and varied use of Scots dialogue it is, as Professor Hart has said, ‘as moving and believable … as any novel produced by modern Scotland’.
John Burns
THE HEAVENLY AND THE EARTHLY FATHER
The world was old, very old. Many seasons of sowing and harvest had come and gone since the days of Isaac and of Abraham. In the fullness of His own time the Lord gathered every one to His bosom – save those sinners and mockers whom He cast into the bottomless pit.
Down the long centuries of time, custom had altered little. Always the land had to be tilled and husbanded. Always the earth had called for human hands. Always it would be so. The earth and its people did not change. Time and again had men tempted Providence. The Lord had been patient with them – until His patience had become exhausted. Then He had scattered them: like chaff: ground them under the heel of His wrath: destroyed them utterly and without mercy. They had built their Towers of Babel: they had worshipped their Golden Calves: they had committed folly upon folly. But equally they had been as ruthlessly cut down in their folly.
Tom Gibson watched the iron ships on the sea with their smoke belching funnels and smiled grimly: the Lord would deal with them in His own time and in His own way. He was like rock in his faith. They could build their iron roads for their iron horses – but already they were paying a dear price for it. Not a day passed but men were blown to bits or otherwise maimed and destroyed. Yet they would not heed the warning!
The industrial revolution was in the frenzied riot of its hey-day. Age-long traditions and customs were being ruthlessly cast to its furnaces. Capital cried for labour and more labour. The Dragon of Capital clashed its iron jaws and belched forth fire and smoke and devoured in a decade a generation of men, women and children. Not all the dragons of fable were half so terrible as the modern machine-made dragon.
He had heard of the dragon – but from afar. He could smile grimly at the thought of it. He belonged to the land and the land belonged to the Lord. For the landlords and farmers only held it in trust. Let the dragon roar its iron guts asunder: the Lord would deal with it and the rabble who grovelled before it.
Tom Gibson embodied most of the virtues and not a few of the vices of the Galloway agricultural labourer. Physically he was a giant. Six feet four inches in height; shoulders like a byre door; straight as a post; possessed of enormous physical strength. His character was as strong and remarkable as his body. He knew nothing of fear; was upright, just, hardworking. Almost he was an absolute product of the Presbyterian religion as interpreted by the Galloway peasant. He brought up his family in the way of the Lord.
He was respected: he was feared. Respected by the farmers and merchants: feared by his fellow-workers. The parish of Kirkmaiden was proud of him because already his fame as a worker was almost legendary. He could plough and sow and reap with any three men in the Rhinns of Galloway.
He never doubted or questioned the rightness and righteousness of his own authority. He brooked no interference with his manner and method of life. His God was the God of Abraham and Isaac, and finally the God of Thomas Gibson. His morality was that of the Old Testament as interpreted by the Scottish Presbyterian Church. And again, finally, as interpreted by Thomas Gibson. At whatever cost, justice had to be meted out. Obedience was a corner stone. Obedience to the master: obedience to the parent.
The rock, the foundation of life and salvation, was the duty of work. Work for the night is coming. And the night was always coming. Idleness, more than disobedience, was the greatest and gravest sin.
Tom Gibson was fully satisfied with this philosophy of life. He did not question it: he did not consider any alternative philosophy. Man could live only by the sweat of his brow. The fields had to be cut with the plough and torn with the harrows that the seed might be sown: that there might be bread. Nature had not lavished any bounties on the Rhinns of Galloway. The fruits of the soil could only be won by hard and, if necessary, brutal toil. There was no surplus which would have eased their days or encouraged sloth and idleness. Rather was there ever present the fear of shortage and want. Work always lagged behind the weather and the seasons. No matter how hard the work or how long the day there was always work lying to hand. Even during the hours of rest, short though they were, work accumulated, piled up against the morrow.
From daylight to dark, from youth to old age, the yoke of work was firmly riveted to the necks of the Galloway agricultural labourers.
Yet Tom Gibson did not find the yoke burdensome. He revelled in it. He was in the prime of his life. He was twenty-eight years old; his beard was black and lustrous; his blood rich and lusty; his eye clear; his muscles strong and supple. Illness was something he had never known – was certain he would never know. He had a horror and contempt for any one who ailed or complained of sickness.
As grieve to Ned MacWhirrie, farmer of Craigdaroch, and the father of a family that increased yearly, his life consisted of work. The land needed labour. Economic necessity and the Lord’s will ordained that he should father the largest possible family.
He strode the heights and howes of the Rhinns dominating the earth as he dominated man and beast, magnificent in his physical strength and courage, integrated fully by his religion, faithful to his God and his duty. He was devoid of humour as he was devoid of lechery. He was incapable of lusting after a woman – even in his heart. Like an eagle, his eye was cold, keen and passionless – except when it glinted with a Presbyterian cruelty. He laughed; but his laughter was hard and joyless.
His wife, Agnes, cowered before him. She bore her yearly pregnancies without complaint: carefully hid her sicknesses and indispositions from him. She suffered greatly for she was a thin under-nourished woman who had suffered as a child during the Famine of the Forties. If she ever rebelled it was only in her heart. She accepted, if she did not always comprehend, the world into which she had been born. It was her duty to bear children – even had it not been her duty she could not have escaped – no more than the tethered mare … She knew there was no alternative to her slavery outside her house or the drudgery within it. At twenty-seven she was already an old woman.
But in many important respects Agnes Gibson was a more remarkable individual than her husband. She was possessed of an unusual intelligence: she could reason within her limits profoundly and wisely. She had developed an infinite resourcefulness. From her own mother, who was reputed to be almost a witch, she had acquired a vast knowledge of the power of herbs in relation to their healing and medicinal properties. She had a medicine shelf on the wall where she stored her herbs. Tom Gibson feared and respected this activity of hers: it represented something outside his immediate knowledge – if not outside his experience. Doctors were expensive: they were difficult to get. The nearest was Doctor Slaney, at Drummore, four miles away. He knew that there had always been women skilled and knowledgeable in the use of the leaves and roots with which the Lord had, in His infinite wisdom, so bountifully supplied the earth.
This skill and knowledge, allied to her abilities as a midwife, made Agnes Gibson as famous as her husband. In this aspect of her life, which was closed to him, he did not seek to interfere. But secretly he was proud of her distinctive ability.
Agnes Gibson’s knowledge of herbalism and obstetrics was tainted and impregnated with elements of superstition and dæmonology. She had her rites and her incantations. There were ingredients to her medicines – such as the powdered remains of a roasted field mouse – that had no demonstrable therapeutic value.
But she did not practise herbalism for any recreative enjoyment or mercenary ambition. She was no stranger herself to pain and illness: she lived her life amongst pain and illness – especially ailments more peculiar to women and children.
She was a natural healer: all her deeper instincts impelled her towards the alleviation of pain and suffering. There were many women who would rather have had Agnes Gibson