She leant her head in her hand a moment and waited for the hill below to cease reeling—maybe she’d come out too early from bed, this walk, Else had said she mustn’t go far. But the Kaimes had called her after those weeks of the smell of medicines, close fires, and the pain that ran up and down her and played hide and seek with every sinew and bone that she had. So up she had come, the sun was up here, she was out of it for an hour or so, out of the winking flash of the days, to sit and look from the high places here, as Christ once had done with the devil for guide.
Idly she minded that and smiled—it came of being a minister’s wife. What had the devil said to Christ then? Maybe Just rest. Rest and have peace. Don’t let them tear you to bits with their hates, their cares and their loves, your angers for them. Leave them and rest!
Yes, He’d said that, there wasn’t a doubt, just as He stood by her saying it now, telling her to rest for the first time in years since that night when she last had climbed up the Kaimes, telling her to rest and leave them a-be, her cares for Robert, for that other who came and yet never came—for that third, that stranger whom slow through the years she had grown to half-know as a traveller half-knows the face of another on a lone road at night, in the summer light of a falling star…. How Segget would snigger if they heard her say that that stranger desired was her own son Ewan!
BEING YOUNG Ewan Tavendale wasn’t all fun, you’d to get up as early as half-past six in the little room that looked down on Segget. But it was a good room, the best in the Manse, you could look of a night right into the trees when the rooks came nesting, they had a great time, fighting and mating and playing the devil. Once you nearly fell out when two rooks were at it—mating, you’d wanted to know how it was done. But that was a long time ago, when a kid, you knew all about it now, humans or rooks, mother or Robert, and there wasn’t much in it, though the spinner kids of West Wynd thought so. Charlie Cronin drew pictures in the lavatories at school, the silly ass couldn’t draw at all. So you drew some yourself to show how things were, he turned red-faced when you drew it so well. Ewan that’s dirty! What was dirty about it?
You would lie and mind these things of a morning and stare at the ceiling and hark to the rooks—moving and chattering and swearing in the cold—how they did swear as the daylight grew! Sometimes you’d wanted to swear yourself, and you’d tried once or twice when you were a kid, but it sounded half-witted, so you gave it up. You couldn’t see sense in rubbish like swearing, any more than in speaking in Scotch, not English, as mother did sometimes, and so did Robert, and so did Else (but she couldn’t help it). Scotch was rubbish, all ee’s and wee’s, you didn’t even speak it in the school playground. And the other kids had mocked you at first, but they didn’t long, with a bashing or so.
Chris (and once Else) rigged you out of a morning, now you did it yourself, nearly twelve years old. The clock went birr as you looked at its face and you got out of bed and out of your pyjamas, Charlie Cronin slept in his shirt, he said only gentry wore things like pyjamas. You were glad you were gentry, then, shirts got sticky. Then you’d hear the clock going off down below, where the new girl slept, she was shy and said Eh? A perfect fool, she near fainted one morning, in summer it was, when she first came here. You’d thought you’d go down and get a bath first before either Robert or Chris should be at it. So you’d nipped down the stairs without anything on, and as you came back she came from her room, and gave a screech like a frightened hen, as though she’d never seen folk without clothes. Charlie Cronin said that his father, old George, would take off his clothes slow bit by bit, the top bits first, and cover himself up, and then the lower, and he’d cover that—you’d supposed that Maidie herself was like that, a fool, maybe frightened to look at herself.
So after that you had promised Chris that you’d wear some clothes when outside your room, she’d said that she herself didn’t care—and you said Yes, mother, I know that you don’t. I once saw you with nothing on coming up the stairs—a night long ago when I was a kid. I think it was the night of a Segget Show.
