Sphene

AS THE DAY awoke great clouds had come out of the North Sea over Duncairn, with them the wind rose and rose, snarling at the gates of the dark, waiting to break through with the first peep of light. And now as that peep came glimmering, far off, beyond the edge of the Mounth, the storm loosed itself over the toun, sheeting down a frozen torrent of water. Sometimes the sleet was a ding-dong fall, and again the wind would whirl and lift, pitching great handfuls into your face though a minute before you had been in the lithe. The Windmill Steps were sheeted in slush, twice Chris slipped and nearly fell as she ran for the shelter of the mirror ledge, low below a first shrouded tram wheeled, moaning, and took the road to the Mile, the lights were going out one by one as the winter morning broke on Duncairn.

In the lithe of the mirror Chris stopped and panted and beat her frozen hands together, hatless still but muffled in a scarf to the ears for that last silly journey down to the doctor’s. She’d finished with him, done everything proper, and now there was surely nothing else. And she felt—oh, she could sleep for a month—like a polar bear, with the sleet for a sheet—

Her hair faint-sprayed by the sleet that went by, not touching the rest of her, she raised her eyes and saw it, half in the dark, half in the light, strange, a strange blind glister and drift high in the lift, a bannered attack going by in silence though you heard the shoom of the spears far down. Stamping her feet to bring them to warmth, she rested a minute, closed her eyes, yawned over-poweringly and achingly, and ceased from that to stare sombre-eyed down at the breaking of the sleet-hunted light. Whatever next? Whatever next?

How could she have known that day in July when she rested here and wondered on things that this would come, that she’d stand here appalled, that she wouldn’t know which way to think or to move? Her mind shrank in a passion of pity a minute, strangely linked with a desire to laugh…. And she shook herself, no time to stand here, with the house above wakening and waiting her—

Oh, let it wait, let it rest awhile while she caught her breath and tried to make out where she’d mislaid that security hers and her own only a short six months before:

Long-mousered, green-eyed, with his ploughman’s swagger, it had seemed to Chris six months before that Ake Ogilvie’s coming had brought to Duncairn something clean and crude as the smell of rain—crude and clean as she herself had been once before a playing at gentry enslaved her, like turning round in a lane at night and meeting one’s own lost self and face, lost a long fifteen years before, smiling with cool and sardonic lips. Not that Ake had anything very young about him, or old-like either, he was one of the kind that seem to stick to one age all their lives, swagger and pipe and clumping feet, met on the stairs as he carried up his kist that Monday morning from the taxi below.