A Scots Quair

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

  First ere the cutting in the ley began there’d been roads to clear all round the corn, wide bouts that father scythed himself, he swore that the scythe would yet come back to its own when the binders and reapers rotted in rust and folk bred the old breed again. But it’s time was past or was yet to come, the scythe’s, out the reaper was driven and yoked, Chris followed down at the tail of it. The best of weather for harvest, folk said, it was ill to cut in a swither of heat; and so still was the air by morn and noon it reminded you of the days in Spring, you’d hear the skirl of the blades ring down the Howe for mile on mile, the singing of Long Rob of the Mill, the Cuddiestoun creatures swearing at Tony as he stood and gowked at the stooks. Then Blawearie’s reaper clanged in through the gates with Bess and Clyde at the pole, and the blades flashed and brightened like the teeth of a beast and snarled in a famished freedom. And then John Guthrie cried Get up! and swung the horses down the bout, and the hungry snarl changed to a deep, clogged growling as the corn was driven on the teeth by the swinging reaper flails; and down the bout, steady and fine, sped the reaper, clean- cutting from top to bottom, with never a straggling straw as on other farms, John Guthrie saw to that.

  But feint the time had you for glowering at rig or reaper, soon as the horses were off and the flail drove the first sheaf from the tail-board Chris had pounced on that sheaf and gathered and bound it and flung it aside before you could say Glenbervie! and had run to the next and twisted its band, and gathered and bound and bound and gathered with her hands like a mist below her eyes, so quick they were. Midway the bout Will met with her, working up from the foot, and flicking the sweat from his face. And just as they straightened and stretched and looked up to the head of the park the clong, clong of the empty reaper would change to the snarling engaging whirr as father guided the horses to the cutting again. Still the sun smouldered behind its mists and out by Kinneff the fog-horn moaned all hours, you felt like moaning like that yourself long ere the day was out and your back near cracked and broke with the strain of the bending.

  But in three days time the ley was cut, the yavil glowed yellow across the dykes and they moved to that without stop. And then suddenly the mists cleared up and the fog-horn stopped from its droning, it came on real blistering weather of heat, but hardly you’d bear to touch on the wood of the reaper shaft when you loosed the horses, so hot it grew. Kinraddie gasped and then bent to its chaving again, this heat wouldn’t last, the rain was due, God help the crops that waited cutting then.

  The second day of the yavil cutting a tink climbed up the Blawearie road from the turnpike and cried to John Guthrie for work, and father said Maybe, maybe. Let’s see the work that you’ve in you first, and the tink said Ay, fine that. And he off with his coat and took the middle of the bout, and was up it in a jiffy, gathering and binding to the manner born, you might say, and giving Chris a bit smile when he met with her. So, coming down the next bout father cried to the tink that he’d take him on for a day or so, if the weather held; and Chris could get up to the house and see to the supper—no idling, quean, mind that. He was a black-like, gypsy childe, the tink, father wouldn’t have him into the kitchen for meat, the creature might be all lice; and he wouldn’t have him sleep in the house.

  So Chris made him a shake-down out in the barn, he said he was real content with that. But when she carried him his supper over to the barn the first night she felt shamed for him suddenly, and told him she’d have had him eat in the house if it hadn’t been father. And he said Don’t let that fash you, lass, I’m as little anxious for his company as he is for mine. Forbye, he’s only a Kinraddie clown! Chris felt her face flame at that, it just showed you there was no good doing kindness to tinks, but she made out she hadn’t heard and turned back to go over the close. Then it was the tink put out his arm, round her legs before she could move, almost he pulled her down on the hay beside him. You’ve never lain with a man yet, lass, I can see, and that’s a sore waste of hot blood like yours. So mind I’m here if you want me, I’ve deflowered more queans than I’ve years to my name and sent none of them empty away. He loosed her then, laughing low, she couldn’t do anything but stare and stare at him, sick and not angry, something turned in her stomach and her knees felt weak. The tink put out his hand and patted her leg again, Mind, if you want me I’ll be here, and Chris shook her head, she felt too sick to speak, and slipped out of the barn and crossed the close and washed and washed at her hands and face with hot water till father lowered his paper and asked Have you gone clean daft?

