Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 27

Throughout that spring Martha had walked enchanted. A spell was on her that altered the very contours of her body. Unlike the maleficent spells of the witches, that shrivel the flesh and destroy the human semblance, the spell that was on Martha rounded her figure, filled out the hollows of her cheeks, straightened her shoulders. In spite in her harassed and laborious winter, she had never been so strong and well. Her limbs were tireless. She carried her head high. The philtre she had drunk was of very ancient efficacy. Under the influence of her conscious love for Luke, she was rapidly becoming what Luke loved her for not being − a woman.

‘That’s grand hurdies ye’re gettin’ on you, lassie,’ said Geordie, slapping her as she passed him. ‘The wark suits you better’n the books.’

Martha was indignant. She felt obscurely that a change was coming on her, and though hardly aware of its cause knew well enough that it was not housework. Scornful, she tossed herself from her father’s reach and strode up the brae towards Crannochie.

‘Spangin’ awa’ up the hill in some style,’ her father reported.

‘Weel, lat her,’ said Emmeline. Now that she had recovered sufficiently to resume most of her household duties, she was willing enough that Martha should take her liberty again. Besides, it was Sunday evening − an April Sunday − the very time of the week for young people to go walking. Madge was out too.

‘Awa’ oot aboot wi’ her lad,’ said Geordie.

‘Lad!’ quoth Emmeline contemptuously. ‘Fat’n a way wad she hae a lad?’

‘Weel she tells me whiles aboot him.’

‘O ay, a’ It’s easy to see fa her lad wad be − a palin’ post.’

On this occasion Emmeline was wrong. Madge had a lad. He came from Glasgow, clerked throughout the week in a wholesale paper store − a very genteel business − wore his tie through a ring with a flashy diamond and had alberts to his watch chain. Altogether a satisfactory person, and given to the week-end pursuit of rural delights: among which was numbered Madge’s sturdy little figure. At sixteen her breasts were already swollen and her hips pronounced. Madge, when she caught gawkishly at the alberts as they walked along the road, was already in possession of her share of the spiritual mysteries. Her perceptions had attained their apotheosis. She had other uses now for her side-combs than offering them to Martha.

Martha, swinging uphill on the April Sunday evening, had no more use for the side-combs than she had had on the October night when they were offered. She was feeling splendidly alive. Life coursed through her veins, and she was glad, in a way she had hardly known before, of the possession of her body. It was a virginal possession. On the solitary uplands, throwing her arms to the winds, breasting the hurricane, laughing with glee at the onslaught of the rains, she felt as Diana might have felt, possessing herself upon the mountains. She rejoiced, as a strong man rejoices to run a race, in her own virginity, the more, as she came to fuller understanding of life’s purposes, in that she felt herself surrendered eternally to a love without consummation. Her virginity was Luke’s, proudly and passionately kept for him.

So strong was the life in her as she walked onwards in the tossing April weather, that she could afford to be prodigal of herself even to the extent of throwing a greeting to Andy Macpherson, who was walking, also alone, on the uplands. So might Artemis, of her condescension, have graced a mortal with a word. But Andy knew only one way of talking to a girl, and be sure, given the opportunity so long denied, made use of it: whereupon Artemis, who had amassed a very considerable vocabulary during her researches in history and literature, and in her new-found arrogance of spirit discovered she could use it, chid him with such hot scorn and vehement indignation (after making the first advances too!) that Andy’s blandness frothed to bluster and his bluster collapsed like a paper bag at a Sunday school picnic; while Martha marched ahead with her chin a little higher and her shoulders more squarely set. O, cruel! − But these goddesses are notoriously unfeeling, up yonder on their Olympian crags. When Artemis takes to the heather, ware to the soap-selling, bacon-slicing helot who would follow.

Artemis was very happy on the heather. She swung up through Crannochie, hailing Aunt Josephine as she went; and on to the Rotten Moss, where she clambered upon the boulders and plunged among the heather-tufts; and like a votary of the fleet-foot goddess (for to goddess her were hardly fair and she so near the discovery of her humanity), ran races with her own swift thought; and wind-blown, mazed with distance, drunken with height and space, danced fiercely under a bare sky. Diana would have trembled, could she have seen her votary. Such wild abandon was hardly virginal.

