The Weatherhouse

by Nan Shepherd

  ‘I heard—something.’

  ‘Oh, something. But no one knew. Do you suppose we blabbed? No, but we talked and talked—six weeks we talked. Oh, just in snatches, when he had the time. He slaved all those weeks. But when he had an hour—how we talked! We threshed out all the religions in the world, I think. You didn’t know David cared for that. You thought his machinery and his music were all he thought about. But he did. I made him care. Only—he died so soon I never knew, never was sure that I had saved his soul. And now I never can be. So, you see, I couldn’t enter into a formal engagement, could I? But it would have come to that. Am I so very wrong to claim it before the world? To me it is like a proclamation of my faith in David—that his soul was right at the last. It is a mere formality I am assuming. But surely I am justified. The truth that was the truth of our hearts is expressed in it—that is all.’

  Garry said slowly and with difficult utterance, ‘That is a morality more involved than I am accustomed to.’

  ‘Morality is always involved. Only truth is clear and one. But we never see it. That’s why we must live by morality.’

  Garry got up from the garden chair on which he had been seated.

  ‘This is too much for me. I don’t pretend to understand you. And was this what distressed you in the evening?’

  ‘Yes, yes. You made me feel a cheat, to claim the reality without my formal right. But I do not feel a cheat now.’

  ‘Then I suppose I had better go away?’

  ‘Yes, go; yes, go.’

  He went in misery. He could not disbelieve this tale of David. Talk they must have had. More of David—and more of Miss Morgan—than he had known became apparent: new stars slipping from the dusk. He walked bewildered.

  In a little he came to Craggie. All was dark and silent. He rattled on the door, and the sound, rolling into the night, roused him to observe that all the countryside was folded. It must be late: he had not thought of time. He made out the figures on his luminous wristwatch—half past eleven. The Hunters were a-bed; he regretted having come and turned to go quietly away.

  But shuffling footsteps were approaching, bolts were shot back, and the long knotted figure of Jake Hunter appeared in the doorway, trousers pulled hastily up over his nightshirt. His face was twisted in a look of apprehension.

  ‘What’s wrong, ava?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’ Garry apologised, explaining his errand.

  ‘Man, it’s a terrible-like time o’night to tak a body out o’ their beds.’

  ‘So it’s you that’s the death o’ them,’ cried Mrs Hunter, coming to the door. ‘And me callin’ Jonathan Bannochie for a’ thing—nae boots for Bill the morn’s morn. An’ it’s nae like Jonathan to be ahin hand wi’ his work. He doesna seek nae to put to his hand. And it’s you that was poochin’ my laddie’s boots.’

  ‘Man,’ said Jake, ‘you feared me, comin’ in about at this hour.’

  ‘O ay, now, Mr Garry, sir,’ Mrs Hunter interrupted, ‘what’s this you were up to with Miss Louie? She came by this house with a face begrutten that you couldna tell it was a face, and when I but said “Good evening”—quiet-like and never lettin’ on I saw the tears—ran as if she saw reek. Bubblin’ an’ greetin’—tears enough to make the porridge with.’

  ‘Hoots, wumman,’ said Jake, ‘let the thing be. Seein’ there’s naething a-dae, let’s to our beds. But man, you fair feared me. Would it be our laddie, I thocht, killed maybe or wounded.’

  Garry apologised again.

  ‘Miss Morgan’s all right,’ he told Mrs Hunter. ‘I saw her a little ago. Very cheerful.’

  The couple went in and shut their door. But Garry stood on the road, struck dumb. Mrs Hunter’s voice had brought to his memory what he had forgotten—the assurance she had given him that Louie had her betrothal ring: the ring that David’s mother had reserved for his bride.

  Not betrothed to David, yet wearing his mother’s ring: now what should that forebode?

  NINE

  The Andrew Lorimers go to the Country

  The sleet had vanished in the night. Airs were soft as summer, and over the last golden clumps of crocus, wide open in the sun, bees droned and buzzed.

  ‘A flinchin’ Friday,’ warned Miss Annie, who had a farmer’s knowledge of the weather signs. ‘There’ll be storm on the heels of this.’