  But up in her room that night, the room that was hers and hers only now, Will slept where his brothers had slept, she saw a great moon come over the Grampians as she undressed for bed. She opened the window then, she liked to sleep with it open, and it was as though the night had been waiting for that, a waft of the autumn wind blew in, it was warm and cool and it blew in her face with a smell like the smell of late clover and the smell of dung and the smell of the stubble fields all commingled. She leant there breathing it, watching the moon with the hills below it but higher than Blawearie, Kinraddie slept like a place in a picture-book, drifting long shadows that danced a petronella across the night-stilled parks. And without beginning or reason a strange ache came in her, in her breasts, so that they tingled, and in her throat, and below her heart, and she heard her heart beating, and for a minute the sound of the blood beating through her own head. And she thought of the tink lying there in the barn and how easy it would be to steal down the stairs and across the close, dense black in its shadows, to the barn.

  But it was only for a second she thought of that, daftly, then laughed at herself, cool and trim and trig, and closed the window, shutting out the smells of the night, and slowly took off her clothes, looking at herself in the long glass that had once stood in mother’s room. She was growing up limber and sweet, not bonny, perhaps, her cheek-bones were over high and her nose over short for that, but her eyes clear and deep and brown, brown, deep and clear as the Denburn flow, and her hair was red and was brown by turns, spun fine as a spider’s web, wild, wonderful hair. So she saw herself and her teeth clean-cut and even, a white gleam in that grave brown stillness of face John Guthrie’s blood had bequeathed to her. And below face and neck now her clothes were off was the glimmer of shoulders and breast and there her skin was like satin, it tickled her touching herself. Below the tilt of her left breast was a dimple, she saw it and bent to look at it and the moonlight ran down her back, so queer the moonlight she felt the running of that beam along her back. And she straightened as the moonlight grew and looked at the rest of herself, and thought herself sweet and cool and fit for that lover who would some day come and kiss her and hold her, so.

  And Chris saw the brown glimmer of her face grow sweet and scared as she thought of that—how they’d lie together, in a room with moonlight, and she’d be kind to him, kind and kind, giving him all and everything, and he’d sleep with his head here on her breast or they’d lie far into the mornings whispering one to the other, they’d have so much to tell! And maybe that third and last Chris would find voice at last for the whimsies that filled her eyes, and tell of rain on the roof at night, the terror and the splendour of it across the long slate roofs; and the years that faded and fell, dissolved as a breath, before those third clear eyes; and mother’s face, lying dead; and the Standing Stones up there night after night and day after day by the loch of Blawearie, how around them there gathered things that wept and laughed and lived again in the hours before the dawn, till far below the cocks began to crow in Kinraddie and day had come again. And all that he’d believe, more than so often she believed herself, not laugh at, holding and kissing her, so. And faith! no more than a corpse he’d hold if she didn’t get into her bed-gown and into her bed, you may dream of a lad till you’re frozen as a stone, but he’ll want you warmer than that.

  SO THAT WAS THE harvest madness that came on Chris, mild enough it had been, she fell fast asleep in the middle of it. But it scored her mind as a long drill sco
res the crumbling sods of a brown, still May, it left neither pleasure nor pain, but she’d know that track all the days of her life, and its dark, long sweep across the long waiting field. Binder and reaper clattered and wheeped through the brittle weather that held the Howe, soon the weather might break and the stooking was far behind in Blawearie. But Will would have nothing to do with night-time work, he laughed in John Guthrie’s face at the mention of it and jumped on his bicycle and rode for Drumlithie evening on evening. Father would wander out by the biggings and stare at the parks and then come glinting into the house and glower at Chris, Get off to your bed when you’ve milked the kye; and she made little protest at that, she was tired enough at the end of a day to nearly sleep in the straw of the byre.

