by Nan Shepherd
But between the striking of the chord and the first note of her music (which was never sounded), Mrs Falconer stood up in her place. She had not known herself what she was to do. White, erect, stern, she had sat through the entertainment like a woman hewn from stone; but suddenly, at sight of Louie posturing and smiling, her teeth began to chatter. ‘False, false, false,’ she thought. She was not conscious of getting upon her feet, nor did the voice that cried aloud above the chattering and the laughter seem to come from her throat; but the astonished assemblage saw the rising of the white stern figure, saw the thin lips move, and listened as she cried, ‘Friends, there has been a wrong done here amongst you. That woman yonder is a thief. Round her neck you will find a ribbon, and on it she carries a ring. Will you ask her where she got that ring?’ Louie’s face was ashen. She was conscious of the glare of eyes, but all she could do was to shake her head and smile. ‘The ring is Mr Grey’s,’ cried Mrs Falconer, and sat abruptly down. Her knees had given way.
Into the moment of astonished silence Stella’s voice broke shrill. Stella had clambered up and was dancing on the seat in her excitement.
‘It’s a blue ribbon,’ she shrieked. ‘Oh, Miss Morgan, say your piece. “Do you take this woman to be your−”’
Her voice was drowned in the hubbub that arose. Someone pulled her off the seat and put a hand across her mouth. Stella battered herself free with two strong and skinny hands.
And then John Grey stood up. He had been seated with both hands laid on the head of his staff, a stout cherrywood staff, short, tough and seasoned like himself. He rose in his place and stretched a hand over the turbulent assembly.
‘Now, now. Now, now.’ His gentle voice would not carry. He stood with a hand stretched out and made a half-articulate sound of grieved annoyance, then rapped on the ground with his staff. In a moment the noise fell.
‘There was no need for this bustle. I knew where the ring had gone to.’
Louie gave a gasping cry and made blindly for the door. A hulking overgrown farm lad, a halflin not yet old enough for war, thrust his clumsy boot across the passage to trip her. She stumbled and recovered; but John Grey, leaning from his place, hooked the handle of his staff into her filmy clothing and detained her. He detained her long enough to work his way out from among the people, then took her arm in his and led her from the room in courteous silence.
The hubbub recommenced; but Garry leaped to a form and shouted above the din.
‘Friends, I’m sorry this has happened, but Mr Grey is sure to have some explanation. Don’t let’s spoil the concert, since we’re all together. Let’s sing something.’
He began to sing a rattling song, then another. The chorus was taken up with a will. That concert was remembered for years in Fetter-Rothnie—Garry Forbes’s concert, they called it. They sing his songs and repeat his yarns today.
‘I did myself ill with laughin’,’ declared Mrs Hunter.
As Miss Morgan herself had requested, Garry said a few words about the Front. But such words!—droll, gargantuan, unforeseen. Each tale was greeted with a hurricane of laughter, each chorus shouted in a lusty heat. The folk trooped out at last into the night, laughing and warm.
Garry wiped the pouring sweat from his face.
‘That was fun,’ Lindsay said, linking her arm in his. ‘Garry, how can you keep so solemn when you tell those ridiculous stories? You didn’t laugh once.’
‘Never felt less like laughing in my life.’
She looked at him, and grew suddenly grave.
‘You mean—you were doing it to keep them from—’
‘From talking about her. Yes, of course. Fill up their heads with something else. It’s an off-chance that they won’t say quite so much about it as they’d have been sure to say if the concert had gone to bits. Good God, the thing was indecent! Do you realise what I feel like? I began it, of course. But to throw the common theft to the mob was mean. What on earth induced her?’
‘She’s a horrid old woman, thrusting herself into the limelight, that’s what she is,’ cried Lindsay, in her hard, clear, indignant voice.
Mrs Falconer, walking behind them, heard.
