Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 21

She was wearing shoes that afternoon, trim, black, new − big, of course, because her feet were big; but respectable by any Leggatt standard, though, to be sure, they showed up the clumsiness of her ankles in their four-ply fingering home-knitted stockings. She was wearing also her Sunday costume. Emmeline had grumbled at both shoes and costume: wearing them to her school − a pretty-like palaver. Emmeline continued to talk of Martha’s University classes as ‘school’ and of the hours she spent in study as her ‘lessons’. So did Geordie, for the matter of that. ‘But they will never understand,’ Martha sighed to herself.

Emmeline’s displeasure notwithstanding, Martha wore the Sunday shoes and costume. Dussie had a tea-party and there was no time to come home and change. The tea-party in the parlance of the hour was a ‘hen-shine’: until Luke came in at five o’clock, bringing Macallister, there were no men present. Martha felt herself a dullard in more than clothing. The chatter was edged, and Miss Warrender, now President of the Sociological, with her raking wit and air of authority, turned the world inside out to the discomfort of one at least of its inhabitants. It was after Luke came in that someone, discussing another theme, took for granted Martha’s Honours course.

Martha said, ‘But I am not taking Honours.’

‘Not taking Honours? Everyone thinks you are.’

They overhauled the position. Miss Warrender in her adequate way (‘rather foolish, isn’t it?’ she asked) persuaded the assembly that in these modern days the passman was a nonentity.

‘An ordinary degree is cheap,’ she said. ‘Everyone specialises.’

She disposed of Martha’s pretensions to a share in the sunlight of the teaching profession without specialisation and an Honours degree, with the same thoroughness and decision wherewith Stoddart Semple and Mrs. Ironside had disposed of her pretensions to a degree at all.

‘Even financially, the extra year is worth it.’

The thought of Emmeline obtruded itself on Martha’s mind and she realized, hating the knowledge, that she did not wholly belong to the world in which she sat.

She became aware that Luke was speaking. He was speaking magisterially, with an air of authority that equalled Miss Warrender’s own.

‘That’s nonsense,’ she heard him say. ‘It’s quite wrong, most of this specialising. For teachers, anyhow. Teachers shouldn’t specialise − except in life. That’s their subject, really. A man doesn’t set out to teach mathematics, but life illuminated by mathematics; or by literature, or dancing, or Double Dutch, or whatever it is he chooses with which to elucidate the mysteries. Miss Ironside is specialising in life. She does it rather well too.’

‘Illuminated by what, if one may ask?’

The speaker was Macallister, the only other man in the room. A huge full-blooded bovine fellow, with inflated hands and lurks of fat ruffling above his collar, he was reading for Honours in Philosophy.

‘I wish to goodness you’d stop asking that Macallister here,’ said Dussie. ‘He never looks precisely at any particular spot of you, but you feel all the same as if he’d been staring the whole time just under here. Such a sight too − all those collops of fat.’

Here indicated the waist-line. She referred to Macallister’s way of looking as ‘the Greek statue glare’.

‘That’s what comes of philosophy, you see,’ said Luke. ‘Aren’t you thankful I gave it up? − Jolly acute mind, though, for all the encumbrance.’

He continued to bring Macallister to the house. He liked to know the latest developments in philosophic thought, having never quite forgotten that as an apprentice shoemaker he had constructed a system of philosophy which he dreamed would revolutionise the world. Macallister was a useful asset.

‘Illuminated by what, if one may ask?’ Macallister was saying, waving his cigarette towards Martha and giving her the Greek statue glare with his continually roving eyes.

‘Illuminated,’ said Luke, ‘by the sun, the moon and the eleven stars. Also by a little history and poetry and the cool clear truths of the wash-tub.’

And again before Martha’s quickening eye came the figure of Emmeline, towsled and sluttish, and of herself on the sloppy kitchen floor thrusting her arms in the water. Emmeline’s voice rasped. ‘Ye’ve scleitered a’ower the place,’ she was saying. Martha felt sure that every other girl in the room was seeing the same vision as she saw, and her heart burned hot against Luke.

‘Luke, you gumpus!’ cried Dussie’s ringing voice. ‘Cool and clear indeed! Much you know about the wash-tub.’

And a girl in an immaculate white silk shirt said pettishly,

‘My blouses are being ruined, just ruined! In digs, you know − but what can one do? Last week −’

The conversation drifted to more important matters than specialisation.

