He has seen drawings of fish as big as horses, fish with horns as well, and scores of teeth each like a skinner"s knife. Also some that are smooth and smiling, and wickedly teasing, having the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of women but not the other parts which the sight of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s conducts a man"s thoughts to. All this in a book of stories and engravings that he got out of the Peebles Subscription Library.
These thoughts do not distress him. He always sets himself to think clearly and if possible to picture accurately the most disagreeable or shocking things, so as to reduce their power over him. As he pictures it now, the child is being eaten. Not swallowed whole as in the case of Jonah but chewed into bits as he himself would chew a tasty chunk from a boiled sheep. But there is the matter of a soul. The soul leaves the body at the moment of death. But from which part of the body does it leave, what has been its particular bodily location? The best guess seems to be that it emerges with the last breath, having been hidden somewhere in the chest around the place of the heart and the lungs. Though Walter has heard a joke they used to tell about an old fellow in the Ettrick, to the effect that he was so dirty that when he died his soul came out his a.r.s.ehole, and was heard to do so, with a mighty explosion.
This is the sort of information that preachers might be expected to give you-not mentioning anything like an a.r.s.e-hole of course but explaining something of the soul"s proper location and exit. But they shy away from it. Also they cannot explain-or he has never heard one explain-how the souls maintain themselves outside of bodies until the Day of Judgment and how on that day each one finds and recognizes the body that is its own and reunites with it, though it be not so much as a skeleton at that time. Though it be dust. There must be some who have studied enough to know how all this is accomplished. But there are also some-he has learned this recently-who have studied and read and thought till they have come to the conclusion that there are no souls at all. No one cares to speak about these people either, and indeed the thought of them is terrible. How can they live with the fear-indeed, the certainty-of h.e.l.l before them?
There was the man like that who came from by Berwick, Fat Davey he was called, because he was so fat the table had to be cut away so he could sit down to his meal. And when he died in Edinburgh, where he was some sort of scholar, the people stood in the street outside his house waiting to see if the Devil would come to claim him. A sermon had been preached on that in Ettrick, which claimed as far as Walter could understand it that the Devil did not go in for displays of that sort and only superst.i.tious and vulgar and Popish sort of people would expect him to, but that his embrace was nevertheless far more horrible and the torments that accompanied it more subtle than any such minds could imagine.
On the third day aboard ship Old James got up and started to walk around. Now he is walking all the time. He stops and speaks to anybody who seems ready to listen. He tells his name, and says that he comes from Ettrick, from the valley and forest of Ettrick, where the old Kings of Scotland used to hunt.
"And on the field at Flodden," he says, "after the battle of Flodden, they said you could walk up and down among the corpses and pick out the men from the Ettrick, because they were the tallest and the strongest and the finest-looking men on the ground. I have five sons and they are all good strong lads but only two of them are with me. One of my sons is in Nova Scotia, he is the one with my own name and the last I heard of him he was in a place called Economy, but we have not had any word of him since, and I do not know whether he is alive or dead. My eldest son went off to work in the Highlands, and the son that is next to the youngest took it into his head to go off there too, and I will never see either of them again. Five sons and by the mercy of G.o.d all grew to be men, but it was not the Lord"s will that I should keep them with me. Their mother died after the last of them was born. She took a fever and she never got up from her bed after she bore him. A man"s life is full of sorrow. I have a daughter as well, the oldest of them all, but she is nearly a dwarf. Her mother was chased by a ram when she was carrying her. I have three old sisters all the same, all dwarfs."
His voice rises over all the hubbub of shipboard life and his sons make tracks in some other direction in dread embarra.s.sment, whenever they hear it.
On the afternoon of the 14th a wind came from the North and the ship began to shake as if every board that was in it would fly loose from every other. The buckets overflowed from the people that were sick and vomiting and there was the contents of them slipping all over the deck. All people were ordered below but many of them crumpled up against the rail and did not care if they were washed over. None of our family was sick however and now the wind has dropped and the sun has come out and those who did not care if they died in the filth a little while ago have got up and dragged themselves to be washed where the sailors are splashing buckets of water over the decks. The women are busy too washing and rinsing and wringing out all the foul clothing. It is the worst misery and the suddenest recovery I have seen ever in my life . . .
A young girl ten or twelve years old stands watching Walter write. She is wearing a fancy dress and bonnet and has light-brown curly hair. Not so much a pretty face as a pert one.
