A Scots Quair

  And here the sub-editor who wrote the leaders stopped and scratched his head in some doubt and stared at the Spring rain pelting Duncairn and streaming from the gutters of the grey granite roofs. He wondered a moment what had really happened when the furniture was smashed in two barrack- rooms and five rounds issued to the NCO’S? Better cut out that bit and keep bloody vague. Something about the absolute and unswerving loyalty of our Army and Navy throughout the hundreds of years of their history? What about Parker and the Mutiny at the Nore? Or, closer in memory, the Navy at Invergordon? Or the Highlanders in France? … Better miss it all out. Some blah about the bloody hunger-march now—

  … In civil affairs the same state of things, culminating in the organizing of this hunger march down through Scotland and England to London. Hunger—there was none anywhere in Duncairn. For their own ends extremists were deluding the unemployed into the privations of a march that would profit them nothing, a march already disowned by official Labour—

  . . . . .

  Bailie Brown said Ay, B’God that was right, the Labour Party would have nothing to do with it: if the unemployed would wait another three years and put the Labour Party back in power, their troubles would all be solved for them. But of course it was no class party, Labour: wasn’t it Labour had instituted the Means Test? It stood for a sound and strong government, justice for all, peace and progress, sound economy and defence of our rights…. And hurrying to the police court at ten o’clock he sentenced two keelies to two months a-piece, for obstructing the police near the Labour Exchange, and to show the low brutes what Reform would be like—

  . . . . .

  The Reverend MacShilluck said straight from the pulpit we could see the mind of Moscow again, deluding our unemployed brothers, ahhhhhhhhhhhh, why didn’t the Government take a stern stand and put down these activities of the anti-Christ? The unemployed were fully provided for and the Kirk was here to guide and to counsel. Straitened means and times were the test-gauge of God….

  And he wondered what Pootsy would have for lunch; and finished the service and got into the car and drove home, the streets shining white in the rain. And he let himself into the Manse, rubbing his hands, and called for the woman to come take his coat. But he heard no reply, the place sounded empty; and he couldn’t find her ben in the kitchen or yet upstairs or yet in the sitting-room. In the dining-room he came on his desk smashed open and gaping, the Kirk fund gone, and where had the silver gone from the sideboard? But there in the middle of the desk was a note: I’ve cleared off at last and taken my wages—with a little bit extra as a kind of a tip for sticking your dirty habits so long. Just try and prosecute and I’ll show you up so you can’t show your face anywhere in Duncairn—

  . . . . .

  In Paldy Parish and the Gallowgate, in Kirrieben, Eccles- griegs and Lower Footforthie, folk stood and debated with a bit of a laugh this hunger march that the Reds were planning. And those that had jobs said Christ, look out, they’re just leading you off to get broken heads, they don’t care a damn for themselves or any other, the Communionists, the sods aren’t canny. And those that hadn’t jobs said Maybe ay, maybe no. Who got the pac rates raised if it wasn’t the Reds, tell us that?

  Not that you were a Red, Christ, no, you had more sense, and you wouldn’t be found in this daft-like March, you hadn’t the boots for it for one thing. And the wife said Mind, Jim … or Sam … or Rob … you’re not being taken in by this coarse March of the Reds, are you now? And you said to her Away to hell. Think I’ve gone gyte?; and took a stroll out, all the Gallowgate dripping and drookèd, most folk indoors but chaps here and there nipping in and out of the wynds and courts, what mucking palaver was on with them now?

  Then, afore you could do a sneak back and miss him, there was Big Jim Trease bearing down upon you, crying your name, he’d been looking for you as one of the most active and sure of the chaps. The March wouldn’t be a march unless you were in it to stiffen the backbone of the younger lads. And you said To hell, you hadn’t any boots; and he said that they’d be provided all right and wrote your name down in a little book, and you saw Will’s there and Geordie’s and Ian’s and even old Malcolm’s—Christ, you could go if they were going; and it was true what Big Jim said, you wanted a pickle of the older men to put some guts in the younger sods—

  . . . . .

