in her. The ichor of her life’s too thin and weak to receive anything in solution − all her experience is precipitated immediately − it doesn’t even cloud the liquor − simply doesn’t touch her. You can say any mortal thing you like to her and be safe. And then there’s the woman in whom the life is so strong and powerful that it receives all experience into solution − makes a strange rich-flavoured compound of the liquor; and crystal clear. You can trust a woman like that with any knowledge. You can tell her the truth. We lie to most of the women we know. I’m telling you the truth.’
She remained silent so long that he turned to look at her. They had left the woodland and the moon was strong. He saw her face, held straight ahead and as though she walked without seeing where she went. Rossetti’s picture of the Annunciation came irresistibly to his mind. She had Mary’s rapt tranquillity.
It did not occur to him that that was her very mood; that she carried it home with her; that, lying still on her bed, among threadbare sheets that were patched with stuff of different tone and texture from themselves, under matted and dun-coloured blankets, she was undergoing the awe and rapture of annunciation. Humbly she cried, ‘I am not worthy,’ and the wonder deepened within her till it brimmed and flooded her consciousness. She lay without moving, nor were there articulate words even in her thought; but her whole being was caught up in passionate prayer that she might be able for her destiny. The place was holy; neither Madge’s noisy and rancid breathing, nor Flossie’s muttering and the constant twitch of her limbs, could disturb its solemn air. Let the whole world despise her now, in Luke’s dower was her peace. He made her great by believing her so. Because unwittingly she loved him she became the more fully what he had imagined her. She fell asleep in ecstasy, and woke in ecstasy, carrying to the tasks of early morning a sense of indwelling grandeur that redeemed them all. So strong and bright was this interior life that the things she touched and saw no longer wore their own significance. Their nature was subjugated to her nature; and she handled without disgust, in the confined and reeking closet where the boys had slept, the warm and smelly bed-clothes and the flock mattress that had sagged in holes and hardened into lumps, because her mind had no room for the realization that they were disgusting. As she cleaned the bairns’ boots, there fell on her so strong a persuasion of the very immediacy of unseen presences that she stood still, a clumsy boot thrust upon her fist, staring at the stubbly brush.
‘You’re a dreamy Daniel as ever I saw,’ cried Emmeline as she poked fresh sticks beneath the kettle. ‘A real hinder o’ time, you and yer glowerin’. Fa’s the time to wait on you? − Haud, Willie! − ye thievin’ randy.’ And she clutched Willie’s nieve, birsing the cakes he had been stealing into mealy crumbles that spilt over the floor.
Martha returned to the brushing of the boots without comment, tied the strings of her petticoats for Flossie, who was wandering about half-clad among everyone’s feet, and went back to the bedroom to make ready for town.
‘Am I the daughter of this house, or are you?’ she found herself asking Madge, having rubbed her sleeve against some of her untidy pastes that Madge had larded on a chair-back.
Madge, fourteen years old and done with her education, required, like Martha herself, a wider life than the cottage allowed, and was finding it in the glare of publicity afforded by the baker’s shop, whither she took her jewelled side-combs and fiery bows attached to the very point of her lustreless pigtail, to enliven the selling of bath-buns and half panned loaves and extra strongs, and the delivery of morning baps and ‘butteries’ at the villas round Cairns. She ate in these pleasant precincts more chocolates and pastries than were at all good for her complexion, which had considerably more need now of her geranium petals than it had had two years before; instead of scarlet, however, on the assumption that the more of pallor the less of plebeian was accused by one’s appearance, she spent her meagre cash on the cheapest variety of face powder, which she smeared with an unskilful hand across her features. Martha shrank from her tawdry ostentation, but was worsted in every attempt at remonstrance by Madge’s complete indifference to what she had to say. It was useless to lose one’s temper with Madge; and quite ridiculous to waste one’s irony. She stared and answered, ‘You are, of course,’ and completed the tying of her pigtail bow. Madge would go her own way though the heavens fell upon her: or though Emmeline fell upon her, a much more probable, and to the girl’s imagination more terrifying, catastrophe. She asked no one’s advice and sought no one’s approval. Martha was grateful for at least her silences, dearly as she resented the visible signs of her presence. She had long since ceased to share a bed with her, allowing Madge and Flossie the one respectable bed the room contained, and sleeping herself on a rackety trestle-bed underneath the window. There she could watch Orion, or hear, in the drowsy dawn, a blackbird fluting and the first small stir of wings.
On this particular morning she stood by the window watching clouds like green glass curving upward from the east horizon, and dressing her hair − a little perfunctorily, it must be admitted − while she gazed. She had wiped the chair-back clean herself, being in no mood to break her own interior peace by altercation with Madge. She studied now to dwell in peace. That she had suffered what was obnoxious in her surroundings − whether Madge’s conceits, or Emmeline’s sloven hastes and languors, or Geordie’s grossness − had until now been by instinct; not from the tolerance that comes of understanding, but because, not having begun to understand them, she lived her real life apart from them, within herself. But she was now more consciously resolved to shrink from nothing in her laborious and distasteful life, subjecting herself in a glow of exaltation to the rough sand-papering of her daily courses. She would in no wise dishonour her fate. If the spirit had chosen her for shining through, she would be crystal clear. Crystal clear! Luke had used the very words. And again there rushed on her a sense of abasement that was in itself the sharpest joy. Incredible and sure − it was she who had been chosen for this rare privilege. Luke, whom she honoured, had desired her too. But what did they all see in her eyes, she queried, staring in the dull and spotty mirror. She could not even tell their colour exactly: they had something in them of Nature’s greens that have gone brown, of grass-fields before the freshening of spring. What did they all see in them? She looked in the mirror longer than she had ever looked before, searching for her own beauty. It was not to be found there.
‘Fat are ye scutterin’ aboot at?’ cried Emmeline from the kitchen. ‘Ye’ll be late for yer school.’
She jammed a hairpin into place and pulled her blouse awry as she poked it under the band of her skirt. The end of a shiny safety-pin looked out from below her waist-belt. The mirror had more cause than ever not to reflect her beauty.
Spring wore to summer and Martha lived in an abiding peace. She was disciplined to exaltation. Doubtless her critical faculty suffered. A course of Muckle Arlo would have done her no harm; and Emmeline fell ill, to the advantage of Martha’s domestic, if dubiously (in her own eyes) of her spiritual economy.
On a day in early June she sat and read upon the cairn.
The country was indigo, its austere line running out against a burnished sky to the clear enamelled blue of the mountains. Rain at sea, a soft trail of it like grey gauze blowing in the wind. And an enormous sky, where clouds of shadowed ivory and lustrous hyacinth filed by in vast processional; yet were no more than swayed in the wash of shallows when the eye plunged past them to the unfathomable gulfs of blue beyond. Martha lifted her head from the pages and looked out on those infinitudes of light. She was reading history that year. The slow accumulation of facts and dates was marshalled in her brain, waiting for the fire from heaven to fall; and as she turned from reading and gazed on that wide country gathering blue airs about itself; saw the farms and cottar-houses, roads, dykes, fields, river, she was teased from her own inner stillness by an excitement to which all she had been reading anent the press and stir of centuries contributed. Looking up, she thought suddenly, ‘I am a portion of history,’ and between her glancing from the pages and the formulation of the words, that she had spoken half aloud, there passed the fraction of a second, which nevertheless was crammed with furious
