ALL AROUND her the street walls were dripping in fog as Chris Colquohoun made her way up the Gallowgate, yellow fog that hung tiny veils on her eyelashes, curled wet, and had in her throat the acrid taste of an ancient smoke. Here the slipper-slide of the pavement took a turn that she knew, leading up to the heights of Windmill Place, and shortly, out of the yellow swath, she saw come shambling the lines of the Steps with their iron hand-rail like a famished snake. She put out her hand on that rail, warm, slimy, and paused afore tackling the chave of the climb, breathing deeply, she could hear her heart. The netbagful of groceries on her arm ached—she looked down through wet lashes at the shape of the thing—as though it was the bag that ached, not her arm….
Standing still so breathing that little while she was suddenly aware of the silence below—as though all the shrouded town also stood still, deep-breathing a minute in the curl of the fog—stilling the shamble and grind of the trams, the purr of the buses in Royal Mile, the clang and swing of the trains in Grand Central, the swish and roll and oily call of the trawlers taking the Forthie’s flood—all pausing, folk wiping the fog from their eyes and squinting about them an un-eident minute—
Daft, she said to herself, and began climbing the stairs. Midway their forty steps a lamp came in sight, at last, glistening, it flung a long dirty hand down to help her. Her face came into its touch, it blinked surprised, not expecting that face or head or the glistering bronze coils of hair that crowned them—hair drawn in spiralled pads over each ear, fog-veiled, but shining. Chris halted again here under the lamp, thirty-eight, so she couldn’t run up these steps, stiff’s an old horse on a Mounth hill-road.
Old at thirty-eight? You’ll need a bath-chair at fifty. And at sixty—why, as they’d say in Segget, they’ll have carted you off to the creamery!
Panting, she smiled wry under the lamp at the foul tale told of Duncairn crematorium—the foul story that had struck her as funny enough even hearing it after the burning of Robert…. Oh, mixed and queer soss that living was, dying, dying slowly a bit of yourself every year, dying long ago with that dim lad, Ewan, dying in the kirk of Segget the time your hand came red from Robert’s dead lips—and yet midmost the agonies of those little deaths thinking a foul tale flouting them funny!
Daft as well as decrepit, she told herself, but with a cool kindness, and looked over the Steps at the mirror hung where the stairs swung west, to show small loons the downward perils as they pelted blue hell on a morning to school. She saw a woman who was thirty-eight, looked less, she thought, thirty-five maybe in spite of those little ropes of grey that marred the loops of the coiled bronze hair, the crinkles about the sulky mouth and the eyes that were older than the face. Face thinner and straighter and stranger than once, as though it were shedding mask on mask down to one last reality—the skull, she supposed, that final reality. Funny she could stand here and face up to that, not feel sick, just faintly surprised! Once it had been dreadful and awful to think of—the horror of forgotten flesh taken from enduring bone, the masks and veils of life away, down to those grim essentials. Now it left her neither sick nor sorry, she found, watching a twinkle in sulky gold eyes above the smooth jut of the wide cheekbones. Not sad at all, just a silly bit joke of a middle-aged woman with idle thoughts in a pause on the Steps of Windmill Brae.
Below the quiet broke with the scrunch of a tram wheeling down from the lights of Royal Mile to the Saturday quietude of Gallowgate. Chris turned, looked, saw the shiver of sparks through the fog, syne the sailing brute swing topaz in sight, swaying and swearing, with aching feet as it ran for its depot in Alban Street. Its passage seemed to set fire to the fog, a little wind came and blew the mist-ash, and there was Grand Central smoking with trains. And now, through the thinning bouts of the fog, Chris could see the lighted clock of Thomson Tower shine sudden a mile or so away over the tumbled rigs of grey granite.
Nine o’clock.
She lowered the netbag and stretched her arms, saw herself wheel and stretch in the mirror, slim still, long curves, half-nice she half-thought. Her hands came down on the railing and held it, no need to hurry tonight for a change, Ma Cleghorn would have seen to supper for them all—the nine o’clock Gallop to the Guts as she called it. No need to hurry, if only this once in the peace of the ill-tasting fog off the Forthie, in the blessed desertion of the Windmill Steps so few folk used in Duncairn toun. Rest for a minute in the peace of the fog—or nearly at peace but for its foul smell.
Like the faint, ill odour of that silent place where they’d ta’en Robert’s body six months before—
She’d thought hardly at all what she would do after Robert’s funeral that so shocked Segget, she’d carried out all the instructions in the will and gone back with Ewan to the empty Manse, Ewan made her tea and looked after her, cool and efficient, only eighteen, though he acted more like twenty-eight—at odd minutes he acted eighty-two she told him as he brought her the tea in the afternoon stillness of the sitting-room.
He grinned the quick grin that was boy-like enough, and wandered the room a bit, tall and dark, unrestlessly, while she drank the tea. He hated tea himself, with a bairn-like liking for bairny things—milk and oatcakes would have contented Ewan from breakfast to dinner and some more for his supper. Ayont the windows in the waning of the afternoon Chris could see the frozen glister of night on the Grampians, swift and near-moving, Ewan’s shoulder and sleekèd dark head against it…. Then he turned from the window. Mother, I’ve got a job.
She’d been sunk in a little drowse of sheer ache, tiredness from the funeral and the day in Duncairn, she woke stupid at his speak and only half-hearing: A job?—who for?
He said Why, for little Ewan Tavendale all by his lone. But you’ll have to sign the papers first.
—But it’s daft, Ewan, you haven’t finished college yet, and then there’s the university!
He shook the sleekèd head: Not for me. I’m tired of college and I’m not going to live off you. And thought for a minute and added with calm sense, Especially as you haven’t much to live off.
So that was that and he fetched the papers, Chris sat and read the dreich things appalled, papers of apprenticeship for four years to the firm of Gowans and Gloag in Duncairn. Smelters and steel manufacturers—But, Ewan, you’d go daft in a job like that.
He said he’d try not to, awfully hard, especially as it was the best job he could come by—and I can come out in weekends and see you quite often. Duncairn’s only a twenty miles off.
—And where do you think I am going to bide?
He looked at her curiously with cool, remote eyes, black didn’t suit him, hair and skin over dark. Eh? Oh, here in Segget, aren’t you? You used to like it before Robert died.
Sense the way he would speak of Robert, not heartlessly, just with indifference, as much as to say what did it matter, would a godly snuffling help Robert now? But a queer curiosity moved Chris to ask Does anything ever matter to you at all, Ewan?
—Oh, lots. Where you’re going to stay, for one thing, when I’ve gone.
He’d slipped out of that well, Chris thought with a twinkle, sitting in the deep armchair on her heels, her head down bent, he ran his finger along the curve of her neck, coolly, with liking, as she looked up at last:
I’m coming to bide with you in Duncairn.
*
When they’d sold the furniture and paid off the debts there was barely a hundred and fifty pounds left, Segget took the matter through hand at the Arms, the news got about though both Chris and Ewan had been secret about it and never let on. But Segget would overhear what you said though you whispered the thing at the dead of night ten miles from a living soul in the hills. And it fair enjoyed itself at the news, God man! that was a right dight in the face for that sulky, stuck-up bitch at the Manse, her with her braw clothes and her proud-like ways, never greeting when her man died there in the pulpit, just as cool as though the childe were a load of swedes, not greeting even, or so ’twas said, when they burned the corp in there in Duncairn. And such a like funeral to give a minister, burning the man in a creamery!
And the Segget Provost, Hairy Hogg the sutor, said the thing was a judgment on the coarse brutes both, he never spoke ill of the dead, not him, but what had his forefather, the poet Burns, said?—
Ake Ogilvie the joiner was having a dram and he sneered real coarse: You and your Burns! The gawpus blethered a lot of stite afore they shovelled him into the earth and sent all the worms for a mile around as drunk as tinks at Paldy Fair. But I’m damned if he’d ever a tongue like yours. What ill did Robert Colquohoun ever do you —or his mistress either, I’d like to know, except to treat you as a human being?—B’God, they showed themselves soft enough there!
Alec the Provost’s son was in having a nip, he wanted to fight Ake Ogilvie for that, the coarse Bulgar of a joiner to curse that way at a poor old sod like the Provost his father. But the wife of the hotel-keeper was back of the bar, folk called her the Blaster and Blasphemer for short, she was awful against a bit curse now and then: and she nipped Alec short as a new-libbed calf. None of your cursings in here, she cried, I won’t have the Lord’s name taken in vain. Alec habbered he’d nothing against the Lord, it wasn’t Him he’d called a Bulgar, but the other one—and got in a soss, fairly upset at the Blaster’s glower. Folk thought her an interfering old runt, ay God! she’d find her custom go.
So the most in the bar took a taik to the door with their drams in their hands and sat on the steps and looked at the sky, evening in Spring, bonny the hills, the seven o’clock dirling down Segget High Brig, peesies out on the long flat field that went mounting up to the bend of the hills. You minded Colquohoun, how he’d haunt those hills, the temples of God the creature would call them, him that died in the pulpit preaching a sermon—fair heathen it was, ay, a judgment of God. And now this slip of a wife of his had less than a two hundred pounds to her name, living up there in one room, folk said, all by her lone now that her loon, Εwan (ay, a son by her first bit man) had gone to work in Duncairn toun. It just showed you what happened to proud-like dirt, she’d intended the loon for an education and a braw-like life in a pulpit, maybe, nothing to do but habber and haver and glower over a collar on back to front: and instead he’d be just a common working chap.
Ake Ogilvie had new come out and heard that last speak of wee Peter Peat’s. Well, God, you’re common enough, he said, though it’s damn little work you ever manage. And then he went swaggering across the Square, past the statue of the War Memorial Angel, a trig-like lassie with a pair of fine hips, and spat at it, coarse-like, fair a tink Ake, aye sticking up for the working men, you were maybe a working man yourself but were hardly such a fool as stick up for the brutes.
Syne Feet the Policeman came dandering along, he was due to leave for a job in Duncairn, folk cried out Ay, Mr Leslie, fine night, respectful-like, for he’d fair got on. And he stuck his thumbs in his belt and said Ay, majestic-like, like a steer with the staggers, and squashed out his great feet and looked up at the Angel as though to speir where she’d mislaid her stays. Syne folk saw that he’d gotten his sergeant’s stripes, he’d come out to give the bit things an air; and he said he was off to Duncairn in a week, he’d been kind of put in charge of the toun, you learned, him and some other skilly childes, or at least in a bit that they called Footforthie where the factories were and a lot of tink workers, low brutes, for they hadn’t a meek to their name and lived off the Broo and Ramsay MacDonald, draining the country and Ramsay dry. But did that content them?—No, faith, it didn’t, they were aye on the riot about something or other, stirred up by those ill-ta’en Bulgars, the Socialists…. Feet said that he’d use a firm hand, by God you thought if he used his feet there wouldn’t be a Socialist left in Duncairn that didn’t look like an accident with a rhubarb tart. God, how the meikle- houghed sod could blow!
Folk ganted a bit and began to taik off, but halted at the hint of a tasty bit news, and cried No, man? and came tearing back. What’s that? God be here! and Feet swelled out his chest and started to tell his tale over again.
And the gist of the thing when you got to the bree was that Sergeant Sim Leslie had been in Duncairn, on business, like, that very forenoon—colloguing with the other heads of the Police and learning the work that he’d have to take on. Well, he’d finished the business and looked out for lodgings, awful expensive up in Duncairn and you needed a fine salary, same as he had. The second bit place that he keeked intil was a boarding-house on Windmill Brae, fell swell it looked, a braw bit house on the high hill that rises over Duncairn. But the terms were hardly as much as he’d feared, and he clinched for a room with the mistress o’t, a meikle bit woman, Cleghorn the name.
