The Weatherhouse

by Nan Shepherd

  ‘What think you o’ that in a Christian country?’ Francie was asking; and Mrs Falconer saw, as Lindsay had seen, the blazing lights of Knapperley.

  ‘What a strange pale beauty they have,’ she said, ‘in the moonlight.’

  ‘Beauty, said ye?’ echoed Francie, with supreme scorn. ‘It’s a beauty I can do fine wantin’ in a war-time, and all them Zepps about.’

  ‘Hoots, Francie,’ said Mrs Falconer, recovering herself, ‘it’s as light as day. The house lights ’ll make little difference in the sky tonight.’

  ‘I’ve seen that lights, Mrs Falconer, in the darkest night o’ winter. It’s nae canny. She’ll come by some mishaunter, ay will she, ay will she that.’

  ‘A fine, maybe. Don’t you worry, Francie. If she carries on like that the police ’ll soon put a stop to her cantrips.’

  Francie went away muttering. Mrs Falconer returned home, having forgotten to look very hard for the runaway. Lindsay was still absent.

  ‘You can’t have looked sore all the time you’ve been,’ said Theresa.

  Ellen did not, of course, confess that she had forgotten the girl. She said, ‘What harm can she come to? She’s gone out to see the moon.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks and rosit! Everybody’s not so daft about a view as you.’

  ‘I’ll go again,’ said Ellen, nothing loth; but as she opened the door Lindsay arrived, running.

  She was plainly in terror, and throwing herself on the sofa broke into sobbing.

  ‘Whatever made you want to go there?’ they asked when she told where she had been.

  ‘I don’t know,’ sobbed Lindsay. She was like a little frightened child, and very lovely in her woe. They made much of her, and miscalled Bawbie Paterson to their hearts’ content.

  Lindsay told her story over again to Kate, when Kate had arrived home for the night and the girls were in the windowed room that Kate shared habitually with her mother. Ellen had yielded her tower to the guest.

  ‘They wanted to know why I went, Katie, but they mustn’t. Oh, I wish she weren’t like that—she’s dreadful.’

  ‘But you needn’t go near her, need you?’

  Lindsay began to laugh and to sob. ‘Katie,’ she whispered, ‘she’s his aunt, you know.’

  Kate was silent from astonishment.

  She had heard her aunt’s account of Mrs Andrew Lorimer’s story—‘Captain Dalgarno,’ Mrs Andrew had said.

  ‘I see,’ she said at last. Captain Dalgarno was therefore Garry Forbes.

  ‘Mother told you about me, didn’t she? Didn’t she, Katie? She had no right—they treat me like a child. She did say, didn’t she?’

  ‘I wasn’t here, Linny. Yes, she said.’

  ‘Said what? How much, Katie? Oh, I couldn’t bear them to know that was why I ran after her. I wanted to see—Do you suppose they know, Katie?’

  ‘I am sure they don’t. But is it secret, Linny?’

  ‘No. But running after her like that—’ She began to writhe on the bed. ‘I’m so unhappy, Katie.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kate.

  Kate was dumb before emotion. Her own was mastered and undivulged. She remained silent while Lindsay sobbed, and in a while the girl grew quiet, and fell asleep.

  But Kate, after her young cousin slept, stole out of bed and crossed the room. Bending, she pulled the cover over Lindsay’s naked arm. ‘In this frost—she’d starve.’ And for a moment Kate stood looking down on the flushed young face. So this was the woman whom Garry Forbes had chosen. Kate returned to bed and went to sleep. She had a long day’s work ahead of her and a long day’s work behind; and lying awake brought scanty profit.

  FOUR

  Coming of Spring

  Lindsay’s escapade on the night of the Christmas tree provided much matter for talk and for allusion. The ladies had their ways. Paradise, genial and warm, would cry, ‘Out again, Lindsay. Stay you by the fire, my lass. But you don’t seem to feel the cold, stravaigin’ in the snow. You’ll be stiffer about the hunkers before you come to my time of life. Put some clothes on, lassie, you’ll starve.’

  Theresa, hearing, would retort, ‘She’s not like you, rowed up like a sair thoomb. She’s youth to keep her warm.’

  ‘Ay, ay, here’s me that needs the fire. And me to have been so active all my days.’

