The Weatherhouse

by Nan Shepherd

  ‘Indeed I am sorry,’ said Garry, rising in confusion. ‘I didn’t suppose—I supposed Miss Morgan—well, that she had charge of all the programme, and when she was gone that it would fall to pieces.’ He stammered an apology to the half-wit, who stared grinning.

  ‘O ay,’ said Jonathan. ‘Anything to shield the lady. Ay, ay, the first thing that came handiest.’

  Again, as when he stood before the Session, the young man felt a fury of rage against this mocker who could penetrate among his secret thoughts. Stammering a further apology, he went out.

  ‘Try her in the tower, Captain Forbes,’ quoth Jonathan, with a stolid face. A mutter of laughter ran about: the old story was remembered, had very lately been revived. Well out into the hurricane of wind, Garry could distinguish a louder laughter and Jonathan’s voice clear in the general guffaw.

  He walked into the anger of wind with his head down. Jonathan’s parting barb was in, and rankled. At the moment he wanted to have Louie in the tower, wanted to have her alone, wanted simply to have her. And apology was not the need. She was in his blood like a disturbing drug. He knew that she had already turned to his pursuit, and his soul had sickened at the knowledge; but suddenly he realised that he wanted to seize her, to give her what she hankered after, make her taste to the dregs the cup she wantoned with. He went straight to the house of Mrs Morgan, and was shown in.

  Louie sprang from a stool by the fireside and faced him screaming. Her lips were livid, her eyes blazed.

  ‘How dare you come here?’ she screamed. ‘How dare you? How dare you? Haven’t you done me enough harm already, exposing me like that? They all know now. You’ve ruined my name. And you promised not to tell, you promised.’

  Her voice ran on, high-pitched, terrific in its morbid energy. Scarlet blotches showed upon the greyness of her face. Bags of skin hung under her eyes. The possession went from him. His fury of lust for strange knowledge was dead. He began to explain that his promise had not been broken.

  She did not listen. The high-pitched voice screamed on. And now she was beating her hands against a chair and laughing because she had drawn blood.

  ‘Oh, this is terrible! Oh, this is terrible!’ moaned Mrs Morgan. The elder lady rocked her body back and fore, staring uneasily from her daughter to her guest. ‘I shall never be able to give a hand with the tea again,’ she moaned.

  Garry shook the house from him and its dark sultry atmosphere, but in the howl of the wind he continued to hear Louie’s hysterical screaming. He hated both himself and her. Sounds were swallowed in the gale. Nothing lived in the steady pouring noise but its own insistence. Even thought went numb. He let himself be driven before the blast as Lindsay earlier had done, but for him there was no joy of surrender. All that tormented—the whining shell, the destructive sea, lust, folly and derision, brute and insensate nature’s roar—was in the cataract that crashed about his ears. To run before this enormous wind put him to shame, as though he had let himself be routed by unholy forces. Of purpose he overreached Knapperley and battled back, and in the tussle felt some control upon himself return. When therefore in the shelter of the house he distinguished voices, he was able to give them a wary attention.

  The April night had almost come, but a drab gleam showed the figures of three or four men, curious like so many others, who were retreating from a survey of the burnt house. Unperceived, Garry heard the story of the fire recounted by a man who had indeed been present, but had rendered hardly the effective aid his boast suggested. The unseen listener smiled; but heard on the instant the voice of Jonathan Bannochie, who said, ‘You would need Garry Forbes to you, my lad.’

  Laughter greeted the sally. The braggart was known.

  Garry remained hidden. The bandying of his name moved him to wrath.

  ‘Well, well,’ said another voice, ‘he made’s sit up over Miss Morgan, anyway.’

  ‘Mrs Falconer did, you mean.’

  ‘Ay, where got she her information, would you say?’

  ‘Where she always bides,’ said Jonathan. ‘Hine up on the head o’ the house, like Garry Forbes and his twa fools.’

  Garry strode into the open.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen, you are having a look around. Rather dark, isn’t it? Perhaps you’d like to see inside? Hine up on the head of the house, if you want to.’

  And he suddenly began to laugh.

