The Grampian Quartet. Nan ShepherdЧитать онлайн книгу.
she echoed, in such genuine astonishment that Luke and Dussie laughed aloud.
‘They’re nice eyes, you know,’ said Dussie. And she plumped herself on a cushion at Martha’s feet and craned up into her face.
‘If you had said Dussie’s eyes −’ Martha began.
‘Dussie? − Oh, she uses eye-shine. Pots of it. You have stars in yours.’
He loved to disparage Dussie’s beauty. She loved him to disparage it, paying him back with hot-head glee.
Seriously, he said,
‘You are a very lovely woman, Marty.’
‘Oh well,’ objected Dussie, ‘not very lovely, you know …’ and Martha, Singing up her head, was crying, ‘I don’t know what you mean, Luke! I’m ugly.’
‘True,’ he answered promptly. ‘Out of the running, you and I. We have both big noses.’
It was the same sensitiveness to any external oddity that operated on an afternoon in early spring when Luke, she felt resentfully, put her to public shame.
Beatrice among the Pots
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.