Susan Settles Down

by Molly Clavering

  Thus encouraged, Susan took her seat and, obeying the injunctions to thump, pounded at the keys, a large proportion of which were broken, with hearty good will. The fiddler, enlivened by support and refreshed with whisky, sawed away beside her, breathing hotly down the back of her neck. The dancers, red-faced and serious, stamped their way through dance after unfamiliar country dance until her fingers were numb and her arms ached.

  During an interval in which Susan leant thankfully against the hard back of her chair, she watched the interchange of courtesies between the girls and their attendant swains. These, to a man, dropped their partners like hot potatoes at the end of each dance, and retired to the doorway to smoke. Sitting-out, so important a part of dances as she knew them, was unknown here, where the girls all ranged themselves in a serried rank along the benches lining the walls, and there made necessary repairs to their finery, or shrieked replies to such, of the men as were bold enough to attempt badinage. The decorum prevailing at the beginning of the evening had vanished, and merriment, untrammelled, had its way.

  “Well, what d’you think of it?” asked Jed, who unnoticed by Susan, had come to stand at her side.

  “It’s rather amusing,” Susan screamed back at him above the tumult.

  “Have you been dancing at all?”

  “Dancing? I’ve never stopped hitting this wretched piano!” said Susan, indicating the time-worn instrument with its two candles guttering one on either side of the ragged and dirty country dance music.

  “We’ll soon see about that!” he exclaimed and, turning, seized by the arm one of the house-party, a languid and exquisite creature who, with a cigarette between lips ruddier than the cherry, was superciliously surveying the crowd, an attention which they returned with interest. “Here,” said Mr. Armstrong, unabashed by her stare, “can one of you not play a bit and let Miss Parsons dance?”

  “Dance?” drawled she. “But do you really want to dance? With that zoo? How too marvellous of you!”

  Until she spoke, Susan had no faintest intention of dancing, but now the demon of perversity entered into her, urging her to declare that nothing would please her more. Whereupon, with a faint lift of well-plucked eyebrows, the other murmured that possibly she might be able to play “one or two of those utterly weird tunes,” and took Susan’s place at the piano.

  The dance was that exciting and exhausting measure known variously as “Strip the Willow” or “Draps o’ Brandy.” Susan’s acquaintance with country dances being limited to Sir Roger de Coverley, performed in far-off days at children’s parties, she would have fared badly but for the tireless good nature of her neighbours. Aided by their instructions hissed in her ears, she was prodded, pushed and dragged through the dance, in jig-time, handed like any parcel from arm to arm of the grinning young men who formed the opposite line, and returned to her partner, “Maister Wat,” of Kelpieha’, with the breathless remark: “Here y’are! Tak’ her!”

  Slightly weary, and in wild disarray, Susan finally sank to rest on a hard bench between two buxom country girls, who alternately assured her that she had “done fine,” and reviled the clumsiness of their men-folk.

  “They’d tear the dress aff ye!” one asserted, and the other, agreeing, passionately added that “afore she’d tak’ the floor wi’ yon pig-man frae Kelpieha’ Mains again she’d need tae get a new pair o’ shoon.”

  “Shoon, did ye say? A new pair o’ feet’s what ye’re needin’!” cried number one.

  “ ‘Deed, ay!” chorused several others in shrill-voiced accord and skirls of wild laughter.

  Towards midnight, when the company repaired to a smaller barn, there to partake of a lavish meal, at which tea and whisky flowed in almost equal quantities, a man with a melodeon made his appearance, and bashfully announced his readiness to accompany the fiddler.

  “You’ll be wanting to get home now, likely?” asked Jed Armstrong, and Susan was surprised to find herself quite reluctant to leave the revels. Their host and hostess—whose name to the end she never discovered—thanked them for their help (“Hers, you mean; I didn’t do anything,” growled Jed) and a vote of thanks was proposed, to Susan’s great embarrassment, and responded to with vociferous cheering. Perhaps the most touching farewell was the fiddler’s, who, weeping maudlin tears begotten of much whisky, shook her warmly by the hand, assured her that he was her friend for life, and hoped soon to play again with her. The last they saw of the Kelpieha’ tenants’ dance was his figure, propped against the doorway, while he waved a large red handkerchief after them.