‘Spanking night,’ said Luke when the guests had gone. ‘Say, Duss, let’s walk Marty home.’

‘You can walk her home if you like, but I’ve an ironing to do. − No indeed, Marty, you shan’t stay and help.’

She despatched them into the dusk.

‘Quarries car,’ cried Luke, ‘and out by Hazelwood.’

The twilight was luminous, from a golden west and a rising moon. The whole sky glowed like some enormous jewel that held fire diffused within itself. Slowly the fire gathered to points, focussed in leaping stars. They struck through Hazelwood. Stark boughs vaulted the sky, and they walked below in silence, along paths that the moon made unfamiliar. There was no purpose in breaking a silence that was part of the magic of the place and hour. Luke walked on in a gay content. Troubled, in a low voice, Martha at last remonstrated with him on the disclosure to which he had subjected her. ‘They will despise me.’

He heard the low words with some astonishment, not having supposed her susceptible to a worldy valuation. For a moment he realized that her nature might be other than he had perceived, but speedily forgot it and saw her only in his own conception of her.

‘Let them then. It’s not worth minding, Marty. Merely the price you have to pay for my determination that they shall know there are people like you in the world. They don’t think, these women − they don’t think anywhere farther up than coffee in Kennington’s and partners for the next dance.’

‘Oh Luke, that isn’t true. They know such a lot − things I don’t know. All those books they’ve read and plays they’ve been to, and concerts. I’ve never heard of half the names they used.’

‘Ornamentation, Marty. They wear them because they’re in the fashion. When they really think, it’s of how to remove an incipient moustache. Oh, they’re not all like that, thank God, but that little lot mostly are. I want them to know you − what you’re like. To understand that there are qualities of mind that make common labour grace and not disgrace the purest intellectual ardour.’

‘But I’m not intellectual.’

She did not know what she was, never having analysed herself; and the disclaimer was not coquetry but disbelief.

‘No,’ he answered, ‘you’re an Intelligence − a Phantom Intelligence.’

She let the accusation pass, not knowing how to refute it; and followed her own thought.

‘But Miss Warrender, she’s not − she’s −’

‘Oh, she’s different, of course. Talks well, doesn’t she? Tremendously well-read. Get Miss Warrender talking and you’re sure to learn something you didn’t know. A perfect pit of knowledge.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have classed her with these others − should you, Luke? The ones that just wear what they know.’

Martha spoke slowly, pondering the question, which evidently exercised her.

‘I am rebuked, gentle guardian.’ Martha shrank. Luke in obeisance before her was troubling. If she were sure that he was only bantering − ! She guessed too that he was aware of her trouble. ‘Of course I shouldn’t. Not so very different either, though. Her knowledge is merely hers, not her. It makes no sort of alteration in the essential man. She knows a few hundred times more now than when I met her first, and she hasn’t grown an atom with it all. It gets no farther in than her brain. When her brain suffers dissolution, so will the knowledge. Food for worms. She’ll waken up to her next incarnation with horribly little to put on. Now you, on the other hand, Marty − you know things with the whole of you. Your knowledge pervades your whole personality. It’s pure spirit. A rare and subtle essence.’

He took an arrogant delight in troubling her, having decided that she was insufficiently aware of her own worth and ought to be made to see herself through other eyes. He had a fine intellectual apprehension of her quality arid tried to show her herself as he perceived her.

‘You are big enough to stand the knowledge. Nothing will spoil you, Marty − there’s flame enough in you to burn the danger up.’

She began to comprehend that she was for him an earnest of the spiritual world; its ministrant; his Beatrice.

‘I don’t worship you. You worship a goddess through flame, don’t you? − But I have learned through you to worship flame. The flame of life. Like Beatrice. Making me aware of hierarchies of being beyond our own. − I’m not making love to you, you know, Marty.’

She said, ‘Luke!’ with a tongue so astounded that he laughed audibly; and in a moment so did she. The absurdity of the idea was palpable.

