dominie emerged briskly enough: he had had a row with his wife about the saltness of the porridge and his wife had told him if he didn’t like them he knew what to do. Fine Johnny knew what to do. They were too salt to be eaten: so he had to drink his milk and leave them.
So great was his haste to get to the stove he almost tripped over his own feet and it took all Ned MacCalman’s self-control to prevent himself from laughing outright.
A moment later the pupils were startled by a bloodcurdling howl. Johnny had seized the poker firmly and his hand was painfully roasted. He made several fantastic and frantic leaps in the air. Many of the older pupils roared their delight at the unusual spectacle. Jean Gibson, uncomprehending, sat in open-eyed wonder. By a series of bounds and leaps the dominie reached his dwelling door and disappeared.
His amazing exit was the signal for a pandemonious outbreak. Ned MacCalman laughed till the tears rolled down his red weatherbeaten cheeks. But Ned was careful not to divulge his secret: time enough to boast of that when he was driving his pair of horse and quit for ever of Dunmore school.
But the merriment and excited speculation died when Johnny Gibb reappeared with a bandaged hand. His face, twisted with pain and fury, was truly diabolical. His drawn lips revealed his pointed double set of yellow teeth, curved like a hare’s. His breathing was short and laboured and came and went with a peculiar hissing noise. His eyes were fixed on the senior pupils and he crept forward as if walking with his bare feet on sharp gravel.
‘Come out the boy who did that.’
There was no response.
‘Very well.’
The dominie grasped the pointer: his eyes seemed to roll in their sockets.
‘I said: come out the infernal limb of Satan who did that. D’ye hear?’
His voice rose to a scream. Jean Gibson crouched on her seat. Ned MacCalman’s face went sickly white.
‘Very well. Is there any one prepared to volunteer the necessary information? Will any one tell me who the culprit is? No? Very well: I’ll punish every one of you till I get the culprit. D’ye hear? Every one of you.’
The dominie crouched for a moment, the pointer gripped tightly in his left hand. Then he sprang towards a group of bigger boys occupying the back benches. What happened afterwards was never very clearly explained. There was a terrific struggle; blows rained from the pointer; there were yells and screams; some of the girls became hysterical. Then the dominie fell with a crash to the floor. His fall was immediately followed by a mad stampede to the door on the part of the boys concerned. Ned MacCalman, bleeding from a cut on the brow, was leading.
A moment later Mrs. Gibb rushed into the class-room and rescued her badly shaken husband.
The school was dismissed for the day. But not before Mrs. Mirren Gibb had told them just exactly what kind of dirt and vermin they were.
Jean had to explain to her father why the school had broken up so early. He listened to her disconnected story with great patience.
‘Aye: John Gibb has more than his sorrows to seek: he didna get his hand burned like that for nothing. But a maist dastardly thing to do for all that. There’s a wicked ungovernable spirit growing up among the scholars to-day. John Gibb’s no’ the man to discipline them. Well, it’s telling you ye had no hand in that, my lass, or I’d have teached ye better how to respect your elders. Aye …’
Having delivered himself gravely of this unusually long homily, Tom Gibson attacked his soup with relish.
It was his firm belief that there were always two sides to a story: neither of them necessarily right or wrong. Common sense told him that the dominie didn’t get his hand burned for nothing: at the same time he could not see him guilty of an offence justifying such punishment.
But the incident only touched him remotely. He had more urgent and pressing problems. The best horse on Craigdaroch was in the stable with a bad weed: he was still a few acres behind with his spring ploughing. And his wife was a week overdue with her confinement …
Jean knew there was something troubling her mother. Instinct, rather than knowledge, told her what was wrong. But she could not dwell on her mother’s condition. Her unbidden thoughts terrified her. In a vague way she experienced resentment against her father. Somehow she knew he was responsible. And as she watched him un-noticed, massive, dominating and yet somehow remote and unconcerned, and then looked at her mother, white-faced thin and grotesquely mis-shapen, she was conscious of a deep revulsion: a desire to withdraw from them both.
A night or two later she was wakened by her mother’s agonised moaning and her blood ran cold and shiver after shiver went through her. She recognised the voice of a neighbour, Mrs. MacHaffie.
‘It’ll no’ be long now, Mrs. Gibson: it’ll no’ be long now. God help ye: but it’s me that knows what ye’re suffering …’
Suffering? She did not need to be told her mother was suffering. But why should she suffer … and where was her father? In a sudden stillness she heard his step on the paving outside: slow, deliberate … She imagined him smoking quietly at his pipe and pausing for a moment on the turn of his step to spit and then draw the back of his huge hand across his bearded lips before the deliberate replacing of his pipe between the strong regular teeth that flashed so white against the lustrous blackness of his beard.
There came a terrible cry from her mother, through the wooden division of the bed. Jean stiffened and held her breath. She stiffened with terror and the terror was cold and agonising. Her mother whom, in her blind generous way she loved more than anything else in the world … Her mother who was frail, uncomplaining, enduring – and now crying in an agony that was as helpless as it was despairing. Only some trial vast and terrible could wring that cry from her. Maybe … but she heard her voice, low weak indistinct, followed by the soft rush of Mrs. MacHaffie’s reply.
She relaxed. The tears were streaming from her eyes. She heard the latch being pulled on the door.
The soft padding and shuffling of feet on the dry earthen floor caressed her mind. She was very young and she was very tired. The thin wailing of her newly-born brother did not reach her. She had cried herself to sleep.
The ugly incident of the poker made a deep impression on Jean Gibson and she lived in terror and dread of Johnny Gibb. Ever since then the dominie had been more repressive in his attitude towards the scholars. He used the pointer freely and with little or no discrimination. The scholars were completely terrorised. They learned little even if they memorised much. For the Craigdaroch children there was little fun going across the fields to school in the morning. They were too busy memorising a portion of Catechism and eight or ten verses of a psalm. Religious instruction came first every morning and it had become the most terror-ridden hour of the day.
There was a reason for this. Johnny Gibb knew that there was always the possibility of some of the children complaining to their parents. As a consequence, the parents might complain to him – rather unpleasantly. But what answer could a parent make to the charge that its child had been guilty of neglecting either its Catechism or the psalms of David? Here, indeed, the dominie felt he could not be accused of spoiling the child by sparing the rod.
But though he reckoned on a safe margin in which he could work, he was guilty of a miscalculation that almost cost him his life.
June came: a hot dry June but with enough rain to satisfy the farmers.
