A Scots Quair (62 page)

So he told her the baby was born that morning after the spinners went to blow up the brig. Robert had gone for the doctor and Ewan had stayed at home and tried to look after her, though he didn't know much of the things he should do: as for Maidie, the girl was a perfect fool. At last the doctor and Robert arrived, Robert sent off a wire to Else at Fordoun, and they put Ewan out of the room—he was glad, even though it was Chris, he'd a beast of a headache. The baby had been born then, it wasn't born dead, though it died soon after, or so Ewan heard. Else said that it was a boy, like Robert, but Ewan hadn't seen it: that was days ago, two or three days before the Strike ended.

Chris remembered:
What, is it ended, then? Who won?
and Ewan said the Government, Robert raved the leaders had betrayed the Strike, they'd been feared that they would be jailed, the leaders, they had sold the Strike to save their skins. Robert hadn't believed the news when it came, that was the morning that Chris was so bad and the two of them had sat in her room—

Chris lay still and said
Thank you, Ewan
, with a little ghost of a laugh inside to know that he called her Chris in his thoughts, as she'd thought he did; and soon, wearied
still, she slept again, sleeping till supper-time, it brought Else up with a tray and hot bottle, and all things needed, she cried, right pleased,
You're fine again, Mem?
and Chris said she was, she had to thank Else with others for that.

Else said
Devil a thanks—if you'll pardon a body
mentioning Meiklebogs' cousin in a Manse. I liked fine to
come 'stead of biding in Fordoun, with the old man glunching
at me and my bairn
. Chris asked how the baby was, and Else kindled,
Fine, Mem
, and fegs you should see how he grows. And then suddenly stopped and punched up the pillows, and set Chris up rough, and began to chatter, like a gramophone suddenly gone quite mad, with her ears very red and her face turned away.

Chris knew why she did it, she'd thought of that baby she'd carried out dead from this room a while back, she was feared that Chris might take ill again were anything said to mind her of babies. But Chris had never felt further from weeping, appalled at the happening to Robert, not her.

Else told how the Strike had ended in Segget, folk said that the spinners who went out that night and tried to blow up the brig would be jailed. But there was no proof, only rumours and scandal, and the burnt grass in the lee of the brig. Sim Leslie, him that the folk called Feet, had come up to the Manse like a sow seeking scrunch, but the minister had dealt with him short and sharp and he taiked away home like an ill-kicked cur. The spinners and station folk wouldn't believe it when the news came through that the Strike was ended, they said the news was just a damned lie, John Cronin said it, and they wouldn't go back, he and the minister kept them from that till they got more telegrams up from London. And Mr Colquohoun and Ake Ogilvie the joiner, John Muir and some spinners had organized pickets to keep Mr Mowat's folk from getting to the Mills. Syne they heard how the leaders had been feared of the jail, and the whole thing just fell to smithereens in Segget. Some spinners that night went down the West Wynd and bashed in the windows of the Cronin house, and set out in a birn to come to the Manse, they said the minister had egged them on, him safe and sound in his own damned job, and they'd do to the Manse as they'd done to the Cronins.

But coming up the Wynd they met in with Ake Ogilvie, folk said that he cursed them black and blue; and told them how Chris was lying ill and wouldn't it have been a damned sight easier for Mr Colquohoun to have kept in with the gentry, instead of risking his neck for the spinners? The spinners all sneered and jeered at Ake, but he stood fast there in the middle of the road, and wouldn't let them up, and they turned and tailed off. A third were on to the Bureau again, and Jock Cronin sacked from his job at the station, and Miss Jeannie Grant hadn't gone to the school, through all the nine days she'd been helping the spinners: and when she went back Mr Geddes said No, and folk told that she would get the sack, too.

Chris said
So it ended like that? Else—was my baby
born dead, and was it a boy?
Else went white and wept a little at that, Chris lay and watched and Else peeked at her, scared, she looked strangely un-ill with that foam of bronze hair, and the dour face thin, but still sweet and sure. Else said that it wasn't, it lived half an hour, the minister came up and baptized it Michael, a bonny bairn, tiny and quiet, it yawned and blinked its eyes just a minute—
oh, Mem,
I shouldn't be telling you this!

Chris said
But you should. Where is it buried?
and Else said 'twas out in the old kirkyard, there were only the minister and Muir and herself, the minister carried the coffin in there, and read the service,
bonny he did it, if it wasn't for that fool John
Muir that stood by, like a trumpet, near, blowing his nose. And
when the minister came to the bit about Resurrection—I don't
mind the words—

Chris said
I do
, and heard her own voice tell them with Else near weeping again:
I am the Resurrection and the Life
.
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live
.

