The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd Canongate Classics

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and not in the granite walls, not in lecture-room nor laboratory nor library, nor even in the mind and character of those who taught, was the true breeding-ground of Geordie’s jeopardy. Here, for this one day, was the creative power behind the University’s glory and achievement. Twice a year she gathered for an hour the sources of her life, that he who would might look and understand. Geordie was part of this great spectacle, no spectator merely. By his ploughman’s gait, his misshapen shoulders, his broken nails and fingers ingrained with earth, his slow rough speech, his unabashed acceptance of himself, he brought into that magnificent hall the sense of a laborious past, of animal endurances, of the obstinate wholesome conservative earth. With him came the mind’s humbleness. He symbolised its ultimate dependences, its elemental strength.

      Part also of this spectacle for the imagination was Aunt Josephine, who had been piloted by Dussie to the gallery and sat pleased with all she saw and pleasing all who saw her. In her was manifest that substantial Leggatt imperturbability, sure of its own worth and ways, positive, that gives direction and stability to the questioning mind.

      Part too was the woman who sat on Geordie’s farther side, and shared with him her printed list of graduands, Emmeline having fixed very securely on to the sheet served to them. With her exquisitely gloved finger she pointed out to him the name of her son (‘my youngest’) and he sought for Martha’s and showed it her, pressing his thick discoloured thumb on the paper (‘ma auldest an’ ma youngest tae. I’ve bit the ane − ma ain, like,’ he said).

      ‘Yon was a gey grand duchess I had to sit aside me,’ he told them later, at lunch in Dussie’s flat. ‘A terrible fine woman.’ A woman of race, mother of sons who were to make an illustrious name yet more illustrious in government and law and literature.

      Part also was the washerwoman with ragnails and sucked hands where the flesh had swollen in ridges round her wedding-ring, whose daughter went in crêpe-de-chine; and the minister, hollow of cheek and with the eyes of a fanatic, and his shabby sunny wife, clapping her hands at the antics of the laddies, at heart a halarackit boy herself.

      Martha, as part of the obvious spectacle, discovered that graduation was after all not very exciting. It was ordinary and inevitable, like stepping out of a train when you reach your destination. She was excited none the less; and her secret excitement had a double cause. Half was in Luke’s parting words to her that evening − ‘We’re off tomorrow. Mind, you are coming to stay with us.’ The other half, surprisingly in a Martha who seemed to care so little for the outer integuments of living, was the lustre frock. It was so different from every other frock she had possessed. Dussie called it her inspiration. Everything had gone right in its making. Wearing it, Martha had an uncanny sense of being someone other than herself; as though she had stepped carelessly to a mirror to dress her hair and had seen features not her own looking out from the glass. The mere wearing of the frock could not have changed her: but like the mirror it served to make her aware of alteration; and she seemed to herself farther from her folk and her home. Wearing the lustre frock, she had no Ironside instincts. She did not belong to the Leggatts. Across the mirror of lustre there flitted an unfamiliar Martha with alien desires; and when some days after her capping she received one of Aunt Jean’s brusque notes of invitation, that specified the dates on which she was expected to arrive at and depart from Muckle Arlo, Martha set it aside and did not answer. The following day brought another note, as brief and as peremptory as Aunt Jean’s:

      DEAR MARTY,

      The Beyond at whose Back we are meanwhile situated is a Gloomy Mountain Pass much infested by midges. Come at once.

      LUKE

      ‘But ye canna nae ging to yer aunt’s,’ said Emmeline aghast.

      ‘I could go later.’

      ‘Deed ye’ll dae nae sic thing. Ye maun ging whan she’s bidden you.’

      ‘Not if I’m going elsewhere,’ said Martha. ‘I shall write and ask if I may come to her afterwards.’

      Emmeline bickered for the next two days. This was a strange riding to the ramparts of the citadel that she was counting on Martha to reconquer. When the portcullis had been lifted, that the girl should turn in the saddle and canter away to other ploys! ‘She wunna lat you come,’ she said to Martha.

      ‘I suppose I shan’t miss a very great deal,’ Martha answered.

      Queer contagion from a frock!

      Aunt Jean having signified that the later date was approved, Martha went to Luke and Dussie.

      Her fortnight in the hills had no reality. The hours floated past. Night glided after night. Muckle Arlo was on another earth. After two years Martha was amazed to find how similar everything was and how differently she regarded it. The black currants were over but there were red currants and rasps to pick. Martha again gathered currants and Aunt Leebie cried to her to wipe her feet; and Aunt and Uncle Webster came to Sunday dinner.

      Yet nothing was the same. She was not excited but bored by her bedroom, and Leebie with the physic bottle was ludicrous; and when she changed on Sunday morning, after breakfast and the making of the beds, to her best apparel (which was of course the lustre frock), she chafed a little at kinship. Relations … but what relation had they to her soul? She set out for church living again in ecstasy her days among the hills.

      ‘Ye’ve connached it,’ Aunt Leebie was saying. ‘Clean connached.’

      She was pulling her lustre frock about, scraping with her nail at its embroidery. But what right had she to be displeased? She had given the frock. And Martha remembered how Luke had approved it and Dussie had waltzed her round the room when she saw it on.

      ‘That’s gey guideship it’s gotten,’ the old woman was muttering.

      Martha had no leisure to be touched.

      ‘I’m nae nane cornered wi’ Matty this time,’ Leebie said to Jean.

      A relation … but what relation had she to their soul?

       TWELVE

       Torchlight

      Martha’s year of professional training began badly. After a dozen tentatives, rehearsals as it were for the grand affair, Emmeline took that autumn to her bed in sober earnest.

      ‘There’s naething ails her but creish,’ grumbled Stoddart Semple.

      He still came in about and smoked a pipe by the fireside while Emmeline lay, lumped and shapeless, in the kitchen bed. He would slouch about the doors: sometimes Martha, glancing up, saw him glowering through the window.

      ‘Foo are ye the day, missus?’ he would cry through the window to Emmeline; and abroad, report, ‘There’s naething ails her but creish’ − a diagnosis that speedily came round to the lady’s ears.

      ‘So he says,’ quoth she a little grimly. ‘He says a’thing, that man, but his prayers.’

      If creish were the ailment, certainly it did not serve to swacken the patient’s temper. Martha was trauchled.

      ‘Ye can keep Madge at hame to notice ye,’ said Geordie. But Madge was earning money (if but a pittance), Martha merely expending it by her daily labour. It was obvious to plain common-sense which of the two might best be interrupted.

      Martha, however, was resolved not to have her work interrupted. She knew that Emmeline would fare well enough alone by day. There was a modicum of truth in Stoddart’s dictum. Emmeline was ill, though not so ill but that she might have been better had she wished. She had perhaps a pardonable temptation to indulgence in the importance that hedges an invalid about. Emmeline had been unimportant

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