after getting a complete set of false teeth. Unlucky all the ways of it, those teeth. He hadn’t had them three weeks when he had a drop too much. Some late in coming home, he was, and not so able to hold his liquor as he used to be … ‘an’ him spewin’ a’ the road hame, in ahin dykes an’ sic-like.’ … It was next morning till he noticed that he had shed the teeth … ‘An’ a terrible palaver there was or they got them.’ The police poking about in all odd corners. And he hadn’t had them three months when he died.
Mary Annie’s plaint against the horrible uncertainty of life started always from the teeth and returned back upon them. They symbolised for her the tragedy of life’s waste. She had wrapped them in a handkerchief and put them between the folds of the nightgown laid aside in her kist for her own last dressing. She would have given them a more prominent place among her gear had it not been for awe of her daughter Jeannie. Jeannie, and no cataclysm of nature or the soul, had tortured Mary Annie’s features into their ghastly fixedness of dark anxiety. She was preyed upon by the perennial sense that she was unworthy of her daughter.
Jeannie indeed had certain powers beyond her mother’s comprehension. In her early teens she had developed ways of her own and displeasures for which her mother could see no kind of reason. Her withering young disapproval ran across the household. Mary Annie set herself against innovation and Jeannie had no more than looked at her father.
‘I dinna see fat ye need conter the lassie for,’ said he to his wife. ‘Dinna quarrel her. Jeannie’s nae to be contered.’
Mary Annie, painfully conscious of the honour he had done her in lifting her from her estate of servant lassie at the Leggatts’ to be mistress of a four-roomed house, had sorrowfully acquiesced. Her daughter bewildered her. She was of her father’s mould, superior to the breed of servants. Her own shortcomings loomed heinous in view of Jeannie’s assured and incomprehensible managements. But one day when the girl was sixteen she had appropriated a crimson sateen bodice trimmed with black bugles, that had been her mother’s pride some eighteen years before. Never worn now, it yet retained its valour in her memory. It was like a bit of materialized experience. Mrs. Mortimer entered by chance her daughter’s bedroom (without knocking: a practice that Jeannie in vain had indicated to her as objectionable) just as the second slash was making in the crimson stuff. The girl (who did not even pay her mother the idle compliment of deceit with regard to unapproved proceedings) told her coolly that she was doing up the bodice to wear when Tammie Gleg took her next week to the Timmer Market.
‘Ye needn’t be in sic a takin’ aboot it,’ she said, the scissor poised for another cut, ‘it’s gey cheap-john lookin’ stuff.’
Mary Annie had long ceased expostulating with her daughter by word of mouth. She simply grabbed the crimson bodice and wrested it by main force from its captor. Jeannie let go, to avoid rending it, secure of her own ultimate victory. But Mr. Mortimer, to whom the sentimental value of the garment was fudge, nevertheless on this occasion sided with his wife. He had no mind to see a lass of his gallivanting in the Castlegate with a merry-andra like Tammie Gleg, ‘skraighin’ an’ chawin’ nuts, an’ nae mair sense in their heids nor the timmer spurtles.’ He forbade the occasion for the bodice, whispering behind his hand to Jeannie.
‘Never heed the boady. Ye’ll get a better ane to yersel whan ye’re a bittie aulder.’
Jeannie never forgave her mother the interference. She took a terrible, if unintentional, revenge. She took to religion. In one of her turbulent adolescent moods she underwent conversion. The process was passionate and thorough, nor was there any reason to doubt its sincerity; but she early learned to master a force that might otherwise have mastered her, and use its currents for her own purposes. Henceforward the thwarting of her will became impossible. She had leadings from above and resorts to prayer in every complicated situation. She cultivated the habit of praying − aloud − for the soul of anyone who crossed her will. Mary Annie was gifted with a humble and ignorant adoration for all that had to do with religion. She had no genius for it herself. For many years it had been the secret craving of her heart to make up a prayer out of her own head, till the attempts had shrivelled of their own useless accord and been forgotten. When therefore her daughter graduated in piety, Mary Annie abased herself and worshipped. Thenceforward she was haunted by her own unworthiness of such a daughter. There was no conscious hypocrisy in Jeannie’s conduct: her life indeed was one of extreme rectitude, just as many of the innovations she brought to the home were in themselves excellent: she merely allowed herself to be deluded in accordance with her desires.
She was now a woman in the middle forties, of powerful build and marked features, that gave her the impression of a strength of character she did not really possess. She was thrawn, not strong.
Aunt Josephine was making tea.
‘Ye cutty ’at ye are!’ she would interrupt herself to say to Dussie.
‘And shouldn’t Marty get married too?’ said Dussie, preening herself.
‘There’s Andy Macpherson has a gey ill e’e aifter her, I’m thinkin’,’ said Aunt Josephine complacently.
‘Rubbish!’ cried Martha in a savage scarlet. Andy Macpherson, who sold bacon and sweeties in a grocer’s shop at Peterkirk, had considerably less to do with her present scheme of the universe than had Hannibal or Robert Peel. Her annoyance, however, rapidly subsided. A day earlier she would not even have blushed. But something in Dussie’s presence, her dancing and observant eye, troubled the waters in Martha’s soul. Only momentarily: anything so alien from her common world of ideas had little power to hold her mind.
‘You must come and see my house,’ Dussie was saying.
‘House!’ scoffed Luke. ‘Two rooms and a half, four stairs up.’
‘In Union Street,’ Dussie explained.
‘Union Street!’ echoed Martha. Funny place to live − all shops and offices. She had not thought that folk lived there.
‘Oh, right on the top,’ said Dussie. ‘Above the shops and offices. Right up at the roof.’
‘And you get out on the leads,’ − Luke added his touch to the picture − ‘grand view. All up and down Union Street. Some sky and a few gulls besides. You must be our guest next coronation procession. Splendid facilities.’
‘You must be our guest a jolly lot sooner. Waiting for any old King, indeed!’
‘Well, the Torchlight, then. That’s better than a coronation. You shall view that from our top shrubbery − no, it hasn’t any greens, just a way of speaking. Oh, but I forgot. You’ll be a student yourself by the next Torchlight. You’ll be waiting in the Quad, of course, not a spectator from the gods.’
And Martha listening had a sense of widening horizons, of vistas opening insecurely on a foreign country.
There was less foreign in the country when, a week or so later, she went to tea in Union Street, four stairs up, above the shops and offices, and Luke showed her his row of books. She was at home there, glowing visibly as she touched them, turned their leaves, read in snatches. She even found a tongue, and questioned. A listener, too. Her very listening was speech, he thought. She was eloquent by what she did not say.
‘Young Pantagruel!’ he laughed at her: and to her look of enquiry read aloud:
‘“These letters being received and read, Pantagruel pluck’t up his heart, took a fresh courage to him, and was inflamed with a desire to profit in his studies more than ever, so that if you had seen him, how he took paines,
