A Scots Quair (82 page)

Oh, sick of the whole damn idiot mess, drifting about nowadays like a fool, couldn't settle to anything, couldn't read a book, caught in the net of this idiot rubbish. Your head had softened like a swede in the rain ever to be taken in with the rot—rot about leading new life to the workers, moulding them into History's new tool, apprehending a force more sure and certain than the God poor Robert had preached in Segget…. In the workers?—Rats, what was there in them that wasn't in the people of any class? Some louts, some decent, the most of them brainless, what certain tool to be found in crude dirt? You'd dug deep enough to make sure of
that, playing the game as a keelie yourself, fraternizing with the fauna down at the Works—hell, how they stank, the unscrubbed lot, with their idiot ape-maunderings and idiot hopes, their idiot boasts, poor dirty devils. They took you for one of themselves nowadays, so you'd almost become as half-witted as they.

Finished with it all quite definitely now. What have the keelies to do with you—except to make you feel sick? They don't like the same things, haven't the same interests, don't care a hang for the books you read (mislaid those text-books this last week somewhere). And you pretending an interest in horses—dog-racing—football—all the silly kid-games that excite the keelies—find History's beat in their drivelling blah!

… That ghastly house that Bob took you to—father unemployed for over five years, mother all running to a pale grey fat like a thing you found when you turned up a stone, one of the brothers a cretin, rickets—sat giggling and slavering in a half-dark corner, they couldn't afford to have the gas on, a dead smell of dirt left unstirred and unscrubbed, disharmonic heads and moron brains; and outside the house as you came away: streets on streets, the fug of the Cowgate, keelies on the lounge in the gutter, in the dirt, their ghastly voices and their ghastly faces—

They
DON'T
concern you.
BREAK
with it all.

So when Alick and Norman that Saturday asked if you were coming to the Beach Pavilion, Snellie Guff the Scotch Comedian was On, you said
No, sorry, I've reading to do
, and saw their faces fall, damn them, they'd just have to learn as you had to learn. But when you got home and had finished dinner and been caught by that ghastly old bore Ake Ogilvie who thought himself God's regent on earth because Christ had been of the same trade as himself, and heard his lout swagger on this and that, you felt too restless to rout out the books. Damn nuisance, August blazing outside, birds high up in the Howe today, a bus would take you to Segget in an hour…. If only it could take you back over a year!

And you thought of the times when you'd haunted the
Howe, as a schoolboy, seeking the old-time flints, Neolithic stuff, passable collection: you'd forgotten it since you'd come to Duncairn. Where could it be?

And in chase of that you went down to the kitchen and knocked and looked in, Chris and Ma Cleghorn and Meg the maid, they all looked up and you said
I'm sorry. Chris, d'you
mind where my flints went to?

Chris said she thought you had finished with them, they were up in the box-room under the eaves. Ma called as you turned away
Ewan man, why aren't you out at a game this
weather? Or out with a lass?—that'd be more your age than
bothering about with a rickle of stones. Your mother showed me
them and I thought ‘What dirt!
'

You said
Oh, really
? funny old hag, another keelie trying to keep you in the gutter—games and street-crawling and their blasted girls. Her face fell a bit when you spoke like that, the old fool should heed to her own damned business. Chris looked at you with her nice, cool eyes, a long time since you'd kissed her, she had a nice kiss. Then you went up the stairs to your flints.

They were thick with dust, lying higgledy-piggledy in the press, tortoise-cores and a scraper or so, you took them out and turned them about, and saw the wavery lines of the knapping done long ago in the hills of the Howe, some day three thousand years before. Some careful craftsman had squatted to knapp, with careful knee and finger and eye, looking up now and then from his work on the flakes to see the grey glister of the Howe below, the long lake that covered the Low Mearns then, with sailing shapes of islands upon it, smoke of fires rising slow in the air from the squatting-places of the Simple Men, deer belling far on the hills as the sun swung over to the hazes of the afternoon, things plain and clear to anyone then—you supposed: was that no more than supposing?

But at least they had made the things they desired, finely and surely and lovely as these, long long ago. Still, things no lovelier than the shining giants that whirred and spun in Gowans and Gloag's, power-dreams fulfilled of the flint-
knapping men…. And at that the little warmth they had brought you quite went, you were staring down at a dusty stone, chipped by someone no shape at all, a dim shadow on dust, meaning nothing, saying nothing: and down there in the heat of this August day the festering wynds of Paldy Parish—

You closed the press and went down the stairs, out of the house, down Windmill Brae, idiot-angry to escape your soft self. Turning up to Royal Mile you went slower, wondering what you could do at this hour. A thin little gallop of Autumn rain came pelting down the street as you wondered, and you looked up and saw the Library near and beside it the Museum Galleries.