  ‘Like Vesuvius.’

  ‘Don’t you heed her,’ said Paradise, laughing. ‘I could dander at night with the best when I was younger. O ay, frosty nights and all. Many’s the lad that’s chased me up the park and in by the woodie side.’

  ‘But she aye took care of herself. Catch a weasel sleeping. You’d better have a care, Lindsay, going out alone by night, in a place you don’t know.’

  ‘There’s somebody you would have liked fine to be meeting out there, my lady,’ Paradise would add.

  And Lindsay’s face burned, as she watched them under narrowed lids. They had no mind to disconcert her, but had lived too long and heartily to remember the reticence of youth; and old Mrs Craigmyle, with her fine regard, Lindsay felt, enjoyed her young discomfort—not in a thoughtless frankness, like the others, but pondering its quality.

  ‘Leezie Lindsay,’ her grand-aunt would say—the very name made Lindsay’s cheek grow hot—‘you never ask the old dame for a song. When you were a littlin, it was, “And now a song, my grand-aunt,” and when she sang you danced and you trebled. You have other ploys to please you now.’

  Lindsay, knowing that she avoided the old lady’s presence, blushed the more. And there was nothing in the words, yet everything. Her rare low words had a choice insolence that astounded the girl; but she dared not take offence, so delicate was the insinuation, lest she had mistaken her grand-aunt’s meaning and herself supplied the subtle sting she felt. She would leave Lang Leeb’s presence bewildered, in a sorry heat of shame that she had a mind so tainted.

  Mrs Falconer had other modes of leading to attack. She would make up on the girl as she tramped the long moor roads and walk musing by her side. An ungainly figure, Lindsay thought. And rather a nuisance. She could never get accustomed to Cousin Ellen’s habit of muttering to herself as she walked, and when Mrs Falconer began to address her, in her low hesitating voice, it was hard to be sure that she was not still talking to herself. Hard, indeed; because Ellen had no plain path out from her dreams, and her queer ends of talk were part of the story she had woven around herself and Lindsay.

  ‘There’s hard knowing what to do,’ she would say. ‘I’ve had to suffer, too. I fought for my own way of seeing things.’ That battle of thirty years before came fresh and horrible to her memory. ‘One generation forgets another’s war. But, you see, I came out the conqueror.’

  She let her thought hover upon her own past. It was a glancing embroidery now, pleasant to sight. But Lindsay saw only a tarnished and tangled thread or two that had no connection with herself, and thus a scanty interest.

  ‘So I didn’t hurry you,’ Cousin Ellen went on. ‘ “Seek her out,” they said, “seek her out. There’s danger.” But I knew, you see. Oh yes, I knew. Not the danger they meant. So I didn’t look sore. I let you bide your time. There’s some sorts of danger you have to meet, and where better to meet them than under a moon like yon? Oh yes, I knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’ Lindsay pondered. ‘Why I went out at night? But I am sure she doesn’t. What danger was there?’

  Only Kate, who knew, said nothing. Kate had no words. Lindsay thought her callous, and writhed angrily to remember how she had given her secret self away. But she could have given it to no better heart than Kate’s. Kate took it in and loved it.

  Lindsay, unaware of her devotion, had hours of embarrassment among these elderly women who barbed their chance words with a story half heard from her mother and an escapade whose reason they did not understand. The allusions were sufficiently rare, except on the part of Mrs Falconer, who continued to puzzle Lindsay with her air of secret communion; but their mere possibility was enough to alarm the girl and soil the pleasantness she h
ad always expected of a Weatherhouse sojourn. When, therefore, the frost gave and the roads were filled with slush and the whole countryside was dirty, Lindsay went home without regret.

  It was a black February, wet, with an east wind ‘hostin’ through atween the houses.’ At the end of the month trains were blocked by snow and fallen trees, and March came in bleak and bitter. Lindsay found the time long. She had wanted to be a nurse and they would not let her—she was not strong enough, they said—and there was nothing else that she particularly desired to do. So she made swabs and waited at the Station Rest Room Canteen, and thought herself a little hardly used by fate, but would not confess it, since she saw others around her used more hardly. She was to think it shortly with more justice, for Garry ceased to write to her. She would not confess at home to the lapse, but searched casualty lists and grew pale and restless. Before March ended spring suddenly filled the world. Buds were swollen in a night. Crocuses and scilla broke from the black earth; and Mrs Andrew Lorimer, watching her daughter’s thin, strained face, sent her back to the Weatherhouse. She knew well enough that no letter had come for Lindsay, but would show no sympathy in an affair of which she disapproved.

