The Quarry Wood - Nan Shepherd Canons

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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 disquietudes of her childhood, she had settled into a uniform calmness of demeanour that was rarely broken. Her silences, however, were deceptive. She was not placid, but controlled. She had the control that comes of purpose; and her purpose was the getting of knowledge. There was no end to the things that one could know.

      Goerdie was still in his cups, metaphorically speaking, an honest joke suiting him as well as a dram; and Mrs. Ironside was grumbling still: ‘Garrin’ a body bite their tongue … I never heard …’; when Willie sprang on the top of the table and upset the bottle of ink upon Martha’s Latin version. She had written half of it in fair copy, in a burst of exasperation at the refusal of the second half to take coherent form. Now she sprang to her feet and watched the black ruin, staring at the meandering of the ink.

      ‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ said Emmeline.

      Emmeline had stuffed the novelette under her chin, pressing it there, head forward, to keep it in position, and had lunged out after Willie, flicking at his ear with the dish-towel. The lurch she gave as he dodged jerked the book on to the floor and Emmeline herself against the table; and the dish-towel flicked the ink.

      ‘Blaudin’ ma towel an’ a’,’ she grumbled; and then,

      ‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ she said to Martha.

      Martha gulped. She suddenly wanted to scream, to cry out at the pitch of her voice, ‘I haven’t time, I haven’t time, I haven’t time! What’s a kitchen table in comparison with my Latin, with knowing things, with catching up on the interminable past! There isn’t time!’

      She set to work cleaning up the mess.

      Then tears scalded her. Through them, blurred, ridiculous, all out of shape, fantastically reduplicated, she was watching her mother pick up the Pansy Novelette, bunch the towel beneath her arm again, and read.

      Martha felt her mouth twist. The reeking air of the kitchen choked her. Its noises hammered and sang through her brain. The room was insufferably tight. She pushed viciously with both hands at the wet cloth she was using, smearing the table still further with pale blue stains. She licked a tear from her upper lip. Quite salt. Another − she licked that too. Her eyes and cheeks were fired

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