Inside there, breathing from running from the rain you debated a minute to stay or go out, the place as usual dingy and desolate, old chap in uniform yawning at a table. Then you went past him into the hall and stood and looked at the statues around, poor stuff the most of it, you'd seen it before.

Plaster-cast stuff of the Greek antiques, Discobolus, blowsily mammalian Venus, Pallas Athene—rather a dirty lot they had been, the Greeks, though so many clean things survived. Why did they never immortalize in stone a scene from the Athenian justice-courts—a slave being ritually, unnecessarily tortured before he could legally act as a witness? Or a baby exposed to die in a jar?—hundreds every year in the streets of Athens, it went on all day, the little kids wailing and crying and crying as the hot sun rose and they scorched in the jars; and then their mouths dried up, they just weeked and whimpered, they generally died by dark….

There was a cast of Trajan, good head; Cæsar—the Cæsar they said wasn't Cæsar. Why not a head of Spartacus? Or a plaque of the dripping line of crosses that manned the Appian Way with slaves—dripping and falling to bits through long months, they took days to die, torn by wild beasts. Or a statuary group of a Roman slave being fed to fishes, alive, in a pool….

You turned and went up the deserted stairs to the picture galleries, dusty and dim, drowsily undisturbed but for one
room you passed where a keelie was cuddling a girl on the sly, sitting on a bench, they giggled a bit, dried up as you looked and stared and stared. You looked away and about the room, flat seascapes and landscapes, the deadest stuff, why did people make a fuss of pictures? Or music? You'd never seen anything in either. You went and sat down in the Italian room, on the bench in the middle, and stared at a picture, couldn't be bothered to find out the painter, group of Renaissance people somewhere: soldiers, a cardinal, an angel or so, and a throng of keelies cheering like hell about nothing at all—in the background, as usual. Why not a more typical Italian scene!—a man being broken on the wheel with a club, mashed and smashed till his chest caved in, till his bones were a blood-clottered powdery mess?—

Passed in a minute, that flaring savage sickness, and you got to your feet and went on again: but the same everywhere, as though suddenly unblinded, picture on picture limned in dried blood, never painted or hung in any gallery—pictures of the poor folk since history began, bedevilled and murdered, trodden underfoot, trodden down in the bree, a human slime, hungered, unfed, with their darkened brains, their silly revenges, their infantile hopes—the men who built Münster's City of God and were hanged and burned in scores by the Church, the Spartacists, the blacks of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Parker's sailors who were hanged at the Nore, the Broo men manhandled in Royal Mile. Pictures unceasing of the men of your kin, peasants and slaves and common folk and their ghastly lives through six thousand years—oh hell, what had it to do with you?

And you bit your lip to keep something back, something that rose and slew coolness and judgment—steady, white- edged, a rising flame, anger bright as a clear bright flame, as though 'twas yourself that history had tortured, trodden on, spat on, clubbed down in you, as though you were every scream and each wound, flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood…. And you gave a queer sob that startled yourself: Something was happening to you: God—what?

Ma said, coming down to Chris in the kitchen after collecting the lodgers' fees, she went round each room of a Sabbath morning before the breakfast time or the kirk:
The Murga
troyd creature's fair in a stew, her dividends are all going down
she says and she hardly knows how she'll Pay her Way. She's a
bittie of a shareholder in Gowans and Gloag's and there's not
a cent from the firm this year. Aren't they brutes to mistreat a
respectable woman?

Chris asked if that meant that she'd have to leave, and Ma shook her head, Oh no, not her, she'd a bit of a pension as well as an income, a three hundred pounds a year from a trust. Chris stared:
Then what's coming over her?
and Ma sighed that Chris didn't understand and hadn't a proper sympathy, like, with financial straits of wealthy folk—like herself and their wee Miss Murgatroyd. What the old bitch really wanted of course was her runkled old bottom kicked a bit and turned out into the streets for a night hawking herself at a tanner a time….

