Geordie stood with an admirer’s eye upon the fat breast of the fowl, holding her out from him until her spasms of involuntary twitching were over. Martha watched, breathing the clean sweet air of a July morning. When she raised her head she saw the wet fields and the soft gleam of the river. ‘How fresh it is,’ she said.
‘Ay, ay,’ answered her father, still holding the hen. ‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.’
Roderick Watson
Aunt Josephine Leggatt
Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her grand-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it was she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving − she reflected − that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.
Mrs. Ironside would have grumbled on for long enough and Aunt Josephine knew it.
‘Ye’ll just tak the craitur awa fae the school Emmeline,’ the old lady said. ‘Ye’ll never haud book-larnin’ in a wizened cask. Stap it in, it’ll aye rin oot the faister. The bairn’s fair wizened.’
‘Oh, I ken she’s nae bonny, Aunt Josephine—’
‘O ay, ye were aye the beauty yersel, Emmeline, I’se nae deny it. But ye’ve nane to blame but yersel that the bairn’s as she is. “There’s Emmeline, noo,” I says to Leebie, “throwin’ hersel awa on yon Geordie Ironside, and the bairn’s as ugly a little sinner as you’d clap e’en on in a month o’ Sabbaths.” “Dinna mention the wean,” says Leebie, “nor Emmeline neither. If she hadna the wit to pit a plooman by the door, nor the grace to mind on fat was due to her fowk and their position, she can just bide the consequences. Dinna speak o’ Emmeline to me,” says Leebie. “She’s never lookit richt upon her man if she’s gotten a surprise that the bairn’s nae a beauty.”’
‘Geordie’s nae that ill-looking, Aunt Josephine.’
‘Na, mebbe no. But look at his sister Sally − as grim’s an auld horse wi’ a pain in its belly. Matty’s an Ironside, ma dear, and ye’ve gotten fat ye hae gotten by mairryin’ aneath ye.’
Aunt Josephine said it calmly, without passion or malice, as one delivers an impersonal truth. She alone of the Leggatt family had recognised Emmeline since her marriage; but she would never have dreamed of denying that the marriage was a folly. She had even, in the early years, attempted on her sisters the thankless task of persuasion in Emmeline’s behalf. After all, she was the only bairn of their own brother − ‘blood’s thicker nor water,’ Aunt Josephine had the audacity to remind Aunt Jean, even after that lady had delivered her ultimatum with regard to Emmeline.
‘But it’s nae sae easy to get aff yer hands,’ said Jean.
That made the matter conclusive. To have Emmeline on their hands would have been an impossible disaster for the respectable Leggatts.
Emmeline tossed her head at their opinion. With base effrontery she married the man she loved, and after twelve pinched and muddled years, with her trim beauty slack, two dead bairns and a living one mostly nerves and temper, she stood in her disordered kitchen and fretted that she could not offer her aunt a decent cup of tea.
‘Beautiful, my dear, just beautiful,’ said Aunt Josephine, sipping the tea; and she returned to the question of Martha’s schooling. Emmeline, to be sure, had a dozen reasons against taking the child away. Reasoning to Miss Leggatt was so much moonshine. Fretful little girls are solid realities (if not so solid as their grand-aunts might wish): reasons, merely breath. It was not to be expected that a vapour would impede Aunt Josephine. She announced calmly and conclusively that she was taking the child back with her to Crannochie.
‘We’ll just cry on the craitur,’ she said, ‘and lat her know.’
The craitur all this while, serenely unaware of the conspiracy against her peace, was dwelling on a planet of her own. A field’s breadth from the cottage, where two dykes intersected, there was piled a great cairn of stones. They had lain there so long that no one troubled to remember their purpose or their origin. Gathered from the surrounding soil, they had resumed a sort of unity with it. The cairn had settled back into the landscape, like a dark outcrop of rock. There Martha played. The stones summed up existence.
Aunt Josephine walked at her easy pace across the field. Mrs. Ironside followed for a couple of steps; then stood where she was and bawled across Aunt Josephine’s head.
Aunt Josephine paid no attention: nor did Martha. The one plodded steadily on through the grass, the other made a planet with her dozen stones; both thirled to a purpose: while Mrs. Ironside behind them shrilled and gesticulated to no purpose whatsoever.
As her mother acknowledged, the child was no beauty: though impartial opinion, at sight of her, might well have decided that the mother was; intensifying the description by aid of the sturdiest little helot of the local speech − ‘a gey beauty’: inasmuch as the bairn’s frock was glazed with dirt and drawn up in a pucker where it had been torn; and of her two clumsy boots, one gaped and the other was fastened with half a bootlace and a knotted bit of string, and both were grey. Her hair was a good sensible drab, not too conspicuous when badly groomed; and she had a wicked habit of sucking one or another of its stribbly ends.
‘She’s just a skin,’ said Miss Leggatt, pausing at the foot of the cairn, while Mrs. Ironside’s voice came spattering past her in little bursts:
‘Tak yer hair ooten yer mou’, Matty … and say how-do-you-do … to yer aunt. Mumblin’ yer hair … like that … I never saw the like.’
‘She’s hungry, that’s fat she is, the littlin,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘Ye’re fair hungerin’ her, Emmeline.’ And she put out her hands and drew Martha towards her by the shoulders. ‘Now, my dear,’ she said. It was a finished action and a finished phrase. Miss Leggatt’s simplest word had a way of suggesting completion, as though it conveyed her own abounding certainty in the rightness of everything.
Emmeline told her daughter what was in store for her.
‘Wunna that be fine?’ said Aunt Josephine.
Martha firmly held by the shoulders in Aunt Josephine’s grasp, answered by the action and not by word. Words came slowly to her need; and her present need was the most unmanageable she had ever experienced; for school to Martha was escape into a magic world where people knew things. Already she dreamed passionately of knowing all there was to know in the universe: not that she expressed it so, even to herself. She had no idea of the spaciousness of her own desires; but she knew very fervently that she was in love with school. Her reaction to the news she had just heard, therefore, was in the nature of protest − swift and thorough. She simply kicked out with all her strength of limb.
‘I wunna be ta’en awa fae the school,’ she screamed. ‘I wunna. I wunna.’
‘Did ever ye see the likes o’ that?’ panted her mother. ‘Be quaet, will ye, Matty? I’m black affronted at ye. Kickin’ yer aunt like that. Gin I cud get ye still a meenute, my lady, I’d gar yer lugs hotter for ye.’
Martha kicked and screamed the more.
Aunt Josephine let them bicker. Troubling not even to bend and brush the dust of Martha’s footmarks from her skirt, she walked back calmly to the cottage.
Aunt Josephine Leggatt was a fine figure of a woman. She carried her four-and-sixty years with a straight back and a steady foot. She would tramp you her ten miles still, at her own pace and on her own occasions. Miss Leggatt made haste for no man, no, nor woman