A Scots Quair (72 page)

It is Chris whose whole being is inseparable from the truth, justice and freedom which Muir claimed were such strong values for Gibbon, and Ewan whose communism is religious at bottom, as Ma Cleghorn notes quite early in the book:

It would seem likely, then, that Chris's oblivion on the hilltop must have something to do with Freedom and God. In W.K. Malcolm's interpretation, it signalizes a union between the two categories attained by Chris on the very last page, ‘for just before she finally becomes insensate to the feel of the rain and oblivious to the noise of the passing lapwings, she ultimately recognizes God in the constant working and reworking of her natural surroundings, identifying the power of Change which holds sway over life as the final truth.'
13
This is quite some distance from earlier allegorical interpretations which identified Chris with the Land or the Scottish nation, and saw her ‘death' as symbolizing both the final destruction of the peasantry and the end of Scotland, and indeed of all other nations, in favour of the proletarian internationalism of the industrial working class. One mystical experience is balanced against another—Ewan's visionary identification with all the oppressed, and Chris's recognition of God in the ever-changing natural world—and each epiphany is, in the last resort, religious.

Thomas Crawford

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
. mss in the National Library of Scotland are quoted by kind permission of the nls and of Gibbon's daughter, Mrs Rhea Martin.

ALL AROUND her the street walls were dripping in fog as Chris Colquohoun made her way up the Gallowgate, yellow fog that hung tiny veils on her eyelashes, curled wet, and had in her throat the acrid taste of an ancient smoke. Here the slipper-slide of the pavement took a turn that she knew, leading up to the heights of Windmill Place, and shortly, out of the yellow swath, she saw come shambling the lines of the Steps with their iron hand-rail like a famished snake. She put out her hand on that rail, warm, slimy, and paused afore tackling the chave of the climb, breathing deeply, she could hear her heart. The netbagful of groceries on her arm ached—she looked down through wet lashes at the shape of the thing—as though it was the bag that ached, not her arm….

Standing still so breathing that little while she was suddenly aware of the silence below—as though all the shrouded town also stood still, deep-breathing a minute in the curl of the fog—stilling the shamble and grind of the trams, the purr of the buses in Royal Mile, the clang and swing of the trains in Grand Central, the swish and roll and oily call of the trawlers taking the Forthie's flood—all pausing, folk wiping the fog from their eyes and squinting about them an un-eident minute—

Daft
, she said to herself, and began climbing the stairs. Midway their forty steps a lamp came in sight, at last, glistening, it flung a long dirty hand down to help her. Her face came into its touch, it blinked surprised, not expecting that face or head or the glistering bronze coils of hair that crowned them—hair drawn in spiralled pads over each ear, fog-veiled, but shining. Chris halted again here under the
lamp, thirty-eight, so she couldn't run up these steps, stiff's an old horse on a Mounth hill-road.

Old at thirty-eight? You'll need a bath-chair at fifty. And at
sixty
—
why, as they'd say in Segget, they'll have carted you off to
the creamery!

Panting, she smiled wry under the lamp at the foul tale told of Duncairn crematorium—the foul story that had struck her as funny enough even hearing it after the burning of Robert…. Oh, mixed and queer soss that living was, dying, dying slowly a bit of yourself every year, dying long ago with that dim lad, Ewan, dying in the kirk of Segget the time your hand came red from Robert's dead lips—and yet midmost the agonies of those little deaths thinking a foul tale flouting them funny!

Daft as well as decrepit
, she told herself, but with a cool kindness, and looked over the Steps at the mirror hung where the stairs swung west, to show small loons the downward perils as they pelted blue hell on a morning to school. She saw a woman who was thirty-eight, looked less, she thought, thirty-five maybe in spite of those little ropes of grey that marred the loops of the coiled bronze hair, the crinkles about the sulky mouth and the eyes that were older than the face. Face thinner and straighter and stranger than once, as though it were shedding mask on mask down to one last reality—the skull, she supposed, that final reality. Funny she could stand here and face up to that, not feel sick, just faintly surprised! Once it had been dreadful and awful to think of—the horror of forgotten flesh taken from enduring bone, the masks and veils of life away, down to those grim essentials. Now it left her neither sick nor sorry, she found, watching a twinkle in sulky gold eyes above the smooth jut of the wide cheekbones. Not sad at all, just a silly bit joke of a middle-aged woman with idle thoughts in a pause on the Steps of Windmill Brae.