‘I suppose to some fools it would sound pernicious,’ he reflected. ‘To tell a woman that you love her and at the same time that you haven’t the least intention of wooing her − well! − It can be done, though.’ He was a little magisterial again, liking his theories. ‘There are two sorts of woman to whom one can say these things with impunity. There’s the quite worthless woman, frivolous, nothing in her. The ichor of her life’s too thin and weak to receive anything in solution − all her experience is precipitated immediately − it doesn’t even cloud the liquor − simply doesn’t touch her. You can say any mortal thing you like to her and be safe. And then there’s the woman in whom the life is so strong and powerful that it receives all experience into solution − makes a strange rich-flavoured compound of the liquor; and crystal clear. You can trust a woman like that with any knowledge. You can tell her the truth. We lie to most of the women we know. I’m telling you the truth.’

She remained silent so long that he turned to look at her. They had left the woodland and the moon was strong. He saw her face, held straight ahead and as though she walked without seeing where she went. Rossetti’s picture of the Annunciation came irresistibly to his mind. She had Mary’s rapt tranquillity.

It did not occur to him that that was her very mood; that she carried it home with her; that, lying still on her bed, among threadbare sheets that were patched with stuff of different tone and texture from themselves, under matted and dun-coloured blankets, she was undergoing the awe and rapture of annunciation. Humbly she cried, ‘I am not worthy,’ and the wonder deepened within her till it brimmed and flooded her consciousness. She lay without moving, nor were there articulate words even in her thought; but her whole being was caught up in passionate prayer that she might be able for her destiny. The place was holy; neither Madge’s noisy and rancid breathing, nor Flossie’s muttering and the constant twitch of her limbs, could disturb its solemn air. Let the whole world despise her now, in Luke’s dower was her peace. He made her great by believing her so. Because unwittingly she loved him she became the more fully what he had imagined her. She fell asleep in ecstasy, and woke in ecstasy, carrying to the tasks of early morning a sense of indwelling grandeur that redeemed them all. So strong and bright was this interior life that the things she touched and saw no longer wore their own significance. Their nature was subjugated to her nature; and she handled without disgust, in the confined and reeking closet where the boys had slept, the warm and smelly bed-clothes and the flock mattress that had sagged in holes and hardened into lumps, because her mind had no room for the realization that they were disgusting. As she cleaned the bairns’ boots, there fell on her so strong a persuasion of the very immediacy of unseen presences that she stood still, a clumsy boot thrust upon her fist, staring at the stubbly brush.

‘You’re a dreamy Daniel as ever I saw,’ cried Emmeline as she poked fresh sticks beneath the kettle. ‘A real hinder o’ time, you and yer glowerin’. Fa’s the time to wait on you? − Haud, Willie! − ye thievin’ randy.’ And she clutched Willie’s nieve, birsing the cakes he had been stealing into mealy crumbles that spilt over the floor.

Martha returned to the brushing of the boots without comment, tied the strings of her petticoats for Flossie, who was wandering about half-clad among everyone’s feet, and went back to the bedroom to make ready for town.

‘Am I the daughter of this house, or are you?’ she found herself asking Madge, having rubbed her sleeve against some of her untidy pastes that Madge had larded on a chair-back.

Madge, fourteen years old and done with her education, required, like Martha herself, a wider life than the cottage allowed, and was finding it in the glare of publicity afforded by the baker’s shop, whither she took her jewelled side-combs and fiery bows attached to the very point of her lustreless pigtail, to enliven the selling of bath-buns and half panned loaves and extra strongs, and the delivery of morning baps and ‘butteries’ at the villas round Cairns. She ate in these pleasant precincts more chocolates and pastries than were at all good for her complexion, which had considerably more need now of her geranium petals than it had had two years before; instead of scarlet, however, on the assumption that the more of pallor the less of plebeian was accused by one’s appearance, she spent her meagre cash on the cheapest variety of face powder, which she smeared with an unskilful hand across her features. Martha shrank from her tawdry ostentation, but was worsted in every attempt at remonstrance by Madge’s complete indifference to what she had to say. It was useless to lose one’s temper with Madge; and quite ridiculous to waste one’s irony. She stared and answered, ‘You are, of course,’ and completed the tying of her pigtail bow. Madge would go her own way though the heavens fell upon her: or though Emmeline fell upon her, a much more probable, and to the girl’s imagination more terrifying, catastrophe. She asked no one’s advice and sought no one’s approval. Martha was grateful for at least her silences, dearly as she resented the visible signs of her presence. She had long since ceased to share a bed with her, allowing Madge and Flossie the one respectable bed the room contained, and sleeping herself on a rackety trestle-bed underneath the window. There she could watch Orion, or hear, in the drowsy dawn, a blackbird fluting and the first small stir of wings.

