Chris said I see. Well, she needn’t be, and turned and went down the stairs, stare on her back; turned again: I think you owe me a sixpence.
He dived in a pouch and brought one out, flushing again, but looking at her cocky: There you are, mistress. Enjoy your money while you have it. There’s a time coming when your class won’t have it long.
Chris’s temper quite went with her a minute, silly fool, the heat she supposed, she didn’t care:
My class? It was digging its living in sweat while yours lay down with a whine in the dirt. Good-bye.
Εwan was tired enough of the going next week, lying in bed, reading in books, feeling the throb under the bandages go. If only they’d leave him alone with the books…. And he thought Most people—how they hate you to read!
They were at him all hours: Chris in the morning, decent sort Chris, though you’d never got very close to each other since that winter in Segget, further off now since you’d made it plain her notions on begettings weren’t necessarily yours. But once or twice when she put her arm under your head and unwound the bandage in the early morning, stuck on the lint, hands and arms so alive you felt queer—as though you were falling in love! You’d gathered the reactions were something like that, and possible enough for all that you knew, those psychoanalyst Jewboy chaps had had cases enough, record on record, Œdipus the first of the Unhanged Unhygienics— Rot! Let’s dig in the phosphor bronze!
She’d hardly have gone than a thunderous chapp, and in would come waddling Mrs Cleghorn, very fat, very oozing, you rather liked her. Supposed it was her jollity, easily come by, it didn’t mean much and couldn’t mean much, but a bearable ingredient—so damn scarce. She’d plump on the bed and ask how you were, not stop for an answer, instead start in to tell of the time when her husband, Jim, was ill—with mumps, so he’d said, and looking like a tattie scone. And he’d been fair ashamed to have mumps at his age, the daft old tyke, Ma had wondered a bit, funny-like mumps for a body to have. So she’d hauled in the doctor, will he nill he, and then could you guess what his illness was? You couldn’t, you were over innocent and young, but the cause turned out to be one of those trollops down in Fish Market, Jim had chased her and gotten her and got tally-ho. And he’d got more than that when the doctor left.
Ewan had said Oh? not caring a rap, and Ma had nodded, Mind out for the women. You’re over bonny a lad to be taken that way. Ewan’d said, grave, he’d be sure to mind, and Ma had said Fine, and gone, thank God. Back to that chapter on phosphor-bronze smelting, house cleared with the others all off to their work. All?—No luck, a knock on the door.
Miss Murgatroyd this time, thin and peeking, tittering and shy like a wren gone erotic, Eh me, in a Gentleman’s Room, such a scandal! I thought you’d maybe like an orange or so, she’d brought two of the things, great bulging brutes. You said you were sorry you never ate them, and she shrivelled in a way and you really felt sorry—why couldn’t old people leave one alone?—always in need of pity, compassion, soft words to fend off the edge of things, cuddling in words, oh, damn them all!
So you’d put on a kind face and said you were sorry— it was nice of you to think of me. And at that she’d unshrivelled like a weed in the rain, peeking and chittering in your bedroom chair all about herself and her life and her likes; and Ewan’d sat and listened, half-wishing she’d go, half-wondering about her in an idle way. Queer to think she’d been born for that, been young once like oneself and wanted real things: food, wind on the sea, phosphor-bronze smelting … maybe not, but books and sleeping with men. Surely at least she had wanted that—her generation had seemed to want little else, blethered in their books about little else, Shaw and the little sham-scientist Wells running a fornication a folio before they could pitch an idea across: gluey devils, the Edwardians, chokers and chignons, worse than the padded Victorian rabbits…. And now at the end she had none of it, went to tea-fights, the Unionist Ladies, she liked Mr MacDonald and the National Government and read lots of faded verse in Scots, the new Scots letters the Edwardian survivals were trying to foist on the Scottish scene—Have you read Dr Pittendrigh MacGillivray’s pomes? Such lovely, I think, and Clean and Fine. And Miss Marion Angus, though they’re awful Broad. And Ewan said he hadn’t, he didn’t read poetry. Then she tweetered from the room and came back with a book of Mr Lewis Spence’s for him to read, all about the ancient Scots, they’d been Awful Powerful in magic. And Ewan said that was nice; and he was sure they had.
