LITMIR.BIZ

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Madge’s only reply was to march without the slightest attempt at secrecy into the next geraniumed garden and abstract a goodly handful of scarlet petals. She was quite capable, if she caught sight of them in the bedroom, of using Martha’s scraps of silk for personal adornment. In the end Martha flattened the envelope, that was crushed and smeared from its sojourn in her pocket, and laid it between the pages of a heavy algebra text-book that stood on the high triangular shelf in the corner of the room: with hooks on its under surface to serve the girls for wardrobe. Sometimes she slipped the envelope from its hiding-place and touched the bits of silk that a regiment had followed. At such times it seemed to her that she was touching the past.

      While her universe was thus widening both in time and in space, Scotland grew wider too. Hitherto her own blue valley, the city with its spires and dirty trawlers, had been her measure of Scotland. Now it grew. The North came alive. Out of it, from cottar-houses and farms, from parlours behind country shops, from fishing-villages on the Moray Firth, from station-houses and shepherds’ houses and school-houses, manses and mansions, crofts on the edge of heather, snow-blocked glens, clachans on green howes beneath the corries, where tumbling waterfalls lit the rocks; islands in the Atlantic, gale-swept, treeless; thatched cottages where the peat reek clung in stuff and fabric and carried east in clothes and books − there flocked in their hundreds her fellow-students, grave, gay, eager, anxious, earnest, flippant, stupid and humble and wise in their own conceits, dreamers and doers and idlers, bunglers and jesters, seekers of pleasure and seekers of wisdom, troubled, serene, impetuous, and all inquisitive; subjecting life to inquisition.

      Out of the Islands Martha found her friends. Chief was Harrie Nevin. Harrie came from Shetland. She had the Vikings in her bearing and Martha worshipped her from a distance: until she discovered that Harrie was doing the same by her. Then they wrote each other wonderful letters. …

      Martha suffered bitterly because she could not ask Harrie to her home. Harrie, with her regal port, in Emmeline’s haphazard kitchen! In compensation she was able to introduce her to Luke Cromar.

      It had not occurred to Martha that knowing Luke was a matter for public congratulation; but the girls who saw him leave a group of talkers in the quadrangle at Marischal and dash across to Martha when he saw her pass, put her right as to that. She perceived that knowing Luke gave her a social status in University affairs; but rated that at less worth than simply knowing him.

      University affairs, indeed, made much of Luke. He was in everything. He was President of the Student’s Representative Council and on half a dozen other committees as well. And in the flat, four stairs up, Dussie waited for him and entertained his guests. They lived on little. Luke had been an apprentice shoemaker, an orphan boy who had dreamed while he cobbled shoes of mending all the philosophies of the world. A legacy had enabled him to go through college. But Dussie played eagerly at economy. Gracious, petulant, fresh as rain, she was the delight of all his friends. She made a hundred mistakes, but proclaimed them aloud with such a bubbling candour that they were only so many assets the more to her popularity. The men loved to hear her own rapturous recital of her indiscretions, her social faux pas.

      In the summer they held tea-parties on the leads − ‘Luke’s sky-highs,’ Kennedy called them; and the name caught.

      Martha came to few of their parties, though Dussie, whose childhood’s adoration had lost none of its vehemence, would have had her come to all. She was too shy, too awkward, and her Sunday blouse and skirt were out of place. Besides, time was short. Piles of stockings to darn, of dishes to wash, ate too far into it. Emmeline, it was clear, regarded the time she spent on books as leisure, her recreation. To have pen and paper about, and open note-books, protected her: but when her pulses raced to the choruses in Atlanta, or, rapt away by thought, poring over The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, she stared out motionless upon the strangeness of its landscapes, Emmeline’s voice would break in:

      ‘Is that yer lessons ye’re at?’

      It took many skirmishes with her conscience to convince her that she was justified in saying yes: and by that time Emmeline was convinced to the contrary. A ‘poetry book’ was for fun, and its reader might legitimately be interrupted. The English Parnassus she recognized as a lesson book. It had been bought, not borrowed from the Library at King’s; and on winter nights that were too chill for her bedroom, Martha carried The English Parnassus to the kitchen; she read it from cover to cover, fairly secure from onslaught.

      Her leisure therefore she would not devote to parties: where, to say the truth, she was not over-happy. She went however to the Friday evening Societies − to the ‘Lit.’; and to the ‘Sociolog,’ because Luke was its President and had made her a gift of a membership card.

      ‘Raw ripe red wisdom every Friday at seven,’ he proclaimed.

      She sat astounded at the discussions she heard. Wages, industrial unrest, sweated labour, unemployment, mental deficiency, syndicalism, federation − words to her! She had given so little of her thought as yet to the present; and it amazed her increasingly to hear her fellow-students, some glib, some stuttering, some passionate, some sardonic, talk of these matters. We are the people, they might have cried.

      In particular she stared cold-hearted at the ‘Vice’. The Vice-President was a girl: Lucy Warrender by name. No matter what the theme, Miss Warrender talked with authority. She had already an Honours degree in Philosophy and was studying now for History and Economics. She seemed to know existence to its ends. Martha gulped in sheer terror sometimes when she heard her talk: so competent, flawless, master of her purposes.

      ‘Oh, a mine of information,’ Luke called her, when Martha stammered her dismay. Was it praise or disparagement? She could not tell: and when, puzzling it out, she looked at him, his long face told her nothing.

      But astonishing as were some of the things she heard, Martha took them all in. One must not throw away a fact. Knowledge grew sweeter the more one ate of it. Sharp-flavoured too, though, acrid at times upon the palate.

      This widening world of ideas grew more and more the true abode of her consciousness. The cottage did not reabsorb her afternoon by afternoon: it received her back. She was in its life but not of it. Its concerns did not concern her nearly. Still less did she feel herself concerned with her neighbours, the Andy Macphersons and the Stoddart Semples. She had no point of contact with these: or thought so. In this she was mistaken. The contact was there, though she did not feel it.

      Its existence, however, might have been detected, less than a month after her session began, on a day when Aunt Josephine Leggatt walked down from Crannochie to Wester Cairns.

       SEVEN

       Sundry Weathers

      Aunt Josephine, hodging steadily along the soft road in the direction of Wester Cairns, met Stoddart Semple lounging by the dyke.

      Stoddart had never forgiven his February dismissal into the sleet. Having backed, in that dispute, the side that lost, he went away convinced of Martha’s uppishness; and as Martha did not like the man, tasted moreover no salt in the jokes he relished with her father, and never stopped to give him a crack by the roadside, he supposed himself in her contempt when it was merely she who sat in his.

      Meeting Miss Leggatt, he began to grumble sourly.

      ‘Ye’ve gotten a lady in the family noo.’

      He put a bitter emphasis on the lady and stopped to look at Miss Leggatt.

      ‘I see the muckle feet o’ her takin’ awa’ doon the road,’ he added.

      ‘If it’s Matty ye’re meanin’,’ said Miss Josephine − and she said it without the shadow of an alteration in mien or accent − ‘she’s been a lady sin’ ever she was the littlin.’

      ‘A bonny penny she’ll be for books,’ he grumbled.

      ‘I wadna say. Ye get naething for naething in this warld.’

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