Читать книгу The Gowk Storm - Nancy Brysson Morrison - Страница 12

BOOK ONE. CHAPTER FIVE

It was a day in late spring and we all sat round the table at our evening meal, while papa’s hand beat on the cloth, a sign that he was upset. The letter, handed in by young Malcolm Gow, from the new dominie of Barnfingal school, lay in front of him. It was written in a uniformly sloping hand and was an invitation asking the minister if he would attend a demonstration of the dominie’s scholars. Papa, who enjoyed the company of his contemporaries, was uncomfortable with children, but he felt duty-bound to accept the invitation, and, as he always liked his discomforts to be shared, said Julia must accompany him.

‘You had better come too,’ he remarked, as though recollecting something when his glance fell on me.

‘Why, dear?’ asked mamma. She had to repeat her question for lately papa had grown somewhat deaf, as though to cut himself off still further from disturbing influences. ‘Why do you want Lisbet to go with you and Julia?’ she repeated in a slightly louder voice.

‘He is a very good Latin scholar, I believe,’ papa informed her, ‘and I want to arrange for Lisbet to have lessons from him twice a week. It would absorb too much of my time to teach her myself. And she must go to him as he won’t be able to charge so much then. The whole morning’s going to be most inconvenient. Dominie Naughton never had any of this demonstration nonsense.’

‘No, papa,’ Julia reminded him, wearying of his impatience, ‘and you were always saying the loch trout received more attention from Dominie Naughton than the children ever did.’

Papa performed his duties amongst his dispersed congregation with the undeviating punctiliousness that was characteristic of him, but as the years passed the less he had to do the more disinclined he seemed to do it. He liked each day to pass the same as the one before and became easily irritated when shaken out of his groove. He was learned but had neither the patience nor understanding to make a sympathetic teacher, so that I was relieved when I heard him announce I was to receive my finishing lessons from the dominie.

Neither Emmy nor I had ever very much to say to papa, but Julia, who could read him like a book, never had any difficulty in making him discourse on whatever subject she happened to be interested in. She could not be called studious, but her imagination coloured and her receptive thoughts enlivened what he told her, while her restless questing mind found food amongst his books.

We left the manse about eleven on the morning of the demonstration. By the time we were half-way to Barnfingal, papa, under Julia’s influence, was talking with animation about the tribes of ancient Scotland, the ‘smeared people’ of the far north, the ‘hunters’ of Galloway, the Caledonians of our own and neighbouring shires, the ‘horsemen’ of Arygll, and the squat, dark, ‘unbekent’ people found sometimes in the Hebrides who are believed to be either relics of the Lost Ten Tribes or descendants of sailors wrecked from the Spanish Armada.

Barnfingal was two miles from the manse and one came upon it suddenly, with its few white-washed, thatched cottages scattered up the hillside and its graveyard walled in by a round, low, grass-topped dyke and warded by the gable- end of a ruined church.

When we reached the crest of the steep winding brae leading into it, the smoke from the straw chimneys was the only visible sign of life. Otherwise one might have imagined that some terrible scourge had made an end to all the inhabitants and no one had come near the clachan since from a superstitious dread.

Green hill rising behind green hill—they raised in me a brooding, inherent melancholy. I felt this place had lived through everything, had seen everything, that it was saturated with memories and legends. I thought of it submerged under the sea, of the ocean receding farther and farther from it; of glaciers creeping down the mountains, forming the glens and ravines; of the mountains as spent volcanoes covered by the impenetrable Caledonian forest. And now there was nothing more for it to know and it was waiting for the clap of doom.

The schoolhouse stood back from the road, its three- cornered playground surrounded by ploughed fields as though they would fain encroach upon it. When we arrived at the gate, we heard through the wide-open door the loud chattering of children, but as we walked across the playground, a sudden silence fell, as if the noise had dropped through the floor.

The dominie came forward to greet us. His broad shoulders wore a deprecating stoop as though apologising for his height, and he spoke in the slow, concentrated English of a Gaelic speaker. His low voice had a curious effect on his listeners. It was like a voice heard in lonely, echoing places; his words seemed to linger in the air long after he had spoken, as a twig still trembles when the bird has flown.

There was something almost foreign in his appearance as he stood with his head to one side while he listened, smilingly attentive, to what papa had to say. It was some minutes before I traced this strangeness to his eyes and discovered that, while one was blue, the other was brown. This peculiarity lent him an unfamiliar look, as though he were some one from a different planet, or as though each of his eyes looked out on a different world.

The children rose to their feet when we entered and the dominie brought forward a chair for me. Evidently he had expected papa to bring one of us with him, for beside his desk, adorned with flowers and ferns, where the minister was to sit, stood a chair for Julia which had been made into a bower. Armfuls of flowers and ferns were arranged round the room and some drawings of birds and insects had been pinned to the blackboard beside a few lined maps, with herring-bone mountain ranges and eel-like rivers.

A vast dumbness had spread over the children, who watched our every movement, all except little Jinty MacPhee, the mole-catcher’s daughter, and her gaze was fixed to her drawing of a thrush on the blackboard as though she expected it to fly away. There were about a score sitting on the whittled forms before us, the girls with red buttons of noses and blunt mouths, the boys with their large knuckled hands, big knees and swinging, scratched bare legs.

The proceedings began with their singing several songs in unison, then Ian Malloch, at the dominie’s prompting, rose to give a short recitation. His voice came and went huskily, but he kept on until the end, while his elder sister Maggie, knotting her fingers together in her nervousness, leant forward on the bench and watched his face intently as she frantically lipped his words. The five members of the Gow family now delivered with gusto and appropriate gestures ‘The Bonnie House o’ Airlie’. They were all red- haired and had the same jutting-out underlip—Nannie was wont to say that ‘gash-gabbit’ children were usually forward and ‘quick on the uptak’’.

Ten bonny sons I have borne unto him,

The eleventh ne’er saw his daddy;

Although I had a hundred more,

I would give them all to Prince Charly,

they finished triumphantly. After them, the three smallest girls sang in high sweet voices a quaint little song about rocking a baby to sleep.

‘They’re some verses sung often in the parts from where I come, Miss Lockhart,’ the dominie announced suddenly, addressing Julia as though she had spoken. He stood behind me and as I listened to his voice I wondered from where it was he came. ‘If you should so desire it, I can write out the lines for you.’

Julia thanked him and declared they were so pretty she would indeed like to have them. More songs were sung and recitations delivered. I think the dominie hoped the minister would now examine some of the older boys, but papa made no such proposal; indeed he appeared anxious to be gone. Perhaps the dominie sensed the preoccupied tenseness which sometimes emanated from him, as though he had been interrupted in the midst of something vitally important; anyway he went with us most readily to the door and accompanied us across the playground. I thought papa had forgotten about my lessons and was swallowing my disappointment, but at the gate he turned to the dominie and said:

‘Mr Mac Donald, I want to arrange with you to teach my youngest daughter Latin. I propose that you give her two lessons a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and that she comes to you in the afternoon, when she would not impinge upon your other lessons. She could perhaps begin this coming Tuesday?’

‘Yes,’ Julia said suddenly, ‘Tuesday would be quite suitable.’

We left the dominie looking after us with his disconcerting eyes, one of his hands still holding open the gate through which we had passed.