  ‘Do come in,’ he said. ‘The night’s young, and my aunt has a blazer of a fire. You’re not so often round by Knapperley that you need to go so soon. Come away in.’

  He ushered them suavely to the kitchen, lit a lamp and shepherded the party to the damaged room. A boisterous mirth took hold of him.

  ‘Up you go,’ he cried, pointing to the ladder by which Lindsay had climbed. It stretched into shadows, through the gaping hole above them that showed like a blotch of darkness upon the plaster. The wind still shrieked through the broken window and the sheet of iron clattered overhead.

  Garry acted with a reckless gaiety. A fortunate mockery came to his aid, to assuage his own pain and bewilderment. He mocked at his aunt and Johnnie, Francie, himself, with a tongue so blithe and impudent that his guests felt its invitation to laughter and joined in his mirth. His laughter was quite unforced. The interlude had been high comedy; even his own part in it he could recount with appreciation of its comic values. He swaggered, sang again the drinking song. ‘Garry Forbes and his twa fools,’ he cried, laughing, and catching the noise of the sheet of iron that clattered on the slates, ‘Hark to yon fellow—hine up on the head of the house, like Garry Forbes and his twa fools. The old house has got a dunt on the rigging, like the folk that bide in it. But you can’t deny,’ he added, with a persuasive gleam, ‘that Francie showed spirit. I loved it in the man. A fine large folly we both showed, he to attack the thing he couldn’t do, and I to let him. Ha, ha, we want more of that spirit in the world!’

  They returned to the kitchen. Garry heaped wood upon the fire and fetched Miss Barbara’s whisky. Only Jonathan refused to drink.

  ‘Drink, man,’ said Garry roughly, but turned away from him at once and talked to the other men. The talk flowed rich and warm as the whisky. Garry began to speak of the war, not in the sardonic humour of his overnight stories, but with the natural sincerity he used in speaking to John Grey. His guests gave him back of their best. They told him, in shrewd and racy idiom, how a countryside took war: food, stock, labour, transport.

  ‘There’s mair goes on here than the King kens o’,’ said one.

  A very old man sat next the fire. His face was crunkled and dry; he rarely spoke; but tonight, holding the glass of whisky in a trembling hand, as the liquor slowly warmed his old blood, he too began to talk.

  ‘Your war—your war—surely it’s gey near lousin’ time. What’s come to a’ the young men that they must up and to the wars? In my young time we kent the way to bide whaur our business was. I was fee’d for ane-an’-twenty year to sup brose ane-an’-twenty times a week—nae gallivantin’ frae toun to toun whan I was a sharger. But there’s nae haudin’ the young men in aboot the day. My lassie’s loon, he’s but a bairn, he must be aff an’ a’. “Come rattle in his queets wi’ the poker,” I says to her. “That’ll learn him to keep to his work.” War—it wunna let a body be. It’s lousin’ time, I tell you.’

  ‘It won’t be lousin’ time till we’ve won the field,’ said Garry. And he looked strangely at the very old man. How easy, if one could regulate all life by a single duty: a ploughman his field to plough, a cobbler his boot to patch; a life without glory and without failure, without responsibility for oneself.

  ‘Won!’ mocked Jonathan across his thoughts. ‘This war will not be won. What’s your belligerents? Twa fools, playing Double Dummy and grand pleased with themselves. Both’ll think they’ve won, but there’s neither won nor lost. A farce all the ways of it.’ He added, in a voice hardly audible, his face to the fire and a smile playing about his mouth, ‘Twa fools, hine up on the head o’ the house—’
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  Garry argued hotly. ‘I don’t know, I can’t explain it, but I believe we are in some way fighting the devil. Have you no belief in the sanctity of a cause?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And the rights of the small nations? National honour?’

  Jonathan chanted:

  Peter my neebor,

  Had a wife an’ couldna keep her,

  He stappit her in a hole in the dyke an’ the mice eat her.

  And at Garry’s impatient movement, ‘You needna get hot, Captain. You think much the same yourself at bottom. All the mercy a war shows to any is to them that gets their pooches filled. I’m told there’s some that way,’ he added, ‘not that I know of it.’

  Garry cried on a reckless inspiration, ‘You would need Garry Forbes to you.’

