the accusation had no meaning. Even shame was burned out; nothing had reality but his going. He saw her from the carriage window among the waving group; so gay, so shabby. Almost, he thought − but it was not a thought, so quickly it flitted, so unformulated it remained in the scurry of his mind − almost, he thought, he had rather she had not been gay; but still, a shining symbol, herself the counterpart of the image he had made of her.
She was gay because she was no longer a counterpart. She did not know what she was.
Climbing the long brae home she was overtaken by the lassitude of reaction. She did not seem to have strength enough left in her for passion, but she did not understand that it was only a temporary ebb. ‘I don’t seem to care any more,’ she thought; and later, walking wearily on, with her eyes to the ground, she said to herself, ‘So that’s over,’ and she thought she had only to exercise her will to be again what she was before, passionless, possessed only of herself.
But Martha after all was very ignorant. She could not know that a cataclysm four years in preparing does not spend its forces so easily. The waters were loosened and not to be gathered back.
Trouble for Aunt Josephine
Martha went to the Graduation. She had intended to go, and though the sap and savour were gone from every avocation and she was indifferent as to how she spent the days, it was easier to drift on the stream of former intentions than to force herself to new. Besides, Harrie Nevin was graduating, with Honours in English Language and Literature. She realized with a shock how little she had seen of Harrie recently and how seldom she had visited her thoughts. Of course she must see Harrie capped! But it was a stimulated interest.
For a time she continued to sleep out of doors, though there was no joy in the changing lights or the many voices of the country. She could no longer surrender herself and be lost in the world’s loveliness. She would as willingly have slept in the bedroom beside Madge; she was quite indifferent to where she slept, and it was easier to stay in the bedroom; but that would have provoked comment and question. Anything rather than that! But she was not sorry when the weather broke and she was compelled to stay within.
At the turn of July there was already a hint of autumn. The skies were heavy grey; everything closed in unexpectedly; the wind blustered and squalls of rain broke upon the country, laying the corn in patches. The hips and rowan berries were dull brown that sharpened every day. Soon, the barley was russet. An antrin elm-leaf yellowed. Birds gathered; suddenly on a still day a tree would heave and reeshle with their movement, a flock dart out and swoop, to settle black and serried on the telegraph wires; and after a little rise again in a flock and disappear within the tree. In the wood and among the grasses gossamers floated, tantalizing the face, invisible, but flaring as they caught the sun like burnished ropes of light. Moors and hillsides, railway cuttings and banks beside the roads, glowed with the purple of heather. In a blaze of sun its scent rose on the air and bees droned and hummed above the blossom. Strong showers dashed the sun and the scent. Hairst began. They were cutting the barley. Scythes were out and the laid patches cut patiently by hand. Sometimes a whole field had been devastated, and through the yellow of the heads there gleamed the pink of exposed stalks. Winds rose and dried the grain. Stooks covered the fields. Nights grew longer and sharper. One morning the nasturtiums and potato tops were black. Leaves floated down. At every gust a light rain of preens blew through the firwood. The bracken and the birches turned golden and golden trails swayed from the laburnum trees, a foolish senile mimicry of their summer decoration. Gales brandished the half-denuded boughs and whirled the leaves in madcap companies about the roads. The whole world sounded. A roaring and a rustle and a creak was everywhere; and dust and dead leaves eddied in the gateways.
But long ere these things Martha’s path had turned. Late in August she was appointed to a school at Slack of Mar, some ten miles across country towards the Hill o’ Fare. There being no direct conveyance, it was not so near that she could stay at home, though not so far but that at weekends she could cycle back and fore. From Monday morning till Friday night, and later when the nights grew longer and darker from Sunday night till Saturday morning, she lodged in a cottage near the school.
‘A gey quaet missy − terrible keep-yersel’-tae-yersel-kin’,’ the folk around said of the new teacher. The other teachers in the school tried to draw her out, but she refused their advances. She was thankful to be left alone. Her inner life was too turbulent, too riotous, and absorbed her energies too fully to leave much possibility of interest in the external world.
Martha had discovered that she was by no means done with passion. The numbness of exhaustion worn off, she found herself delivered again to its power. She let herself go to it. Only in its flame did she feel herself alive. She luxuriated even in the black depths of pain to which her craving surrendered her. They were the earnest of an intensity of life beside which all else in the world was mean and flat. She lived for the incidence of those cyclones of desire that lifted her and drove her far beyond herself, to dash her back bruised, her very flesh aching as though she had been trampled. There were times when she felt the presence of Luke so close and vivid that the things she touched with her hands and saw with her eyes were as shadows. These were the times when she had been accustomed to pour herself out for him. Since the day when, dripping wet from the pelt of rain that had overtaken her, she had crouched on her bedroom floor and felt for the first time in absence of her spirit in immediate communion with his, she had satisfied by this means love’s imperative demand to give. Her life had seemed to pass out from her and be received in his.
But love’s imperative demand was now to take. She wanted Luke, his presence, his life, his laughing vitality; and it seemed to her, crouching mute upon the floor with the mood upon her, that reaching him she could draw his very life away and take it for her own. ‘I mustn’t. I mustn’t,’ she thought. It was like rape. And her exultant clutching was followed by an agony of shame. But next time the mood possessed her she clutched again. ‘He is mine. I can hold him. I can have his life in me.’ And she felt like a dabbler in black magic, the illicit arts. There had been nothing illicit in her loving Luke, nor in the outpouring of her spirit upon him; but this reckless grabbing was like a shameful and beloved vice. She fought frantically against it, only to succumb to a blacker and more gluttonous debauchery. Reason, that had been the adversary in her effort to give, mocking her with the ultimate inability of the mind to know that what she felt as true was actually so, was now her triumphant ally. ‘You cannot know,’ reason whispered, ‘that you really touch him. It is only idea.’ And as long as she could not be sure, she could not exert her will to check her thieving. Afterwards she was hagridden, with strained miserable eyes. The hollows had come again in her cheeks. Her face was hungry.
At home she was merrier and more vivacious than she had ever been. Mirth was her hiding-place. Anything rather than have them guess she had been hurt, and how! But she hated the effort it demanded and was thankful that the larger part of that winter was spent away from home.
The road from Slack of Mar to Wester Cairns ran through Crannochie, and every weekend as she passed on her bicycle, Martha paid Aunt Josephine a visit; but preoccupied with herself she failed to notice, what the neighbours round about Crannochie were noticing that spring, that Miss Leggatt was less alert than she had been. Her straight shoulder and steady foot were failing her. She sat too often and too long by the ingle, forgetting time; sometimes, she forgot to rise; her blind was not drawn up, her door was not opened, till far on in the day; but always she had a ready word for a visitor, and Martha, for whom Aunt Josephine had been just the same since ever she could remember her, went on perceiving the familiar image and missed its alteration.
‘Yer Aunt Josephine hasna come in aboot this lang while,’ said Emmeline one Sunday in February. ‘Is she weel eneuch?’ If it
