Semple lounging by the dyke.
Stoddart had never forgiven his February dismissal into the sleet. Having backed, in that dispute, the side that lost, he went away convinced of Martha’s uppishness; and as Martha did not like the man, tasted moreover no salt in the jokes he relished with her father, and never stopped to give him a crack by the roadside, he supposed himself in her contempt when it was merely she who sat in his.
Meeting Miss Leggatt, he began to grumble sourly.
‘Ye’ve gotten a lady in the family noo.’
He put a bitter emphasis on the lady and stopped to look at Miss Leggatt.
‘I see the muckle feet o’ her takin’ awa’ doon the road,’ he added.
‘If it’s Matty ye’re meanin’,’ said Miss Josephine − and she said it without the shadow of an alteration in mien or accent − ‘she’s been a lady sin’ ever she was the littlin.’
‘A bonny penny she’ll be for books,’ he grumbled.
‘I wadna say. Ye get naething for naething in this warld.’ Miss Leggat was quite unmoved at his grievance. She told him with an amiable serenity, ‘An’ naebody’s biddin’ you pay. Ye needna talk as though they hadna a penny to rub on t’ither.’
Once launched, he could not leave the theme. There was east in his weather. The old sore itched. He scratched. Moreover he was curious. He wanted to know many things − matters of price, for instance, and such gossip as he could glean regarding the terrible long chiel that came about the doors sometimes, and his wife, that was here when she was a bairn. He had questioned Geordie, to be sure, but Geordie’s knowledge did not go very far.
‘He’s a terrible ane to speir,’ Aunt Josephine said to Emmeline. She had given him little satisfaction by her answers.
‘Speir!’ cried Mrs. Ironside. ‘He wad speir the claes aff’n yer back an’ than speir faur ye tint them.’
She resented his prying into Martha’s affairs, and − remembering February − stiffened her resolution to see the girl through her Odyssey.
‘I’ll show him,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Speirin’ indeed.’
She ‘showed him’ a few days later. Martha fell sick. She recovered, but dragged her limbs.
‘The cyclin’s ower muckle for ye,’ said Emmeline. ‘Ye’ll get a season ticket in the train.’
Thenceforward Martha went by train, tramping down the rough brae morning by morning.
The cross-country road, through the bright winds of October, had been pleasant: but she was glad enough to put away the cycle in these faint November days. December came with rain, black pitiless unceasing rain, that hurled itself upon the fields for days together, paused sullenly, and spewed again upon a filthy earth. It was on such a day of rain that Martha went with Luke and Dussie to her first opera. Luke insisted on coming home with her, although she warned him that he could hardly hope to catch the last train back to town.
‘No matter,’ he said. ‘I like a soaking now and then. Good elemental feel it gives you.’ And he steadied her by the elbow at the turn of the road.
The road was swimming. A flat of slimy mud lay across the bottom of the brae. Cataracts poured ceaselessly into it, carrying soil from the brae. The wind drove from the east.
‘Just an April shower,’ he said, crossing to the weather side of her as they turned.
She looked at him, swiftly. She could not see him. It was too dark. But she had an uncanny impression of having seen his smile. Oh, it was in his voice! − that smile that she had not been able to locate. He had a laughing voice.
They were both laughing as they stumbled among the mud and the loose stones. Weather was a joke, it seemed! And the stormy chords from Tannhäuser beat upon her sleep, mingled in a colossal harmony with the beat of the elemental storm, through which his laughing voice recurred like a song.
January changed the wind. The stir of spring was in the world almost as soon as the year came in. Soft airs, faint skies plumed with shining wisps of cloud, blossom on the whins, bursting willow catkins, blackbirds fluting, a gauze of gnats against the sun, and everywhere the strong clean smell of new-turned earth − a wholesome kindly world: too mellow perhaps; without the young astringency of spring.
But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums − blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acutenesses of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk reefs among the furrows.
‘We’ll hae wer sax weeks’ snaw in March the year richt eneuch,’ said Geordie, beating his arms across his chest to quicken the circulation.
Baby Flossie wailed miserably and sucked her frozen fingers. They were hottest in her mouth. When Emmeline caught them there she pulled them out and smacked them till they tingled. That heated them too.
Martha, buffeted in the bitter winds, struggling to keep her footing on the rutted ice of the brae, arrived listless at the lecture-room. Often her fingers were dead. She could not write notes. She sat, in the chill room that gathered a clammy warmth from a hundred breaths, heavy-headed, her interest subdued: but by noon, when Professor Gregory lectured, she was alert again, fleet-footed after knowledge. No ice, no battering winds, could hold her from that pursuit.
The spring term had ended before the frost gave.
One afternoon the wind veered. It rushed out of the south-west, hot and sweet, like the breathing of a cow against one’s face.
‘The snaw’s gotten a fleg,’ said Geordie jubilantly. He leaned against the door-post, a thumb in his arm-hole, watching the wind lick the surface of the world clean. Martha, plodding home with a bagful of groceries, looked at him listlessly and made no answer. She was heavy-eyed and round-shouldered. Knowledge is inexorable to its devotees and sets its own price high. The mild air softened her resistance to her own weariness. Her month’s vacation dragged.
And meanwhile the sun was gathering strength. The earth was steaming like a wet clout held to the fire, with a steam so thick, and close that it floated over the fields like heavy morning mists on an autumn valley. The fog-horn boomed; and the slopes beyond the river were out of recognition, flat and pale.
The sun gathered strength. The roads blew dry. In three days’ time the dust was flying. The plough land changed its colour − sharp sandy brown at last, ready for the seed. Larks sprang and shrilled, operatic, mechanical, in a series, as though a multitude of catches were successively released in the grass and stubble. The sowers were out and the harrow was on the fields.
Geordie cried to Stoddart Semple down the gale that lifted the earliest clouds of dust − a roaring, rollicking, tattering, clothes-line-walloping gale − ‘Ay, ay, man, the land’s dryin’ fine.’
