A Scots Quair

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  And there, as they swung by the Meiklebogs farm, the hills to the right, at last lay Segget, a cluster and crawl of houses white-washed, the jute-mills smoking by Segget Water, the kirk with no steeple that rose through the trees, the houses of the spinners down low on the left, though Chris didn’t know that these were their houses. Then the lorry puffed up to the old kirk Manse, on the fringe of Segget, and Chris saw the lawn piled in a fair hysteria of furniture. She jumped down and stood a minute at gaze, in the shadows, the shadows the new yews flung, the grass seemed blue in the blaze of the heat.

  Then as Melvin backed back the lorry and Ewan went running out over the lawn to the door, Robert came out and saw Chris and waved, and was pleased as though they’d been parted a year. He dropped the end of the press he’d picked up, near dropped it down on the toes of Muir (who gleyed as cheery as though ’twas a coffin) and cried to Chris, Come and see the new study. And nothing could content him but up she must go, leaving Melvin below to glower after the gowks.

  Then two men came talking up the Manse drive, Dalziel of the Meiklebogs and one of his men, Robert went down to see who they were. Dalziel said Ay, you’ll be the minister? and smiled, he was bad in the need of a shave, of middle height though he looked a lot less, so broad in the shoulders, hands like hams; and he smiled slow and shy with his red, creased face, and he said that he’d seen the lorries go by, and he knew right well the sore job it was to do a flitting without much help. And all the time he was smiling there, shy, he looked to Chris like a Highland bull, with his hair and his horns and maybe other things: there was something in his shyness that made her shiver. Beside him, Robert seemed like a boy from school, thin and tall with his slim, thin face; and back of Robert was Else as she looked, not slim at all but big and well-made, her head flung back in that way she had and a look on her face as much as to say, Good Lord, what’s this that has come to us now?

  Then they all fell to carrying in the Manse gear, and Chris fled here and there in the house, a great toom place that shambled all ways, there were stairs that started and suddenly finished and steps that crumbled away into gloom, down to old cellars that never were used. And sometimes you’d think you would come to a room, and you didn’t, you came slap-bang on another, the windows fast-closed and stiff with the heat. Chris told where and how to place all the things, and Meiklebogs and Else carried up the beds, and set them together, Chris heard Else give orders and Meiklebogs answer, canny and shy, You’ll be the new minister’s bit maidie? Else said, There’s damn the maidie about me; and Chris didn’t hear more, but she guessed a bit.

  John Muir came to her and asked where to put a press and a bed and some other things she’d brought from Blawearie the first flit she made. And she didn’t know, in that crowding of rooms, till he said Would you maybe like the gear altogether? and she said, Just that, in a small-like room. So he carried the bed up and back through the Manse, to a high-built room, it was three stairs up. The place was so lost that the cleaners had missed it, there were cobwebs looped from the walls like twine. But through the window, when you swung it out wide, you saw sudden hills rise up in your face, with below you the roll of long, grass-grown mounds. John Muir let down the bed with a bang, the great heavy bed that had once been her father’s. Chris asked him what were the ruins up there, and he said, You’ve heard of the Kaimes of Segget?

  Chris leaned from the window and looked to the west. And what’s that to the left, that hiddle of houses?—Where the spinners bide, he told her, she stared, she had thought them abandoned byres or pig-styes. But Muir just gleyed and said they were fine—good enough for the dirt that’s in them. If you gave good houses to rubbish like them, they’d have them pig-rees in a damn short while. They’re not Segget folk, the spinners, at all.

  Chris said Oh? and looked at him, quiet, then they went down to bring up the rest; and there was Meiklebogs met on the stair, smiling shy at that sumph of a maid. And John Muir thought, You’d think he’d have quieted by now. A man that can’t keep off the women by the time he’s reaching to sixty or so should be libbed and tethered in a cattle-court.

  Near twelve they’d the most of the furniture in, all but a long table brought from the north, from the Manse of Robert Colquohoun’s old father, solid and oak and a hell of a weight. And then Else called that the dinner was ready, Chris said they all must stay and have dinner. Robert said Let’s eat it out on this table.

