The Quarry Wood. Nan Shepherd
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joke was able to exhaust. Long after other people had fatigued their petty powers of laughter at some easy joke, the vast concourses of Geordie’s merriment were gathering within him and crashing out in mightily renewed eruptions of unwearied vigour. He found a joke wholesome until seventy times seven.
So he laughed, not once, but half a dozen times, over Miss Leggatt’s departure from the common sanities. But after his seventh wind or so, he put his pipe back in his mouth and drew at it awhile in silence. Then he hitched himself out of his chair, with the resolution of a man who has viewed the situation impartially and made up his mind.
‘Yer mither disna like me touchin’ her thingies,’ he said, ‘but we’ll need to get a bit piece till ye.’
Martha did not budge. She lay back in her chair with her legs dangling, and awaited the pleasure of her Ganymede.
‘Here’s a sup milk an’ a saft biscuit,’ said Ganymede, returning (silent-footed as became a banquet). ‘That’ll suit ye better’n the cakes.’
Martha nodded and bit deep into the floury cushion of the biscuit. She loved soft biscuits.
She lay still in the chair and nibbled luxuriously, her thoughts drifting.
Ganymede resumed his leisure. He sprawled, his stockinged feet upon the arm of Martha’s chair. They gave her a happy, companionable feeling. She moved the least thing in her corner so as to nudge them gently. Ganymede gave her in response the tenderest, most tranquil, subjovial little kick. Father and daughter shared a silence of the gods, in which all is said that need be said.
The clatter of a distracted earth broke by and by upon Olympus. Noisy voices, with anger in the flying rumours they sent ahead.
‘Here’s yer mither comin’ in aboot,’ said Geordie, disposing of his legs, ‘an’ I some doot she’s in ane o’ her ill teens.’
Geordie’s diagnosis of his wife’s spiritual condition was correct. Mrs. Ironside appeared, herding in Blackeyes. Her very skirts were irate. The three-year old bairn who hung in the wind of them was in some danger of blowing off. A baby kept her arms steadier than they might otherwise have been. Mrs. Ironside had multiplied her family by two.
Her wrath against Blackeyes was checked by the sight of Martha, motionless in the depths of her chair.
The situation was explained.
‘Ye maun jist ging back to the school, than,’ said Mrs. Ironside, eyeing her daughter.
Passionate tears broke over Martha’s cheeks.
To make herself conspicuous by marching back to school when Aunt Josephine herself had made arrangement for her absence, publicly to give report of the drab conclusion to her travels, was more than Martha’s equanimity could face. She went hot with shame at the very thought.
She battered the arm of the chair with her fists.
‘I canna ging back,’ she sobbed. ‘I canna ging back.’
‘You’re a queer ane,’ said her mother. ‘Ye hinna a please. Temper whan we tak ye fae the school an’ temper whan we pit ye back.’
‘She can bide aboot the doors, surely,’ said Geordie.
‘I canna hae her trallopin’ at my tails a’ day lang. An’ look at the mess she wad be in. She’s a gey lookin’ objeck as it is,’ said Emmeline, whose appreciation of cleanliness varied inversely with the godliness of her calm. The more serene she was, the more she tolerated dirt.
‘I gaed dunt intil the puddle,’ said Martha miserably.
‘Fit way cud she help it, whan she hadna had ony dinner?’ said her father: a notable man for logic of a strictly informal variety.
Blackeyes was crying, ‘It was me that made her do it,’ and Martha, suddenly remembering her parcel, jumped up and said,
‘But I got the mince.’
A pound of mince may not go far to counterbalance an increase in family, but it helps. It abated Emmeline’s aggressiveness. Mollified with mince, she put her family to rights. Martha was beddit side by side with Blackeyes, who fell asleep with one swarthy arm curved round her middle.
The newcomers were Dussie, Madge, and Jim. In August the elder children went to school again. Soon it was dark by supper-time, then by the closing of afternoon school. Winds were up. Mornings of naked frost changed to afternoons of black and sullen rain. There were nights when the darkness blared and eddied round the thatch and sang in the chimney; white nights, all sky, with the moon riding overhead and round her half the heaven swirling in an enormous broch; moonless nights when Orion strode up-valley and the furred and fallen leaves glistered on the silken roads.
The children saw nothing of these night festivities. They were jammed together in the huddled kitchen, under the smoky and flaring lamp. But one evening Geordie, from the open house-door, whence a guff of caller air flapped through the stifling kitchen, called the girls out to the night.
At Geordie’s call, Dussie was up on the instant. Martha came reluctantly, stooping back over the table to add another stroke to her map.
Outside, after the flare of the lamp and the burnish of firelight, they stepped into a bewildering January dark. Bewildering, because not really dark. Their eyes accustomed to it, they found it was a dark that glowed. No moon; infrequent stars; but when Geordie led them round the end of the house they saw the north on fire. Tongues of flame ran up the sky, flickered, fell back in the unstable pools of flame that gathered on the horizon, rose to crests again and broke into flying jets. The vast north was sheeted in light; low down and black, twisted firs, gnarled, shrunken, edged the enormous heaven. The Merry Dancers were out.
A shudder ran over Martha. Something inside her grew and grew till she felt as enormous as the sky. She gulped the night air; and at the same time made a convulsive little movement against her father. She was not afraid; but she felt so out of size and knowledge of herself that she wanted to touch something ordinary.
‘Some feart kind, are ye?’ said the ploughman, taking her hand tight in his own. Dussie clung to his other hand, rapping his knuckles, waggling his fingers, stroking his leg, sneaking a supple hand in his trouser pocket, all the while that she made lively comment on the sky. Geordie and Dussie had half a dozen private finger games before Martha had had enough of gazing upon the light.
It was Dussie who put the eager questions Geordie could not answer.
‘Weel, I dinna richtly ken fat they micht be. They ca’ them the Northern Lichts. Fireflaughts.’ Then an ancient memory stirring (a rare occurrence with Geordie), ‘I min’ fan I was a laddie there was a bit screed I used to ken. It was some like the geography, Matty, gin I could get a haud o’t. Arory … arory … bory … syne there was a lassie’s name on till’t. Fat div ye ca’ yon reid-heided craiturie o’ Sandy Burnett’s?’
‘Alice,’ said Matty.
‘Ay, ay, that’s the very dunt. Arory-bory-Alice. Weel. Noo, Matty, fat is there a’ roun’ Scotland, lassie?’
‘The sea,’ said Matty, ‘a’ the way roun’, except faur there’s England.’
Geordie stood so long considering it that Martha grew impatient. She was jumping up and down against his hand in her excitement.
‘An’ fat aboot the Arory-bory-Alices, faither?’
‘Weel, I canna get a richt haud o’t,’ said Geordie deliberately, ‘but it gaed some gait like this: On the sooth o’ Scotland there’s England, on the north the Arory-bory − Burnett’s lassie, the reid-heided ane − Alice; on the east − fat’s east o’t?’
‘The sea,’ said Martha, turning eastward, where a span of sea, too dull a glint under the Dancer’s light to catch an ignorant eye, notched their eastern view.
‘Weel, aye, but it wisna the sea. It