her at the door:
‘Noo clean yer feet, aifter a’ that muck. We’ll hae a hoose nae common.’
Martha grew to have a fondness for Aunt Leebie; though her reprimands pursued her. She liked the funny soft giggle in which her sentences ended. Round-shouldered, wrapped always in a grey Shetland shawl that was matted by frequent washings, she watched the girl’s every action, and found fault with many. On washing day it was Martha who carried out the rugs and beat them on the green. She paused for breath, too soon.
‘That’s nae the way,’ cried Leebie from the window. ‘Startin’ aff like that at a bicker an’ then haein’ to stop.’
The aunts had undertaken Martha’s domestic education with more thoroughness than consorted with holiday. She made beds under supervision and learned how silver should be laid away and the due and proper method of buying and storing yellow soap. They talked as though she knew nothing.
‘But I’ve stayed with Aunt Josephine,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen …’
Leebie sniffed. ‘Josephine does a’thing by instalments.’
And Aunt Jean added, in one of her rare bursts of eloquence,
‘Josephine will dee by instalments.’
On the last evening of her stay they called her into Leebie’s room. The half-drawn blinds, the starched Nottingham curtains, the dressing-table with its swivel mirror set straight across the window, made the room dark: Aunt Jean, sitting very upright on a cane-bottomed chair, made it portentous. Leebie sorted her parson-grey Shetland shawl. ‘It’s aye slippin’,’ she complained, ending on her soft giggle. And pulling it closer to her throat, she moved up to the bed. ‘Come richt in,’ she ordered Martha over her shoulder.
On the bed was laid a lustre frock − ivory, that had deepened with age. Its voluminous skirts billowed over the quilt.
‘Ye’ll try it on,’ Leebie said.
Fingering the folds while Martha took off her blouse and skirt, ‘It was richt gweed stuff,’ she muttered; and pouncing, at sight of Martha’s underclothes,
‘The Lord preserve’s, look at yer slip-body − that’s yer safety-pins. Pinnin’ yer skirt up!’ (‘It won’t keep without,’ Martha pleaded.) ‘Canna ye wear stays, like a Christian body?’
She dropped the gown and with her hands explored the leaness of Martha’s haunches.
‘There’s naething there to support a skirt. Ye maun get a pair o’ stays.’ She continued to fumble with her hands at the girl’s hips, muttering, as though she had a personal grievance in the make of her lanky figure. Then she lifted the lustre gown and fitted it upon her grand-niece. The full skirts sprang from the waist, covering her thinness, and at the back trailed slightly on the floor. Aunt Leebie struggled with the fastenings of the bodice, dragging Martha round, pulling her from point to point in the room to catch a clearer light. The bodice was fitted to a shaped lining, that fastened down the front with close-set alternating rows of hooks and eyes.
‘It’s some grippit in at the middle,’ she complained in the aggrieved tone she had used with which to talk of stays. ‘But ye cud sort that.’ And again she giggled softly.
Martha perceived that the frock was given to her.
She wondered vaguely what she could do with it. No room at Wester Cairns for frocks like that − hardly room to store it! And as for wearing it −! Of course it could be remade − there were yards of stuff: but plainly that was not Aunt Leebie’s purpose. Sort the waist, shorten the skirt a little, and there you were! Martha gave a gulp of sheer panic at the thought of wearing the gown; and she was no facile needlewoman, to transform it for herself. Shirts, underclothing, yes: but when it came to the tricksey wiles of fashion … she remembered Dussie’s frocks and felt that she would rather die than snip and alter at this ancient dress till it was wearable.
But what was it that Aunt Leebie was saying? − She must make some sign of gratitude; and plunging she said,
‘I could wear it when I’m capped.’
Her graduation was so infinitely remote − two whole years away. One could make rash promises for two years hence.
‘I’ll keep it for then,’ she said. And fearful that her gratitude had not been warm enough, she put her arms round Aunt Leebie’s neck, rubbing upon the parson-grey Shetland shawl, and kissed her. ‘But where am I to keep it?’ she was thinking.
Aunt Leebie was pleased. She helped Martha to take off the gown and lay it carefully across the back of a chair.
‘Ye maunna fold it yet,’ she warned. ‘Let it air a whilie.’ And anxiously, with her head pushed forward and her bent shoulders pressing in the direction of the girl, she added,
‘See ye guide it noo ye’ve got it.’
It was plain that the maxim emanated from Aunt Jean (seated there so upright and so silent on her cane-bottomed seat), and issued by way of her square-set chin through Leebie’s mouth, although the frock was Leebie’s and the impulse to give it Leebie’s too.
Martha suddenly wanted to kiss Aunt Leebie again. ‘But must I kiss Aunt Jean as well?’ she queried. And a wave of shyness flooded her.
Next morning she had to unpack the Japanese basket hamper (frayed to a hole at one of its corners) in which she had brought her clothes. She had to unpack it because Aunt Leebie came into her room too late to see her fold the gown.
‘I canna hae it whammlin’ aboot in there,’ she said. And she giggled her soft giggle.
That Martha was affected by this solidity and order, the Leggatt respectability towards which her mother yearned in vain, the girl herself did not perceive: though she gave certain signals of it after her return. Indifference to the household laxity, the unconcern with which, sunk in a dream or hot on the tracks of knowledge, she had viewed domestic turmoil as no affair of hers, altered − spasmodically only, it is true − to irritation and that to hesitant rebuke. Emmeline took the hints with unexpected meekness. She had the makings of respect for her daughter now that she was reconquering the citadel whence Emmeline had been exiled. Martha had visited at Muckle Arlo: henceforward she was allowed to be an individual. Emmeline accepted an occasional innovation, not because it was cleanly and made for order, not even because Aunt Jean arranged her matters so, but because Martha had been at Muckle Arlo. That Martha had been at Muckle Arlo was a step on towards the shining goal round which her fancies fluttered, the respectability she had foregone: though how indeed was she to reach it? Respectability was a habit of mind beyond her powers.
It was a habit of mind beyond Martha’s intentions. When the winter session opened in October, and her mind was steeped again in book-learning, she forgot household management. Respectability according to the Leggatt canons had little reality in a world of passionate pursuing, where the quarry, phantoms from a dead past flitting in shadow, grew more and more alive the hotter one’s pursuit. Her contact with it had nonetheless strengthened, unknown to herself, an inborn timidity that shrank from unlikeness to its fellows. It made her more sensitive to the deficiencies of her personal appearance. It was it that operated in her, on a day in the winter session, when Luke had said,
‘Oh, but you mustn’t go away, Marty. You must stay to tea. Old Dunster’s coming.’
His professor! Tongue-tied though she knew that she would be, Martha longed to meet him. But she said.
‘Oh, I can’t, Luke! Not with these old boots on.’
The old was a concession to public opinion. They were not really old; nor had she any better; but they were rough, clumsily cut, of thick unpliable leather that had crunkled into lurks about her ankles; country boots, and all the more unsuitable for the reception of Professor Dunster that Dussie was wearing the daintiest of black court shoes, with buckles whose silver gleam was lit with blue that answered the blue shimmer of her frock.
And