"Are you from one of the cabins?" she says.
Walter says, "No. I am not."
"I knew you were not. There are only four of them and one is for my father and me and one is for the captain and one is for his mother and she never comes out and one is for the two ladies. You are not supposed to be on this part of the deck unless you are from one of the cabins."
"Well, I did not know that," Walter says, but does not bestir himself to move away.
"I have seen you before writing in your book."
"I haven"t seen you."
"No. You were writing, so you didn"t notice."
"Well," says Walter. "I"m finished with it now anyway."
"I haven"t told anybody about you," she says carelessly, as if that was a matter of choice, and she might well change her mind.
And on that same day but an hour or so on, there comes a great cry from the port side that there is a last sight of Scotland. Walter and Andrew go over to see that, and Mary with Young James on her hip and many others. Old James and Agnes do not go-she because she objects now to moving herself anywhere, and he on account of perversity. His sons have urged him to go but he has said, "It is nothing to me. I have seen the last of the Ettrick so I have seen the last of Scotland already."
It turns out that the cry to say farewell has been premature-a gray rim of land will remain in place for hours yet. Many will grow tired of looking at it-it is just land, like any other-but some will stay at the rail until the last rag of it fades, with the daylight.
"You should go and say farewell to your native land and the last farewell to your mother and father for you will not be seeing them again," says Old James to Agnes. "And there is worse yet you will have to endure. Aye, but there is. You have the curse of Eve." He says this with the mealy relish of a preacher and Agnes calls him an old s.h.i.te-bag under her breath, but she has hardly the energy even to scowl.
Old s.h.i.te-bag. You and your native land.
Walter writes at last a single sentence.
And this night in the year 1818 we lost sight of Scotland.
The words seem majestic to him. He is filled with a sense of grandeur, solemnity, and personal importance.
16th was a very windy day with the wind coming out of the S.W. the sea was running very high and the ship got her gib-boom broken on account of the violence of the wind. And this day our sister Agnes was taken into the cabin.
Sister, he has written, as if she were all the same to him as poor Mary, but that is hardly the case. Agnes is a tall well-built girl with thick dark hair and dark eyes. The flush on one of her cheeks slides into a splotch of pale brown as big as a handprint. It is a birthmark, which people say is a pity, because without it she would be handsome. Walter can hardly bear looking at it, but this is not because it is ugly. It is because he longs to touch it, to stroke it with the tips of his fingers. It looks not like ordinary skin but like the velvet on a deer. His feelings about her are so troubling that he can only speak unpleasantly to her if he speaks at all. And she pays him back with a good seasoning of contempt.
Agnes thinks that she is in the water and the waves are heaving her up and slamming her down again. Every time the waves slap her down it is worse than the time before and she sinks farther and deeper, with the moment of relief pa.s.sing before she can grab it, for the wave is already gathering its power to hit her again.
Then sometimes she knows she is in a bed, a strange bed and strangely soft, but it is all the worse for that because when she sinks down there is no resistance, no hard place where the pain has to stop. And here or on the water people keep rushing back and forth in front of her. They are all seen sideways and all transparent, talking very fast so she can"t make them out, and maliciously taking no heed of her. She sees Andrew in the midst of them, and two or three of his brothers. Some of the girls she knows are there too-the friends she used to lark around with in Hawick. And they do not give a glance or a poor penny for the plight she is in now.
She shouts at them to take themselves off but not one of them pays any attention and she sees more of them coming right through the wall. She never knew before that she had so many enemies. They are grinding her and pretending they don"t even know it. Their movement is grinding her to death.
Her mother bends over her and says in a drawling, cold, lackadaisical voice, "You are not trying, my girl. You must try harder." Her mother is all dressed up and talking fine, like some Edinburgh lady.
Evil stuff is poured into her mouth. She tries to spit it out, knowing it is poison.
I will just get up and get out of this, she thinks. She starts trying to pull herself loose from her body, as if it were a heap of rags all on fire.
A man"s voice is heard, giving some order.
"Hold her," he says and she is split and stretched wide open to the world and the fire.
"Ah-ah-ahh," the man"s voice says, panting as if he has been running in a race.
Then a cow that is so heavy, bawling heavy with milk, rears up and sits down on Agnes s stomach.
