the self chanced to be, the beautiful Mrs. K. notwithstanding. He discussed at length the scheme and purpose of his narrative poem and declaimed the complete contents of the manuscript.
‘If you’d cut out two-thirds of it and sharpen the rest, Luke,’ said young Kennedy, ‘you could make something of that.’
‘Cut out two-thirds! My dear fellow, there’s two-thirds yet to write.’
Kennedy grinned. With his Buchan accent he developed his criticism.
‘It’s like a half-hewn statue just now. Imperfectly disengaged from the block. You want to hew much deeper −’
‘My good youth, am I a hewer of wood and a drawer of water?’
He wrote his poetry easily. Like going to heaven, it was fun; and without the travail of his soul he was satisfied.
Martha spoke little during the supper party. She sat very quiet, smiling to herself with a still, shining smile. She was intensely happy. How Luke could take her secret thoughts and transfigure them! − as though she had not always known that when the angel visits the man the deeper spiritual experience is the angel’s. Since he had begun to write poetry (would he be as great as − oh, not Milton! one could not expect that − as Tennyson perhaps? or Mr. Yeats?) he had written nothing but had responded, like the vibration of a stringed instrument, to some tune within her own being. She did not look at him, but once or twice amid the nonsense he was talking he caught her eye. There passed between them a spark, swift, momentary, the flitting of a gleam, a recognition from their external and perfect selves.
Fraser called across the quadrangle next morning, ‘Hello, Luke, how’s the Archangel Gabriel?’ It became a three-weeks’ fashion to greet him with, ‘Hello, Luke, what’s the Archangel doing?’
The Archangel Gabriel remained in a parlous state between earth and heaven, and Luke was unable to extricate him from his plight.
‘After all,’ he explained, ‘light takes a few hundred years to make the passage. You can’t expect an Archangel to do it in a month.’
Doubtless the Archangel accepted the situation with grace and humour, that paradisal attribute. The only person to suffer seriously from the delay was Martha, who was passionately exercised over the climax of Gabriel’s experience. What did he discover about God? She wished Luke would reveal it; and brooding, devised conclusions for herself, even setting one of them, impatiently, to rhyme; though to tell the truth her verses were by no means as beautiful as her eyes had been when she tramped the Quarry Wood beating out the metre. Preoccupied thus, less than ever did she yield her inclinations to Dussie’s Cupid-mongering.
The Lustre Frock
‘She’s to hae a goon like the lave o’ them,’ said Geordie. ‘She’s nae to be an ootlin.’
Emmeline fingered the stuff of Aunt Leebie’s lustre frock, holding it taut and running her thumb along its weave.
‘It’s richt gweed stuff,’ she said. ‘Yer Aunt Leebie’ll be terrible offended if ye dinna wear it.’
Martha had said, when she brought the frock from Muckle Arlo:
‘I promised to wear it when I’m capped.’
Graduation had looked immeasurably distant then, but how rapidly the years had sped! She had still her year of professional training to go through before she would be a ‘finished teacher’; but her University course was almost over. Another month, and she would be dismissed into the world with a little tap on the head to signify that there was learning there … Initium sapientiae. …
Meanwhile there was the question of the frock. Martha considered it with a bad grace. The sacrificial mood was in abeyance. She had conceived a horror of the out-moded garment and would have repudiated her own hasty promise with great good-will. It was Dussie whose quick eye saw the possibilities of the lustre, her hands that transformed it. Martha was astonished by the result.
The Graduation morning arrived.
Geordie, Emmeline and Aunt Josephine came through the archway slowly. Of the three, Aunt Josephine was most at ease. She was superbly at her ease. She had travelled. She knew the ways of the world. She moved at her steady sober pace down the quadrangle, doubting nothing of the homeliness of those towers and pinnacles of granite towards which she floated with sails full-set. She would have made port as cheerfully in a barn.
Neither was Geordie perturbed, though stiff and awkward to appearance in his Sunday suit; and though he stood within the very haunt, the breeding-ground of that jeopardy that menaces a comfortable world, the virus of brains. For, holding still to his opinion that brains were a vexing agitation, he had yet of late kept silence on the matter and ruminated over what he saw; since he saw Martha reaching the very crown and proper end, the acme − as he supposed, being uninformed to the contrary and knowing nothing of the cunning whereby the university makes mention to her sons of only the beginning of wisdom* − the acme of instruction, without any alteration so far as he could see in her power or willingness to wash his sweaty socks and clear away the remnants of a meal. Moreover he had the reassuring persuasion that he had the right to be where he was. He set foot in the precincts with the confidence of a man for whom a place is prepared. Had not his daughter won it for him? And no gliding motors, no proud and peacocked women, could take away his security. It was Emmeline with her pretensions to gentility who was embarassed. Waddling under her load of fat, smelling of perspiration, with a button missing from one of her grey cotton gloves, she stared around uneasily, convinced that the majority of that animated throng had eyes for her; and with a good conceit of herself in spite of her uneasiness, keeked about in the presumptuous hope of being seen by someone who might admire and report her state. Being recognised by no one but Luke (who existed merely as husband to that Dussie) she yielded herself with but a hoity grace to his guidance, and followed behind his lean length up the stairway of the Mitchell Hall, indignant at his easy thinness and turning a critical eye upon the company with which she moved. ‘Some gey ordinary jiffs,’ she thought. She had been very uncertain what she was to see in a concourse gathered under the roof of the great hall of the University, and was secretly reassured by seeing numbers of men and women not too unlike herself.
From the glens and farms, the fishing villages and country towns, the fathers and the mothers had come.
Here, and not in the granite walls, not in lecture-room nor laboratory nor library, nor even in the mind and character of those who taught, was the true breeding-ground of Geordie’s jeopardy. Here, for this one day, was the creative power behind the University’s glory and achievement. Twice a year she gathered for an hour the sources of her life, that he who would might look and understand. Geordie was part of this great spectacle, no spectator merely. By his ploughman’s gait, his misshapen shoulders, his broken nails and fingers ingrained with earth, his slow rough speech, his unabashed acceptance of himself, he brought into that magnificent hall the sense of a laborious past, of animal endurances, of the obstinate wholesome conservative earth. With him came the mind’s humbleness. He symbolised its ultimate dependences, its elemental strength.
Part also of this spectacle for the imagination was Aunt Josephine, who had been piloted by Dussie to the gallery and sat pleased with all she saw and pleasing all who saw her.
