The Weatherhouse Read online

  But Leeb knew what she was doing. She took the cottages and joined them. Andra’s problem was, after all, easy enough to solve. She had money: a useful adjunct to brains. She knocked out the partition of Andra’s original home and made of it a long living-room with a glass door to the garden; and between the two cottages, with the girls’ old bedroom for corridor, she built a quaint irregular hexagon, with an upper storey that contained one plain bedroom and one that was all corners and windows—an elfin inconsequential room, using up odd scraps of space.

  The whole was roofed with mellowed tiles. None of your crude new colourings for Leeb. She went up and down the country till she had collected all she required, from barns and byres and outhouses. Leeb knew how to obtain what she wanted. She came back possessed of three or four quern stones, a cruisie lamp and a tirl-the-pin; and from the farm she brought the spinning wheel and the old wooden dresser and plate racks.

  The place grew quaint and rare both out of doors and in. One morning Leeb contemplated the low vestibule that had been a bedroom, humming the gay little verse it often brought to her mind:

  The grey cat’s kittled in Charley’s wig,

  There’s ane o’ them livin’ an’ twa o’ them deid.

  ‘Now this should be part of the living-room,’ said she. ‘It’s dark and awkward as a passage. We’ll have it so—and so.’

  She knew exactly what she wanted done, and gave her orders; but the workman sent to her reported back some three hours later with instructions not to return.

  ‘But what have you against the man?’ his master asked.

  ‘I’ve nothing against him, forbye that he’s blind, and he canna see.’

  She refused another man; but one day she called Jeames Ferguson in from the garden. Jeames was a wonder with his hands. He had set up the sundial, laid the crazy paving, and constructed stone stalks to the querns, some curved, some tapering, some squat, that made them look like monstrous mushrooms. ‘Could you do that, Jeames?’ ‘Fine that.’ Jeames did it, and was promptly dismissed to the garden, for his clumps of boots were ill-placed in the house. Mrs Craigmyle did the finishing herself and rearranged her curious possessions. Some weeks later Jeames, receiving orders beside the glass door, suddenly observed, ‘I hinna seen’t sin’ it was finished,’ and strode on to the Persian rug with his dubbit and tacketty boots. But no Persian rug did Jeames see. Folding his arms, he beamed all over his honest face and contemplated his own handiwork.

  ‘That’s a fine bit o’ work, ay is it,’ he said at last.

  ‘You couldn’t be angered at the body. He was that fine pleased with himself,’ said Mrs Craigmyle.

  But the house once to her mind, Mrs Craigmyle did no more work. Dismissing her husband in a phrase, ‘He was a moral man—I can say no more,’ she sat down with a careless ease in the Weatherhouse and gathered her chapbooks and broadsheets around her:

  Songs, Bibles, Psalm-books and the like,

  As mony as would big a dyke—

  though, to be sure, daughter of the manse as she was, the Bible had scanty place in her heap of books. Whistle Binkie was her Shorter Catechism. She gave all her household dignity for an old song: sometimes her honour and kindliness as well; for Leeb treated the life around her as though it were already ballad. She relished it, but having ceased herself to feel, seemed to have forgotten that others felt. She grew hardly visibly older, retaining to old age her erect carriage and the colour and texture of her skin. Her face was without blemish, her hands were delicate; only the long legs, as Kate Falconer could have told, were brown with fern-tickles. Kate had watched so often, with a child’s fascinated stare, her grandmother washing her feet in a tin basin on the kitchen floor. Kate grew up believing that her grandmother ran barefoot among tall bracken when she was young; and probably Kate was right.

  So Lang Leeb detached herself from active living. Once a year she made an expedition to town, and visited in turn the homes of her three Lorimer nephews. She carried on these occasions a huge pot of jam, which she called ‘the berries’; and having ladled out the Andrew Lorimers’ portion with a wooden spoon, replaced the pot in her basket and bore it to the Roberts and the Johns. For the rest, she sat aside and chuckled. Life is an entertainment hard to beat when one’s affections are not engaged. Theresa managed the house and throve on it, having found too little scope at the farm for her masterful temper. Her mother let her be, treating even her craze for acquisition with an ironic indulgence. Already with the things they had brought from the farm the house was full. But Theresa never missed a chance to add to her possessions. She had a passion for roups. ‘A ga’in foot’s aye gettin’,’ she said.

