The Quarry Wood. Nan Shepherd
glanced upon their private notch of sea. ‘I some think it was the sun − the risin’ sun. Ay, fairly. That’s fat it was. Noo, the wast. Fat’s wast o’ Scotland, Matty?’
‘The sea,’ said Martha again.
‘It’s nae that, though, i’ the bit rhyme. It was a bigger word nor that.’
‘Ye cud ca’t the ocean − that’s a bigger word,’ suggested Dussie.
‘It’s the Atlantic Ocean,’ Martha said.
Geordie could get no further with the boundaries of Scotland: but his assertion of the northward edge was too obvious at the moment to be doubted. They stood on Scotland and there was nothing north of them but light. It was Dussie who wondered what bounded Scotland when the Aurora was not there. Neither Martha nor Geordie had an answer.
Some weeks later Geordie had a shaking and shuffle of excitement in the middle of the kirk. He nudged Martha with signs and whispers she could not understand. She held her eyes straight forward and a prim little mouth, pretending not to see or hear. It was dreadful of her father to behave like that in church. Once out on the road again,
‘Yon’s the wordie, Matty − fat’s the meenister was readin’ aboot. Eternity. That’s fat wast o’ Scotland. I mind it noo.’
Martha said it over and over to herself: Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by Eternity.
Eternity did not seem to be in any of her maps: but neither was the Aurora. She accepted that negligence of the map-makers as she accepted so much else in life. She had enough to occupy her meanwhile in discovering what life held, without concerning herself as to what it lacked.
She repeated the boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers in Spain. Up to her University days she carried the conviction that there was something about Scotland in the Bible.
The Merry Dancers danced in storm.
Huge galleons of cloud bore down upon the earth, their white sails billowing on the north horizon. Swiftly their glitter and their pride foundered in a swirl of falling snow. The air was darkened. The sun crept doubtfully back to silence. Shifty winds blew the road bare and piled great wreaths at corners and against the dykes. An unvarying wind chiselled knife-edged cornices along the wreaths. Thaw blunted them, and filled the roads with slush. Rain pitted the slush and bogged the pathways.
The children went to school through mire. There was no scolding now for mucky garments; boots were clorted and coats sodden and splashed. Their ungloved hands were blue and swollen with chilblains.
There was east in the spring. Summer winds tumbled the sky. Dykesides smelt of myrrh and wild rose petals were transparent in the July rain.
Dussie and Martha were each a year older. So was Madge. She was not communicative. Her conversation was yea and nay − except to Geordie, and her own small brother Jim, to both of whom she would occasionally impart much astonishing information. Geordie received it with composure, Jim with fists or chuckles according to the edge of his appetite.
In August Mrs. Ironside brought home another baby boy.
One result of this was that Madge, who because she took frequent colds had hitherto slept in the unfreshened kitchen, was sent to share the west room with the other girls. Dussie and Martha found her inconvenient. She interrupted their disclosures to each other regarding the general queerness of life. Not that she seemed to be paying any attention; but one day Martha overheard her solemn and detailed recital to baby Jim of one of their dearest secrets. Martha had shaken her till her yells resounded from the Quarry Wood; and Emmeline had shaken Martha till she was sick and had to have castor oil.
It was some consolation for the castor oil that Dussie heartily approved her action. Dussie also commandeered two sweeties from Andy Macpherson and raced home with them triumphantly to Martha as an aid to the castor oil in its kindly office.
Dussie and Martha had things to tell each other that were not for the ear of infants.
In Which a Latin Version Is Spoilt
On a February evening, when sleet lashed the window in tides of deepening violence, and spat upon the flames, and sluiced under the ill-fitting outer door, was debated with pomp and circumstance the question of whether or not Martha should go to the University. For days the wind had streamed up-valley; a dull, grey wind, rude and stubborn, that subdued the whole landscape to its own east temper. The howl of it was in the ear at night, long after dark had hid its bleakness from the eye. Gulls screamed and circled overhead − a wild skirl against the drone of the firwood. Spring was late. Hardly a peewit, not a lark, to hear. A drab disconsolate world.
Martha had pushed against the sodden wind four miles and a half that morning, her heavy bundle of books tied on behind her cycle. She was eighteen now and in the highest class at school; but the bursaries on which she had carried herself so far ran to no unnecessary railway fares − not in the Ironside family, where a penny saved had a trick of turning to a penny squandered − and in most weathers she cycled back and fore to town night and morning.
That morning Emmeline had said:
‘Ye’ll nae get in dry. It’ll be a doonpour. Yon win’s nae for naething. Hae. There’s yer coppers.’
She gave her daughter the pence for her return fare to town. Martha had never had money of her own. She handed over all her bursary money to her mother and had to ask back what she needed. She very seldom asked back. It was too unpleasant being made to feel an undue drag upon the house. Not an exercise-book was purchased but it was audibly grudged. Martha felt a felon when her teachers ordered her to buy a pencil. Her journey home at night was sometimes spent devising ways and words to approach the theme of another new text-book; she would sit all through suppertime with a sickening twinge pulling and twisting inside her body; her back would not hold up; when she washed the supper dishes her knees were sagging. Emmeline had no understanding of her own tyranny. She objected for the sake of objecting.
Martha put the train fare in her pocket and looked at the sombre sky. It had been just as heavy for days and she had escaped a wetting. She pulled her cycle from the shed and raced along the beaten path that crossed the field. The field was lately ploughed. At every dozen steps she stumbled off the narrow path (moist enough itself in the sodden weather) into the heavy upturned earth. Clods hung upon her boots. She raced on, to gain the road before her mother saw her go. The pennies in her pocket jigged to a dance tune. They meant a candle (if the candles could be bought before her mother knew the pence were saved), and a candle meant peace to work at night in her own chill room.
She dared not buy the candles in town lest at the last minute the storm broke and she had to return after all by train. At half-past four the wind still screamed up-country; no change since morning, and Martha set off to cycle home. She intended to dismount and buy her candles in the last shop on the outskirts of the city; but the wind, and her own fear of being caught in rain and her mother’s anger, drove her at such a frantic speed that she was already past the shop before her mind snatched at the necessity for dismounting. It would have been foolish to turn back and fight the wind − the candles could be bought at Cairns. The shop was far behind her by the time her mind had worked itself to that resolve, so irresistible a vigour was in the wind that pushed her on. She let herself go to its power, pedalling furiously on her old machine that had no free-wheel and one inefficient brake.
A long stretch of unsheltered road lay ahead, running beneath a low sky that sank farther and farther as she advanced. Suddenly the grey wind turned dirty-white, drove upon her in a blast of sleet. It chilled her neck, soaked her hair, dribbled along her spine, smothered her ears; the backs of her legs and arms were battered numb; her boots filled slowly with the down-drip