She had not yet ceased to tremble. From the moment when her knees had given way beneath her and she had sat down, her body had shaken without remission. She was deadly cold. Garry’s quips, the laughter and the choruses, had passed over her like winds. They sounded in her ears, but brought no meaning. She was wholly given over to one idea, that at last she had achieved something in the world of real endeavour. Its results, its value, she was incapable of considering. All she could feel was that she had made the thrust, though the mere bodily effect upon herself was beyond belief. Yet, though her flesh was shaken, her mind was not. She felt as an arch-angel might who, returning from an errand on the earth, reports to God that his mission is fulfilled: no angel could be surer of the divine compulsion.
When therefore Lindsay’s clear indignant cry, ‘She’s a horrid old woman, that’s what she is,’ came upon her ear, she did not at once understand its significance. She was, indeed, still wandering in her own pleasaunce. But instantly Theresa began to talk. Theresa had only a moment before made up on her sister on the road, having had words to exchange with sundry other curious persons. Now she demanded news. Ellen had to speak; and Theresa’s impatience would not let her wait until the Weatherhouse was reached: she must needs call the lovers back to hear and to discuss.
So it was that Ellen was forced at last out of her dream, and learned that she had done the very thing that Garry was working to prevent. Standing there on the road, in the chill spring night, she heard him say, ‘I’d give a good deal for this not to have happened.’ The spring sky was hard and clear as Lindsay’s voice.
‘I meant to help you,’ stammered the old woman. Old was what she felt, she who had been so young, feeling the spring in her coursing blood upon the moor. They talked interminably. Even in bed, Theresa’s tongue ran on. But Ellen lay impassive. She had not even prayed that night. She was dumb.
THIRTEEN
Proverbial
The throng that passed out from the schoolroom singing Garry’s songs and repeating his stories took away also a lively curiosity over the incident he had striven to make them forget, and inevitably it was linked with the earlier incident of Garry’s outbreak before the Session. Matters so strange were worth the breath it cost to thresh them out. The wars had little chance of a hearing in Fetter-Rothnie for the next forty eight hours, by which time, thanks to Jonathan Bannochie, Garry’s reputation was established in a phrase.
Out of the cold, clear night a wind came blowing. It gathered strength all day, till in the late afternoon nothing was at peace upon the earth. Trees and bushes swirled. Boughs were wrenched away and tender leaves, half opened, sailed aloft or drifted in huddled bands about the corners. Twigs and sand battered against the windows and struck the faces and necks of those who went outside. One had no sense of light in the world. The smooth, suave things from which light habitually glisters were wrinkled or soiled in the universal restlessness. Blossom was shrivelled. ‘I can’t hear a single bird,’ Lindsay complained. ‘Only the crows.’
Lindsay stood by the window, where she had stood the other morning to watch the snow upon the garden. Now the garden was changed anew. But while it had lain sealed and mute beneath the snow it was less hard to believe in the life within it than now, when this frenzy of motion tormented it from end to end. This was not the motion of life. How just, that Dante in his vision of love that has strayed from its own nature should see it punished by the blare and buffeting of such a wind as this. No silence, to hear the myriad voices, no quietude, to contemplate and recollect. No fineness of perception. A wind of death.
But Lindsay felt only that the garden was ugly, and the howl and clatter set her teeth on edge. She could stay no longer in the warm room. She could not stay even in the garden. The fury of the wind within its enclosure, where the daffodil trumpets were flattened like paper bags
and the air was full of strippings from the branches, seemed more withering and ruthless than on the open moor. On the moor the blast swept on without obstruction. The whole grey sky tore forwards to the sea. Even from the hill-top one saw the huge white bursts of foam that grew fiercer and more numerous from moment to moment. Lindsay ran all the way to Knapperley. She could not keep herself from running. When she turned aside her head she could hardly breathe, the wind drove her nostril in with such violence. But she wanted to run. She wanted to dance and to shout above the clamour of the hurricane. Nothing could have pleased her better than to fly thus upon the wings of the wind towards her lover—faster and faster, riding the gale like a leaf. She was glad to merge her will in the larger will of the tempest, for she knew now that she had merged it in her lover’s will. Since the morning when he had told her of Louie’s perfidy and she had recognised that her own judgment had gone astray, she had had no more desire to trust herself. She had wept, indeed, for the revelation she had had of the evil that is in life; but now, how free and glad she felt! Running thus before the wind, she had entered into the peace that is beyond understanding: she was at one with the motion of her universe.