Well, they had a bit crack when he’d ta’en the room and she told to Feet, fair newsy-like, she’d had the place all decorated of late at an awful expense she couldn’t have afforded but that she had advertised for a partner with a bit of silver to lay down as deposit, and syne help as a maid attending the lodgers. Feet had said Ay? and Well, that’s right fine, not caring a damn one way or the other till she mentioned the new bit partner’s name.
But when he heard that Feet fairly sat up, as every soul did now in front of the Arms: Mrs Colquohoun? Where might she come from? And the Cleghorn body had said From Segget. Her man was a minister-creature there, though I’m damned if she looks it, a fleet trig woman that could muck a byre more ready any day than snuffle a psalm. At that poor Feet was took sore aback, he never could stick the proud bitch at the Manse; but he’d made a deposit for the lodgings already and couldn’t well ask for the silver back. So off he’d come home and got ready to pack—and faith, did you ever hear the like of that?
Afore night was out all Segget had heard, and half of the Mearns afore the next day, postmen ran for miles over parks with the news, old Hogg hammered four soles on the same pair of boots he was in such a fash to give the tale out. And when Mrs Colquohoun went down to the station, straight and cool, with her trig-like back, her hair coiled over each lug, fair daft, some thought it bonny, you were damned if you did—the half of Segget was keeking from its windows, and wondering about her, how she’d get on, what was she thinking, what was she wearing, had she had a bath on the previous night, did she ever think of a man to sleep with, how much did she measure around the hips, could she greet if she liked, what was her temper, how much of the hundred and fifty was left, was that loon of hers, Εwan, as dour as he looked, would he land in jail or would he get on?
At half-past five the clock would go birr! in the narrow long room you had ta’en for yourself, you’d wake with a start and find yourself sprawled in weariness right across the great bed, dark the guff of the early Spring, no cheep of birds here on Windmill Brae, clatter of the clock as it started again with a hoast and a rasp; and you’d reach for the thing and switch it off and lie still a minute, hands under your neck in the pad of your hair, fingers rough-seamed and scraping your skin. And you’d stretch out under the bedclothes, long, till your muscles all creaked, legs, hips and ribs, blessedly, you’d still a passable figure. Syne you’d throw off the blankets and get from the bed, the floorcloth cold as a Christian’s heart under the naked soles of your feet—off with your nightie and stretch again and look from the window at the coming of dawn, lacing its boots and grabbing its muffler and pelting across the roofs of Duncairn. In a hurry the same you’d wriggle in your vest, stockings and knickers, slip on your dress, getting warm already in spite of the floor and the frozen gleam of grey granite outside. And you’d open the door and go down the stairs, quick, and looping back your hair, to the cold prison walls of the kitchen, smelly, fling open the window, in rushed the air and a smell of cats you could cut with a knife. At first that smell had made you near sick, even Jock the house-cat, a clean beast enough, but you’d no time for such luxuries as sickness now-a-days, lighting the gas, the kitchen range, your hands swift on kettles and frying-pan, eyes on the clock and ears wide open for the first stir of life in the morning’s morgue.
At six you were up at Ma Cleghorn’s room with a cup of tea and a knock at her door and go in and draw back the window- curtains, let up the blinds, bang! She’d wake up and groan Is’t you, Chris lass? Losh, you spoil me, just, she meant the tea, and you’d say Oh, havers, she spoke Duncairn and you’d got the same gait. And Ma Cleghorn would give another bit groan and drink up the tea and loup from the bed, swack as you like, an old woman only a minute afore but filled now with tea and a fury to work. The Bulgars’ll soon be on the howl for their meat. Whatever made me take to the keeping of lodgings?
You’d say A BOARDING-HOUSE, please, Mrs Cleghorn, one of the jokes that the two of you shared, Ma’d give a great snifter through her meikle nose: Boarding? B’God, it’s leathering they want. And I haven’t a pair of bloomers to my name that’s not darned so a body can hardly sit down. I’ve a fair bit padding of my own to ease it, you haven’t, get out of the damn trade, lass, afore you’re like me and take to bloomers instead of them frilly things you wear—God be here, they’ll kill you yet dead with cold. Aren’t your legs froze?
You’d say Not them; fine legs, and Ma struggling into her blouse would say You’re no blate. Who told you they’re fine? And you’d say Oh, men, and she’d nod to that, great red face topped with greying hair like the face of a war-horse out of Isaiah (as you’d once thought, minding back through the months to Robert’s reading from the Bible in Segget).—Ay, no doubt they have, and enjoyed them fine. And would again if you gave them the chance.
Syne you’d to tear to the kitchen again, in time for the ring from Miss Murgatroyd’s room, dying for her tea the poor old wretch, solemn you’d carry it up to her room, the best in the house, three guineas a week. She’d quaver out of a lace nightcap: Is that you, Mrs Colquohoun? And you have my tea? Oh, that’s Such Fine, she was awful genteel, poor spinster body with her pensions and potterings, not a soul in the world hers and respectable down to her shrivelled toes, wabbling hands and meek quiet eyes, Episcopalian, serving tea for the whist drives up at the Unionist Club…. And Ma Cleghorn, watching her taik down the street, would ask who in God’s name would be an old maid? She’d often used to think when her Jim was alive and would come back from the Fish Market stinking so bad that his shirts hung out on a washing day would bring the cats scraiching for miles around—she’d used often to think I wish I were single, trig on my own, not handled, not kenned, with nobody’s seed ever laid in me! But losh, when he died she had minded him sore, night on night and would fain have had him again though he smelt like a kipper mislaid in a drain when he’d cuddle you, feuch! They were sosses, were men, but you’d only to look at the Murgatroyd creature to make you mad to go tearing out and grab the first soss that you met in breeks—Half-past six, Chris; will you waken your Εwan?
He slept in one of the two rooms of the upper floor, the other empty, his window looked down on the glare of Footforthie at night that changed to a sick yellow furnace- glow, unstill, staining the sky on the morning’s edge. You’d wanted him to change to another room, and he’d asked you why and you’d told him he’d surely get sick of it—working down there all day and seeing it all night. But he’d shaken his shapely, sleekèd head, no fancies or flim-flams with Εwan at all: It’ll neither wake me nor send me to sleep. Only a light in the sky, you know, Chris.—So you’d turn the handle of his door and go in and meet the sting of the sea-wind there, the window wide open, the curtains flowing, Εwan dim in the light of the early dawn, lying so still, so still he slept that near every morning you’d be startled the same, feared that he lay there dead, so quiet, you’d shake his shoulder and see as you bent the blankets he’d thrust away from himself, pyjamas open wide to the waist, curling dark down on a boy’s breast. Strange to think that this was your Ewan, once yours and so close, so tiny, so small and weak, sexless, a baby, that had grown a body tall as your own, slimmer, stronger, secret and strange, blossom and fruit from that seed of yours…. In a queer pity you’d look and shake him awake: Ewan, time you were up!
He’d start awake quietly, at once, like a cat, and look at you with those deep, cool eyes, neither grey nor green, grey granite eyes. All right. Thanks. No, I don’t want tea. I’ll get an apple for myself, mother. MOTHER! I said I’d get it for myself! And he’d be out of bed and have reached the dish and caught an apple afore you got near. You’ve enough to do without waiting on me.
—But I like waiting on you. Wouldn’t you wait on me?
—I suppose so, if you were sick or insane. What’s the time? And lean out half-naked from the window ledge to peer over Duncairn to Thomson Tower. Splendid. I’ve time for a dip in the Forthie.
He’d be out of the house as you gained the kitchen, an uproar by then of banging pans, Ma Cleghorn cooking porridge and bacon and sausages and coffee and cocoa and tea, and swearing out loud at the young maid, Meg, who slept at her home away down in the Cowgate and was supposed to come up each morning at seven. Call that seven?—Then you’re blind as well’s sweir. Stack up the range and be nippy about it. Mrs Colquohoun, will you lay the table?
You were aye Mrs Colquohoun when Meg was about, Ma Cleghorn treating you distant, polite, for the sake of discipline, so she said. You’d gathered the way of setting the table in the big ben room so quick your eyes hardly followed your fingers, porridge plates for Sim Leslie (who’d come from Segget where they’d called him Feet) and Mr George Piddle, the Runner reporter, thin and he-he’ing, minus his hair so that he could go bald-headed for news. Bacon for Miss Murgatroyd and Mr Neil Quaritch: Mr Quaritch worked on the Runner as well, a sub-editor creature, aye reading books and sloshing them to death in the Runner next day. But you rather liked the wee ferret man, red eyes and red hair and a red nose as well, and a straggle of beard on an unhappy chin, Ewan said he’d gone sozzled with reading rot rather than with knocking back gills of Glenlivet…. Mixed grill for Miss Ena Lyon, the typist, powdered and lipsticked, and awful up-to-date, baggy a bittie below the eyes and a voice like a harried peahen, poor lass. Porridge for young Mr Clearmont, nice loon who went to the University and was awful keen on music and jokes, you could never make head nor tail of either as he always guffawed out, young and hearty, right at the point—if there was a point. Ma Cleghorn didn’t think much of him, she said if ever he’d a thought in his head it’d be easy to tell it, you’d hear the damn thing rattling about like a stone in a tin. But she was jealous a bit, you thought, of the lad’s university and books and book- learning…. Bacon for young John Cushnie, all red, the clerk in Raggie Robertson’s Drapery Depot, half-sulky, half-shy and would spend half an hour roping up his neck in a speckled tie, he shared Archie Clearmont’s room but nought else…. Eight o’clock and you hit the gong, breakfast all ready set on the table.
And down they’d all pour and sit in about, Miss Murgatroyd sitting neat as a pin, Such Fine, and eating her grape-fruit up like a sparrow pecking at a bit of dung (you laughed: but you sometimes wished that Ma wouldn’t say those things about folk so often: the picture stuck, true or untrue, and you never saw them in real likeness again); Sergeant Sim Leslie supping his porridge and goggling at you over his collar; Ewan eating quick, clean and indifferent, lost in his thoughts or else in a book, all squiggly lines and figures and drawings; Miss Ena Lyon, complete with complexion, eating her bacon and talking to Clearmont, he’d been to a concert the night before and Miss Lyon was saying she liked music as well—just loved a talkie with a Catchy Choon. Poor Mr Piddle with his long thin neck and his long thin head, as bald as a neep and something the shape, would snap up his meat in a haste to be gone in search of news for the Daily Runner, a fine big paper, the pride of Duncairn, and awful useful for lining your shelves; Cushnie, red-eared and trying to speak English, would call out above the folds of his tie Will ye pass the cruet? I’m in a gey hurry. Me and Mr Robertson have the Spring Sale on; and Mr Neil Quaritch would push down his cup, May I have another, Mrs Colquohoun? he’d left his breakfast untasted as usual.
And Ma Cleghorn would sit at the top of the table, her big red face set square on its neck, sonsy and sturdy, you’d liked her from the first, she you, you supposed you’d neither of you frills, you’d seen over much of this queer thing Life to try hide from its face by covering your own with a ready-made complexion out of a jar, or ready-made morals from the Unionist Club, or ready-made fear and excitement and thrill out of the pages of the Daily Runner…. And you’d sit and stare at your own porridge plate till Ma would call out: Will you fill up the cups?
By ten the lot would have clattered away, on trams and buses, on foot and a-run, tripping along like a sparrow, Miss Murgatroyd, Mr Piddle whirring away on his bike like a snake going pelting back to the Zoo, Miss Ena Lyon with her heels so high that her shoulders drooped and her bottom stuck out, quite up-to-date, Εwan in dungarees, no hat, books under his arm, black hair almost blue, shinning down the Steps of Windmill Brae two at a time, hands in his pouches…. And they left the real work of the house to begin.
You and Ma Cleghorn couldn’t run to more help than Meg for the washing-up in the kitchen, Ma took the first floor with the dining-room and sitting-room and swept them and dusted them and tore up the rugs and went out to the back and hung them on the line and thrashed them to death in a shower of stour. You had the bedrooms, Ma’d asked if you’d mind—Some of them stink like a polecats den. You’d said you didn’t care, we all stank sometimes. And Ma had nodded, Fegs, and that’s true. But fancy you being willing to let on—you that was wed to a minister body!
