A Scots Quair (46 page)

Bruce was a dark and a sour-like childe, but he looked near twice as sour in a minute when old Smithie took him a crack in the jaw.
What's that for?
Bruce cried, and Smithie said
Lip
, and came at him again, the daft-like old tyke. Well, you couldn't expect but that Bruce would be raised, he was knocking Smithie all over the bar when Mistress Melvin came tearing in. She cried in her thin Aberdeen,
What's
this? Stop your Blasting and Blaspheming in here
. Bruce said,
I haven't sworn a damn word
, she said
That's enough,
take your tink fights out, sossing up the place with blood and
the like. If you've any quarrel to settle with your relations, go
out and settle it where folk can't see
.

And Bruce said
Right;
and took old Smithie out, and gey near settled him entire, you would say. It just showed you what happened to a billy that stole, there's a difference between nicking a thing here and there, and being found out and made look a fair fool.

AND NEXT SABBATH
MacDougall Brown, the postmaster, came down to the Square and preached on stealing, right godly-like, and you'd never have thought that him and his wife stayed up of a night sanding the sugar and watering the paraffin—or so folk said, but they tell such lies. He was maybe a fifty years old, MacDougall, a singer as well as a preacher, i'faith! though some said his voice was the kind of a thing better suited to slicing a cheese. During the War he had fair been a patriot, he hadn't fought, but losh! how he'd sung! In the first bit concert held in the War he sang Tipperary to the Segget folk, with his face all shining like a ham on the fry, and he sang it right well till he got to the bit where the song has to say that his heart's right there. And faith, MacDougall got things a bit mixed, he clapped down his hand the wrong side of his wame; and Ake Ogilvie that sat in the front of the hall gave a coarse snicker and syne
everybody laughed; and MacDougall had never forgiven Ake that. But he got on well with his post-office place, Johnnie his son was a bit of a fool and MacDougall sent him to take round the letters, it cost him little with a son that was daft and MacDougall kept the cash for himself. Forbye young Jock he'd two daughters as well, the eldest, Cis, was bonny and trig, with a grave, douce face, she went to the College but she wasn't proud, a fine bit queen, and all Segget liked her.

Well, MacDougall had a special religion of his own, he wasn't Old Kirk and he wasn't of the Frees, he wasn't even an Episcopalian, but Salvation Army, or as near as damn it. He went on a Sabbath morn to the Square and preached there under the lee of the angel, that the road to heaven was the way he said. He'd made two-three converts in his years in Segget, they'd stand up and say what the Lord had done, how before they'd met Him they were lost, ruined souls: but now God had made them into new men. And faith! you would think, if that was the case, the Lord's handiwork was failing, like everything else.

Well, that Sunday after the row at Smithie's, he was there at his stance where the angel stood, MacDougall himself with his flat, bald head, and beside him his mistress, a meikle great sumph, she came from the south and she mouthed her words broad as an elephant's behind, said Ake Ogilvie. She thought little of Cis, that was clever and bonny, but a lot of her youngest, the quean called Mabel—by all but her mother, she called her May-bull. Well, they both were there, and the daftie Jock, gleying, and slavering up at the angel, and a two-three more, the gardener Grant and Newlands the stationy, them and their wives; with the angel above with her night-gown drawn back, right handy-like, in case it might rap against the bald pow of MacDougall Brown. Mistress Brown opened up the harmonica they'd brought, it groaned and spluttered and gave a bit hoast, syne they started the singing of their unco hymns, Newlands burring away in his boots and MacDougall slicing the words like cheese.

Syne MacDougall started to preach about stealing, with a verse from Leviticus for the text, though the case of old
Smithie had supplied the cause; and they started singing another bit hymn, all about being washed in the Blood of the Lamb, the Lamb being Jesus Christ, said MacDougall, he was awful fond of hymns full of blood, though he'd turned as white as a sheet the time Dite Peat had come over to kill his pig, and asked MacDougall to hold the beast down.

