Chris went down to Ewan to wire for the doctor. When he came in the evening he sounded Robert’s lungs, Robert lying quiet, his eyes far away; and the doctor was puzzled, though he chatted and joked. But later, downstairs, he said to Chris, There’s something queer in Mr Colquohoun’s lungs—oh no, this cold’s not on to them yet. Was he ever gassed in the War, do you know? There’s the strangest contraction in both upper lungs. I’ll be back fell early the morn’s morning, keep him in bed and keep him warm.
Ewan went up about six and came back and said that Robert was sleeping again, but there was blood on his pillow, fresh. Chris got up to change it, she ached in each limb, but Ewan said that he’d done that already, and Robert wasn’t waked up from his sleep. Sit down and rest, and he forced her to sit, and they sat a long time looking into the fire, hearing the blast of the wind over Segget. But near eight or nine when they went to their beds the wind seemed to die in the cry of the yews, Ewan went to the window and called Chris to look. So she did, and stood by his side in the dark, and looked on a sky that was burnished in steel, rimed with a pringling frost of stars, nothing moved or lived, the yews stood black, the garden hedges rose up in the silence as if to listen to the void star-glow…. Ewan said You’ll catch cold, and blinded the window, and above their heads they heard Robert cough.
NEXT MORNING John Muir came early to the Manse, he said that he’d tell the congregation there wouldn’t be a service; and Chris agreed. But then, as they stood together in the hall they heard the sound of an opening door, and looked up, and Chris gave a gasp and cried, Robert! He was coming down slowly, his hand on the rails, he said I’m all right; I must take the service. He’d a handkerchief up to his mouth, saying that, and stopped and coughed, and Chris wrung her hands. Robert, go back to your bed—you must.
He shook his head, he was fully dressed, even shaved, I’ll take the service as usual. There’s nothing in a cough to stop me, is there? AND I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY TO THE FOLK.
Chris had stood enough, now she knew at last if she didn’t win now she never would win. She said Robert, for me. I’ve never asked much—for me, and I’ll never ask another thing: Will you please go back?
Εwan had come out of his room and looked down, and he saw Robert’s face for a moment twist, as if in pain, then it altered again, back to the dark, dreaming look that they knew. It’s you or the kirk, Chris, and I’m the kirk’s man.
For a second it seemed to Chris she’d be sick, she gave the funniest dry laugh at that thought, with that gripping in her stomach and that pain in her throat. Then that went by, she was suddenly cool, she heard herself say, All right, here’s your coat; and found a coat for him in the hall, and a muffler, and wrapped it about him, as she finished with that he stared at her queer, the ice broke round his eyes. He said suddenly, Chris—my dear, dear Chris! and kissed her with that look, not with his lips, not in front of John Muir, and she smiled at him, white. Then he went out across the chill blow of the wind, his feet rang sharp on the frozen ground. Chris caught Ewan’s arm and shook it—Go with him! I’ll come as soon as ever I’m dressed.
She fled and changed in a flurry and was down, and across through the snow-wrapped garden before the kirk bells had ceased from their sudden clamour. She raised her eyes as she hurried through the kirkyard, and saw the Mounth as though suddenly halted, watching, and staring down at Segget, the far peaks under their canopy of cloud, the nearer bare but for a snow-pillar she saw rise up from the Leachie bents and whirl in the icy blow of the wind.
FOLK SAID THAT THE kirk at Segget nowadays was a fine bit place to go for a sleep, the Reverend Colquohoun was as quiet as a cow with his blethers of Jesus and Brotherhood and Love and the Sacred Heart that still bled for men. You could pop a sweetie or so in your mouth and take a bit snore as the sermon went on; even hairy Hogg confessed it was quiet, they had fairly tamed that creature Colquohoun, with his coarse-like suggestings the Hoggs came from monkeys, when instead they were all descended from Burns. And Ake Ogilvie said Well, monkeys for me!
They were both of them there, both Ake and the Provost, that Sunday, and Mistress Hogg came as well, she was failing a bit, but still as sharp-tongued, she had said to her son when he married Else Queen—Ay, you’re keen on the bowl in spite of the slop. She sat by her man, Else and Alec sat near, and it tickled you a bit to see Meiklebogs—behind, ill-shaved, smiling shy to himself, he had come back to kirk since Colquohoun quietened down.
