they were at liberty to laugh. He let them laugh, but in a fury of contempt. He grew increasingly morose, striding by in a sort of bickering speechlessness. He shunned society: then mooned; then slouched, body and mind settling to a habit of slackness; his features coarsened; he seeded and grew stringy. His grudge against ungrateful man blackened and rotted his powers. The devotee’s indignation at the disdaining of his god had turned to a black and brooding madness on this one subject of himself.
With the passage of years he ceased himself to believe in his discredited dignity.
The neighbours saw the deterioration of face and figure, the hanging jaw, the rag-nailed thumbs, the sloven countenance; they saw refuse encumber his doors; the smell of his body scunnered them; they cackled at his clothing, sodden from exposure to every weather, matted and split. He trailed through any dubs, under any sky. A night prowler too, haunting the deep of the wood by midnight. His neighbours’ premises, perhaps, as well: who could know? Labouring folk sleep early and sleep sound. But there were suspicions anent him − queer ends of talk. A dark bulk − an indeterminate shadow − a malignant reeshle of the leaves without wind − sorry matters, but from them grew half-broken tales. A troubler of men’s imaginations, generating legend … a queer rôle for the stickit graduate. A looking-glass progression towards the object of his old ambitious desires … troubling men’s imaginations. …
The neighbours saw the change in him − his rotting look: it was not for them to know that under the external squalor seethed horribly a spiritual regeneration.
Stoddart had need of his kind.
He blundered his way back into society by virtue of an inlaid dambrod. Old Semple had been a craftsman of sorts and had begun to fashion a dambrod of two varieties of wood, each square inset with patient skill. Death made a move on his board before the man’s board was completed. It lay where chance had tossed it, till Stoddart unearthed it one morning and set to work to finish it. No craftsman, he made a sorry enough job: but the board was ready for the game and Jamie Lowden liked a game fine of a blank and blustery winter evening. Stoddart carried the dambrod to Jamie Lowden’s.
By what processes of pity, curiosity, persuasion, the dambrod gave him entry to other houses, would be hard to say: but in course of time, shambling, apologetic, he slunk his way wherever he desired: accompanied always by the board. He loved the bit of wood. He would shuffle round with it under his arm, ‘oxterin’ at it as though it were a body.’ Humbly at first, he ventured the piece of workmanship into view, claiming praise for his father’s handiwork; but careful to add that it was he who had finished it. By and by the squares that he had fashioned subtly shifted their position on the board. He was not oversure himself which he had made; and at the thought that he might really be the framer of this dark beauty or of that, he regained something of the belief in himself that he had lost. In consequence he tidied his homestead a little and cleaned his person; and became a more decent member of human society. With the passage of another year or two he was very comfortably convinced once more of his own dignity and importance: with this difference, that he had ceased to trouble very much whether others believed in them or not.
One house to which he did not carry the dambrod was the Ironsides’. Emmeline could not abide him, in his days of grandiloquence. ‘He’s fair clorted wi’ conceit,’ she said impatiently to Geordie. ‘Ye cud tak a rake an’ rake it aff’n him.’ Emmeline’s own conceit, in those early days of marriage, was at too low an ebb to allow her to enjoy the quality in others: hence perhaps her ineradicable grudge against Stoddart. When he rose out of the nadir of his degradation and Geordie brought him in aboot of an evening, she suffered his presence but gave short shrift to the dambrod. Geordie indeed, in the natural complaisance of his soul, sat to study the play: but it exacted too much of a man wearied out and sodden still with the heavy sense of wet fields and claggy soil. Geordie carried back with him to his own fireside, stored up in his own body − his stiff and aching muscles, his numbed brain, his slow and inattentive nerves − the memory of a thousand generations wearing down the long resistances of the earth. A desperate task, to shake oneself quickly free from memory that had worked itself in. Geordie was not altogether sorry when Emmeline’s tongue banished the dambrod from her kitchen.
‘Sic a cairry-on he hauds wi’ himsel an’ yon boardie,’ she said contemptuously. − ‘Wheesht, wheesht, he’s hearin’ ye,’ from Geordie. − ‘I named nae names,’ said Emmeline. ‘Them that has lang noses can tak tae them.’ Stoddart was touchy. The dambrod was effectively dismissed.
The man, however, kept coming, in spite of abuse. He was stingy with his own fuel and liked Emmeline’s lavishness with hers: especially on a night of driving bitter sleet, like the one in question.
So he slouched in the heat and, diving among recollections that had gone sour, miscalled knowledge.
Martha listening did not divine the man.
Our acquaintances have no past for us until we have a past ourselves.
She was merely irritated at his opposition. Rashly, she had precipitated her fight, and the fortune of war was against her. This henchman of darkness, sunken-eyed, slack-mouthed, betrayed her to the enemy. The wastrel forces of ignorance were in power.
For Martha was set upon a purpose not yet divulged. It was understood that she was to be a teacher, after a two years’ course at a Training Centre; but Martha herself was working secretly for more. She had learned as yet to be passionate on behalf of one thing only − knowledge: but for that she could intrigue like any lover. She had made her own plans for going, not to the Training Centre but to the University. So, quite unnecessarily, she was learning Latin. When her bursary was gained, it was time enough to tell.
And now, fool that she was, she had given her position away.
And to let Stoddart Semple, whom she hated, see her cry! She swallowed hot tears and listened, craning for every word, to her mother and Stoddart, disputatious, grumblers both, using Martha’s preposterous ambition to justify their own particular grievance.
‘Fat ails ye at bein’ a teacher?’ demanded Emmeline.
‘Nothing ails me. − I’m going to be a teacher. But I want to go to the University.’
‘An’ how muckle langer’ll that tak ye?’
‘Two years,’ Martha said.
Emmeline’s exasperation had a deeper basis than Martha understood; than Martha indeed was capable of understanding, for she had never breathed a Leggatt atmosphere nor been nurtured in the pietas of Leggatt respectability: except, and that dubiously, at Crannochie; for Aunt Josephine was not a thoroughbred. Her social status did not exist for Martha. She had never thought about it. But Emmeline had dreamed with undiminished ardour for twenty years of being respectable again. She had consented to let Martha be a teacher for no other end than this. And after twenty years you ask an Emmeline to wait another four instead of two to see her dream fulfilled! How could a Martha, hungry for the tartness and savour of knowledge, be expected to understand? Martha saw only a slovenly and inefficient woman, given to uncertainties of temper and meaningless indulgences, and with a cankering aptitude for objection. She had never even known that her mother was beautiful; nor that men have decreed rights to beauty that reason need not approve. Dumbly, fitfully, Emmeline was aware of a trouble within her consciousness. She had been somehow foiled − blame it on any wind you will, not on Emmeline − of the right of loveliness to queen it over the imaginations of men. Ill-trickit rascal, that godling with the bow, at whose caprice she had given her love, and been thrust away in consequence to the middle of this dull ploughed field! Emmeline hankered still after the respect men pay to beauty, though what she dreamed she wanted was the respect they pay to the respectable. She had built herself a formidable conviction of the automatic increase in reputation that would come to the family when Matty was a finished teacher. Add two years to that! − Two and two in this case made an eternity.
Mother and daughter fronted each other, antagonistic, weighing the years in a balance, but with what differing weights!
Stoddart Semple grumbled on. ‘She wants to mak hersel