to each other regarding the general queerness of life. Not that she seemed to be paying any attention; but one day Martha overheard her solemn and detailed recital to baby Jim of one of their dearest secrets. Martha had shaken her till her yells resounded from the Quarry Wood; and Emmeline had shaken Martha till she was sick and had to have castor oil.
It was some consolation for the castor oil that Dussie heartily approved her action. Dussie also commandeered two sweeties from Andy Macpherson and raced home with them triumphantly to Martha as an aid to the castor oil in its kindly office.
Dussie and Martha had things to tell each other that were not for the ear of infants.
In Which a Latin Version Is Spoilt
On a February evening, when sleet lashed the window in tides of deepening violence, and spat upon the flames, and sluiced under the ill-fitting outer door, was debated with pomp and circumstance the question of whether or not Martha should go to the University. For days the wind had streamed up-valley; a dull, grey wind, rude and stubborn, that subdued the whole landscape to its own east temper. The howl of it was in the ear at night, long after dark had hid its bleakness from the eye. Gulls screamed and circled overhead − a wild skirl against the drone of the firwood. Spring was late. Hardly a peewit, not a lark, to hear. A drab disconsolate world.
Martha had pushed against the sodden wind four miles and a half that morning, her heavy bundle of books tied on behind her cycle. She was eighteen now and in the highest class at school; but the bursaries on which she had carried herself so far ran to no unnecessary railway fares − not in the Ironside family, where a penny saved had a trick of turning to a penny squandered − and in most weathers she cycled back and fore to town night and morning.
That morning Emmeline had said:
‘Ye’ll nae get in dry. It’ll be a doonpour. Yon win’s nae for naething. Hae. There’s yer coppers.’
She gave her daughter the pence for her return fare to town. Martha had never had money of her own. She handed over all her bursary money to her mother and had to ask back what she needed. She very seldom asked back. It was too unpleasant being made to feel an undue drag upon the house. Not an exercise-book was purchased but it was audibly grudged. Martha felt a felon when her teachers ordered her to buy a pencil. Her journey home at night was sometimes spent devising ways and words to approach the theme of another new text-book; she would sit all through suppertime with a sickening twinge pulling and twisting inside her body; her back would not hold up; when she washed the supper dishes her knees were sagging. Emmeline had no understanding of her own tyranny. She objected for the sake of objecting.
Martha put the train fare in her pocket and looked at the sombre sky. It had been just as heavy for days and she had escaped a wetting. She pulled her cycle from the shed and raced along the beaten path that crossed the field. The field was lately ploughed. At every dozen steps she stumbled off the narrow path (moist enough itself in the sodden weather) into the heavy upturned earth. Clods hung upon her boots. She raced on, to gain the road before her mother saw her go. The pennies in her pocket jigged to a dance tune. They meant a candle (if the candles could be bought before her mother knew the pence were saved), and a candle meant peace to work at night in her own chill room.
She dared not buy the candles in town lest at the last minute the storm broke and she had to return after all by train. At half-past four the wind still screamed up-country; no change since morning, and Martha set off to cycle home. She intended to dismount and buy her candles in the last shop on the outskirts of the city; but the wind, and her own fear of being caught in rain and her mother’s anger, drove her at such a frantic speed that she was already past the shop before her mind snatched at the necessity for dismounting. It would have been foolish to turn back and fight the wind − the candles could be bought at Cairns. The shop was far behind her by the time her mind had worked itself to that resolve, so irresistible a vigour was in the wind that pushed her on. She let herself go to its power, pedalling furiously on her old machine that had no free-wheel and one inefficient brake.
A long stretch of unsheltered road lay ahead, running beneath a low sky that sank farther and farther as she advanced. Suddenly the grey wind turned dirty-white, drove upon her in a blast of sleet. It chilled her neck, soaked her hair, dribbled along her spine, smothered her ears; the backs of her legs and arms were battered numb; her boots filled slowly with the down-drip from her skirt and stockings; once or twice she looked at the handle-bars to make sure that her hands were there. She had dismounted when the sleet began, to unfasten her books from behind the bicycle; her person might be soaked, but not her precious books. She rammed them in the bosom of her coat, that gaped and would not fasten over the unwieldly bundle. When she mounted again she had to pedal furiously in spite of her hampered and clammy limbs, because to pedal furiously was easier than to hold back against the sweep of the wind; but as the sleet continued to fall and filled the road with slush and semiliquid mud, her pace slackened, till at last she was pushing with effort over the pasty ground, her front wheel bumping, splashing, squirming by reason of her inability to guide it. Darkness had come down too soon. She had a lamp but no means of lighting it, nor could it easily have been lit in the violence of the weather. A passing cart filled her with nameless dread; a chance pedestrian loomed horribly distorted through the sleet; there were no recognizable sounds. The beat of the storm upon her back had plastered her shoddy clothing to her skin. By the time she rode through Cairns, its early lights diffused and smudgy in the thickened air, she was too numb to think, even to picture the possession of a candle, much less procure it. She rode like an automaton.
At the foot of the long brae to the cottage she stumbled from her machine. Light had gone from the earth. The sleet drove now upon her side as she battled uphill pushing her bicycle. Thought began to stir again when she reached the puddle at the gateway of the field. She went straight ahead through the puddle because it mattered little now how much wetter she became; and with that she began to wonder what reproach her mother would have ready. She had not even candles for consolation; and Emmeline would say next morning, ‘Ye’ve got yer money for the train.’ She tumbled her cycle into the shed and pushed open the house-door, standing dazed a moment on the threshold.
Emmeline’s back was towards the door, as she bent over the fire and stirred the so wens for supper. Without turning, when one of the children said, ‘Here’s Matty come,’ she complained to her daughter.
‘Ye’ve ta’en a terrible like time to come up fae the station.’
Martha’s heart fluttered and thumped, and pulses beat hot and hurried in the chill of her temples. So her mother had not been in the shed and did not even know that the cycle had been taken out!
‘It’s a terrible night. I’m wet through,’ she said. But the wetting had suddenly become of no importance. Her mind did not even run forward to the pennies she had gained; the mere relief from an immediate onslaught by her mother’s tongue was joy enough. She went in a sort of stupid excitement to remove her dangling clothes; but she had to call Madge through from her Pansy Novelette to help her strip.
Geordie came in, soaked too. The fireplace was hung with dripping garments and the iron kettles perched with sopping boots. The steam of them eddied about the room, mingling with the wood-smoke blown back from the chimney. Emmeline worked herself into a lather of vituperation at the weather and the folk, but gave the latter none the less their so wens in ample measure, smeared with syrup and piping hot. She set the boys to feed the fire with branches and logs of pine. Every now and then a resinous knot spluttered and sang, flared out in blobs and fans of flame. Emmeline made no economies with fire. She loved heat. The little