Well, they were getting on fine and bloody, and having fairly a splash in the gore, when MacDougall noticed there was something wrong, the words all to hell, he couldn't make it out. Syne his mistress noticed and screwed round her head, and she said
What is't?
and saw MacDougall, red as rhubarb, he'd stopped his singing. The rest of them had to do the same, for a drove of the spinners had come in about, with that tink Jock Cronin at their head, as usual, they were singing up fast and fair drowning MacDougall, a coarse-like mocking at MacDougall's hymn:

And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall!

MacDougall waited until they had stopped, then he cried to Cronin
Have you no respect—you, John Cronin—for
the Lord's Day at all?
And the tink said,
Damn the bit;
nor have you
. And MacDougall nearly burst to hear that, he'd lived by the Bible all his life. And John Cronin said
You believe all that's in it?
and MacDougall Brown said,
Ay, I have faith
. But Cronin had fairly got him trapped now, he said
Well, it says in the Bible that if you've got faith
you can move a mountain. That'll be proof Move back the
Mounth there in front of our eyes!

The spinners with him, a lot of tink brutes, all brayed up then,
Ay, come on, MacDougall! Move a mountain—
you're used to move sand!
MacDougall habbered redder than ever, then he cried
We'll now sing Rock of Ages
. Jock Cronin cried
Where's the rock of your faith?
and as soon as MacDougall and his converts began the spinners sang up their song as before, about being whiter than the whitewash on the wall, and about MacDougall's dirty daughter; and
such a noise was never heard before in the Sabbath Square of Segget.

Old Leslie came by and he heard the noise, and he knew MacDougall and was right sorry for him. But when he came over and tried to interfere, Jock Cronin cried
Christ, here's
Ananias!
And old Leslie walked away, fair in a rage, and went up to the Manse to complain about them.

He arrived there just after the morning service, the minister new back, and dinner-time done. And old Leslie said 'twas Infernal, just, the way that they treated a man nowadays. In his young days if a loon like that Cronin had miscalled a man he'd have been ta'en out and libbed. Ay, he minded when he was a loon up in Garvock—

But the new minister rose up and said
Well, I'll hear that
again, I've no time to waste
, with a look as black as though he could kill you. And afore old Leslie knew well what had happened he was out on the doorstep and heard the door bang.

CHRIS HEARD
the door bang and she saw old Leslie, he was turning slow to go down the walk, crunching the shingle under his feet; and suddenly you saw the old man that he was, his back crooked into that queer-like shape, cruel and a shame to get rid of him so, suddenly you wanted to weep, but you didn't, biting your lips as you watched him go. Only a tiring old fool, as you knew, and he'd come on Robert in that mad, black mood. And yet—

Things like that caught you again and again, with a tightening heart, when you had no thought—Robert in weariness half an hour back, his head in his hands, as he said
What's the use?
Robert's head as he prayed to that God of his that you couldn't believe in, though you hid that away, what need to hurt Robert with something that never he or you could alter though you lived forever? So, in the strangest of moments it would come, in a flame and a flash, a glimpse into depths that wrung your heart, you'd see the body of Else as she bent, a curve of pleasure that would curve yet in pain. You'd see—frightening the things if you cared to think in the dark of the night in the quiet of Segget, the hush of the yews out there on the lawn—the
hopeless folly of all striving, all hope. Sudden, in a Segget shop, maybe, you'd glimpse a face like your father's, near, alive and keen with its bearded lips, and you'd think of your father, long ago dead, bones rotted from flesh in Kinraddie kirkyard—what had life availed him and all his long years when he hoped for this and he strove for that? He died a coarse farmer in a little coarse house, hid in the earth and forgot by men, as forgot as your pains and your tears by God, that God that you knew could never exist….

Only with Εwan you'd never these glimpses into the shifting sands of life, bairn though he was there was something within him hard and shining and unbreaking as rock, something like a sliver of granite within him. Strange that his body had once come from yours in the days when you were a quean unthinking, so close to the earth and its smell and its feel that nearly he came from the earth itself!

