to, changed into malignant mnemonics which he could never retain; and the simple recording of facts, even facts that he knew well, such as how best to guddle for trout, was subject to a mysterious standard of appraisal called ‘style’ which was never defined, and for which, apparently, he had no natural gift. He took it for granted that books and all that they stood for were beyond his capacity, and sustained himself against humiliation by his prowess in games, and, in later years, by his success with women. He had found nothing else in life.
Every morning on entering the office of John Shand & Sons he felt a faint recurrence of the old nausea. He would add a column of figures five, six or even seven times before assuming that his answer was correct, and even then he convinced himself only by totting the whole up on his fingers.
‘Is that how you count, man?’ said John, one day. That’s how they used to do it in the Stone Age.’
‘Is there nothing else you can give me to do?’ burst out Hector in a rage. ‘I can’t stick at these damned figures all the time.’
John wheeled round. His manner was curt; he had been irritable for some days past, for he had not yet solved his own problem with Lizzie.
‘I want to see whether you can stick to anything at all once you’ve begun it,’ he said, and went away without waiting for an answer, being in a hurry to get to Tom Mitchell’s.
Hector turned white. John always roused him to defiance. John was always expecting him to make a mistake of some kind, and not only expecting it but waiting for a chance to say: ‘I thought as much.’ By setting his teeth Hector could only just cope with that; here, however, was a new obstacle to overcome, the deadly suggestion that even if he could master anything he lacked steadiness enough to stick to it. It was a deadly suggestion, because in his own experience of himself Hector found nothing to rebut it.
He gritted his teeth, but the figures swam before his gaze. The office window looked into the deep well of the yard, where horses were backing and carts unloading. In spite of the sick distaste he had for the office Hector liked the rest of the mill; even the men who worked in it were better than the clerks, he thought, who were all elderly dried-up machines like John himself.
‘Hell and damnation!’ He clapped the ledger to. In the outer office he paused and said to the head clerk who peered at him enviously over steel-rimmed spectacles: ‘If Mr John asks where I am, Mason, you can tell him I’m taking a turn through the mill.’
He had a child’s delight in watching belts whiz and wheels go round. The impalpable flour that floated in the air sifted over his head and shoulders as he lounged from one corner to another, edging his way between piles of full sacks. He liked the smell of the mill, a compound of machine grease and the fragrance of grain; he liked the regular thud thud of the big dynamo which shook the whole building as if a giant were trying to kick the walls out. He watched the fat golden grains of wheat go sliding down the chute in a lazy mass, and turned up his sleeve to plunge his arm among them.
‘That’s good wheat,’ he yelled to the man in charge.
‘Mains of Invercalder,’ the man yelled back. ‘Best wheat in the haul countryside.’
That was Mabel’s father’s wheat. I should know good wheat when I see it, thought Hector, bitterness overcoming him again. A whole year and a half on that damned Alberta farm. What he didn’t know about wheat wasn’t worth knowing. Horse-feed, too, he knew something about that.
‘Damnation!’ he swore again, emerging into the yard. John’s last remark was still active. He hadn’t been able to stick to farming anyhow. Could he stick to anything?
He nodded to the carters tramping over the mud of the yard with bits of dirty sacking laid over their shoulders. Probably that was the kind of job John thought him fit for. ‘Wouldn’t that jar you?’ he found himself sneering; the Canadian phrase had not occurred to him for a long time. Hell, what a life it had been!
He leaned against a doorway and watched the horses; their haunches were wrinkling, and their great bearded feet were braced against the cobbles. On his farm he had felt something like that, like a brute in blinkers between two shafts. He rememberd his disgust and forlornness at the plough-tail; he had even kicked at the ploughshare with his heavy boots in a senseless frenzy of rage, and sent long imploring letters to Aunt Janet. What maddened him most was the feeling that he had been turned down by the whole lot of them, even by Aunt Janet. And then Aunt Janet had assured him that all was forgotten and forgiven, and on that assurance he had sold up his farm and come home to make good.
It was more than a year since he had come back, but he was still angry when he remembered how John had so high-and- mightily washed his hands of him. It was the affair with Bell Duncan that did it; everybody turned against him when that came out. And what was there in that? The girl was asking for it. Fellows had done much worse than that. His own father had been a damned sight worse. And he was only a boy when the affair began; he was heartily sick of the girl by the time she started slandering him right and left. Glad enough he had been to clear out when they offered him the chance. But in any decent family the whole history of the affair would have been different. As it was, they merely clapped blinkers on him and stuck him between two shafts, the shafts of a plough.
It was a raw afternoon, and to the dull rage he felt was added the discomfort of cold. With an abrupt jerk he turned and marched up to the office again, hurled a ledger on the floor and put on his coat, hat and muffler. Without thinking he then went out through the main gateway facing the dock. It was high tide; the dock-gates were open, and a dirty- looking steamer was warping her way in. A rope came curling on the quay beside him, and was knotted in a trice round an iron post rooted among the worn granite setts that surrounded the little square of deep water. Foreign-looking chaps, thought Hector, as he glanced at the crew leaning over the side, and he strolled away to see where they had come from. Elsa. Kjobenhavn. Copenhagen. Strange, clipped syllables were tossed along the deck, and he listened to them with a vague pleasure in the strangeness. Calderwick wasn’t the only place on God’s earth after all.
He wandered round the dock, peering into the water. One corner, the corner nearest to Dock Street, which led into the heart of the town, always used to be foul with straw and floating rubbish, he remembered, a nasty, stagnant corner which would be damned unpleasant to fall into. It was still as dirty and foul as ever. On a dark night, he reflected, it would be easy to come down to Dock Street and walk right over the edge into that scum. When he was a child that corner had always given him the creeps. He gazed into the murky water. Better to drown in the open sea than in that stagnant muck.
He shivered and turned up his coat collar. Damn it all, he would get even with John yet. There was Elizabeth to back him up. Elizabeth swore that it took a higher kind of courage to come back from Canada than to stick on out there. So he hadn’t been a quitter when he left the farm. He had come back with more money than he started with. Nobody could say he was a quitter. Damn it all, if he was an out-and-out rotter Elizabeth would never have married him, and there was precious little about himself he hadn’t told her.
Elizabeth made a fellow feel he had some guts in him. He would go home and shake it all off. Elizabeth was a wonder, he thought, striding up the street with the sea-wind behind him. Queer that none of the other chaps had had the nerve to make love to her. Of course, she said herself she was too brotherly for them. But she had fallen for him all right, all right.
At the moment he was filled with passionate gratitude towards her. She was the biggest success he had ever had. She was one of those superior people who understood books, and yet she hadn’t turned him down. Far from it. He was the first man she had ever fallen for.
He studied the figure of a girl coming towards him, her head down against the wind.
