‘Fat are ye scutterin’ aboot at?’ cried Emmeline from the kitchen. ‘Ye’ll be late for yer school.’
She jammed a hairpin into place and pulled her blouse awry as she poked it under the band of her skirt. The end of a shiny safety-pin looked out from below her waist-belt. The mirror had more cause than ever not to reflect her beauty.
Spring wore to summer and Martha lived in an abiding peace. She was disciplined to exaltation. Doubtless her critical faculty suffered. A course of Muckle Arlo would have done her no harm; and Emmeline fell ill, to the advantage of Martha’s domestic, if dubiously (in her own eyes) of her spiritual economy.
On a day in early June she sat and read upon the cairn.
The country was indigo, its austere line running out against a burnished sky to the clear enamelled blue of the mountains. Rain at sea, a soft trail of it like grey gauze blowing in the wind. And an enormous sky, where clouds of shadowed ivory and lustrous hyacinth filed by in vast processional; yet were no more than swayed in the wash of shallows when the eye plunged past them to the unfathomable gulfs of blue beyond. Martha lifted her head from the pages and looked out on those infinitudes of light. She was reading history that year. The slow accumulation of facts and dates was marshalled in her brain, waiting for the fire from heaven to fall; and as she turned from reading and gazed on that wide country gathering blue airs about itself; saw the farms and cottar-houses, roads, dykes, fields, river, she was teased from her own inner stillness by an excitement to which all she had been reading anent the press and stir of centuries contributed. Looking up, she thought suddenly, ‘I am a portion of history,’ and between her glancing from the pages and the formulation of the words, that she had spoken half aloud, there passed the fraction of a second, which nevertheless was crammed with furious thought. She had seen the riotous pageant of history peopled with folk who were like herself. Wheresoever they had gone, whatsoever had been their acts and achievement, they had all begun in a single spot, knowing nothing, with all to find and dare.
‘This place as well as another, ‘she thought; and then she said,’ But I am part of it too.’
She perceived that the folk who had made history were not necessarily aware of the making, might indeed be quite ignorant of it: folk to whom a little valley and a broken hilltop spelt infinity and who from that width and reasonableness of life had somehow been involved in the monstrous and sublime unreason of purposes beyond their own intention. The walls that shut people from people and generation from generation collapsed about her ears; and all that had ever been done on the earth − all she had read and heard and seen − swung together to a knot of life so blinding that involuntarily she closed her eyes and covered them with her hands. She could not keep still for the excitement and almost ran in her haste to the wood, forgot the supper-hour, and walked hither and thither at random; but noting that north of west the skies were flecked with saffron, and that a June sunset is late, she turned home to resume her part in the making of history.
Geordie was leaning against the door and seemed glad to see his daughter.
‘Yer mither’s feelin’ drumlie kind,’ he told her. ‘She’s had a dwam.’
Martha recalled her thoughts from the All and considered this ingredient in it. Emmeline was not wont to be ill.
They went indoors together.
Emmeline, flushed and querulous, manifested a valiant disinclination for bed. They got her there at last, and at intervals throughout the night she proclaimed stoutly that she was a better Leggatt than the best and ‘that sair made wi’ thirst that she could drink the sea and sook the banks’.
‘She’s raivelled kind,’ said Geordie.
In the morning it was plain that Martha must turn sick-nurse. It was hardly the contribution to history that she desired to make. Her examinations were coming on and Emmeline ill was a handful. She broke every regulation the doctor laid down. Fevered, she hoisted her bulk from the bed and ran with her naked feet upon the floor to alter the angle of the window screens.
‘Sic a sicht ye hae them,’ she grumbled to Martha when the girl expostulated with tears. ‘If ye wunna pit things as I tell ye, fat can I dae bit rise masel’?’
‘Temperature up again,’ said the doctor to Martha. ‘I hoped you would have managed to keep it down.’
‘Fat’n a way could she keep it doon?’ cried Emmeline. ‘Wad ye expect her to haud ma big tae to keep doon ma temperature?’
She was indignant now on Martha’s behalf as she had been against her earlier. Indignation was a fine ploy when one lay idle and condemned. Emmeline was in high good-humour with herself. It was long since she had felt so important as she did lying mountainous beneath the bed-clothes, deriding her medical adviser’s opinions and diagnosing her every symptom for herself with the aid of nothing more artificial than mother-wit; while round her in the heated kitchen the fervours of life went on − the steam of pots, the smell of food, the clatter of dishes, the hubbub of tongues, the intimacies of a sick-room toilet. Martha made a clearance of such articles as she could do without and Emmeline enjoyed a fresh attack of indignation. Demanding news of the whereabouts of something she had missed,
‘There’s a’thing ahin that door but dulse, ‘she cried, being told.’ Easy to tidy up when ye jist bang a’thing in ahin a door. But wow to the day o’ revelations.’
‘But where am I to put things?’ Martha asked. There’s just nowhere. There’s nowhere in this house to put things. You shouldn’t have so many of us − it’s not as if they were ourselves.’ And forgetting under the pressure of life the way of life she had purposed − her jubilant acceptance of every roughness − she allowed a secret desire to break cover.
‘You should put these boys away now, mother. Why should we keep them when we haven’t room for ourselves?’
Emmeline lay astounded. To be sure they had not room. And to be sure the boys were not her own, and stripped her stores like locusts, and brought no counter benefit in cash. The meagre sum she received for Jim and Madge was still forthcoming, but for Willie there had been more promises than pence. But put them away!
Alter an arrangement that had hardened to the solidity of a law! It was, and therefore it was right. − A belief that Emmeline was not singular in holding.
Martha did not push her argument. She dropped it, indeed, hastily, as though she had touched live coal. But the presence of the boys, their claims upon space and time, burned acidly in her consciousness. Jim she could endure, big hulking loon though he was, with Madge’s own stolidity and a genius for unnecessary noise; but Willie, the younger boy, she was coming to dislike very fervently. He was dirty in habit and in attitude of mind. He sniggered. He used accomplishments hard-won at