  And in and out through the courts and wynds and about the pubs all through that last week were Trease and that mad young devil Εwan Tavendale, prigging with folk and taking down names and raising the wind to buy chaps boots. The bobbies kept trailing after them, the sergeant called Feet and a couple of constables, who the hell were they to interfere? They’d never let up on young Tavendale since he’d shown up the explosion at Gowans and Gloag’s as the work of the Government testing out gas to see its effect in a crowded shed. So you guarded him and Trease in a bit of a bouroch, a bodyguard, like, wherever they went, young Tavendale whistling and joking about it, a clever young Bee—and Christ, how he could fight! They said he was a devil with the queans as well, though you hadn’t heard that he’d bairned one yet.

  . . . . .

  Trease said the last afternoon to Ewan that he’d better get home and put in a bit sleep, he’d want it afore setting out the morn to tackle the chave of the march down south, the windy five hundred miles to London. Lucky young devil that he was to be going, Trease wished it was him that was leading the March, but the ec had given its instructions for Ewan and intended keeping him down there in London as a new organizer—right in the thick…. And for God’s sake take care on the line of march to keep the sods from straying or stealing or raising up trouble through lying with queans, they’d find the Labour locals en route were forced to give them shelter and help, never heed that, never heed that, rub it well in through all the speeches that the workers had no hope but the Communist Party.

  Ewan said with a laugh that Jim needn’t worry, rape Labour’s pouches, but not its wenches, he’d got that all fixed; well, so long, comrade. You’ll lead us out with the band tomorrow? And Trease said he would, and then So long, Ewan, and they shook hands, liking each other well, nothing to each other, soldiers who met a moment at night under the walls of a town yet unstormed.

  The workmen from Murray’s Mart had come up and bade in the house all the afternoon tirring the rooms of their furniture. Chris had made the two men each a cup of tea, they’d sat in the kitchen and drank it, fell grateful: You’ll be moving to a smaller house, then, mistress? Chris said Yes, and leaving Duncairn, and the older man gave his bit head a shake when he heard the place she was moving to. He doubted she’d be gey lonely, like. He was all for the toun himself, he was.

  Now, in the early fall of the evening, Chris went from room to room of the house, locking the doors and seeing the windows were snibbed up against the beat of the wind. The floors sent up a hollow echo to her tread, in Miss Murgatroyd’s room a hanky lay in a corner, mislaid, she’d be missing it the morn and maybe sending for it. She’d said Eh me, she was Such Sorry that the place was breaking up, but maybe for the best, maybe for the best, she’d be Awful Comfortable in her new place she was sure. And would Mrs Ogilvie take this as a Small Bit Present? And this for young Mr Ewan, if he’d have it?—two Awful Nice books about the ancient Scots, such powerful they were in magic, Mr Ewan had once read the books and So Liked them.

  Chris closed that door and went ben the corridor, to Archie Clearmont’s, and peeped in a minute; he’d flushed, standing in that doorway, trunk behind him: I say, I’m damnably sorry to leave. Given you a lot of trouble, often. I say—and flushed again, looking at her. And Chris had known and smiled, known what he wanted, and kissed him, and watched him go striding away, and thought, kind, Nice boy; and forgotten him.

  Nothing in here, nor in Mr Quaritch’s, except the pale patches along the walls where his books had rested, still the fug of his pipe. He’d said You were never meant for this, anyhow. Mind if I ask: Is your husband coming back? Chris had shaken her head and said No, t
hey had separated, Ake was settling in Saskatchewan. And Neil had fidgeted and then proposed, she could get a divorce, he had some money saved, get a decent house and he wouldn’t much bother her. When she shook her head he gave a sigh: Well, luck go with you if you’re not for me.

  Mr Piddle hadn’t bidden good-bye at all, he’d brought a cab and loaded in his goods, and gone cycling off in the rear of it, head down, neck out, without a He-he! And, queer, that had hurt Chris a bit she found—that the funny thing couldn’t have said good-bye. The cracked pane in his window was winking in the light from the lamps new-lit outside as she looked round his room; then closed it and locked it. That was the lot. Oh no, there was one.

