kent my sister Ann for twa years and yet you say that! You’re a bigger fool than I took you for…. Dinna mind my tongue,’ she went on quickly, ‘I canna help laying it about me. But Ann! She’s been a hard and cantankerous woman all her life, Mr Murray. The de’il kens who would have put up with her the way I’ve done. She plagued my mother to death when the poor woman was lying bedridden; mother didna dare to move a finger in her bed or Ann was at her like a wild cat for ravelling the bedclothes. She was the same when she was a lassie…. Many’s the skelp across the face I’ve had from her, the ill-gettit wretch. Father widna have her in the shop; he said she would ruin his business in a week with her tantrums, and yet she was better to him than to anybody. And since father died she’s led me the life of a dog, Mr Murray. I sometimes dinna ken how I’ve managed to keep going.’
It may have been the darkness of the small streets and the impersonality of a silent and only half-visible companion that encouraged Mary to be so confidential. She had never told so much about herself to anybody. Depressed as he was William Murray could not help feeling vaguely that after all there was much to be said for Mary Watson, and that the goodwill he liked to postulate in everybody was not lacking in her, but only hidden away. His mind was not clear enough to let him perceive that her aggressive attitude towards the world was a kind of self-defence, but he was sorry for her.
‘I’ve aye tried to be respectable,’ said Mary. ‘I’ve done my duty; nobody can say I ha vena done my duty. But this last carry-on of Ann’s fairly crowns a’. This is the first time I’ve had to ask help from a single living being, Mr Murray.’
William Murray was touched by this confession. It did not occur to him that Mary so fiercely resented the necessity of asking help that she might not be grateful afterwards to the helper.
‘We all need help sometimes,’ he said, to himself as much as to her. Perhaps in turning to God he had turned his back too much on his fellow-men. God must be present in all His creatures…. In Mary Watson, for instance, in Ann Watson … even when He gave no sign of His presence, even when the soul felt empty and forlorn….
It was only one’s consciousness of God that was intermittent…. Elizabeth Shand has said something like that….
His mind kept returning to Elizabeth Shand, as if warming its numbed faculties at a fire. He had not seen her for some days: he hoped she would be in church to-morrow. God was not a mere person, she had insisted, not a limited creature with fits of bad temper who sulkily withdrew Himself from His children; the fault is in us, she had repeated, if we feel ourselves cut off from God, and that alone should keep a man from falling into despair, since faults can be discovered and corrected. That was one-half of what she had pressed so urgently upon him: it was the half from which he drew some comfort. The other half of her argument was a doctrine he would not admit, that God existed not in another world, but in this very material one. ‘We shan’t discover God anywhere if not in ourselves,’ she had said. ‘I don’t believe in your separation of the body from the spirit. I can’t think of my spirit without feeling that it’s even in my little finger.’
No, no. William Murray knew that the body and the passions of the body could darken the vision of the spirit. In itself the body was nothing but darkness. That was what oppressed him so much.
‘We all need help,’ he repeated to Mary Watson, becoming aware that she had stopped speaking and was expecting an answer.
‘Tits, man,’ she retorted, ‘you said that before. That’ll no’ get Ann to open the door to us.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the minister. ‘I was thinking of – I was thinking, Miss Mary – that—’
‘What you are going to say to Ann?’ demanded Mary.
The minister did not know what he was going to say to Ann. He had a confused hope that God would put the right words into his mouth.
‘As I was saying,’ said Mary, with marked emphasis, ‘it’s no’ so easy to get her oot; I just canna bring the police, even if I wanted a scandal, for the hoose is hers, no’ mine. The shop’s mine, but the hoose is hers. She hasna a penny piece besides what I give her, but the hoose is hers. Father willed it like that. And what she wants is to make a scandal; just that, just that. She’s waiting girning behind that door for me to break it open, and then she’ll have the police on to me; I ken it fine. Brawly that. Ay sirs!’
‘Surely she’s not counting on that….’
Mary snorted and turned up the lane towards the cottage. The nearer she got to the gate the more she ceased to believe that the minister would be of any use at all.
‘It’s the fear of God you have to put into her, mind you that,’ she said, opening the gate and preceding him along the garden path.
The cottage was in darkness save for a feeble light shining through the blind of the kitchen window.
‘She’s in her bed,’ said Mary in a loud whisper. ‘That’s the light from her bedroom shining through the kitchen. Chap at the front door as hard as you can.’
She pushed him past her, and stealthily pried at the lighted window.
‘It’s snibbed,’ she whispered. ‘A’ the windows are snibbed. Chap at the door, man, I’m telling you.’
In the mirk of that winter night William Murray, as he rapped firmly with the cold iron knocker on the door of the little cottage, felt incongruously that he was making a last trial of his faith. It was not in a great arena that he was to be proved worthy or unworthy, not even in a despairing battle for his own brother’s soul, it was in knocking at a door trying to persuade one bitter old woman to give shelter to another. The cottage itself reminded him of the text with which he had been wrestling all the week: ‘But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.’ The kitchen window was a dim and evil eye; the cottage was, like himself, a body full of darkness. He rapped once more, and remembered again how Ned had spat in his face. A shrill scream followed his rapping, which he recognized although it was intercepted by the door, and he could make out slow and shuffling footsteps. Ann was not helpless, then: she was able to walk.
‘Cry through the keyhole,’ urged Mary, but the minister remained upright and silent as the footsteps became more audible.
There was a sound as of unlocking, and a scream: ‘Wha’s there?’
He nearly jumped: the voice came not from behind the door but from the kitchen window to his right. Ann had stopped there, unsnibbed the window and opened it a little from the top. He could see her dark outline.
‘It’s me, Miss Ann: Mr Murray.’
‘What were you wanting?’
‘I want to talk to you.’ The minister’s voice was gentle, but firm.
‘Come back the morn then: I’m no’ wanting anybody the night.’ The window shut with a bang.
‘Eh, the obstinate wretch,’ muttered Mary. ‘Try her again; chap on the window; go on, man; go on.’
The minister walked to the window and rapped on it. Ann was barely discernible inside. His sympathy for her welled up again.
‘She shouldn’t be shut up all alone like this,’ he muttered, and rapped more insistently than before.
Ann came closer to the window and peered through the glass as if she were spying into the darkness