Else gulped and nodded.
And after he said that—he didn't
know what he was saying, Mem, with his bairn new dead and
his Strike as well—he said
and who shall believe?
quiet and queer…. I shouldn't be telling you this, but oh!
you'll have to hurry and get well for him!

COMING OUT OF
those memories given to the years, Chris moved and looked at the waiting Segget, quiet in the lazy
spray of June sun, the same land and sun that Hew Monte Alto had looked on that morning before Bara battle. You were waiting yourself in a halt before battle: all haltings were that, you thought, or would think if you weren't too wearied to think now at all.

But that would pass soon, you'd to get better quick— quick and quick for the sake of Robert. Better, and take him out of himself, Ewan would help, maybe Segget even yet—

She rose slowly to her feet and smiled at herself, for that weakness that followed her when she stood up, with the drowse of the June day a moment a haze of little floating specks in her eyes. Then that cleared, and a cold little wind came by, she looked up and saw a thickening of clouds, rain-nimbus driving down upon Segget.

NOW, WITH THE coming of the morning, the stars shone bright and brittle on the Segget roofs, the rime of the frost Chris saw rise up, an uneasy carpet that shook in the wind, the icy wind from the sea and Kinneff. Under her feet the dark ground cracked, as though she were treading on the crackle of grass, and she passed through the Kaimes' last gate—far up, in the dimming light of the stars, there fell a long flash from the arc of the sky, rending that brittle white glow for a moment, its light for a second death-white on the hills. Then she saw the sky darken, and the corpse-light went: behind the darkness the morning was coming.

So, walking quick to keep her feet warm, and because she'd but little time left for this ploy, she gained the Kaimes and halted and looked—not at them, but up at the heights of the hills, sleeping there on the verge of a dawn. Nothing cried or moved, too early as yet, but a peewit far in a hidden hollow, she minded how it was here she had come—almost at this very hour she had come—the very first night she had lain in Segget. And here she climbed from those ten full years, still the same Chris in her heart of hearts, nothing altered but space and time and the things she had once believed everlasting and sure—believed that they made her life, they made her! But they hadn't, there was something beyond that endured, some thing she had never yet garbed in a name.

She put up her hand to her dew-touched hair, she'd climbed bare-headed up to the Kaimes, she had seen a grey hair here and there last night. But it felt the same hair as she felt the same self, its essence unchanged whatever its look. Queer and terrible to think of that now—that all things passed as your life went on, but the little things you had given no heed.

The wind goeth towards the south, and turneth about unto the
north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
again according to his circuits
.

That was Ecclesiastes, she thought; stilled; the dawn pallid on her coiled, bronze hair.

In Segget below a cock crew shrill, she turned and looked down at the shining of frost, remotely, and saw it gleam and transmute, change and transmute as though Time turned back, back through the green and grey of the years till that last time here when she'd climbed the Kaimes, her baby new dead and herself a live ache—

SHE HAD SHOWN
as little of the ache as she might, in spite of the waste, she had hated that. So she told to Robert and he laughed and said
You sound like a woman in an Aberdeen joke
, his eyes with the beast of the black mood in them.
Waste?
Good God, do you think that is all?

He flung away from her and walked to the window, beyond it the smell and blow of the hay in the sleeping parks of Dalziel of Meiklebogs. Then suddenly he turned—
Christine, I'm
sorry. But I'm weary as well, let's not speak of it more
.

And she left it at that, he'd drawn into himself, lonely, he sat for hours in his room, with impatience for either her pity or help. So she buried herself in the work of the house, and sought in her pride a salve for the sting of the knowledge she counted for little with Robert, compared with his cloudy hopings and God. She could be strange and remote as he could ….

And it came with hardly an effort at all, they were hurrying nods that met on the stairs and went to bed at uneven hours; yet sometimes a hand seemed to twist in her heart as she watched him sit at his meat in silence, or at night when she woke and he lay asleep, with it seemed the tug of lips on her breasts and the ghostly ache of her empty womb—silent the yews in the listening dark.