  The car had long since been hauled out of the ford, the damage assessed by the Kelpieha’ chauffeur as nothing worse than lack of petrol, and now, filled up, was ready for the road once more. They travelled peacefully homewards through the sleeping countryside, the noise of the dance fading behind them, and nothing but the wind’s sigh or the chuckle of a burn to break the silence.

  Jed did not speak until they came to the gate of Easter Hartrigg. Then he said, “You’ve had a pretty long day of it.”

  “Do you know, I rather enjoyed it,” Susan confessed honestly.

  He laughed. “You weren’t so keen when we had those punctures and got stuck in the ford,” he said.

  And before Susan could explain that her annoyance had been caused by the thought of Miss MacIlwaine and not her own discomfort, he added unexpectedly: “I rather like to make you angry. You look so handsome in a rage. . . . But I must say you stood it all very well.”

  From Oliver, being a brother, she neither expected nor received even this slight approbation.

  “Nothing like it,” he grunted the next morning at breakfast. “Leaving the Women’s Guilders in the lurch while you went careering all over the place with Jed. I thought yon didn’t like his society—”

  “I hadn’t much choice,” Susan pointed out mildly.

  “Well, you’ll have to pay for your fun. Miss MacIlwaine’s left a bill for her taxi, and her address for you to send on the cash!”

  Miss MacIlwaine had. On the sheet of notepaper which Oliver handed to his sister were two items, written in a neat, clerkly hand:

  To hire of taxi from Abbeyshiels to Muirfoot .. 5s. 6d.

  To high tea at Kirkhouse Inn, Muirfoot .. 3s. 5d.

  Total .. 8s. 11d.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  A heavy after-luncheon somnolence had fallen over Easter Hartrigg, which the distant clatter of dishes and the voice of Donaldina drawling a gloomy Calvinistic hymn only served to intensify.

  Presently, however, the silence of the sitting-room was broken by Donaldina herself, who entered with the Sunday paper, brought by Jems from Abbeyshiels. While Oliver, roused to semi-activity, seized it and prepared to wallow in lurid descriptions of the latest murder trial, she hovered in the doorway, quite obviously bursting with news.

  “Yes, Donaldina, what is it?” asked Susan resignedly. It would have been sheer cruelty to dismiss her before she had unburdened herself of her load of local gossip, whatever it might be.

  “Eh, mem,” she began eagerly, “d’ye mind yon Bairniss Bald? Her wi’ the mither that drinks, that was here a while back?”

  “I remember her well,” said Susan with feeling. “What about her?”

  “She’s mairret on yon Wullie Blair, him that used tae drive the baker’s van.”

  “Dear me,” said Susan, while Oliver lowered the paper to listen. “That won’t please Mrs. Bald. I fancy she had other views for Bernice than marriage with a mere baker’s boy.”

  “’Deed, an’ Mistress Bald’s as prood’s a dug wi’ twa tails, then. She didna’ fancy Wullie when he was gettin’ auchteen shullin’ a week wi’ the baker, mem, but noo that he’s mairret an’ drawin’ the dole, d’ye see, they’ve twenty-sax shullin’ a week—”

  “But can’t the boy find something to do? Why did he leave the baker?” Thus Oliver.

  Donaldina, with a glance of pity for his innocence, enlightened him. “The baker gi’ed him the sack, sir, these
twa-three months syne,” she said. “An’ there’s no’ anither body wad hae Wullie Blair in their employ. Wullie’s a wee thing saft, ye see, sir”—thus delicately did Donaldina indicate a certain mental deficiency which Susan had long since suspected in the ex-baker’s boy—“. . . but he’s canny eneuch tae ken that he’ll get mair on the burroo than wi’ honest wark. Though he’d need tae be gey an’ saft ere he mairret on yon Bairniss Bald!” she added.

  “So they’ve married quite happily, and no doubt intend to start a family on the dole—as long as it lasts,” Susan said. The point of view prevalent among the idle that it was not only justifiable, but the height of common sense, to marry on the dole and, regarding children as a profitable investment, to increase the population almost as rapidly and prolifically as rabbits, was well known to her by this time. She still found it lamentable, but it amazed her no longer.

