Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 25

Martha’s year of professional training began badly. After a dozen tentatives, rehearsals as it were for the grand affair, Emmeline took that autumn to her bed in sober earnest.

‘There’s naething ails her but creish,’ grumbled Stoddart Semple.

He still came in about and smoked a pipe by the fireside while Emmeline lay, lumped and shapeless, in the kitchen bed. He would slouch about the doors: sometimes Martha, glancing up, saw him glowering through the window.

‘Foo are ye the day, missus?’ he would cry through the window to Emmeline; and abroad, report, ‘There’s naething ails her but creish’ − a diagnosis that speedily came round to the lady’s ears.

‘So he says,’ quoth she a little grimly. ‘He says a’thing, that man, but his prayers.’

If creish were the ailment, certainly it did not serve to swacken the patient’s temper. Martha was trauchled.

‘Ye can keep Madge at hame to notice ye,’ said Geordie. But Madge was earning money (if but a pittance), Martha merely expending it by her daily labour. It was obvious to plain common-sense which of the two might best be interrupted.

Martha, however, was resolved not to have her work interrupted. She knew that Emmeline would fare well enough alone by day. There was a modicum of truth in Stoddart’s dictum. Emmeline was ill, though not so ill but that she might have been better had she wished. She had perhaps a pardonable temptation to indulgence in the importance that hedges an invalid about. Emmeline had been unimportant for so long! − Now her neighbours talked of her, and talked with her, comparing her ailment with their own, their sisters’, their mothers’, their aunts’. … How could Emmeline resist such dalliance? Fortified by the doctor’s authority, Martha determined to do her college work by day and her cottage work at morning and evening; but stated early in family conclave the condition upon which alone it would be possible: that the bairns should be put away. Her reasoning was too cogent to be dismissed. Even Emmeline yielded; and other homes were found for the boys and Flossie. Madge remained, parting from her brother with no emotion on either side. Flossie screamed and kicked. She had had scoldings and buffetings enough in all conscience; and yet immoderate huggings too, and jammy pieces at illegitimate hours; and always Geordie’s slow affectionate devotion.

Martha was not much concerned as to where they might be ultimately tossed. She had other absorptions. Even apart from her enraptured inner drama, her life was full enough to keep her thoughts engaged. She came home from long crowded days in schools and lecture-rooms to make the supper, set the house to rights, prepare as far as she could the next day’s dinner; and rose in raw black mornings to get breakfast ready and attend to Emmeline’s wants. Never, through all the weeks of Emmeline’s illness, had she to clean the stove, light the fire, or carry water. Slowly and clumsily, but without fail, Geordie did these things; and he and Madge between them dished up some sort of dinner, while Aunt Josephine came frequently about, and the neighbours ran in and lent a hand. By and by Emmeline rose again, and sat heavily by the fire, putting her hand to an occasional job; and the winter wore through.

Meanwhile Martha’s private drama had spun more fiercely. She had discovered, on the opening of the Training Centre session, with something like dismay, that Miss Warrender, now with Double Firsts, had been appointed to the lecturing staff; and that she would spend an hour a week under her tuition. Her reason repudiated the dismay. To feel a fool in the presence of a brilliant woman when one meets her socially, is no excuse for dread of her as a teacher: but reason was not particularly successful in her arguments. Martha continued to feel constraint in Miss Warrender’s presence.

Others of the girls, who though her juniors had been the year before the young lecturer’s fellow-students, were less abashed. The student’s inalienable right to criticize his teachers became doubly a right when the teacher had been a fellow student the previous year. Martha therefore heard, in the Common Room and corridors, much discussion of Miss Warrender’s affairs. It was thus that one afternoon, waiting in the lecture room for the lady herself to appear − for with all her brilliance Miss Warrender had no very accurate ideas on punctuality − Martha heard her name coupled with that of Luke Cromar, and coupled lightly. Luke, it appeared, talked philosophy with Miss Warrender elsewhere than in Union Street. She was reported to have said that he counted her his greatest friend. The tone implied that species of friendship that has laws outwith the common moral law. It was the tone, even more than the disclosure, that played havoc in Martha’s brain. She tried to shout, ‘It’s a lie, a lie,’ but her lips were parched, her tongue was too clumsy for her mouth. Miss Warrender came in. Martha could distinguish words but no ideas in the lecture. Her pulses were pelting and in a little she rose and went out. ‘Are you sick?’ her neighbour whispered. She paid no attention, walking straight past the lecturer’s desk to the door.