  ‘She’s like Robbie Welsh the hangman,’ Lang Leeb would chuckle, ‘must have a fish out of ilka creel.’ And when Mrs Hunter told Jonathan Bannochie the souter, a noted hater of women, that Miss Theresa was at the Wastride roup, ‘and up and awa wi’ her oxter full o’ stuff,’ she was said to have added, ‘They would need a displenish themsels in yon hoose, let alane bringin’ mair in by.’ ‘Displenish,’ snorted Jonathan. ‘Displenish, said ye? It’s a roup o’ the fowk that’s needed there.’

  Miss Annie too, when she gave up the farm brought part of her plenishing. Ellen was the only one who brought nothing to the household gear. Ellen brought nothing but her child; and there was nowhere to put her but the daft room at the head of the stairs that Theresa had been using for lumber.

  ‘It’s a mad-like place,’ Theresa said. ‘Nothing but a trap for dust. But you won’t take a Finnan haddie in a Hielan’ burnie. She’s no way to come but this, and she’ll just need to be doing with it. She’s swallowed the cow and needn’t choke at the tail.’

  Ellen did not choke. She loved the many-cornered room with its irregular windows. There she shut herself in as to a tower and was safe; or rather, she felt, shut herself out from the rest of the house. The room seemed not to end with itself, but through its protruding windows became part of the infinite world. There she lay and watched the stars; saw dawn touch the mountains; and fortified her soul in the darkness that had come on her.

  TWO

  Of the three Craigmyle sisters, Ellen was the likest to her mother. She too was long and lean, though she had not her mother’s delicacy of fingers and of skin; and to Ellen alone among her daughters Mrs Craigmyle had bequeathed the wild Lorimer heart.

  How wild it was not even the girl herself had discovered, when at twenty seven she married Charley Falconer. There was no opposition to the match, though Falconer was a stranger; well-doing apparently; quiet and assured: which the family took to mean reliable, and Ellen, profound. Her life had hitherto been hard and rigid; her father, James Craigmyle, kept his whole household to the plough; not from any love of tyranny, but because he had never conceived of a life other than strait and laborious. To work in sweat was man’s natural heritage. His wife obeyed him and bided her time; Ellen obeyed, and escaped in thought to a fantastic world of her own imagining. The merest hint of a tale sufficed her, her fancy was off. Her choicest hours were spent in unreality—a land where others act in accordance with one’s expectations. Sometimes her toppling palaces would crash at the touch of the actual, and then she suffered an agony of remorse because the real Ellen was so unlike the Ellen of her fancies. ‘There I am again—I mustn’t pretend these silly things,’ she would say; and taking her Bible she would read the verse that she had marked for her own especial scourging: ‘Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.’ For a day or two she would sternly dismiss each fleeting suggestion of fiction, striving to empty a mind that was naturally quick and receptive, and finding the plain sobriety of a Craigmyle regimen inadequate to fill it. Shortly she was ‘telling herself stories’ again. It might be wicked, but it made life radiant.

  Concerning Charley Falconer she told herself an endless story. The tragedy of her brief married life lay in the clash between her story and
the truth. Charley was very ordinary and a little cheap. He dragged her miserably from one lodging to another, unstable, but with a certain large indifference to his own interests that exposed his memory to Craigmyle and Lorimer contempt, when at his death Ellen could no longer deny how poor she was.