  “Ma sister was in Kaleford yesterday,” Donaldina went on, not to be diverted from her narrative by side issues, “an’ sic a weddin’, she said, she never seen. There was Mistress Bald in a new dress an’ an awfu’ nice hat she got at the last Jumbo Sale, an’ Bairniss wi’ a veil an’ a’, grinnin’ awa’ frae ear tae lug, an’ fit tae Inirrst wi’ pride because she’d got a man. An’ Wullie, he had a flooer in his coat, a muckle great rose. . . . An’ the cawr frae Muirfoot wi’ Gibbie Johnston drivin’ it, tae tak’ them aff on their honeymoon, nae less, to some hottle I canna’ mind the name o’. But ma sister says it’ll need tae be a queer like hottle that wad tak’ in two tinkler-lookin’ bodies like yon, wi’ their luggage a’ done up in broon-paper paircels. The cawr was fu’ o’ them. I doot it wad be the puirs-hoose they’d look like mair nor ony hottle. Ay; they’re gaun tee live in Kaleford wi’ Mistress Bald, so ma sister heard tell, an’ they havena’ a stick o’ furnitcher but juist three crystal bowls—frae Woolworth’s—they got in waddin’ presents.”

  Here Oliver uttered a choking sound and hurriedly retreated behind the paper, and Susan, retaining her self-control with difficulty, for Donaldina in the character of raconteuse was irresistibly comic, murmured that she hoped the newly married couple would be happy.

  “Raither them nor me!” was Donaldina’s comment. She set the empty coffee-cups on their tray, took it up, and prepared to depart. “Ye’ll be oot for yer teas, mem?” she asked at the door.

  “Yes, Donaldina,” said her mistress with gravity. “We shall be out.”

  2

  When Oliver had sufficiently recovered from the paroxysm of laughter into which the tale of Bernice’s romantic marriage had hurled him, Susan put on a shady hat, and the two left the house. It was a brilliant Sunday afternoon of early September, and they were going to walk over to Reiverslaw to have tea with Jed Armstrong.

  “I’m so glad he has summoned up enough courage to ask me at last,” said Susan. “I’ve been curious to see how a descendant of Border reivers famed in foray lives—”

  Her brother growled, “If you hadn’t been so deuced stand-off with him he’d have asked you months ago.”

  “I know, I know. Don’t start all that over again,” implored Susan. “You can’t say we don’t get on well now, Oliver.”

  “After your midnight motor-trip with him, you ought to get on,” was Oliver’s reply.

  Susan made a hideous face at him, and they proceeded in friendly silence.

  The corn had been cut, and the fields on either side of the road they followed, shaded as usual by high hawthorn hedges, were filled with the rows of cunningly-built stooks, standing like small golden tents in the blonde stubble, over which they cast shadows of softest, deepest blue. As they mounted higher, the whole country lay spread out before them, walled in on one hand by the far purple line of the Lammermuirs, on the other by the dim, grey-green Cheviots. Between, the land rose in waves to the long ridges so characteristic a part of the view, and sank again in patched fields of green and gold, of woods sombrely clothed in their late summer foliage, to the hollows where burns ran unseen. On the top of one of these ridges stood Reiverslaw: house, farm-steading and cottages, a midget school, and a tiny ancient church which boasted in its quiet kirkyard the mouldering grave of a knight who fell on Flodden Field. Across the road, and hardly more than a stone’s throw from the solid, unassuming house built on the site of the old reivers’ fortalice, a little loch, fringed with brown rushes, rippled in the soft breeze. A deep Sabbath stillness brooded over all.

  “Unless Jed’s having a caulk in the house, I expect he’ll be somewhere about the farm,” said Oliver. “Which shall we try first?”

  Susan, knowing that when her brother was disturbed in the afternoon nap by which most sailors seem to set such store he was like a lioness robbed of her whelps, had no difficulty in picturing Jed Armstrong in like circumstances, and decided on the farm. They turned aside from the white gates leading to the house, and made their way past a long cart shed, the red pantiles of its roof mellowed by age into a sunny rose, towards a stackyard in the rear. Fowls clucked about their feet in the soft carpet of straw and husks, pigeons rose with a storm of white and coloured wings and circled round the old buildings of the steading. From various sheds came the lowing of cattle, the ringing stamp of the resting cart horses’ iron-shod hooves. All human activity, all the bustle which during the week makes a farm hum like a huge hive, was in abeyance. Even the dogs were nowhere to be seen, and the skulking cats had retired to their secret lairs until evening brought them out to hunt.