  The Weatherhouse ladies had had time to forget Lindsay’s escapade. It was no longer matter for stupid allusion. They seemed also to have forgotten the love affair. There were no covert allusions to that either. Perhaps the girl’s bearing, a little proud, steeled to show no hurt even when hurt was taken, made a hearty farm allusiveness fall flat. Kate remembered in silence. Mrs Falconer again waylaid the girl with queer talk that she could not understand. Lindsay could have no idea of the rush of life that came to Cousin Ellen by touching even so distantly the vital experience of a young girl’s love and growth. Ellen had touched no vital experience other than her own. Kate had apparently had none to show her. No one had opened a heart to her or shared with her the strange secrecy of living, and in the hours of remorse when she chid herself for the false fictions of her brain she recognised sadly that she created these because she had had so little of the real stuff of living to fill her mind. So Lindsay, coming to Fetter-Rothnie charged with the splendours of a real romance, intoxicated Mrs Falconer. The elderly woman watched her with a sort of adoration, and would have purchased her confidence at a price; but she did not know how to reach the girl’s confidence. Lindsay thought her queer and avoided her.

  The others she did not avoid. Suspense, she found, was easier to bear up here in the sun and wind, where no one knew that she was waiting. It surprised her to find how she slipped into the life of the countryside, learned its stories, its secret griefs and endeavours. She had not dreamed how much alive a few square miles of field and moor could become. Miss Annie taught her to understand the earth and its labourers—the long, slow toil of cultivating a land denuded of its men. She learned to despise Peter Cairnie, a shrewd shirker in a rich farm by the river, who ploughed Maggie Barnett’s land to her at an exorbitant figure; and to honour Maggie, wife of a young crofter at the Front, who managed the croft and reared her three bairns alone.

  ‘Do you hear from him often?’ Lindsay said to Maggie.

  ‘Whiles, whiles,’ the wiry woman answered. ‘But he’s nae great sticks at the pen. I heard five weeks syne.’

  Five weeks, Lindsay thought, and she takes it as of course. She watched Maggie whack the cow round in her stall and set to milking, and followed Miss Theresa a little thoughtfully to Mrs Hunter at Craggie.

  Another croft; its man not gone this time, but slow and frail; Dave, the eldest boy, in the Gordons.

  ‘And does he write?’ asked Lindsay. It was something to say.

  ‘Write!’ cried Mrs Hunter in her glowing fashion. ‘There was never a lad to write like our Dave. And money coming home to keep the loonies at the school. “Keep you Bill and Dod to their books, Mother,” he says. “This war’s bound to go over some time, and the boys’ll need all the education they can get. I’ll put them through college,” he says. It’s himsel should have been at the college, if I had my way of it. His heart was never in the joinering, but there, it couldna be. But the young ones, they’re to town to the school, a gey lang way, and a gey lang day; their father could do fine with a hand from them with the beasts and about the place, but there you are, you see. “Keep them to their books, mother,” says Dave. “They’ll get what I couldn’t get.” And I can aye lend a hand with the beasts mysel.’

  Lindsay went often to Mrs Hunter’s. Mrs Hunter had been servant lass for so long at Knapperley, and she talked freely of Miss Barbara and Mr Garry, not suspecting the avid interest of her listener. Talk lightened the heart to Mrs Hunter. Good reminiscent unprejudiced talk was the salt of earth to her; and she had earth enough in her laborious life to require salting.

