a hand at his back, to look at the lorry—whose could it be? And all the long line would straighten up, slow, and catch a glimpse of Chris, in her blue, and young Ewan in his, with his straight, black hair.
And there, as they swung by the Meiklebogs farm, the hills to the right, at last lay Segget, a cluster and crawl of houses white-washed, the jute-mills smoking by Segget Water, the kirk with no steeple that rose through the trees, the houses of the spinners down low on the left, though Chris didn’t know that these were their houses. Then the lorry puffed up to the old kirk Manse, on the fringe of Segget, and Chris saw the lawn piled in a fair hysteria of furniture. She jumped down and stood a minute at gaze, in the shadows, the shadows the new yews flung, the grass seemed blue in the blaze of the heat.
Then as Melvin backed back the lorry and Ewan went running out over the lawn to the door, Robert came out and saw Chris and waved, and was pleased as though they’d been parted a year. He dropped the end of the press he’d picked up, near dropped it down on the toes of Muir (who gleyed as cheery as though ’twas a coffin) and cried to Chris, Come and see the new study. And nothing could content him but up she must go, leaving Melvin below to glower after the gowks.
Then two men came talking up the Manse drive, Dalziel of the Meiklebogs and one of his men, Robert went down to see who they were. Dalziel said Ay, you’ll be the minister? and smiled, he was bad in the need of a shave, of middle height though he looked a lot less, so broad in the shoulders, hands like hams; and he smiled slow and shy with his red, creased face, and he said that he’d seen the lorries go by, and he knew right well the sore job it was to do a flitting without much help. And all the time he was smiling there, shy, he looked to Chris like a Highland bull, with his hair and his horns and maybe other things: there was something in his shyness that made her shiver. Beside him, Robert seemed like a boy from school, thin and tall with his slim, thin face; and back of Robert was Else as she looked, not slim at all but big and well-made, her head flung back in that way she had and a look on her face as much as to say, Good Lord, what’s this that has come to us now?
Then they all fell to carrying in the Manse gear, and Chris fled here and there in the house, a great toom place that shambled all ways, there were stairs that started and suddenly finished and steps that crumbled away into gloom, down to old cellars that never were used. And sometimes you’d think you would come to a room, and you didn’t, you came slap-bang on another, the windows fast-closed and stiff with the heat. Chris told where and how to place all the things, and Meiklebogs and Else carried up the beds, and set them together, Chris heard Else give orders and Meiklebogs answer, canny and shy, You’ll be the new minister’s bit maidie? Else said, There’s damn the MAIDIE about me; and Chris didn’t hear more, but she guessed a bit.
John Muir came to her and asked where to put a press and a bed and some other things she’d brought from Blawearie the first flit she made. And she didn’t know, in that crowding of rooms, till he said Would you maybe like the gear altogether? and she said, Just that, in a small-like room. So he carried the bed up and back through the Manse, to a high-built room, it was three stairs up. The place was so lost that the cleaners had missed it, there were cobwebs looped from the walls like twine. But through the window, when you swung it out wide, you saw sudden hills rise up in your face, with below you the roll of long, grass-grown mounds. John Muir let down the bed with a bang, the great heavy bed that had once been her father’s. Chris asked him what were the ruins up there, and he said, You’ve heard of the Kaimes of Segget?
Chris leaned from the window and looked to the west. And what’s that to the left, that hiddle of houses?—Where the spinners bide, he told her, she stared, she had thought them abandoned byres or pig-styes. But Muir just gleyed and said they were fine—good enough for the dirt that’s in them. If you gave good houses to rubbish like them, they’d have them pig-rees in a damn short while. They’re not Segget folk, the spinners, at all.
Chris said Oh? and looked at him, quiet, then they went down to bring up the rest; and there was Meiklebogs met on the stair, smiling shy at that sumph of a maid. And John Muir thought, You’d think he’d have quieted by now. A man that can’t keep off the women by the time he’s reaching to sixty or so should be libbed and tethered in a cattle-court.
Near twelve they’d the most of the furniture in, all but a long table brought from the north, from the Manse of Robert Colquohoun’s old father, solid and oak and a hell of a weight. And then Else called that the dinner was ready, Chris said they all must stay and have dinner. Robert said Let’s eat it out on this table.
So Else served them the dinner in the shade of the yews, and sat down herself when she’d finished with that, Meiklebogs waiting to see where she sat, and sitting down next with a shy-like smile. Robert came out, getting into his coat, and stood at the end of the table a minute and bent his head, fair in the sunny weather, and said the grace, the grace of a bairn; and they bent and listened, all but young Ewan:
God bless our food,
And make us good.
And pardon all our sins,
For Jesus Christ’s sake.
Then they all ate up, Muir, Melvin, and Meiklebogs, and the fee’d man that blushed and was shy, not just looked it, Chris liked him best, with that sudden compassion that always came on her as she looked at one of his kind—that conviction that he and his like were the REAL, they were the salt and savour of earth. She heard him, shy-like, say Ay, I’ve a spoon, as Else was asking, and knew by the way that he mouthed the spoon that he came from the North, as she did herself. And faith! so he did, like her ’twas from Echt, and he knew fine the place where once she had bidden, Cairndhu in the Barmekin’s lithe. And he fair buckled up and he lost his shyness, Ay, then, you’re a Guthrie? and she said that she was, and he said that they minded him long up in Echt, John Guthrie, her father, the trig way he farmed: and Chris felt herself colour up with sheer pleasure, her father could farm other folk off the earth!
Then she fell in a dream as she heard them talk, the rooks were cawing up in the yews, and you thought how they’d fringed your pattern of life—birds, and the waving leafage of trees: peewits over the lands of Echt when you were a bairn with your brother Will, and the spruce stood dark in the little woods that climbed up the slopes to the Barmekin bend; snipe sounding low on Blawearie loch as you turned in unease by the side of Εwan, and listened and heard the whisp of the beech out by the hedge in the quiet of the night; and here now rooks and the yews that stood to peer in the twisty rooms of the Manse. How often would you know them, hear them and see them, with what things in your heart, in what hours of the dark and what hours of the day, in all the hours lying beyond this hour when the sun stood high and the yew-trees drowsed?
But she shook herself and came out of her dream, back to the table and the sun on the lawn, daft to go prowling those copses of night where the sad things done were stored with the moon. Here was the sun, and here was her son, Ewan, and Robert, the comrade of God, and those folk of Segget she had yet to know, and all the tomorrows that waited her here.
BUT THAT NIGHT she had slept in fits and in starts, waking early in that strange, quiet room, by the side of Robert, sleeping so sound. Then it was the notion had suddenly arisen, to come up to the Kaimes, as here she was now, watching the east grow pale in the dawn.
Pale and so pale: but now it was flushed, barred sudden with red and corona’ed with red, as though they were there, the folk who had died, and the sun came washed from the sea of their blood, the million Christs who had died in France, as once she had heard Robert preach in a sermon. Then she shook her head and that whimsy passed, and she thought of Robert—his dream just a dream? Was there a new time coming to the earth, when nowhere a bairn would cry in the night,
