But though he jested she touched him with a kind of awe. Impossible ideas she had, of course; not of this world: but her speech was like a lit and potent draught. What fools men were, to think the spirit could not be manifest in human flesh!
She kept herself in hand until the last of the evening’s tasks was over, undressed herself in darkness and went to bed. Then she let her strung nerve snap and sobbed with abandon. He had smiled at her and she all earnestness. … Thinking after a time that she heard a movement in the room, she quieted herself and lay, tense and listening. So lying, she became aware of moonlight, and turned her head; Madge in the other bed had raised herself upon her elbow and was watching her with curiosity.
‘What’ up with you?’ she asked.
‘Nothing’s up with me.’
‘What’re you crying for then?’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘Oh, all right, then.’
Madge dropped to her pillow again.
Shortly she said, ‘If you’d fash yourself to do your hair a bit decenter, you’d easy get a lad.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, well,’ said Madge, ‘you’re near twenty-two and hinna a lad yet.’ And after a moment’s pause she added, ‘I’ll lend you my side-combs if you like.’
Her side-combs were set with a glitter of sham blue brilliants.
Martha said sharply:
‘I don’t want either your side-combs, or a lad, thank you.’
‘Oh, all right, then,’ said Madge again. She turned her shoulder, rubbing her greasy hair about on the pillow till she found a comfortable nook. Soon she was sleeping heavily.
Martha was indignant at the supposition that she occupied her thoughts with anything as vulgar as a lad: though if a lad be considered as a young male who cares for one and for whom one cares in return, that was exactly of what she had been thinking with persistence for some little time. But what relation was there between Luke and a lad, any more than between Martha and an Ironside or a Leggatt? He had set their intercourse on too high a plane for the one, and kept her in her exalted mood too long for the other. Thinking of him (and no longer of his honour) she fell asleep.
The following week Miss Warrender spoke to Martha after lecture.
‘Are you quite better now?’ she asked. ‘I was sorry you weren’t feeling well.’
Martha stared, having forgotten the manner of her exit the previous week. Talking at the classroom door with the young lecturer, she was swept by a hurricane of hate. She wanted to hit her. Her fingers clenched of themselves … she could feel them closing on Miss Warrender’s throat … and all the time she was saying calmly, with a smile, that she had not been very sick and was quite well now; that the sky was threatening; there had been too much wet weather lately and it would be most unfortunate if the coming Rectorial Election were marred by rain.
‘For the peasemeal fight and the torchlight procession − it would be too bad,’ Miss Warrender said.
Martha walked away. The corridor was endless. It seemed to roll away, like a barrel on which one tried to walk. She supposed she was tired; and, Good Lord! how she ached, now that she let herself relax. Into that imagined strangulation had gone the energy of a week’s work.
She went home, climbing the long brae very slowly. There was dirty weather in the offing. A grey south; and a diffused yellow crept through the grey, giving it a still dirtier look. As Martha plodded on, absorbed, her blue-paper-covered child-observation note-book, in which she had to write her observations on every lesson she saw taught in the schools, slipped from among the books on her arm and fell in the soft road. She was annoyed at its griminess and wiped it hastily with her coat-sleeve. The smear looked uglier.
‘Stupid!’ she thought. ‘I should have let it dry.’
And he stood staring at the stain, but it was not the stain that she was seeing. She felt as though with every step in her slow ascent she had been turning very carefully the revolving lens of a fieldglass, and had come to rest with her picture focussed to a perfect clarity.
She understood now that she was in love with Luke.
Reason told her that there should be black depths of horror in the knowledge, but all she could feel was wild glad exultancy, the sureness of a dweller in the hills who has come home. One loves − the books had taught her, though she had given the theme but little attention − as one must, perhaps against one’s will and inclination: but she, sucked under without awareness, had loved the greatest man she knew. Judgment approved. She counted herself among the blest. Besides, this secret and impossible love had a wild sweetness, flavoured and heady, luscious upon the palate, a draught for gods. It was eternal, set beyond the shadow of alteration in an ideal sphere, one of the concentric spheres of Paradise. It would satisfy her eternally. There was nothing possessive in her love; or rather she possessed already all that she desired in him − those far shining, terribly intimate moments of spiritual communion.
She thought that she would love Luke forever with hidden and delectable love. It was a consummation, the final fusion of their spirits in a crystal that would keep forever its own exquisite shape, timelessly itself.
But some crystals founder in some fires.
The rain began, hesitant at first, then powerful as from an opened sluice. Martha pulled off her gloves, and throwing her face and palms upwards, let the water rush upon her naked flesh. She felt light, as though her body were sea-wrack floating in the deluge of waters; or as though an energy too exorbitant for her frame, coursing through her, had whipped her into foam.
‘Ye maun be soaked,’ Emmeline was saying. ‘Yon was hale water.’
Martha only laughed, standing in the doorway with the water streaming from her clothes. She was remembering what Luke had said, one stormy night when he had brought her home from town: ‘I like a soaking now and then. Good elemental feel it gives you.’ Elemental! − That was it. Washed by the rain she felt strong and large, like a wind that tosses the Atlantic or a tide at flood −
‘Ye micht shut tae the door,’ Emmeline complained. ‘We’ll be perished wi’ cauld.’
Martha smiled to herself and shut the door. She had done the biggest thing she had ever done: she had fallen in love with Luke. It was the crown of her achievement. And without changing her wet garments she began briskly to prepare the supper.
‘Ye’re raised the nicht,’ her mother said. ‘Fatever’s ta’en ye?’
Martha laughed again, catching the tails of her dripping skirt for joy of the feel of water through her fingers. Raised! − of course she was − upraised to the highest heaven because she had had the wit to fall in love with Luke and with no other man on earth. And still laughing, and squeezing the hems of her skirt, she began to waltz round and round very rapidly on the kitchen floor.
Martha’s procedure was by way of pantomime to her mother. Emmeline found the days very long. ‘We’re better wantin’ yon canalye o’ kids,’ she acknowledged; but she missed the stir. When Aunt Josephine did not walk down from Crannochie, and none of the neighbours stepped in about for a crack, and not even Stoddart Semple flattened his nose against the window and called ‘Foo are ye daein’?’ her days were very empty; nor did her evenings provide much entertainment. Geordie might have a curran remarks to make anent the doings at the farm, and Madge, when directly asked, would detail the customers who had visited the baker’s shop and what their purchases had been; but Martha, with her head in the clouds, or absorbed by the mysteries of School Hygiene and Child Psychology, had no news to give her mother. Emmeline therefore