Below the quiet broke with the scrunch of a tram wheeling down from the lights of Royal Mile to the Saturday quietude of Gallowgate. Chris turned, looked, saw the shiver of sparks through the fog, syne the sailing brute swing topaz in sight,
swaying and swearing, with aching feet as it ran for its depot in Alban Street. Its passage seemed to set fire to the fog, a little wind came and blew the mist-ash, and there was Grand Central smoking with trains. And now, through the thinning bouts of the fog, Chris could see the lighted clock of Thomson Tower shine sudden a mile or so away over the tumbled rigs of grey granite.

Nine o'clock.

She lowered the netbag and stretched her arms, saw herself wheel and stretch in the mirror, slim still, long curves, half-nice she half-thought. Her hands came down on the railing and held it, no need to hurry tonight for a change, Ma Cleghorn would have seen to supper for them all—the nine o'clock Gallop to the Guts as she called it. No need to hurry, if only this once in the peace of the ill-tasting fog off the Forthie, in the blessed desertion of the Windmill Steps so few folk used in Duncairn toun. Rest for a minute in the peace of the fog—or nearly at peace but for its foul smell.

Like the faint, ill odour of that silent place where they'd ta'en Robert's body six months before—

She'd thought hardly at all what she would do after Robert's funeral that so shocked Segget, she'd carried out all the instructions in the will and gone back with Ewan to the empty Manse, Ewan made her tea and looked after her, cool and efficient, only eighteen, though he acted more like twenty-eight—at odd minutes he acted eighty-two she told him as he brought her the tea in the afternoon stillness of the sitting-room.

He grinned the quick grin that was boy-like enough, and wandered the room a bit, tall and dark, unrestlessly, while she drank the tea. He hated tea himself, with a bairn-like liking for bairny things—milk and oatcakes would have contented Ewan from breakfast to dinner and some more for his supper. Ayont the windows in the waning of the afternoon Chris could see the frozen glister of night on the Grampians, swift and near-moving, Ewan's shoulder and
sleekèd dark head against it…. Then he turned from the window.
Mother, I've got a job
.

She'd been sunk in a little drowse of sheer ache, tiredness from the funeral and the day in Duncairn, she woke stupid at his speak and only half-hearing:
A job?
—
who for?

He said
Why, for little Ewan Tavendale all by his lone. But
you'll have to sign the papers first
.

—
But it's daft, Ewan, you haven't finished college yet, and
then there's the university!

He shook the sleekèd head:
Not for me. I'm tired of college
and I'm not going to live off you
. And thought for a minute and added with calm sense,
Especially as you haven't much to live
off
.

So that was that and he fetched the papers, Chris sat and read the dreich things appalled, papers of apprenticeship for four years to the firm of Gowans and Gloag in Duncairn. Smelters and steel manufacturers—
But, Ewan, you'd go daft
in a job like that
.

He said he'd try not to, awfully hard, especially as it was the best job he could come by—
and I can come out in weekends
and see you quite often. Duncairn's only a twenty miles off
.

—
And where do you think
I
am going to bide?

He looked at her curiously with cool, remote eyes, black didn't suit him, hair and skin over dark.
Eh? Oh, here in
Segget, aren't you? You used to like it before Robert died
.

Sense the way he would speak of Robert, not heartlessly, just with indifference, as much as to say what did it matter, would a godly snuffling help Robert now? But a queer curiosity moved Chris to ask
Does anything ever matter to you
at all, Ewan?

—
Oh, lots. Where you're going to stay, for one thing, when
I've gone
.

He'd slipped out of that well, Chris thought with a twinkle, sitting in the deep armchair on her heels, her head down bent, he ran his finger along the curve of her neck, coolly, with liking, as she looked up at last:

I'm coming to bide with you in Duncairn
.

When they'd sold the furniture and paid off the debts there was barely a hundred and fifty pounds left, Segget took the matter through hand at the Arms, the news got about though both Chris and Ewan had been secret about it and never let on. But Segget would overhear what you said though you whispered the thing at the dead of night ten miles from a living soul in the hills. And it fair enjoyed itself at the news, God man! that was a right dight in the face for that sulky, stuck-up bitch at the Manse, her with her braw clothes and her proud-like ways, never greeting when her man died there in the pulpit, just as cool as though the childe were a load of swedes, not greeting even, or so 'twas said, when they burned the corp in there in Duncairn. And such a like funeral to give a minister, burning the man in a creamery!