From that we all came, you had heard Robert say, but wilder and stranger you knew it by far, from the earth's beginning
you yourself
had been here, a blowing of motes in the world's prime, earth, roots and the wings of an insect long syne in the days when the dragons still ranged the world—every atom here in your body now, that was here, that was you, that beat in your heart, that shaped your body to whiteness and strength, the speed of your legs and the love of your breasts when you turned to the kiss of your Robert at night—these had been there, there was nothing but a change, in a form, the stroke and the beat of a song.

And you thought how long, long ago with Will, your brother, that time he came home from France, before he went back and was killed in France you'd said that the Scots were never religious, had never believed as other folks did; and that was fell true, and not only for you, MacDougall that brayed by the angel in the Square, the folk that came to the kirk on a Sunday, Robert himself—even Robert himself! There was something lacking or something added, something that was bred in your bones in this land—oh, Something: maybe that Something was god—that made folk take with a smile and a gley the tales of the gods and the heavens and the hells, the afterlives and the lives before, heaven on earth and the chances of
change, the hope and belief in salvation for men—as a fairy-tale in a play that they'd play, but they knew the whole time they were only players, no Scots bodies died but they knew that fine, deep and real in their hearts they knew that here they faced up to the real, at last, neither heaven nor hell but the earth that was red, the cling of the clay where you'd alter and turn, back to the earth and the times to be, to a spraying of motes on a raging wind when the Howe was happed in its winter storms, to a spray of dust as some childe went by with his plough and his horse in a morning in Spring, to the peck and tweet of the birds in the trees, to trees themselves in a burgeoning Spring. You knew, and you knew that they knew—even Robert, holding to God in his blackest hour, this God he believed was the father of men, pitiful, He was Pity and a Friend, helpless even in a way as men, but Kind and Hero, and He'd conquer yet with all the legions of hell to battle.

So Robert believed: but now, as you heard his feet coming down the stairs in haste, out of his mood and happy again, you knew that he knew he followed a dream, with the black mood real, and his hopes but mists.

CHRIS REMEMBERED THAT
dream of her own—she'd been daft! she thought as she fled about next week's work. There was jam to make and she thought it fun, and so did Else, they'd boil pot on pot and fill all the jars, and forget about dinner. And Robert would come sweating in from the garden and cry
Losh, Christine, where have you
been? I thought you promised to come out and help. What's
wrong—nothing wrong with you, is there, my dear?
Chris would say
Only hunger
, and he'd say
Not love?
and the two would be fools for a moment till they heard the stamp of Else bringing in the tray. Syne they'd each slip into a chair and look solemn; but once Else caught them and said to the minister
Faith, I don't wonder!
and looked at Chris; and Chris thought that the nicest thing ever
looked
about her.

Ewan ran wild, Chris seldom saw him all the length of the summer days, he was out in Segget, exploring the streets, Chris at first had been feared for him—that he'd fall in front of a horse, or a car, or one of the buses that went by
to Dundon. She tried to tell him to be careful, then stopped, he'd to take his chances with the rest of the world.

On the Saturday she and Robert looked up from their work in the garden, and stood and watched Ewan, hands in his pockets, no cap on his head, go sauntering out through the gates of the Manse, his black hair almost blue in the sun, and turn by the Meiklebogs, going to the Kaimes, Chris wondered what he could want up there?

Robert said
He's seeking the High Places already
, and laughed, and went on with his digging, Chris the same, sweet and forgotten the smell of the earth, you thrust with your spade, the full throw of your body, so, and the drill built up as you dug. Then the rooks came cawing and wheeling in by, and they both looked up from Segget to the Mounth, rain drumming upon it far in the heuchs, cattle, tail-switching, dots on the heath. Chris asked what the clouds were, up there by Trusta, they piled up dome on dome in the sky, like the roofs of a city in the land of cloud. Robert said
Cumulus: just summer rain;
and a minute later—
Look, here it comes!