THE CRISIS OF VICTOR'S WALK with Maggie was now over.
After a little silence, they began talking happily about indifferent
matters. Presently they came to a little cottage that offered teas.
They had their meal in the garden, sitting together on a bench before a
rickety little table, facing the view. Maggie told me that through that
meal and the rest of their walk she had an increasing sense that they
had known one another for many years. Again and again they anticipated
each other's thoughts, as though each knew beforehand what to expect of
the other. Yet consciously they knew very little of each other, and
their minds were very different- Victor with his background of public
school and Oxford, Maggie a country girl with simple tastes and a
veneer of town experience. Yet so long as they did not discuss their
own future, they talked easily and happily. In spite of differences of
accent and social class, each delighted each by quick intuition of the
other's point of view. Maggie was soon telling Victor about her own life. Her early years
were spent in Shetland. She was born in a minute crofter's cottage
beside one of the larger "voes" or fjords. Her father was a typical
Shetlander, who made a precarious living by a combination of fishing by
line or net from a boat, tending the little hardy though soft-fleeced
sheep, and tilling the impoverished and storm-swept soil, which yielded
oats and rye as dwarfed as the sheep and the famous ponies. Rambingly
and with evident nostalgIia, Maggie told Victor how she used to take
part in the fishing; how, holding the line, one had to feel for the
gentle tremor when the fish nibbled the bait, distinguishing between
the different action of whiting, haddock and the rest; how in the old
days cod were plentiful m the coastal waters and within range of small
boats, but now they had to be sought far off in the Arctic by
long-ranging steam trawlers; how the herring fishery, at one time
prosperous, had retreated to the south, leaving behind broken-down
jetties and the rotting remains of the fishing fleet in almost every
village; how her father used to take out his gun and shoot the seals
from the cliff, and the dead or merely wounded creatures, tortured by
the salt water in their wounds, would be left on the rocks by the next
retreating tide, to be retrieved at leisure by the men of the crofts;
how the cruel business distressed her, but gradually she hardened
herself to it, knowing well how much the meat and oil and skin were
needed; how, when she was about twelve years old, one of her elder
brothers was lost in a storm, having gone out beyond the headlands in
an unseaworthy boat, against his father's advice; how she herself,
weeks later, happened on his decaying body on the rocks, damaged,
bloated, blackened by corruption, but still recognizably her brother;
and how this experience had "somehow opened a window on to the evil of
the world ", so that for years afterwards she was prone to " waking
nightmares " in which she was paralysed by the shocking memory of that
strange thing that had been her brother; how her eldest brother became
a deck-hand on a liner, and would periodically return from the Far East
with strange gifts and stranger stories; how these homecomings used to
fill her with a fierce determination to see the great world, though she
was only a girl; how the eider-ducks piloted their flotillas of tiny
babies on the turbulent waves, and in among the rocks; how the stylish
arctic skuas and the great brown "bonxies" would dive screaming from
the sky to threaten the head of any child venturing too near their
nests; how the gannets, dagger-beaked, creamy headed, wing-tipped with
ink, would drop like stones into the sea for fish, and the cormorants
would come up from the deep with their writhing bulky catch, and
struggle valiantly to swallow it, till at last it showed merely as a
great swelling in the bird's neck; how a dead whale was once stranded
at the mouth of the voe, and how it stank; how one of the boys once
carried home on his shoulder a whale's vertebra, a lump of sea-polished
solid bone as big as a new grindstone, but triangular and with a hole
in the middle for the great spinal cord; how she and her school friends
used to play in a near-by "broch", a stone-built Pictish fortress, on a
high cliff over the sea; how her mother used to plant their cabbages in
queer little circles of stone wall, like miniature brochs, to protect
them from the ruthless winds; how at midnight in the summer, the grass
was still green and the water blue; but in winter, noon was just an
evening between two interminable dead black nights, relieved sometimes
by the pale or rosy Northern Lights; how the whole family would
