by Jane Duncan
Rory, I decided, must be a hermit, who did not want to see anybody, ever, for he could not be away from home every time I went there and called Good Day to him, or perhaps he always went out on Sunday afternoons, which, of course, were the only times I could go to the quarry with real safety.
On this Sunday Fly and I left home immediately after dinner and ‘went straight’ to the quarry, for I hoped that if the hermit went to tea with some other hermit friend on Sundays I might be in time to see him leave, even if he would not speak to us, but when we arrived at the quarry, there it was, green and damp and quiet as usual, the boulder in front of the cave and not a movement to be seen. Oh, well. We had a dabble in the newt pool, got some newts out on to a stone, had a look at them, put them back, had a look into the big dark pipe that carried the water out of the pool and through the green basin wall of the quarry to trickle away to join the Seamuir Burn, and we floated a few pieces of stick into the pipe and ran round to see them come out on the other side. We were just setting a really large piece of bark on its way through the pipe when Fly cocked her head, listened and looked towards the little path through the broom that led into the quarry basin. It could only be my father, Tom or George. They had followed me. Like a flash, Fly and I were into the middle of a thick clump of broom together, and in another flash I had the belt of my kim-oh-no wound round Fly’s muzzle, but my heart was sick, for I knew that at the first whistle from any of them Fly would succeed in barking, bound muzzle or not. But it was not any member of my family that came over the green rim of the basin. Fear and guilt streamed out like hot water from the tips of my fingers and toes and my hand dropped away from the belt on Fly’s face. It was that Miss Iris Boyd and that son of the cattleman at Whitemills that was home on leave from the Army, and he had his arm round her waist and she had her head on his shoulder and was giggling in a way so silly that I was red hot all over and rooted to the ground with shame for her. Before Fly and I could feel calm enough to move, they suddenly sat down right beside the clump of broom that held us, and he began to pull at the front of her blouse and she was saying: “Now don’t, Jamie!” and giggling, and then again: “Jamie, you mustn’t!” and not really meaning it at all, and his face was looking sly and his eyes were bright and his mouth was open and the lips wet and slobbery. And, always from Miss Iris there would come that silly, ineffectual, guilty furtive Kimrle and the “Now, don’t, Jamie! You mustn’t take advantage!” After what seemed a very long time of this, she suddenly sprang to her feet and ran, clumsily like a crab but giggling all the time, across the grass by the pool, but I saw Jamie catch up with her and they threw themselves down by another clump of broom where I could see only their feet and his hand, now, pushing the skirts up from her skinny legs with the black stockings and the pink garters below the knees. Fly and I crawled out, silent and unseen, on to the path, then took to our Heels and left Miss Iris and Jamie wrestling in the quarry. . . .
It was all Dreadful, dreadful in a way that I could not describe, for my brain would not think about it without having red sparks of shame, and my stomach felt sick. And I was afraid to go home, not because the broom bushes had torn my hair ribbons off and had made a big rent in my kim-oh-no, although these things were bad enough, but because I felt that some of the hideous, sly guilt of Jamie’s slobbery mouth was somewhere on me and that my family would see it. I felt that, for the first time in my life, I had been in contact with Real, Awful Sin—the kind of sin that shamed and degraded—and that it was My Own Wicked Fault for going to the quarry where My Friend Tom and My Friend George had told me I must not go. If I had not gone there I would never have seen Jamie’s horrid face as he tried—tried—what were her words?—as he tried to Take Advantage. He had been trying to couple with her as the stallion at Poyntdale did with the mares, but this had not been clean and natural as the animals were. Jamie and Miss Iris knew it was not. She called it ‘Taking Advantage’, and his eyes and mouth had shown his guilty knowledge of shame and ugliness.
When I came within sight of the house, which stood darkly outlined between me and the sunset light above the Ben, I sat down behind a tree and began to cry. I would be late for tea. I would get a scolding. I did not care. If only—if only my family could scold me enough to take away all that appalling ugliness, I would never, never go near the quarry again.
I do not remember how I passed that evening, nor do I remember much of the week that followed—I remember nothing except my Burden of Sin which went everywhere with me and was behind my shoulder as I fed Fly and Chickabird, and on the next Sunday I remember how I wanted to cry when, after dinner, both Tom and George announced that they did not want a Sunday Sleep and that the three of us would go out and have a Right Good Look Round for the whole afternoon. If they knew, I thought, about my Burden of Sin, they would never invite me to go for a Look Round with them again.
When we had passed through the moor gate we took the south-easterly path that led to the Home Spring about half a mile away, from which the water flowed down a little trench through the heather to feed the well where the whiskered Sandy was reputed to have lived. Tom and George showed little inclination for conversation, for which I was grateful, because my Burden of Sin made me that I could neither think nor talk with any pleasure. When we reached the Juniper Place where the spring was they sat down on the green turf among the juniper bushes which had the grotesque shapes of pillars, pincushions, deformed dwarfs and queer animals, took out their pipes and looked around them at the quiet fir trees that ringed the small clearing among the heather.