May was a frail blue radiance. Was there ever such a summer? Day after day the sun rose softly and night after night sank in a shimmering haze. The hills trembled, so liquid a blue that they seemed at point of dissolution; and clouds like silver thistle-down floated and hovered above them. Stifling one night in the low-roofed bedroom, where Madge’s cheap scents befouled the air, Martha rose exasperated and carried her shoddy bed outside. There she watched till morning the changes of the sky and saw the familiar line of hills grow strange in the dusky pallor of a summer midnight. Thereafter she made the field her cubicle and in its privacy she spent her nights. She did not sleep profoundly, but her vitality was too radiant to suffer from the privation. Sometimes the rain surprised her and she was compelled to shelter; sometimes she let it fall on her, soft unhurrying rain that refreshed like sleep itself; sometimes she awoke, dry and warm, to a cool wet world where every grass, each hair on the uncovered portions of her blanket, each hair about her own forehead, hung with its own wet drops. But oftener the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver-clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranquil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake skraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea’s roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.

In the third week of June Luke said: ‘We deserve a change − we’re positively grey with dust.’

The hot air quivered above the bogs. There was no wind to blow the cotton-grass. An insubstantial world, hazed upon its edges, unstable where the hot air shook. Midsummer: at their feet the sweet pink orchises, the waxen pale cat-heather, butterwort: the drone and shimmer of dragon-flies around them: and everywhere the call of water.

They were drowsed with happiness. Sometimes they walked, sometimes they stood and gazed, sometimes they lay in the long brown heather, smelling the bog-myrtle, listening to the many voices of the burns. A butterfly − a tiny blue − glided over and over them. It floated on the current of their happiness.

At twilight long shadows came out upon the hills. Their darknesses were tender purple, and stars, too soft to shine, hung few and single above. The skies were dust-of-gold.

There were no stars too soft, no purple too tender, no dust-of-gold too paradisal, for their mood.

Tomorrow − the trance will break.

Martha tossed the bedclothes off and sat up in bed. She was in the house, in the low hot room with Madge and her reek of face powder. She had been too weary, coming home from the afternoon among the hills, to carry her bed outside. They had gone, the three of them, in an excursion train, up-country among the Saturday trippers, and back at night in a crowded compartment where sleepy children squabbled and smeared the windows with their sticky hands.

It was long past midnight when she abandoned the effort to sleep and sat up. She was not weary now, but through her body there ran a tantalizing irritation. She thought: ‘It isn’t pain − but what is it? It’s in me. It hurts my body.’ And she writhed, twisting herself upon the bed. ‘I want the eleven stars,’ she thought. ‘But are they enough?’ Her wants felt inordinate and she too small and weak. She battled against a sense of impotence.

She moved again, tossing an arm, and her hands met and clenched. She was so sunk in her absorption that for a moment she did not realize it was her own hand she had closed upon. She felt the firm impact of the grip … oh, it was her own! Queer, her own hand there. And then, with the suddenness of light when a match is struck, she knew what it was she wanted. Luke’s hand, just to touch his hand: that would allay the agony that tore her, the pain that gnawed and could not be located, that was in all her body and yet nowhere.

She knew now. She wanted Luke. All of him, and to be her own. And the torrent of her passion, sweeping headlong, bore her on in imagination past every obstacle between her and her desire. The thought of Dussie was like a straw tumbled in a cataract. Let the whole world be swamped and broken in this cataract, so it carry her to her goal. The Ironside in her blood was up. Like her father who had swept the proud Leggatt beauty on to marriage, masterful until he had his will; like her Aunt Sally who had defied opinion and eloped with the man who roused her passion; Martha was ready to spurn the whole world and herself as well, in the savage imperious urge of her desire. Leggatt respectability! − She wanted Luke with an animal Ironside ardour. And was he not already half in love with her? − or more than half. ‘I could make him love me,’ she thought; and the sense of her own power rushed over her with a wild black sweetness she could not resist.

A curious part to be cast for a Beatrice. Martha was going out of her rôle. But in truth she was neither Beatrice, nor Artemis, but Martha Ironside, a woman: of like dimensions, senses, affections, passions, with other women. If you prick her, will she not bleed? And if you wrong her −

But it was a little later till Martha began to consider whether she had not been wronged.

Morning came at last, and she could rise without exciting comment.