sometimes go by boat, sailing or rowing, inland to the head of the voe
to cut peat on the low moors, and stack it to dry (like slabs of moist
ginger cake, she said); and how, long afterwards, they would go again
to load the dried peat on to the boat and bring it home; how in fine
weather one could see far out on the horizon a small, tall, lonely
island where several families won a meagre living from the ocean and
the scanty pasture, and sometimes (it was said) great storms swept
their houses over the cliff into the seas; how she was sometimes taken
by her father on sheep-dipping or fleecing expeditions, with a party of
men, boys and dogs from the neighbouring crofts, generally by boat to
some remote promontory, to spend the day in the orchestration of
bleatings, barkings, human shoutings, the cries of gulls, and of course
the wind; how the "national sport" of the Shetlanders (Shelties, she
sometimes called them) was racing their Norse-looking sailing craft at
regattas in one little port after another; how the family boasted about
their own old elegant and often successful boat, and their father's
seamanship; how she used to walk over the hill to the village school
beside a neighbouring voe, often in wild weather, dry in her little
black oil-skins; how on Sundays the whole family, father, mother, two
aunts, three boys and two girls, would follow the same track over the
hill to the little Methodist chapel, all dressed in their precious
Sunday clothes, she with her wild red hair tightly plaited and her
sturdy little legs clad in the inevitable home-knitted black woollen
stockings; how on one occasion a blue-eyed young lay preacher, who was
also the local blacksmith (idolized by the young girls for his mighty
prowess at the anvil, and for his radiant kindliness), gave them a
terrific sermon all about hell-fire and shipwreck; how the fire, he
said, rose up from the depth of the ocean and devoured the proud ships
with their ungodly crews, and sucked them down into the nether pit for
eternal damnation; how, after the service, when the young man stood at
the chapel door to shake hands with each member of the congregation,
she dared hardly take his hand, though she saw, incredulously, that he
was once more beaming with good will; how, when her father once took
her to the far-off town of Lerwick, on the way she saw for the first
time trees, little stunted trees round a house in a sheltered valley,
but to her they were symbolical of all the world's forests and jungles;
how Lerwick seemed to her in those days a great bewildering glamourful
city, but in fact it was a small fishing port with narrow cobbled
streets and an all-pervading smell from the salting of innumerable
herrings; how she marvelled at the trawlers, the smart fisheries
gunboat, and the little old mail steamer; how she longed to go in the
steamer all the way to far-off Scotland, but such a trip was beyond the
family's means; how, even in those early days she began to be aware
that she was living only on the outermost fringe of a great exciting
dangerous modern world, in comparison with which her home life and all
its values were old-fashioned, niggardly and superstitious; how, as a
girl in her teens, she used to steal sweet meetings with a boy from
Glasgow, a very young engineer, who used to come to the village on a
motor-bike in connection with the setting up of a pumping engine; how
he scorned Shetland, and told her about the gay city life; how he once
took her for a wild pillion-ride on his motor-cycle, and her father
heard of it, and was furious; how, in the long dark winter evenings,
her mother and aunts, and often the two girls also, would sit spinning
the near-white or richly brown ("murrat") home-grown wool, or knitting,
or mending clothes, fishing-nets or lines, while her father with a clay
pipe in his mouth would be doing repairs to some tool, or mending a
wicker lobster-pot; how sometimes he would tell them stories of the old
days, or read aloud from "improving" books or Sir Walter Scott's
novels; for they had a couple of shelves stocked with well-used
classics and religious works, as in so many of the Shetland crofts; how
sometimes she would listen to her father with a deep sense of peace,
loving the little cramped, dark, over- crowded home and the feeling of
continuity with a mysterious romantic past; but sometimes she was
restless, aloof, exasperated with her grown-up relatives because of
their open contempt and secret fear of the new ways which were
constantly eating into the old; how she and her elder sister sometimes
went to the tiny croft of their Great-Aunt Abigail, to be given
bannocks and a glass of precious ginger-wine, but the old woman herself
