and gave a low laugh behind her, and touched her hand with a cold, hairy touch so that a daft-like cry started up on her lips, she wished she’d gone round by the plain, straightforward road, instead of this near-cut she’d thought so handy.
So she whistled to herself, hurrying, and just outside the kirkyard stood the new minister himself, leaning over the gate looking in among the stones, he saw her before she saw him and his voice fair startled her. Well, Chrissie, you’re very gay, he said, and she felt ashamed to have him know she whistled in a kirkyard; and he stared at her strange and queer and seemed to forget her a minute; and he gave an unco half-laugh and muttered to himself, but she heard him, One’s enough for one day. Then he seemed to wake up, he mooed out at her And now you’ll be needing a book, no doubt. Well, the Manse is fair in a mess this evening, spring-cleaning or something like that, but if you just wait here a minute I’ll run in and pick you something light and cheerful.
Off he set, she was left alone among the black trees that bent over the greyness of the kirkyard. Unendingly the unseen grasses whispered and rustled above the stones’ dim, recumbent shapes, and she thought of the dead below those stones, farmers and ploughmen and their wives, and little bairns and new-born babes, their bodies turned to skeletons now so that if you dug in the earth you’d find only their bones, except the new-buried, and maybe there in the darkness worms and awful things crawled and festered in flesh grown rotten and black, and it was a terrifying place. But at last came the minister, not hurrying at all but just drifting towards her, he held out a book and said Well, here it is, and I hope you’ll like it. She took the book and looked at it in the dying light, its name was Religio Medici, and she mastered her shyness and asked Did you, sir? and the minister stared at her and said, his voice just even as ever, Oh, like hell! and turned about and left her to go back through the terror of the yews. But they didn’t terrify at all, climbing home and thinking of that word he used, swearing it had been and nothing else, should she tell of it to father?
No, that wouldn’t do, a minister was only a man, and he’d loaned her a book, kind of him though he looked so queer. And besides, father didn’t know of this errand of hers down to the Manse, maybe’d he’d think she was trying to hold in with gentry and would swear himself. Not that he swore often, father, she told herself as she hurried across the brae, and, hurrying, climbed out of the dimness into the last of the May daylight with the sunset a glow and a glimmer that danced about her feet, waiting for her; not often, except when things went clean over him, as that day in the sowing of the park below Blawearie when first the cart-shaft had broken and then the hammer had broken and then he’d watched the rain come on, and he’d gone nearly mad, raging at Will and Chris that he’d leather them till they hadn’t enough skin to sit a threepenny bit on; and at last, fair skite, he’d shaken his fist at the sky and cried Ay, laugh, you Mucker!
CHRIS TOOK A BIT peep or so in Religio Medici and nearly yawned her head off with the reading of it, it was better fun on a spare, slow day to help mother wash the blankets. In the sun of the red, still weather Jean Guthrie had every bed in Blawearie cleared and the blankets piled in tubs half-filled with lukewarm water and soap, and Chris took off her boots and her stockings and rolled her knickers far up her white legs and stepped in the grey, lathered folds of blankets and tramped them up and down. It felt fine with the water gurgling blue and iridescent up through your toes and getting thicker and thicker; then into the next tub while mother emptied the first, lovely work, she felt she could trample blankets forever, only it grew hot and hot, a red forenoon while they did the washing. So next time mother was indoors she took off her skirt and then her petticoat and mother coming out with another blanket cried God, you’ve stripped! and gave Chris a slap in the knickers, friendly-like, and said You’d make a fine lad, Chris quean, and smiled the blithe way she had and went on with the washing.
But John Guthrie came home from the fields then, him and Will, and as soon as he saw her father’s face went all shrivelled up and he cried Get out of that at once, you shameful limmer, and get on your clothes! And out she got, white and ashamed, shamed more for father than herself, and Will turned red and led off the horses, awkward-like, but John Guthrie went striding across the close to the kitchen and mother and began to rage at her. What would folk say of the quean if they saw her sit there, near naked? We’d be the speak and laughing-stock of the place. And mother looked at him, sweet and cold, Ah, well, it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve seen a naked lass yourself; and if your neighbours haven’t they must have fathered their own bairns with their breeks on.
Father had been in a fair stamash at that, he left mother and went out with his face dead-white, not red, and he didn’t say another word, he didn’t speak to mother all that evening nor all the next day. Chris went to her bed that night and thought of the happening, lying close-up and alone, it had been as though she saw a caged beast peep from her father’s eyes as he saw her stand in the tub. Like a fire that burned across the close, it went on and on as though she still stood there and he glowered at her. She hid her face below the blankets but she couldn’t forget, next morning she was able to bear thinking of it no longer, the house had quietened with the folk gone out, she went to mother and asked her straight, she’d never asked anything of the kind before.
And then an awful thing happened, mother’s face went grey and old as she stopped from her work at the kitchen table, she went whiter and whiter second on second, Chris near went out of her mind at the sight. Oh, mother, I didn’t mean to vex, she cried and flung her arms round mother and held her tight, seeing her face then, so white and ill-looking it had grown in the last month. And mother smiled at her at last, putting her hands on her shoulders. Not you, Chris quean, just life. I cannot tell you a thing or advise you a thing, my quean. You’ll have to face men for yourself when the time comes, there’s none can stand and help you. And then she said something queerer, kissing Chris, Mind that for me sometime if I cannot thole it longer—and stopped and laughed and was blithe again. We’re daft, the two of us, run out and bring me a pail of water. And Chris went out with the pail, out and up to the pump in the hot red weather, and then something came on her, she crept back soft-footed and there mother stood as she’d left her, white and lovely and sad, Chris didn’t dare go in to her, just stood and looked.
Something was happening to mother, things were happening to all of them, nothing ever stayed the same except maybe this weather and if it went on much longer the Reverend Colquohoun’s bit jungles would soon be sprouting back across the parks of the Howe. The weary pleiter of the land and its life while you waited for rain or thaw! Glad she’d be when she’d finished her exams and was into Aberdeen University, getting her b. a. and then a school of her own, the English Chris, father and his glowering and girning forgotten, she’d have a brave house of her own and wear what she liked and have never a man vexed with sight of her, she’d take care of that.
Or maybe she wouldn’t, queer that she never knew herself for long, grown up though she was, a woman now, near. Father said that the salt of the earth were the folk that drove a straight drill and never looked back, but she was no more than ploughed land still, the furrows went criss and cross, you wanted this and you wanted that, books and the fineness of them no more than an empty gabble sometimes, and then the sharn and the snapping that sickened you and drove you back to books—
She turned over on the grass with a jerk when she came to that troubled thinking. The sunset was painting the loch, but hot as ever it was, breaking up for one of those nights when you couldn’t bear a blanket above you and even the dark was a foul, black blanket. It had died off, the wind, while she lay and thought, feint the loss was that, but there was sign of nothing in the place of it, the broom stood up in the late afternoon, not moving, great faces massed and yellow like the faces of an army of yellow men, looking down across Kinraddie, watching for the rain. Mother below would be needing her help, Dod and Alec back from the school already, father and Will soon in from the fields.
There somebody was crying her already!
She stood up and shook out her frock and went through the grass to the tail of the brae, and looked down and saw Dod and Alec far below waving up at her. They were crying her