The kirk began to fill up a bit, old Leslie came in, he was getting fell done, and you thought as you watched him paich down the aisle he never would finish that story about Garvock. And damn’t! you felt almost sorry about that, worse folk than old Leslie, his son Sim for one, promoted now, he was leaving Segget, if it wasn’t he had such feet as he had you’d have said he’d grown overbig for his boots.
That fair was a hell of a clamour Muir raised, Will Melvin came in in the middle of the ring, like a pot-bellied cat, his thin mistress behind, they were making money like dirt, folk said. Dirt unto dirt, ’twas the way of all flesh was Ake Ogilvie’s speak about that—aye the same, he’d miscall both the good and the bad in Segget, and didn’t seem to see any difference at all ’tween an ill-doing brute like that tink, Dite Peat, and his brother, Peter, that owned his own shop.
There was wee Peter Peat up near the choir, looking round him right fierce to see folk were quiet, his mistress beside him, and the Sourock’s wife, the Sourock himself would be down in the Square, singing about Blood in MacDougall’s band—he’d never gotten over that mess in his bed when Dite Peat had left the pig he had killed.
God! the frost was fair driving the folk to the kirk; you moved over a bit to let a childe in; young Cronin, you saw, from the manse at Frellin, the only one of the spinners that had come; the coarse creatures hadn’t a care for religion. Charlie Cronin blushed and opened his Bible and sat like a duck on the edge of egg-laying, fell decent-like and shy; and you thought to yourself that Geddes, the headmaster, might well take a lesson, there he was, all asprawl in his pew, showing no respect or example at all; and that nasty bit sneer on his face as he sprawled.
Syne you saw the choir was beginning to fill, Miss
Ferguson first; God! how she still blushed. Ake Ogilvie said she’d have a blush on her face if ever they exhumed her corpse from its coffin. Beside her Miss M’Askill sat down with a jerk that couldn’t have been good for her spine, you’d have thought, especially as the bottom of that looked ill-padded. She hadn’t got a man, and there seemed little chance that she ever would now, things as they were—damn’t, Segget affairs were fair in a state, you could only hope, with the National Government, they’d alter some time afore Segget was dead. Ramsay Mac Donald had said that they would, if we all went poorer, ate less, and spent more—ay, fair a fine childe, with a right clear mind, Ramsay MacDonald, as the English knew well, they couldn’t breed the like of Ramsay in England: though Ake Ogilvie said they smothered them at birth. But that was just one of his tink-like says, the English aye needed the Scots at their head, right holy and smart at the same bit time.
John Muir had finished with his ringing at last, and went gleying down the aisle as of old, one shoulder first, and brought in the minister. Faith, he looked white, you’d heard he’d been ill, some cold or such like, a nothing at all. He climbed to the pulpit and coughed and sat down, and looked down the kirk—damn’t! a queer-like look, near the kind he would give in the days long syne when he was so keen on changing the world.
Syne you saw that you’d fair been mistaken in that, he was praying, with his head laid down in his hands; you felt a bit better to see him like that, decent and douce, as a minister should be—not trying to alter things as he’d done—who the hell wanted alterations in Segget? Folk were fine, if it wasn’t that there wasn’t any work, and meat a bit scarce, and you hadn’t a notion what your bairns would find to do in the world, when they grew up and found it full up of the ill-gettèd bairns of spinners, and such. Ah well, they’d just have to gang
their own gait, with the help of some guts and the rock of Christ’s kirk.
Young Ewan Tavendale came in and sat down, and looked round the kirk and up at the pulpit as though he owned both and was frightened at neither—faith, folk were right, an impudent get, with no respect for God or man. Then, as the playing on the organ stopped, the far door opened to Mrs Colquohoun, white-faced and proud, like a proud quean still, hurrying to take her seat in the choir. Half-way to that she stopped and looked up at her man who sat so quiet in the pulpit—folk saw the look and kittled to interest, could the two of them have had a row in the Manse?