would generally find some excuse for indulging in neat whisky or rum;
how the dark little croft was crammed with furniture and treasures
collected throughout a lifetime; how the kindly but alarming old witch
(for such she looked, with her tousled grey hair and bushy brows that
met over her nose, and her face of wrinkled leather) would sit by the
fire with bright and frightening eyes telling stories of tragic loves
and quarrels, of murders out at sea, of Pictish and Norse tradition, of
kelpies and howling invisible fiends that rode on the storm, and could
lift a man from his feet and throw him from a cliff; how sometimes in a
low voice her great-aunt would tell of her own reputedly occult powers
of second sight and control of people's behaviour; how, for instance,
she foretold the greatest storm of a century, and the wreck of a
full-rigged ship on the rocks below the broch; how she triumphed over a
wicked laird, who was the harsh landlord of all that district, by
compelling him to throw himself from a high cliff. Maggie told Victor that she herself, being a very level-headed
child, was sceptical about all these stories, and yet fascinated by
them. One thing she did not tell Victor till long afterwards. When
Great-Aunt Abigail was at the point of death she summoned her favourite
great-niece, Maggie, to a strictly private interview, and prophesied
that she, too, would develop strange powers. Meanwhile, she said,
Maggie herself, under the influence of the "great unbelieving world"
would grow to neglect "the old wisdom", till at last in suffering she
would discover that she, too, was a witch, with powers that she might
use for good or evil. The old lady said, "You will find, Maggie dear,
that you can be strong both in the old wisdom and in the new wisdom,
about which I know nothing but that the two clashing wisdoms are at
bottom one true wisdom." Her tired old eyes, that were still lit with
frightening fire, looked fixedly at the young girl; and presently she
said, "They will call you ugly, but you are beautiful. Most people are
too blind to see your beauty, and if any of these ever calls you
beautiful, he will be lying. But the very few, who can see, will see
that you are lovely with a very ancient and forgotten kind of
loveliness, or perhaps a new kind, still to win men's praise. I don't
know which." She gazed at the fascinated child; then said, "You must
try to do much better than I have done, wasting all my powers, and all
my life." She fell silent for some time, while Maggie gazed at her in
awe. Then Great-Aunt Abigail said, "Goodbye, dear Maggie. Remember
always what I have said. And now, go!" With mingled fright, repugnance, affection and exaltation, Maggie
stooped and put her lips to the ancient leathery brow. But Great-Aunt
Abigail said, faintly but sharply,"On the lips, little fool; even 1f It
makes you vomit. Maggie brought herself to comply, murmured, "Dear
Great-Aunt Abigail!" and fled. This exciting suggestion that she herself was a witch worked deeply
into young Maggie's mind; the more so since on one or two occasions she
had had dreams that seemed to turn out obscurely prophetic. Maggie did not tell Victor about this death-bed scene; partly
because, though almost unconsciously she still cherished it, she had
long ago ceased to take her great-aunt's prophecy seriously, and had
ceased to have any of those ambiguous experiences that had seemed to
confirm it. Moreover, she feared that, if she told Victor, he would
think her credulous. Instead, she rambled on about her ordinary
memories, while Victor occasionally interjected some question or
friendly comment. The sun was now sinking behind the trees, and the chill of evening
made them sit closely together, like well-tried brother and sister. Maggie recounted how, when she left school, her parents reluctantly
sent her into "service" in Lerwick, to add to the family earnings; how
she wept on the day of departure, but how, as she settled into the new
life she became more and more dependent on the excitement of this
minute metropolis, and more determined to seek her fortune in some
great glamorous city in Scotland; how her parents sternly opposed this
intention, but in the end, without their consent, she bought a passage
with her savings and at last boarded the mail steamer with a friend,
Katie, who was returning from a holiday at home to a post as
chamber-maid in a hotel in Aberdeen; how the two slept on deck under a
tarpaulin, but were drenched by a wave; how the friend secured her a
place as scullery-maid; how she marvelled at the city of grey granite,
feeling that at last she was in the great world; how nevertheless she
often found herself longing for the voes and the crofts and the