The day was Sunday. Impossible to see Luke that day. She passed the time in restless walking, and had one thought only: ‘I can make him love me.’ She had never had a strong sense of the complex social inter-relationships of life: now it was gone completely.

At night she slept in the field. Slept! − Sleep was past imagining. There was no darkness; and the diffusion of light was strange and troubling. In the very early hours of morning she slipped from bed, put on her clothes, and went to the wood.

There the light was stranger still. The wood was bathed in it; a wood from another world; as though someone had enclosed it long ago in a volatile spirit, through which as through a subtly altering medium one saw its boughs and boles. She was almost afraid to enter in; and when, ahead through the glimmering gloom, she had a swift glimpse of fire, as though a match had been struck and extinguished, she shook with an undefined terror and plunged hastily in another direction.

Roaming thus through the wood, she came in sight of Luke himself, standing among the trees. She knew of his night-wandering habits, but nonetheless at finding him there just then, an intoxication seized her. Her blood raced; her heart thumped; she could hardly stand: but recovering herself she went straight towards him. ‘I will have what I want. I can make him give −’ But as she glided on among the boles of the pine-trees, and he saw her coming and stood watching where he was, there was no alteration in her that he could have seen. The boiling fermentation of her passion was all within; and her habit of self-control and silence was too strong to be broken soon or lightly. The Martha who advanced through the strange shimmering night came tranquilly, stole in an exquisite quietude to shatter and plunder and riot. In her heart was havoc, in face and movement a profundity of peace. Luke, watching her coming, did not stir. She stood beside him, and neither he nor she spoke a syllable. They did not look at each other but at the night. Moon and afterglow and the promise of dawning were dissolved together in one soft lustre. They stood side by side and looked at it. After a long time Martha swayed a little, made a blundering half-step backwards, as though numbed with standing and seeking the support of a tree. He put out an arm and she swayed against it; and stood so for some minutes longer; and imperceptibly her head drew closer until she laid it at last upon his shoulder and looked up full, for the first time that night, in his face. Her whole being cried, ‘Take me, take me.’ But she stood so still, so poised, that it did not occur to him that she was offering herself. After a while he stooped and kissed her on the lips. There was no passion in the kiss. It was grave, a reluctance, diffident and abashed, as of a worshipper who trembles lest his offering pollute the shrine. But the flame that burned within herself was fierce enough to transfigure the kiss. It seemed to blaze upon her lips and run like fire through all her body. She closed her eyes under its ecstasy; and opening them again, slipped from his arm and went swiftly away through the wood. He did not follow her, nor did she look back, nor had either of them spoken.

Martha did not perceive that she had not had her desire. She was drunk with the sense of her own power over Luke and gulped more and more of the perilous draught until she was incapable of distinguishing any other taste. She lived only for seeing him again, but would not place herself in his path. It was three days later that, walking along the street, she heard his voice behind her and turned. The look she gave him was a direct continuance of the look with which she had left him, as though all that had passed between had not existed and they were still at their moment of exquisite communion in beauty. But he was not aware of the look. He had been much occupied in the interval and plunged at once into the theme that engrossed him.

‘Tremendous news, Marty. If you have tears, prepare, etcetera.’

And suddenly very grave:

‘Marty, how long have you known me? − four years, is it? And have you seen me in all that time accomplish anything? Lord, I’ve strewn the street with corpses! − things I’ve begun and cast away unfinished. And you’ve seen it and never said a word. Why didn’t you tell me about it earlier?’

‘Tell you,’ stammered Martha. How could she have told what she had not perceived?

‘You should have stabbed me awake to it sooner. There I’ve been, junketting at a thousand occupations, while you walk steadily on at one. So that’s why I’m going away.’

‘Away.’

‘Imphm. A spell of hard labour. Hard labour and prison fare. It’s you that’s sending me away, you know. Aren’t you upset by the responsibility?’

‘Sending you away,’ she said again. She had not fully grasped his meaning. He always went away in summer; but, was there more in this? And her responsibility? Wildly self-conscious, remembering the night in the wood, she queried: Was he fleeing her? Afraid of her power? And black exultation shook her. But he was speaking − she forced herself to listen.

‘We’re bound for Liverpool, Marty. I’ve just completed the purchase of a practice − a fine slummy practice, plenty of work and little pay. I’m leaving the University − old Dunster has his hanky out.’