You’d mind that speak as you redded the rooms, gathered the mats and pulled wide the curtains, opened the windows and made the beds, swept out and polished each of the rooms, emptied slops and carried down washing, and cleared the bathroom of razor blades and bits of paper stuck with shaving-soap hair, other things that Miss Murgatroyd would half-hide, so would Miss Lyon in a different way…. Wife to a minister—wife to Robert: it faded away in the stour of the days though only last Spring you had been in Segget, had slept beside him in those chill hours that had come trailing down a blanket of dark to cut you off one from the other, Robert sleeping sound while you woke and heard the wail of sleet from the Grampian haughs. All ended, put by, Robert himself no more than a name, you’d loved him so deep that the day he died something had broken in you, not in your heart, it didn’t break there, something in your belly went numb, still, and stayed so … but the queerness of things! You could hardly mind now the shape of his face—his eyes, were they grey or blue?—Oh God! … And you’d sometimes stop and feel sick to think how quickly even your memories went, as though you stood naked in an endless storm shrilling about you, wisp by wisp your garments went till at last you’d stand to all uncovered—love, pity, desire, hope, hate put by under the sail of the endless clouds over Cloud Howe, the Howe of the World—
Then you’d shake yourself to sense, get down with pail of water and a scrubbing-brush, scrub and scrub till your finger-nails, so smooth and round-shaped in your years at Segget, come jagged again, hacks in your fingers that caught the blankets as you turned in unease of a night and sent a shrill stream of pain up your hands. Queer to work again in such fashion, use all your body till you ached dead tired, by the time you’d finished the upper floor your hips were filled with a stinging and shooting, like a bees’ byke with bees, bad as having a baby, sweat in runnels either side your nose—you felt like a greasy dish-clout, just, ready to be wrung and hung out to dry. And when you got down to the kitchen at last Ma Cleghorn would skeugh at you over her specs, Fegs, lass, you take well with a slammock of work. Like a cup of tea?—Here, gi’me the basses, I’ll take them out while you sit down a minute. You’d say I’ll shake them myself, I’m fine, and she’d look at you grim, It’s your funeral, then. But die where it’s easy to spread out the corp.
A blessed minute that when you’d gotten back, though, sat down to drink the strong tea Ma made, hot, steaming and thick, Ma drinking another cup the other side of the table, Meg pleitering still at the kitchen sink. You felt all revived, throat, belly and—better not further. (Miss Murgatroyd you were sure never went further, Ma Cleghorn on the contrary seldom went higher.) You’d see yourself as you sat and drank, your head and hair and face and breast in the kitchen mirror over the range, flushed face, not pretty, it was never that, sulky eyes and the mouth men had liked well enough in your time—long ago, afore you grew old and took to scrubbing! … And you’d finish your tea and loup to your feet and be gone to finish the rest of the ploy, and be back in the kitchen to lend Ma a hand to plan out the dinner for those that came home—Mr Clearmont from the University, Ewan seldom, Mr Piddle sometimes, Mr Quaritch and Miss Ena Lyon never, John Cushnie when Raggie’s rag Sales would allow, Sergeant Sim Leslie sure as the clock.
Ma had a great cookery-book of her own, made up of recipes cut out of the papers, daft ones and good ones and plain damn silly ones, Ma’d say What stomachs some folk must have to eat the dirt that the papers say! But she cooked well enough, passable yourself, Jock the cat would sit and purr under the red-hot glow of the range, half-roasted the brute had been since his birth, and liked it: Ma said he’d enjoy hell. And she’d lift him aside with a meikle great foot, impatient- like, and he’d purr all the time, while the foot was under him, while he sailed through the air, while he landed with a thump out under the sink. And Meg would give a bit scraich of fear, and maybe drop a plate, inviting death.
In the first few days you’d been sorry for the lass, Ma Cleghorn treated her worse than dirt, bullying her, sneering at her, upbraiding Almighty God for making such a trauchle to pest decent folk. Syne you saw that Meg, thin, schlimpèd and pert, wasn’t feared a wee bit, sleekèd and sly with a sideways glint in her eyes at Ma, taking her in and her measure unfeared. And Ma that could skin a body alive with her tongue and hang out the hide in the sun to dry wouldn’t send Meg out on a message if it rained, heaped her plate with great helpings at dinner, and when she saw the bit maid over-trauchled with a job would swear at her and go tearing to help…. So you didn’t interfere but got on with your own work, plenty of that—how you’d ached at first afore dinner-time, hungry as you’d never been in a manse: genteel appetite going with all else, walking now with a quick and a hasting step not the long lope that had once been yours, face altering as well from the drowsy mask that had come on you under the yew-trees of Segget—waiting, half-asleep, sitting deep in a chair, for Maidie to bring tea out on the lawn, the peesies flying over Segget blue in smoke, smoke in sun smother, long ago, long ago; and Robert coming striding across the lawn, whistling—and you looked, and he hadn’t a face—
And once Ma came on you as you stood and wept, tearless, sobbing dry-eyed, and stared and knew, shook you and hugged you tight, it hurt: Don’t greet, nothing’s worth it, not a damn thing, no man that ever yet was, Chris! You’d stopped from that daft carry-on at once, shamed of yourself, bothering Ma, weeping like a fool over something as common as kale, losh, weren’t there thousands of widows in the world worse off than you and not snivelling like bairns? And you’d shaken Ma off, gentle as you could: I know. I’m just giving myself a pet. My father would have said it was salts I needed.
Dinner and the feeding of all the faces, funny to think a face was mainly for that; and then out shopping for the morn’s meat. You went down Windmill Steps in the blue Spring air, the grey granite walls rising about you, if the day was clear you’d see below Duncairn spread as a map for show, far off, north-east, the sheen of the Beach beyond the rolling green of the Links, Footforthie a smother of smoke ayont the Docks, the Fish Market and the trawlers’ rig, the Forthie gleaming grey under its brigs. Cleaving the jumble of warrens and wynds went Royal Mile like a south-driven sword, to the left the new biggings of Ecclesgriegs, Town Hall and courts and Thomson Tower, the Tangleha’ trees that hid the University, the gentry’s quarters, genteel Craigneuks—to the right in jumbles around Grand Central the Cowgate and Gallowgate, Paldy Parish, and far off in the west beyond Footforthie the fishers’ wee toun, called Kir- riebem.
You waited a tram by the Windmill Steps, it came showding and banging up from the Station, green like a garden slug, in you got, and sat down and closed your eyes and thought hard, the things you’d to order, where you’d best get them. Fish, beef, eggs, butter, go swear at the grocer, the laundry hadn’t sent back those sheets, Ma Cleghorn wanted the chimney-sweep, you needed a new frock and must bear with the need…. Out into Royal Mile you stepped,—there on his stance, unmoving, King Edward, bald as a turkey and with much the same face, ready to gobble from a ton of grey granite. In the seats round the plinth the unemployed, aye plenty of them, yawning and wearied, with their flat-soled boots and their half-shaved faces, they’d cry their bit bars as they stared at the stir, or chirp a bit filth to a passing quean, sometimes though seldom they did it to you. You didn’t much mind, were you wearied yourself and half-fed, you thought, with nothing to do, you’d do worse than chirp.
Only once had that worse ever happened to you, you’d run down the steps from the Mile to the lane that led to the Gallowgate’s guff one evening, to a dairy there that sold good eggs. Day above, but already half-dark in that place, no body about as you hurried along, or so you thought till you sighted the man. He’d been leaning in the doorway of an empty warehouse, heard you coming and looked up and down: and as you came near he got in your way. I’m starving, wifie. Gi’me a tanner.
His face was thin and dirty and brown, he’d no shirt, his jacket pinned over his breast, smelt awful, great knuckled hands, should you scream? And then you’d known that that would be daft, you’d said All right, though I haven’t one to spare. And you’d opened your bag, heart thumping as you did it, what if he grabbed and made off with the lot? But he didn’t, stood waiting, face red with shame. You’d found him the sixpence, handed it over, he’d nodded, no thanks, and looked away. And you’d hurried on down the lane to the dairy, suddenly trembling and your lips grown wet.
You’d get back to tea with the netbag full, have a first cup ere the others came, Archie Clearmont first, banging up the stairs, he’d meet you and smile, ’Lo, Mrs Colquohoun. That’s a nice frock. You’d tease him and say There’s a nice woman in it, and he’d blush, boy-clear, I know that as well. If only Ewan were as simple as he! … Mr Piddle tearing in from his office, all in a fash to be off to the Station and catch the 6.30 bound for Dunedin. Not that he’d catch the train himself, he’d send off the latest news of Duncairn and make a bit extra salary, he-he! from the linage the Tory Pictman would print…. Miss Ena Lyon trailing in half-dead from the work in her office, half the rouge gone, the other half sprinkled about like a rash, she’d drawl on the Awful Rush in the firm, and the Boss no more than a Vulgar Keelie…. Ewan at last, black-streaked, black-haired, as cool and composed from Gowans and Gloag’s as he’d been when haunting the hills of the Howe seeking the flints of the ancient men.
More clearing away, more tidying-up, getting ready supper, eating it, clearing it—you might almost have hated the sight of food with the number of times you messed the stuff. But you didn’t: instead, you were hungry all day, ate a large supper at nine o’clock, found work nearly done and yawned a bit, and sat listening to Ma’s radio in the sitting-room, a deserted place most nights but for you. And you’d listen to talks on ethics and cocktails and how to go hiking on the Côte d’Azur, minding the baby, copulation in catkins, and the views of Jacob P. Hackenschmidt on Scotland and Her Ancient Nationhood; and you’d switch the thing off, losh, that was better, worth paying a licence to keep the thing quiet, drowse instead and think of the countryside, corn coming green in clay parks this night as often you’d seen it when you were a quean, wedded to Εwan in Kinraddie long syne—you that waited the feet of another Ewan now.
In Paldy Parish as the June came in there came a wave of heat with the month, it lifted the guffs from the half-choked drains and flung them in under the broken doors down through the courts to simmer and stew, a body could hardly bear the touch of his sark as he lay in bed by his wife of a night, the weans would whimper and move and scratch on the shake-down over under the window—stewing in the front of a half-open furnace. And a man would get up in a Paldy tenement and go along the passage to the wc, blasted thing crowded, served a score of folk, not decent, by God what a country to live in. On the Broo since the War and five kids to keep, eating off your head—och, why did you live?—never a minute of quiet to yourself, nothing but the girnings of the wife for more silver, the kids half-barefoot, half-fed, oh hell.
And the wife would turn as she heard him come back, lie wakeful and think on the morn’s morning—what to give the weans, what to give the man, fed he must be ere he took the streets to look for that weary job he’d not find—he’d never find one you had come to ken. Hardly believe it was him you had wed, that had been a gey bit spark in his time, hearty and bonny, liked you well: and had hit you last night, the bloody brute coming drunk from the pub—a woman couldn’t go and hide in booze, forget all the soss and pleiter, oh no, she’d to go on till she dropped, weans scraiching, getting thin and like tinks, and the awful words they picked up every place, the eldest loon a street-corner keelie, the quean—oh God, it made a body sick.
And the quean would turn by the side of her sisters, see the faint glow of the dawn, smell the reek of the Paldy heat—Christ, would she never get out of it, get a job, get away, have clothes, some fun? If they couldn’t afford to bring up their weans decent why did father and mother have them? and syne nag and nag at you day on day, on this and that, the way that you walked, the way you behaved (take care that the loons don’t touch your legs), the way that you spoke—nothing pleased the old fools, and what you brought home they thought should be theirs, every meek that you made, nothing for yourself, stew in the reek of the Cowgate’s drains till you died and were buried and stank to match. My God, if a lassie couldn’t do anything else she could take a bit walk out to Doughty Park, fine there, though the place was littered with Reds, fair daft, the Communionists the worst of the lot, aye holding their meetings and scraiching and bawling that the workers all join up with their unions and fight for their rights and down with the gents.
