He said nothing to that, but went on with his meat, they didn’t say grace when Robert wasn’t there, that was funny when you came to think of the thing, Robert knew and knew that you knew he knew. But he was too sure to vex about that, sure of himself and his God and belief, except when the angry black moments came—seldom enough in this last three years. Once he’d raved Religion—A Scot know religion? Half of them think of God as a Scot with brosy morals and a penchant for Burns. And the other half are over damned mean to allow the Almighty even existence. You know which half you belong to, I think. Hate and fury in his face as he said it, the day after the killing of Meiklebogs’ horse. Chris had looked at him cool and remotely then, as she’d learned with the years, and he’d banged from the room, to return in an hour or so recovered. What a ranter and raver I am, Christine! I think you’ll outlast me a thousand years!
And now, on a sudden impulse, she said, Do you ever think of religion, Ewan?
He never said What? or said your last word the way other boys of his age would do; he looked up and shook his head, Not now. She asked when he had and he said, long ago, when he was a kid and hadn’t much sense, he used to be worried when Robert was preaching. Chris said But he never tried to fear you, and Ewan shook his head, Oh no, it wasn’t that. But I hated the notion God was there, prying into every minute of my life. I wanted to belong to myself, and I do; it doesn’t matter a bit to me now. She understood well enough what he meant, how like her he sometimes was, how unlike! So you think God doesn’t matter, then, Εwan? and he said, I don’t think He’s worth bothering about. He can’t make any difference to the world—or I should think He’d have made it by now.
The evening came down before it was four, up in the Mounth the snow came thick, sheeting hill on hill as it passed on the wings of the howling wind from the haughs. But the storm passed north of Segget, lying lithe, Chris in the kitchen looked out at it pass, she was making cakes and pies for the morn, Maidie tweetering about like a bird Eh, Mem, but that’s rich, that’ll be a fine one!
Chris said Then be sure you eat a good share, you’re still thin enough since you came to the Manse. Are you sure you are well? And Maidie said Fine. She blushed and stood like a thin little bird, Chris looked at her quiet, a thin little lass—what did she think, what did she do in her moments alone, had she a lad, had she ever been kissed—or more than that, as they said in Segget? Not half the life in her that poor Else had; what would Else Queen be doing to-day?
Dark. As they took their tea together, Ewan and Chris, they left the blinds drawn and could see the night coming stark outbye, growing strangely light as the daylight waned and the frost, white-plumed, walked swift over Segget. Ewan sat on the rug by the fire and read, his blue head down-bent over his book, Chris stared in the fire and tired of that and finished her tea, and wandered about, and went to the window and looked at the night. Then she looked at the clock. She would go and meet Robert.
She turned to the door and Ewan jumped up, she said not to bother, she was going to walk. He said absent-mindedly, See you keep warm, and his eyes went back again to his book.
Outside, she went hatless, with her coat collar up, she found at the door of the Manse a wind, bright, keen, and edged like a razor-blade, the world sleeping on the winter’s edge, about her, dim-pathed, wound the garden of summer, she passed up its aisles, the hoar crackled below her, all Segget seemed held in the hand-grip of frost. A queer thought and memory came to her then and she turned about from going to the gate, and went back instead by the side of the Manse, up through the garden where the strawberry beds lay covered deep in manure and straw, to the wall that girded the kirkyard of Segget.
Here the wind was still, in the Manse’s lithe, she put out a hand on the hoar of the dyke, it felt soft as salt and as cold as steel; and idly, standing, she wrote her name, though she couldn’t see it by then in the dark, CHRISTINE COLQUOHOUN in great capital letters. And she minded how once she had stood here before, four years or more, after Segget Show; and she and Robert were there together and she’d thought of the vanished folk in the yard, and planned to add to those that supplanted. And the War-time wound that was seared on Robert had seared that plan from her mind as with fire….
It seemed this night remote from her life as the things she’d dreamt as a quean in Blawearie, when she was a maid and knew nothing of men, the kind of play that a bairn would play: for her who stood here with life in her again, unexpected, certain, Robert’s baby and hers.