On this particular morning she stood by the window watching clouds like green glass curving upward from the east horizon, and dressing her hair − a little perfunctorily, it must be admitted − while she gazed. She had wiped the chair-back clean herself, being in no mood to break her own interior peace by altercation with Madge. She studied now to dwell in peace. That she had suffered what was obnoxious in her surroundings − whether Madge’s conceits, or Emmeline’s sloven hastes and languors, or Geordie’s grossness − had until now been by instinct; not from the tolerance that comes of understanding, but because, not having begun to understand them, she lived her real life apart from them, within herself. But she was now more consciously resolved to shrink from nothing in her laborious and distasteful life, subjecting herself in a glow of exaltation to the rough sand-papering of her daily courses. She would in no wise dishonour her fate. If the spirit had chosen her for shining through, she would be crystal clear. Crystal clear! Luke had used the very words. And again there rushed on her a sense of abasement that was in itself the sharpest joy. Incredible and sure − it was she who had been chosen for this rare privilege. Luke, whom she honoured, had desired her too. But what did they all see in her eyes, she queried, staring in the dull and spotty mirror. She could not even tell their colour exactly: they had something in them of Nature’s greens that have gone brown, of grass-fields before the freshening of spring. What did they all see in them? She looked in the mirror longer than she had ever looked before, searching for her own beauty. It was not to be found there.

‘Fat are ye scutterin’ aboot at?’ cried Emmeline from the kitchen. ‘Ye’ll be late for yer school.’

She jammed a hairpin into place and pulled her blouse awry as she poked it under the band of her skirt. The end of a shiny safety-pin looked out from below her waist-belt. The mirror had more cause than ever not to reflect her beauty.

Spring wore to summer and Martha lived in an abiding peace. She was disciplined to exaltation. Doubtless her critical faculty suffered. A course of Muckle Arlo would have done her no harm; and Emmeline fell ill, to the advantage of Martha’s domestic, if dubiously (in her own eyes) of her spiritual economy.

On a day in early June she sat and read upon the cairn.

The country was indigo, its austere line running out against a burnished sky to the clear enamelled blue of the mountains. Rain at sea, a soft trail of it like grey gauze blowing in the wind. And an enormous sky, where clouds of shadowed ivory and lustrous hyacinth filed by in vast processional; yet were no more than swayed in the wash of shallows when the eye plunged past them to the unfathomable gulfs of blue beyond. Martha lifted her head from the pages and looked out on those infinitudes of light. She was reading history that year. The slow accumulation of facts and dates was marshalled in her brain, waiting for the fire from heaven to fall; and as she turned from reading and gazed on that wide country gathering blue airs about itself; saw the farms and cottar-houses, roads, dykes, fields, river, she was teased from her own inner stillness by an excitement to which all she had been reading anent the press and stir of centuries contributed. Looking up, she thought suddenly, ‘I am a portion of history,’ and between her glancing from the pages and the formulation of the words, that she had spoken half aloud, there passed the fraction of a second, which nevertheless was crammed with furious thought. She had seen the riotous pageant of history peopled with folk who were like herself. Wheresoever they had gone, whatsoever had been their acts and achievement, they had all begun in a single spot, knowing nothing, with all to find and dare.

‘This place as well as another, ‘she thought; and then she said,’ But I am part of it too.’

She perceived that the folk who had made history were not necessarily aware of the making, might indeed be quite ignorant of it: folk to whom a little valley and a broken hilltop spelt infinity and who from that width and reasonableness of life had somehow been involved in the monstrous and sublime unreason of purposes beyond their own intention. The walls that shut people from people and generation from generation collapsed about her ears; and all that had ever been done on the earth − all she had read and heard and seen − swung together to a knot of life so blinding that involuntarily she closed her eyes and covered them with her hands. She could not keep still for the excitement and almost ran in her haste to the wood, forgot the supper-hour, and walked hither and thither at random; but noting that north of west the skies were flecked with saffron, and that a June sunset is late, she turned home to resume her part in the making of history.

Geordie was leaning against the door and seemed glad to see his daughter.