  So Else served them the dinner in the shade of the yews, and sat down herself when she’d finished with that, Meiklebogs waiting to see where she sat, and sitting down next with a shy-like smile. Robert came out, getting into his coat, and stood at the end of the table a minute and bent his head, fair in the sunny weather, and said the grace, the grace of a bairn; and they bent and listened, all but young Ewan:

  God bless our food,

  And make us good.

  And pardon all our sins,

  For Jesus Christ’s sake.

  Then they all ate up, Muir, Melvin, and Meiklebogs, and the fee’d man that blushed and was shy, not just looked it, Chris liked him best, with that sudden compassion that always came on her as she looked at one of his kind—that conviction that he and his like were the real, they were the salt and savour of earth. She heard him, shy-like, say Ay, I’ve a spoon, as Else was asking, and knew by the way that he mouthed the spoon that he came from the North, as she did herself. And faith! so he did, like her ’twas from Echt, and he knew fine the place where once she had bidden, Cairndhu in the Barmekin’s lithe. And he fair buckled up and he lost his shyness, Ay, then, you’re a Guthrie? and she said that she was, and he said that they minded him long up in Echt, John Guthrie, her father, the trig way he farmed: and Chris felt herself colour up with sheer pleasure, her father could farm other folk off the earth!

  Then she fell in a dream as she heard them talk, the rooks were cawing up in the yews, and you thought how they’d fringed your pattern of life—birds, and the waving leafage of trees: peewits over the lands of Echt when you were a bairn with your brother Will, and the spruce stood dark in the little woods that climbed up the slopes to the Barmekin bend; snipe sounding low on Blawearie loch as you turned in unease by the side of Εwan, and listened and heard the whisp of the beech out by the hedge in the quiet of the night; and here now rooks and the yews that stood to peer in the twisty rooms of the Manse. How often would you know them, hear them and see them, with what things in your heart, in what hours of the dark and what hours of the day, in all the hours lying beyond this hour when the sun stood high and the yew-trees drowsed?

  But she shook herself and came out of her dream, back to the table and the sun on the lawn, daft to go prowling those copses of night where the sad things done were stored with the moon. Here was the sun, and here was her son, Ewan, and Robert, the comrade of God, and those folk of Segget she had yet to know, and all the tomorrows that waited her here.

  but that night she had slept in fits and in starts, waking early in that strange, quiet room, by the side of Robert, sleeping so sound. Then it was the notion had suddenly arisen, to come up to the Kaimes, as here she was now, watching the east grow pale in the dawn.

  Pale and so pale: but now it was flushed, barred sudden with red and corona’ed with red, as though they were there, the folk who had died, and the sun came washed from the sea of their blood, the million Christs who had died in France, as once she had heard Robert preach in a sermon. Then she shook her head and that whimsy passed, and she thought of Robert—his dream just a dream? Was there a new time coming to the earth, when nowhere a bairn would cry in the night, or a woman go bowed as her mother had done, or a man turn into a tormented beast, as her father, or into a bullet-torn corpse, as had Εwan? A time when those folk down there in Segget might be what Robert said all men might be, companions with God on a terrible adventure? Segget: John Muir, Will Melvin, Else Queen; the folk of the grisly rees of West Wynd—

  Suddenly, far down and beyond the toun there came a screech as the morning grew, a screech
like an hungered beast in pain. The hooters were blowing in the Segget Mills.

  TWO

  Cumulus

  CROSSING THE steep of the brae in the dark, by the winding path from the Manse to the Kaimes, Chris bent her head to the seep of the rain, the wet November drizzle of Segget. Then she minded a wall of the Kaimes still stood, and ran quick up the path to stand in its lee. That gained, she stood and panted a while, six months since she’d been up here in the Kaimes—only six months, she could hardly believe it!

  It felt like years—long and long years—since she’d worked as a farmer’s wife in Kinraddie. Years since she’d felt the beat of the rain in her face as she moiled at work in the parks. How much had she gained, how much had she lost?—apart from her breath, she had almost lost that!