And she found it strange in that icy hush, leaning there warm, her hair bare to the cold, to think how remote was that life from her now, even bairn for the thing that lay under her heart was a word that she’d hardly used a long time, thinking of it as a baby, in English—that from her books and her life in a Manse. She seemed to stand here by the kirkyard’s edge looking back on the stones that marked the years where so many Chrises had died and lay buried—back and back, as the graveyard grew dim, far over those smothered hopes and delights, to that other Chris that had been with child, a child herself or so little more, and had known such terror and delight in that, young and raw and queer and sweet, you thought her now, that Chris that had been—the Chris far off in that vanished year who had lain in terror as nights came down with knowledge of the thing that moved in herself, the fruit of her love for the boy she had wed, Ewan sleeping so quiet and so sound in her bed. Remote and far to think she was YOU!
Quiet in the dark she wrote with her finger another name across that of her own, on the kirkyard dyke, and heard as she wrote far up in the Kaimes a peesie wheep—maybe a lost memory from those years in Kinraddie, a peesie that had known that other Chris! She heard a long scuffling through the long grass, silver beyond the rim of the dyke, some rabbit or hare, though it made her heart jump; and slowly she felt her finger rub out the name she had written in hoar on the dyke—ill-luck to have done that, she minded folk said.
A month ago since she’d known for sure, had puzzled for days with the second no-go. Robert would frown, What on earth’s gone wrong? You’re dreaming, Christine! and smile, and she’d smile, and puzzle again when he’d left her alone. So it came on her in the strangest places, she stood in MacDougall Brown’s to shop, and MacDougall asked thrice what thing she might want—Now, Mem—and she said—Did I want it at all? and then came to herself at his cod-like stare. So she gave her order and went out and home, she supposed MacDougall would manage to make out that was another proof of her pride!—all Segget for some reason thought her proud, maybe because she had taken to thinking, not stayed as still as a quean in a book or a quean in a bothy, from year unto year.
And when once Stephen Mowat came down to see Robert, and she gave them supper and sat by to listen, Mowat broke off the talk to say Rahly, Mrs Colquohoun, do tell us the joke! She said What joke? And he said The one that’s making you smile in that charming way. She’d said Oh, I suppose I am full up of supper! And he’d said he thought that a Jahly untruth, joking, polished as a mart-day pig.
So at last she had known and woke one day sure; and lay and dreamt; and Robert got up—Feeling all right?—and she had said Fine. Robert, we’re going to have a baby. He stared—We?—the thing had staggered him, she lay and watched, something moved in her heart, laughter for him, a queer pity for him—oh, men were funny and just boys to be pitied! Well, I am, she’d said, but you had a share. He was standing half-dressed, with his fair hair on end, he sat on the bed and stared and then smiled, slowly, with that crinkling about the eyes she had loved near the very first time she met him. Really and honest-to-God that we are? And she’d said it was real enough, how did it happen? And he’d said he hadn’t the least idea, and that struck them as funny, they giggled like children; and after ’twas Robert that went into long dreams. She’d say What again? and he’d say But Christine! A baby—Good Lord, I hope it’s a girl! What does it feel like being as you are—a nuisance, just, or tremendous and terrible? And Chris had said that it made you feel sick, now and then, and Robert had laughed a
t that, he wasn’t so easily cheated as Mowat. Oh Chris Caledonia, I’ve married a nation!
Now, standing beside the dyke in the dark, she minded that, it was true enough, somehow you did hide away the great things, Scots folk had always done that, you supposed—in case they’d go blind in their naked shine, like a soul in the presence of Robert’s great God—that God he followed unfaltering still, and was getting him deeper in dislike than ever, with his preaching in Segget the cause of the Miners. These were the folk that were going on strike, in May, unless their wages were raised. Robert said their case was a testing case, the triumph of greed or the triumph of God. Chris herself had hardly a thought in the matter because of that nameless doubt that was hers—doubt of the men and method that came to change the world that was waiting change—all the mixed, strange world of the Segget touns, with its failing trade and its Mills often idle. The folk of the Mills would hang round the room where their dole was paid by a little clerk, they’d laze there and snicker at the women that passed, and yawn, with weariness stamped on each face; and smoke, and whistle, and yawn some more. Once she’d passed and heard some of them quarrelling out loud, she had thought it must surely be over politics; but instead ’twas the chances of a football match! She’d told Robert that and he’d laughed and said Demos!—didn’t you know that the chap was like that? But we’ll alter these things forever in May.