But no decent lassies would listen to them, for they knew the Communionists were awful tinks who wanted to break up the home.
Every day as the Cowgate stirred Meg was up at the cheep of dawn, seeing to young Jessie and Geordie for school, getting ready breakfast, snapping back at Mother, Father the old devil lying snoozing in bed, he didn’t go down to the Docks till ten. He swore he could hardly get a wink of sleep because of the old trawl-skipper next door, awful religious and fond of a nip, who thrashed his old wife near every night, singing out hymn-tunes like hell the while. If other folk could sleep through the old skipper’s roar of Rock of Ages, cleft for me as he cleft his old woman under the bed, why couldn’t Father sleep as well?
Alick, Meg’s brother, would get into his clothes, grumbling as usual when he’d only porridge. He was barely Meg’s age, an apprentice-lad down at Gowans and Gloag’s in Footforthie. That might have been fine, the beginnings of a job, but when his apprenticeship was up—well, everybody kenned what happened to apprentices. They were sacked right off when they needed men’s wages, and Alick like others would be chucked on the Broo.
Alick said this morning when Meg sneered that, Ay, maybe to me the same as the others, but not to the dirty college sods. And he said that Gowans took college pups now, with a special apprenticeship, easy as winking, they served the first six months at the Furnace, same as the others, but what happened to them then? They squatted their dowps in office jobs, and put on clean collars and gave out their orders, bloody toffs, though no better than you or me. There’d been two of them in the last two years, training as managers, they weren’t sacked, when the last machinery came into the Works that would do all the doings without working-chaps: you’d still need somebody to oil it about, and they’d keep the mammie’s pets to do that. Another had come a two months back—a black-haired, stuck-up gypsy Bulgar, over-fine to speak to a chap like Alick, he’d get a sock in the kisser sometime.
Meg said Don’t blether, you haven’t the guts; you’re jealous he’s brains and you haven’t, that’s all. Alick snorted Brains? Him? He’s only got swank. And me and the chaps in the Furnaces are planning a little bit of a surprise for Mr Bloody Ewan Tavendale.
—WHO?
Alick said Wash out your lugs. Ewan Tavendale’s the name if you want to know. Here, get out of my way till I get on my boots, the hooter’ll be howling in a minute or so.
So that was where her son worked, was it then? What had She to be stuck-up about? A lassie could bear with old Ma Cleghorn, an orra old bitch but not a bad heart. But the way that that Mrs Colquohoun took on, and looked at you cool, put a body off. And who was she to put on her airs that kept a lodging-house for a living and had her son only an apprentice like Alick?
Meg grabbed her hat and set out for Windmill, the Cowgate slowly unwreathing its fug, up in Royal Mile the lorries were lolloping over the calsays, Paldy Parish littering its doors with weans, snuffy and ragged, kids off to school, scrawling dirty things on the pavements, some throwing filth and cheeking a lassie…. She’d get out of this place, get a lodging somewhere in Tangleha’ or the Ecclesgriegs.
But who should she meet where the Cowgate lane climbed up to the stour and whirr of the Mile than Big Jim Trease the Communionist, red-cheeked and sappy, everybody kenned him and called him Jim when bobbies weren’t looking. But Meg had no use for those coarse brutes the Reds that would do away with the gents and her job, and when Big Jim smiled all over his face twinkling his wee pig eyes at her she made to go by with her nose in the air. He’d a creature with him she didn’t know, thin, brown, ragged, with an ill-shaved face; and Jim cried Meg, I’ve been looking for you. Has your Ma still got that spare bed to let?
Meg snapped Supposing you gang and speir at her? Big Jim smiled at her sappy and kind, she felt half-shamed though the beast was a Red: Right, and we will. Many thanks, Meg.
Would you credit that?—trying to land a Red in the house, maybe rape you and gut you in the middle of the night, as the coarse tinks did with hardly a break, night on night, in that awful Russia. If Ma wasn’t soft she would keep the door snibbed…. Oh to hell, there’s the Windmill tram!
She caught the thing by the skin of the teeth and got out under the Windmill Brae, ran up the Steps and met face to face young Ewan Tavendale coming down them—three at a time, no hat, in overalls, hands in his pouches, two books alow his oxter, his eyes went over her, why need he be proud? The like of him made you think the Reds right, he needed to be jammed by a wall and shot.
Morning, Meg, he said, Didn’t notice you, and smiled as sweet as a kid at you. Oh, losh, and the things you’d been thinking about him!
And the things Alick said they were doing today—
Gowans and Gloag made metal containers, bolts and girders and metal trestles, fine castings for sections of engine casings, a thousand men working in great rattling sheds built to hold the labour of three times the number in a rattle and roar of prosperity. Ewan Tavendale would think of that now and then, Gowans had flourished just after the War, high wages and bonuses dished out to all, pap for the proletariats. Wonder what they did with the high money then?—Spent it on the usual keelie things, dogs and horse-racing and sleeping with whores, poor devils—it had nothing to do with him.
Hardly anything to do with the others at all, stoking his shot in the Furnaces, stripped to the waist, he stripped brown, mother’s skin, and tightened his belt over shovel and barrow, cleared out the clinkers and wheeled up a load and flung it deep in the whoom of the flame, the Works kittling up as the morning woke, bells snarling hell if the heat now and then went low in one fire or another. In an hour or so Ewan’d be dripping with sweat, and drink and drink from the tap in the rear, water that gushed out again from him, a sponge-like life and tremendous fun. The other apprentices, keelies the lot, didn’t seem anxious to chum up at all, thank goodness, it gave him time to tackle the books of the trade, metallurgy twice as exciting as flints. He stacked the books with his coat in the sheds, till dinner, and went up and scrubbed himself, put on his coat and went down to the Docks with books and a sandwich and swotted up Castings. But the other apprentices stayed behind and laughed and joked in the lavatories, insanitary devils, no business of his.
But this forenoon was the worst he’d faced in the Furnaces, hours clogged with heat, lungs going like bellows, once the foreman Dallas came swearing down, about fires, not Ewan’s, it was drawing fine. He looked at Ewan and gave him a nod Take it a bit easier, Mr Tavendale. Yours is fine. It’s the fires of those other muckers. He’d hardly gone up the steps to Machines when the pimply keelie Alick Watson called out to another of them, Ewan didn’t know his name: D’you know any poetry this morning, Norman?
—Oh, ay, a fine bit. You other lads heard it?—
There once was a gent Tavendale
(Oh-Rahly-the-guff-makes me pale!)
A pimp and a sucker,
A dirty wee mucker—
And his name, as I’ve said, Tavendale.
…. Oh ay, the toff bastard heard it fine, but he didn’t let on, just went on with his work, all the lads laughed, you’d known he’d no guts. Syne Norman Cruickshank sang out another bit, you laughed till you split, a funny sod Norman, about the toff mucker’s mucking mother. He threw down the shovel as he said that, Norman, getting ready for the toff when he louped to bash him, as any body would do when he heard that about his mother. And he heard it all right and gave Norman a look, fair damn well maddening, as though Norman were dirt and not very interesting dirt at that: and went on with raking the clinkers, calm. But Alick you could see was warming up to him, you all warmed up, led him hell’s delight, serve him right with his bloody show-off. Wee Geordie Bruce couped his barrow when he wasn’t looking, and Norman nipped back for the urine pan and slung it right slap in the toff Bulgar’s fire, it sent up a guff that near killed you all and the toff had to stoke it up afresh.
He’d only just finished when the hooter went, Alick Watson had nipped up a minute afore bent on some deviltry you could be bound. When the rest of you got up the stairs he was just coming out of the washing-sheds where all the lads left their jackets and pieces. He winked and you knew he’d been up to something, and grinned and waited for Tavendale.
Ewan went in and washed and took down his jacket, and put it on, and put his hand in his pocket…. For a minute, certain, he knew he’d be sick, damned sick, and then swallowed his throat and didn’t think as he washed his hand and wrenched off his jacket. Nuisance—miss most of that section on phosphor bronze now.
The five keelies were waiting for him to come out, they held their noses and capered and laughed, Ewan thought The pimply keelie, I suppose, and walked quietly over to where the five stood. The keelie’s eyes in his thin, dour face didn’t change, scornful of gentry, hands in his pouches, Damn shame, he’s no chance, said Ewan’s mind as he hit him and felt his arm go numb.
Alick shot like a stone from a catapult half across the yard crash in a bowie of lime, Ewan knew he’d be back in less than a minute, the only other dangerous one in the gang the one called Norman, an unscrubbed little swine—about three inches higher than yourself—still, little. And he swung up his left, keelie on the point, he whirled about and went flump in the stour; and it seemed to Ewan suddenly all the day cleared, Duncairn clear, bright and sharp to his finger-tips’ touch, he’d never felt so well or so keen for life, he laughed: and Alick Watson came at him head down.
The foreman and another man heard the fighting back by the sheds and came round to see. The childe with the foreman grunted That’s him: another of those gentry apprentice sods, but the foreman Dallas of course had his favourite, he called out Steady a bit, Tavendale! Ewan dripped blood like a half-killed pig, but he didn’t know that, infighting, they were both thick-streaked with blood and snot, holding and fighting, Alick tried to kick, Ewan felt a stab of pain like a knife, and loosened his hold and Alick broke away—looked, swung, and struck, it caught Ewan’s neck, he gave a queer grunt and twist, the fight finished, queer that silence to Alick and the way the sheds shook.
When Chris woke next morning the first thought that came in her mind was of Ewan. She didn’t lie in bed and stretch as usual, got out and dressed and went down to the kitchen. Outside the early dawn of Duncairn lay pallid on the rigs and rinds of grey granite stretching away to the feet of the morning, east wan-tinted, no birds crying, the toun turning to yawn awake below. Jock came and purred and circled her legs, sniffed and sneezed, but she hardly noticed, taking up Ma’s tea, syne Miss Murgatroyd’s, and so at last gained Ewan’s room.
He lay fast sleep, head bandaged, neck bandaged, she thought He’s so young! as she saw his arm, dimpled and smooth of skin, lying by his side. And then as she went nearer she saw his face, the bruises upon it, the broken skin, the swollen lips: and went soft inside in a blaze of rage. How could they—to Ewan, he was only a bairn!
She picked up one of the apples he’d want and sat down on the bed and shook him awake. He woke with the usual quick lack of blink, but half unguarded for a minute, Chris thought, as though she’d peeped down in his eyes for once to that queer boy-self that so puzzled her. Son of herself but sometimes so un-sib she felt more kin to Meg Watson the maid!
She told him that, idly, as though it were a joke, and he put his hands under his head and considered, and said something about hormones and egg-cells, whatever they had to do with it—I’m not so different; but I want to know things. And I love you up to that phosphor-bronze hair—more than Meg Whatname’ll ever do.
Chris said it was Watson, not Whatname, and Εwan said that was a funny coincidence, wondered if she were any relation of the keelie that had bashed him so yesterday.— Perfect hiding he was giving me, Chris; and I struck it unlucky, head bang on a girder. Fought like a rat and so did I.
Chris said What was it all about?
He lay still a minute, still in that posture. Oh, filth. Nothing you need worry about. They don’t much like me, the keelies, Chris.
She’d heard him use that word before but the queerest thing happened to her now. She said sharply: What’s a keelie, Εwan? Your father was a ploughman afore we were wed, and I was a quean in a crofter’s kitchen.
Bandaged, undisturbed, he lay looking at her. A ploughman’s not a keelie. And anyhow, Chris—
Her heart tightened in a funny way. There was something else. She said Yes?
—Oh—just that though my father was a ploughman and you came from a kitchen—that’s nothing to do with me, has it? I’m neither you nor my father: I’m myself.
