A Scots Quair. Lewis Grassic Gibbon

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СКАЧАТЬ like an artist, Latin and French and Greek and history were the things in which she shone. And the English master set their class an essay on Deaths of the Great and her essay was so good that he was fored to read it aloud to all the class, and the Fordyce quean had snickered and sniffed, so mad she was with jealousy.

      Mr Murgetson was the English master there, not that he was English himself, he came from Argyll and spoke with a funny whine, the Highland whine, and the boys swore he had hair growing up between his toes like a Highland cow, and when they’d see him coming down a corridor they’d push their heads round a corner and cry Moo! like a lot of cattle. He’d fly in an awful rage at that, and once when they’d done it he came into the class where Chris was waiting her lesson and he stood and swore, right out and horrible, and gripped a black ruler in his hands and glared round as if he meant to murder a body. And maybe he would if the French teacher, her that was bonny and brave, hadn’t come simpering into the room, and then he lowered the ruler and grunted and curled up his lip and said Eh? Canaille? and the French teacher she simpered some more and said May swee.

      So that was the college place at Duncairn, two Chrisses went there each morning, and one was right douce and studious and the other sat back and laughed a canny laugh at the antics of the teachers and minded Blawearie brae and the champ of horses and the smell of dung and her father’s brown, grained hands till she was sick to be home again. But she made friends with young Marget Strachan, Chae Strachan’s daughter, she was slim and sweet and fair, fine to know, though she spoke about things that seemed awful at first and then weren’t awful at all; and you wanted to hear more and Marget would laugh and say it was Chae that had told her. Always as Chae she spoke of him and that was an unco-like thing to do of your father, but maybe it was because he was socialist and thought that Rich and Poor should be Equal. And what was the sense of believing that and then sending his daughter to educate herself and herself become one of the Rich?

      But Marget cried that wasn’t what Chae intended, she was to learn and be ready for the Revolution that was some day coming. And if come it never did she wasn’t to seek out riches anyway, she was off to be trained as a doctor, Chae said that life came out of women through tunnels of pain and if God had planned women for anything else but the bearing of children it was surely the saving of them. And Marget’s eyes, that were blue and so deep they minded you of a well you peeped into, they’d grow deeper and darker and her sweet face grow so solemn Chris felt solemn herself. But that would be only a minute, the next and Marget was laughing and fleering, trying to shock her, telling of men and women, what fools they were below their clothes; and how children came and how you should have them; and the things that Chae had seen in the huts of the blacks in Africa. And she told of a place where the bodies of men lay salted and white in great stone vats till the doctors needed to cut them up, the bodies of paupers they were—so take care you don’t die as a pauper, Chris, for I’d hate some day if I rang a bell and they brought me up out of the vat your naked body, old and shrivelled and frosted with salt, and I looked in your dead, queer face, standing there with the scalpel held in my hand, and cried ‘But this is Chris Guthrie!’

      That was awful, Chris felt sick and sick and stopped midway the shining path that led through the fields to Peesie’s Knapp that evening in March. Clean and keen and wild and clear, the evening ploughed land’s smell up in your nose and your mouth when you opened it, for Netherhill’s teams had been out in that park all day, queer and lovely and dear the smell Chris noted. And something else she saw, looking at Marget, sick at the thought of her dead body brought to Marget. And that thing was a vein that beat in Marget’s throat, a little blue gathering where the blood beat past in slow, quiet strokes, it would never do that when one was dead and still under grass, down in the earth that smelt so fine and you’d never smell; or cased in the icy darkness of a vat, seeing never again the lowe of burning whins or hearing the North Sea thunder beyond the hills, the thunder of it breaking through a morning of mist, the right things that might not last and so soon went by. And they only were real and true, beyond them was nought you might ever attain but a weary dream and that last dark silence—Oh, only a fool loved being alive!

      But Marget threw her arms around her when she said that, and kissed her with red, kind lips, so red they were that they looked like haws, and said there were lovely things in the world, lovely that didn’t endure, and the lovelier for that. Wait till you find yourself in the arms of your lad, in the harvest time it’ll be with the stooks round about you, and he’ll stop from joking—they do, you know, and that’s just when their blood-pressure alters—and he’ll take you like this—wait, there’s not a body to see us!—and hold you like this, with his hands held so, and kiss you like this!

      It was over in a moment, quick and shameful, fine for all that, tingling and strange and shameful by turns. Long after she parted with Marget that evening she turned and stared down at Peesie’s Knapp and blushed again; and suddenly she was seeing them all at Blawearie as though they were strangers naked out of the sea, she felt ill every time she looked at father and mother. But that passed in a day or so, for nothing endures.

      Not a thing, though you’re over-young to go thinking of that, you’ve your lessons and studies, the English Chris, and living and eating and sleeping that other Chris that stretches your toes for you in the dark of the night and whispers a drowsy I’m you. But you might not stay from the thinking when all in a day, Marget, grown part of your life, came waving to you as you neared the Knapp with the news she was off to Aberdeen to live with an auntie there—it’s a better place for a scholar, Chae says, and I’ll be trained all the sooner.

      And three days later Chae Strachan and Chris drove down to the station with her, and saw her off at the platform, and she waved at them, bonny and young, Chae looked as numb as Chris felt. He gave her a lift from the station, did Chae, and on the road he spoke but once, to himself it seemed, not Chris: Ay, Marget lass, you’ll do fine, if you keep the lads at bay from kissing the bonny breast of you.

      SO THAT WAS YOUR Marget gone, there seemed not a soul in Kinraddie that could take her place, the servant queans of an age with Chris were no more than gowks and gomerils a-screech round the barn of the Mains at night with the ploughmen snickering behind them. And John Guthrie had as little use for them as Marget herself. Friends? Stick to your lessons and let’s see you make a name for yourself, you’ve no time for friends.

      Mother looked up at that, friendly-like, not feared of him at all, she was never feared. Take care her head doesn’t soften with lessons and dirt, learning in books it was sent the wee red daftie at Cuddiestoun clean skite, they say. And father poked out his beard at her. Say? Would you rather see her skite with book-learning or skite with—and then he stopped and began to rage at Dod and Alec that were making a noise in the kitchen corner. But Chris, a-pore above her books in the glow of the paraffin lamp, heeding to Caesar’s coming in Gaul and the stour the creature raised there, knew right well what father had thought to speak of—lust was the word he’d wanted, perhaps. And she turned a page with the weary Caesar man and thought of the wild career the daftie Andy had led one day in the roads and woods of Kinraddie.

      Marget had barely gone when the thing came off, it was fair the speak of the place that happening early in April. The sowing time was at hand, John Guthrie put down two parks with grass and corn, swinging hand from hand as he walked and sowed and Will carried the corn across to him from the sacks that lined the rigs. Chris herself would help of an early morning when the dew had lifted quick, it was blithe and lightsome in the caller air with the whistle of the blackbirds in Blawearie’s trees and the glint of the sea across the Howe and the wind blowing up the braes with a fresh, wild smell that caught you and made you gasp. So silent the world with the sun just peeking above the horizon those hours that you’d hear, clear and bright as though he paced the next field, the ringing steps of Chae Strachan—far down, a shadow and a sunlit dot, sowing his parks behind the steadings of Peesie’s Knapp. There were larks coming over that morning, СКАЧАТЬ