“Aye, a grand day,” said George, and reached into his pocket for his tobacco, but, instead, he took out two of my hair ribbons and a kim-oh-no belt. “So you were having a bit Look Round at the old quarry last Sunday, Janet?”
This was it. Sin had Found Me Out. I began to cry.
“Ach, wheesht, now!” said Tom. “There’s nothing to be crying about and worrying the way you have been doing a-all the week past. . . . Wheesht, now.”
“Was you seeing anything going on up there?” George asked.
“I saw everything!” I sobbed. “I saw it all! I know all about it! It is dreadful and awful!”
“Ach, away with you!” he said. “There’s nothing dreadful and awful about it at a-all! Where is the harm in a wee bit caper like that?”
“It isn’t a caper! It’s a dreadful, awful, wicked sin and people shouldn’t be doing things like that! God will put a curse on people that’s doing things like that——”
“Where would God put a curse on George and me for making a droppie good——” Tom burst out.
“Hold your tongue, man!” George broke in sharply, but he was too late. My raw, flayed perceptions had caught the ‘George and me’.
“George and you?” I stared at Tom while the tears tickled my cheeks as they ran down. “Making a droppie? A droppie what?”
“What are ye speaking about?” George enquired blandly. “What would we be making? You didna hear right—what Tom said was——”
“You’re making drams!” I shouted. “Drams! In that pot in the Hermit’s cave!”
“Be quiet, for God’s sake!” snapped George with a haunted look round him at the silent bushes and trees, and then he stared at Tom’s stricken face and said with terrible, long-drawn-out vehemence: “Da-a-amn ye to hell with your long, foolish tongue!”
I stared wildly from one of them to the other. Never, never had I heard George be angry at Tom, and never, never had I heard George Swear an Awful Swear like that one he had sworn at Tom. It was all my fault for going to the old quarry; my Burden of Sin was growing bigger and bigger. It overwhelmed me. I cast myself face downwards on the short rough grass and sobbed until I thought my heart must burst.
“Wheesht, pettie!” said Tom, his big hand rubbing my shoulders. “Come now. It’s all right. George and me has done away with the bliddy thing—come now, pettie, don’t you be worrying. It’s not such a terrible big sin to make a dram now. Wheesht, pettie——”
“I don’t—I don’t care if you’ll be making a—making a loch of whisky,” I sobbed. “Dad said when the Excisemen caught the man at Ullapool that people would be at far bigger sins than that and so they are! So they are! Terrible, awful sins!”
“Here, come now,” said George in an authoritative voice, much more like the voice of my father than that of my clown of an uncle. “Sit up now and tell Tom and me about this. What people? What sins?”
“That Miss Boyd and that man——”
“When?”
“Last Sunday at the quarry——”
“What the bliddy hell was one o’ that danged bitches doing on Reachfar ground?” Tom bawled. “What man?”
I told them. I told them everything—black stockings, pink garters, ‘Don’t take advantage’ and all. They listened in rigid silence to my recital, and when I had finished I looked from one of them to the other.
“For myself,” said George, “I am hard put till it not to be laughing!” and suddenly he rolled over on the grass towards Tom, caught him round the neck and said: “Come on, Tom, dearie, give me a nice kiss, now!”
“Now, now, Geordie!” said Tom with squeaky refinement. “Don’t be taking advantage!”
They began to roll about on the grass together until I could hardly believe that they had not been with me the Sunday before and seen the whole episode for themselves. The longer it went on, the funnier it became, and by the time Tom sprang up and began to run, giggling, away, with his toes turned out, his hands holding up his trouser legs as Miss Iris had held her skirt, I was holding my aching sides as I laughed, and the dogs were barking their delight and jumping round in circles.
“Was that the way it was, at all?” George asked, after they had sat down again and caught their breath.
“Yes—but not funny like that,” I told him.
“No. That was because they weren’t doing it for pure foolishness, like Tom and me. But it was chust foolishness that was in them, a-all the same, although that Miss Boyd is too foolish to know when she’s being foolish, like.”
“That’s chust the way of it,” said Tom. “And her that ugly, with the pink garters on her, and a-all.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Iphm. . . . But, George, man, we’ll have to sort it so that they will not be at their foolishness on Reachfar ground—in the old quarry, in parteeclar.”
“Aye,” George agreed, and to me: “They wouldn’t be going near the cave, do you think?”
“No,” I said. “It’s dirty and wet near the cave.”
“And the leddy might be getting mud on her pink garters,” said Tom, with which they both began to laugh as though they would burst. Somehow, my Burden of Sin had now disappeared and my relieved mind went off on a new tack.
“A fine to-do,” I told them severely, in the voice of my grandmother, when they had stopped laughing. “You two telling me a Pack of Lies about Rory with the black whiskers and you making drams in that cave all the time!”
“We will not be speaking about that at a-all,” said Tom with dignity.
“Not to nobody,” added George firmly.
“It’s tell Granda on the two of you I should do!”
“Telling yarns like that is no use to nobody,” said George in a superior way. “You have to have proof of the like o’ that.”
“There’s plenty of proof!” I said. “The bags and yon big pot and everything!”
“All right. Away ye go and tell Granda and take him to see the pot, and ye better send a tellygram west for the policeman when you’re at it, ye wee limmer!”