And Ma sat down and paiched a bit, smoothing out the pounds and the ten bob notes, and said that Mr Piddle was short again, him that banked nearly every meek that he got. Ma'd told him she'd need the balance on Monday—and not to
he-he!
at her like a goat.
Four, five, two halves, a one and ten
silver, that's our little bit English pussy-cat. Sitting up there
and reading a book—can you guess what the book is about now,
lass?

Chris looked in the range and over at the clock, and shook her head, only half-heeding Ma's claik.—
Well, then, it's a
Manual of Birth Control. What think you of that and our Ellen
Johns, with her little mouser and her neat long legs?

Chris was over-surprised a minute to say anything, then asked if Miss Johns tried to hide the book? Ma said she hadn't; neither showing off nor hiding:
Ay, a gey keek our
Ellen, with all her quiet ways. And it's all to the good of the trade,
anyhow
. Chris asked
How?
and Ma said
Why, she'll be able to
sin as she likes and go free, with no need to marry the gallus childe.
So we'll be able to keep her our lodger…. Twelve, thirteen, ten,
Ake Ogilvie's—ay, faith he's made of the old-time stuff. If I'd
been a ten years younger or so I'd be chumming up to him, a bonny
man, well-shouldered and canty, it's a pity you're gentry
.

Chris had heard this before and now hardly smiled, if it was gentry to know her own mind, the things that she liked and the things that she didn't, well then, she was gentry down to the core. And Ma had been watching her and cried out
Hoots, now don't go away and take offence. I'm just a coarse
old wife and must have my bit joke
. Chris laughed, half-angry,
Well, don't have it on me
, and Ma said she'd mind and went on with her counting, Miss Lyon's Boss had fined her two shillings, Awful the way that they treat Us Girls, the Clearmont laddie was all a-blither and a-clatter over his Rectorial election, fegs, what was this Nationalist stite that had got him?

Chris minded back to her days in Segget and said that this Nationalism was just another plan of the Tories to do down the common folk. Only this time 'twas to be done in kilts and hose, with bagpipes playing and a blether about Wallace, the English to be chased across the Border and the Scots to live on brose and baps. Ma said
Fegs now, and are we so, then?
Then I'm for the English. Eighteen, nine and six, the lot for this
week and we're doing fine. Did I ever tell you when I wanted a
partner my niece Izey Urquhart wanted to come in?

Chris said she didn't know Ma had a niece, Ma nodded, worse luck, a thrawn wee skunk that lived away down in Kirrieben. Ma couldn't stick the creature at all but she was her only living relation and kenned that when Ma pushed off at last she'd get what bittie of silver there was. That might be so, but Ma had made up her mind she wasn't to have the long-nosed sniftering wretch skeetering around while she was alive; and maybe when Ma died holy Izey would find a bit of a sore surprise to meet—
I'm fond of you, lass, and I'm
sending next week for my lawyer man to alter the will. What's in
the house and all things I have would be better in your bit keeping,
I think, than as miser's savings in Kirrieben
.

Chris said sensibly that Ma shouldn't be silly, it was likely that she would outlive them all. And Ma said she hoped to God that she wouldn't, if there was anything that cumbered
the earth it was some old runkle of a woman body living on with no man to tend and no bairns, a woman stopped living when she stopped having bairns. And Chris laughed at that and said
What about men?
and Ma said
Och, damn't, they never
live at all. They're just a squeeze and a cuddle we need to keep our
lives going, they're nothing themselves
.

And Chris went out in the Sunday quiet to the little patch of garden behind and worked there tending the beds of flowers she'd put in early in blinks of the Spring, sooty and loamy and soft the ground, clouds were flying high in the lift beyond the tilting roofs of Duncairn, the hedge by the house next door was a-rustle, soft green, with its budding beech, far off through the hedges some eident body was at work with a lawn-mower,
clinkle-clankle
, a bairn was wailing in a bairn's unease as Chris dug and raked, watered the flowers, pale things hers compared with Segget's. And somehow Ma's daft words bade in her mind, those about a woman having finished with things when she finished having bairns, just an empty drum, an old fruit squeezed and rotting away, useless, unkenned, unstirred by the agonies of bearing a bairn, heeding it, feeding it, watching it grow—was she now no more than that herself?—a woman on the verge of middle age content to trauchle the hours in a kitchen and come out and potter with weeds and flowers, all the passion of living put by long ago, wonder and terror and the tang of long kisses, embracing knee to knee, the blood in a stream of fire through the heart, the beat and drum of that tide of life that once poured so swift in those moments unheard—never to be heard again, grown old.