Chapter 36 - Page 2

corners, wondering if I could dare to meet her and her mother on
their way to church, he would walk past with them. He was
accompanied always by a lanky black dog, which he had brought from
a foreign country. He never signed for any ship without first
getting permission to take it with him, and in Harvie they said it
did not know the language of the native dogs. I have never known a
man and dog so attached to each other."

"I remember that black dog," Gavin said. "I have spoken of it to
my mother, and she shuddered, as if it had once bitten her."

"While Adam strutted by with them," I continued. "I would hang
back, raging at his assurance or my own timidity; but I lost my
next chance in the same way. In Margaret's presence something came
over me, a kind of dryness in the throat, that made me dumb. I
have known divinity students stricken in the same way, just as
they were giving out their first text. It is no aid in getting a
kirk or wooing a woman.

"If any one in Harvie recalls me now, it is as a hobbledehoy who
strode along the cliffs, shouting Homer at the sea-mews. With all
my learning, I, who gave Margaret the name of Lalage, understood
women less than any fisherman who bandied words with them across a
boat. I remember a Yule night when both Adam and I were at her
mother's cottage, and, as we were leaving, he had the audacity to
kiss Margaret. She ran out of the room, and Adam swaggered off,
and when I recovered from my horror, I apologized for what he had
done. I shall never forget how her mother looked at me, and said,
'Ay, Gavin, I see they dinna teach everything at Aberdeen.' You
will not believe it, but I walked away doubting her meaning. I
thought more of scholarship then than I do now. Adam Dishart
taught me its proper place.

"Well, that is the dull man I was; and yet, though Adam was always
saying and doing the things I was making up my mind to say and do,
I think Margaret cared more for me. Nevertheless, there was
something about him that all women seemed to find lovable, a dash
that made them send him away and then well-nigh run after him. At
any rate, I could have got her after her mother's death if I had
been half a man. But I went back to Aberdeen to write a poem about
her, and while I was at it Adam married her."

I opened my desk and took from it a yellow manuscript.

"Here," I said, "is the poem. You see, I never finished it."

I was fingering the thing grimly when Gavin's eye fell on
something else in the desk. It was an ungainly clasp-knife, as
rusty as if it had spent a winter beneath a hedge.

"I seem to remember that knife," he said.