She stared at him without speaking. Her mind seemed to have stopped working.

‘Got a shock?’ he said, looking down on her. ‘We’re giving shocks all round, it seems.’

‘It’s so − sudden.’

‘Yes. Well, no. Not exactly. It’s been under consideration for awhile, but we didn’t want to say anything till it was all settled.’

She asked,

‘Does Dussie know?’

‘Dussie? − Rather!’

‘I mean, did she know? − before.’

‘Before? − When? − But of course she knew. A man doesn’t do that sort of thing without consulting his wife.’

He was still unaware that Martha loved him. Rapidly though his education had progressed in the last few months, he was still able to believe that a woman could be all spirit. He had told Dussie, with a certain defiant diffidence, of his meeting Martha in the wood.

‘You know when I walked the other night − sounds like a ghost, doesn’t it? And it was ghosty − you wanted to say a bit out of the Litany, that bit we used to say when we went the long way round home at nights, after theatres and things, in the out-of-way streets, you know − “Fae ghaisties, ghoulies an’ lang-leggity beasties, fae things that go dunt in the dark, Good Lord, deliver us.” Only it wasn’t things that go dunt in the dark that you wanted protection from, but things that go lithe in the light. Ghosts of light, not of darkness. You never saw such a night! Moon up and the whole sky like silk − gleamed. So did the earth. You felt like − or at least I felt like − a stitch or two of Chinese embroidery. You know − as though you were on a panel of silk. Unreal. I went as far as Marty’s wood − the Quarry Wood. You’ve no idea, Duss − you couldn’t imagine what it was like. At least I couldn’t have. You know that thing − Rossetti’s − about going down to the deep wells of light and bathing. It was like that. Only it was like an ocean, not a well. Submarine. Seas of light washing over you, far up above your head, and all the boughs and things were like the sea-blooms and the oozy woods that wear − you know. It was like being dissolved in a Shelley ode. Your body hadn’t substance − it was all dissolved away except its shape. You walked about among shapes that hadn’t substance, unreal shapes like things under the sea. Even some of the horrid rapscallion fishes out of the sea-bottom were there − one was, anyhow. That great sumph of a man that lives near Marty − what’s his name? − Stoddart something. I met him just inside the wood − like a monstrous unnatural fish, one of those repulsive deep-sea creatures. Meeting him’s like finding a slug in your salad. It was that night, anyhow. He had his eternal pipe in his mouth, and when he cracked a spunk the lowe of the flame was like an evil eye winking. Horrid feel it gave you. But further into the wood you forgot ugly fishes. You forgot ugly everything, and when Marty came walking through the wood you knew she wasn’t real − just a ghost of light. I’ve no idea why she came − perhaps it really wasn’t herself but just her phantom. I don’t know. I didn’t ask. She didn’t speak a single word all the time. Just glided in and stood beside me − stood at gaze, so to speak. We looked and looked for a long time. Then she got tired, standing so long in one position, and made a stumbling sort of movement. And I put out my arm to give her support − and kept it there. And then somehow or other − God knows why I did it − I kissed her.’

He had paused there, diffident. Dussie had made no answer.

‘And she just melted away − if I were a mediaeval chiel I’d honestly be tempted to believe she was an apparition. A false Florimel. An accident of light. She never spoke, you see. A voice is rather a comforting thing, don’t you think?’

He paused again: and suddenly his wife was in his arms, her bright capriciousness gone out, sobbing as though she could not stop.

When he understood her fear, Luke went through one of those moments that are like eternity, so full it was of revelation. In that moment his boyhood was over. When he had held Martha in his arms in the wood, he had felt no lust for her possession but only a solemn wonder at his nearness to a thing so pure and rare: but now as he held his wife in his arms, and understood her fear that he might love Martha more than herself, he was ravaged by desire for Martha. At that moment he felt like universal Man assailed by the whole temptation of the universe; and because hitherto he had taken exactly what he wanted from life, the shock was extreme.

But there was rock in the welter: he did not know that Martha loved him. Had he been aware of her passion, there could have been no straight issue. Blindingly it flashed on him that she might be assailed. He put the thought from him. The contest was unimaginable but so brief that when he came to himself Dussie was still sobbing:

‘I know she’s better than me, but I love you so, oh Luke, I love you so.’