All that day and the next Meg didn’t turn up, Ma Cleghorn swore at the lazy limmer and did all the washing-up by herself, and broke two plates in the first half-hour—all through that lazy bitch of a quean! Jock hardly knew where he was after that, his feet more often in the air than not, as Ma kicked him from the range to the dresser and back, he purring like a red-hot engine the while, Chris saw the last act as she brought down a tray—Jock scart his claws in Ma’s sonsy leg and give a loud scraich and shoot out of the window. And the sight was so funny Chris heard herself giggle, like a bairn, Ma rubbing her leg and swearing:
Malagaroused by a cat and forsook by a jade. Will you go to the Cowgate and see what’s come of her?
So down Chris went, not taking the tram, better acquainted with Duncairn by now, down Windmill Brae with its shelving steps, across the Meal Market where they didn’t sell meal, sold nothing, old, a deserted patch, dogs and unemployed squatting in the sun, through Melvin Wynd into Little Mart where the ploughmen gathered in feeing-times in Paldy Fair in the days long syne. They didn’t now, two or three shops littered here, shops everywhere that a body might look, how did they all live and manage a trade? The pavements were sweating a greasy slime as she made her way to the Cowgate’s brink, steps leading down to Paldy Parish.
She’d never been so far into Paldy before, seeing the broken windows and the tattered doors and the weary faces of the women going by, basket-laden, all the place had a smell of hippens, unwashed, and old stale meat and God knew what, if even He knew, Chris thought He couldn’t. And she passed a Free Kirk with a twist to her thought: if there was a God as Robert had believed couldn’t He put it into the heads of those folk they’d be better served filling the wames of their weans than the stomach of some parson clown in a Manse? But then she’d never understood religion, thought it only a fairy-tale, not a good one, dark and evil rather, hurting life, hurting death, no concern of hers if others didn’t force it on her, she herself had nothing to force in its stead.
Robert once had had with his Socialism. And looking around that evil place in the stew of the hottering rising June she minded that verse he’d once quoted in Segget, long ago in that other life:
Stone hearts we cannot waken
Smite into living men:
Jehovah of the thunders
Assert Thy power again!
And dimly she thought that maybe that was what the Covenanters had believed when they faced the gentry in the old-time wars. Only God never came and they died for Him and the old soss went on as it always would do, aye idiot folk to take dirty lives and squat in the dirt, not caring a lot were they letten a-be to rot as they liked. No concern of hers—she belonged to herself as Ewan had told her he belonged to himself, she’d have hated the Covenant giving her orders as much as she’d have hated its enemies, the gentry.
… And all far off from a middle-aged wife looking for a missing maidie, Meg. Where was it Ma said the creature bade?
She found it at last, a deep narrow court, used to the smells she went in and up the stone stairs, chapped at the door and waited and listened. In a tenement near a row was on, furniture crashing, Chris heard a woman scraich and grew white to the lips. Syne she heard a loud voice raised in a hymn:
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God has done,
Count your blessings, name them one by one
And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.
There followed a final thump on that, somebody cried I’ll ha’e the bobbies on you, and then a door banged: and then a loud silence.
Chris chapped again, heard a noise inside, the door opened, she said: Is Meg Watson in?
The man who opened the door was the same who’d once stopped her in the Upper Cowgate and asked her for sixpence.
They both stared like gowks a minute, speechless, he’d shaved and wore a second-hand suit, over-big for him, bulging at paunch and bottom, the thin brown face didn’t look so starved, cocky and confident till he met her eyes. Now he flushed dark and licked his lips:
Meg Watson’s gone off to look for a job.
Chris nodded. I see. Will you tell her I want to know why she left me? My name is Mrs Colquohoun and if she comes back the morn you can tell her that I’ll say nothing about it.
… So that was who the sulky bitch was, boorjoy and stuck-up—he’d heard the tale, Alick had sloshed her son down at Gowans. A stuck-up toff, he’d said; like the mother, damn her and her glower and her ice-brick eyes.
Meg was feared to go back when she heard from her brother he’d bashed your son in a bit fight at the Works.
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 Piddle’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.
But that fancy was lost in the hours that followed. The three went down to Mercat Cross and found an Aberdeen bus waiting there, ready to leave in a minute or so, crossing the Slug into Banchory, down by Deeside and Dunecht to Aberdeen, turning about and so back again. And they got in the bus, the two pussy-cats polite, not wanting either to sit by the other, manœuvring each to sit by Chris. Chris said I think I’ll sit by myself, right at the front, and went and sat there, the other two on the opposite seat, Ellen by the window, hatless, hair braided, curling long lashes and secret face, Ewan hatless as well, cool and composed, staring about him as the bus moved off. Once he leaned over and asked where they were going, Chris didn’t know, they’d get out at some place they liked.
In a minute, themselves near the only passengers, the bus was climbing Duncairn Rise up to the heights where the men of Montrose had marshalled three hundred years before, suddenly, on a Sunday, over-awing Duncairn and pouring down to a Sabbath of blood. Chris turned in her seat and looked down and saw the white sword gleam of Royal Mile, the haze that lay on the lums of Footforthie, shining boats dipping out to sea in the pelt and shine of the morning tide. And then the road wheeled up and around and paused: there below the Howe of the Mearns, crowned, shod, be-belted in green and gold, silver chains where the Mearns burns wound and spun to the Forthie’s flow, Stonehaven forward, Bervie behind, far off the shimmer where the Grampians rode, the farms gleaming below the bents, haugh on haugh, tumbling green long corn-swaths under the wind. And syne the bus stopped and took on a farmer, thin and mean-looking, he starved his men and ate sowans to his meat, never cuddled his wife except on Sundays and only then if he’d been to kirk. And like a great squat beetle the bus crept on, oh, they were cutting the hay in a park, the smell in the bus, drifting, tingling—Blawearie’s night and days, hush of the beeches in a still July, pastures sleeping around Segget Manse with Robert beside you as you drowsed on the lawn—Robert that you looked at, and he hadn’t a face—
And Chris shook that woe dreaming away from herself, let nothing spoil the sun and the hay and the goodness of being alone and alive, peering through lids at July unfold, birring, up the blossoming Howe, deep-honeysuckled ran the hedges, in parks out bye the gleg-vexed kye were tearing about with tails a-switch, some eident body would have sour milk the night. Ewan and Ellen at last were speaking to each other. Ewan had turned his head and Chris saw the English quean looking up at him, cool, like a virtuous panther-kitten exchanging tail-switchings with a black-avised leopard.
The next thing she knew they were through Stonehyve, windy, guarded by Dunnottar Woods, and were climbing up the heath of the Slug, no hay-smell here but the guff of the heather billowing up to the quivering heights. And there came a sudden memory to Chris—a winter night twenty- three years before when father and mother and Will and herself and the loons long-lost and the twins that died had flitted across these hills in a storm, with battered lanterns in the on-ding of sleet … twenty-three years before. Back and back through the years as the bus climbed the Slug, years like the rustle of falling leaves, dreams by night and dim turnings in sleep, and you were again that quean in the sleet, all the world and living before you unkenned, kisses and hate and toil and woe, kisses at night when the byre-stalls drowsed, agony in long deserted noons, hush of terror of those moon-bright nights when you carried within your womb seed of men—for a minute they seemed no more than dreams as you drowsed, a quean, in the smore of the sleet….
But now below, creeping out of the heat, the Howe left behind, came Banchory shining in its woods and far away the long flicker of the ribboned Dee that went down through the fine lands to Aberdeen. On the sky-line the mountains marched snow-covered, lifting white faces to the blink of July, in great haughs the fir-woods bourouched green, red crags climbed the northwards sky to peer, hands at their eyes, at Aberdeen. Sometimes a body would get off the bus, sometimes it would stop by a tottering gate and a slow, canny childe climb grinning aboard, or a sharp-faced woman, Aberdeen, thin-voiced, thin-faced, with a quick ferret look around, from Chris to Εwan, Εwan to Ellen, syne to the driver, syne up to the roof, syne out of the window, syne folding her lips and her hands, the world well and respectable and behaving itself. And Chris sat and watched the comings and goings, happy and happy and sweir to the bone.
Then at last here was Ewan shaking her: Chris. Where are we going?—to Aberdeen? She said goodness no, she didn’t hope so, though the tickets were for there and ’twas a pity to waste them. And then she looked out and saw flash by a word white-painted on a cross-roads sign, a word and a place she had long forgotten. We’ll get out at Echt and wait the bus back.
So they did, Echt snoozing white in its stour, bairns playing about the doors of the houses, Ewan went into a shop and bought pieces, Chris went to help: loaf, butter and milk, some cakes and a knife, they looked loaded down for a feast or a famine, or tinks on the road, fair shocking Echt. Ellen showed her bit English mettle at once, no pride, she caught up the loaf and the bottles, some of the bairns cried after them, she laughed and didn’t mind, kitten not cat. Then Chris led them off on the ploy she’d planned.
The Hill of Fare towered high in the sun, scaured and red, the flow of heather like a sea of wine, leftwards, dark, the Barmekin haunted even in July’s sun-haze. Chris cried Oh, wheesht! to the others and they stopped, looked at her, listened, and heard through the sun, lonely, unforgotten, never-stopping that plaint, the peesies flying over Barmekin. Twenty-three years and they never had stopped…. And Chris thought half-shamed, in a desperate flyting: Losh, but their throats must surely be dry!
And at last through the litter of the wild-growing broom choking the upward track, they came to the croft of Cairndhu where Chris had been born, rank thistles all about, the windows were shuttered, grass crept to the door, another and bigger farm long syne had eaten up the land and the implements. They poked their heads inside the out-biggings, the barn musty with a smell of old hay, rats scampered there in the sun-hazed gloom, Chris wandered from place to place like one seeking that which she wouldn’t know—maybe something of that sureness mislaid in the past, long ago, when she was a quean. But here was nothing, nothing but change that had followed every pace of her feet, quiet- padding as a panther at night.
When she turned away from the biggings at last she found Ellen and Εwan sitting on the mill-course, speaking low and clear to each other, not to disturb her, cat-like the two of them, unheeding the sun, haunted by no such memories as hers. Daft not to have known from the first that this meant nothing to them, ruined biggings on a little farm: her old frere the land was nothing to them, children of touns by love or by nature, Εwan born in a croft in Kinraddie knew little of the land, cared less, not his job—that was stoking a furnace in Gowans and Gloag’s!
He asked where now, and said Chris was the guide, and she pointed up to the Barmekin shining high and flat in the air against the tops of the further hills: I haven’t been there since I was a bairn. Ellen said Well, you don’t look as though that was long ago, and Chris asked Am I as bairn-like as all that? and Ellen flushed and said she hadn’t meant that—it’s just you don’t possibly look as though Mr Tavendale here were your son. Chris smiled at him. But he is, worse luck, Ewan nodded, a kindly joke in his compass: The luck’s all mine. Come along then. Carry your parcel, Chris?
Chris said shortly she’d manage it herself, she wasn’t in her second childhood, either; and they laughed and went up and left the road and waded through the whins and the broom and over fences and up steep braes, steep so’s you’d to clutch up step by step with handfuls of heather and grass for holds, Ellen flinched with stung legs and Ewan slipped on smooth shoes, Chris laughed back at both of them, shinning the slopes light and free and sure of her hold, she looked back from the uppermost ledge and waved to them, poor fusionless creatures her father would have called them—her father who all his years in Cairndhu had never (that she knew) climbed Barmekin, over-busy with chaving and slaving his flesh, body and soul and that dark, fierce heart, into the land to wring sustenance therefrom. So the whirlimagig went round and on: Father, now Ewan, the hill little to either, only to her who came in between and carried the little torch one from the other on that dreich, daft journey that led nowhither—
But, standing up there, with the wind in her hair, the thought came to her that that didn’t much matter—daft the journey, but the journeying good. And she looked at the slopes gay in their gear, useless and meaningless but fine fun to climb…. The other two thought the same when they came, Ellen with smooth braids tangled a bit, a damp lock over Ewan’s high forehead, they laughed and said things about Excelsior, young and sexless both, like the angels, dark angels, folk of an older stock than Chris’s, intenter and sharper, not losing themselves in heather dreams or the smell of broom. Ewan said he was hungry,—aren’t you. Miss Johns? and Miss Johns said Aren’t I? Hungry as hell.
