The Quarry Wood. Nan Shepherd
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ears, clamouring in an exultant chaos. And that last triumphant mastery, forcing on the chaos order and a purpose − the god’s security. Gone now. Spilt like the ink, as irretrievably. A worse waste even than the time.
‘Ye’re skirpin’ a’ ower the place,’ said Emmeline.
Martha flung the cloth into the basin of water.
‘Oh why can’t you do it yourself!’ she cried. ‘Mother! You’ve more time than I have. You’re just reading. Just rubbish. − Oh, it doesn’t matter − I didn’t mean − you needn’t be angry anyway. It is just rubbish. And I’ve all my Latin to do for tomorrow.’
‘Latin?’ said her mother.
‘I’ll never get it done tonight now.’
‘Latin,’ said Emmeline again. ‘Fat sorra div ye need wi’ Latin for a teacher? Ye’re nae to larn the geets Latin, I’m hopefu’, an’ them disna ken ae year’s en’ fae the t’ither.’
Martha moistened her lips. The hot salt tears had shrivelled them.
‘I need it to get a bursary,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s something new,’ said her mother. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard o’t.’
Stoddart Semple glowered at Martha. He was a long loose man, ill-shakken thegither. Useless laps of skin sagged round his mouth. ‘Nos et mat …,’ he mumbled, forgetting the conclusion. Then he broke into a tirade against learning. Abject the people who value what we valued once and today despise. Stoddart had hankered once after knowledge; once he too had stormed the fastnesses of understanding. The fastnesses unfortunately had stood fast. His father, who had jogged for a lifetime behind his shaltie selling smokies and finnan haddies to the country wives, and had jogged more pence into his pocket than wisdom into his head, satisfied the boy’s ambition and sent him to college. Strangely, not a professor among them could be found to endorse young Stoddart’s opinion of his brains. Old Semple would have bribed them cheerfully, the whole Senatus, Sacrist and all, to let the laddie through: but he died before it became plain that the laddie had stuck; and the old man’s transactions began and ended with fish. Stoddart sold the fish-cart and the decrepit horse, counted (in an evil day) his father’s savings, and from that day onward never did a stroke of honest labour. He lived alone in his father’s cottage, meditating projects to astonish the earth: soon he would have been glad to astonish even the parish. The parish had little use for a fine phrase, and did not know what to do with learning authenticated by no official stamp. Had he passed his examinations they might have listened to him, even without understanding; once he had been ploughed, they were at liberty to laugh. He let them laugh, but in a fury of contempt. He grew increasingly morose, striding by in a sort of bickering speechlessness. He shunned society: then mooned; then slouched, body and mind settling to a habit of slackness; his features coarsened; he seeded and grew stringy. His grudge against ungrateful man blackened and rotted his powers. The devotee’s indignation at the disdaining of his god had turned to a black and brooding madness on this one subject of himself.
With the passage of years he ceased himself to believe in his discredited dignity.
The neighbours saw the deterioration of face and figure, the hanging jaw, the rag-nailed thumbs, the sloven countenance; they saw refuse encumber his doors; the smell of his body scunnered them; they cackled at his clothing, sodden from exposure to every weather, matted and split. He trailed through any dubs, under any sky. A night prowler too, haunting the deep of the wood by midnight. His neighbours’ premises, perhaps, as well: who could know? Labouring folk sleep early and sleep sound. But there were suspicions anent him − queer ends of talk. A dark bulk − an indeterminate shadow − a malignant reeshle of the leaves without wind − sorry matters, but from them grew half-broken tales. A troubler of men’s imaginations, generating legend … a queer rôle for the stickit graduate. A looking-glass progression towards the object of his old ambitious desires … troubling men’s imaginations. …
The neighbours saw the change in him − his rotting look: it was not for them to know that under the external squalor seethed horribly a spiritual regeneration.
Stoddart had need of his kind.
He blundered his way back into society by virtue of an inlaid dambrod. Old Semple had been a craftsman of sorts and had begun to fashion a dambrod of two varieties of wood, each square inset with patient skill. Death made a move on his board before the man’s board was completed. It lay where chance had tossed it, till Stoddart unearthed it one morning and set to work to finish it. No craftsman, he made a sorry enough job: but the board was ready for the game and Jamie Lowden liked a game fine of a blank and blustery winter evening. Stoddart carried the dambrod to Jamie Lowden’s.
By what processes of pity, curiosity, persuasion, the dambrod gave him entry to other houses, would be hard to say: but in course of time, shambling, apologetic, he slunk his way wherever he desired: accompanied always by the board. He loved the bit of wood. He would shuffle round with it under his arm, ‘oxterin’ at it as though it were a body.’ Humbly at first, he ventured the piece of workmanship into view, claiming praise for his father’s handiwork; but careful to add that it was he who had finished it. By and by the squares that he had fashioned subtly shifted their position on the board. He was not oversure himself which he had made; and at the thought that he might really be the framer of this dark beauty or of that, he regained something of the belief in himself that he had lost. In consequence he tidied his homestead a little and cleaned his person; and became a more decent member of human society. With the passage of another year or two he was very comfortably convinced once more of his own dignity and importance: with this difference, that he had ceased to trouble very much whether others believed in them or not.
One house to which he did not carry the dambrod was the Ironsides’. Emmeline could not abide him, in his days of grandiloquence. ‘He’s fair clorted wi’ conceit,’ she said impatiently to Geordie. ‘Ye cud tak a rake an’ rake it aff’n him.’ Emmeline’s own conceit, in those early days of marriage, was at too low an ebb to allow her to enjoy the quality in others: hence perhaps her ineradicable grudge against Stoddart. When he rose out of the nadir of his degradation and Geordie brought him in aboot of an evening, she suffered his presence but gave short shrift to the dambrod. Geordie indeed, in the natural complaisance of his soul, sat to study the play: but it exacted too much of a man wearied out and sodden still with the heavy sense of wet fields and claggy soil. Geordie carried back with him to his own fireside, stored up in his own body − his stiff and aching muscles, his numbed brain, his slow and inattentive nerves − the memory of a thousand generations wearing down the long resistances of the earth. A desperate task, to shake oneself quickly free from memory that had worked itself in. Geordie was not altogether sorry when Emmeline’s tongue banished the dambrod from her kitchen.
‘Sic a cairry-on he hauds wi’ himsel an’ yon boardie,’ she said contemptuously. − ‘Wheesht, wheesht, he’s hearin’ ye,’ from Geordie. − ‘I named nae names,’ said Emmeline. ‘Them that has lang noses can tak tae them.’ Stoddart was touchy. The dambrod was effectively dismissed.
The man, however, kept coming, in spite of abuse. He was stingy with his own fuel and liked Emmeline’s lavishness with hers: especially on a night of driving bitter sleet, like the one in question.
So he slouched in the heat and, diving among recollections that had gone sour, miscalled knowledge.
Martha listening did not divine the man.
Our acquaintances have no past for us until we have a past ourselves.
She was merely irritated at his opposition. Rashly, she had precipitated her fight, and the fortune of war was against her. This henchman of darkness, sunken-eyed, slack-mouthed, betrayed her to the enemy. The wastrel forces of ignorance were in power.
For Martha was set upon a purpose not yet divulged. It was understood that she was to be a teacher, after a two years’ course at a Training Centre; but Martha herself was working secretly for more. She had learned as yet