Read Online A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon - Free Book Online Page B

as Chae she spoke of him and that was an unco-like thing to do of your father, but maybe it was because he was socialist and thought that Rich and Poor should beEqual. And what was the sense of believing that and then sending his daughter to educate herself and herself become one of the Rich?
    But Marget cried that wasn’t what Chae intended, she was to learn and be ready for the Revolution that was some day coming. And if come it never did she wasn’t to seek out riches anyway, she was off to be trained as a doctor, Chae said that life came out of women through tunnels of pain and if God had planned women for anything else but the bearing of children it was surely the saving of them. And Marget’s eyes, that were blue and so deep they minded you of a well you peeped into, they’d grow deeper and darker and her sweet face grow so solemn Chris felt solemn herself. But that would be only a minute, the next and Marget was laughing and fleering, trying to shock her, telling of men and women, what fools they were below their clothes; and how children came and how you should have them; and the things that Chae had seen in the huts of the blacks in Africa. And she told of a place where the bodies of men lay salted and white in great stone vats till the doctors needed to cut them up, the bodies of paupers they were— so take care you don’t die as a pauper, Chris, for I’d hate some day if I rang a bell and they brought me up out of the vat your naked body, old and shrivelled and frosted with salt, and I looked in your dead, queer face, standing there with the scalpel held in my hand, and cried ‘But this is Chris Guthrie!’
    That was awful, Chris felt sick and sick and stopped midway the shining path that led through the fields to Peesie’s Knapp that evening in March. Clean and keen and wild and clear, the evening ploughed land’s smell up in your nose and your mouth when you opened it, for Netherhill’s teams had been out in that park all day, queer and lovely and dear the smell Chris noted. And something else she saw, looking at Marget, sick at the thought of her dead body brought to Marget. And that thing was a vein that beat in Marget’s throat, a little blue gathering where the blood beat past in slow, quiet strokes, it would never do that when one was dead and still under grass, down in the earth that smelt so fine and you’d never smell; or cased in the icy darkness ofa vat, seeing never again the lowe of burning whins or hearing the North Sea thunder beyond the hills, the thunder of it breaking through a morning of mist, the right things that might not last and so soon went by. And they only were real and true, beyond them was nought you might ever attain but a weary dream and that last dark silence—Oh, only a fool loved being alive!
    But Marget threw her arms around her when she said that, and kissed her with red, kind lips, so red they were that they looked like haws, and said there were lovely things in the world, lovely that didn’t endure, and the lovelier for that. Wait till you find yourself in the arms of your lad, in the harvest time it’ll be with the stooks round about you, and he’ll stop from joking—they do, you know, and that’s just when their blood-pressure alters—and he’ll take you like this—wait, there’s not a body to see us!—and hold you like this, with his hands held so, and kiss you like this!
    It was over in a moment, quick and shameful, fine for all that, tingling and strange and shameful by turns. Long after she parted with Marget that evening she turned and stared down at Peesie’s Knapp and blushed again; and suddenly she was seeing them all at Blawearie as though they were strangers naked out of the sea, she felt ill every time she looked at father and mother. But that passed in a day or so, for nothing endures.
    Not a thing, though you’re over-young to go thinking of that,