  But one night she didn’t dare sleep, for up in the room he’d shared with mother she heard John Guthrie get out of bed and go slow padding about in his stocking soles, like a great cat padding there, a beast that sniffed and planned and smelled at the night. And once he came soft down the cowering creak of the stairs and stopped by her door, and she held her breath, near sick with fright, though what was there to be feared of? And she heard his breath come quick and gasping, and the scuffle of his hand on the sneck of the door; and then that stopped, he must have gone up or down, the house was quiet, but she didn’t dare sleep again till Will came clattering home in the still, small hours.

  For the harvest madness was out in Kinraddie if Chris had been quick to master hers. And though a lad and a quean might think their ongoings known to none but themselves, they’d soon be sore mistaken, you might hide with your lass on the top of Ben Nevis and have your bit pleasure there, but ten to one when you got up to go home there’d be Mistress Munro or some claik of her kidney, near sniggering herself daft with delight at your shame. First it was Sarah Sinclair and the foreman at Upperhill, Εwan Tavendale he was, that the speak rose round: they’d been seen coming out of the larch wood above the Upperhill, that wood where the daftie had trapped Maggie Jean, and what had they been doing there on their lone? It was Alec Mutch of Bridge End that met them, him taking a dander over the moor to the smithy with a broken binder-blade for mending. The two hardly saw him at first, Miss Sinclair’s face was an unco sight, raddled with blushing it was like the leg of a tuberculous rabbit when you skinned the beast, Ewan slouched along at her side, hang-dog he looked as though it was his mother he’d bedded with, said Alec, and maybe that’s how it had felt. Alec cried a Good night! to the pair, they near jumped out of their skins, and went on with the story to the smithy beyond the moor. And from there you may well be sure it went through Kinraddie fast enough, the smith could tell lies faster than he could shoe horses; and he was fell champion at that.

  Truth or no, Chae Strachan got hold of the story and went over to Upperhill to see Ewan Tavendale and ask in a friendly way what he meant to do about Sarah, his sister-in-law, the daft old trollop. And maybe he’d have settled things canty and fine but that he came on Ewan at the wrong bit minute, he was sitting outside the bothy door with the rest of the bothy billies; and when Chae came up there rose a bit snigger, that fair roused Chae, he stopped bang in front of them and asked what the hell they were laughing at? And Sam Gourlay said Little, damned little, looking Chae from head to foot; and Ewan said he felt more in the way of weeping than laughing at such a sight, and he spoke in a slow, impudent way that fair roused Chae’s dander to the boiling point. So, being a fell impatient man, and skilly with his hands, he took Sam Gourlay a clout in the lug that couped him down in the stour and then before you could wink he and Ewan were at it, ding-dong, like a pair of tinks, all round the Upperhill close; and Upprums came running in his leggings, the creature, fair scandalised, but he got a shove in the guts that couped him right down in the greip where once his son Jock had been so mischieved; and that was the end of his interfering. In a minute or so it was plain that Ewan, fight though he might, was like to have the worst of the sett, he was no match for that madman Chae. So the rest of the bothy lads up and went for Chae; and when he got back to Peesie’s Knapp he’d hardly a stitch on his back. But Ewan, the coarse, dour brute, had a cut in the face that stopped his mouth for a while, and a black eye big enough to sole the boots on Cuddiestoun’s meikle feet, folk said.