Outside she stood still in a fury of anger. This breaking of the third commandment! But was it true? The blood thundered in her ears and wave after wave rushed hotly to her brow. She hurried at random among the mean streets that surrounded the Training Centre, but recollecting that her fellow-students might come out from lecture and meet her, directed her steps towards Union Street. A filthy lie. − But if he had given it circumstance? His walking with Miss Warrender was so hateful to herself that she saw it as a dishonour to his nature. That Luke should stain his honour! − could even act so that foul breath might play upon his honour.

In Union Street she met Dussie. Dussie cried, ‘Do come and see this frock!’ and dragged her to a window. ‘That golden-brown one. Marty, you’d look lovely in it.’

‘Duss,’ blurted Martha, staring through the plate-glass window, ‘I heard something abominable just now. Some girls talking. They suggested that Luke goes too much with Lucy Warrender.’

‘Pigs,’ said Dussie.

Martha had spoken from an urgent impulse to thrust the knowledge outside herself, but regretted at once that she had thrust in on Dussie.

‘I oughtn’t to have told you. I−’

‘Why ever not? You’ll better tell me next who the damsels were, so that I can claw their eyes out when I meet them.’

She had broken across Martha’s slower speech, so that simultaneously Martha was saying:

‘− didn’t mean to make you unhappy.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t make me unhappy! It’s rather fun than not to be properly angry. I could slaughter the lot of them and then dance upon their reeking corpses.’

She made a mouth at the shop-window and laughed at it herself so heartily that Martha was compelled also to laugh.

‘I suppose,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘a thing like that couldn’t make you unhappy unless you weren’t sure of Luke.’

‘Marty! − You’re the pig now.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean you. I mean anyone. I was only −’ after a perceptible pause she concluded − ‘theorising.’

‘Don’t, then. Theorising’s stupid. Sure − ! I’m as sure as death. No, as life. That’s a lot surer.’

‘I know you are. No one could be not sure of Luke.’

Her anguish nevertheless was because she was not sure. Not that she doubted his faithfulness to Dussie! But she feared lest by a careless gesture he had marred his own shining image, made himself a little less than ideally perfect.

It was at that moment it dawned on Dussie that Martha was in love with Luke, and the irony of her own procedure struck her. But immediately after she was moved with a grave pity for her friend. ‘How unhappy she must be.’

But Martha was not unhappy. So long as she was unaware of it, to be in love with Luke was bliss; and she was not yet quite aware. She was however at the moment in an agony of fear for him. Her love was ruthless on his behalf and would have nothing less for him than her imagined perfection. For two days she supped and slept with her agony, rose with it in the morning and carried it to every task she undertook. She began to understand the Incarnation. It was the uttermost shame for her to offer rebuke to the man who had dazzled her eyes until she could not see his human littleness; but if one cared enough for a person one would be thankful to suffer any shame, humiliation, misunderstanding, if so be the beloved could be saved from becoming a lesser man than was in him to become. God, put gladly to shame and reviled, because that was a lesser anguish than to see men and women fail of their own potentialities. … By the third day she had tortured herself into the persuasion that she must do violence to her nature and tell Luke that he had laid himself somehow open to public reproach.

She told him what she had heard.

‘Do you happen to know one George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal?’ he said, in the curious voice that she used to think had a smile in it.

She turned enquiring eyes, as though to ask what the Earl did there.