Tired after that and a spot of sleep. Chris would waken him up at noon, with a tray and dinner, gleam of bronze hair, dolichocephalic heads scarce in Duncairn, his own one only a betwixt-and-between. And he’d eat, not much, and read some more, Duncairn outside in its afternoon haze, far off the foghorn on Crowie Point lowing like an aurochs with belly-ache—the cattle that Cæsar said couldn’t lie down, no knee joints, they kipped up against a tree…. What the devil had that to do with a chapter on Castings?
Five o’clock, shoes on the stairs, a guffaw, a knock, young Archie Clearmont. Decent chap Archie, if a bit of a bore, baby face, a long story about a Prof: he’d turned round in the lecture-room and said to Archie, and Archie had turned and said to the Prof—, and Ewan nodded and wondered they hadn’t grown dizzy. Rectorial elections coming off soon, Archie thought he’d support the Nationalist. Ewan asked why, and Archie said for a bit of a rag, the Nationalist candidate was Hugo MacDownall, the chap who wrote in Synthetic Scots. Ewan asked Why synthetic? Can’t he write the real stuff? and Archie said I’m damned if I know. Sounds more epileptic than synthetic to me—that’s why I’m interested, I’m going in for Medicals!
John Cushnie next, sure as fate, poor devil with his English and his earnestness, smart, in a new Raggie Robertson suit, he’d brought Ewan an Edgar Wallace to read—you must feel weariet with lying there. And he said ’twas a gey thing when decent chaps, just because they spoke well with a bit of class, were bashed by keelies down in Footforthie. They were never letten into Raggie Robertson’s Depot, time the bobbies took they kind of wasters in hand…. Ewan said What wasters?—Raggie or the keelies? and Cushnie gawked above his tight collar oh ay, ha-ha, but Raggie was all right, he’d a good job there and a chance to get on. A chap didn’t need a union to help if he put his back into a job of work—though Labour wasn’t so bad, look at Bailie Brown. But the Communists—along in Doughty Park on Sunday he’d stopped and listened to that dirty Red, Trease, paid from Moscow as every body knew, splurging away about all workers uniting and yet pitching glaur as fast’s he was able at decent folk like Bailie Brown…. And then, thank God, the tea-bell went, and Cushnie with it, tie, spots, and all.
Mr Quaritch came up in the evening to see him, with a pile of review-books from the Daily Runner, and his pipe, ferret-twinkle, and unhappy wee beard: Want anything to read? What’s that you’ve got? Ewan showed him the text-book and he shook his head: Dreich stuff. Would you care to review a novel?
Ewan shook his head, couldn’t be bothered with novels. Mr Quaritch said he might count himself lucky, he’d to bother enough with the lousy tripe, twenty or so of the damned things a week. Ewan asked who wrote them—and what on earth for? and Mr Quaritch said mostly wee chaps without chins—but what for God might know, He kept quiet about it, unless it was to provide the deserving reviewer with half a crown a copy when he sold them at Burnett’s.—Piddle makes a fortune flogging reviews. Have you heard what happened to my colleague last night?
Ewan said he hadn’t and Quaritch told him the tale, Mr Piddle was racing for the six-thirty train with his copy, Duncairn news for the Tory Pictman, gey late, in a hell of a sweat that he’d miss it. You knew the way the daft Bulgar would ride?—head down over the handlebars, neck out like a gander seeking the water, all in a flush and a paddy for time. Well, he wheeled out from the Runner offices in Wells Street, into Royal Mile, and pedalled like hell up the Royal, tramcars and buses and lorries about, dodging the lot and beating them all. Dark was coming down and the street-lamps were lighting and Pidd
le’s feet were flying like the wind when, keeking his head a bit to one side he noticed a lot of folk yelling at him. Well, he took no notice, half Duncairn yells whenever it sights our reporter Piddle, just thought that the proletariat,—he-he!—was living up to its lowness, yes? And then next minute his bike left the earth, his head went over his heels and vanished, and when he’d finished wondering with a sheer despair how he’d ever get copy about the end of the world down to the Tory Pictman office when there wouldn’t be a Pictman left to print it—he looked up round the curve of his haunches and saw two or three folk looking down at him, one cried Are you killed? Piddle wasn’t sure, but he managed to stand up, and was dragged from the hole by the crowd that had come, the rest of the survivors of the end of the world. And then he found what had happened was he’d fallen head-first into road-digging in the middle of the Mile, he’d passed the red lights with never a glance, that’s what the shouts had been for as he passed. The bike looked like a bit of string chewed by a cow, but Piddle had no time to attend to it: the next things the gapers around the hole saw were Piddle’s legs scudding away up the Mile, bent on catching the Pictman train….