Shetland speech, and her still dear family; how she was torn between
love and contempt for the old life, between fascination and vague
disgust with the city; how in due season she became a waitress in the
same hotel and, in spite of her ugliness, was a success, not merely
through efficiency but because of her knack of pleasing people of very
different sorts; how she spent her free time mostly on solitary walks
in the country or the town itself, watching its life; how her ugliness
was a protection against unwanted attentions, but also a barrier
between her and the boys; how she occasionally went with Katie to see
the thrilling new moving pictures of life in New York or Monte Carlo;
how Katie had a succession of love affairs, but she herself was merely
everybody's dear sister; how, still seeking fullness of life, she
presently moved on to posts in Glasgow, and then to the North of
England and her present job; how her ambition was to reach London. While Maggie was happily telling Victor about her life, the
afternoon had advanced into evening. The trees in front of them were
silhouetted against a golden sky. The two sat closer together, and
Victor had allowed himself to slip his arm under hers, and to hold her
hand. She responded with gentle pressure, but said, "We may as well be
friendly, even if I'm not going to take you on." Victor told me that he had been wondering how it was that a girl who
had missed her due of admiration from young men could be so detached
and even guarded against his own cautious advances. Intuitively he felt
that sex was somehow repugnant to her; and yet, according to her own
account, she had regretted her exclusion from normal love-experiences. " Tell me!" he said. "Even though most young men were too blind to
see your beauty, surely some must have wanted you? You don't
behave at all like- like a plain girl who is always longing to be
loved." She did not answer. He felt her go rigid. Her face was turned
away from him. Presently she turned toward him, and seemed to study his face in the
fading light. Then she said, "Inquisitive, aren't you? Why should I
have to tell you all about myself? But you're sort of understanding,
like my brother Tom, who was drowned" Then she suddenly disengaged herself and rose, saying that it was
getting late, and they mustn't miss the bus. He did not press her to
say more. When he had paid for the meal, they walked down the garden,
and he held the gate open for her. As she passed through, the evening
light lent mystery to her face. "You are lovely to look at," he said,
"but that is not all. There is something strange about you. I think you
must be a witch. Do you see the future, or stick pins in waxen images
of your enemies, or put potions in people's beer? Or do you just cast
spells on them by giving them waking-dreams of your face?" She was
startled, thinking of Great-Aunt Abigail's now almost forgotten
declaration. But she said, rather sharply, "I don't believe in such
things. I'm modern. I should like to go in a submarine or fly an
aeroplane, or be a great surgeon. I believe in science. I'm bored with
the old dope about witches and magic and second sight." He said, "Then
what about my dreams of you?" She answered, "Oh, that's your affair.
Probably you are just kidding yourself." "Well, Miss Modern," he said,"
you must have had lots of lovers. Tell me about them!" She answered
only, "Nosing again! " And when he attempted to take her arm, she
gently freed herself. But as they walked unlinked down the dark road,
under trees, she said, "Oh, well. Perhaps I shall tell you some day." She did; at a much later date, when she had come to know him much
better. And Victor, sitting; with me in the hotel lounge, told me
vaguely that she had indeed, as he suspected, "encountered the seamy
side of sex", and been "severely wounded by her experiences". Not till
long afterwards did I learn from Maggie herself the details of this
unhappy side of it' her life. But I had better give some account of
them now, since without some knowledge of them the reader would be
unable to understand the course of her early relations with Victor. During her time in Aberdeen she suffered increasingly from the sense
of inability to attract men, and from her privation of all the normal
dalliance and "walking out" which meant so much to her friend Katie.
Moreover, her longing to be "modern", and to have all kinds of "modern"
and "emancipated" experiences, disposed her to a freedom and even
licentiousness that was still rare in those days before the First World
War. So when she found that some men would, with a little
encouragement, make advances to her, she was very ready to accept them.