‘As you may have heard,’ Luke proceeded, ‘he founded Marischal College, of which I am an unworthy member, in the year of grace 1593. Rather a magnificent Earl he must have been, since he did of his own prowess what it required kings and such-like bodies to do elsewhere − founded a University. The only one in Britain, you know, founded by an Earl. It was a separate University then, a sort of rival grocer’s shop across the street from King’s − whence it results that Marischal had a motto which I daresay you have heard.’

She wished he would be serious.

‘What’s good enough for an Earl is good enough for me.’ And he quoted the old motto: ‘They haf said: Quhat say they: Lat them say.’

So! − He had not understood.

She made her point clear − the high perfection he must not violate; and lifted her eyes to him, suffering mutely, imploring his acquiescence with all her simplicity of soul.

‘You precious saint!’ he said. ‘Beatrice from the Heavenly Towers. There’s an impromptu beginning for a poem. Shall I continue? Or has any other blighter used it before me?’

But though he jested she touched him with a kind of awe. Impossible ideas she had, of course; not of this world: but her speech was like a lit and potent draught. What fools men were, to think the spirit could not be manifest in human flesh!

She kept herself in hand until the last of the evening’s tasks was over, undressed herself in darkness and went to bed. Then she let her strung nerve snap and sobbed with abandon. He had smiled at her and she all earnestness. … Thinking after a time that she heard a movement in the room, she quieted herself and lay, tense and listening. So lying, she became aware of moonlight, and turned her head; Madge in the other bed had raised herself upon her elbow and was watching her with curiosity.

‘What’ up with you?’ she asked.

‘Nothing’s up with me.’

‘What’re you crying for then?’

‘I’m not crying.’

‘Oh, all right, then.’

Madge dropped to her pillow again.

Shortly she said, ‘If you’d fash yourself to do your hair a bit decenter, you’d easy get a lad.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, well,’ said Madge, ‘you’re near twenty-two and hinna a lad yet.’ And after a moment’s pause she added, ‘I’ll lend you my side-combs if you like.’

Her side-combs were set with a glitter of sham blue brilliants.

Martha said sharply:

‘I don’t want either your side-combs, or a lad, thank you.’

‘Oh, all right, then,’ said Madge again. She turned her shoulder, rubbing her greasy hair about on the pillow till she found a comfortable nook. Soon she was sleeping heavily.

Martha was indignant at the supposition that she occupied her thoughts with anything as vulgar as a lad: though if a lad be considered as a young male who cares for one and for whom one cares in return, that was exactly of what she had been thinking with persistence for some little time. But what relation was there between Luke and a lad, any more than between Martha and an Ironside or a Leggatt? He had set their intercourse on too high a plane for the one, and kept her in her exalted mood too long for the other. Thinking of him (and no longer of his honour) she fell asleep.

The following week Miss Warrender spoke to Martha after lecture.

‘Are you quite better now?’ she asked. ‘I was sorry you weren’t feeling well.’

Martha stared, having forgotten the manner of her exit the previous week. Talking at the classroom door with the young lecturer, she was swept by a hurricane of hate. She wanted to hit her. Her fingers clenched of themselves … she could feel them closing on Miss Warrender’s throat … and all the time she was saying calmly, with a smile, that she had not been very sick and was quite well now; that the sky was threatening; there had been too much wet weather lately and it would be most unfortunate if the coming Rectorial Election were marred by rain.

‘For the peasemeal fight and the torchlight procession − it would be too bad,’ Miss Warrender said.

Martha walked away. The corridor was endless. It seemed to roll away, like a barrel on which one tried to walk. She supposed she was tired; and, Good Lord! how she ached, now that she let herself relax. Into that imagined strangulation had gone the energy of a week’s work.