And the Segget Provost, Hairy Hogg the sutor, said the thing was a judgment on the coarse brutes both, he never spoke ill of the dead, not him, but what had his forefather, the poet Burns, said?—

Ake Ogilvie the joiner was having a dram and he sneered real coarse:
You and your Burns! The gawpus blethered a lot of
stite afore they shovelled him into the earth and sent all the worms
for a mile around as drunk as tinks at Paldy Fair. But I'm
damned if he'd ever a tongue like yours. What ill did Robert
Colquohoun ever do you —or his mistress either, I'd like to know,
except to treat you as a human being?—B'God, they showed
themselves soft enough there!

Alec the Provost's son was in having a nip, he wanted to fight Ake Ogilvie for that, the coarse Bulgar of a joiner to curse that way at a poor old sod like the Provost his father. But the wife of the hotel-keeper was back of the bar, folk called her the Blaster and Blasphemer for short, she was awful against a bit curse now and then: and she nipped Alec short as a new-libbed calf.
None of your cursings in here
, she cried,
I won't have the Lord's name taken in vain
. Alec habbered he'd nothing against the Lord, it wasn't Him he'd called a Bulgar, but the other one—and got in a soss, fairly upset at the Blaster's glower. Folk thought her an interfering old runt, ay God! she'd find her custom go.

So the most in the bar took a taik to the door with their drams in their hands and sat on the steps and looked at the sky, evening in Spring, bonny the hills, the seven o'clock dirling down Segget High Brig, peesies out on the long flat field that went mounting up to the bend of the hills. You minded Colquohoun, how he'd haunt those hills, the temples of God the creature would call them, him that died in the pulpit preaching a sermon—fair heathen it was, ay, a judgment of God. And now this slip of a wife of his had less than a two hundred pounds to her name, living up there in one room, folk said, all by her lone now that her loon, Εwan (ay, a son by her first bit man) had gone to work in Duncairn toun. It just showed you what happened to proud-like dirt, she'd intended the loon for an education and a braw-like life in a pulpit, maybe, nothing to do but habber and haver and glower over a collar on back to front: and instead he'd be just a common working chap.

Ake Ogilvie had new come out and heard that last speak of wee Peter Peat's.
Well, God
, you're
common enough
, he said,
though it's damn little work you ever manage
. And then he went swaggering across the Square, past the statue of the War Memorial Angel, a trig-like lassie with a pair of fine hips, and spat at it, coarse-like, fair a tink Ake, aye sticking up for the working men, you were maybe a working man yourself but were hardly such a fool as stick up for the brutes.

Syne Feet the Policeman came dandering along, he was due to leave for a job in Duncairn, folk cried out
Ay, Mr
Leslie, fine night
, respectful-like, for he'd fair got on. And he stuck his thumbs in his belt and said
Ay
, majestic-like, like a steer with the staggers, and squashed out his great feet and looked up at the Angel as though to speir where she'd mislaid her stays. Syne folk saw that he'd gotten his sergeant's stripes, he'd come out to give the bit things an air; and he said he was off to Duncairn in a week, he'd been kind of put in charge of the toun, you learned, him and some other skilly childes, or at least in a bit that they called Footforthie where the factories were and a lot of tink workers, low brutes, for they hadn't a meek to their name and lived off the Broo and
Ramsay MacDonald, draining the country and Ramsay dry. But did that content them?—No, faith, it didn't, they were aye on the riot about something or other, stirred up by those ill-ta'en Bulgars, the Socialists…. Feet said that he'd use a firm hand, by God you thought if he used his feet there wouldn't be a Socialist left in Duncairn that didn't look like an accident with a rhubarb tart. God, how the meikle- houghed sod could blow!

Folk ganted a bit and began to taik off, but halted at the hint of a tasty bit news, and cried
No, man?
and came tearing back.
What's that? God be here!
and Feet swelled out his chest and started to tell his tale over again.

And the gist of the thing when you got to the bree was that Sergeant Sim Leslie had been in Duncairn, on business, like, that very forenoon—colloguing with the other heads of the Police and learning the work that he'd have to take on. Well, he'd finished the business and looked out for lodgings, awful expensive up in Duncairn and you needed a fine salary, same as he had. The second bit place that he keeked intil was a boarding-house on Windmill Brae, fell swell it looked, a braw bit house on the high hill that rises over Duncairn. But the terms were hardly as much as he'd feared, and he clinched for a room with the mistress o't, a meikle bit woman, Cleghorn the name.

Well, they had a bit crack when he'd ta'en the room and she told to Feet, fair newsy-like, she'd had the place all decorated of late at an awful expense she couldn't have afforded but that she had advertised for a partner with a bit of silver to lay down as deposit, and syne help as a maid attending the lodgers. Feet had said
Ay?
and
Well, that's right
fine
, not caring a damn one way or the other till she mentioned the new bit partner's name.