  And faith! if it shouldn’t be Cuddiestoun himself that began the next story, running into the middle of it himself, you might say, going up to the Manse to get a bit signature on some paper or other for his lawyer man. But Mr Gibbon they told him wasn’t at home, Mistress Gibbon herself came out to tell him that, kind and fine as she was, but he didn’t like her, the English dirt. So, fair disgruntled he turned from the door, maybe the poor brute’s big sweating feet were fell sore already with a hot day’s stooking. But just down at the end of the Manse’s garden, where the yews bent thick above the lush grass their boughs that had sheltered the lost childe Wallace in the days before the coarse English ran him to earth and took him to London and there hanged and libbed him and hewed his body in four to hang on the gates of Scotland—there, in that grass in the half-dark was a rustling and squealing as though a drove of young pigs was rootling there. And Cuddiestoun stopped and picked up a handful of gravel from the minister’s walk and flung it into the grass and cried Away with you! for maybe it was dogs in heat that were chaving there, big collies are none so chancy to meet when the creatures are set for mating. But instead of a collie up out of the grass rose the Gourdon quean, her that old Mistress Sinclair had fee’d for the Manse; and Munro saw her face then with a glazed look on it, like the face of a pig below the knife of its killer; and she brushed the hair from her face, daft-like, and went trailing past Munro, without a word from her, as though she walked half-asleep. But past him, going into the Manse, she began to whistle, and laughed a loud scraich of a laugh—as though she’d tried right desperately for something, and won, and beaten all the world in the winning of it. So it seemed to Cuddiestoun, and faith! you couldn’t put that down to imagination, for he’d never had any, the ugly stock; so fair queer it must well have been, he stood and stared after her, dumbfoundered-like, and was just turning at last, to tramp down to the road, when he found Mr Gibbon himself at his elbow.

  It had grown fell dark by then but not so dark that Cuddiestoun couldn’t see the minister was without a hat and was breathing in great deep paichs as though he’d come from the running of a race. And he barked out, Well, speak up, man, what do you want? Munro was sore took aback at hearing a fine childe like the minister snap at him that way. So he just said Well, well, Mr Gibbon, you’ve surely been running a bit race? and then wished he hadn’t, for the minister went by him without another word, and then flung over his shoulder If you want me, come to-morrow.

  And into the Manse he went and banged the door with a clash that fair made Cuddiestoun loup in his meikle boots. So there was nothing for him but to taik away home to Mistress Munro, and faith! you might well believe the story lost nothing in the telling she gave it, and soon every soul in Kinraddie had a different version, Long Rob’s was cried to John Guthrie as he went by the Mill. He never spread scandal about folk, Long Rob—only horses, was the joke they told of him—but maybe he classed ministers lower than them.

  It seemed like enough to John Guthrie, the story, though he’d no coarse notions like Rob and his Ingersoll, the world was rolling fast to a hell of riches and the old slave days come back again, ministers went with it and whored with the rest. For the bitterness had grown and eaten away into the heart of him in his year at Blawearie. So coarse the land proved in the turn of the seasons he’d fair been staggered, the crops had fared none so bad this once, but he saw in a normal year the corn would come hardly at all on the long, stiff slopes of the dour red clay. Now also it grew plain to him here as never in Echt that the day of the crofter was fell near finished, put by, the day of folk like himself and Chae and Cuddiestoun, Pooty and Long Rob of the Mill, the last of the farming folk that wrung their living from the land with their own bare hands. Sign of the times he saw Jean
Guthrie’s killing of herself to shame him and make of his name a by-word in the mouths of his neighbours, sign of a time when women would take their own lives or flaunt their harlotries as they pleased, with the country-folk climbing on silver, the few, back in the pit, the many; and a darkness down on the land he loved better than his soul or God.

  AND NEXT IT WAS Will himself that started the claiks of Kinraddie, him and his doings in Drumlithie. But Chris met the story ere it reached Kinraddie, she met it in Drumlithie itself, in the yard of the gardener Galt. The tink had been gone from Blawearie that day she set out with her basket, no sign of the rain showed even then, the heat held still as the white, dull heat from a furnace door. Down in the turnpike the motor-cars went whipping by as she set her feet for Mondynes, there where the battle was fought in the days long syne. Below the bridge went the wash of the burn west to the Bervie Water, bairns cried and splashed in the bridge’s lithe, they went naked there when they dared, she saw them glance white and startled in the shelter of the stones. Soon the heat grew such that she took off her hat and swung that in her hand and so climbed the road, and there to the left rose Drumlithie at last, some called it Skite to torment the folk and they’d get fell angry at that in Skite. No more than a rickle of houses it was, white with sunshine below its steeple that made of Skite the laugh of the Howe, for feint the kirk was near it. Folk said for a joke that every time it came on to rain the Drumlithie folk ran out and took in their steeple, that proud they were of the thing, it came from the weaver days of the village when damn the clock was there in the place and its tolling told the hour.