  The roar of laughter that went up from the others told him that the shaft went home. He watched Jonathan, throwing back his head and laughing too.

  ‘Him!’ said Mrs Hunter, when later he questioned her. ‘He would skin a louse to get tallow. O ay, I’m told he’s made a tidy bit out o’ the war. A country cobbler—you would wonder, wouldna ye? But he must have a smart bit o’ siller laid by and there’s folks in debt to him round and round. There’s places up and down that’s changed hands since the war, folks bought out and businesses shut down, and some grand anes wi’ new-got siller set up in their braw establishments, and Jonathan’s got his nieve packed tight, ay has he that. He kens mair than he’ll let on, but folk has an inkling. He kens the ins an’ the oots o’ maist o’ the places that’s come to the hammer hereaboots.’

  Garry sat in Knapperley kitchen and watched the man. He changed countenance not at all, but laughed the matter by, saying idly, ‘Garry Forbes would have his own ado.’

  The phrase was established.

  The following evening Jonathan said, in his own shop before a half dozen witnesses, to Mally Sandison who swore that she had paid the boots when she brought them to have the ‘tackets ca’ed in,’ ‘What’s that, mistress?’ Jonathan said. ‘Paid, said ye? You would need Garry Forbes to you, I’m thinking.’

  The joke went round. It penetrated the more surely for being more than joke, or joke not fully understood. It puzzled the consciousness of Fetter-Rothnie, but remained on its tongue. The phrase became the accepted reproof of falsehood.

  For the other phrase of Jonathan’s coinage, ‘Hine up on the head o’ the house, like Garry Forbes and his twa fools,’ that also passed into current speech, but baldly, a jesting reproach to those who attempted what they could not overtake. Like other phrases debased by popular usage, it lost the first subtle mockery it took from the brain of its originator. The intelligence of its victim alone apprehended it; he knew (as Jonathan did likewise, else he would not have mocked) that his folly on the housetop was a generosity, a gesture of faith in mankind.

  Returning by the dark avenue when he had seen his guests to the gate of Knapperley on the Sunday after the concert, Garry heard a noise among the bushes that was not caused by the wind, and immediately a stone hit him on the shin-bone. He thrust his way among the bushes and dragged a captive to the open. His match flared in the wind and went out, but gave him time to see the half-wit whose song had not been sung. He spoke kindly to the lad, who wrenched himself free with evil words and made off.

  The wind poured on—a south-wester like an elemental energy. Garry stood awhile in the fury. The shriek of wind brought to his mind the flying shells, and he thought of troop ships and minesweepers riding the storm. Only those without imagination, he felt, could love the wind. A tree crashed. He shuddered, and a longing seized him to have done with sick-leave and be again in battle. The danger that was abroad in the tortured night of wind cooled and braced him. ‘I’m fit now,’ he thought, ‘I must get back. Damn that man and his talk of futility. It’s a battle about something and I must get back.’

  Jonathan’s cynical smile recurred to his mind, and the roar of wind changed in his ear to the roaring of their ridicule as they made phrases of his name. That also seemed an elemental energy, and the screaming of a woman sounded through it, elemental too, destructive as the hurricane.

  He slept at last, and the wind fell.

  FOURTEEN

  April Sunrise

  He awoke before the dawn. There was no sound at all, no motion in the house or wood. The silence was unearthly, as though the wind had blown itself out and with it all the accustomed sounds of earth.

  Birds brought back the normal world. Sounds began anew. Garry threw himself from bed and went outside.

  The morning was like a flute note, single, high and pure, that for the moment of its domination satisfies the ear as though all music were in itself; but hardly has it sounded when the other instruments break in.

  Life recommenced. Dogs barked, cocks crew, smoke rose, men shouted, women clattered their milk pails. Soon figures moved upon the empty fields. Somewhere a plough was creaking. Garry turned his head towards the noise and searched the brown earth until he saw the team. Seagulls were crying after it, settling in the black furrow, rising again to wheel around the horses. As he watched, the sun reached the field. The wet new-turned furrow was touched to light as though a line of fire had run along it. The flanks of the horses gleamed. They tossed their manes, lifting their arched necks and bowing again to the pull: brown farm horses, white-nosed, white-footed, stalwart and unhurrying as the earth they trampled or the man who held the share.