‘Yer mither’s feelin’ drumlie kind,’ he told her. ‘She’s had a dwam.’

Martha recalled her thoughts from the All and considered this ingredient in it. Emmeline was not wont to be ill.

They went indoors together.

Emmeline, flushed and querulous, manifested a valiant disinclination for bed. They got her there at last, and at intervals throughout the night she proclaimed stoutly that she was a better Leggatt than the best and ‘that sair made wi’ thirst that she could drink the sea and sook the banks’.

‘She’s raivelled kind,’ said Geordie.

In the morning it was plain that Martha must turn sick-nurse. It was hardly the contribution to history that she desired to make. Her examinations were coming on and Emmeline ill was a handful. She broke every regulation the doctor laid down. Fevered, she hoisted her bulk from the bed and ran with her naked feet upon the floor to alter the angle of the window screens.

‘Sic a sicht ye hae them,’ she grumbled to Martha when the girl expostulated with tears. ‘If ye wunna pit things as I tell ye, fat can I dae bit rise masel’?’

‘Temperature up again,’ said the doctor to Martha. ‘I hoped you would have managed to keep it down.’

‘Fat’n a way could she keep it doon?’ cried Emmeline. ‘Wad ye expect her to haud ma big tae to keep doon ma temperature?’

She was indignant now on Martha’s behalf as she had been against her earlier. Indignation was a fine ploy when one lay idle and condemned. Emmeline was in high good-humour with herself. It was long since she had felt so important as she did lying mountainous beneath the bed-clothes, deriding her medical adviser’s opinions and diagnosing her every symptom for herself with the aid of nothing more artificial than mother-wit; while round her in the heated kitchen the fervours of life went on − the steam of pots, the smell of food, the clatter of dishes, the hubbub of tongues, the intimacies of a sick-room toilet. Martha made a clearance of such articles as she could do without and Emmeline enjoyed a fresh attack of indignation. Demanding news of the whereabouts of something she had missed,

‘There’s a’thing ahin that door but dulse, ‘she cried, being told.’ Easy to tidy up when ye jist bang a’thing in ahin a door. But wow to the day o’ revelations.’

‘But where am I to put things?’ Martha asked. There’s just nowhere. There’s nowhere in this house to put things. You shouldn’t have so many of us − it’s not as if they were ourselves.’ And forgetting under the pressure of life the way of life she had purposed − her jubilant acceptance of every roughness − she allowed a secret desire to break cover.

‘You should put these boys away now, mother. Why should we keep them when we haven’t room for ourselves?’

Emmeline lay astounded. To be sure they had not room. And to be sure the boys were not her own, and stripped her stores like locusts, and brought no counter benefit in cash. The meagre sum she received for Jim and Madge was still forthcoming, but for Willie there had been more promises than pence. But put them away!

Alter an arrangement that had hardened to the solidity of a law! It was, and therefore it was right. − A belief that Emmeline was not singular in holding.

Martha did not push her argument. She dropped it, indeed, hastily, as though she had touched live coal. But the presence of the boys, their claims upon space and time, burned acidly in her consciousness. Jim she could endure, big hulking loon though he was, with Madge’s own stolidity and a genius for unnecessary noise; but Willie, the younger boy, she was coming to dislike very fervently. He was dirty in habit and in attitude of mind. He sniggered. He used accomplishments hard-won at school for nefarious purposes, writing up obscene words on gates and outhouse doors: a procedure quite unredeemed in Martha’s eyes by a certain merry insolence of bearing, not unattractive in itself. Her father’s crassness, Martha could recognise from contact with Willie, was wholesome.

It looked like a month before Emmeline had recovered sufficiently to allow her to resume her classes. Actually the time had been so short that Luke and Dussie had not discovered her absence. But they had so many preoccupations! Luke was writing detective stories. He wrote for dear life, as though he had never had a hobby before and could not conceivably have another.

Dussie collaborated, criticising with a contemptuous common-sense the more outrageous effronteries of his plots.

They had had one accepted.

‘Stout old yarn,’ − Luke was telling Martha all about it, about its cruise among the editors, its ultimate haven − ‘We’ll go down to posterity yet: Sherlock and Missus.’

They were dreadfully − and quite sincerely − sorry to hear that Emmeline had been ill, and eagerly gave Martha the magazine to read that contained their detective story.