  So she climbed up the stairs and stood in that, the room above her own, next to Ewan’s, half-dark and quite empty but for its shadows. It had had no lodger a three months now, Ellen Johns herself had never come back from that week-end she’d gone away with Ewan: Ewan himself had come back mud-splashed as though he’d been walking the roads like a tink. And then next day a messenger had come with a little note, asking Mrs Ogilvie if she’d pack Ellen’s things, Ellen was too busy to come herself and here was a week’s pay in place of notice. And she hoped Mrs Ogilvie would be awfully happy….

  Chris had ceased wondering on that long ago; but now, going down to the kitchen where Ewan sat and the fire was whooming and the supper near ready, she minded it as in an ancient dream. As she closed the door Ewan looked up, he’d been deep for hours in papers and lists, marking off items of marching equipment, addresses, routes, notes for speeches: Chris had looked over his shoulder earlier and seen the stuff and left him a-be. But now, with that distant stare upon her, she asked if he’d ever seen Ellen since then?

  He said Seen whom? and looked blank, and then shook his head. Not a glimpse. Why?

  Chris said Oh nothing, she’d just wondered about her; and Ewan nodded, forgetting them both, finishing his lists while she laid the supper, the house unquiet without furnishing, filled with rustlings and little draughts. Then she called Ewan to supper and they ate in silence, night without close down on Duncairn.

  He said suddenly and queerly The Last Supper, Chris. Will you manage all right where you’re going?

  She said that he need have no fear of that, she was going to what she wanted, the same as he was going. And they smiled at each other, both resolute and cool, and Chris cleared the table and re-stoked the fire and they sat either side and watched the fire-lowe and heard the spleiter of the wet on the panes. And Ewan sat with his jaw in his hand, the briskness dropped from him, the hard young keelie with the iron jaw softening a moment to a moment’s memory: Do you mind Segget Manse and the lawn in Spring?

  Chris said that she minded, and smiled upon him, in pity, seeing a moment how it shook him, she herself beyond Such quavers ever again. But his thoughts had gone back to other things in Segget: that day that Robert had died in the kirk—did Chris mind the creed he’d bade men seek out, a creed as clear and sharp as a knife? He’d never thought till this minute that that was what he himself had found—in a way, he supposed, Robert wouldn’t have acknowledged, a sentimentalist and a softie, though a decent sort, Robert.

  Chris stirred the fire, looking into it, hearing the Spring wind rising over Duncairn, unending Spring, unending Spring! …. Rain tomorrow, Ewan said from the window, rotten for the march, but they’d got those boots. Then he came and sat down and looked at her, and asked her, teasing, of what she was dreaming. She said Of Robert and this faith of yours. The world’s sought faiths for thousands of years and found only death or unease in them. Yours is just another dark cloud to me—or a great rock you’re trying to push up a hill.

  He said it was the rock was pushing him; and sat dreaming again, who had called Robert dreamer: only for a moment, on the edge of tomorrow, all those tomorrows that awaited his feet by years and tracks Chris would never see, dropping the jargons and shields of his creed, thinking again as once when a boy, openly and honestly, kindly and wise:

  There will always be you and I, I think. Mother. It’s the old fight that maybe will never have a finish, whatever the names we give to it—the fight in the end between freedom and GOD.

  The night was coming in fast Chris saw from her seat on the summit of the Barmekin. Far over, right of Bennachie’s ridges, a gathering of gold cloud gleamed a moment then dulled to dun red. The last of the light would be going soon.

  Alow her feet, under the hills, she could see the hiddle of Cairndhu, all settled for the night as she’d left it, the two kye milked and the chickens meated, her corn coming fine in the little park that ran up the hill, its green a jade blur in the soft summer light. Tomorrow she’d be out to tackle the turnips, they were coming up fairly choked with weed.

  At first they’d been doubtful about letting her the place, doubtful of a woman body at all. But they’d long forgotten her father, John Guthrie, and the ill ta’en in which he had flitted from Echt twenty-three years before. To them she was just a widow-body, Ogilvie, wanting to take on the coarse little place that hadn’t had a tenant this many a year. She’d moved in early in the April, setting the house to rights, working till she near bared her hands to the bone, scrubbing it out both but and ben, the room where she herself had been born, the kitchen where she’d sat and heard her mother, long syne, that night the twins were born…. And sometimes in the middle of that work in the house or tinkling a hoe out in the parks she’d close her eyes a daft minute and think nothing indeed of it all had happened—Kinraddie, Segget, the years in Duncairn—that beside her Will her brother was bending to weed, her father coming striding peak-faced from the house, she might turn and see her mother’s face…. And she’d open her eyes and see only the land, enduring, encompassing, the summer hills gurling in the summer heat, unceasing the wail of the peesies far off.