SEGGET CROWDED
THE
kirk the first Sunday in May after the General Strike collapsed, to hear what that cocky billy Colquohoun would say of his tink-like socialists now. But he never mentioned the creatures at all, he preached a sermon
that maddened you, just, he said there was nothing new under the sun: and that showed you the kind of twister he was. Hairy Hogg, the Provost, came out of the kirk, and said that the man was insulting them, sly, trying to make out that the work they had done to beat the coarse Labour tinks was a nothing. Instead, now the Strike was ended so fine, you'd mighty soon see a gey change for the good, no more unions to cripple folks' trade, and peace and prosperity returning again; and maybe a tariff on those foreign-made boots.

But damn the sign of either you saw as that year went on and the next came in, there was little prosperity down at the Mills, they were working whiles, and whiles they were not, young Mr Mowat went off to London and syne from there he went off on a cruise, as a young gent should; but he fair was real kind. For he wrote that he'd soon be back home again, and would see about pushing the Segget trade, that would mean more men—
but no union men
.

It wasn't his wyte that he had no work, in spite of the spinners and their ill-ta'en grumblings. For they grumbled still, though their union was finished—faith! that was funny, for you'd got from the papers that the men would be fine if it wasn't the unions—the Tory childes nearly broke down and wept on the way the unions oppressed the workers. The Cronins had all been sacked from the Mills and no more of a Sunday you'd hear them preach about socialism coming, and coarse dirt like that. Jock Cronin, that had once been a railway porter, was down now in Glasgow, tinking about, it fairly was fine to be rid of the brute. Folk said that that Miss Jeannie Grant had gone with him, some childe had seen her, down there at a mart, all painted and powdered, she'd ta'en to the streets, and kept Jock Cronin, he lived off her earnings. Ay, just the kind of the thing you'd expect from socialists and dirt that spoke ill of their betters, and yet powdered and fornicated like gentry.

But young Dod Cronin, that was a mere loon, he heard the news, he worked out at Fordoun, and he went to the smiddy and tackled old Leslie, with the sweat dripping down from his wrinkled old chops. And Dod said
What's this you've been
saying of my brother?
and old Leslie said
What? And who
are you, lad?
And Dod said
You know damn well who I am.
And if ever I hear you spreading your claik about my brother or
Miss Jeannie Grant, I'll bash in your old face with one of your
hammers
.

Old Leslie backed nippy behind the anvil and said
Take
care, take care what you say! I'm not a man you must rouse,
let me tell you
. And he told later on that never in his life had he heard such impudence—'twas Infernal, just, he'd a mighty sore job to keep himself back from taking that Cronin loon a good clout. Now, when himself was a loon up in Garvock— And you didn't hear, more, for you looked at your watch, and said you must go, and went at a lick; and left him habbering and chapping and sweating.

Young Dod was as mad as could be on the thing, he went up to the Manse and clyped to Colquohoun; and Else Queen, that was back there again as the maid, told that the minister said he was sorry, but what could he do? Young Cronin shouldn't worry, you could only expect a smell from a drain.

Else said the minister was referring to Leslie: and folk when they heard that speak were real mad. Who was he, a damned creature that sat in a Manse, to say that an honest man was a drain? There was nothing wrong with old Leslie, not him, he'd aye paid his way, a cheery old soul, though he could sicken a cow into colic with his long, dreich tales and his habberings of gossip.

He'd aye been good to his guts, the old smith, and faith, he grew better the longer he lived. At New Year he took a bit taik down the toun, into the shop of MacDougall Brown; it was late at night and what could Brown do but ask the old smith to come ben for a drink—not of whisky, you wouldn't find that at MacDougall's, but of some orange wine or such a like drink, awful genteel, though it had a bit taste as though a stray pig had eased himself in it. Well, Leslie went ben, and there sat the creash, MacDougall's wife, and Cis, the fine lass, and the other bit quean that folk teased and called May-bull. Mrs Brown was right kind and poured out the wine, syne she went and took out a cake from the press, there was more than half of the cake on the plate, and Mistress Brown cut off a thin slice, genteel, and held out the plate to the smith.

And what did he do but take up the cake, not the slice, and sit with it there in his hand, habbering and sweating like
a hungered old bull, and tearing into MacDougall's cake, MacDougall watching him boiling with rage—faith! speak about washing in the blood of the Lamb, he looked as though he'd like a real bath in the smith's.

Well, old Leslie finished his bit of repast, and got up, though he hadn't near finished his story, about Garvock, but he never yet had done that, though you'd known him fine this last fifty years. But it was getting fell late-like by then and he thought he'd better go take a taik home, Mrs Brown had gone to her bed, and Maybull, and the fine lass Cis had gone as well. MacDougall showed him out to the door, and cried good-night, and banged it behind him; and old Leslie was standing sucking at a crumb that was jooking about in an old hollow tooth, when what did he see round the end of the dyke that sloped to the back of MacDougall's shop, but a body slipping over in the dark.

