang and shrilled, operatic, mechanical, in a series, as though a multitude of catches were successively released in the grass and stubble. The sowers were out and the harrow was on the fields.

Geordie cried to Stoddart Semple down the gale that lifted the earliest clouds of dust − a roaring, rollicking, tattering, clothes-line-walloping gale − ‘Ay, ay, man, the land’s dryin’ fine.’

It had been Geordie’s daily remark since the thaw set in. He said it to everyone he met outside, and three or four times a day at home as well. A matter of such importance could not stale.

Stoddart, slouching by the dyke, made answer,

‘It would dry some quicker if your missus stood oot o’ the way a bit.’

And he looked at Emmeline where she stood full in the sun, stretching out after the tail of a shirt that reared and curveted on the clothes-line.

‘I see she’s gettin’ a terrible-like size,’ he said.

Emmeline in the last few months had been putting on flesh rapidly, achieving a shapelessness that was far from her old rounded grace. The shadow she cast, standing there in the sun, was considerable. It was a sore point, and luckily she was too far away to catch either Stoddart’s sneer or the reply made by Geordie, quick-witted for once as he watched the surface of the earth scatter upon the wind.

‘O ay,’ he said, ‘gran’ for keepin’ the grun’ doon in a gale.’

Martha, however, had been near enough to catch both. She pondered, standing by a bush of whin, plucking at the golden scented blossoms and rubbing them on her palm until her skin was yellow; she pondered whether her father’s answer was really as crass as it had sounded. She remembered Luke Cromar, who was polite even to Emmeline. And behind her Geordie went off in sudden uproarious laughter, as though his witticism, so natural in face of the blowing dust, had only now occurred to him as being witty.

Martha went back to the house and read The Land of Heart’s Desire − a silver and azure world where she did not recognize that there walked the peasant folk of her own acquaintance. Like Emmeline, she hardly desired the stories that she read to deal with ploughmen: not at any rate with sharny boots and hacked hands seamed with dirt.

In the summer term she spent her afternoons studying Natural History. The Professor, in a quiet voice that he never raised nor quickened, peopled for her the airs, glancing waters and grassblades, and the cold dark grave profundities of the sea. He had the tongue of a poet and of a humorist: a tongue like that of the fabled story-teller of Arabia, whom no one could hear without believing every word he uttered. When he spoke, incredible shapes moved through an unimaginable past; and an unimaginable present surged in on one, humming with a life one had not seen before, nor even suspected. So full the world was, and so clamorous! And placidly, without haste or emphasis, he conjured up its press and clangour, its multitudinous anxieties.

‘Like Aunt Josephine,’ Martha found herself thinking: and her own temerity frightened her. But she was right. He had the same luminous unhurrying serenity as Aunt Josephine, the same sure capable grasp of life.

She lunched, between her two diets of worship, between King’s in the morning and Marischal in the afternoon, on a hunk of bread and a bit of cold bacon.

‘Not good for you,’ said Luke. ‘You must lunch with us.’

Dussie seconded eagerly. She served up every dish in her repertory, and invented a few new combinations of material. Martha had never eaten so many unfamiliar things in her life.

Dussie objected: ‘You are not a rapturous eater, Marty. Now Luke is. He really pays attention to what I make for him.’

And to Luke she pouted: ‘She might just as well be chewing at her hunk of bread. She doesn’t care what it is she’s eating.’

To which Luke made answer: ‘Well, of course, you know, flame is fairly indiscriminate as to what it takes for fuel.’

‘Oh,’ she cried, exasperated, ‘you are crazed with your flame. Marty has a stomach like the rest of us, I suppose, and she should be made to know about it.’

‘Lord forbid!’ he said. ‘The people who know about their stomachs are the devil.’

Her exasperation effervesced into laughter.

‘But you know what I mean, Luke. It’s only because I love her so much that I want her to be like other people.’

‘I should have thought that was a reason for wanting to keep her as she is.’

Dussie’s brows went up in pity. Really, to be so clever, Luke had sometimes astonishingly little common-sense.

If Martha was indifferent to the provender, she was not indifferent to the joy of sharing it. As May ran on, indeed, she was glad of the heat and the shelter. The weather changed to a black cold, hard skies, hard edges to the earth, bitter winds. Then the skies loosened at the edge, puckered into cloud.

‘Ower mony upcastin’s,’ said Geordie, eyeing the solid lumps of cloud birsed up into the sky.

Next day a plaster of snow deformed the opening leaves and hung in wet semi-transparent blobs on the clusters of lilac.

‘The cauld Kalends o’ May,’ Geordie called it.

‘Fourth winter for the season,’ said Luke, helping Martha out of her dripping coat and chafing her white dead hands. And such a lunch as Dussie had for them − ‘hot as sin,’ Luke proclaimed.

Luke graduated early in July, coming through his finals with a star. One of his professors − who had warned him against his own enthusiasms − told him drily that he had no right even to have passed. Luke seemed to spend his days doing things he had no right to do, and doing them triumphantly: marrying Dussie, for example. They were radiant both. Their weather was golden, crisp, vibrant with energy. The dark gods had little portion in their love. It was of the sunlight and flashing winds, clear and merry.

Standing in the quadrangle after his graduation, Luke held a petty court. Half the University surged up to congratulate him; and when it became known that old Dunster had asked him to stay on the following session as assistant, they surged back and congratulated him again.

‘It’s not official yet,’ he kept saying. ‘Has to be ratified by the Senatus. Doubtless they’ll rise in a body and refuse.’

Professor Forbes, who had told him he had no right to pass, shook hands and said cordially,

‘So you’re to be one of us next session, I hear.’

Next day they left for the Continent, where Luke was to study for six weeks in a hospital. Martha saw them off. Harrie had gone too. The islands and the glens and the fishing villages and farms had taken their bairns back. Martha’s life was bounded again, in its externals, by the slovenly kitchen with its heat and clatter, the low-roofed bedroom where all the family clothes were stocked and where Madge smeared her lips with her geranium petals and studied the effect in a spotty mirror that had a crack across its upper corner; by meals for which her father cast his coat and kicked his boots aside, where the bairns wrangled and slobbered, Emmeline raged, Flossie whimpered. Her privacy was in the open; and in her thoughts. There like a wrestler she tried all comers − the companies of new ideas that had crowded in upon her mind. She had received them all impartially, stored them away. Now she called them out again. Martha was beginning to think.

Emmeline had said, eyeing the newspaper on the day when the University lists were published and Martha’s name appeared,

‘They’ll see’t at Muckle Arlo’ − a consolation that it required some strength of mind to accept for consolation; since she could not know that her surmise was correct. It was therefore by way of a flutter in the dovecot when Aunt Jean herself wrote to Martha inviting her to Muckle Arlo.