The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
notes, Nicole wrote to her friend Jean Douglas.
. . . This is the sort of day that makes me simply long for Rutherfurd. The snowdrops will be in drifts by the burn-side now. How often I’ve stood under a steel-grey sky, with a north wind blowing, and looked at the brave little advance armies of spring poking their heads through the beech-leaves of a dead October. To-day I’m positively hungry for Rutherfurd. How gladly would I turn the Jacksons out neck and crop, if only I had the fairy whistle! Everything in its proper place I would pipe, and positively laugh to see them scuttle. . . . After that outburst I shall write, I hope, in a better spirit. You see, I can only say it to you. I daren’t breathe a word of discontent here in case of rousing sleeping fires of desire in Mother and Barbara. Poor Babs does miss the old life so badly. Mother never says she misses anything, and is always cheerful and willing to be amused, only—laughter can be sadder than tears sometimes. She still, at times, has an air of sitting so loosely to the things of earth that Babs and I want to clutch at her skirts to keep her with us at all.
Things amble along as usual. I said this morning, “I do wish Mistress Jean would pay us a visit.” The others echoed the wish, only Babs was sceptical about our power to entertain you. But, I think you would be quite well amused.
What fun it would be to get the best guest-room ready for you: to find flowers for it—flowers are a great difficulty here, as the nearest florist is in Langtoun and he sells mostly vegetables!—and to choose books for your bed-table that you would like. And you would lie in bed in the morning and listen to voices underneath your windows, fisher laddies talking their Fife lilt, foreign sailor-men, fish-wives crying “Hawdies, fresh hawdies,” and smell through the lavender of the bed-linen the salt, tarry smell of the harbour.
And what else can I offer you? We would explore the East Neuk, you and I, and I wonder if you know St. Andrews? If not, there are fascinating things to see there. And, of course, you would meet all our new friends—I shouldn’t wonder if Mrs. Heggie made a dinner party for you, and you would enjoy the comedy of that good lady and Barbara. Barbara is always putting Mrs. Heggie in her place, but her efforts are quite lost on the dear soul, for she has no notion what the place is or that she has ever strayed from it. She admires Barbara immensely—licks the hand that beats her, so to speak. She tells me Mother is her idea of a grande dame, but she doesn’t quite understand where I get my democratic ways. Alas, poor Yorick!
Miss Symington you would have to go and see, though, probably, you’d find her supremely uninteresting, with her ugly clothes, and her bleak house, and her still ways. But I think you’d like Dr. Kilgour and his nice funny sister, and it would be most disappointing if you didn’t appreciate my friends the Lamberts. It does make me feel ashamed of myself when I go to the Manse of a morning to take the babies out to find Mrs. Lambert conning over her address for the Mothers’ Meeting while she stirs a milk pudding for the early dinner! Her great cross is having to speak in public, and open meetings with prayer, but she does it, the valiant little person, she does it. I now and again go with her to the Mothers’ Meeting, to help with the singing and play Sankey’s hymns on the harmonium, and to hear her read the Bible is an inspiration. It is no dusty far-away history when she reads it. She is so interested in it herself that she makes it sound like Dumas, and the women sit back with a sigh when she finishes.
She has a small transparent face like a wood-anemone, and I’m always afraid she wears herself out of existence, but you mustn’t think Mr. Lambert is idle. He helps her in a hundred ways, writes his sermons with a baby rolling on the floor at his feet—and very good sermons they are. He keeps the garden, and goes messages and does all the odd carpentering jobs about the house. The only thing his wife cannot get him to do is gush. To her most frantic appeals to be “frank” to some person he can only manage a cold hand-shake and a bald sentence. I’ve seen her turn on him a face half vexed, half amused as she said: “Oh, John, you’re a dry character!”
Odd, isn’t it, that there are one or two words that have a different meaning in Scots? English people mean by “frank” honest and open; here “frank” means free: a “frank” manner is a forthcoming, gushing manner. “Canny” is another word. It really means cunning, but in Scotland it means gentle—“Canny wee thing.”
Well! is that all I’ve got to offer you? Not quite. Barbara will want you to know her friends, the Erskines. They are a great support to her, and she goes over a good deal to their place and meets people she likes, and they come here. Mother and I like them very much, but it’s difficult taking an interest in new people, I find. Babs retorts that I manage to be interested in the Kirkmeikle people, but they are different, more human, somehow, and pitiful. The Erskines are so sure of themselves, prosperous, invulnerable.
And you might possibly be invited to lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Buckler. Their lives have been full of colour and interest—thirty years in India—but they haven’t brought much of either away with them. They are oddly interested in things like disrespectful parlour-maids . . . so after all what does it profit a man to see the world?
I wonder if you stayed a week with us consorting daily with Kirkmeikle people, would you say, like Babs, that you were sick of honest worth? She says she is driven to Mr. Michael Arlen in sheer self-defence. To forget Mrs. Heggie and Miss Janet Symington she reads of ladies reclining in slenderness on divans, playing with rosaries of black pearls and eating scented macaroons out of bowls of white jade!
This is a long letter all about nothing. Your last letter was a joy. Cannes must have been lovely. How could you tear yourselves away?—but of course I know that Colonel Douglas is never really happy anywhere except at Kingshouse. You will be home now, lucky people. Write when you have time and tell me all about everybody.
Your loving
Nikky.
Nicole, having finished her letter, sat on at the writing-table, looking before her. A letter all about nothing indeed! But, somehow, there was nothing of interest anywhere these days; life was flat and stale, and Simon Beckett was going away.
Well: Nicole gave herself a mental shake as she put her letter into an envelope, and straightened the writing things on the table. It must be the hint of spring in the air that was making her feel foolish and sentimental; besides it was Saturday afternoon, always a depressing time somehow, and her mother and Barbara had motored off to have tea at a distance, and Alastair had gone with Simon, in the latter’s car, to Langtoun, to see a football match. She had preferred to stay at home, thinking it would be pleasant to have a long afternoon for letter-writing, but she found she wasn’t liking it at all. She would go out, she decided, and talk to old Betsy for a little, and then walk very fast round the links and try to walk off this curious depression which had suddenly enveloped her.
She found Betsy in a distinctly bad humour. Saturday afternoon seemed to have cast a blight on her spirits also. She had paid somebody twopence to sand her stair, and was not pleased with the way it had been done.
“And it’s juist like everything else,” she grumbled. “The folk nowadays winna work. They dinna ken what work means: them and their eight hours day! Labourites they ca’ theirsels. What they’re lookin’ for is a country whaur folk wad be hangit for workin’. . . . An’ the Government’s tae support a’body! Ye’d think to hear them that the Government could pick up siller in gowpins . . . Ay, thae folk next door ca’ theirsels Labour, but efter the way the wumman washed ma stair, I’ll naither dab nor peck wi’ them!”
“But,” said Nicole, “the stair looked to me very clean. I just thought as I came up how fresh everything was, all ready for the Sabbath day. . . . And it’s February, Betsy, and almost spring. The last time I was here it was Christmas.”
“Weel, better something lang than naething sune, but I was wonderin’ what hed come ower ye. But her leddyship’s awfu’ attentive. I div like tae see her, an’ we’ve sic graund cracks aboot oor ain place. An’ she reads to me whiles, for ma sicht’s no’ what it was. Sic a bonnie speaker she is! There’s a lot o’ folk awfu’ queer pronouncers o’ words, ye wud suppose they were readin’ the buik upside doon. The man next door came in and read me oot o’ a paper, but losh! I was nane the wiser when he feenished. . . .”
“You’ve