  She came back to her mother’s house, dependent, the more so that she had a child; at bitter variance with herself. She had been forced up against a grinding poverty, a shallow nature and a life without dignity. By the time she returned home her father was dead, the Weatherhouse built and Theresa comfortably settled as its genius. Ellen found herself tolerated. Power was too sweet to this youngest sister who had had none: the widowed and deprived was put in her place. Since that place was the odd-shaped upstairs room, Ellen did not grumble; but Theresa’s management made it perhaps a trifle harder for her to come to terms with the world. Her own subordinate position in the house was subtly a temptation: it sent her back to refuge in her imaginings. After a time the rancour and indignity of her married years faded out. She thought she was experienced in life, but in truth she had assimilated nothing from her suffering, only dismissed it and returned to her dreams.

  Two things above all restored her—her child and the country. It was a country that liberated. More than half the world was sky. The coastline vanished at one of the four corners of the earth, Ellen lost herself in its immensity. It wiled her from thought.

  Kate also took her from herself. She was not a clever child, neither quaint nor original nor ill-trickit; but never out of humour. She asked nothing much from life—too easily satisfied, her mother thought, without what she could not have. Ellen, arguing from her own history, had schooled herself to meet the girl’s inevitable revolt, her demand for her own way of living. But Kate at thirty had not yet revolted. She had wanted nothing that was not to her hand. She had no ambition after a career, higher education did not interest her, she questioned neither life nor her own right to relish it. Had she not been brought up among Craigmyles, their quiet domesticity was what she would have fancied. She liked making a bed and contriving a dinner; and since she must earn her living she took a Diploma in Domestic Science and had held several posts as housekeeper or school matron; but late in 1917 she entered (to the regret of some of her relations) upon voluntary work in a Hospital, becoming cook in a convalescent Hospital not far from her home.

  Ellen had therefore carried for nearly thirty years the conviction that she had tested life; and mastered it.

  At sixty she was curiously young. Her body was strong and supple, her face tanned, a warm glow beneath the tan. She walked much alone upon the moors, walking heel first to the ground with a firm and elastic tread. Her eyes were young; by cause both of their brightness and of their dreaming look. No experience was in their glance. She knew remote and unspeakable things—the passage of winds, the trembling of the morning star, the ecstasy of February nights when all the streams are murmuring. She did not know human pain and danger. She thought she did, but the pain she knew was only her own quivering hurt. Her world was all her own, she its centre and interpretation; and she had even a faint sweet contempt for those who could not enter it. The world and its modes passed by and she ignored them. She was a little proud of her indifference to fashion and chid her sister Theresa for liking a modish gown. She saw—as who could have helped seeing—the external changes that marked life during the thirty years she had lived in the Weatherhouse: motor cars, the shortening skirt, the vacuum cleaner; but of the profounder revolutions, the change in temper of a generation, the altered point of balance of the world’s knowledge, the press of passions other than individual and domestic, she was completely unaware.

  Insensibly as these thirty years passed she allowed her old fashion to grow on her. Fancy was her tower of refuge. Like any green girl she pictured her futures by the score. After a time she took the habit of her imaginary worlds so strongly that hints of their presence dropped out in her talk, and when she was laughed at she would laugh or be offended according to the vehemence with which she had created; but among the gentle scoffers none guessed the ravishment her creations brought her, and none the mortified despair of her occasional revulsions from her fairyland.

  It did not occur to her that when Lindsay Lorimer came to Fetter-Rothnie her fairyland would vanish into smoke.

  Lindsay came to stay at the Weatherhouse on this wise: her mother, Mrs Andrew Lorimer, arrived one day in perturbation.

  ‘We don’t know what to do with Lindsay,’ she confessed. ‘If you would let her come here for a little—? We thought perhaps the change—and away from the others. These boys do tease her so. They can’t see that she’s ill.’

  ‘She’s ill, is she?’ said Theresa. ‘And what ails her, then?’

  Mrs Andrew took some time to make it clear that Lindsay’s sickness was of the temper.

  ‘Not that we have anything against him,’ she said. ‘He’s an excellent young man—most gentlemanly. When he likes. But she’s so young. Nineteen. Her father won’t hear of it. “All nonsense too young,” he says. But I suppose she keeps thinking, well, and if he doesn’t come back. It’s this war that does it.’

