A Scots Quair (47 page)

Chris saw it come wheeling like a flying of rooks, dipping and pelting down from the heights, she looked left and saw it through a smother of smoke, the smoke stilled for a minute as it waited the rain, all Segget turning to look at the rain. Then Robert was running and Chris ran as well, under the shelter of the pattering yews. There they stood and panted and watched the water, whirling in and over the drills, the potato-shaws a-bend in the pelt, the patter like hail and then like a shoom, like the sea on a morning heard from Kinraddie,
the empty garden blind with rain
. And then it was gone and the sun bright out, and Chris heard, far, clear, as though it never had stopped, a snipe that was sounding up in the hills.

By noon they saw a drooked figure approaching. Chris heard Else cry
Are you soaked!
and Ewan answer
I was;
but I dried
, he'd some thing in his hand. Turning it over he came up to Robert.
Look, I found this up on the Kaimes
.

Chris stopped as well to look at the thing, the three of them stood in the bright, wet weather, Robert turning the implement over in his hands, it was rusted and broken, the
blade of a spear.
Did they use it for ploughing?
Ewan wanted to know, and Robert said
No, they used it for killing, it's a
spear, Ewan man, from the daft old days
.

Then Else came crying them in for their dinner, and in they all went, as hungry as hawks. Ewan wanted to know a lot more about spears, 'twas a wonder he managed to ask all he did, him eating as well, but he managed both fine; he'd a question-mark for a brain, Robert said!

But the most of his questions he kept until night, when Chris bathed him and took him up to his room. Why did the stairs wind? Why weren't they straight? Would it be long till he was a man? Where was Christ now, and had Robert met Him?
That's an owl, why don't owls fly in
the day? Why don't you go to sleep when I do? Does Else
like Dalziel of the Meiklebogs much? I like the smiddy of old
Mr Leslie, he says that when he was a loon up on Garvock he
was never let gang anywhere near a smiddy, his mammy would
have smacked his dowp; didn't she like it? I saw Mr Hogg,
he said ‘What's your name?' Why is there hair growing out of
his nose? Mrs Hogg is fat, is she going to have a calf? Does
she take off her clothes to have it, mother? Mother, have you
got a navel like mine? I'll show you mine, look, there it is,
isn't it funny? I'm not sleepy, let's sing a while. Why——

He was sleeping at last, in the evening quiet, the Saturday quiet, the sun not yet gone. Chris went down to the garden and took out a chair, and leaned back in it with her arms behind her, drowsy, watching the gloaming come. Robert was up in his room with his sermon, he wrote the thing out when he'd thought of a theme—he would think of a theme of a sudden and swear because he hadn't a note-book at hand.

This afternoon it had come on him suddenly.
I know!
That spear-blade that Ewan brought—where the devil has
he hidden the thing?

At half-past ten next morning, the Sunday, Chris heard John Muir and looked out and saw him, his shoulder a-skeugh in his Sunday suit, come stepping up the path from the kirk.
There's a fair concourse of the folk the day;
and how are you keeping then, mistress, yourself?

Chris said she was fine, and he gleyed at her cheery,
Faith, so you look, you take well with Segget. Well, well, if
the minister hasn't any orders I'll taik away back and tug at
the bell.

Chris heard that bell in a minute or so beat and clang through the quiet of the air. It was time that she herself had got ready, she sought out her hymn-book and hanky and Bible, and inspected Ewan, and straightened his collar. Then the two of them hurried through the blow of the garden, and out of the little door let in the dyke, and into the little room back of the kirk. There the sound of the bell was a deafening clamour. Chris brushed Ewan down and went into the kirk, and put Ewan into a pew and herself went ben to the pews where the kirk choir sat, Mrs Geddes, the schoolmaster's wife, there already, smiling and oozing with eau-de-Cologne, whispered right low and right holy-like,
Morning. A grand day, isn't it, and
such a pity so few have come up to hear the Lord's word
.