  Lindsay would come in, swing herself to the table or squat upon a creepie, and manoeuvre Mrs Hunter to the subjects she desired. It was thus that she heard the story of David Grey. David had been Garry’s friend. And he was dead. His father, John Grey, lived across the dyke from Mrs Hunter. This indomitable old man, approaching the seventies, spare, small and alert, lived alone except for the woman who kept his house. Son of a petty crofter in a Deeside glen, he had laboured on the croft, taken his schooling as he could, and fought his way to apprenticeship in an engineering shop. The master of the country school where he had spent his winters did well by him; in night school he rose steadily, until by the end of his apprenticeship he was teaching draughtsmanship and mechanics. He went out early on Sunday mornings and took long walks in the country, in the course of which he studied botany and learned by heart the works of the English poets. He even wrote verses, in Tennyson’s early manner; and studied Carlyle and Ruskin, John Locke and Adam Smith. His books were bought from second-hand bookstalls; it was thus that he became possessor of an eighteenth-century Paradise Lost, leather-bound, with steel engravings of our First Parents in a state of innocence. To these engravings he had added, for Eve a skirt, for Adam short pants, of Indian ink. He married, became Works manager of the Foundry where he had served his apprenticeship, settled within reach of town and cultivated his garden. He rose with daylight, laboured in the earth till the breakfast hour, made a rapid but thorough toilet, went to town. At the end of his garden, the beauty of which was celebrated through all the district, was a workshop: there was nothing connected with a homestead that he could not make or mend. His fingers, clumsy, broad and seamed, were incredibly delicate in action. His figure was squat and plebeian, but redeemed by its alert activity and by the large and noble head. The brow was wide and lofty, the nose aquiline, shaggy eyebrows emphasised the depths of the eye-sockets, in which there shone a pair of dark, piercing and kindly eyes. Children loved him. His voice was soft and persuasive. His men revered him and trusted his judgment. He spoke evil of no man.

  In youth his hair, brows and beard (which he never removed) were intensely black, but by the time of this story, white; and so much of his forehead and temples was now bare as gave a singularly lofty and serene appearance to his head. One felt him as a man of peace. In the spring of 1914 he had retired from work and given himself with a child’s delight to his garden; but early in the war, feeling that his specialised knowledge and training should be put at the service of his country, he offered himself to the Munitions Department of his city, and was engaged as a voluntary and unpaid Inspector of Shells; he stipulated only that his travelling expenses should be paid—his salary had always been small, and he had saved no more than would suffice for his old age. The lifting and handling of shells was too much for his failing strength. He toiled home at night exhausted; but was up on the following morning to work in his garden. He had even taken in another piece of ground and was growing huge crops of potatoes and green vegetables, which he distributed among the local hospitals.

  His wife was dead. His only son, a brilliant boy, unlike his father in appearance and temperament, had inherited and intensifed his genius. David was tall, red-headed, fiery-tempered, wild and splendid, but with his f
ather’s capacity for engineering and his power over those who worked for him. John Grey saw his own dreams fulfilled in his son. The boy marched triumphantly through school and college, and, entering Woolwich Arsenal in the war, became night manager of a new fuse factory. His work was his passion. Brilliant, inventive, steady in work as his father, he lacked the older man’s composed serenity. The artist’s sensibility, the lover’s exaltation, went to his work; and broke him. He developed tuberculosis, and in three months’ time was dead.

  John Grey took the blow in silence. He spoke to no one of his son, but went on his steady, quiet way. Only the professional books that he and the boy together had amassed ceased to interest him. He never read them again, and his tired mind had no further concern with the modern developments of which, for the boy’s sake, he had kept himself informed.

  When Lindsay learned, through Mrs Hunter, that David Grey had been Garry’s friend, she placed both the old and the dead man in her shrine of heroes. This shy and undeveloped girl at nineteen had the Lorimer passion, exemplified in Mrs Falconer’s day-dreams and the balladry of Lang Leeb her mother, for a romantic enlargement of life. Lindsay was given to hero-worship. On these spring evenings and on Saturday afternoons she would watch the old man at work in his garden. Sometimes, as he crawled weeding among the beds, in his old garments that had turned the colour of earth itself, with his hands earth-encrusted, he seemed older than human—some antique embodiment of earth. One could fancy a god creating an Eden. Steady and happy. Absorbed. Like a part of what he worked in, and yet beyond it. The immanent presence. The stooping figure, moving back and forth like a great silent animal, would raise itself, the noble forehead come into view; and rising on stiff knees, the old man would greet the girl with a perfect courtesy, sit by her pulling at his pipe. Once, in the sun, he fell asleep as he sat beside her, nodding in an old man’s light and easy slumbers.