Εwan lay with his hands under his head, drowsing and thinking of Quaritch and his tale when both had gone down to their supper. Now the night was coming in by, lamps lighted; through the window and up through the night the ghost-radiance of Footforthie flecked the blind.—People thought that kind of a story funny, everyone laughed, Quaritch had expected him to laugh, and he hadn’t, he’d seen nothing funny about it. What was funny in a queer old wreck like Piddle falling into a dirty hole in the Mile? He’d hurt himself a bit, no doubt—that the fun? Enjoyment of seeing another look ridiculous? And he thought of innumerable stories he’d heard, overheard when a boy, been told in Duncairn with loud guffaws and glazed eyes of mirth—about women and their silly, unfortunate bodies, about babies and death and disease and dirt, and something he supposed was lacking in him, Robert had once told him he was born a prig, he’d no humour and couldn’t be cheerful and lusty and scrabble in filth and call it fun. Fun? Real fun enough in the world—fun in the roar of the furnaces, in a sweeping door and a dripping trough of blazing metal a-pour on the castings, fun in the following of formulae through trick on trick in the twists of maths, fun in the stars wheeling at night with long lights over the whoom of Footforthie, the breathtaking glister of the Galaxy. Fun in the deadness of Duncairn after midnight, you could stand by the edge of Royal Mile where it wheeled to the moving blackness of Paldy and think the end of the world had come—the shining dead streets of this land long hence, waving in grass, beasts lairing in culverts, the sea creeping up and up on Footforthie and a clamour of seals on the rocky points where once they launched the fisher- fleets, men long gone from the earth, not wiped out, not lost, vanished an invading host to the skies, to alien planets and the furthest stars, storming at last the rooftops of heaven, earth remote from their vision as the womb and its dreams remote from the memory of an adult man—
He woke late that evening to hear a commotion in the next-door bedroom, empty till then. Low talk and quick steps, Mrs Cleghorn, Chris, then a shivering bang, silence, a cough. Then Ma Cleghorn whispering Will that have waked Ewan?
His own door was opened a minute later and Chris came in, walking pussy-foot, she stood and listened till he called out soft, ’Lo, Chris. What’s all the row next door?
She said she was sorry they’d woken him up, a new lodger was coming in a hurry, late, and they were making her up a bit bed.
Ewan said he saw. What was she like?
Chris didn’t know, a lass up from Dundee, the new schoolteacher at the Ecclesgriegs Middle—English, she’d heard, though she hadn’t yet seen her—
Then she saw with a smile that Εwan was asleep, human beings were never of much interest to him.
Taking up tea to Ma Cleghorn next morning Chris found the meikle creature already out of bed, getting into her stays like wool into a bottle. God, Chris, just give a pull at they points, I’m getting a wee bittie stout, I’m half-feared.
Chris put down the tray and pulled at the tapes, the house a drowse in the Saturday quiet, she asked why Ma’d got up so early, and Ma asked if she’d forgotten the new lodger-lassie, was Chris herself to do all the work? Chris said Well, unless she’s so awful big, she’ll make no difference to me, I hope. What’s she like? and Ma gave a bit of a snort: A stuck-up looking bitch from a school in Dundee. Schlimpèd and English and thin as a sparrow, I never could abide the stuck-up kind. Chris said Some folk say that I’m stuck up, Ma said So you are, and so’s your bit Ewan. I’ll maybe thole two of you about the house but I’ll be danged to a cinder-ash afore I bear with another of the brew…. Och, lassie, go away, I’m in bad tune this morning. Take the teacher creature her cup of tea.
So Chris did, and went up and knocked, a cool voice said Come in, in she went, the lassie lying in the double bed Chris and Ma Cleghorn had put up yestreen, window wide open, curtains flying, Chris lowered her eyes to the quean herself and saw her trig, neat, in a flowered nightie, slim like a boy, like Ewan almost, short black hair and blue deep eyes, great pools going down into darkness. She sat up and took the cup and nodded: You Mrs Cleghorn’s partner?
Chris knew for certain then what was wrong, the English lass was shy as could be but carrying it off with a brassy front, the kind of cool courage Chris always had liked. And as Chris smiled the brassiness went, the quean flushed sweet as they looked at each other, was suddenly neat and demure and forlorn, no more; like a prize pussy-cat, Chris thought, with that faint line of down on her upper lip that one liked the look of, most folk didn’t.—I’m Mrs Colquohoun and you’re Miss Johns.