So they made their way in the brush of the broom along the outer wall of the old Pict fort built by the men of antique time, a holy place before Christ was born, Chris said they’d find shade from the sun in its lithe. Syne they came on a thing they had little looked for, Ewan swore, his old passion for old times rekindled—men had been here, a great gang of them, had torn down the walls and flung them aside, deep ruts showed where the carts had been driven: and within the inner walls of the fort were the char and ash of a great foolish fire.
Some celebration, Chris thought, not caring, Εwan did, he said it was a filthy outrage and justified nothing that had happened in Aberdeen since they told the first of their filthy stories—that was probably before Christ’s coming as well. Chris had never seen him so angered, she herself wasn’t, they were only rickles of stone from long syne raised up by daft childes who worshipped the sun. Εwan said That’s rot. You know nothing about it, and Chris gave a laugh and sat down on a stone, clasping her knees, not caring a fig one way or another. Miss Johns said I agree with Mrs Colquohoun. What does it matter what happens to this rubbish? There are things more in need of worrying about. Ewan turned his grey granite glance upon her: I didn’t expect that you would think different.
So they sulked a bit, sitting each side of Chris, and she didn’t laugh, but looked fearsomely solemn. Then Ewan opened the milk-bottles and got out the bread and Ellen spread out the papers for a tablecloth, two sleek black heads under Chris’s gaze; and they fed her solemn, though Ellen peeped at Ewan through those dangerous lashes—she’d trip on them some time. But he wasn’t thinking of her at all, his mind far off with his ancient men, he began to tell them of that time that had been, how close in the generations these men were, how alike ourselves in the things they believed, unessentials different—blood, bone, thought the same. For if history had any lesson at all it was just that men hadn’t changed a bit since the days of the folk in the Spanish caves who painted the charging aurochsen—except to take up civilization, that ancient calamity that fell on the world with gods and kings and culture and classes—Ellen cried But then you’re a Socialist!
Ewan looked blank, smooth boy face, angel-devil eyes, suddenly dragged from his ancient Picts: What’s that to do with it? And Ellen said Everything. If there was once a time without gods and classes couldn’t there be that time again?
Ewan said I suppose so. I don’t much care. It won’t come in our time. I’ve my own life to lead—and at that the slim quean seemed to forget all her hunger, curling lashes and dimpled ways, she said Mr Tavendale was talking rot, how could anyone live a free life in this age?—capitalism falling to bits everywhere, or raising up classes of slaves again, Fascism coming, the rule of the beast—
Ewan sat and munched bread They won’t rule me. I’m myself. — You’re not. You’re a consequence and product as all of us are. If we’re all the children of those old-time men that you’ve told us about do you think for a moment we aren’t more the children of our fathers and mothers and the things we’ve read and depended upon? Just silly to say that we’re not. And Ewan asked what had that to do with it?; and they lost their tempers; and Chris fell asleep.
When she woke they were nowhere in sight; far off, drowsy, a ring-dove crooned in the little woods scampering down to Echt, remoter still a peesie cried. The sun had wheeled to afternoon, red on the nearer mountain cliffs, blue far in the upper heights. Mountain on mountain: there was Bennachie ahint which the tired folk went in song. Sitting with her hands so propping her, Chris found herself aching, sun-wearied and sad, in the bright day’s glister curiously lost though she knew that Ewan and the English quean couldn’t be far off, they’d come if she cried. Call?—behave like a frightened old wife?
She lay back again in the heather bells, and under her ears heard whispers unceasing, sounds soft and urgent and quieter than mice, the little world of the little beasts about its existence of sowing and harvest, feeding and fighting and a pridesome begetting, moral and urgent and dreadfully unsweir, pelting through lives as brief as a blink as though the blink lasted a hundred years. It felt like God so to lie and listen—so long’s the beasts didn’t come climbing up a stalk and mistake one’s ear for heaven.
When she rose and went to look for the others she found them close on the ruined dyke, not sitting and kissing as they might have been (some sense in that, said her mind, still sleepy), Ewan perched on a stone, hands clasping his knees, looking down at Ellen sitting clasping hers, nice knees and long legs and the lot forgotten, talking, still talking—about history and Socialism and freedom for people in the modern world. And Εwan was saying Yes, that seems sense and I’ll look it up. I’ve always thought Socialism just a measly whine, MacDonaldish stuff and politicians’ patter. Different when you think of it as history making, the working class to be captured and led: all right, I’ll give the keelies a chance. Ellen said And don’t be so horridly superior; you’ll never lead if you can’t be an equal…. Oh, there’s your mother. Coo-ee, Mrs Colquohoun!
It seemed that their talk had run them clean dry, quiet enough in the afternoon quiet gathering up the papers and burning them, carrying the milk-bottles down the hill, the sun was dimming and all about bees homing like drunken men from a pub, one came bumbling against Chris’s face and tangled itself in her hair. She brushed it aside, quickly and quietly, and Ellen shivered I couldn’t do that! Chris asked What? and Ellen said That bee—I’d have jumped and hit it and it would have stung me. I’m a ghastly coward, and shivered again. Ewan didn’t notice, far off in thought, treading down from the breach in the Pictman’s fort to seek the like in the crumbling castle that prisoned the men of his time.
Alick Watson said Och, let the sod a-be. He gave me as good as I gave him; and Norman Cruickshank said He gave you a mucking sight more; who’d have thought a toff Bulgar had a punch like that?
So they wouldn’t have anything to do with the plan of Wee Geordie Bruce to send a bit note, insulting-like, to Tavendale’s address when he bade at home nursing the broken head he’d gotten in that fight with Alick in the yard—Christ, the place was splottered in blood, wee Geordie went out and glowered all about it and nearly got down on his knees to lick it, with his wee shrivelled face and shifty eyes, awful keen on blood and snot. Alick said You’re not right in your head, you wee whoreson, he seemed hardly right himself all that week, snapping a chap’s head off if you spoke to him praising him a bit how he’d bashed the toff Bulgar.
Norman wasn’t much better, they both worked like tinks doing Tavendale’s furnace as well as their own, trying to stick in with the foreman, were they? They got little thanks if that was their hope, Dallas came down and glowered God Almighty, is that the way to work at Gowans and Gloag’s? Alick said to him Ach, away to hell. We’re doing the work of a dozen here—if that doesn’t please you, gang off and clype. The foreman looked a bit ta’en aback, We’ve all to do more than our shift in Gowans, so give’s none of your lip, you Cowgate brat. And Alick said when the foreman had gone what he’d like to give the bastard was one in the guts, syne dance on his face with tacketty boots.
For Gowans and Gloag were fair in a way, they’d sacked a dozen from Machines that week and were trying to cheese- pare all over the shops, they’d been on to Dallas and gotten out his rag. The apprentice chaps in the dinner hour sat out in the yard and swore at them, and smoked, and watched through the haze from the Docks the swinging cranes that loaded the ships, or the bridges open and a laggard trawler creep in from an antrin night on the sea, lost in the fogs of the Dogger Bank. And Alick said by Christ if he had the guts he’d run off from it all and take to the sea, a fine bit life if it wasn’t that on a ship a common chap was near starved to death. And Norman said that he’d like a farm: and he’d near as much chance of getting that as of wee King Geordie making him his vallay.
Well, you couldn’t but wonder what Tavendale would do when he got back to Furnaces on the Monday morning, stuck up as ever, and acting the toff he looked when he came down and took up his shovel, you keeked sideways and saw he’d no sign of a bandage, froze up and don’t-touch-me-I’m-awful- grand. Syne the work started, all at it hell for leather till the hooter went, no larking or jookery-packery, Alick and Norman not looking at the toff, they were maybe a bit feared he’d reported them.
And then as you all climbed up to the yard the toff turned round to Alick Hello! and Alick gave a kind of a start Hello! and they laughed, and Norman went dandering over Hello! as well, and a fag to the toff Tavendale. You’d never seen him smoking before, but he took it: I’m going down to the Docks to eat my dinner. Coming, you chaps?
Now Alick and Norman never left the yard, they would bide there all the dinner hour and raise hell with pitching stones at old tins, telling bit tales of their Saturday nights, they were both of them awful Bulgars with the queans, Norman had gotten a tart into trouble, and laughed when her Ma came after him chasing him with a bit of a broken bottle from the Gallowgate half through Paldy Parish; and they’d tease Geordie Bruce, the dirty wee devil, and get him to do the dirtiest capers, rouse hell’s delight and have a fair time. But now they just looked a bit tint and surprised, and Alick said Och, ay, as though he couldn’t help it, and Norman Cruickshank gave a bit nod, and away the three of them went together.
That was the beginning of a gey queer time, it wasn’t only the apprentices noticed it, the toff didn’t go out of his way to be friends but if he came on you, joking-like, he’d sit down and listen and smoke a fag-end and give a bit nod, and he wasn’t so bad, not looking at you now so that a childe felt his face was all wrong and his sark gey clorted up at the neck and he hadn’t ta’en the trouble to wash that morning. Some said that his bashing had done him good, he’d gotten scared of the working chaps; but Alick Watson said that that was damned stite, Ewan Tavendale could tackle any Bulgar here. And had he gone clyping to the management?
He was in and out of the shops all the time, and Norman’s father, in the Grindery, took him down to a meeting of the Union branch, Norman didn’t go, he couldn’t be bothered, he said to Tavendale They just claik and claik and grab your subscription and never give anything, they’re a twisting lot of sods in the Union. But the old man’s aye been keen on them. And looked a bit shamed, He’s Labour, you see.
Tavendale said There are lots of chaps that, my step-father was, and you all cheered up, sitting on buckets in the furnace room, a slack hour, and having a bit of a jaw, you were none of you Labour and knew nothing about politics, but all of you had thought that the Bulgars of toffs were aye Tory or Liberal or this National faeces. And somehow when a chap knew another had a father who’d been Labour you could speak to him plainer, like, say what you thought, not that you thought much, you wanted a job when apprenticeship was over and a decent bit time and maybe now and then a spare bob or so to take your quean to the Talkies—och, you spoke a lot of stite like the others did, about the queans that you’d like to lie with, and the booze you’d drink, what a devil you were, but if you got half a chance what you wanted was marriage, and a house and a wife and a lum of your own…. Wee Geordie Bruce said The Tories have the money, they’re the muckers for the working man; and Norman said Blethers, the Bulgars have money, but they take good care to keep it for themselves or spend it on their lily-fingered whores, what’s the good of Tories to us, you neep? Alick said that maybe the next Labour Government wouldn’t be so bad as the last had been, they were working folk themselves, some of them, though they’d birns of the rotten toffs as well…. And you all said what you thought, except Ewan—funny, you’d started to call him Ewan—he just sat and listened and nodded now and then, as though he couldn’t make up his own mind: well, that’s what a chap with sense would do. And when one of the chaps in the Stores said to you: I hear you’re all sucking the young toff’s anus you nearly took him a crack in the jaw, the daft sod, young Ewan was as good as he was and a damn sight cleaner in the neck and the tongue.
Well, Ewan went to the Union meeting that night, next morning chaps asked him what he’d thought o’t, and he said there hadn’t been much on at all, there’d been less than a dozen members there—I suppose you can’t blame a union if the chaps who belong to it won’t attend its meetings. Norman asked what the hell was the good of attending, the Union had sold the pass time and again, the heads of the bloody thing down in London were thick as thieves with the viscounts and earls. Ewan said that was rotten if it was true, why didn’t the Union give them the chuck? And Norman said he’d be Bulgared if he knew.