May: and the baby wouldn’t come till July, a good enough month for a baby to be born, though Robert said if they had planned it at all they would surely have planned it better than that. July might be far too hot for comfort. But he didn’t fuss round her, stood back and aside, he knew it her work and that he’d little help—oh, different as could be from the Εwan long ago, the frightened boy who had so fussed about her—how they’d quarrelled, how wept, how laughed in that time of the coming of that baby that was now in the Manse—a boy, grown up, remote from it all, remote enough with his books and his flints, far enough off from being a baby, rather like a flint himself in some ways, but of a better shape and grain, grey granite down to the core, young Ewan, with its flinty shine and its cool grey skin and the lights and the flashing strands in it. Different from that, Robert’s baby and hers—
She stamped her feet and woke from her dreaming as down through the dark she heard on the shingle the coming footsteps of Robert himself.
AND NEXT MORNING he said, Let’s go out a walk, up in the hills somewhere—are you keen? Chris said she was and well before eight they were off, they met with Ewan in the hall as they went, he said nothing at all about going out with them, he always knew when he wasn’t much wanted. Chris kissed him and said they’d be back for dinner; syne she and Robert went up by the Kaimes, and Ewan stood and looked after them—you could hardly believe that Chris was so old.
Underfoot the frost held hard and firm in the rising sun of the New Year’s Day, that sun a red smoulder down in the Howe, the hoar was a blanching on post and hedge, riming the dykes, far up in the Mounth the veilings of mists were draping the hills, except that now and then they blew off and you saw the coarse country deep in the haughs, remote with a flicker of red on the roofs of some shepherd’s sheiling high in the heath. Robert was walking so fast that Chris for a while could hardly keep up with his stride, then she fell into that and found it easy, the Kaimes was past and above it the path opened out through the ragged fringe of the moor that came peering and sniffling down at Segget as a draggled cat at a dish out of doors, all the country-side begirdled with hills and their companions the moors that crept and slept and yawned in the sun, watching the Howe at its work below.
They passed a tarn that was frozen and shone, Chris tried the edge with her stick and it broke, and she saw herself for a minute then, with the looped-up hair and the short-cut skirts and the leather jacket tight at her waist, high in the collar; and the blown bronze of her cheeks and hair and the stick in her hands and the fur-backed gloves, she smiled at herself, for this Chris that she’d grown. Robert stopped and looked back and was puzzled, and came, and stood by her side and looked down at that Chris that smiled remote in the broken ice. Yes, not at all bad. See the childe by her shoulder? Do you think the two can be decently married?
Chris said that she thought not, they’d something in their eyes—and Robert kissed her then, iron, his hard, quick kiss, the kiss of a man with other passions than kissing: but wonderful and daft a moment to stand, on the frozen moor, her head back on his shoulder, and so be kissed, and at last released, Robert panting a little, and they both looked away; and then they went on, swinging hand in hand for a while till they tired and needed their sticks.
Robert went first, bare-headed, black-coated, he was whistling Over the Sea to Skye, clear and bright as they still went on, up through the wind of a sheep-track here where the Grampians pushed out their ramparts in fence against the coming of life from below.
By eleven they were high in the Culdyce moor, winding the twist of its slopes in the broom that hung thick-rimed with unshaken frost; for the sun had died away in a smoulder, the Howe lay grey in a haze below, as they climbed that haze betook itself from the heights to the haughs, Leachie towered high, its crag-head swathed with a silk-web mutch. Trusta’s ten hundred feet cowered west as if bending away from the blow of the wind, the moors a ragged shawl on her shoulders, crouching and seated since the haughs were born, watching the haze in the Howe below, the flicker of the little folk that came and builded and loved and hated and died, and were not, a crying and swarm of midges warmed by the sun to a glow and a dance. And the Trusta heights drew closer their cloaks, year by year, at the snip of the shears, as coulter and crofter moiled up the haughs.