The minister gave out the psalm, but so low you hardly heard the words that he said; and you spent so long looking up the passage that the singing was over afore you had found it. Syne the minister was praying, you bent your head, a fell dreich prayer and only half-heard. But then as he finished and gave out his text folk fairly louped in their seats as he spoke, his voice had a ring like a sudden bell:
My text is from the twenty-third chapter of St Luke, verse forty- two: AND HE SAID UNTO JESUS, LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST INTO THY KINGDOM.
It is nineteen hundred years since that cry was heard, it is sixteen hundred years since the holy Catholic Church was established in temporal power. In the early days after the death of Christ His return was hourly awaited—His followers, scanty, assured, looked to His coming within a few months or years at the most, they were certain He would come again and redeem the evil of the world that had murdered him. And the years went by: and He tarried still. But that Hope and that Promise it was that bore the Cross to triumph at last in Rome, all over Europe; that uplifts it still. And still the Christ tarries and the world remains.
LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST INTO THY KINGDOM.
In Segget a week ago to-night, in this Christian village, a man and a woman were driven from their home and had no place to lay their heads. In the night a rat came and fed on their child, eating its flesh in a sacrament of hunger—
LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST INTO THY KINGDOM!
In the years when the Great War ended the world seemed to turn in its sleep and awake, a new promise cried all about the earth, the promise of the Christ fulfilled in Man—fulfilled in the movements of pity and hope that men called by many names, meaning the same. Against ignoble oppressions and a bitter tyranny the common people banded themselves at last—in a Christ-like rage of pity to defend their brothers who sweated their blood in the mines, to give warmth and light and ease to us all. And the leaders of the great Nine Days, days filled with the anger and pity of the Christ who drove the money-changers from the Temple courts, looked in their hearts and found there fear, heard the crunch of the nails that were driven in through the shrinking hands of the Christ. And they sold Him again, his promise in Man, each for their thirty pieces of silver.
LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST INTO THY KINGDOM.
This year, when hunger and want filled the land, the coun sellors of the nation told for our guidance that more hunger and poverty yet must come, an increasing of stripes in the name of the Law, of Good Government, Order, in this Christian land, in this nineteenth century since the Christ died and came into that Kingdom of the Soul which the Churches proclaim that he came into—
LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST INTO THY KINGDOM.
AND IT WAS ABOUT THE SIXTH HOUR, AND THERE WAS A DARKNESS OVER ALL THE EARTH UNTIL THE NINTH HOUR.
AND THE SUN WAS DARKENED AND THE VEIL OF THE TEMPLE WAS RENT IN THE MIDST.
So we see, it seems, in the darkened sun, in the rending veils of the temples and kirks, the end of Mankind himself in the West, or the end of the strangest dream men have dreamt—of both the God and the Man Who was Christ, Who gave to the world a hope that passes, and goeth about like the wind, and like it returns and follows, fulfilling nothing. There is no hope for the world at all—as I, the least of His followers see—except it forget the dream of the Christ, forget the creeds that they forged in His shadow when their primal faith in the God was loosed—and turn and seek with unclouded eyes, not that sad vision that leaves hunger unfed, the wail of children in unending dark, the cry of human flesh eaten by beasts…. But a stark, sure creed that will cut like a knife, a surgeon’s knife through the doubt and disease—men with unclouded eyes may yet find it, and far off yet in the times to be, on an earth at peace, living and joyous, the Christ come back—
His voice had sunk near to a whisper by then, so that folk in the back of the kirk couldn’t hear, all the kirk sitting and staring in silence. Then he started again, he said, very clear, and once again, slowly, terrible to hear, as a man who cried from his soul on a friend who had passed beyond either helping or help:
LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST INTO THY KINGDOM.
CHRIS WAS NEVER exactly sure of what followed. But she got from the choir stalls and ran up the aisle, the frozenness gone that had hemmed her in—took scarcely a second to move from that moment when Robert had stopped, the queer look on his face. For he stared down the kirk as though Someone stood there. And then a bright crimson thing came on his lips, and down at the kirk’s far end a loon screamed.