She went home, climbing the long brae very slowly. There was dirty weather in the offing. A grey south; and a diffused yellow crept through the grey, giving it a still dirtier look. As Martha plodded on, absorbed, her blue-paper-covered child-observation note-book, in which she had to write her observations on every lesson she saw taught in the schools, slipped from among the books on her arm and fell in the soft road. She was annoyed at its griminess and wiped it hastily with her coat-sleeve. The smear looked uglier.

‘Stupid!’ she thought. ‘I should have let it dry.’

And he stood staring at the stain, but it was not the stain that she was seeing. She felt as though with every step in her slow ascent she had been turning very carefully the revolving lens of a fieldglass, and had come to rest with her picture focussed to a perfect clarity.

She understood now that she was in love with Luke.

Reason told her that there should be black depths of horror in the knowledge, but all she could feel was wild glad exultancy, the sureness of a dweller in the hills who has come home. One loves − the books had taught her, though she had given the theme but little attention − as one must, perhaps against one’s will and inclination: but she, sucked under without awareness, had loved the greatest man she knew. Judgment approved. She counted herself among the blest. Besides, this secret and impossible love had a wild sweetness, flavoured and heady, luscious upon the palate, a draught for gods. It was eternal, set beyond the shadow of alteration in an ideal sphere, one of the concentric spheres of Paradise. It would satisfy her eternally. There was nothing possessive in her love; or rather she possessed already all that she desired in him − those far shining, terribly intimate moments of spiritual communion.

She thought that she would love Luke forever with hidden and delectable love. It was a consummation, the final fusion of their spirits in a crystal that would keep forever its own exquisite shape, timelessly itself.

But some crystals founder in some fires.

The rain began, hesitant at first, then powerful as from an opened sluice. Martha pulled off her gloves, and throwing her face and palms upwards, let the water rush upon her naked flesh. She felt light, as though her body were sea-wrack floating in the deluge of waters; or as though an energy too exorbitant for her frame, coursing through her, had whipped her into foam.

‘Ye maun be soaked,’ Emmeline was saying. ‘Yon was hale water.’

Martha only laughed, standing in the doorway with the water streaming from her clothes. She was remembering what Luke had said, one stormy night when he had brought her home from town: ‘I like a soaking now and then. Good elemental feel it gives you.’ Elemental! − That was it. Washed by the rain she felt strong and large, like a wind that tosses the Atlantic or a tide at flood −

‘Ye micht shut tae the door,’ Emmeline complained. ‘We’ll be perished wi’ cauld.’

Martha smiled to herself and shut the door. She had done the biggest thing she had ever done: she had fallen in love with Luke. It was the crown of her achievement. And without changing her wet garments she began briskly to prepare the supper.

‘Ye’re raised the nicht,’ her mother said. ‘Fatever’s ta’en ye?’

Martha laughed again, catching the tails of her dripping skirt for joy of the feel of water through her fingers. Raised! − of course she was − upraised to the highest heaven because she had had the wit to fall in love with Luke and with no other man on earth. And still laughing, and squeezing the hems of her skirt, she began to waltz round and round very rapidly on the kitchen floor.

Martha’s procedure was by way of pantomime to her mother. Emmeline found the days very long. ‘We’re better wantin’ yon canalye o’ kids,’ she acknowledged; but she missed the stir. When Aunt Josephine did not walk down from Crannochie, and none of the neighbours stepped in about for a crack, and not even Stoddart Semple flattened his nose against the window and called ‘Foo are ye daein’?’ her days were very empty; nor did her evenings provide much entertainment. Geordie might have a curran remarks to make anent the doings at the farm, and Madge, when directly asked, would detail the customers who had visited the baker’s shop and what their purchases had been; but Martha, with her head in the clouds, or absorbed by the mysteries of School Hygiene and Child Psychology, had no news to give her mother. Emmeline therefore enjoyed the departure of Martha’s impromptu by the fireside, though her mind, untrained to the true analysis of its own enjoyments, insisted that she was distressed.

‘Are ye gane clean gyte?’ she asked; and anxiously: ‘Haud oot ower fae the dishes. − There ye are noo! − a’ tae crockaneeshion.’