"Now. Now," says the man"s voice, and he groans at the end of his strength as he tries to heave it off.
The fools. The fools, ever to have let it in.
She was not better till the 18th when she was delivered of a daughter. We having a surgeon on board nothing happened. Nothing occurred till the 22nd this was the roughest day we had till then experienced. The gib-boom was broken a second time. Nothing worth mentioning happened Agnes was mending in an ordinary way till the 29th we saw a great shoal of porpoises and the 30th (yesterday) was a very rough sea with the wind blowing from the west we went rather backwards than forwards . . .
"In the Ettrick there is what they call the highest house in Scotland," James says, "and the house that my grandfather lived in was a higher one than that. The name of the place is Phauhope, they call it Phaup, my grandfather was Will O"Phaup and fifty years ago you would have heard of him if you came from any place south of the Forth and north of the Debatable Lands."
Unless a person stops up his ears, what is to be done but listen? thinks Walter. There are people who curse to see the old man coming but there do seem to be others who are glad of any distraction.
He is telling about Will and his races, and the wagers on him, and other foolishness more than Walter can bear.
"And he married a woman named Bessie Scott and one of his sons was named Robert and that same Robert was my father. My father. And I am standing here in front of you."
"In but one leap Will could clear the river Ettrick, and the place is marked."
For the first two or three days Young James has refused to be unfastened from Mary"s hip. He has been bold enough, but only if he can stay there. At night he has slept in her cloak, curled up beside her, and she has wakened aching along her left side because she lay stiffly all night not to disturb him. Then in the s.p.a.ce of one morning he is down and running about and kicking at her if she tries to hoist him up.
Everything on the ship is calling out for his attention. Even at night he tries to climb over her and run away in the dark. So she gets up aching not only from her stiff position but from lack of sleep altogether. One night she drops off and the child gets loose but most fortunately stumbles against his father"s body in his bid for escape. Henceforth Andrew insists that he be tied down every night. He howls of course, and Andrew shakes him and cuffs him and then he sobs himself to sleep. Mary lies by him softly explaining how this is necessary so that he should not fall off the ship into the ocean, but he regards her at these times as his enemy and if she puts a hand to stroke his face he tries to bite it with his baby teeth. Every night he goes to sleep in a rage, but in the morning when she unties him, still half-asleep and full of his infant sweetness, he clings to her drowsily and she is suffused with love.
The truth is that she loves even his howls and his rages and his kicks and his bites. She loves his dirty and his curdled smells as well as his fresh ones. As his drowsiness leaves him his clear blue eyes, looking into hers, fill with a marvellous intelligence and an imperious will, which seem to her to come straight from Heaven. (Though her religion has always taught her that self-will comes from the opposite direction.) She loved her brothers too when they were sweet and wild and had to be kept from falling into the burn, but surely not as pa.s.sionately as she loves James.
Then one day he is gone. She is in the line for the wash water and she turns around and he is not beside her. She has just been speaking a few words to the woman ahead of her, answering a question about Agnes and the infant, she has just told its name-Isabel-and in that moment he has got away. When she was saying the name, Isabel, she felt a surprising longing to hold that new, exquisitely light bundle, and as she abandons her place in line and chases about for sight of James it seems to her that he must have felt her disloyalty and vanished to punish her.
Everything in an instant is overturned. The nature of the world is altered. She runs back and forth, crying out James"s name. She runs up to strangers, to sailors who laugh at her as she begs them, "Have you seen a little boy, have you seen a little boy this high, he has blue eyes?"
"I seen a fifty or sixty of them like that in the last five minutes," a man says to her. A woman trying to be kind says that he will turn up, Mary should not worry herself, he will be playing with some of the other children. Some women even look about as if they would help her to search, but of course they cannot, they have their own responsibilities.
This is what Mary plainly sees, in those moments of anguish-that the world which has turned into a horror for her is still the same ordinary world for all these other people and will remain so even if James has truly vanished, even if he has crawled through the ship"s railings-she has noticed, all over, the places where this could be possible-and is swallowed in the ocean.
The most brutal and unthinkable of all events, to her, could seem to most others like a sad but not extraordinary misadventure. It would not be unthinkable to them.
Or to G.o.d. For in fact when G.o.d makes some rare and remarkably beautiful human child, is He not particularly tempted to take His creature back, as if the world did not deserve it?