At Knapperley she pushed open the door and ran upstairs. She felt free of the house now. She had accepted Miss Barbara. What a child she had been to fear her! As she had been a child to fear Garry’s love. The sea was, after all, not so very wide; and earth, primitive, shapeless, intractable (as exemplified in Miss Barbara), was everywhere about one, and could be ignored. Roots, if one thought of it, must grow somewhere—in the customary earth.
She ran singing up the narrow stairway, and found Miss Barbara shaking with a jolly mirth beside the ruins of the tinker’s bed.
‘There’s wounds,’ she said, ‘and growths and mutilations, bits rugged off and bits clapped on to the body of man that is made in the image of his Maker. Them and their war up there’—she nodded upwards to where her nephew was at work—‘they mutilate their thousands, they chop off heads and hands and fingers, they could take Johnny’s cranny from him, but could they make another Johnny? What’s the use of your war, tell me that. You’re making tinklers right enough, I’ll grant you. They’ll be all upon the roads, them that wants their legs and them that wants their wits and them that wants a finger and a toe, like Johnny. But ach! For all your shooting and your hacking, Johnny’s beyond you. Your war won’t make him.’
‘But you know,’ said Lindsay, who had listened in amazement to this novel point of view upon the war, ‘wounding people isn’t all that the war does.’ She would have proceeded to expound as best she could Garry’s gospel of a rejuvenated world, had Miss Barbara not cut her short with a decisive: ‘Fient a thing does the war do that I can see but provide you tramps to tramp the roads. Wounds and mutilations—that’s what a war’s for and that’s what it fabricates.’
‘O Garry, may I come up?’ Lindsay cried, turning her back upon the crass earth without perceptions that she divined Miss Barbara to be. ‘May I come up the ladder?’ she cried, singing, and climbing, she thrust her head above the attic floor and sang, ‘Mayn’t I hold something for you? Or hand you up something? O Garry, mayn’t I help?’
Already the gap in the roof was covered. Garry had stripped a tumbled shed of its corrugated-iron roofing and fixed the sheet upon the boards he had already nailed in place. In the wild fury of the gale the iron sheeting had worked loose, and kept an intermittent clatter above their heads. The wind too, entering by nooks and holes, shrieked desperately round the empty room. The old house groaned and trembled.
‘Garry, have you been at work all day? Garry, won’t you stop, one little minute—and kiss me? Now go on. I love to watch you work. And I do love to be here. We’re so respectable. I went to church this morning, Garry—just myself and Cousin Tris. Kate’s back on duty, you know. And—Garry, it was so strange. Cousin Ellen—’
She stopped, leaning from the top step of the ladder upon the garret planks, and was silent so long that Garry, dragging boards across the floor, stopped too and looked at her.
‘Well, what of Cousin Ellen?’
She raised her eyes to his. Unshed tears were gleaming on her lashes. The tin patch rattled on the roof. The wind roared round the garret, raising the sawdust in whirlpools, and out of grimy corners the cobwebs streamed upon its current. And Lindsay said, ‘I’m all afraid of life. I thought I wasn’t, but I am. We’re so cruel to one another, aren’t we?’ she continued. ‘At least over at the Weatherhouse we are. I don’t suppose we mean it, but we are. Cousin Ellen came down all ready dressed for church and Cousin Theresa said, “What! Nell you fool, you can’t mean to go to church today. Show yourself off in public, after what you did last night.” And Cousin Ellen said, “You would take my very God away from me.” And she marched out on to the moor. “But what’s worse in me than in your pails?” she turned back to ask. “If I’m not ashamed, why need you be?” They won’t leave each other alone. Pails, pails, pails, and, Making yourself a public show, I never saw! It went on all dinner-time. I couldn’t stand it any more, I ran away. And old Aunt Leeb sits there and chuckles. Oh, she’s cruel! She’s worse than they are. She’s happy when she can say a thing that hurts. She’s like the Snow Queen—she looks at you with those sharp eyes, and it’s like splinters of ice that pierce you through. There’s only Paradise that you can feel comfortable with.’
