The Grampian Quartet. Nan Shepherd

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      Martha put the train fare in her pocket and looked at the sombre sky. It had been just as heavy for days and she had escaped a wetting. She pulled her cycle from the shed and raced along the beaten path that crossed the field. The field was lately ploughed. At every dozen steps she stumbled off the narrow path (moist enough itself in the sodden weather) into the heavy upturned earth. Clods hung upon her boots. She raced on, to gain the road before her mother saw her go. The pennies in her pocket jigged to a dance tune. They meant a candle (if the candles could be bought before her mother knew the pence were saved), and a candle meant peace to work at night in her own chill room.

      She dared not buy the candles in town lest at the last minute the storm broke and she had to return after all by train. At half-past four the wind still screamed up-country; no change since morning, and Martha set off to cycle home. She intended to dismount and buy her candles in the last shop on the outskirts of the city; but the wind, and her own fear of being caught in rain and her mother’s anger, drove her at such a frantic speed that she was already past the shop before her mind snatched at the necessity for dismounting. It would have been foolish to turn back and fight the wind − the candles could be bought at Cairns. The shop was far behind her by the time her mind had worked itself to that resolve, so irresistible a vigour was in the wind that pushed her on. She let herself go to its power, pedalling furiously on her old machine that had no free-wheel and one inefficient brake.

      A long stretch of unsheltered road lay ahead, running beneath a low sky that sank farther and farther as she advanced. Suddenly the grey wind turned dirty-white, drove upon her in a blast of sleet. It chilled her neck, soaked her hair, dribbled along her spine, smothered her ears; the backs of her legs and arms were battered numb; her boots filled slowly with the down-drip from her skirt and stockings; once or twice she looked at the handle-bars to make sure that her hands were there. She had dismounted when the sleet began, to unfasten her books from behind the bicycle; her person might be soaked, but not her precious books. She rammed them in the bosom of her coat, that gaped and would not fasten over the unwieldly bundle. When she mounted again she had to pedal furiously in spite of her hampered and clammy limbs, because to pedal furiously was easier than to hold back against the sweep of the wind; but as the sleet continued to fall and filled the road with slush and semiliquid mud, her pace slackened, till at last she was pushing with effort over the pasty ground, her front wheel bumping, splashing, squirming by reason of her inability to guide it. Darkness had come down too soon. She had a lamp but no means of lighting it, nor could it easily have been lit in the violence of the weather. A passing cart filled her with nameless dread; a chance pedestrian loomed horribly distorted through the sleet; there were no recognizable sounds. The beat of the storm upon her back had plastered her shoddy clothing to her skin. By the time she rode through Cairns, its early lights diffused and smudgy in the thickened air, she was too numb to think, even to picture the possession of a candle, much less procure it. She rode like an automaton.

      At the foot of the long brae to the cottage she stumbled from her machine. Light had gone from the earth. The sleet drove now upon her side as she battled uphill pushing her bicycle. Thought began to stir again when she reached the puddle at the gateway of the field. She went straight ahead through the puddle because it mattered little now how much wetter she became; and with that she began to wonder what reproach her mother would have ready. She had not even candles for consolation; and Emmeline would say next morning, ‘Ye’ve got yer money for the train.’ She tumbled her cycle into the shed and pushed open the house-door, standing dazed a moment on the threshold.

      Emmeline’s back was towards the door, as she bent over the fire and stirred the so wens for supper. Without turning, when one of the children said, ‘Here’s Matty come,’ she complained to her daughter.

      ‘Ye’ve ta’en a terrible like time to come up fae the station.’

      Martha’s heart fluttered and thumped, and pulses beat hot and hurried in the chill of her temples. So her mother had not been in the shed and did not even know that the cycle had been taken out!

      ‘It’s a terrible night. I’m wet through,’ she said. But the wetting had suddenly become of no importance. Her mind did not even run forward to the pennies she had gained; the mere relief from an immediate onslaught by her mother’s tongue was joy enough. She went in a sort of stupid excitement to remove her dangling clothes; but she had to call Madge through from her Pansy Novelette to help her strip.

      Geordie came in, soaked too. The fireplace was hung with dripping garments and the iron kettles perched with sopping boots. The steam of them eddied about the room, mingling with the wood-smoke blown back from the chimney. Emmeline worked herself into a lather of vituperation at the weather and the folk, but gave the latter none the less their so wens in ample measure, smeared with syrup and piping hot. She set the boys to feed the fire with branches and logs of pine. Every now and then a resinous knot spluttered and sang, flared out in blobs and fans of flame. Emmeline made no economies with fire. She loved heat. The little kitchen was shortly stuffed with a hot reek − the reek of wood and folk and so wens, wet clothes, steaming dishwater and Bogie Roll.

      For once Martha did not regret her lack of candles. She was shivering violently from her exposure and glad of the heavy heat of the kitchen. She sat at the deal table, catching her share of light from the lamp upon her open schoolbooks. Geordie was playing Snakes-and-Ladders with the bairns − Madge and the eight-and nine-year-old boys. There was no Dussie now. Something less than three years after her arrival, Mrs. Ironside had polished her one day according to her lights and taken her away. Her folk reclaimed her. Dussie was in a whirl of excitement. She had tangled the processes of washing and dressing with fifty plans for interminable futures, and Martha was to share her fortune and her favour. They had not seen her since.

      A three-year-old girl was asleep in the kitchen bed, to be carried ben the hoose in Madge’s ruddy arms when she herself retired. Madge was twelve, a strong-built girl, not tall, no great talker, knowing and not sharing her own mind.

      In spite of the driving sleet, which had sting enough to keep most folk by their own firesides, Stoddart Semple lounged in the ingle nook and smoked his filthy cutty. He was a grey cadaverous man in the middle fifties, who did for himself and doggedly invaded his neighbours’ homes. ‘Stoddart’s takin’ a bide,’ folk said. They growled at him but seldom put him out. He was good to laugh at.

      Emmeline, still standing, a dish-towel lumped beneath one arm, and her elbows dug into the back of her husband’s chair, was having her turn of the Pansy Novelette.

      Geordie could rattle the dice with the best when it was a matter of Snakes-and-Ladders or so, and was unaffectedly happy in his slow deliberate play with the bairns; but jerking back his chair he chanced to dislodge Emmeline’s elbows, and drove her fists against her chin, her teeth closing upon her tongue.

      ‘Tak care, will ye?’ said she. ‘Garrin’ a body bite their tongue. …’

      ‘Haud oot ower a bit, than,’ said Geordie, and he slapped his knee and roared with laughter. The game was upset, and the boys began a monkey-chase about the room. Madge climbed on a creepie to see over Emmeline’s shoulder on to the jewelled-and-ermined pages of the Pansy Novelette, which Emmeline was still reading voraciously, bending as often as the boys scuttled within her reach to flick them with the dish-towel.

      Martha all this while sat at another board, playing a different game: a game of shifting and shuffling and giving in exchange. Its most fascinating move consisted in fitting four flighty little English sentences into one rolling Latin period. Martha bent her energies upon it, too absorbed to heed the racket around her. Even when a bear beneath the table worried her knees, she only moved aside a little impatiently, saying nothing.

      Martha had grown up quiet. After all the flaring СКАЧАТЬ