But she is praying to Him, all the time. At first she only called on the Lord"s name. But as her search grows more specific and in some ways more bizarre-she is ducking under clotheslines that people have contrived for privacy, she thinks nothing of interrupting folk at any business, she flings up the lids of their boxes and roots in their bedclothes, not even hearing them when they curse her-her prayers also become more complicated and audacious. She seeks for something to offer, something that could be the price of James"s being restored to her. But what does she have? Nothing of her own-not health or prospects or anybody"s regard. There is no piece of luck or even a hope she can offer to give up. What she has is James.
And how can she offer James for James?
This is what is knocking around in her head.
But what about her love of James? Her extreme and perhaps idolatrous, perhaps wicked love of another creature. She will give up that, she will give it up gladly, if only he isn"t gone, if only he can be found. If only he isn"t dead.
She recalls all this, an hour or two after somebody has noticed the boy peeping out from under an empty bucket, listening to the hubbub. And she retracted her vow at once. She grabbed him in her arms and held him hard against her and took deep groaning breaths, while he struggled to get free.
Her understanding of G.o.d is shallow and unstable and the truth is that except in a time of terror such as she has just experienced, she does not really care. She has always felt that G.o.d or even the idea of Him was more distant from her than from other people. Also she does not fear His punishments after death as she should and she does not even know why. There is a stubborn indifference in her mind that n.o.body knows about. In fact, everybody may think that she clings secretly to religion because so little else is available to her. They are quite wrong, and now she has James back she gives no thanks but thinks what a fool she was and how she could not give up her love of him any more than stop her heart beating.
After that, Andrew insists that James be tied not only by night but to the post of the bunk or to their own clothesline on the deck, by day. Mary wishes him to be tethered to her but Andrew says a boy like that would kick her to pieces. Andrew has trounced him for the trick he played, but the look in James"s eyes says that his tricks are not finished.
That climb in Edinburgh, that sighting across the water, was a thing Andrew did not even mention to his own brothers-America being already a sore enough matter. The oldest brother, Robert, went off to the Highlands as soon as he was grown, leaving home without a farewell on an evening when his father was at Tibbie Shiel"s. He made it plain that he was doing this in order not to have to join any expedition that their father might have in mind. Then the brother James perversely set out for America on his own, saying that at least if he did that, he could save himself hearing any more about it. And finally Will, younger than Andrew but always the most contrary and the most bitterly set against the father, Will too had run away, to join Robert. That left only Walt, who was still childish enough to be thinking of adventures-he had grown up bragging about how he was going to fight the French, so maybe now he thought he"d fight the Indians.
And then there was Andrew himself, who ever since that day on the rock has felt about his father a deep bewildered sense of responsibility, much like sorrow.
But then, Andrew feels a responsibility for everybody in his family. For his often ill-tempered young wife, whom he has again brought into a state of peril, for the brothers far away and the brother at his side, for his pitiable sister and his heedless child. This is his burden-it never occurs to him to call it love.
Agnes keeps asking for salt, till they begin to fear that she will fuss herself into a fever. The two women looking after her are cabin pa.s.sengers, Edinburgh ladies, who took on the job out of charity.
"You be still now," they tell her. "You have no idea what a fortunate la.s.sie you are that we had Mr. Suter on board."
They tell her that the baby was turned the wrong way inside her, and they were all afraid that Mr. Suter would have to cut her, and that might be the end of her. But he had managed to get it turned so that he could wrestle it out.
"I need salt for my milk," says Agnes, who is not going to let them put her in her place with their reproaches and Edinburgh speech. They are idiots anyway. She has to tell them how you must put a little salt in the baby"s first milk, just place a few grains on your finger and squeeze a drop or two of milk onto it and let the child swallow that before you put it to the breast. Without this precaution there is a good chance that it will grow up half-witted.
"Is she even a Christian?" says the one of them to the other.
"I am as much as you," Agnes says. But to her own surprise and shame she starts to weep aloud, and the baby howls along with her, out of sympathy or out of hunger. And still she refuses to feed it.
Mr. Suter comes in to see how she is. He asks what all the grief is about, and they tell him the trouble.
"A newborn baby to get salt on its stomach-where did she get the idea?"
He says, "Give her the salt." And he stays to see her squeeze the milk on her salty finger, lay the finger to the infant"s lips, and follow it with her nipple.