Alick Watson said that his Ma’s new lodger, a chap called Selden, and he was a Red, was aye saying the unions should chuck out the leaders. And everybody laughed, you knew well enough what Reds were like, daft about Russia and its Bolshevists—tink brutes, it made you boil to think the way they mis-used the ministers there, the Daily Runner had pages about it and the Pope had been in a hell of a rage at atheists behaving near as bad as Christians.
And you all sat by the Docks, you’d go down there now and look at the two or three ships in the harbour sleeping an hour in the still July, smoke a slow pencil plume from the derricks, a dead cat or so floating under your feet, far off through the brigs you could see the North Sea fling up its green hands again and again and grab and scrabble at the breakwater wall—and you blethered about everything you could think of, Ewan wouldn’t talk much unless Alick made him, Alick’d slap him on the shoulder, Come on, man, tell us. But he’d say I don’t know any more than you chaps—less, it’s only stuff out of books.
Well, wasn’t that a lot? And you’d ask him about it, did he hold with this ongoing of the Bolshevists in Russia, closing down kirks and chasing ministers all to hell for just preaching, like? He said he didn’t know anything about Russia but he thought the time of kirks was past. But you surely believe there’s Something, man? and Ewan said Maybe, but I don’t think it’s God.
And you couldn’t make out what he meant by that, funny chap, fine chap, you liked to go home with him, he called you Bob as you called him Ewan, and was awfully interested in everything, where you’d been born, and gone to school, and the stuff they’d taught you in Ecclesgriegs. And you felt a bit shy to invite him, like, the old man’s house was a hell of a soss, but you’d like him to tea some Saturday night. And he said Right, thanks. I’d like to come; and you went home and maybe boasted a bit till your sister, the silly bitch, said Tavendale: isn’t that the toff that you couldn’t stick?
And out of the fragments of days and nights Chris saw her life shape to a pattern again. Getting up and working and going to bed—it had never been anything else in a way she thought as she scrubbed the floors, tidied the rooms, and helped Ma Cleghorn cook the meals or young Meg Watson wash up at the sink. Meg had come back and was fair subdued, looking at Chris with a frightened eye, afraid, poor lass, she’d be somehow blamed over that fight at Gowans and Gloag’s. But Chris wasn’t so daft as pay heed to that, Ewan could heed to himself, she thought, he was growing up with his own life to lead. And she had hers, and sleep, and food, work, and meikle Ma Cleghorn to laugh at—and what else was there a body could want?
Ma said B’God she should marry some childe, fair going to waste, a lassie like her. And Chris asked who she should marry—Mr Piddle? and Ma gave a snort, she’d said marry, not martyr, he’d never get up from the marriage bed.
Chris said she thought that was fair indecent, drinking tea and pulling a long face; and Ma shook her meikle red face at her, Life was damn indecent as both of them knew. The first time she’d lain with a man, her Jim, she couldn’t make up her mind to be sick or to sing. But there was more of the singing than sickness for all that, even though it felt awful like going to bed and being cuddled by a herring-creel, not a man. But mighty, a lassie when she was a lass just bubbled for a childe to set her on fire. But now they were all as hard and cold and unhandled as a slab of grey granite in a cemetery. Look at that teacher-creature, Miss Johns, whipping in and out the house like a futret, with books and papers and meetings to attend, never a lad to give her a squeeze. Chris said You don’t know, she’s maybe squeezed on the sly, Ma said Not her, she’d freeze up a childe. Not but she isn’t bonny in a kind of a way, though I never could stick they black-like jades with a bit of a mouser on the upper lip.
Chris thought of the faint, dark down on the lip of a downbent face, and the long lashes, curled, soft and tender, blue in the sun. And she said that she thought it rather bonny, and Ma said Bonny? You’ve an awful taste. Though the Cushnie and Clearmont think the same, they near eat her up at breakfast time. I suppose the most of the queans about are all such a pack of scrawny scans that a sleek pussy-cat like our Really-Miss-Johns just sets a childe fair a-tingle to stroke her.
Chris had noticed how Ellen woke up the breakfast, though she herself didn’t seem to know it, canty and trig, with her braided hair and her cool, blue eyes, John Cushnie would pass the marmalade, and blush, and habber a bit of English, making an awful mess of it above his tight-tied tie, Mr Clearmont would give his cheerful guffaw and fix his round baby eyes on this titbit—Coming to the Saturday Match, Miss Johns, Students and Profs, it’ll be great fun? And Miss Johns would shake her head, Too busy, and Archie’s face would fall with a bang. Even Mr Quaritch forgot his books, the pussy-cat had snared him as well, he’d waggle his thin little beard at her and tell her stories of the Daily Runner, and start to explain the Douglas Scheme, the Only Plan to Save Civilization by giving out lots and lots of money to every soul whether he worked for’t or not. Who would be such a fool as work at all then? Miss Johns would ask, but she’d ta’en it up wrong, Mr Quaritch would marshal bits of bread to prove the Scheme again up to the hilt, and Miss Johns would say it sounded great fun, she knew there was Relativity in physics, this was the first time she’d met it in maths. Mr Piddle would say, He-he! Fine morning. And how is Miss Johns today, yes—yes? And Feet the Policeman would curl his mouser, a Sergeant, and give her a bit of a stare like a cod that wanted its teeth in a cat, instead of the other way round, as was usual. Chris would smile at the coffee-pot and meet Ellen’s eyes, demure blue eyes with an undemure twinkle.
She and Ewan were indifferent, polite, Chris thought them too much alike to take heed of each other. But Miss Lyon couldn’t abide her at all, and would sniff as she watched her, Just a Vulgar Flirt, she didn’t let men take Liberties with her. She told this to Chris after breakfast one day, didn’t Mrs Colquohoun think the Johns girl Common? And Chris smiled at her sweet, I don’t know, Miss Lyon. You see I’m awfully common myself.
The first bit of scandal on the pussy-cat Chris heard was brought by Miss Murgatroyd, she had heard it up at the Unionist Ladies—it was awful, and Miss Johns looking Such Genteel. And what the Tory women had been saying was that the new teacher in the Ecclesgriegs Middle was being over-quick with the strap, strict as could be, maybe not a bad fault. But worse than that she was telling the bairns the queerest and dirtiest things, Mrs Colquohoun, drawing pictures on the blackboard of people’s insides and how their food was digested and oh—And Miss Murgatroyd coloured over with Shame, and dropped her voice and nearly her cup—the way that the waste comes out, you know.
Chris said she thought that was maybe good and the bairns would be less constipated. Miss Murgatroyd tweetered like a chicken in the rain, and then bridled a wee, Well, of course I’m Single, and don’t know much about things like that. Chris wanted to ask, but didn’t, if being Single meant that you never went to the bathroom; but a question like that wouldn’t have been Such Fine.
But more was to come, as she heard soon enough, the Unionist Ladies in an awful stew, and hot to write the Education Authority. Miss Johns had been explaining the Bible away, the whole tale told to Miss Murgatroyd by Mrs Gawpus, the wife of Bailie Gawpus, she said her little niece had come home and said there wasn’t a God at all, the new teacher had said so or as good as said so, He was just a silly old man the Jews worshipped and the world had really begun in a fire…. Just Rank Materialism, wasn’t it, now?—And who would think it of a girl like Miss Johns?
She told the same story to Ma Cleghorn that night, but got feint the much petting for her pains. Well, damn’t, there’s maybe some sense in her say, Miss Murgatroyd, the Bible’s no canny. Mind the bit about Lot and his daughters, the foul slummocks, him worse, the randy old ram? It’s better to speak of beginnings in fire than let the weans think it began in a midden. Ay, there’s more in the lass than meets the eye, I’ll have to see how she’s getting on.
Chris met Ellen Johns a week after that, coming up the stairs, her dark face pale, she smiled at Chris, a tired-looking lass and Chris said she looked tired. She said so she was, though not with the teaching, and then told she’d been summoned before the Authority and reprimanded for telling the Duncairn kids a few elementary facts about themselves. —So I’ve to leave off physiology and it’s Nature Study now—bees, flowers, and how catkins copulate. Won’t that be fun? But she didn’t wait an answer, just smiled in the sleekèd way she had, dark and cool and wise, a mere slip, a little quean playing about with fire, and went on up the stair to the room next Ewan’s.
Jim Trease had planned the march for the Friday, Broo day, with all the unemployed of Paldy and contingents from Ecclesgriegs and Footforthie and a gang of the chaps on the Kirrieben Broo. The main mob marshalled up in the Cowgate, the Communionists crying for the folk to join up—we’ll march to the Council and demand admittance, and see the Provost about the pac. And a man’d look shamefaced at another childe, and smoke his pipe and never let on till Big Jim himself came habbering along, crying you out by your Christian name, and you couldn’t well do anything else but join—God blast it, you’d grievances enough to complain of. The wife would see you line up with the other Broo chaps, looking sheepish enough, and cry out Will! or Peter! or Tam! Come out of that—mighty, it’ll do you no good. And a man just waved at her, off-hand-like, seeing her feared face peeking at him. But a bit of a qualm would come in your wame, thinking Och well, she’ll be all right. We’re just marching down to the Castlegate.
Syne the drum struck up and off you all marched, some gype had shoved the handle of a flag in your hand, it read DOWN WITH THE MEANS TEST AND HUNGER AND WAR, the rest of the billies made a joke about it, they would rather, they said, down a bottle of beer. Right in front was Big Jim Trease, big and sappy in his shiny blue shirt, beside him the chap he’d been helping of late, Stephen Selden that had been an emigrant to Canada and come back from the starvation there to starve here. The two of them were in the lead of the march, wee Jake Forbes waddling behind, banging the drum, boomroomroom, he could play a one-man band on his own, a Red musician, and played at the dances with his meikle white face that had never a smile. And on and up you rumbled through Paldy, clatter of boots on the calsay stones, the sun was shining through drifts of rain, shining you saw it fall on the roofs in long, wavering lines and floodings of rain, queer you’d never seen it look bonny as that.
But now all the chaps were lifting their heads as they marched, and looking as though they hadn’t a care in the world, not showing their qualms to the gentry sods. Bobbies had come out and now marched by the column, a birn of the bastards, fat and well fed, coshes in hand, there was the new Sergeant, him they called Feet—Christ, and what plates of meat! Boomr-oom went the drum and you all were singing:
Up wi’ the gentry, that’s for me,
Up wi’ the gentry fairly,
Let’s slobber on King and our dear Countree—
And I’m sure they’ll like me sairly.
And a lot more like that, about Ramsay Mac, stite, but it gave a swing to your feet and you all felt kittled up and high by then and looked back by your shoulder and saw behind the birn of the billies marching like you, you forgot the wife, that you hadn’t a meck, the hunger and dirt, you’d alter that. They couldn’t deny you, you and the rest of the Broo folk here, the right to lay bare your grievances. Flutter, flutter the banner over your head, your feet beginning to stound a wee, long since the boots held out the water, shining the drift of the rain going by. And now you were all thudding into step, and beyond the drum saw Royal Mile, flashing with trams, thick with bobbies: and here out from the wynds came the Ecclesgriegs men and the fisher-chaps from Kirrieben, they looked the worst of the whole caboosh. And Big Jim Trease cried Halt a minute, you all paiched to a stop while the other chaps drew in and formed fours.
Watching that you minded your time in the army, the rain and stink and that first queer time your feet slipped in a soss of blood and guts, going up to the front at Ypres—Christ, long syne that, you’d not thought then to come to this, to come to the wife with the face she had now, and the weans— by God, you would see about things! Communionists like Big Jim might blether damned stite but they tried to win you your rights for you. And all the march spat on its hands again and gripped the banners and fell in line, and looked sideways and saw the pavements half-blocked, half Duncairn had heard of the march on the Town House—and och, blast it if there wasn’t the wife again, thin-faced, greeting, the silly bitch, making you shake like this, the great sumph, by the side of those oozing creashes of bobbies, shining their capes in the rain.
