A seriousness, a calm thoughtfulness far beyond his years, settled upon David Ramsay on these Sabbaths. But his faith in God and in man was being built up and had not yet been tested in the fire of experience. His faith was great because it was pure, because it had all the childish purity of immature inexperience. He thought of God, of Isaac, of Abraham and of Joseph, with his coat of many colours, and of David with his harp and his sling; and he thought of his father and Sam MacKitteroch. But he did not think of the MacMeechans of Achgammie, he did not even think of his mother or his brother Peter. And the background to his thoughts was the sea and the quiet mournful land of Galloway that rose and fell and gathered itself peacefully in the hollows.
In the evening he would return home quiet and withdrawn. Before going to bed his father would read a chapter from the Book. But this was never more than an exercise in piety. David sat with his head bent for he disliked his mother’s eyes. Now that he was beginning to see his mother objectively he found he disliked her – that he instinctively shrank from her. There was no kindness in her, no softness, no quality that drew him towards her. He sensed that she was neither robust nor healthy. But her pinched face, cold passionless eyes and white drawn lips were not solely accounted for by ill-health. It was her spirit that was hard and mean and her mind that lacked all humour and imagination.
Even as he sat listening with half an ear to his father’s reading, he knew that there was no love, no bond of affection between his parents. His father never conversed with his mother: they exchanged information. But, for that matter, there was no conversation in the Suie – never anything more vital than an exchange of information. His mother would sit at one side of the fire knitting or darning – but doing this work resentfully, sighing one time and pulling viciously with her needle the next. His father would sit at the other side, elbows on knees, smoking resignedly and occasionally spitting into the fire. But all the time it was obvious to David that his thoughts were not centred on his home or on his family. Sometimes he speculated on the nature of his father’s thoughts …
But there was never long to wonder. The nights were short. Bed time came early in the Suie for the day started with the rising of the sun.
But often enough Andrew Ramsay’s thoughts centred on his home and his family. How often did he wonder about Sarah MacCalman? She had not been his only love – far from it. There had been Jessie MacKnight, Lizzie Kirkton, Meg Dodds … any of them might have made a better wife for they could not have made a worse. All of them had been stout buxom lassies full of life and laughter. And Jessie MacKnight had been comely and high-spirited. But they were all young then and even Sarah MacCalman, in a pale delicate way, had not been unattractive.
Sarah alone had yielded to him. That had been his undoing. He had clipped and cuddled with Jessie and Lizzie and Meg. But only Sarah had yielded – only with Sarah had the ultimate barriers been overcome. He had been young and hot blooded. There had been nights when he had courted Jessie only to leave her in an unbearable tension of physical passion …
How often did he recall that first night when after a precious hour with Jessie he had met Sarah on his homecoming and found that she offered no resistance? And how easy, how fatally simple her first conception had been or appeared to be. Sometimes he wondered … And yet … she had been a virgin …
He had married her: there had been no alternative – for him. Then how quickly had disillusionment come: how quickly had he realised the enormity of his mistake.
Even now, across the years, the words of Jessie MacKnight were terrible to recall:
‘If ye had only waited, Andra, there’s nothing I wouldna have given you.’
Aye: if only he had waited. And what kind of life would he have had with Jessie? What kind of children might she have borne him? A world of difference between hers and Sarah’s – but what kind of world? There had been Richard – now there was David. But a family of Davids or Richards? That might have been possible. His daughters might have been like Jessie – and laughter might have broken against the walls of his home.
Aye: ten thousand times had he thought how it might have turned out – if only he had waited. His life had turned sour thinking of the might-have-been. But life took no heed of might-have-been. Life was – in all its terrible inexorability.
Some day he would have a word with his son David and tell him, warn him of the dangers of not waiting. Caution him to be certain – certain almost as of death – before he made the irrevocable step of marriage. For once the ox had been led to the slaughter …
But for Richard he might not have gone on – might never have slept with Sarah again. But there had been Richard and he had hoped there might be another …
His life had been passed hoping for this and for that. Regretting his marriage, his lack of activity, sighing for the life he might have lived but had not. Above all he regretted his lack of activity.
What activity could have been possible in his corner of the Rhinns? The farmers dominated the life of the countryside and the farmers in their turn were dominated by the landlords. The people had no life. Their best hours were given to the labour of the land. When their work was over they retired to their cot-houses – miserable one-roomed boxes, many of them built of turf-sods without windows of any kind – and there partook of their porridge or gruel and crawled into bed or threw themselves down on a bunch of straw or hay in a corner.
There was no communal life – they might foregather once a week under the one kirk roof – but they each came their several ways and departed their several ways. Only at certain times in their labour were they drawn together – at harvest or threshing or at the potato gathering – drawn together and yet separated by the incessant toil. At meal times sitting in the lee of a dyke they might exchange opinion and banter.
But Andrew Ramsay was isolated from the farm workers. He laboured by himself. He had not the common bond of agricultural labour. His isolation depressed him. He enjoyed contact with his fellow-men – and there was only Sam and the minister. Their talk, in the end, was futile enough. Especially their politics. For how could they translate their political ideals into action? They could theorise – indeed they were always theorising. But their theorisings concerned movements and events far removed from their influence. The Civil War in America – or the latest speech of William Ewart Gladstone – or the Mayor of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. There was nothing that could be done – except talk. And yet, an inheritance from the Chartist fervour of his father, Andrew Ramsay had often thought what a significant achievement it would be to organise the farm and agricultural workers of the Rhinns into a Union – so that they could impose their conditions on the farmers. He had devoted much thought and speculation to the idea – but always in the end he had been frustrated by the impossibility of its realisation.
He was a rebel without an immediate objective. There were not many of his kind in Galloway though they were to be found in plenty in the growing industrial cities. This was his tragedy – that he could not find a way to his fellow-men; that he could not realise his ideals in practice.
He felt he was living before his time. He believed that some day, and some day soon, his ideals would triumph; that man to man the world over would be brothers. A day would surely dawn when men, women and children would cease to be slaves of the men who owned the land; that the land would become theirs to enjoy. But that day would not just dawn – that day would have to be striven for, worked for, planned for and finally fought for. The earth was the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. But not even the children of Israel had entered without pain and travail the land the Lord had promised them.
THE CAPTAIN COMES HOME
In the midst of that summer’s work Captain Richard Ramsay came home. His ship was lying at South Shields and he had some ten days of freedom.