Chris said,
Oh, yes
, and sat down beside her, and looked round as the folk came stepping in, slow, Hairy Hogg, the Provost, and his mistress, Jean, they plumped in their seats and Hairy looked round and closed his eyes like a grass-filled cow. Then the wife and queans of John Muir came in, Chris had heard a lot about them from Else. Else said she could swear there were times when Muir wished he'd stayed where he was when he fell in that grave. His wife was one of the Milton lot that farmed down under Glenbervie brae, she deaved John Muir from morning till night to get out of his job, a common bit roadman, and get on in the world and show up her sister, Marget Ann, that had married a farmer. But John Muir would say
Damn't,
we all come to the same—a hole and a stink and worms
at the end
and his mistress would snap,
Ay, maybe we do,
but there's ways of getting there decent and undecent. And as
for stinking, speak of yourself
. And, real vexed, she'd clout Tooje one in the ear. Tooje was her eldest, fairly a gawk, and then clout little Ted when she started to greet because she saw her sister Tooje greeting; and John Muir would get up and say not a word but go dig a grave as a bit of a change.

Then Chris saw Bruce, the porter, come in, with the mark
on his jaw where his goodfather hit him, then Leslie, the smith, paiching and sweating, he dropped his stick with an awful clatter. Then she saw Geddes, the Segget headmaster, sitting grim in a pew midway, his rimless specs set close on his nose, looking wearied to death, as he was. Robert had thought to make him an ally, but he'd said to Robert,
Don't be a fool, leave the swine to stew in their juice
—by swine he meant his fellow-folk of Segget. He would stand hymn-singing with his hand in his pocket, and rattle his keys and yawn at the roof.

Then Moultrie came in, a slow tap-tap, with his stick and his glare, and stopped half-way, his wife, Jess Moultrie, waiting behind, her hand on his arm, gentle and quiet. But when he moved on he shook her away. Chris had heard the story of him and of her and how he had never forgiven her her daughter, Ag, whom they called the Roarer and Greeter.

The others came in, all in a birn, Chris didn't know some and of some was uncertain, she thought that one was Ake Ogilvie the joiner; and a trickle of folk from the farms outbye, a spinner or so, but they were fell few, and Dalziel of the Meiklebogs, red-faced and shy, funny how one couldn't abide him at all.

Syne John Muir finished with the ringing of the bell and came with his feet splayed out as he walked, and his shoulder agley, down the length of the kirk; and went into the little room at the back. Robert would be there and Muir help him to robe. Syne the door opened and John Muir came out, and swayed and gleyed cheerful up to the pulpit and opened the door and stood back and waited. And Robert went up, with his hair fresh-brushed, and his eyes remote, and sat down and prayed, silent, and all the kirk silent as well, for a minute, while Chris looked down at her hands.

Then Robert stood up in the pulpit and said, in his clear, strong voice that hadn't a mumble, that called God god and never just gawd,
We will begin the worship of God by
the singing of hymn one hundred and forty, ‘Our shield and
defender, the Ancient of Days, pavilioned in splendour and
girded with praise.' Hymn one hundred and forty
.

Folk rustled the leaves and here and there a man glowered helpless while his wife found the page; and the organ
started with a moan and a grind and the kirk was a rustle with Sunday braws, folk standing and singing, all straight and decent, except young Εwan, a-lean in his pew, and Geddes the Dominie, hand in his pouch.

Chris liked this hymn near as much as did Robert, most folk stuck fast when they came to pavilioned, Robert's bass came in, Chris's tenor to help, Mrs Geddes' contralto a wail at their heels. Then down they all sat; Robert said
Let us
pray
.

Chris wondered what Robert was to preach to-day, his text was no clue when he gave it out. Folk shuffled in their seats, and hoasted genteel, and put up their hankies to slip sweeties in their mouths; sometimes Chris wished she could do the same, but she couldn't very well, the minister's wife. And all Segget lifted its eyes to Robert, he flung back the shoulders of his robe and began, slow and careful, reading from his notes; and then pushed them aside and began a sermon on that bit of a spear young Ewan Tavendale had found on the Kaimes. He'd brought the thing up in the pulpit with him, folk stopped in their sucking of sweeties and gaped.

And Robert told of the uses the thing had once had, in the hands of the carles of the ruined Kaimes; and the siege and the fighting and the man who had held it, desperate at last in the burning lowe as King Kenneth's men came into the castle: and the blood that ran on this ruined blade for things that the men of that time believed would endure and be true till the world died; they thought they were fighting for things that would last, they'd be classed as heroes and victors forever. And now they were gone, they were not even names, their lives and their deaths we knew to be foolish, a clamour and babble on little things.