  From where he watched Garry could see a long stretch of country. Jake Hunter’s croft was visible. Jake was bowed above a heap of turnips, slicing in his slow, laborious fashion. Mrs Hunter sailed across the stackyard in a stream of hens. And on his steep, thin field Francie Ferguson walked, casting the seed. It was his moment of dignity. Clumsy, ridiculous, sport of a woman’s caprice and a byword in men’s jesting, as he cast the seed with the free ample movement of the sower Francie had a grandeur more than natural. The dead reached through him to the future. Continuity was in his gait. His thin upland soil, ending in stony crests of whin and heather, was transfigured by the faith that used it, he himself by the sower’s poise that symbolised his faith.

  That gesture, of throwing the seed, seemed to the man who watched the most generous of movements; and he was glad to associate it with Francie, whose native generosity he had seen and loved. His blind anger of the previous night flared suddenly anew. ‘Garry Forbes and his twa fools,’ he muttered. ‘I had rather be Francie and capable of a generous folly than these others with all their common sense.’ His own wild mockery of both Francie and himself had had last night a harsh wholesome savour; this morning it felt like a disloyalty.

  At that moment Mrs Falconer appeared among the trees.

  The strong family resemblance among the Craigmyle sisters had never seemed to him so marked as when he saw Mrs Falconer walking towards him from the wood. She had an almost truculent air. Theresa herself could not have put him right with more assurance.

  ‘So you like a sunrise, too,’ she said in an abrupt, hard way. ‘Well, I wanted to say, I believe I crossed your wishes the other night, letting them know about that Louie. I thought you wanted them to know. But it seems you changed your mind.’

  ‘Oh well, you see—’ The accusation in her tone annoyed him. ‘A matter of common theft—pretty low down to expose that, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry. But it was for—’ She was about to add ‘—your truth that I did it,’ but something in his face made her pause. He was grey and haggard. She left her sentence incomplete. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated humbly.

  ‘Her neck’s thrawn now. Much good may it do us all.’

  Mrs Falconer found nothing to answer.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ he continued. ‘It amuses people. One should be glad to add to the gaiety of mankind. They’ve made a joke of it already. They seem to find me a pretty good joke hereabouts.’ With his arms folded on the top of a gate he was leaning forward to watch Francie. ‘See that seed-casting machine
over yonder?’

  ‘What? Where? Machine—I only see Francie Ferguson.’

  ‘What’s he?’

  ‘Mrs Falconer stared.

  ‘Why, he’s the crofter at the place by us, just over the field. But you know Francie. It was him you—’

  Again she left her sentence incomplete.

  ‘Jerked up like a marionette on the roof at Knapperley, for folk to laugh at. So it was.’

  ‘You spoke of a machine—’

  ‘Men like machines walking. Somewhere in the Bible, I believe. I thought myself he was a man. I’m glad that you agree.’

  ‘Captain Forbes, I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you.’

  He straightened himself from the gate, stretched his arms, and laughed.

  ‘No, I suppose not. It’s quite simple, though. I chose to employ Francie because I liked the spirit of the man. He’s ignorant, he’s clumsy, but—well, I love him. The men of sense—oh, very decent fellows, I had a drink with some of them last night—have made a laughing-stock of both of us. I could forgive it for myself. I can’t forgive it for Francie. And I can’t forgive them because I joined the laugh myself. Logical, isn’t it? If you’re laughed at, always join the laugh. It takes the sting out. But then you see—I laughed at Francie too. They made it seem, if I could put it so, a necessary condition for my entering their kingdom.’ He ended with passion, ‘They conspire together to prevent my loving men.’

  Mrs Falconer turned away her eyes. His passionate face, dark, unshaven, haggard, moved her with an emotion that she dared not countenance. Gazing intently at the clear blue hills she let fall the words, ‘They too are men.’

  And suddenly the man at her side, at whom she could not look, burst out laughing. His laughter resounded through the quiet morning. Jake Hunter, several fields away, lifted himself from the turnips and shaded his brows with his hand to search in the direction of the noise.