For once Martha did not regret her lack of candles. She was shivering violently from her exposure and glad of the heavy heat of the kitchen. She sat at the deal table, catching her share of light from the lamp upon her open schoolbooks. Geordie was playing Snakes-and-Ladders with the bairns − Madge and the eight-and nine-year-old boys. There was no Dussie now. Something less than three years after her arrival, Mrs. Ironside had polished her one day according to her lights and taken her away. Her folk reclaimed her. Dussie was in a whirl of excitement. She had tangled the processes of washing and dressing with fifty plans for interminable futures, and Martha was to share her fortune and her favour. They had not seen her since.
A three-year-old girl was asleep in the kitchen bed, to be carried ben the hoose in Madge’s ruddy arms when she herself retired. Madge was twelve, a strong-built girl, not tall, no great talker, knowing and not sharing her own mind.
In spite of the driving sleet, which had sting enough to keep most folk by their own firesides, Stoddart Semple lounged in the ingle nook and smoked his filthy cutty. He was a grey cadaverous man in the middle fifties, who did for himself and doggedly invaded his neighbours’ homes. ‘Stoddart’s takin’ a bide,’ folk said. They growled at him but seldom put him out. He was good to laugh at.
Emmeline, still standing, a dish-towel lumped beneath one arm, and her elbows dug into the back of her husband’s chair, was having her turn of the Pansy Novelette.
Geordie could rattle the dice with the best when it was a matter of Snakes-and-Ladders or so, and was unaffectedly happy in his slow deliberate play with the bairns; but jerking back his chair he chanced to dislodge Emmeline’s elbows, and drove her fists against her chin, her teeth closing upon her tongue.
‘Tak care, will ye?’ said she. ‘Garrin’ a body bite their tongue. …’
‘Haud oot ower a bit, than,’ said Geordie, and he slapped his knee and roared with laughter. The game was upset, and the boys began a monkey-chase about the room. Madge climbed on a creepie to see over Emmeline’s shoulder on to the jewelled-and-ermined pages of the Pansy Novelette, which Emmeline was still reading voraciously, bending as often as the boys scuttled within her reach to flick them with the dish-towel.
Martha all this while sat at another board, playing a different game: a game of shifting and shuffling and giving in exchange. Its most fascinating move consisted in fitting four flighty little English sentences into one rolling Latin period. Martha bent her energies upon it, too absorbed to heed the racket around her. Even when a bear beneath the table worried her knees, she only moved aside a little impatiently, saying nothing.
Martha had grown up quiet. After all the flaring disquietudes of her childhood, she had settled into a uniform calmness of demeanour that was rarely broken. Her silences, however, were deceptive. She was not placid, but controlled. She had the control that comes of purpose; and her purpose was the getting of knowledge. There was no end to the things that one could know.
Goerdie was still in his cups, metaphorically speaking, an honest joke suiting him as well as a dram; and Mrs. Ironside was grumbling still: ‘Garrin’ a body bite their tongue … I never heard …’; when Willie sprang on the top of the table and upset the bottle of ink upon Martha’s Latin version. She had written half of it in fair copy, in a burst of exasperation at the refusal of the second half to take coherent form. Now she sprang to her feet and watched the black ruin, staring at the meandering of the ink.
‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ said Emmeline.
Emmeline had stuffed the novelette under her chin, pressing it there, head forward, to keep it in position, and had lunged out after Willie, flicking at his ear with the dish-towel. The lurch she gave as he dodged jerked the book on to the floor and Emmeline herself against the table; and the dish-towel flicked the ink.
‘Blaudin’ ma towel an’ a’,’ she grumbled; and then,
‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ she said to Martha.
Martha gulped. She suddenly wanted to scream, to cry out at the pitch of her voice, ‘I haven’t time, I haven’t time, I haven’t time! What’s a kitchen table in comparison with my Latin, with knowing things, with catching up on the interminable past! There isn’t time!’
She set to work cleaning up the mess.
Then tears scalded her. Through them, blurred, ridiculous, all out of shape, fantastically reduplicated, she was watching her mother pick up the Pansy Novelette, bunch the towel beneath her arm again, and read.
Martha felt her mouth twist. The reeking air of the kitchen choked her. Its noises hammered and sang through her brain. The room was insufferably tight. She pushed viciously with both hands at the wet cloth she was using, smearing the table still further with pale blue stains. She licked a tear from her upper lip. Quite salt. Another − she licked that too. Her eyes and cheeks were fired where they had run. … And the intolerable waste of mood! She had been saturated with the spirit of Latin prose − it had soaked in. Words, phrases, turns of speech, alert and eager in her brain, drumming at her ears, clamouring in an exultant chaos. And that last triumphant mastery, forcing on the chaos order and a purpose − the god’s security. Gone now. Spilt like the ink, as irretrievably. A worse waste even than the time.
‘Ye’re skirpin’ a’ ower the place,’ said Emmeline.
Martha flung the cloth into the basin of water.
‘Oh why can’t you do it yourself!’ she cried. ‘Mother! You’ve more time than I have. You’re just reading. Just rubbish. − Oh, it doesn’t matter − I didn’t mean − you needn’t be angry anyway. It is just rubbish. And I’ve all my Latin to do for tomorrow.’
‘Latin?’ said her mother.
‘I’ll never get it done tonight now.’
‘Latin,’ said Emmeline again. ‘Fat sorra div ye need wi’ Latin for a teacher? Ye’re nae to larn the geets Latin, I’m hopefu’, an’ them disna ken ae year’s en’ fae the t’ither.’
Martha moistened her lips. The hot salt tears had shrivelled them.
‘I need it to get a bursary,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s something new,’ said her mother. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard o’t.’
Stoddart Semple glowered at Martha. He was a long loose man, ill-shakken thegither. Useless laps of skin sagged round his mouth. ‘Nos et mat …,’ he mumbled, forgetting the conclusion. Then he broke into a tirade against learning. Abject the people who value what we valued once and today despise. Stoddart had hankered once after knowledge; once he too had stormed the fastnesses of understanding. The fastnesses unfortunately had stood fast. His father, who had jogged for a lifetime behind his shaltie selling smokies and finnan haddies to the country wives, and had jogged more pence into his pocket than wisdom into his head, satisfied the boy’s ambition and sent him to college. Strangely, not a professor among them could be found to endorse young Stoddart’s opinion of his brains. Old Semple would have bribed them cheerfully, the whole Senatus, Sacrist and all, to let the laddie through: but he died before it became plain that the laddie had stuck; and the old man’s transactions began and ended with fish. Stoddart sold the fish-cart and the decrepit horse, counted (in an evil day) his father’s savings, and from that day onward never did a stroke of honest labour. He lived alone in his father’s cottage, meditating projects to astonish the earth: soon he would have been glad to astonish even the parish. The parish had little use for a fine phrase, and did not know what to do with learning authenticated