  And the folk around helped, were kind in their way, careless of her, she would meet them and see them by this road and gate, they knew little of her, she less of them, she had found the last road she wanted and taken it, concerning none and concerned with none….

  Crowned with mists, Bennachie was walking into the night: and Chris moved and sat with her knees hand-clasped, looking far on that world across the plain and the day that did not die there but went east, on and on, over all the world till the morning came, the unending morning somewhere on the world. No twilight land anywhere for shade, sun or night the portion of all, her little shelter in Cairndhu a dream of no-life that could not endure. And that was the best deliverance of all, as she saw it now, sitting here quiet—that that Change who ruled the earth and the sky and the waters underneath the earth, Change whose face she’d once feared to see, whose right hand was Death and whose left hand Life, might be stayed by none of the dreams of men, love, hate, compassion, anger or pity, gods or devils or wild crying to the sky. He passed and repassed in the ways of the wind, Deliverer, Destroyer and Friend in one.

  Over in the Hill of Fare, new-timbered, a little belt of rain was falling, a thin screen that blinded the going of the light; behind, as she turned, she saw Skene Loch glimmer and glow a burnished minute; then the rain caught it and swept it from sight and a little wind soughed up the Barmekin. And now behind wind and rain came the darkness.

  Lights had sprung up far in the hills, in little touns for a sunset minute while the folk tirred and went off to their beds, miles away, thin peeks in the summer dark.

  Time she went home herself.

  But she still sat on as one by one the lights went out and the rain came, beating the stones about her, and falling all that night while she still sat there, presently feeling no longer the touch of the rain or hearing the sound of the lapwings going by.

  THE END OF

  a scots quair

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  Grey Granite: Curtain Raiser

  The following fragment is all that survives of the rejected Prelude to the novel. It is in nls ms 26040(3–7), and is printed by kin
d permission of Mrs Rhea Martin, Gibbon’s daughter, and the National Library of Scotland. It consists of five quarto pages of Gibbon’s own first-draft typing. Typographical errors have been corrected and spelling brought into line with that of the first edition.

  The City of Dundon stands midway the coast where they cease their speaking of beets and speens and take to a gabble of buits and spunes. To the north (but only if you’re country and ignorant) they still bake cakes and the folk are meated often enough on a dish of sowans; to the south the old wives still cougg above a girdle set with fine baps of bannocks, thick with fat and dripping with grease. Along that coast in the trawler fleets you come to the city of Aberdeen, genteel with its fine university and proud with a clatter of awful trams, and as full of fine tales as an egg of meat; but if you sail south you come to Dundee, nestling and pressing like an unwashed bairn under the flow of the Sidlaws, dark, you may not see Dundee for a while for the smoke, but you’ll smell it long ere your eyes light on it; and what there is there, and what it is like none know unless they’re native to the place, or sent to the jail on an awful crime.

  When that Greek man Pytheas sailed these coasts long syne, he halted his boat one season by a little place, a wide bay that stretched with a cream and a froth of grey waters, ebbing and swaying into red mists, late autumn, the waters flung long hands upon the beaches, tearing at his craft. But there he cast anchor, and landed his men, strangers came down to trade with them, dark, hairy men of that Pictish coast, bringing corn and the skins of beasts, and Pytheas and his men planted there corn and built them huts against the sweep and the ding of that ill coast’s rains, pelting and salt-ridden, and watched the winter fade. Spring came with a whirling of sudden rains, and they took to the creaming seas again, and sailed north, out of the life of that land but that the Picts drifted here and built them a city of the long earth-houses, the dark broad men with their Kelt overlords, proud, with long, bronze daggers and curled hair, the men of the chariots and the red blood-sacrifice, kittle folk of a bloody mind and ill heart.