The Quarry Wood. Nan Shepherd
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it was time enough to tell.
And now, fool that she was, she had given her position away.
And to let Stoddart Semple, whom she hated, see her cry! She swallowed hot tears and listened, craning for every word, to her mother and Stoddart, disputatious, grumblers both, using Martha’s preposterous ambition to justify their own particular grievance.
‘Fat ails ye at bein’ a teacher?’ demanded Emmeline.
‘Nothing ails me. − I’m going to be a teacher. But I want to go to the University.’
‘An’ how muckle langer’ll that tak ye?’
‘Two years,’ Martha said.
Emmeline’s exasperation had a deeper basis than Martha understood; than Martha indeed was capable of understanding, for she had never breathed a Leggatt atmosphere nor been nurtured in the pietas of Leggatt respectability: except, and that dubiously, at Crannochie; for Aunt Josephine was not a thoroughbred. Her social status did not exist for Martha. She had never thought about it. But Emmeline had dreamed with undiminished ardour for twenty years of being respectable again. She had consented to let Martha be a teacher for no other end than this. And after twenty years you ask an Emmeline to wait another four instead of two to see her dream fulfilled! How could a Martha, hungry for the tartness and savour of knowledge, be expected to understand? Martha saw only a slovenly and inefficient woman, given to uncertainties of temper and meaningless indulgences, and with a cankering aptitude for objection. She had never even known that her mother was beautiful; nor that men have decreed rights to beauty that reason need not approve. Dumbly, fitfully, Emmeline was aware of a trouble within her consciousness. She had been somehow foiled − blame it on any wind you will, not on Emmeline − of the right of loveliness to queen it over the imaginations of men. Ill-trickit rascal, that godling with the bow, at whose caprice she had given her love, and been thrust away in consequence to the middle of this dull ploughed field! Emmeline hankered still after the respect men pay to beauty, though what she dreamed she wanted was the respect they pay to the respectable. She had built herself a formidable conviction of the automatic increase in reputation that would come to the family when Matty was a finished teacher. Add two years to that! − Two and two in this case made an eternity.
Mother and daughter fronted each other, antagonistic, weighing the years in a balance, but with what differing weights!
Stoddart Semple grumbled on. ‘She wants to mak hersel oot somebody,’ he said. All the rasping irritation of his own discomfiture was in the sneer.
‘Some folks are grand at that,’ said Emmeline sharply. But he took her up, not heeding the home-thrust.
‘Deed they are. You cud dae fine to be somebody yersel, Mrs. Ironside, an’ Matty’s nae far ahin ye.’
‘She wunna be’t, then,’ said Emmeline with tart decisiveness, furious that Stoddart should read her secret desires. ‘My lassie wunna ging like Maggie Findlater, terrible goodwillie to yer face an’ despisin’ the hale rick-matick o’ her fowk ahin their backs.’
‘Maggie!’ said Stoddart. ‘Maggie’s nae that ill.’
‘A muckle easy-osy lump,’ snorted Mrs. Ironside.
‘If she’d keep her mou’ shut an’ her feet in she’d be a’ richt. She taks a gweed grip o’ the grun’ yet an’ a grand mou’fu’ o’ her words for a’ her finery.’
‘Yon’s a terrible pit-on.’ Mrs. Ironside’s voice expressed the loftiest contempt that a woman who has married ill can possibly bestow on one who has married gorgeously. ‘An’ a’ the men maun be like her man to be men ava’. “Do you play golf, Mr. Ironside?” she says, most gracious-like. Imagine asking Geordie wi’ his sharny sheen if he played golf!’
Geordie came to the suface again. He had been out of depth, uneasy at every quirk in the conversation that his slow mind could not follow.
‘I dinna haud wi’ that cleverness masel,’ he had said.
Nobody was listening to him. He tried in vain himself to listen to his own thoughts pounding within him. They said nothing intelligible. Now at the relief of a tried and accepted joke he let himself go, laughing immoderately. His eye on his miry boots flung sidelong in the corner − to focus the idea − he pictured their befouled and clumsy strength companioning the natty smartness of the golfers.
Sane man, seeing always in relation such things as he did see.
Martha meanwhile burned in an agony of impatience. What did they mean, chattering of these indifferent occasions while she waited for her doom? If they would only let her back to work. … Wasted time! She stood and fretted, not daring to interrupt, able hardly to endure. And why should her father laugh like that and she in mortal stress?
Geordie came out of the absorption of his joke and heard his wife and his neighbour dispose of Martha’s pretensions to a University education. He ruminated soberly. In the cramped kitchen prodigious horizons lengthened out. There were vast unenclosed tracts within him where his thoughts lost themselves and disappeared. He pursued them deep within himself, past his land marks.
The noise of tongues went on.
‘Ye’re gey forcey, though,’ said Geordie.
He said it very loud, with a sharp resonance that startled Emmeline and Stoddart into silence. He jerked forward on his chair, sitting unusually upright, and spoke unusually loud all through his disquisition. The voice of a man who knew the disabilities of Providence − ‘deaf in the ae lug an’ disna hear wi’ the ither.’ … Providence against Emmeline − it needed that.
‘We’ll nae be nane waur aff wi’ Matty at the college than we are e’noo whan she’s at the school, will we?’ He boomed the question at them as though they too were a little deaf.
‘But we’ll be a hantle better off, it’s to be hopit, whan she’s a finished teacher.’
‘Weel, but that’s nae the pint. We are as we are an’ we’re nae that ill − we micht be a hantle waur. But we wunna be a hantle waur wi’ Matty at the college. It wunna mak nae differ.’
Emmeline felt a little giddy. Geordie argumentative! A new departure.
Being set on concealment of the true reason for her obstructionist policy, she could not immediately find another plausible enough to check him with.
‘We’ve gotten a’ we need,’ he was saying. ‘We’ve aye a tattie till wer dinner.’
‘O ay, it’s aye the meat you look till. Ye’re a grand hand at yer meat, I will say that for ye. But there’s mair things nor meat in this world.’
Emmeline laid a violent emphasis upon this, as though she were quite willing for her husband to circumscribe his activities at eating in a world to come.
‘Ye wunna beat a tattie,’ said Geordie, ‘an’ ye wunna ging far wantin’ ane. − Nae in this warld,’ he added, as though he were willing in his turn for his wife in her next existence to be freed from the encumbrance of food.
Martha crushed the ruined sheet of paper suddenly in her fists and began plucking it to pieces with a series of savage staccato rents.
‘Jist you write it ower again, lassie,’ said her father. ‘There’ll aye be a tattie for ye or ye’re dane.’
Emmeline broke into abuse. She was defeated by one of the few loyalties she retained. Queer, she never taunted Geordie with her loss of status, nor deaved him with her dreams of respectability to come. Queerer still, she had no motive but her love for him. Her fury against Stoddart Semple increased. He had her inner argument pat. She tongued him therefore with virulence, cutting across his rumbling sentences.
‘It’s a mou’bag that you wad need. A body canna hear themsel’s speak in their ain hoose.’
At that moment the