He asks her what the reason is and she tells him.
"And does it work every time?"
She tells him-a little surprised that he is as stupid as they are, though kinder-that it works without fail.
"So where you come from they all have their wits about them? And are all the girls strong and good-looking like you?"
She says that she would not know about that.
Sometimes visiting young men, educated and from the town, used to hang around her and her friends, complimenting them and trying to work up a conversation, and she always thought any girl was a fool who allowed it, even if the man was handsome. Mr. Suter is far from handsome-he is too thin, and his face is badly pocked, so that at first she took him for an old fellow. But he has a kind voice, and if he is teasing her a little there could be no harm in it. No man would have the nature left to deal with a woman after looking at them spread wide, their raw parts open to the air.
"Are you sore?" he says, and she believes there is a shadow on his damaged cheeks, a slight blush rising. She says that she is no worse than she has to be, and he nods, picks up her wrist, and bows over it, strongly pressing her pulse.
"Lively as a racehorse," he says, with his hands still above her, as if he did not know where to drop them next. Then he decides to push back her hair and press his fingers to her temples, as well as behind her ears.
She will recall this touch, this curious, gentle, tingling pressure, with an addled mixture of scorn and longing, for many years to come.
"Good," he says. "No touch of a fever."
He watches, for a moment, the child sucking.
"All"s well with you now," he says, with a sigh. "You have a fine daughter and she can say all her life that she was born at sea.
Andrew arrives later and stands at the foot of the bed. He has never looked on her in such a bed as this (a regular bed even though bolted to the wall). He is red with shame in front of the ladies, who have brought in the basin to wash her.
"That"s it, is it?" he says, with a nod-not a glance-at the bundle beside her.
She laughs in a vexed way and asks, what did he think it was? That is all it takes to knock him off his unsteady perch, puncture his pretense of being at ease. Now he stiffens up, even redder, doused with fire. It isn"t just what she has said, it is the whole scene, the smell of the infant and milk and blood, most of all the basin, the cloths, the women standing by, with their proper looks that can seem to a man both admonishing and full of derision.
He can"t think of another word to say, so she has to tell him, with rough mercy, to get on his way, there"s work to do here.
Some of the girls used to say that when you finally gave in and lay down with a man-even granting he was not the man of your first choice-it gave you a helpless but calm and even sweet feeling. Agnes does not recall that she felt that with Andrew. All she felt was that he was an honest lad and the one that she needed in her circ.u.mstances, and that it would never occur to him to run off and leave her.
Walter has continued to go to the same private place to write in his book and n.o.body has caught him there. Except the girl, of course. But things are even now with her. One day he arrived at the place and she was there before him, skipping with a red-ta.s.selled rope. When she saw him she stopped, out of breath. And no sooner did she catch her breath but she began to cough, so that it was several minutes before she could speak. She sank down against the pile of canvas that concealed the spot, flushed and her eyes full of bright tears from the coughing. He simply stood and watched her, alarmed at this fit but not knowing what to do.
"Do you want me to fetch one of the ladies?"
He is on speaking terms with the Edinburgh women now, on account of Agnes. They take a kind interest in the mother and baby and Mary and Young James, and think that the old father is comical. They are also amused by Andrew and Walter, who seem to them so bashful. Walter is actually not so tongue-tied as Andrew is, but this business of humans giving birth (though he is used to it with sheep) fills him with dismay or outright disgust. Agnes has lost a great part of her sullen allure because of it. (As happened before, when she gave birth to Young James. But then, gradually, her offending powers returned. He thinks that unlikely to happen again. He has seen more of the world now, and on board this ship he has seen more of women.) The coughing girl is shaking her curly head violently.
"I don"t want them," she says, when she can gasp the words out. "I have never told anybody you come here. So you mustn"t tell anybody about me."
"Well you are here by rights."
She shakes her head again and gestures for him to wait till she can speak more easily.
"I mean that you saw me skipping. My father hid my skipping rope but I found where he hid it-but he doesn"t know that."
"It isn"t the Sabbath," Walter says reasonably. "So what is wrong with you skipping?"
"How do I know?" she says, regaining her saucy tone. "Perhaps he thinks I am too old for it. Will you swear not to tell anyone?" She holds up her forefingers to make a cross. The gesture is innocent, he knows, but nevertheless he is shocked, knowing how some people might look at it.