She’d blushed, as though nearly as bad as the others, but she wasn’t: you were glad that your mother was Chris. She didn’t know that you called her that, to yourself, not aloud, aloud you said Mother. But Robert, just Robert, he wasn’t your father. Robert was fun when he wasn’t at work, with the kirk or the spinners or his Labour plans—summers he took you and Chris on your bikes out on far jaunts up and down the Howe, to Edzell, to Brechin, to Garvock Hill where they boiled the Sheriff but not Leslie the smith—you asked Robert what he meant by that say, and he and Chris laughed like a couple of fools. But out on picnics he changed and was young, and would teach you to throw and do the high jump, he could jump like anything, Robert, and box. Everybody knew that in Segget now, they hadn’t at first, especially the spinners, and had mocked at Robert till he taught them manners. Charlie Cronin had been jealous of him and of you, that was at first when you first went to school, the first day he came swaggering up and said Oh, you’re the dirt from the Manse, are you? And you said I’m not dirt, I’m Ewan Tavendale, and he mocked at you till you hit him a bash, right on the nose, and he bled and bled, though it was only a baby bash, you were both of you just babies yourselves. But you won that fight all the same, Mr Geddes had watched it all from a window; and he went to the Manse and told Chris about it; and she asked that night Did he hurt you, Ewan? and you said Ay, all the kids had said Ay; and Chris said Oh, Ewan, that was real like your father! Father had been killed by the Germans in France.
Time for breakfast: and there was Robert, busy with letters, and Chris, looking sweet. But she always did that, even when she was angry, she could do nearly anything, answer you anything, she couldn’t run maybe as fast as you could and she was a perfect fool about flints, but she always told the truth about things, most grown-up people told lies half the time. You didn’t yourself, it wasn’t worth the bother, explaining, and trying to straighten things later.
And Chris would say It’s nearly schooltime, and you’d look at the clock, and see that it was, and Robert would say, He’s dreaming about flints! But you hadn’t been dreaming, you’d been thinking of Chris, she’d looked different of late in a puzzling way. Now, if it had been any other woman in Segget, you’d have known—but not Chris! It made a cold water come in your mouth, as though you were going to be sick, that thought. And Chris said What’s wrong? That’s a funny-loon stare. And you said Oh, nothing. I’ll need to be going.
You kissed Chris every morning, one kiss a day; kisses were sloppy except for that one—like the taste of honey up on a hill, clear, with the wind in the summer south. Robert cried Ta-ta! and you did the same, and were out in the hall, where Maidie would be, tweetering about and worrying again, wondering if breakfast were over yet. You hardly ever took notice of her, not since she’d screeched that time on the stairs. She’d call Master Ewan, is the breakfast done? and you’d say I don’t know and leave her to twitter—who wanted to be mastered like a kid in a book?
Out from the Manse and down through the shingle, giving it a kick and a plough as you went, under the ferny tops of the yews, the rooks all wakened and screeching, or off—all but the young ones, pecking, gaping. If it was summer you passed under quick, they dropped dirt down when you least expected, they dropped it once on the Provost of Segget when he came to see Robert and he walked back home with it white on his hat and everyone laughed, and he nearly had a fit when he found out about it.
He was frightened to be laughed at, most people were, you didn’t care a button one way or another, they might laugh themselves blue in the face at you, you were yourself—and what did it matter?
And there was the land and there were the touns, Segget half-blue in its early smoke, you started early and with time to spare to go round the toun and back up to the school. So you’d stop and pull up your stockings to your knees, in shorts, and the shirt and tie that Chris tied, you couldn’t get the knack of the thing, she would say Oh, Ewan, you’ve forgotten to tie it
at all! and you’d say I forgot, and she’d ruffle your hair, Thinking about flints again, I suppose? She and Robert were always joking about flints, and calling them wrong names, and thinking that funny.
Down by Meiklebogs the curlews were calling, you heard them above the shoom of the Mills, Robert said something about that once—Twin daughters of the Voice of God. You hadn’t bothered to find out what he meant, though you bothered about most things right to the end, sense to find out why this went like this, and that was so, and the wheels went round, and some stars twinkled and a lot did not, why people were ashamed to be seen without clothes and didn’t like girls to go out late at night, and hated capitalists, if they were spinners, and hated spinners, if they were New Toun.
The curlew called and you stopped and listened, Else would hear it at the Meiklebogs, you’d liked Else a lot, though not all the time. Once she’d come to your room late in the night, harvest, and was sloppy and kissed you about, you hated slop and threw a book at her, it hit her, she stared, you were sorry a bit.