But the men who took notice of her were all of the kind that Katie
condemned as riff-raff or "wrong 'uns". Maggie, however, was ready to
believe that they were the sensitive ones who could see the beauty to
which most men were blind. She chose to ignore her great-aunt's warning
that some of the blind would lyingly praise her. Thus it was that she
stumbled into a very unfortunate affair in the dockside underworld .of
Aberdeen. She struck up an acquaintance with some undesirable creature
to whom no decent girl would stoop. His advances were of the crudest,
but he was able to pose to her as an unfortunate and fundamentally
gentle cave-man whom society had maltreated. Maggie frankly responded,
and was ready to see in him virtues which no one else could see. She
allowed him all sorts of liberties with her person. Gradually and very
reluctantly, she discovered that he was not more sensitive than other
men, but more coarse-grained and brutal, that his crude praise of her
looks was quite insincere, that he had come to her not out of
admiration and love but simply in the expectation that such an ugly
girl would be ready to give him what others refused, namely bodily
intercourse. Such a discovery was, of course, bitterly galling. But
such was her hunger for experience and "emancipation " that she
swallowed her shame and allowed herself to be led right up to the point
of going to bed with her "lover". At the last minute violent repugnance
seized her, and she broke from his arms, and began to dress. The man,
of course, was furious, and attempted rape; but Maggie was not one to
give in easily, when loathing had conquered craving. She put up a
spirited fight, and cooled her assailant's ardour by inflicting painful
damage. Thus, battered but victorious, she technically preserved her
virginity. Some time after she had recovered from the shock of this affair
Maggie became involved with another unattractive specimen of the
opposite sex. But this time disillusionment supervened at an earlier
stage of the relationship, and she dismissed her man before she was
seriously implicated. In spite of these two unfortunate incidents her
passion to be experienced and "modern" forced her to try again and
again. Each time, disgust supervened at an earlier stage than before,
until at last she shrank from the slightest contact with any man. In Glasgow, where she was barmaid in a low-class hotel, she had an
adventure of a different pattern. She met a Negro. He had a frightful
cough, was probably tubercular, and was desperately lonely. He longed
to get back to West Africa, but he had no money. The girls treated him
like dirt because he was black, broken-down, and simple. He had the
remains of a well-knit and powerful body, and dog's eyes. Out of
compassion, Maggie befriended him, mothered him. He responded with
adoration and great gentleness, never presuming to touch his goddess.
To her surprise she found that when he did accidentally touch her she
was not repelled, He had a sweet nature, she felt, that could never
harbour the brutish lust that was the sole motive of her other lovers.
He treated everyone, even his persecutors, with fundamental respect. He
was ready to accord to everyone the benefit of the doubt. Maggie
gradually conceived a great affection for him. And so, like a queen
condescending to a trusted subject whom she had chosen as a consort,
she gently led him into making love to her. At first he could scarcely
bring himself to commit so small a sacrilege as stroking her hand. But
stage by stage he reached the point of undressing his goddess, with all
the reverence of a priest unveiling the holy of holies. She felt
neither repugnance nor fear, but only a warm glow of affection and
expectation. But then, to her surprise, his trembling hands were
withdrawn from her, and he muttered in a thick husky voice, "I must
not, I must not. There is a devil in me, and he would hurt you." This
declaration only increased Maggie's confidence in him, and her
readiness to give herself to him. She quickly overcame his scruples,
and with an almost religious reverence and gentleness he took her. The two lived together in very humble quarters, kept by Maggie's
earnings and the intermittent wages that he won from such casual
labouring as he could secure. For a while she was content. But little
by little she became restless and lonely. She craved equal comradeship
and common enterprise. Her Negro, though infinitely patient and gentle,
and in a way personally understanding, was too remote from the "great
world" which had cast its spell on her. "I wanted," she told me, " a
man of my own kind, who would wake me, and- ride me rough-shod to the
stars; who would free something creative in me that had always been
chained up." Such high-falutin language was quite beyond her at the
time; but later, under Victor's half- assimilated influence, this was
how she described her feelings at the close of her adventure with her
Negro. She was beginning to feel that she was losing contact with the
great world, and becoming more and more tangled in responsibility
toward her lover. Further, she was frightened that she might have a
child. Such preventives as she knew were far from reliable. Little by
little, her manner toward him changed. She cooled. Sometimes she would
unintentionally let little spiteful remarks slip from her tongue; and
the effort to comfort the wounded man after these lapses became
increasingly burdensome. One night she was particularly horrid to him, hinting that he was
not really good enough for her, and that she had only accepted him out
of charity, and that his love-making was too humble. She even forgot
herself so far as to say that it would be too awful if she had the
burden of a little nigger baby. This foolish remark woke something in
him that had been long suppressed. He went savage. It was as though the
spirit of the black race took possession of him to avenge itself upon
the whole race of white tyrants. His eyes flashed, his teeth gleamed in
his dark face. He said, "Right I I'll make love to you in another way.