  Storm! thought Ellen, bumming as she cleared the breakfast dishes. Youth was in her heart, she had risen up at the voice of a bird, and the world for her was azure. She could not understand this flood of new life that welled up within her.

  The postman came, bringing the letters, and told them the story of Garry before the Session.

  ‘He had no call to shame her like that,’ said Miss Annie.

  ‘Pity for her in her snuffy condition,’ scoffed Theresa. ‘The lad’s as thrawn as cats’ guts, he’ll do as he pleases.’

  ‘But it’s not to laugh at,’ said Ellen, with an unexpected heat. ‘It was a noble thing to do.’

  ‘Locking her in a schoolroom, the same as he locked her in the old Tower—where’s your nobility in that? Well, well, Louie’ll be having him next, wait till you see. The cow dies waiting the green grass, and if she can’t get one to her mind, she’s well advised to take what she can get.’

  Lindsay thrust her thumb into the envelope of a letter and ripped it savagely open, and glared at Theresa above a trembling lip.

  Ellen said, ‘Tris, you’re an old fool. As if the boy would mind her.’

  ‘If he can’t get a better, where’s the odds?

  Are ye hungry?

  Lick the mills o’ Bungrie,

  Are ye thirsty?

  Kiss Kirsty.

  ‘What stite you talk!’ said Miss Annie. ‘The lad was scunnered at her.’

  ‘There was once a lad that took a scunner at butter, and after that he could never eat it thicker than the bread.’

  ‘Oh, they’re coming here,’ cried Lindsay, reading from her letter. ‘The children—for a picnic.’ She began to read aloud, hastily, to hide the trembling of her mouth, and even she was less indignant than Ellen at the monstrous suggestion that Theresa had made. The sisters were still bickering, and Theresa had just said, ‘Oh, no, to be sure I know nothing. What should a silly tailor do but sit and sew a clout? It was me that had the right of it in the other affair, I would have you remember. I told you she wasn’t engaged to him’—and was making for the kitchen, but paused to hear Lindsay read her mother’s letter.

  Mrs Andrew Lorimer wrote that as the holidays had begun the children were eager for a picnic. They were taking lunch out, and would the Weatherhouse ladies give them tea?

  ‘And there’s them turning in at the foot of the brae,’ said Theresa. ‘What a congregation! We’ll need our time to tea all that.’ She went to the kitchen and began to bake. Theresa liked nothing better than to provide a tea. Lindsay ran flying down the brae to meet the children, and as she ran the words spurted from her lips, ‘Brute, brute, brute. I hate her. Brute.’

  ‘She’s never away in these thin shoes,’ said Miss Annie, following Theresa to the kitchen. ‘She’ll be ill.’

  ‘Fient an ill. She’s that excited you would think she was a bairn herself. That’s her that was so dead set on marrying. There’s no more word of that affair, it seems. And she doesn’t get letters from any at the Front but Frank.’

  About the same hour Garry Forbes was walking up to Mrs Morgan’s door. He was stern and ill at ease, but determined to go through with the task that he had set himself. Louie, too, was ill at ease. When she saw him her face crumpled up, puckering as though she were to cry, and she lowered her eyes and would not meet his. He was sure she had already been weeping.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I haven’t slept. I must know this: that ring you wear—it’s David’s mother’s. How do you come to have it if you were not betrothed?’

  ‘Why do you pursue me like this?’ She sat down with a gesture of despair and motioned him to a seat. He saw the te
ars trickle between the hands with which she covered her face.

  ‘I did try to tell the truth yesterday,’ she said at last, looking up. ‘Perhaps if they hadn’t come in—and yet I don’t know. Oh, must I tell you? Can’t you understand how it is? I am so covered with shame—will you let me try to show you how it was? Will you let me try?’

  He assented gravely.

  ‘I think sometimes I can’t tell the truth—can you understand that?’

  He was embarrassed, not knowing what to answer.

  ‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘truth to me is terribly hard. I am made like that. I live all the time—oh, I am going to scourge myself—in what I want other people to be thinking about me, until often I don’t know—indeed, indeed I don’t—what I really am and what I have thought they are thinking I am. I understand myself, you see. But I can’t give it up, I can’t. I’ve nothing to put in its place.’

  Garry was looking in amazement.

  ‘I should have thought the difference between truth and a lie was clear enough,’ he said as she paused.

  ‘Oh, no, it’s not—not clear at all. Things are true and right in one relationship, and quite false in another. It’s false, as a mere statement of fact, that I was betrothed to David, but true as an expression of—an expression of—’ She faltered and burst into tears.

  ‘I was going to say, an expression of feeling—our feeling. But it’s my feeling. David—I am to tell you the truth now—David never mentioned love to me, or marriage. We had those talks—yes, yes, you must not think those were invented. We talked—all sorts of things, deep, intimate things. And I was always thinking: I am making an impression, I am altering his ideas. I wanted to save his soul. I think—I think I wanted it to be me that would save his soul, not just that his soul would be saved. I am trying to be honest, you see. And then I thought: he will recognise how much I have done for him, I shall become needful to him, and in time—in time—yes, I hoped that in time he might marry me. Don’t you understand? I think that about every man. There have been so few—just none, just none. No one ever before with whom I even had an intimate conversation, like this with David. It was luscious, it was so good! I wanted to be at the heart of life instead of on its margins.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I can see that. But I don’t see that it justifies you in grabbing David.’

  ‘Grabbing! But I didn’t grab. Oh, you haven’t understood at all! That part of him is mine. I created it. No one can touch it but me.’

  ‘But you said he never—’

  ‘No, no, he never did. I suppose it was all a tiny thing to him—just some occasional talk. He liked it at the time. But between times he was absorbed, he forgot. And I thought and thought until that was all that was alive for me. And yet he liked the talks. He would say, “Now there, what you said last week—I’ve been thinking about that.” He made me feel, somehow, as though what I said was tremendously important, as though I were tremendously important to him. And then I came to believe I was important. You see how well I understand myself.’

  Garry was at a loss. He felt as though a roof had blown away and he was looking in amazement at a hive of populous rooms where things were done that he had never imagined.

  ‘So when he died it was myself I felt for, that my hope would never come to be.’ Garry made a motion of disgust. ‘Yes, yes, it was hideous. But don’t you see my desperation? “What are the men thinking about?” they said. “Not about me”—I couldn’t answer that. Don’t you understand? I had to save my self-respect. Confess no man had ever wanted me? “What are the men thinking about, that you are still unmarried?” “Ah, I could tell you that an I would.” You needn’t tell a lie, you see. A hint is all. But it saves you from humiliation—from yourself. Yes, I know it is in your own eyes that you are saved. The others forget, but you keep on remembering that they know.’

  ‘So David had to suffer that people might think—the right thing about you.’

  ‘To suffer! But I forgot. You think it is a degradation for David to be thought in love with me. That is why you have wormed all this out of me.’

  He could not deny, and so was silent.

  ‘But why should it be a degradation? I’m not wicked. I’m not ugly. I have charm. I’m thirty five—you wouldn’t dream. I’ve kept astonishingly youthful.’

  Juvenile, was the word that flashed across his brain.

  ‘I have such girlish ways. Oh, God, what am I doing? Why did you let me go on? You can’t expect me to acknowledge that it would have been a degradation. And yet I know it was only—what was the word you used?—grabbing. That I grabbed David. But it didn’t feel like that to me. It felt like— Oh, I tried to explain it to you. Like the seal and signal of the great belief I had in him. A high and holy thing. I see now that it wasn’t—that it was only—was bad and wicked. The human heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. That doesn’t mean that you tell lies. Self-deceitful. You think you are doing a brave thing, and it turns out mean. And you don’t deliberately persuade yourself about it. You really are deceived. Only some people—like me, I’m one of them, you should pity us, we are of all men most miserable—, some people see the deceptive appearance and the deceit both together, as it were, only they can’t quite distinguish. Or won’t let themselves. Just now, for instance, I am hoping that I am saving your soul. As I hoped with David. I am saying, years after, he will look back on this hour and say, “My life was changed—that was a crucial hour for me. I had a new revelation of life given to me.” That’s what I meant by saving your soul. But you won’t, will you?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘No, of course not. I know that. Only you see I go on thinking and acting as though I knew you would. There, I have revealed my innermost being to you. No one has seen it before. But you—you have forced me to see how vile it is. Will you not have mercy? Are you to make of me an outcast in the eyes of men?’