Once Chris and Robert came to a place, out in the open, here the wind blew and the ground was thick with the droppings of sheep, where a line of the ancient stones stood ringed, as they stood in Kinraddie far west and below, left by the men of antique time, memorial these of a dream long lost, the hopes and fears of fantastic eld.
Robert said that they came from the East, those fears, long ago, ere Pytheas came, sailing the sounding coasts to Thule. Before that the hunters had roamed these hills, naked and bright, in a Golden Age, without fear or hope or hate or love, living high in the race of the wind and the race of life, mating as simple as beasts or birds, dying with a like keen simpleness, the hunting weapons of those ancient folk Ewan would find in his search of the moors. Chris sat on a fallen stone and heard him, about her the gleams of the wintry day, the sailing cloud-shapes over the Howe; and she asked how long ago that had been? And Robert said Less than four thousand years, and it sounded long enough to Chris—four thousand years of kings and of Gods, all the dark, mad hopes that had haunted men since they left the caves and the hunting of deer, and the splendour of life like a song, like the wind.
And she thought then, looking on the shadowed Howe with its stratus mists and its pillars of spume, driving west by the Leachie bents, that men had followed these pillars of cloud like lost men lost in the high, dreich hills, they followed and fought and toiled in the wake of each whirling pillar that rose from the heights, clouds by day to darken men’s minds—loyalty and fealty, patriotism, love, the mumbling chants of the dead old gods that once were worshipped in the circles of stones, Christianity, socialism, nationalism—all—Clouds that swept through the Howe of the world, with men that took them for gods: just clouds, they passed and finished, dissolved and were done, nothing endured but the Seeker himself, him and the everlasting Hills.
Then she came from that thought, Robert shaking her arm. Chris, you’ll be frozen. Let’s climb to the camp. He had once been here with Ewan, she hadn’t; the moor shelved smoothly up to its top, as they climbed in view Chris saw two lines of fencing climbing each slope of the hill, new-driven and stapled, the fences, they met and joined and ended up on the crest. But before that meeting and joining they plunged through the circles of the ancient camp that had been, the turf and the stones had been flung aside, Robert told that the hill had been recently
sold and the lands on either side as well, and two different landowners bought the hill and set up those fences to show their rights—what were dirt like the old heathen forts to them? Symbols of our age and its rulers, these clowns, Robert said, and the new culture struggling to birth—when it came it would first have to scavenge the world!
Then he started talking of the Miners, of Labour, of the coming struggle in the month of May, he hoped and believed that that was beginning of the era of Man made free at last, Man who was God, Man splendid again. Christ meant and intended no more when He said that He was the Son of Man, when He preached the Kingdom of Heaven—He meant it on earth. Christ was no godlet, but a leader and hero—
He forgot Chris, striding up and down the slope; excitement kindled in his harsh, kind eyes. And Chris watched him, standing, her stick behind her, her arms looped about it, saying nothing to him but hearing and seeing, him and the hills and the song that both made. And suddenly she felt quite feared, it was daft—as she looked at the scaling heights high up, the chasms below, and her Robert against them! She put out her hand and caught him, he turned, something in her face stopped questions, all else, the pity and fear that had been in her eyes. He didn’t kiss her now, his arms round about her, they were quiet a long moment as they looked in each other, they had never done that that Chris could remember, seeing herself globed earnest, half-smiling, and with trembling lips there in the deep grey pools that hid away Robert—never hers for long if ever at all, unceasing the Hunter of clouds by day. The men of the earth that had been, that she’d known, who kept to the earth and their eyes upon it—the hunters of clouds that were such as was Robert: how much was each wrong and how much each right, and was there maybe a third way to Life, unguessed, unhailed, never dreamed of yet?