  Presently, as they stood uncertain where to go next, the huge figure of Jed Armstrong made its appearance round the end of a stack, pastorally attended by a large and evil-smelling goat.

  “Hullo!” he said, the greeting, in his tremendous voice, echoing like a view-hallo across the yard. The goat promptly rose to its hind feet, and lowering a pair of unpleasantly sharp horns, advanced nimbly. Susan hastily retired behind her brother and took her nose between finger and thumb.

  “Please call off your goat,” she said in muffled accents. “I don’t care for it.”

  “Feardy! Feardy!” jeered Mr. Armstrong with his schoolboy grin and at least seven r’s reverberating in each word. “I believe you’re scared of him. Scared of a billy-goat!”

  “I am,” said Susan with shameless frankness. “I am terrified of it, and I’ve only one hand to ward it off, because I need the other to hold my nose. So please take it away.”

  “Poor old Captain Kidd. He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” said his owner, fearlessly seizing the evil beast by a horn and dragging it away.

  “No. I should imagine he’d be more likely to fancy something a bit larger,” said Oliver as the goat took a reluctant departure behind some pig styes.

  “The Cunninghams are coming to tea,” said their host, rejoining them with a powerful odour of goat clinging to him. “We’d better be getting back to the house, I suppose.”

  As they neared the white gate once more, a figure on a bicycle came into sight, whirling down the road towards them. It resolved itself into Peggy Cunningham, who flung herself off her machine almost into Oliver’s arms.

  “Uncle Jed!” she panted. “The Miss Pringles are on their way here. I passed them a little ago, all three of them, in the donkey carriage!”

  Her cheeks were flushed to carnation brilliance, her blue eyes were dark with haste and excitement, she had never looked prettier. Susan wished, not for the first time by any means, that her brother’s taste in young women was not confined to fashionable creatures of whippet-like attenuation of form, one adjective—the over-worked “marvellous”—and no brains to speak of. Now, someone like Peggy. . . .

  She was speaking again. “It’s no use hiding. They knew I was coming here—Oh, and by the way, father has had to take a funeral in Abbeyshiels, so he’s gone with Jim on the motor-bike, and mother had a bad headache, so I’m the only one who was able to come. . . . Thank you so much—” This last, with a rather shy smile, to Oliver, who had relieved her of her bicycle.

  “I’ll not have those three old ha
rridans in the house,” growled Peggy’s uncle by adoption. “They’ll stay on and on till supper-time—”

  “But what can you do, Uncle Jed?”

  “Are these Miss Pringles really so very terrible?” asked Susan.

  “D’you mean to say you’ve never met them yet?”

  Susan shook her head. “Not so far. They called, and I was out, and I returned the call, but they were out. And that’s the sum-total of our acquaintance.”

  “Never met Cissie, Jelly and Bell!” gasped Peggy, blue eyes wide. “You don’t know what you’ve escaped.”

  “I like their names,” said Oliver. “But are they real? I mean, Cissie and Bell are possible, but—Jelly?”

  Peggy gurgled delightedly. “Oh, yes, they’re all real. Jelly is short for Geraldine I believe—Uncle Jed! Here they come!”

  A small governess-cart had come into sight over the nearest rise, drawn by a donkey which appeared to have some difficulty in keeping its fore-feet on the ground.

  “They’ll have that miserable brute going on two legs soon,” growled Mr. Armstrong. “And it wouldn’t look as much of a donkey as they do, anyway.”

  Eager cries rose from the occupants of the governess-cart, there were flutterings of hands and scarves, and a parasol, hastily furled, was seen rising and falling in ceaseless flagellation of the donkey’s flanks, with sounds as of carpet-beating. At last, and in their steed’s own time, the three Misses Pringle reached the group which stood by the gate. Seated, they were a dazzling spectacle, arrayed in flowery voiles and large shady hats, hung with chains of beads, clinking with bangles. But as they began to descend, unwillingly assisted by Jed, glimpses of stout and rather shapeless brogues, of dark, wrinkled cashmere stockings, detracted considerably from the first effect of their upper portions. They greeted Peggy with a kindly condescension which Susan at once recognized as infuriating: and being introduced, shook hands with Susan and her brother in a gracious manner plainly intended to convey their own high degree and the unworthiness of the recipients.