  Garry found his thoughts in confusion; but remembered suddenly that she had not yet explained her possession of the ring.

  She went very white, threw her head back and breathed deeply. ‘I took it. Why don’t you say something?’ she added after a pause. ‘I took it. You would say stole, I suppose. But it wasn’t really that.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Oh, you are cruel! You are saying, double meanings again. But I shall tell you how it came about. His mother wore that ring. I used to watch it when I was a girl—the strange old set and chasing of the gold. And I was with my mother when we saw her dying. She said, “It’s not of value, it’s only a square cairngorm, but the setting is old and rare. My son’s bride shall have it.” I thought nothing then, but you know how unimportant words like that may stay with you. You forget that you heard them, and then one day back they all come. It was Mr Grey himself that showed me it. I asked him, “Have you nothing for our jumble sale?” And he said there might be some useless odds and ends. He pulled out a drawer, and there was the ring. I knew it at once. He put it aside and some other things, and then he said, “If you find anything there of any use, just you take it.” So I rummaged in the drawer. But afterwards I couldn’t keep my thoughts off the ring. Nor off his mother’s words, “David’s bride.” I said them over and over, and then I felt: if only I could have the ring a moment on my finger I should feel better. David’s bride. It would feel real then. I thought about it till I couldn’t keep away, and I went back to the house and opened the drawer and slipped the ring on. I felt so happy then, I can’t explain to you. It seemed as though something had come true. I could have danced and sung. I couldn’t bear to take it off again, and I went and stood by the window—it opens like a door, I had come in that way—and watched the light shine on it. And then I heard a sound, and there was his old housekeeper coming in at the door. So I slipped it in my pocket, meaning to put it back in the drawer, and I said, “Mr Grey gave me leave to take some things from that drawer for the Jumble Sale. I knocked, but you couldn’t have heard. I’m glad you’ve come in, for I was just wondering if I co
uld take the things away when nobody was here.” Then I went into the room again and played about among the things in the drawer, always hoping I’d be able to slip the ring back. But she watched me all the time. So I had to carry it away. And I slept with it on that night. Oh, I can’t make you understand—in a few days it felt like a part of me. All I had wanted of David seemed to be concentrated in that little piece of gold. I loved it. I couldn’t bear to have it off my finger—though I was prudent, and wore it only when I was alone. He wasn’t dead a month by then. Well, one day I had it on, and my glove was off, when I happened to meet Mrs Hunter. It was on my wedding finger, you understand, and she pounced at once, and said, “What, what!” and then she stood staring at the ring and cried, “But I’ve seen that ring before,” and I felt like death and said, “Dear Mrs Hunter, it hasn’t to be known. We hadn’t made it public, and now—” “You poor bit bairn!” she said, and I began to weep. It was such a relief to weep, I felt so frightened. But then I recollected myself and told her on no account to speak of it. Especially not to Mr Grey. “You know that he never mentions David’s name,” I said. “And at any rate, since the betrothal had not been announced, it’s better to keep it secret still. I prefer to suffer in silence.” But I couldn’t, you know. That was just it. I wanted everyone to know that I was suffering. Mrs Hunter promised faithfully to say nothing—’

  Garry gave an involuntary exclamation and clapped his mouth shut on it at once.

  ‘I know, I know. You are to say: she spoke to me, she told me. It was Mrs Hunter who told you the ring was his mother’s, wasn’t it? But you see she did not break her promise, it had got known without her, and she was free to speak. Got known, I say. I made it known, was what I mean. I couldn’t keep it, you see. I gave other people hints—it was so sweet, oh, if you knew how sweet their pity was! No, not their pity—their admiration. For the way I bore my suffering, I mean.’