Martha was still laughing. The clash of the broken crockery was like cymbals to her. Stooping she swept the pieces together with her wet hands, flung them with a clatter in the coal-scuttle and ran to her own room.

She was still laughing. She wished that she could stop. It was folly to laugh like this because one had got wet. Her clothes were clammy now and she was shivering from her exposure. Her teeth chattered and suddenly her weariness came back upon her. She sank to the floor, one arm upon the bed. The walls and roof seemed to recede to an interminable distance. The whole house was flying away; and through an unobstructed clearness, but very far off, she could see Luke. There was nothing between him and her and she knew that she could reach him. She knew that she had reached him. Her spirit flowed out upon him, encompassing and permeating his. She could give herself to him forever by the mere outpouring of herself. She put herself at his disposal, and rising from the floor very quietly, changed her clothes and returned to the kitchen.

The weather cleared. The night of the Torchlight Procession was dry and cold, and very dark; but cold only heightened the ardour of the students and the dark threw up the torches ‘glare. They poured out of the quadrangle on to the crowded October streets − devils and pirates, wivies with mutches and wivies with creels, knights and grinning deaths’-heads, Japs and Maoris, tattie-boodies and emperors − lit fantastically by the gleam of the torches they carried. Spectators lined the streets, and the bairns of the poorer quarters, yelling and capering, pressed in upon the revellers; some marvelled, some in a fine scorn criticized, some tumbled to the tail of the procession and followed on with shouts and mimicry. In the remoter streets, away from the glare of the shop-lights, the procession trailed its length like a splendid smouldering caterpillar, with fire and smoke erect like living hairs along its back.

Dussie had pranked Luke out in a sailor suit, from which his inordinate length of neck and limb protruded grotesquely. Though no longer a student, he was too much a boy to hold back from the fun of a Torcher.

‘Wish I could go too,’ Dussie had pouted as she stitched at the sailor collar. ‘Luke − couldn’t I? Dressed up − no one would know.’

‘Rubbish!’ said Luke. ‘The size of you − it would give you away at once.’

Miss Warrender was in the flat that evening. She laughed and said, ‘The men’s monopoly, you see, Mrs. Cromar.’ Miss Warrender was noted for an ardent feminist. Luke laughed also, and said, ‘Oh, you want to share Torchers as well as Westminster, do you, Miss Warrender?’

‘Why not?’ she said.

‘I’d do it,’ cried Dussie. ‘I’d do it in a twink, if I were tall enough.’

‘Oh, no need to wait for your growth, Mrs. Cromar. One should do such things openly, or not at all.’

‘Would you?’ challenged Dussie.

Miss Warrender shrugged her fine supple shoulders and flung her arms above her head in a careless gesture.

‘Why not?’ she said again.

‘You’d make rather a jolly gipsy,’ said Luke watching the play of her arms.

Miss Warrender laughed again.

‘For a freak,’ she said, ‘I believe I’ll do it. You’d better come too, Mrs. Cromar − show yourself off. We’ll let them see we are not afraid of them.’

She spoke mockingly. Luke took her in jest but Dussie in earnest; seeing which ‘Rubbish!’ cried Luke again, sharply decisive. ‘You can hang around in the Quad, Duss, and welcome the warriors home.’

By the evening of the procession he had forgotten the jest; nor did it recur to him at all, when, marching through the streets, he found himself puzzled by a Spanish gypsy lad who walked in front of him. Something in the figure was familiar. It teased him for a little, then was forgotten.