There was a seagull up on that post, try a stone at it—nearly its tail!—and there was Ake Ogilvie’s shop beyond. Most mornings you loitered about at Ake’s, he’d lean from the door with his compass in hand and cry Well, then, have you learned your Burns? ’twas a joke between you, the poetry of Burns, silly Scotch muck about cottars and women, and love and dove and rot of that sort. Ake would recite you some of his own, his green eyes twinkling and his eyebrows twinkling, with a coating of sawdust sprayed on the hairs, and his long moustache going up and down, so, and you’d stare at him and listen a while, it was good enough, better than Burns’s rot. Poetry was rot, why not say it plain, when a man kissed a woman or a woman had a baby?
Down past the house of Jimmy the Sourock, the road had a dip and a hollow for years, the rain would gather, deep, in a pool, you used to march through it, your feet close together, and watch the water soak in at the eyelets, and feel it trickling betwixt your toes: that was when you were only a kid. Then Mrs Sourock would look out and see, and cry she would tell the Mem at the Manse, that was Chris she meant, and you didn’t care. It was no business of hers to get mad because you liked to wade in the water, especially as she herself was so proud that her husband, the Sourock, drank nothing but water, since he got that fright with the pig in his bed. And every Sunday he went down to the Square, to the service-meeting of MacDougall Brown, and sang about blood, and you thought that funny, he’d been so frightened at the blood of the pig. You’d once played truant from the kirk to go down and watch MacDougall Brown as he prayed, he opened his mouth and looked as though blind, with his eyes like glass and his teeth all black, perhaps he was frightened to go to the dentist.
A dentist came twice a week now to Segget, he hired a room at the back of Dite Peat’s: and the first time he came Charlie Cronin was there, hiding and listening under the window to hear the howls when the teeth came out. And the first to come was old Mrs Hogg: she had a wart on her nose like Cromwell and hair growing out of the wart as well, and she groaned like anything, Charlie told. Then she said to the dentist How much will that be? and he said Half a crown, and Mrs Hogg said What? Half a crown for that, just pulling out a tooth? Why, old Leslie the smith down there at the smiddy used to pull me all over the place with his tongs, and never would ask a meek for it, either.
But you liked Mrs Hogg, she would cry as you passed, Hello, Ewan lad, is there anything fresh? And you’d show her the latest flints that you’d got, and she wouldn’t just laugh or blither about Druids, as everyone else in Segget would do, but would ask what the hunters had done with the things, and she’d say that that was amazing, just, what a thing it was to be learned and young. She’d sense, Mrs Hogg, more sense than her son, who sometimes came home on a holiday; he spoke bad English and wore bad breeks, and patted your head and said Little man, or tried to pat you, you just stepped aside.
Sometimes you’d look into Peter Peat’s shop, where he sat on a table making a suit, he’d frown and motion to you to get off, he came every Sunday and listened to Robert and hated his sermons and Robert as well. You’d heard him one Sunday say to the Provost the minister was nothing but a Bolshevik, just, as bad as that tink John Cronin, the porter. Bolsheviks lived in Russia, you knew, they’d closed all the kirks and they all worked together and they hadn’t a king: and it sounded sense.
By now you’d got to the end of East Wynd, to the Square where the War Memorial stood, the angel that looked like Miss M’Askill, Miss M’Askill had eyes that would lift up that way when she found something dirty drawn on a slate. In lower East Wynd of a winter morning half the lane was frozen to a slide, you took a long run from Peter Peat’s shop and shot down the Wynd on the frozen slide that came from the leaking drains of Segget. By the Moultrie shop you’d to plan your turn, else you’d batter yourself on the wall of their house, as you’d done your second winter in Segget, the whole of Segget seemed fallen upon you, and your face had shifted, you sat on the ground and thought you had lost it and felt it all over, it still was there, grown bigger than ever, growing bigger and bigger every moment, it seemed. It was while you were sitting there, licking the blood, it trickled from your lips and tasted salt, and that old Mrs Moultrie came out and found you, she’d heard the bang as you struck the wall, she said to Chris when she took you home she thought that it was a cart and horse. But you liked her in spite of clyping to Chris, her face, brown, old, and tired and quiet as she bathed you and whished as though you were a baby, till you sat up and said I’m fine. Many thanks. Old Moultrie was sitting in his corner, glaring, reading a Bible, and you said Good day.