  She felt the wall and then leant against it, wrapped in her ulster, looking at Segget, in its drowse of oil-lamps under the rain. Safe anyhow to go home this time…. And she smiled as she minded last time she had climbed to the Kaimes, and Segget had seen her go home—by the tale they told all Segget had seen her and stared astounded, a scandalled amaze——

  BUT INDEED, IT was only Ag Moultrie that morning, as ill-luck would have it, who saw her go home. She had gone out early to the school to redd up, she went heavy with sleep and her great mouth a-agant, as you well might believe, though she didn’t tell that. Folk knew her fine, all the Moultries forbye, Rob Moultrie had once been the saddler of Segget, his shop lay down by the edge of the Square. And as coarse an old brute as you’d meet, was Rob Moultrie, though a seventy years old and nearing his grave. ’Twas only a saddler’s shop in name now, the trade had clean gone this many a year. There was still a britchen or so in the shop, and a fine bit bridle Rob Moultrie had made in the days long syne when he still would work. But his trade had gone and his sweirty had come, he was never a popular man in the toun; he couldn’t abide the sight of the gentry, or the smell of the creatures either, he said, and that was why he was Radical still. And if he went on a dander somewhere, along the road and he’d hear a car, toot-tooting behind him, would he get off the road? Not him, he’d walk on bang in the middle, dare any damn motorist try run him down. So sometimes he’d come back to Segget from a walk, step-stepping cannily along the bit road, with a two-three motorists hard at his heels, toot-too ting like mad, and the shovers red-faced. Mrs Moultrie would be looking from the window and see, and cry as he came, Losh, Rob, you’ll be killed! And he’d stop and glower at her with his pocked old face, and his eyes like the twinkling red eyes of a weasel, and sneer, the old creature, shameful to hear. Ay, that would be fine—no doubt you’d get up to your old bit capers. Get out of my way! And he’d lift his stick, maybe more than do that, syne hirple over to his armchair, and sit there and stare in the heart of the fire or turn to the reading of his old bit Bible.

  For he’d never forgiven Jess Moultrie the fact that more than a forty years before, when he’d met her and married her, she’d been with a bairn. She told how it was before she would marry, and he’d glowered at her dour: More fool that I am. But I’m willing to take you and your shame as well. And he took her, and the bairn was born, young Ag, no others came and maybe that was why he still kept up the sneer at his wife. But she would say nothing, she was patient and bowed, little, with a face like a brown, still pool; and she’d say not a word, getting on with her work, making ready the supper for Ag when she came. She cleaned out the school and the hall and such places, did Ag, and in winter made the school broth, as nasty a schlorich as ever you’d taste. She looked like a horse ta’en out of a plough, and her voice was a neigh like a horse’s as well, and she’d try to stand up for her mother with old Rob. Don’t speak that way to my mother! she would cry, and he’d look at her dour, Ay, ay, no doubt she’s precious in your sight. You had only one mother, though three or four fathers; and Ag more than likely would start to greet then, she wasn’t a match for the thrawn old brute, though a good enough one for most other folk. And faith! she’d a tongue for news that was awful. Ake Ogilvie called her the Segget Dispatch, she knew everything that happened in Segget, and a lot that didn’t, but she liked best to tell of births and funerals and such-like things; and how the daughter of this or that corpse no sooner looked on the dead than broke down—and fair roared and grat when she saw him there. So folk called her the Roarer and Greeter for short.

  Well, then, it was her, to get on with the tale, as she blinked her way in that morning in May, saw a woman come down the hill from the Kaimes, and stopped dumbfoundered: Who could she be?

  Ag was real shocked, for the Kaimes was the place where spinners and tinks of that kind would go, of a Sabbath evening, and lie on the grass and giggle and smoke and do worse than that—Ay, things that would leave them smoking in hell, as the old minister said that they would. So no decent folk went up there at night, this creature of a woman was surely a tink. And Ag gave a sniff, but was curious forbye, and crept canny along in the lithe of the dyke that hemmed in the lassies’ playground from the lads’. So she waited there till the woman went by, hurrying, bare-headed, with a stride and a swing and a country-like gait. And then Ag Moultrie near fainted with joy, though she didn’t tell you that when she told you the story, she saw that the woman was Mrs Colquohoun, the wife of the new minister of Segget.