When the roysterers had made their round of the city and gathered in the quadrangle again to fling their torches on the blazing bonfire, Dussie slipped from the crowd of waiting girls. Flushed and excited she sidled among the torch-bearers seeking Luke. Some of the men, recognizing her, shouted a welcome. ‘Come on, Mrs. Cromar − into the ring!’ Luke, excited himself, grabbed at her arm. At the same moment he felt his other arm seized. Turning, he saw the Spanish gypsy whose identity had puzzled him in the street; and with something of astonishment recognized him for Lucy Warrender. In the hilarious confusion that arose as the torch-bearers thronged to dance around the bonfire, she had manoeuvred herself close to Luke and thrust her arm firmly into his. He glanced aside at her. She was wearing heavy gold ear-rings that glittered with a barbaric inconstancy as she swayed; and he was startled by something lascivious in her eyes and posture, as though the Spanish costume, like Martha’s lustre frock, was a mirror that reflected sharply an unfamiliar aspect of the woman. He did not like the sharp reflection. Revolted, he flung her off brusquely and drew forward Dussie, who had been pushed back in the scrimmage, putting his arm around her possessively. For the first time Miss Warrender perceived that Dussie too was in the ring of dancers, and with a savage energy she threw her torch on the bonfire and slipped back into the shadows. A tongue of light pursued her for a moment but shifted rapidly, and her gorgeous finery was flattened out against the blackness and melted in it. Her torch, flying high and falling short of the central fury of the bonfire, spat back a shower of sparks and smuts that lit on Dussie.

The incident made Luke thoughtful. He was still thinking of it next morning, as he walked briskly down Union Street through a frosty haze. In his preoccupation he whistled as he went. Luke had a passion for making the world comfortable. He liked setting people at their ease, humouring them into a satisfaction with themselves that made them the best of company; and if he had humoured his living-mine-of-information-and-perfect-pit-of-knowledge into a belief that she meant more to him than she did, well, he must disabuse her, that was all! But he hated the necessity. He had taken all she offered him so long as it was to his mind, and now that she was offering that for which he had no manner of desire … Luke turned into Broad Street, making for the University, and continued to whistle.

As it happened, Miss Warrender was already sufficiently disabused. Her pride was fiercely hurt by the manner of her throwing off, and she made public the opinion she had always held of Dussie − a poor thing to be mated with a man like Luke, illiterate. She could give him so much that Dussie could not give.

‘A poor thing but mine own,’ Luke said to his wife with the voice that had the smile in it. He had told Dussie plainly of Miss Warrender’s outburst. There were always birds of the air to carry the matter.

‘I prefer to be the dicky-bird myself,’ he told her.

Dussie meditated, saying nothing. Then, flinging her head back and laughing merrily:

‘Do you know, Luko,’ she said, ‘I once tried to make myself literate. I read and read at your books − oh, for hours − when you weren’t in. I thought you’d hate me for being ignorant, but I gave it up ‘cos you didn’t seem to like me any better when I knew things out of books, and just as well when I didn’t. But I was dreadfully unhappy about it for awhile.’

‘I didn’t think you were ever unhappy.’

‘Oh! − lots of times.’

‘Over what, for example?’

She looked at him with her mouth askew.

‘Not over that Warrrender creature, anyhow!’ she said at last.

They agreed that the Warrender creature was not worth unhappiness.

‘You know, Luke,’ said Dussie by and by, ‘Marty never liked that Lucy Warrender. I used to try to argue her out of it, and you see she was right.’

‘Marty has a way of being right on points of judgment. Spiritual instinct. She’s clear-eyed. Like day.’

It were hard to say whether it was by reason of spiritual instinct that Martha disliked Miss Warrender, but very easy to say that she liked her lecturing no better as the term went on. No doubt but that Miss Warrender knew her subject and lectured, as she talked, brilliantly and with authority; but she had no power to fuse the errant enthusiasms of the young minds before her, to startle them from their preoccupations and smite them to a common ardour to which all contributed and by which all were set alight. She had not discovered that lecturing is a communal activity. For once Martha found that the getting of understanding had no charm, and confounding theme with lecturer, she hated both; though as far as Luke was concerned she gathered from both Dussie and Common Room conversation that she need fear nothing more to Luke’s honour from Miss Warrender. She was therefore shining again with gladness, rejoicing that he no longer laid himself open to the misrepresentations of the scandal-mongers and quite unaware that Luke was raging inwardly at that disgusting feminine folly that will not allow a man plain Monday’s fare, a little rational conversation on topics of current interest, without the woman’s obtruding her womanhood on him and forcing upon him the meanness of repulsing her. He had no more desire to offer love to a woman other than Dussie than to offer her a used teacup; but with his avidity for exploring other people’s minds, he wanted as much intellectual comradeship as he could obtain, from men and women alike. He wanted to go on talking philosophy to Miss Warrender as he had always done, and being unaccustomed to repressing any of his energetic and multitudinous impulses, resented the make of human nature.