Afterwards he could hardly remember that he had thought of Martha thus. The lightning had been too keen. He was not quite sure that he saw it. But he took his wife in his arms very soberly. They had done playing at love. Henceforward they were man and woman, knowing that life is edged.

Dussie kept her own counsel concerning Martha.

‘She has just to get over it,’ she thought.

So when, in the street, Martha asked, ‘Did Dussie know?’ he looked at her with some surprise.

Martha perceived that she had not been in his innermost counsels. Hardly aware of the action she began to chafe her hands, which were clammy cold. In common daylight the insanity of her supposition − that she might be more to him than Dussie − was glaringly apparent. Hot black shame consumed her. She was too conscious of it to grasp very thoroughly the significance of his departure, but with a resolute mastery of her thoughts she forced herself to attend to what he was saying. She heard much detail about the new practice, the house they were moving into, the date of their going.

‘I wish you were coming too, Marty,’ he said. ‘We shall miss you horribly.’

She heard her own voice saying:

‘I’d have been away from you this year anyhow. I don’t know where I may get a school. Not at home, likely.’

He continued: ‘You’ve meant an awful lot to us. You’ve no idea how much. And do you know, it’s really you that’s sending me off on this new enterprise. They’ve been glorious, these last three years, but too easy. My work − oh well, I’ve done it all right, of course. Old Dunster wouldn’t be so sorry to let me go if I hadn’t. But somehow − well, it hasn’t used enough of me. There was too much over to caper with. Another year or two of this divine fritteration and I’d be spoiled for good solid unrelieved hard labour. I owe it to you to have realized that one must have singleness of purpose. Oh, I’m not condemning the fritteration. Capering’s an excellent habit. But not for me. Not just now. I feel in need of a cold plunge − you know, something strenuous that you have to brace yourself for. A disciplined march. A general practitioner hasn’t much leisure for capering. G.P.’s to be my disciplined march. Instead of a hundred things I’m going to do one.’

And something cracked within her. Suddenly, it seemed, the new self inside, that in the wood had not yet worked out to the surface, had issue. It surged out over her. It took form in a jest. Gaily she cried, throwing her head back and meeting his look:

‘And what about the other ninety-nine?’

‘Dussie will attend to them,’ he said, gay like herself.

Her mind began to work again. G.P.! − But his greatness? He was to have been − what was he not to have been? She saw the destinies she had dreamed for him float past, majestic, proud, inflated. … She found herself saying − and how queer it was, incongruous, unforeseen, that she was laughing over this also, twisting it to jest −

‘So it’s a P. after all. Remember all the P.’s we planned you were to be? Philosopher, Poet, Professor −’

‘Piper, Pieman, Priest. Sounds like prune-stones, doesn’t it? Or there’s Policeman − I’m tall enough. Or Postman. That would be a fate worth considering. A country postie − I’d love that. There I am again, you see! Can’t stick to one thing. A real Philanderer.’

They had reached the door in Union Street.

‘Dussie’s begun to pack already,’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s what I must be − a Packman! Come on up.’

The next five days were like a dream to Martha. Dazedly she helped with the preparations for departure, and stood on the draughty station platform among the crowd that was seeing the travellers off. There was chattering and jesting, and a ringing cheer as the train steamed slowly out. Martha chattered and jested with the others; but the jests she bandied, and the thoughts she had been thinking, had no reality. ‘You have been a fool,’ she told herself: but the accusation had no meaning. Even shame was burned out; nothing had reality but his going. He saw her from the carriage window among the waving group; so gay, so shabby. Almost, he thought − but it was not a thought, so quickly it flitted, so unformulated it remained in the scurry of his mind − almost, he thought, he had rather she had not been gay; but still, a shining symbol, herself the counterpart of the image he had made of her.

She was gay because she was no longer a counterpart. She did not know what she was.

Climbing the long brae home she was overtaken by the lassitude of reaction. She did not seem to have strength enough left in her for passion, but she did not understand that it was only a temporary ebb. ‘I don’t seem to care any more,’ she thought; and later, walking wearily on, with her eyes to the ground, she said to herself, ‘So that’s over,’ and she thought she had only to exercise her will to be again what she was before, passionless, possessed only of herself.

But Martha after all was very ignorant. She could not know that a cataclysm four years in preparing does not spend its forces so easily. The waters were loosened and not to be gathered back.