Martha was indignant. She felt obscurely that a change was coming on her, and though hardly aware of its cause knew well enough that it was not housework. Scornful, she tossed herself from her father’s reach and strode up the brae towards Crannochie.
‘Spangin’ awa’ up the hill in some style,’ her father reported.
‘Weel, lat her,’ said Emmeline. Now that she had recovered sufficiently to resume most of her household duties, she was willing enough that Martha should take her liberty again. Besides, it was Sunday evening − an April Sunday − the very time of the week for young people to go walking. Madge was out too.
‘Awa’ oot aboot wi’ her lad,’ said Geordie.
‘Lad!’ quoth Emmeline contemptuously. ‘Fat’n a way wad she hae a lad?’
‘Weel she tells me whiles aboot him.’
‘O ay, a’ It’s easy to see fa her lad wad be − a palin’ post.’
On this occasion Emmeline was wrong. Madge had a lad. He came from Glasgow, clerked throughout the week in a wholesale paper store − a very genteel business − wore his tie through a ring with a flashy diamond and had alberts to his watch chain. Altogether a satisfactory person, and given to the week-end pursuit of rural delights: among which was numbered Madge’s sturdy little figure. At sixteen her breasts were already swollen and her hips pronounced. Madge, when she caught gawkishly at the alberts as they walked along the road, was already in possession of her share of the spiritual mysteries. Her perceptions had attained their apotheosis. She had other uses now for her side-combs than offering them to Martha.
Martha, swinging uphill on the April Sunday evening, had no more use for the side-combs than she had had on the October night when they were offered. She was feeling splendidly alive. Life coursed through her veins, and she was glad, in a way she had hardly known before, of the possession of her body. It was a virginal possession. On the solitary uplands, throwing her arms to the winds, breasting the hurricane, laughing with glee at the onslaught of the rains, she felt as Diana might have felt, possessing herself upon the mountains. She rejoiced, as a strong man rejoices to run a race, in her own virginity, the more, as she came to fuller understanding of life’s purposes, in that she felt herself surrendered eternally to a love without consummation. Her virginity was Luke’s, proudly and passionately kept for him.
So strong was the life in her as she walked onwards in the tossing April weather, that she could afford to be prodigal of herself even to the extent of throwing a greeting to Andy Macpherson, who was walking, also alone, on the uplands. So might Artemis, of her condescension, have graced a mortal with a word. But Andy knew only one way of talking to a girl, and be sure, given the opportunity so long denied, made use of it: whereupon Artemis, who had amassed a very considerable vocabulary during her researches in history and literature, and in her new-found arrogance of spirit discovered she could use it, chid him with such hot scorn and vehement indignation (after making the first advances too!) that Andy’s blandness frothed to bluster and his bluster collapsed like a paper bag at a Sunday school picnic; while Martha marched ahead with her chin a little higher and her shoulders more squarely set. O, cruel! − But these goddesses are notoriously unfeeling, up yonder on their Olympian crags. When Artemis takes to the heather, ware to the soap-selling, bacon-slicing helot who would follow.
Artemis was very happy on the heather. She swung up through Crannochie, hailing Aunt Josephine as she went; and on to the Rotten Moss, where she clambered upon the boulders and plunged among the heather-tufts; and like a votary of the fleet-foot goddess (for to goddess her were hardly fair and she so near the discovery of her humanity), ran races with her own swift thought; and wind-blown, mazed with distance, drunken with height and space, danced fiercely under a bare sky. Diana would have trembled, could she have seen her votary. Such wild abandon was hardly virginal.
May was a frail blue radiance. Was there ever such a summer? Day after day the sun rose softly and night after night sank in a shimmering haze. The hills trembled, so liquid a blue that they seemed at point of dissolution; and clouds like silver thistle-down floated and hovered above them. Stifling one night in the low-roofed bedroom, where Madge’s cheap scents befouled the air, Martha rose exasperated and carried her shoddy bed outside. There she watched till morning the changes of the sky and saw the familiar line of hills grow strange in the dusky pallor of a summer midnight. Thereafter she made the field her cubicle and in its privacy she spent her nights. She did not sleep profoundly, but her vitality was too radiant to suffer from the privation. Sometimes the rain surprised her and she was compelled to shelter; sometimes she let it fall on her, soft unhurrying rain that refreshed like sleep itself; sometimes she awoke, dry and warm, to a cool wet world where every grass, each hair on the uncovered portions of her blanket, each hair about her own forehead, hung with its own wet drops. But oftener the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver-clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranquil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake skraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea’s roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.
In the third week of June Luke said: ‘We deserve a change − we’re positively grey with dust.’
The hot air quivered above the bogs. There was no wind to blow the cotton-grass. An insubstantial world, hazed upon its edges, unstable where the hot air shook. Midsummer: at their feet the sweet pink orchises, the waxen pale cat-heather, butterwort: the drone and shimmer of dragon-flies around them: and everywhere the call of water.
They were drowsed with happiness. Sometimes they walked, sometimes they stood and gazed, sometimes they lay in the long brown heather, smelling the bog-myrtle, listening to the many voices of the burns. A butterfly − a tiny blue − glided over and over them. It floated on the current of their happiness.
At twilight long shadows came out upon the hills. Their darknesses were tender purple, and stars, too soft to shine, hung few and single above. The skies were dust-of-gold.
There were no stars too soft, no purple too tender, no dust-of-gold too paradisal, for their mood.
Tomorrow − the trance will break.
Martha tossed the bedclothes off and sat up in bed. She was in the house, in the low hot room with Madge and her reek of face powder. She had been too weary, coming home from the afternoon among the hills, to carry her bed outside. They had gone, the three of them, in an excursion train, up-country among the Saturday trippers, and back at night in a crowded compartment where sleepy children squabbled and smeared the windows with their sticky hands.
It was long past midnight when she abandoned the effort to sleep and sat up. She was not weary now, but through her body there ran a tantalizing irritation. She thought: ‘It isn’t pain − but what is it? It’s in me. It hurts my body.’ And she writhed, twisting herself upon the bed. ‘I want the eleven stars,’ she thought. ‘But are they enough?’ Her wants felt inordinate and she too small and weak. She battled against a sense of impotence.
She moved again, tossing an arm, and her hands met and clenched. She was so sunk in her absorption that for a moment she did not realize it was her own hand she had closed
