right thing. Trusting to his precious wife to help him not to make a bloody mess of his life and she turns round and sneers at him.
What the hell was the use of trying?
As the whisky diminished in the decanter Hector more and more savagely shook himself free from the entanglements he felt irritating him. His love for Elizabeth was one; it only put him in the power of a woman who despised him. His love for Aunt Janet was another; it only related him to a code of prohibitions which he could not observe unaided. Elizabeth and Aunt Janet stood on either side of him demanding what he did not have, for he had neither intellectual freedom nor moral constancy. His slighted vanity, his wounded love, and his morbid feeling of insufficiency filled him with pain and dull rage, and he turned that rage upon the two human beings who stood nearest to him.
Damn all women, he said to himself as he emptied the decanter. He had come to no other conclusion: he was very drunk and intensely miserable.
When he finally stumbled upstairs in his stockinged feet a reek of whisky came with him. Elizabeth was undressed and lying in her bed with her face to the wall. She was very rigid, but he was too drunk to suspect that she was awake. She could hear him disentangling himself from his trousers; he was obviously attempting to make no noise. Suddenly she did not know whether to laugh or cry. His physical presence had thawed that terrifying ice about her heart. Almost palpably she felt her love for him joining them together again…. Hector put out the light and crawled groaning into bed. Elizabeth turned round and stretched out a hand in the darkness as if across a gulf that could still be bridged.
Her hand touched him lightly. He shook it off, growling: ‘Leave a fellow alone, can’t you?’
She turned her face to the wall again and wept quietly, while Hector dreamed that he was dead, lying on a bier in a place that looked like a church, and that Elizabeth and Aunt Janet in deep mourning walked up the aisle to look at his body.
SEVEN
Saturday was Mary Watson’s busiest day. Coats hadn’t been going so well this winter as they should have done, but at last they were beginning to sell, and she was kept hard at it running upstairs to the mantle showroom.
‘I’m fair run off my feet,’ she complained, slumping on to a stool covered with black American cloth. ‘That Mrs McLean is just like the side o’ a hoose; there’s not a coat in the whole of my stock that’ll meet across her, and I’ve had every single outsize off the hangers. I’m fair worn out.’
Her first assistant made no comment. She got on very well with Mary chiefly because she was taciturn.
‘There’s Jeanie come back,’ she said after a while, as the door opened with a rattle and a stumble of feet came down the steps.
‘Ay,’ said Mary dryly, ‘Jeanie’s a handless and footless creature. She’ll come a elite on her head one of these days…. Is all the messages done? Has she ta’en Miss Reid’s trimmings yet?’
‘No’ yet.’
‘Jeanie, you’ve to take this down to Miss Reid the dressmaker. And on the way back ye’ll speir at the manse for Mr Murray, and say that Miss Watson would like to see him at once. At once, mind ye.’
Mary allowed herself a few minutes more on her stool. She was indeed weary. But the chief cause of her weariness she was keeping to herself. No need to make a scandal in the town, although the scandal was bound to come unless a miracle happened, she thought bitterly. Well, she would try the minister first.
Jeanie’s scared little voice piped its message at the manse door. When she stumbled down the shop steps again she elbowed through a throng of customers and hovered uneasily at the back until she could rid herself of the answer.
‘Miss Murray said to say the minister was writin’ his sermon and she couldna disturb him, but he would come as soon as she got at him.’
‘Tchuk, tchuk,’ said Mary.
Writing his sermon on a Saturday afternoon! When he had the whole week to do it in! She was indignant.
When, nearly an hour later, William Murray diffidently appeared Mary was more than tart.
‘It’s to be hoped the Lord answers prayer quicker than his ministers,’ she said. ‘I might have been dead by this time for all you kenned. But I’ve noticed that folk that hasna muckle to do take the whole week to do it in.’
The minister inquired what service he could render.
‘I canna tell you here,’ said Mary. ‘Come into the storeroom. Na, ye’re that late it’s just on tea-time: I’ll walk hame wi’ ye mysel’.’
‘Has anything happened to your sister?’
‘You may weel ask, you that hasna been to see her for months and months.’
A ready answer, a bit of fencing, would have refreshed Mary, but the minister was in no condition to give battle. Since that terrible evening when Ned had spat in his face he had indeed driven the devil out of himself, but the house of his spirit although swept and garnished was still empty. God had forsaken him. Prayer had been unavailing; the sky was merely indifferent sky; he himself was nothing but a vessel of clay, a wretched body of flesh and blood that felt both night and morning as if it had swallowed an enormous cold grey stone.
This oppression in the region of your solar plexus, somebody might have told him, is only a derangement of your sympathetic or your parasympathetic nervous system, my dear fellow. You have had some emotional shock, that’s all. It is a salutary experience if you face it frankly. Revise your hypotheses. Some of them must have been wrong, for the world is exactly the same as it was.
It is doubtful whether that would have comforted William Murray. Like Elizabeth, and, incidentally, like his own brother, he believed in the last resort only what he felt. But the interpretation he had put on his own feelings for so many years had lulled him into such security, had flooded his world with so much sunshine, that he was unfitted to discard it. Ask a man who has been capsized in a cold sea, apparently miles from land, to believe that he never had a boat and that he must have swum out there in a trance, and the task will not be less difficult than that of persuading William Murray that his personal assurance of God’s support had been for nearly twenty years a delusion. Your swimmer will believe in the non-existence of a boat only if he awakens to discover, for instance, that he is not swimming, but really flying in the air, or pushing through a crowd; nothing less than the shock of a similar transposition, an awakening into a different kind of consciousness, could revise William Murray’s conception of God.
As they walked through the darkening streets Mary told him her tale. It appeared that on Friday, the day before, she and Ann had quarrelled. They were aye quarrelling, that was nothing unusual, but this time Ann had taken some notion into her head and had locked the house, snibbed the windows, and refused to let Mary in at night. Mary had trailed back to the shop and slept in the mantle showroom, and cleared it up so that the lassies suspected nothing when they came at eight next morning. She had made an excuse to slip out for a bite or two in the forenoon, and she had eaten a dinner at the nearest baker’s. But this was Saturday night; she couldna sleep in the shop and bide there all Sunday; and would the minister do something with Ann? ‘She can hear you fine through the keyhole. I gave her some fleas in her lug, I can tell you. But not a word to anybody, Mr Murray; I dinna want this to be the clash of the town. I dinna want to have the door forced.’
‘But surely,’ said the minister (people who defend an indefensible position always
