LITMIR.BIZ

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aberration into a universal law governing his being. ‘That thrawn there’s nae livin’ wi’ him. Aince he taks a notion intil his heid, naething’ll move him. He wad argy-bargy ye intil the middle o’ next week. Ye micht as weel ging doon on yer knees an’ speak to a mole that was crawlin’ on the grun’. He taks a bit o’ understandin’.’

      Martha bent grimly to her Latin. But inspiration had fled. The four shabby sentences declined to be made less than four. The prose was completed, with much searching of the heart and the vocabulary.

      Geordie came in again. Wind, water, earth, came with him, spluttered in his tracks. Emmeline dabbed at the filthy runlets − ‘as muckle dirt’s wad fill a kirk. I never saw. …’

      The boys were beddit. They slept in the middle place, a sort of box between the rooms. Madge was sent packing. Martha pulled her books together and went too.

      Emmeline’s resentments were messy, but brief.

      Next day Martha went to town − in a bitter downpour − by train. Her mother gave her the fare without demur: but she missed the early train home and it was already past the family meal-hour when she returned. There was sign of neither family nor meal. Emmeline on her knees, in splendid isolation, scoured the floor as though it had not felt water for a twelvemonth.

      ‘Where’s father?’

      ‘Awa’ to the wall for peats.’

      Finality in that reply. Martha’s heart sagged. She went through to the bedroom.

      There she found Madge, curled on the bed, her shoulders hunched, devouring her penny trash. Her grunt was inarticulate; she did not lift her eyes from the page. She had an end of candle stuck in Martha’s candlestick.

      ‘Where did you get the candle?’ cried Martha sharply. Was it hers? Had Madge stolen it? secreted it?

      Madge smirked: not audible enough for one to say, giggled.

      ‘It’s nae yours, onyway. − Ye needna stand there and glower,’ she added, raising her head. ‘I‘ve tell’t you, it’s nae yours. I suppose I can hide things as well’s you.’

      But where did she get it? Martha continued to ponder, still glowering at the child. One fragment of her brain said reasonably: Of course she can; and another cried in fever: She mustn’t criticize me − she’s much too young. The voices in her head circled and intersected; shortly she became aware that they were laced by actual voices, coming through the shoddy wall. She listened − noises too: the stir of industry. Her father and the boys must be in the lean-to against the house-end. She dashed out through the rain and pushed the door. Inside was a reeking, buzzing warmth − an oily lantern, unwashed and sweaty skins, stale air, animation, laughter. Geordie was cleaning Martha’s neglected bicycle. The boys were also engaged on the bicycle; wreathing a towsled bit of rope through the spokes of the front wheel and ripping it smartly out again. A terrific display of industry. The flaring and smoky light from the open lantern, shifting, smearing, exaggerating what a moment ago it had suppressed, suppressing what it had exaggerated, gave their actions a fantastic air of unreality. Baby Flossie, hoisted aloft on a barrel and some boxes, a little insecure but in great content, presided over the scene like some genius of the place − an immature deity whose effort at creation had resulted in grotesquerie. She was like a grotesque herself-a very tiny baby, ‘an image’ Emmeline contemptuously called her: and there she squatted on her barrel, preternaturally solemn, a little above the level of the lantern, that juggled her features all askew so that she seemed to wink and leer upon the workers. But then of course the workers (Geordie excepted) were labouring a little askew.

      ‘She’ll kick up a waup for a whilie,’ Geordie said when he saw his daughter, ‘but it’ll wear by. She’ll keep’s ooten languor an’ inen anger.’

      He wiped his oily hands on his buttocks, picked up Flossie and happed her in his coat, and extinguishing the lantern made for supper.

      ‘Ay, ay, it’ll wear by,’ he said.

      In spite of a sore throat and aching limbs, Martha did her lessons that night in the cold. She held an illumination, lighting two candles to elucidate the sine of A + B. Madge’s candle-end was gone: she must have secreted the stump for future use. Martha pushed one of her candles into the candlestick and fixed the other by its own melted end to a broken saucer.

      Madge poked her head in.

      ‘You’ve got to come ben. You’ll be perished.’

      ‘I’m not coming. I’m quite warm.’

      ‘A’ richt, then, dinna.’

      She remained staring for a minute at the twin candles, but said nothing and went away. She could keep her own counsel and was quite willing to keep Martha’s also.

      Martha was glad of the feeble heat the candles gave. There was warmth also in the recollection of her father’s words, ‘Ay, ay, it’ll wear by.’

      It wore by. In very short time Emmeline had comfortably persuaded herself that a daughter with a University degree was a grandiloquence worth the waiting for. She took care, however, to hide her persuasion: in case of need still protestant.

      When some months later Martha’s examination was over and she had gained her bursary, Geordie sat a long while in his shirt sleeves, unbraced after supper, gripping the newspaper that had published the results, ‘aye takin’ the t’ither keek at her name.’ Emmeline too was moved by the sight of her daughter’s name in print. They would see it at Muckle Arlo! She pictured Uncle Sandy Corbett spreading out the paper and reading it aloud. Aunt Leebie would sniff, no doubt, and Aunt Jean receive it in silence: but they would know!

      ‘Ye can jist snifter awa’ there’ − she addressed an imaginary Aunt Leebie − ‘but ye canna say ye hinna seen’t.’

      ‘She’s got ma sister Sally’s gump.’ Geordie’s voice broke across her pleasant reverie. ‘She’s rale like Sally whiles.’

      ‘Sally!’ screamed Mrs. Ironside, her fancies scattering like a pack of cards. ‘Her that disna richt ken gin she’s merriet or no.’

      ‘Merriet or nae merriet,’ said Geordie, ‘she had a sicht mair gumption nor ony ither o’ fowk.’

      Sally Ironside’s life, indeed, had demanded, or perhaps developed, gumption. For nine brief days she had been the speak of the place. She had left home at the age of thirty, with neither wealth nor looks to commend her, and gone through a marriage with the man whose taste in womankind had roused the astonishment of all Peterkirk and Corbieshaw and Crannochie.

      ‘If Sally Ironside’s gotten a man, an’ her thirty an’ nae a stitch o’ providin’, there’s hope for me yet,’ said one old crone to another.

      ‘There’s queerer things happened,’ answered she. ‘But fat’s the notion in nae settin’ aboot it the proper gait, tell me that, will ye? A gey heelster-gowdie business, this rinnin’ awa’ to get yer man.’

      Eighteen months later, the sole addition to her worldly gear the bairn in her arms, Sally found herself on the street, her husband having given her to understand that their marriage was a form only, and invalid. Sally disputed nothing; nor did she offer any interference − legal or moral − with his subsequent marriage to a lassie with siller. Ten years later she paid a brief visit to her old home at Peterkirk, in the garb of the Salvation Army. She was well-doing and self-respecting, but what sieges and stratagems she had carried on in the interval against a callous world only Sally herself could tell. She did not choose to tell too much. The bairn had died. ‘Good thing,’ said Sally briefly.

      Questioned as to her marriage, she acknowledged her private suspicion that the ceremony had been valid enough but that the man had taken advantage of her ignorance to get rid of her. She had no marriage lines and did not even know the name of the place where the marriage took place.

      ‘He had a perfect right to tire of me,’ she said.

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