It's your own fault if you don't like it." Recounting this incident to
me, she said, " Then he went at me like a tiger, tearing off my
clothes, biting and tearing at my flesh, and doing unspeakable things."
She screamed and fought; but presently he sprang away from her, and
collapsed in a heap on the floor, blubbering and begging her pardon.
She, in spite of her fright and the rough handling, was feeling very
guilty herself; and soon she was kneeling over him and comforting him,
with blood on her neck and breasts. In ten minutes they were friends
again, and making tea. However, on the following day, the Negro, who seems to have been, at
heart a remarkably generous and sensible person, decided that they must
part. He could no longer trust himself with her. It was obvious to
Maggie, too, that she could not trust herself not to torment him. So it
was agreed that they must part. And they parted in style. They spent
all their cash on food and drink for the celebration, prepared a feast
in their cheap room, ate as much as they could manage, toasted one
another, and then the black race and the white race, and the amity of
the two, toasted everything and everybody, got happily sozzled and
sentimental, petted and embraced one another, and finally, to the
surprise of both, fell to serious love- making, and retired to bed
together. Maggie, generous and courageous, was determined that the
previous night's mishap should be, so far as possible, wiped out by
something better. The Negro was equally anxious to make amends for his
past obsequiousness and for his recent brutality. The sense of her
danger and of their imminent parting exalted Maggie to respond to him
with a new fervour; and her warmth in turn had a tonic effect on him,
so that for once he was able to be gentle without being abject, and
ardent without being brutal. They slept in peace together; and next
morning they parted. For Maggie, the upshot was that, having at last copiously tasted the
forbidden fruit, and having found it both sweet and bitter, she no
longer craved it for its own sake. She would henceforth be violently
repelled by all sexual contacts that were not patently the vehicle of
true love between equals. For with her Negro she had at least
experinced enough to be able to imagine what sex could be when it was
indeed the expression of full personal love. Such were the experiences that Maggie refrained from recounting to
Victor as they walked along the dark road, side by side, but unlinked.
He made one more attempt to gain her confidence. He said, "There's
something painful in your memory, and something you're a bit ashamed
of. If you were to trust me, and share the pain, and the shame too, I might
be able to wipe them out for you. She answered, "No! Not yet, anyhow.
You're not my father inquisitor." The odd phrase amused him; and he
wondered, but did not enquire, whether it was deliberate or due to
ignorance. He pressed her no further, but turned the conversation to
more general subjects. In the bus, they sat snugly together, but he
refrained from holding her hand; and for this she was grateful, yet
vaguely disappointed. When the time came to part, he did take her hand.
It was a large and capable hand, and the skin was rather coarse.
Ineradicable dirt was ingrained in the thumb and forefinger. He raised
the hand to his lips, and said, "Think it all over. I'm leaving
tomorrow, but I shall come back soon."6
MAGGIE’S EARLY LIFE
From 1897 to 1921