The Grampian Quartet. Nan ShepherdЧитать онлайн книгу.
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.
Leggatt Respectability
Emmeline was fluttered and took some pains to make Martha presentable. The girl herself had not much interest in her outfit. She was so much accustomed to her own dowdy appearance that she accepted it as in the nature of things and made no effort to alter it: but the visit itself was an excitement. Here was she a traveller, at last; though the travel carried her only twenty miles. And it thrilled her immoderately to climb a stair to her bedroom. She had never slept upstairs before and never had a bedroom to herself. She sat on the edge of a chair, when she had said goodnight and shut the door, and clenched her hands together to keep within measure the waves of excitement that washed over her. So new the world was! When the door opened gently and she looked up with a start, she was prepared for any unaccountable vision to meet her eyes.
The vision that met her eyes gave account of itself at once.
‘It’s just the Syrup of Figs,’ Aunt Leebie was saying, creeping across the carpet with her shapeless figure hunched together. ‘Yer Aunt Jean aye gars the bairns tak’ a dosie the first nicht they come.’
She was standing above Martha, struggling with the cork, the spoon thrust by the handle in her mouth while she fichered. Her dim and anxious eyes searched the girl, noting the bones that protruded at her throat, the shadows round her eyes. Leebie was a kindly body. Taking her cue from Jean, she was ready to translate her relenting even more liberally than she had formerly translated her disapproval.
‘A sup cream wad dae ye mair gweed,’ she was moved to say. ‘But yer Aunt Jean. … Whan the bairnies comes − ye wunna ken aboot the bairnies?’ She shot off at a tangent, glad of the excuse. Mrs. Corbett’s elder son was married; the two children came frequently to stay with their grandparents. Castor-oil, Aunt Jean believed in. That was the thing when she was young and her bairns after her.
‘But their mither, she has notions o’ her ain. Nae castor-oil for her littlins. She’s a prood piece,’ said Leebie confidentially to Martha, edging up until the Syrup of Figs was almost at her nose.
‘Terrible ful, an’ aye wears a tailor-made.’
In spite of her kindliness, Aunt Leebie was inexorable over the Syrup of Figs. The tilt of Aunt Jean’s chin had commanded.
Leebie, it was plain, was spokesman. The weather being wet and