A Scots Quair (76 page)

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:

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—