So might the men of the future look back, on this Segget here, not of antique times, and see the life of our mean-like streets ape-like chatter as the dark came down. For change, imperative, awaited the world, as never before men could make it anew, men of good will and a steadfast faith. All history had been no more than the gabble of a horde of apes that was trapped in a pit.
Let us see that we clean our
pit-corner in Segget, there is hatred here, and fear, and malaise,
the squabbling of drunken louts in the streets, poor schools, worse
houses—we can alter all these, we can alter then
now,
not
waiting the world
.

Robert had launched his campaign on Segget.

THAT SERMON FAIR
raised a speak in the toun, as soon's they got out Peter Peat said Faith! they'd fair made a mistake in getting this childe. You wanted a sermon with some body in it, with the hell that awaited the folk that were sinners, and lay on the Kaimes with their unwed queans, and were slow in paying their bills to a man. And what did he mean that Segget was foul? A clean little toun as ever there was, no, no, folk wanted no changes here.

Old Leslie said 'Twas Infernal, just, he minded when he was a loon up on Garvock—

Rob Moultrie said
Well, what d'you expect? He's gentry
and dirt with his flat-patted hair; and speaking to God as
though he were speaking to a man next door—and a poor
man at that. Ay, a Tory mucker, I well may warrant, tha
t
would interfere in our houses and streets
.

Will Melvin said
Did you hear him preach against folk taking
a dram now and then? And if he himself wasn't drunk then I'm
daft, with his spears and his stars and his apes and his stite
.

That fairly got Hairy Hogg on the go. He cried
Ay, what
was all yon about apes? And him glaring at me like a thrawn
cat. If he comes from the monkeys himself let him say it, not
sneer at folk of a better blood
.

Folk took a bit snicker at that as they went—damn't, the minister had got one in there! And afore night had come the story had spread, the minister had said—you'd as good as heard him—that Hairy Hogg was a monkey, just.

Well, it made you laugh, though an ill-gettèd thing to say that of old Hairy Hogg, the Provost. Faith, he fair had a face like a monkey, the sutor of Segget and its Provost forbye. He'd been Provost for years, not a soul knew why, or how he'd ever got on for the job; or what was the council, or what it might do, apart from listening to Hairy on Burns. For he claimed descent from the Burneses, Hairy, and you'd have thought by the way he spoke that Rabbie had rocked him to sleep in his youth. His wife
had once been at Glenbervie House, a parlourmaid there, and awful genteel; but a thirty years or so in old Hogg's bed had fair rubbed gentility off of the creature, she was common and rough as a whin bush now, and would hoast out loud in the kirk at prayers till the bairns all giggled and old Hogg would say, loud enough for the pulpit to hear,
Wheest, wheest, redd your thrapple afore you come here
.

She would make him regret that when they got home, she'd little time for any palavers, her daughter Jean that was nurse in London, or Alec her son that clerked down in Edinburgh. Old Hogg he would blow like a windy bellows about Jean and the things she'd done as a nurse. For when the bit King took ill with a cough she was one of the twenty-four nurses or so that went prancing round the bit royalty's bed, she carried a hanky, maybe, or such-like. But to hear old Hairy speak on the business you'd have thought she'd cured the King's illness herself, and been handed a two-three thousand for doing it. Yet damn the penny but her wages she got, said Mrs Hogg; what could you expect? The gentry were aye as mean as is dirt and wasn't the King a German forbye?

Young Hogg was at home now, on holiday like, he meant to attend the Segget Show. You had seen the creature, wearing plus fours, east-windy, west-endy as well as could be, forbye that he said he had joined the Fascists. Folk asked what they were, and he said
they
were fine, Conservatives, like, but a lot more than that; they meant to make Britain the same as was Italy. And old Hogg was real vexed, he cried
But goodsakes! You're not going to leave your fine job,
now, are you, and take to the selling of ice-cream sliders?
And Alec said
Father, please don't be silly;
and old Hogg fair flamed:
Give's less of your lip. What could a man think but
that you were set, you and your breeks and your Fashers and
all, with being a damned ice-creamer yourself?