‘Ay,’ said Mary dryly, ‘Jeanie’s a handless and footless creature. She’ll come a elite on her head one of these days…. Is all the messages done? Has she ta’en Miss Reid’s trimmings yet?’
‘No’ yet.’
‘Jeanie, you’ve to take this down to Miss Reid the dressmaker. And on the way back ye’ll speir at the manse for Mr Murray, and say that Miss Watson would like to see him at once. At once, mind ye.’
Mary allowed herself a few minutes more on her stool. She was indeed weary. But the chief cause of her weariness she was keeping to herself. No need to make a scandal in the town, although the scandal was bound to come unless a miracle happened, she thought bitterly. Well, she would try the minister first.
Jeanie’s scared little voice piped its message at the manse door. When she stumbled down the shop steps again she elbowed through a throng of customers and hovered uneasily at the back until she could rid herself of the answer.
‘Miss Murray said to say the minister was writin’ his sermon and she couldna disturb him, but he would come as soon as she got at him.’
‘Tchuk, tchuk,’ said Mary.
Writing his sermon on a Saturday afternoon! When he had the whole week to do it in! She was indignant.
When, nearly an hour later, William Murray diffidently appeared Mary was more than tart.
‘It’s to be hoped the Lord answers prayer quicker than his ministers,’ she said. ‘I might have been dead by this time for all you kenned. But I’ve noticed that folk that hasna muckle to do take the whole week to do it in.’
The minister inquired what service he could render.
‘I canna tell you here,’ said Mary. ‘Come into the storeroom. Na, ye’re that late it’s just on tea-time: I’ll walk hame wi’ ye mysel’.’
‘Has anything happened to your sister?’
‘You may weel ask, you that hasna been to see her for months and months.’
A ready answer, a bit of fencing, would have refreshed Mary, but the minister was in no condition to give battle. Since that terrible evening when Ned had spat in his face he had indeed driven the devil out of himself, but the house of his spirit although swept and garnished was still empty. God had forsaken him. Prayer had been unavailing; the sky was merely indifferent sky; he himself was nothing but a vessel of clay, a wretched body of flesh and blood that felt both night and morning as if it had swallowed an enormous cold grey stone.
This oppression in the region of your solar plexus, somebody might have told him, is only a derangement of your sympathetic or your parasympathetic nervous system, my dear fellow. You have had some emotional shock, that’s all. It is a salutary experience if you face it frankly. Revise your hypotheses. Some of them must have been wrong, for the world is exactly the same as it was.
It is doubtful whether that would have comforted William Murray. Like Elizabeth, and, incidentally, like his own brother, he believed in the last resort only what he felt. But the interpretation he had put on his own feelings for so many years had lulled him into such security, had flooded his world with so much sunshine, that he was unfitted to discard it. Ask a man who has been capsized in a cold sea, apparently miles from land, to believe that he never had a boat and that he must have swum out there in a trance, and the task will not be less difficult than that of persuading William Murray that his personal assurance of God’s support had been for nearly twenty years a delusion. Your swimmer will believe in the non-existence of a boat only if he awakens to discover, for instance, that he is not swimming, but really flying in the air, or pushing through a crowd; nothing less than the shock of a similar transposition, an awakening into a different kind of consciousness, could revise William Murray’s conception of God.
As they walked through the darkening streets Mary told him her tale. It appeared that on Friday, the day before, she and Ann had quarrelled. They were aye quarrelling, that was nothing unusual, but this time Ann had taken some notion into her head and had locked the house, snibbed the windows, and refused to let Mary in at night. Mary had trailed back to the shop and slept in the mantle showroom, and cleared it up so that the lassies suspected nothing when they came at eight next morning. She had made an excuse to slip out for a bite or two in the forenoon, and she had eaten a dinner at the nearest baker’s. But this was Saturday night; she couldna sleep in the shop and bide there all Sunday; and would the minister do something with Ann? ‘She can hear you fine through the keyhole. I gave her some fleas in her lug, I can tell you. But not a word to anybody, Mr Murray; I dinna want this to be the clash of the town. I dinna want to have the door forced.’
‘But surely,’ said the minister (people who defend an indefensible position always begin with ‘surely’), ‘surely Miss Ann didn’t do it deliberately? She may be lying helpless.’
‘Preserve us a’!’ said Mary slowly, nearly stopping. ‘You’ve kent my sister Ann for twa years and yet you say that! You’re a bigger fool than I took you for…. Dinna mind my tongue,’ she went on quickly, ‘I canna help laying it about me. But Ann! She’s been a hard and cantankerous woman all her life, Mr Murray. The de’il kens who would have put up with her the way I’ve done. She plagued my mother to death when the poor woman was lying bedridden; mother didna dare to move a finger in her bed or Ann was at her like a wild cat for ravelling the bedclothes. She was the same when she was a lassie…. Many’s the skelp across the face I’ve had from her, the ill-gettit wretch. Father widna have her in the shop; he said she would ruin his business in a week with her tantrums, and yet she was better to him than to anybody. And since father died she’s led me the life of a dog, Mr Murray. I sometimes dinna ken how I’ve managed to keep going.’
It may have been the darkness of the small streets and the impersonality of a silent and only half-visible companion that encouraged Mary to be so confidential. She had never told so much about herself to anybody. Depressed as he was William Murray could not help feeling vaguely that after all there was much to be said for Mary Watson, and that the goodwill he liked to postulate in everybody was not lacking in her, but only hidden away. His mind was not clear enough to let him perceive that her aggressive attitude towards the world was a kind of self-defence, but he was sorry for her.
‘I’ve aye tried to be respectable,’ said Mary. ‘I’ve done my duty; nobody can say I ha vena done my duty. But this last carry-on of Ann’s fairly crowns a’. This is the first time I’ve had to ask help from a single living being, Mr Murray.’
William Murray was touched by this confession. It did not occur to him that Mary so fiercely resented the necessity of asking help that she might not be grateful afterwards to the helper.
‘We all need help sometimes,’ he said, to himself as much as to her. Perhaps in turning to God he had turned his back too much on his fellow-men. God must be present in all His creatures…. In Mary Watson, for instance, in Ann Watson … even when He gave no sign of His presence, even when the soul felt empty and forlorn….
It was only one’s consciousness of God that was intermittent…. Elizabeth Shand has said something like that….
His mind kept returning to Elizabeth Shand, as if warming its numbed faculties at a fire. He had not seen her for some days: he hoped she would be in church to-morrow. God was not a mere person, she had insisted, not a limited creature with fits of bad temper who sulkily withdrew Himself from His children; the fault is in us, she had repeated, if we feel ourselves cut off from God, and that alone should keep a man from falling into despair, since faults can be discovered and corrected. That was one-half of what she had pressed so urgently upon him: it was the half from which he drew some comfort. The other half of her argument was a doctrine he would not admit, that God existed not in another world, but in this very material one. ‘We shan’t discover God anywhere if not in ourselves,’ she had said. ‘I don’t believe in your separation of the body from the spirit. I can’t think of my spirit without feeling that it’s even in my little finger.’
No,