  Well, afore the day was well started all Segget had heard that the wife of the new minister had been seen by Ag Moultrie up on the Kaimes, she’d been out all night with a spinner up there, Ag had seen them cuddling and sossing in the grass. Folk said, By God, she’s wasted no time; and who would the spinner have been, would you say? Old Leslie heard the story in the smiddy and he said the thing was Infernal, just. Now, he minded when he was a loon up in Garvock—And the sweat dripped off him, pointing a coulter, and he habbered from nine until loosening-time, near, some story about some minister he’d known; but wherever that was and why it had been, and what the hell happened, if anything ever had, you couldn’t make head nor tail if you listened; and you only did that if you couldn’t get away. Old Leslie was maybe a fair good smith: he was sure the biggest old claik in Segget. He’d blether from the moment you entered his smiddy, he’d ask how the wife and the bairns all were, and your brother Jock that was down in Dundon, and your sister Jean that was in a sore way; and your father that was down with the colic or the like, and your grandfather, dead this last fifty years. And syne he’d start on your cousins, how they were, and your uncles and aunts and their stirks and their stots, their maids and all that were in their gates: till your hair would be grey and your head fair dizzy at the thought you’d so many relations at all. And his face would sweat like a dripping tap as he hammered at the iron and habbered at you and then he’d start some story of the things he’d done or seen or smelt when a loon up in Garvock, and the day would draw in, the night would come on, and the stars come out, he’d have shod all your horses and set all the coulters and you near were dead for lack of some meat; but that damned story wouldn’t have finished, it would be going on still with no sign of an end, he’d start it the next time he saw you or heard you, though you were at the far side of a ten-acre field—unless you took to your heels and ran.

  Well, about the only soul that couldn’t do that was his son, Sim Leslie, the policeman of Segget. He had joined the police and had been sent back to Segget, and still bade with his father, he was used to the blether: and folk said if he listened with a lot of care, for a twenty years or so at a stretch, he at least might find out what really had happened that time when his father was a loon up on Garvock. Folk called him Feet, Sim Leslie the bobby, he’d feet so big he could hardly coup, there was once he was shoeing a horse in the smiddy, an ill-natured brute from the Meiklebogs; and the creature lashed out at him fair and square and caught him such a clour on the chest as would fair have flattened any ordinary man. But young Sim Leslie just rocked a wee bit, his feet had fair a sure grip on Scotland.

  Well, Feet heard the story of Mrs Colquohoun, from his father, as the two of them sat at dinn
er. And he kittled up rare, there was something in this, and maybe a chance of promotion at last. So he went and got hold of Ag Moultrie, the sumph, and pulled out his notebook with his meikle red fingers, and asked was she sure ’twas the minister’s wife? And Ag said Ay, and Feet made a bit note; and then he seemed stuck, and he said; You’re sure? And Ag said Ay, I’m as sure as death. Feet made another note, and scratched at his head, and swayed a bit in his meikle black boots. It fair was her? and Ag said Ay; and by then it seemed just about dawning on Feet it really was her and nobody else.

  But Ag was real vexed, as she told to folk, she hadn’t wanted to miscall a soul, God knows I’m not a body to claik; and she said when she’d finished with Feet and his questions she went home and sat down and just Roared and Grat, so sorry she was for the new minister. And she’d tell you some more how the woman had looked, her face red-flushed, with a springy walk; and if you were married you well could guess why all of that was—damn’t, man, ’twas fairly a tasty bit news!

  That night Feet went up and prowled round the Manse, with his bull’s-eye held in his hand and his feet like the clopping of a Clydesdale heard on the ground. He didn’t know very well what he was there for, or what he would say if Mrs Colquohoun saw him; but he was awful keen on promotion. And he said he was fine at detective-work, like, and if honest merit were given its reward, they’d make him a real detective ere long. And Ake Ogilvie said in his tink-like way A defective, you mean? God, ay, and certificated!