“Aye, and get the Exciseman over at the same time, ye wee besom!” added Tom.
I stared from one blank face to the other. “You’ve shifted it!” I said.
“What?”
“The pot and things.”
“What pot is it she keeps speaking about, George?”
“I wouldna be knowing. I never heard of a pot being in it at a-all myself,” said George and lay back and puffed smoke at the sky.
“That’s a Pack of Lies!” I shouted at them, but they merely lay back and stared at me, half smiling and impervious. “If that pot is on Reachfar, I’ll find it!” I threatened.
They still made no reply. That day, or any other day, they made no reply. That day and many another day, I spent many hours hunting over Reachfar for that pot, but it was like the Rainbow’s End. I knew it was there, but I did not ever find it.
Thirty years later I questioned them about it, for I am extremely persistent about a thing that interests me.
“Why you were never caught, I don’t know,” I told them.
“Och,” said George modestly, “Tom and me were never the ambeetious kind to go in for anything in a big commercial way, to be making money at it, like. Any jobbies that him and me ever went in for—like taking a bit fish out of the river at night or the like o’ that—we aye did it chust for pleasure, in a quiet way, among ourselves and our cronies. Tom and me was never clever enough to get ambeetious. It’s when people will get ambeetious to be making money at a thing that the bother comes in—that’s what I always think, whatever.”
“Yes, and me too, besides,” Tom concurred.
Following my experience in the old quarry, however, Tom, George and I had a number of discussions about the basic ‘foolishness’ of the Miss Boyds and the general ugliness and undesirability of behaviour such as theirs which, as Tom said, ‘made nothing but a speakylation and a laugh-ability of a person’, and we also decided that ‘we would not be speaking of Miss Iris in the old quarry in the house or to the family at a-all’. Apart from these decisions, we added the Miss Boyds in general to our repertory of people to be imitating, such as the Reverend Roderick and Lewie the Joiner, and we agreed among ourselves that Tom’s flair for ‘doing’ a Miss Boyd speaking to a gentleman was utterly surprising as well as completely brilliant.
“It’s always been myself that acted the leddies before,” said George, after a particularly successful tour de force by Tom as Miss Daisy receiving the letters from Bill the Post.
“The thing about it, George, man,” said Tom, reapplying himself to his job of forking straw, “the Miss Boyds is not proper leddies.”
At all events, by one means and another, George and Tom contrived to blot out all the ugliness, shock and outrage of what I had seen in the old quarry with a clear wash of laughter. They convinced me that what I had seen was ‘chust not worth a real person’s time to be bothering about’, and, in return, I made no ‘bother’ for them about the things I had seen in the cave but which had since been removed. We ‘chust did not speak of these things, in the house, or to the family, or to anybody at a-all.’
* * * * *
By the beginning of October the Miss Boyds’ name was enjoying a rest from people’s tongues at school, in the village and on the hills around, for we now all had something else to think about, which was the Poyntdale Harvest Home, which I was to be allowed to attend for the first time in my life. I was delighted and, at the same time, amazed to think that I was to be allowed to penetrate this annual mystery.
“But I thought it was a Big People’s Thing, Mother.”
“So it is, but every time you have a birthday you grow to be a bigger person,” my mother said, “and you are big enough now to go to the young people’s part of it. But you can’t stay all night, like Auntie Kate and Tom and George, of course. You and I will come home after supper.”
This seemed to me ‘only reasonable’, and I went away with Fly to the Thinking Place to give consideration to this idea of growing to be a Bigger Person every year which made you able to go to more and more Things. By the time I was as old as my grandmother, I concluded, there would not be a Thing in the Whole Wide World that I had not been to or did not know about, and the world was a very wonderful place indeed.
The Harvest Home was to be on Friday, and on the Saturday of the week before Danny Maclean came to Reachfar with his fiddle. I loved Danny. He was a strange
, mysterious person, who lived all alone at the bee croft away west on the Dinchory moors, with his dog called Rory and his millions of bees. He had black, lank hair, and queer, brownish, leathery skin on his lace and hands, and a big smiling mouth full of big white teeth, and bees loved him. They would settle all over him when he had caught a queen and never think of stinging him, and when he was not working with his bees he would be playing his fiddle. He very seldom left his bee croft. He came down to Dinchory once a week to pick up his groceries, tobacco and copy of the local newspaper which were left with the Dinchory shepherd, and occasionally he would come to Reachfar to see us when the heel of the sock he was knitting for himself would not come right, and then he would bring us some sections of his honey and have his fiddle with him. Since I learned to knit several years ago, I knitted a pair of socks for Danny now and again, and in return he taught me to dance the Highland Fling and the Sword Dance, only, not having a sword, we used the poker and tongs from the kitchen fireplace instead. Danny said I had a ‘grand sense o’ time and could put a fine lift in it’, and when I had learned all the steps he would stand against the dresser, long and lean and that brownish colour of his, and say: “One-two-three-four!” and off we would go. It was easy to ‘put lift into it’ to Danny’s fiddle. As Tom said: “Danny could play to make a cat dance’, and Tom had a very low opinion of cats.