Old Leslie wondered who it could be, and stepped soft in the dark down the lithe of the dyke. Near to the end he stooped and stopped, and heard the whisp-whisp of some folk close by. And he knew one voice, but not the other, 'twas the voice of Cis Brown and he heard her say
Not
to-night—Mabel is sleeping with me
. The voice that the smith couldn't put a name to said
Damn her, why doesn't she
sleep with the cuddy?
Cis laughed and sighed and syne Leslie heard the sound of a kiss, disgusting-like, he himself had never all his married life so much as pecked at his old wife's face: and once when she saw him without his sark, he'd been changing it, careless-like, by the fire, she nearly had fainted, and so near had he, they'd never been so coarse as look at each other, shameless and bare, in their own bit skins…. Well, where was he now with this story of Cis?—Ay, her slobbering her lad by the dyke. In a little bit while they were whispering again, and the smith tried hard to hear what they said, they spoke over low, the tinks that they were, to make an old man near strain off his neck from his hard-worked shoulders to hear what they said. Syne that finished and Leslie heard footsetps coming and dodged in the shadow of the post-office door. And who should loup over the wall and go by but that tink Dod Cronin, that had so miscalled him, him it had been that was kissing Cis Brown!

But folk said that that was just a damned lie, Cis Brown was as douce and sweet a quean as you'd find in the whole of Segget, they said—old Leslie telling the tale in the Arms was nearly brained by Dite Peat himself. Dite said he liked a bit lie fell well, just as he liked to soss with a woman, especially a woman he'd no right to, but he wasn't to hear that kind of a speak of Cis Brown, he was fairly damned if he was. And others cried,
Ay, that's right, that's right!
and Feet, the policeman, said to his father
You'd better away home
. Off the old smith went, the coarse old brute; still habbering his lies and swearing he'd seen Dod Cronin and that fine quean Cis together.

CHRIS HEARD THE
tale, but she paid it no heed, with long months of resting her strength had come back, she was out in the garden of the Manse each dawn, digging and hoeing as the Spring came in. Funny to think 'twas nearly a year since she'd walked this garden, her child in her body, and stood over there and looked in the kirkyard, and thought of the folk that had once been bairns, and died, and nothing of them endured. And now she herself walked free and young, slim as of old, if her face was thinner, but warm and kind, warm blood in her body, she could see it rise blue if she looked at her hands loosen their grip from the shaft of the graip, and her hair was alive, that had gone a while dead, and crackled its fire as she combed it at night, long hair that still came near to her knees. And the baby she'd brought in the world last year—

But she'd not think of that, not here in the sun, the rooks a long caw out over the yews, sailing, sun-winking, dots in the sun, the clouds went wind-laden down through the Howe, all the Howe wakening below them to hear the trill and shrill of the springs of Spring. So busied Chris was as the days grew warm, she'd found in a garden what once in the fields, years before, on the windy rigs of Blawearie, ease and rest and the kindness of toil, that she saw but little or nothing of Robert—no loss to him, with his bittered face, and no loss to her now, they went their own ways.

Ewan was shooting straight as a larch, narrow and dark, with a cool, quiet gaze, and a sudden smile that came seldom
enough, but still, when it did— Else said she could warm her hands at that smile. He was out all hours of the day, was Ewan, still at his flints, he'd raked half the Howe, he 'd been down by Brechin and Forfar for flints. He was known in places Chris never had seen, the dark-faced loon from the Manse of Segget, that would ask if he might take a look at your fields, and would show the arrows and such-like of old that the creatures of hunters had used in their hunts. And the farmers would say,
Faith, look if you like
, and Ewan would thank them, charming and cool, a queer-like loon, not right in the head, folk that were wice weren't near so polite.

Some times, as the light of the Spring days waned he'd come back from school and find bread and milk, and bring them out to the garden to eat, and set them down by a bed or a drill and take the hoe or the fork from Chris, and start to work with quick, even strokes, the down of a soft, fine hair on his cheeks, Chris would sit with her knees hand-clasped, and watch him, the ripple of his smooth, dark skin, he'd long lashes as well, that were curled and dark, he worked with a cool and deliberate intent at digging the garden as he did at all else. Once Chris asked him, one of those evenings in April, what he would do when he had grown up.