  ‘It’s time it were put a stop to,’ said Miss Annie.

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Mrs Andrew. ‘And let things be as they were.’

  ‘But they won’t be, said Ellen.

  ‘No,’ she answered. ‘Frank’ll never go to college now. He swears he won’t go to the University and won’t. And it’s all this Captain Dalgarno. It’s Dalgarno this and Dalgarno that. Frank’s under him, you know. I wonder what the Captain means by it. He’s contaminating Frank. Putting ideas into his head. He was only a schoolboy when it began, you must remember—hadn’t had time to have his mind formed. And now he swears he won’t go to the University and won’t enter a profession. All my family have been in the professions.’

  She sighed again.

  ‘He wants to do things, he says. Things with his hands. Make things. “Good heavens, mother,” he said to me, just his last leave—the Captain was home with him on his last leave, you know; it was then that Lindsay and he wanted to get married, and her father just wouldn’t have it. “Good heavens mother, we’ve un-made enough, surely, in these three and a half years. I want to make something now. You haven’t seen the ruined villages. The world will get on very well without the law and the Church for a considerable time to come,” he said, “but it’s going to be jolly much in need of engineers and carpenters.” Make chairs and tables, that seems to be his idea. “Even if I could make one table to stand fast on its feet, I’d be happy. I won’t belong to a privileged class,” he said. “There aren’t privileges. There’s only the privilege of working.” It sounds all right, of course, and I’m sure we all feel for the working man. But if Lindsay marries him I don’t know what we shall all come to.’

  Mrs Craigmyle, attentive in the corner, began to hum. No one of course heeded her. She sang a stave through any business that was afoot. She sang now, the hum developing to words:

  Wash weel the fresh fish, wash weel the fresh fish,

  Wash weel the fresh fish and skim weel the bree,

  For there’s mony a foul-fittit thing,

  There’s mony a foul-fittit thing in the saut sea.

  And Ellen’s anger suddenly flared. A natural song enough for one whose home looked down on the coast villages of Finnan and Portlendie; but it was Ellen the dreamer, not the sagacious Annie or Theresa, who had read in her mother that the old lady’s was an intelligent indifference to life. She took no sides, an ironic commentator. Two and thirty years of Craigmyle wedlock had tamed her natural wildness of action to an impudence of thought that relished its own dainty morsels by itself. Her cruelties came from comprehension, not from lack of it. And had not Mrs Andrew said the word? ‘Contaminating,’ she had said. Ellen did well to be angry. She was angry on behalf of this young girl the secret of whose love was bandied thus among contemptuous women.

  ‘But I know, I know, I understand,’ she thou
ght. ‘I must help her, be her friend.’ Already her fancy was off. She had climbed her tower and saw herself in radiant light, creating Lindsay’s destiny.

  She looked from under bent brows at her mother, who continued to sing, with a remote and airy grace, her long fine fingers folded in her lap. She sat very erect and looked at no one, lost apparently in her song. Ellen relaxed her frown, but remained gazing at the singer, falling unconsciously into the same attitude as her mother, and the singular resemblance between the two faces became apparent, both intent, both strangely innocent, the old lady’s by reason of its much withdrawn, Ellen’s from the enthusiasm of solitary dreaming that hedged her about from reality.

  The Drama

  ONE

  Proposal for a Party

  Miss Theresa Craigmyle opened the kitchen door in response to the knock, and saw Francie Ferguson holding a bag of potatoes in his arms.

  ‘Ay, ay, Francie,’ she said, ‘you’ve brought the tatties. Who would have thought, now, there would be such a frost and us not to have a tattie out of the pit? It was a mercy you had some up.’

  ‘O ay,’ said Francie, ‘and the frost’s haudin’. There’s the smell o’ snaw in the air. It’ll be dingin’ on afore ye ken yersel.’

  Miss Theresa took the potatoes, saying cheerily, ‘And a fine big bag you’ve given us, Francie. But you were aye the one for a bittie by the bargain.’

  Francie shuffled to the other foot and rubbed a hand upon his thigh.