‘Perhaps that’s why you called her Paradise.’
‘Oh yes, no one will be uncomfortable in Paradise, do you think? But I used to think no one could be uncomfortable in the Weatherhouse, and now it’s all so changed. Garry, won’t you marry me soon and let me be always with you? I feel so safe with you.’
But not, thought Garry, when later in the day, having taken her home, he was striding back across the moor: not because he was safe with himself. Her perfect trust was, of course, delightful: but oddly, in just those matters where she had yielded most generously to his opinion, he had himself become unsure. Even with regard to his aunt— ‘But I’m not afraid of her any more,’ Lindsay had said, ‘I think she’s splendid’—something of the girl’s terror had gripped his own soul. While she, safe in his arms, had recounted her moment of panic, he too, had become afraid of his aunt: as of something monstrous, primitive and untameable, not by any ardours to be wrought into place in the universe of which he dreamed, a living mock to his aspirations. Yet how triumphantly herself! The corrugated iron clattering at that very moment on the roof of Knapperley was witness to that.
And over Louie Morgan also he was unsure. Lindsay was no longer her champion; but, strangely, she had championed herself. There was a queer twisted truth in what she had said. David too, had felt it. More bitterly than ever he regretted having thrown her to the mob.
Reaching Craggie on his homeward journey, spent with labour and thought, he suddenly turned aside and, bursting into Mrs Hunter’s kitchen, cried, ‘Feed me, for God’s sake.’
‘Weel-a-wat, laddie, come in-by.’ Mrs Hunter thrust him in a chair and spread the cloth.
Food was never out of view in Mrs Hunter’s kitchen. Enter when you would, plates were there, heaped high with girdle scones, oat-cake, soft biscuits. Jam was in perpetual relief. Syrup and sugar kept open state.
‘A puckle sugar’s that handy,’ Mrs Hunter would say, throwing a handful on a dowie fire.
‘I canna bide a room with nae meat about it,’ she added. ‘If Dave now came in at the door and him hadna had a bite a’ the road frae the trenches, a bonny mother he would think he had gotten. And him sending hame his pay to keep the laddies at the school.’
Seizing the loaf, at Garry’s request, and throwing to her youngest boy, seated at the fireside, the hearty hint: ‘Will that kettle be boiling the night, Bill, or the morn’s morning for breakfast?’, she began to cut slice after slice of bread, until the whole loaf lay in pieces on the table. Jake, her husband, shook his head.
‘There’s nae need for sae mony a’ at aince,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘You can a
ye be cuttin’ as it’s called for.’
‘I canna dae wi’ a paltry table. If it were Dave now, in another body’s house, you wouldna like it yoursel.’ And she seized a brown loaf, slicing until it, too, was piled high upon a plate.
‘I grudge nae man his meat, but there’s nae call for sae mony a’ at aince.’
Jake remained with his worried eyes fixed on the table. A lifetime of laborious need was in the look he bent upon the piles of bread.
‘Never heed him, Mr Garry. I’ve a gingerbread here.’ She cut that too. ‘Are you feelin’ like an egg, Mr Garry? There’ll be a hotterel o’ folks in here afore the night’s out, see if there’s nae. There’s aye a collieshangie here on a Sabbath night. And I’ll lay my lugs in pawn but it’s you they’ll have through hand, my lad. A bonny owerga’un they’re givin’ the twa o’ you, you and Miss Morgan.—What kind’s your tea, Mr Garry?—Ay, ay, there’s been mair mention of you this day in Fetter-Rothnie than of God Almighty.’
Indeed, before Garry had well eaten Jonathan Bannochie came in, and with him others.
‘Here’s a young man has a crow to pick with you,’ said Jonathan, pushing forward a half-witted lad in the later teens. ‘You’re terrible smart, a bittie ower smart whiles for us country chaps. What way now did you nae wait last night for the lads and the lasses that were ready with their sangs and suchlike? Here’s Willie here had his sang all ready and him just waiting a chance to get it sung. But na, nae chance.’