He’d taken no notice at all before that, he glared some more, but you didn’t mind, you saw he really was awfully shy underneath all the hair and the horns, so you said, while Mrs Moultrie went out for a towel, Do you like the Bible? There’s a lot of rot in it. He stood up, shaking all over, funny, and asked, And you’re the minister’s bairn? And you shook your head, Oh no, I’m not. Robert’s only my stepfather, didn’t you know? My father was a crofter down in Kinraddie. Much better than being a minister, I think.
Funny, he was friendly enough after that, and started telling stories of Segget, when there weren’t so many of the gentry dirt sossing about with their motor-cars. And you listened, polite, because he was old, a pity besides that he was so shy. But Mrs Moultrie said to Chris that you were the only soul in Segget he’d treated to a civil word for years.
There was the Arms, not worth looking at, you threw a stone at a cat in the Square and watched the dog up against the angel, funny that dogs were so fond of that. They really couldn’t want to, so often. Every day that dog of Newlands came down, as you turned in the Square to go up the Close, and did that against the Memorial stone, you’d once told Robert, and he’d laughed and laughed and said that the dog was a pacifist, maybe. But one morning you stood and watched for the dog and sure as anything along it came, and stopped, and relieved itself by the angel; and the door of the Arms opposite opened, and Mrs Melvin came out and said that you were a dirty little brute to stand and look at a dog doing that— Weren’t you black burning ashamed of yourself? She was soft in the head, why should you be ashamed? Maybe she was drunk, but you didn’t say anything, just looked her all over, from top to toe, to see if she’d fallen while she was drunk, and then raised your cap and went on to school.
Round by here you could see the Mills, in the big, glass windows across the field the whirr of the wheels as they caught the sun, the spinners at work in the dust and the smell; but you liked the Mills, you’d been down there twice, with Charlie, he said the folk in New Toun were daft to speak of the folk in the Mills as only spinners, there were foremen and weavers, and a lot more besides; but they all looked like spinners.
To the right, in the Spring and most of the year, as you passed up The Close you would see in the park the donkey that was kept by MacDougall Brown. If you whistled one note, high up in your throat, you’d found that the donkey would bray every time. So near
ly every day as you passed you whistled that note and the donkey brayed, and you laughed, and he’d bray some more and come trotting and push his long nose through the fence and snuffle, but he never bit you as once Mabel Brown. Mrs Brown spoke funny, and she called her May-bull, and had a long story how the donkey once bat May-bull when she went to play in the park.
There was the smiddy and it once was great fun, when you were a kid, to lean up by the door and look at old Leslie blowing the bellows, he’d turn round and sweat, Ay man, is that you? He’d called you man, but he blithered a lot, you would hardly heed at all what he said—about Chris, was she ill-like of late, would you say? and The minister’ll be gey fond of her, eh? and D’ye mind your own father that was killed out in France? And you said you didn’t know to all of these questions, because you couldn’t be bothered with them, and he said, Eh man, when my father died I just roared and howled—ay, loon, I’d a heart. And you said Like the Roarer and Greeter, Miss Moultrie? And he stopped and stared with his mouth fallen open, and muttered that you were an impudent get.
You’d take the West Wynd through the Old Toun then, with its crumbling white houses and its washing to dry, there was always washing to dry, never dried. You knew a lot of the kids in West Wynd, they’d be finishing porridge and pulling on boots, and they’d cry Wait, Ewan! but you’d never wait, except for young Cronin, he’d come slouching out and say Ay, Ewan, and you’d say Hello, Charlie, and go on together, not saying a thing till he’d ask, as always, Have you done your sums? Then you’d know that he hadn’t done his and would bring out your book so that he might copy.