John Muir reached the pulpit as quick as she did, she saw Ewan, swift and dark, stand up, Ake Ogilvie as well, the rest of the folk stared and stared in a frozen silence, from them to the silent figure up there. Chris ran up the pulpit-stair, opened the door, Robert’s head had fallen forward in his hands, and all the pages of the Bible below she saw soaked in the stream of blood from his lips.
And somehow it did not matter, she had known, she put out her hand and put back the hair, from his forehead, gently; and looked at the faces of the congregation. She wetted her lips and tried to speak, to be cool and tell them the minister was dead, and the service was ended, would they please go? And then at last she heard herself speak, in strange words not her own, unbidden to her lips:
It is Finished.
NOW, WITH THE broadening of the day, she could see the peaks of the Mounth wheel one by one into the line of the flow of the light, dun and sun-riding they rode down the Howe. Trusta towered first and north and north the peaks came fast, sun on the Howe and day on the Howe, her last day in Segget ere she went elsewhere, to new days and ways, to changes she could not foresee or foreknow. Round her the new year wakened to life, she saw the steam of a ploughing team, a curlew was calling up in the broom.
She moved and stretched in weariness then, the morning weariness before you right woke, so standing she minded the way that Robert would bless the folk of Segget on Sabbath. And queerly, her hands shaped into that gesture, with Segget rising in its driftings of smoke, and the hills behind, and all time before.
Then that had finished; she went slow down the brae, only once looked back at the frown of the hills, and caught her breath at that sight they held, seeing them bare of their clouds for once, the pillars of mist that aye crowned their heights, all but a faint wisp vanishing south, and the bare, still rocks upturned to the sky.
Notes
Black = G. F. Black, The Surnames of Scotland (New York 1946)
Kinnear = G. H. Kinnear, Glenbervie (Laurencekirk 1895)
ogs = Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland, ed. F. Η. Groome (Edinburgh 1901)
snd = Scottish National Dictionary, ed. William Grant and David Murison (Edinburgh 1931–76)
Watt = J. C. Watt, The Mearns of Old (Edinburgh and Glasgow 1914)
p. 1 borough of Segget. Gibbon got the name from his birthplace, the croft Hillhead of Segget in Auchterless parish, Aberdeenshire, and he has anglicised the Scots ‘burgh’. The location is deliberately vague; the town and its industries are fictitious, blending some of the characteristics of Auchenblae, Inverbervie and Drumlithie.
the Mounth. The great se spur of the Grampian mountain system.
Μearns Howe. That part of the great valley of Strathmore contained in Kincardineshire.
Fordoun. Village on the main Stonehaven-Forfar road, some three miles ne of Laurencekirk.
> Drumlithie. Village seven miles sw of Stonehaven.
the Kaimes. A ‘kame’ or ‘kaime’ is a long narrow steep-sided ridge, or the crest of a hill or ridge (SND). There is a sandbank with this name between Glenbervie and Arbuthnott parishes which looks ‘as if it had been cast up by human art’ (Kinnear, p.5), but the choice of name may also have been influenced by the Kaim of Mathers, a fortress in the parish of St Cyrus, though it rises above the sea and these Kaimes are inland.
Laurencekirk. Market town on the main road between Aberdeen and Perth, some thirteen miles ssw of Stonehaven.
Finella. The daughter of the Mormaer (High Steward) of Angus and wife of the Mormaer of the Mearns, who is traditionally supposed to have slain Kenneth 111 in 964 at Fenella Castle, one mile W of Fettercairn. Her name occurs in at least three other Kincardineshire place names (OGS).
p. 1 Wyntoun. Andrew of Wyntoun (?1350–?1420), whose vernacular metrical history tells the story of Scotland from the beginning of the world to the accession of James I in 1406. In the Scottish Text Society’s edition of his Original Chronicle, Fenella is called ‘Fembel’.
p.2 Iohannes de Fordun (?d. 1384). Probably a chantry priest at Aberdeen, he was part author of the Latin Scotichronicon and continued it as Gesta Annalia. He naturally says nothing about these Kaimes, since they are fictitious, or about Hew Monte Alto and the ruined camp. But he does tell us that the town of Fettercairn was reduced to ashes in revenge for Kenneth’s murder (John of Fordun’s Chronicles, ed. W. F. Skene, 1872, ii. 167).
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