—I say, you’re different from what I expected.
—You’re a wee bittie different yourself, Chris said, and carried down the tray and went on with her work, nice to have had a nice quean like that for one’s own sometime: as well as had Ewan. But that was just dreaming—she wouldn’t have been one’s own any more than was Ewan, the pussy-cat, wave of nice black hair by her smooth, soft cheek and that funny down and that youngness—oh, but they made one feel like an old trauchled wife, the young folk here in Duncairn!
And suddenly, washing the breakfast things, there came a waft of stray wind through the window, a lost wean of the wind that had tint itself in play in the heights of the summer Mounth, Chris nearly dropped the cup she was drying. Ma Cleghorn louped: Steady on, lass! Mighty be here, have you seen a ghost?
Chris said Only smelt one, and then, on an impulse, Ma, I want the day off. Can you spare me?
Ma said If you like: you’re hardly my slave, Chris said she knew that, but would Ma manage herself? Ma said she’d managed a good fifty-five years, off and on, and as far as she kenned at the moment she was neither a cripple nor had brain-concussion. So Chris laughed and said I’m off to the country.
And she ran up and knocked at Ewan’s door and went in and found him not in bed, up, naked, a long, nice naked leg and that narrow waist that you envied in men, lovely folk men, he was standing and stretching, stark, the bandage gone from his head. No shyness in Ewan, just a cool disinterest, he turned and grinned I’m feeling my feet. Too hot to lie in bed. Chris: let’s take a holiday out in the country!
She said I was off for one on my own, his face fell a little, then he nodded All right. Have a good time.— But aren’t you coming? — Not if you want to be on your own. And Chris said that was daft, she would always want him, and he said that was nice, and meant it, with a sudden glint of a grey granite smile nipped across to where she stood and cuddled her, funny to be cuddled by a naked man, she made out she was shocked, for fun, and he didn’t see that, said Oh, sorry, and went back to his clothes. A minute Chris stood with the queerest feeling of lostness, staring at him, fun was beyond Εwan.
Then, because she knew that couldn’t be helped, daft to expect him other than he was, she said Be ready in half an hour, and went down to her room and changed, looked at her clothes and found
a light frock, took off all she wore and looked at herself, as of old, with cool scrutiny, seeing mirrored her face with the broad cheekbones, seeing the long white lines of thigh and waist and knee, not very much need to envy men. The queer years that I’ve been with you! she said to the earnest thing in the mirror, and the shadow-self smiled back with golden eyes, shadow and self no longer woe, light-hearted suddenly as she dressed in haste to be gone for a day from Duncairn and herself.
She went into the sitting-room for a book, the place half in darkness, half the blinds drawn against the sting of the sun without. And the place wasn’t deserted as usually it was, Miss Johns was sitting in the biggest chair, on her heels, not reading, chin in hand looking out through the window, a little lost pussy-cat Chris thought, with her trim black hair and her lobeless ears. She smiled up at Chris with that fenceless smile that came when the brassy shyness went: and Chris was moved to an impulse again. I’m going for a jaunt to the country today. Would you like to come—if you’ve nothing else to do?
She hesitated a minute, flushed, demure: I’d love to. Terribly. Only—I’ve no money. And in a sudden rush of confidence was telling Chris she’d come dead broke from Dundee and wouldn’t get an advance until Wednesday, she’d nothing till then and had settled herself to mope the weekend in Windmill Place. Chris said that didn’t matter, she’d pay, and Miss Johns could pay her back some time; and the pussy-cat was shyer than ever, and Chris asked her name, and she said, Oh, Ellen. Helen really, you know, but when Dad came down from London to work in Dundee I went to High School and they mis-spelt me Ellen…. And Chris had almost expected that, she couldn’t have been anything else but an Ellen!
She was dressed and down in the sitting-room a short minute before Εwan came down. Chris said Ellen Johns— Ewan Tavendale. He’s my son—sometimes. Ellen’s coming out with us on our jaunt. And Ewan, un-boylike, wasn’t shy a bit, he said that would be nice, grey granite eyes on Ellen Johns as though she were a chapter on phosphor bronze, they were much of the same straight height and look, both dark and cool, Ellen cool as he was, no blush now, indifferently polite to each other. And a queer unease came on Chris that minute as she looked from one to the other: as though she were sitting in a theatre-stall and watching the opening of a dark, queer play.