But now you’d wheeled into Royal Mile, a jam of traffic, the trams had slowed down, flutter, flutter the banners, here the wind drove, your mates shrinking under the sleety drive, Woolworth’s to the right, where all the mecks went, and there the big Commercial Bank and the office of the Daily Runner, the rag, it had tried to put a stop to this march, the sods had said you never looked for work, you that tramped out your guts day on day on the search—to the Docks, to the granite works, the country around, as far to the north as Stonehyve. Boomr-oomr, wee Jake’ll brain that damn drum if he isn’t careful, God, how folk stare! A new song ebbing down the damp column, you’d aye thought it daft to sing afore this, a lot of faeces, who was an outcast? But damn’t, man, now—
Arise, ye outcasts and ye hounded,
Arise, ye slaves of want and fear—
And what the hell else were you, all of you? Singing, you’d never sung so before, all your mates about you, marching as one, you forgot all the chave and trauchle of things, the sting of your feet, nothing could stop you. Rain in your face—that was easy to face, if not the fretting of the wife back there (to hell with her to vex a man’s mind, why couldn’t she have bidden at home, the fool?).
She’d take no hurt, you were all of you peaceable, the singing even in a wee died off, they’d shooed the traffic to the side of the Mile, a gang of the Mounted riding in front, their fat-buttocked horses swaying away, well-fed like their riders, the rain sheeting down from their tippets, the Bulgars, easy for them to boss it on us—
What the devil was up down there?
The whole column had slowed, came bang to a stop, more Mounties with their wee thick sticks in their hands strung out there across the Mile, rain-pelted, the horses chafing at the bridles, impatient, Christ, rotten to face if a brute came at you. And a growl and a murmur went through the column, what was wrong up there, why had they stopped? Chaps cried Get on with it, Jim, what’s wrong? Syne the news came down, childes passing it on, their faces twisted with rage or laughing, they hardly bothered to curse about it, the police were turning the procession back down into Paldy by way of the wynds. It wasn’t to be let near the Town Hall at all, the Provost had refused to see them or Trease.
And then you heard something rising about you that hadn’t words, the queerest-like sound, you stared at your mates, a thing like a growl, low and savage, the same in your throat. And then you were thrusting forward like others— Never mind the Bulgars, they can’t stop our march! And in less than a minute the whole column was swaying and crowding forward, the banners pitching and scudding like leaves above the sodden clothes of the angry Broo men. Trease crying Back! Take care! Keep the line!
And your blood fair boiled when you heard him cry that, a Red—just the same as the Labour whoresons, no guts and scared for his bloody face. And above his head you saw one of the bobbies, an inspector, give his arm a wave, and next minute the horses were pelting upon you hell for leather, oh Christ, they couldn’t—
Ewan was down in Lower Mile when the police tried to turn the unemployment procession down the wynds to the Gallowgate. He’d just come from a bookshop and was forced to stop, the pavements black with outstaring people. And then they began to clear right and left, the shopman behind cried Come back, Sir. There’ll be a hell of a row in a minute, he was standing on a pavement almost deserted. Then he saw the mounted policeman wave and the others jerk at their horses’ bridles, and suddenly, far up, the policeman of Segget, the clown that the Segget folk had called Feet, not mounted, he’d come by the side of the column—saw him grab a young keelie by the collar and lift his baton and hit him, crack!—crack like a calsay-stone hit by a hammer, Ewan’s heart leapt, he bit back a cry, the boy screamed: and then there was hell.
As the bobbies charged the Broo men went mad though their leader tried to wave them back, Εwan saw him mishandled and knocked to the ground under the flying hooves of the horses. And then he saw the Broo folk in action, a man jumped forward with a pole in his hand with a ragged flag with letters on it, and thrust: the bobby took it in the face and went flying over his horse’s rump, Εwan heard some body cheer—himself—well done, well done! Now under the charges and the pelt of the rain the column was broken, but it fought the police, with sticks, with naked hands, with the banners, broken and knocked down right and left, the police had gone mad as well, striking and striking, riding their horses up on the pavements, cursing and shouting, Εwan saw one go by, his teeth bared, bad teeth, the face of a beast, he hit out and an old, quiet-looking man went down, the hoof of the horse went plunk on his breast—
And then Ewan saw the brewery lorry jammed by the pavement, full of empty bottles; and something took hold of him, whirled him about, shot him into the struggling column. For a minute the Broo men didn’t hear or understand, then they caught his gestures or shout or both, yelled, and poured across the Mile and swamped the lorry in a leaping wave….
That evening the Runner ran a special edition and the news went humming into the south about the fight in the Royal Mile, pitched battle between unemployed and police, how the Reds had fought the bobbies with bottles, battering them from their saddles with volleys of bottles: would you credit that, now, the coarse brutes that they were? The poor police had just tried to keep order, to stop a riot, and that’s what they’d got.
. . . . .
The Reverend Edward MacShilluck in his Manse said the thing was disgraceful, ahhhhhhhhhhhh, more than that, a portent of the atheist, loose-living times. Why hadn’t the police called out the North Highlanders? … And he read up the Runner while he ate his bit supper, and called in his housekeeper and told her the news, and she said that she thought it disgraceful, just, she’d heard that a poor old man was in hospital, dying, with his breast all broken up: would he be a policeman, then, would you say? The Reverend MacShilluck gave a bit of a cough and said Well, no, he understood not— Ahhhhhhhhhhhh well, we mustn’t worry over much on these things, the proper authorities will see to them. And gave the housekeeper a slap in the bottom, well-fed, and said Eh, Pootsy, tonight? And the housekeeper simpered and said Oh, sir—
Bailie Brown, that respectable Labour man, was interviewed and was awful indignant, he said that he fought day in, day out, the cause of the unemployed on the Council, none knew the workers better than he or the grievances they had to redress. But what good did this senseless marching do?—the Council had to impose the pac rates the National Government laid down for it, you could alter nothing for a three or four years till Labour came into power again. The unemployed must trust the Labour Party, not allow itself to be led all astray—And he shot Mr Piddle out on the street, in a hurry, like, he’d to dress for dinner.
. . . . .
Lord Provost Speight was found in his garden, stroking his long, dreich, wrinkled face; and he said that this Bolshevism should be suppressed, he put the whole riot down to Communist agents, paid agitators who were trained in Moscow, the working-class was sound as a bell. If they thought they could bring pressure to bear on the Council to alter the rates of the pac, by rioting about in Royal Mile, they were sore mistaken, he’d guarantee that—
. . . . .
Duncairn’s Chief Constable said it wasn’t true the police had run, they’d just given back a wee till reinforcements came and by then the crowd had dispersed, that was all. No, they’d made only one arrest so far, the well-known agitator Trease. And the old man who had died in the hospital had been struck down by one of the rioters—
. . . . .
And the men came back to their homes in Footforthie and Paldy Parish and Kirrieben, some of them walking and laughing, some glum, some of them half-carried all the way, with their broken noses, bashed faces, it made a woman go sick to see Peter or Andrew or Charlie now, his face a dripping, bloody mask, his whispering through his broken lips: I’m fine, lass, fine. Oh God, you could greet if it wasn’t that when you did that you would die….
And all that night they re-fought the fight, in tenements, courts, this room and that, and the bairns lay listening how the bobbies had run, of the young toff who’d appeared when Trease was knocked down and shouted Break down the lorry for bottles! and led them all off when the bottles were finished, him and Steve Selden, and told them to scatter. By God, he’d lots of guts had that loon, though, toff-like, he’d been sick as a dog of a sudden, down in the Cowgate when binding a wound. You wanted more of his kind for the next bit time…. And the wife would say What’s the use of more bashing? and you said a man had to die only once and ’twould be worth while doing that if you kicked the bucket with your nails well twined in a bobby’s liver—
. . . . .
A week later the Daily Runner came out and announced that after a special sitting the Council had raised the pac rates.
Ma Cleghorn heard the story from Chris: Ah well, if that’s how your Ewan feels. I’d never much liking for bobbies myself, though maybe the meikle sumph, you know, was doing no more than his duty, like. Chris said His duty? To bash a young boy—before the boy had done anything to him? And Ma said Well, well, you’re fair stirred up. I’ll think up some sonsy lie as excuse, and tell him the morn to look out other lodgings.
And next morning Ma tackled the sacking of Feet, he’d spluttered a bit and put on the heavy as she told Chris when she came back to the kitchen. But she’d soon settled up his hash for the billy, telling him his room was needed for another, a childe they’d promised it a long while back. He’d told her she’d better look out, she had, and not get in ill with the Force, they’d heard things in headquarters about that quean Johns and were keeping an eye on the house already—
Ma had fair lost her rag at that and told him she didn’t care a twopenny damn though all the bobbies in Duncairn toun were to glue themselves on to her front door knocker, the meikle lice—who was he to insult a decent woman who paid her rent and rates on the nail? If my man had been alive, he’d have kicked you out, sergeant’s stripes and all, you great coarse bap-faced goloch that you are. Feet had habbered I wasn’t trying to insult you, and Ma had said Give me more of your lip and I’ll tackle the kicking of your dowp myself, and left him fair in fluster, poor childe, hardly kenning whether he stood on his head or meikle feet, fair convinced he was in the wrong, and packing up his case to get out of the house.—So there you are, lass, and we’re short of a lodger.
Chris said she was sorry, she’d try and get another, and Ma said Och, not to worry about that, some creature would soon come talking around. Chris thought the same, not heeding a lot, though it was a shame to lose Feet’s fee. But he couldn’t have bidden in the house at all after that tale that Ewan had told her—Ewan with a pale, cool angry face, stirred as she’d never seen him stirred.
She was thinking of that when the postman chapped, Ma Cleghorn went paiching out to the hall and silence followed till Ma cried up A letter for you, Mrs Robert Colquohoun.
When Chris got down to the hail there she stood, turning the thing this way and that, all but tearing it open and reading, Chris nearly laughed, she was used to Ma. It’s from Segget, Ma said, and Chris said Is’t now? and took the thing and opened it and read, Ma giving a whistle and turning away and dighting with a duster at the grandfather clock, making on she was awful ta’en up with her work. And Chris read the long straggle of sloping letters and was suddenly smelling, green and keen, sawdust, sawn wood—queerly and suddenly homesick for Segget:
We’ve a new lodger coming on the Monday, Ma. A man that I used to know in Segget, Ake Ogilvie the joiner, he’s gotten a job as a foreman up at the Provost’s sawmills.
Chris started awake. The fog had re-thickened, blanketing Duncairn away from her sight as she stood here dreaming like a gowkèd bairn. Her hair felt damp with the pressing mist veils and the weight of the bag on her arm was lead—funny this habit she aye had had of finding some place wherever she bade to which she could climb by her lone for a while and think of the days new-finished and done, like a packman halting hill on hill and staring back at the valleys behind. She minded how above the ploughed lands of Blawearie this habit had grown, long syne, long syne, when she’d lain and dreamed as a quean by the loch in the shadow of the marled Druid Stones, and how above Segget in the ruined Kaimes she had done the same as the wife of Robert. Robert: and Ake Ogilvie was coming from Segget with his long brown face and his rangy stride. How would he take with a place like Duncairn? How had he gotten the job with the Provost?
Autumn coming down there in the fog, down in the days you no more could glimpse than the shrouded roofs of Duncairn at this hour…. And Ewan—what was happening to Ewan? Once so cool and cold, boy-clear, boy-clever, a queer lad you’d thought would never be touched by any wing of the fancies of men, grey granite down to the core—and now?
In the mirror she saw her face, dim in mist, and smiled at it with a kind dispassion. And what to herself?—just the trauchle of time, the old woman she’d believed herself at first in Duncairn—as she still did sometimes at moments of weariness—or that other quean that refused to die, that moved and looked and stole off her thoughts, and dreamed the daftest of old, lost dreams, blithe as though twenty, unkissed and uncuddled?
Well, time she went into those mists of the future. There was ten o’clock chapping from Thomson Tower.