Seeing no alteration in Martha’s shining calm, and clearly persuaded that she was in love with Luke, Dussie thought: ‘She is heroic.’ But Martha was not heroic. She had her paradise within herself and it sufficed her. What she possessed was more to her than what she lacked.

Luke continued to believe her a spirit: but her spirit haunted him. He was arrogant but not conceited; and that she might love him had not crossed his mind. Indeed he felt a subtle fear of her; and fear is not the way to truth. But during that spring Luke began to grow up. Though he hardly admitted it, Miss Warrender had sobered him; and Martha’s rebuke had gone deeper than he knew. He was thoughtful, brooding sometimes until Dussie marvelled. He would turn from her finest dishes, light a cigarette and fling it untasted on the fire.

‘A burnt offering,’ he said, answering her remonstrance.

‘A burnt … what on earth?’

‘Well, a sacrifice to the gods. You set fire to valuable things, you know.’

‘And what god do you sacrifice cigarettes to?’

He said: ‘An unknown god.’

‘But what is it, Luke?’ she cried one evening. ‘You don’t eat or anything. You seem hardly to know that I’m here.’

‘I don’t quite know, Duss,’ he said, rumpling his hair. He was rueful and puzzled; a boy who had remained a boy too long and found maturity difficult.

‘It’s … some sort of spiritual adventure, I suppose,’ he said.

And he began to talk of Martha.

‘Remember the time she told me I shouldn’t be so friendly with Lucy Warrender? All nonsense, of course. Oh, in this particular case she happened to have some justification, but in principle she was quite wrong. But somehow afterwards I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Herself. Not what she said. But her nature. Her nature is like an exquisitely chastened work of art. She does without. Rejects. Takes from life only its finest. And she doesn’t want the other things. She’s amazing, you know − to want so little and to lack so much. She doesn’t really want the things we want − chocs and shocks and frocks and things − all our social excitements. But it’s not because she’s satisfied with a thin and empty life. I expect it’s because she has something much more wildly exciting of her own. I thought and thought about it till I wanted to have it too − to get at the positive side of asceticism. What it gives you, not what it denies. It was really an intellectual curiosity − wanted to know what it was like. Inquisitiveness, you know.’

He could not humble himself far enough as yet to acknowledge that it was more than an intellectual curiosity.

‘You’re awfully funny, Luke,’ said Dussie. ‘Imagine punishing yourself out of inquisitiveness.’

‘It’s what scientists and explorers and people do. But it isn’t punishing myself. That’s the great discovery. It’s the most thrilling excitement − refusing yourself things. Things you normally enjoy. The thrill of doing without them is far more exciting than having them. Comes to be a sort of self-indulgence. A Lenten orgy. A feast of fasting. A lap of luxury. I shall take to lashing myself next as an inordinate appetite. Like smoking, you know. Strokes instead of whiffs. Shan’t you love ironing my hair shirt?’

Dussie’s heart had gone cold. Was he in love with Martha? She turned to the piano and played a ranting reel.

‘You’ll have to look after your costume yourself,’ she cried over her shoulder. ‘I don’t know how to dress for spiritual adventures. I never have any, you see. Shouldn’t recognize one if I met it in my porridge.’

They were both growing up and afraid at first to share their knowledge.