His mother, a delicate, submissive woman, had died shortly after he was born, and he was brought up by Janet Shand, who expended upon him in double measure the affection she felt for his father, sharpened at times to a keen edge of anxiety lest he should grow up to resemble his father morally as well as physically. Janet could never rid herself of the knowledge that the Shand men were sexually unbridled; even her own brother had given her a queer feeling; she could not look at him without remembering how often he was reported to lie with women in the town. It was indeed difficult to think of anything but bodily appetites when one met Charlie Shand.
Thus the atmosphere in which Hector Shand grew up was, one might say, heavily charged with sex between the two poles of Janet’s anxious abhorrence of the subject and Charlie Shand’s open devotion to it. Before the boy was twelve his father had become so dissolute that he was a byword in the town. Shamed to the soul, young Hector found little comfort in the thought of his mother, for his Aunt Janet always spoke of her with contemptuous pity as of a poor spiritless thing, who was no wife for Charlie. Hector became convinced that his heredity was tainted; he became fatalistic about it; he persuaded himself that John had escaped the curse only because he had a different kind of mother, and he resented his half-brother’s robust superiority.
Nor did school help him to escape from his fatalistic preoccupation. Examinations made his stomach queasy with nervousness. Everything that he knew ebbed out of his mind when he was ordered to set it down, and his increasing nervous tension in the ordeal invariably discharged itself in a way which made him miserable and strengthened his sense of inborn guilt. In every bodily activity, in every game he played, he had a lightning correspondence between his body and his brain, but the mere sight of ink and paper was enough to paralyse it. A problem in arithmetic, which, given real bricks, he would have solved, became a torturing muddle of cubic feet; rules of grammar, which unconsciously in speaking he adhered to, changed into malignant mnemonics which he could never retain; and the simple recording of facts, even facts that he knew well, such as how best to guddle for trout, was subject to a mysterious standard of appraisal called ‘style’ which was never defined, and for which, apparently, he had no natural gift. He took it for granted that books and all that they stood for were beyond his capacity, and sustained himself against humiliation by his prowess in games, and, in later years, by his success with women. He had found nothing else in life.
Every morning on entering the office of John Shand & Sons he felt a faint recurrence of the old nausea. He would add a column of figures five, six or even seven times before assuming that his answer was correct, and even then he convinced himself only by totting the whole up on his fingers.
‘Is that how you count, man?’ said John, one day. That’s how they used to do it in the Stone Age.’
‘Is there nothing else you can give me to do?’ burst out Hector in a rage. ‘I can’t stick at these damned figures all the time.’
John wheeled round. His manner was curt; he had been irritable for some days past, for he had not yet solved his own problem with Lizzie.
‘I want to see whether you can stick to anything at all once you’ve begun it,’ he said, and went away without waiting for an answer, being in a hurry to get to Tom Mitchell’s.
Hector turned white. John always roused him to defiance. John was always expecting him to make a mistake of some kind, and not only expecting it but waiting for a chance to say: ‘I thought as much.’ By setting his teeth Hector could only just cope with that; here, however, was a new obstacle to overcome, the deadly suggestion that even if he could master anything he lacked steadiness enough to stick to it. It was a deadly suggestion, because in his own experience of himself Hector found nothing to rebut it.
He gritted his teeth, but the figures swam before his gaze. The office window looked into the deep well of the yard, where horses were backing and carts unloading. In spite of the sick distaste he had for the office Hector liked the rest of the mill; even the men who worked in it were better than the clerks, he thought, who were all elderly dried-up machines like John himself.
‘Hell and damnation!’ He clapped the ledger to. In the outer office he paused and said to the head clerk who peered at him enviously over steel-rimmed spectacles: ‘If Mr John asks where I am, Mason, you can tell him I’m taking a turn through the mill.’
He had a child’s delight in watching belts whiz and wheels go round. The impalpable flour that floated in the air sifted over his head and shoulders as he lounged from one corner to another, edging his way between piles of full sacks. He liked the smell of the mill, a compound of machine grease and the fragrance of grain; he liked the regular thud thud of the big dynamo which shook the whole building as if a giant were trying to kick the walls out. He watched the fat golden grains of wheat go sliding down the chute in a lazy mass, and turned up his sleeve to plunge his arm among them.
‘That’s good wheat,’ he yelled to the man in charge.
‘Mains of Invercalder,’ the man yelled back. ‘Best wheat in the haul countryside.’
That was Mabel’s father’s wheat. I should know good wheat when I see it, thought Hector, bitterness overcoming him again. A whole year and a half on that damned Alberta farm. What he didn’t know about wheat wasn’t worth knowing. Horse-feed, too, he knew something about that.
‘Damnation!’ he swore again, emerging into the yard. John’s last remark was still active. He hadn’t been able to stick to farming anyhow. Could he stick to anything?
He nodded to the carters tramping over the mud of the yard with bits of dirty sacking laid over their shoulders. Probably that was the kind of job John thought him fit for. ‘Wouldn’t that jar you?’ he found himself sneering; the Canadian phrase had not occurred to him for a long time. Hell, what a life it had been!
He leaned against a doorway and watched the horses; their haunches were wrinkling, and their great bearded feet were braced against the cobbles. On his farm he had felt something like that, like a brute in blinkers between two shafts. He rememberd his disgust and forlornness at the plough-tail; he had even kicked at the ploughshare with his heavy boots in a senseless frenzy of rage, and sent long imploring letters to Aunt Janet. What maddened him most was the feeling that he had been turned down by the whole lot of them, even by Aunt Janet. And then Aunt Janet had assured him that all was forgotten and forgiven, and on that assurance he had sold up his farm and come home to make good.
It was more than a year since he had come back, but he was still angry when he remembered how John had so high-and- mightily washed his hands of him. It was the affair with Bell Duncan that did it; everybody turned against him when that came out. And what was there in that? The girl was asking for it. Fellows had done much worse than that. His own father had been a damned sight worse. And he was only a boy when the affair began; he was heartily sick of the girl by the time she started slandering him right and left. Glad enough he had been to clear out when they offered him the chance. But in any decent family the whole history of the affair would have been different. As it was, they merely clapped blinkers on him and stuck him between two shafts, the shafts of a plough.
It was a raw afternoon, and to the dull rage he felt was added the discomfort of cold. With an abrupt jerk he turned and marched up to the office again, hurled a ledger on the floor and put on his coat, hat and muffler. Without thinking he then went out through the main gateway facing the dock. It was high tide; the dock-gates were open, and a dirty-looking steamer was warping her way in. A rope came curling on the quay beside him, and was knotted in a trice round an iron post rooted among the worn granite setts that surrounded the little square of deep water. Foreign-looking chaps, thought Hector, as he glanced at the crew leaning over the side, and he strolled away to see where they had come from. Elsa. Kjobenhavn. Copenhagen. Strange, clipped syllables were tossed along the deck, and he listened to them with a vague pleasure in the strangeness. Calderwick wasn’t the only place on God’s earth after all.
He wandered round the