O Caledonia

Back at the stables, as she made her way out into the yard, Mrs. Jarvis suddenly called to her, “Watch that horse.” Obediently Janet stood and gazed at the rounded chestnut hindquarters and the swishing chestnut tail. Nothing happened; it was boring; her feet were very cold. She became aware that Cynthia and the others were giggling at the doorway. “Come on, Janet, whatever are you doing? We’ll be late for tea.” “Mrs. Jarvis said I was to watch this horse.” “She meant keep away from it, not stand staring at it, you idiot.” “What did I tell you?” Cynthia added, to the faces by the door. “Gormless. Completely gormless.”

Janet began to hate the sea. There was so much of it, flowing, counter-flowing, entering other seas, slyly furthering its interests beyond the mind’s reckoning; no wonder it could pass itself off as sky; it was infinite, a voracious marine confederacy. She saw how it diminished people as they walked along the shore; they lost their identity, were no more than pebbles, part of the sea’s scheme. Once there had been a great forest below the cliffs; there the hairy mammoth had browsed and raised his trunk and trumpeted. There had been mountain crags and deep, sweet valleys of gentle herbivores. The sea had come and taken them. Later it had taken churches too, and on wild nights you could listen for their bells. The air was loud enough with bells already; Janet preferred to listen for the hairy mammoth.

On Sunday in church she sang with fervour,

O hear us when we cry to theeFor those in peril on the sea

The minister often chose a maritime text: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord,” or “Many waters cannot quench love.” The wonderful words were almost enough to make Janet believe in God. At Christmas, too, the starry sky and the beauty of language and music caused a great surge of mystic yearning in her; then Mr. McConochie would harangue them, remind them of their unworthiness and guilt, the innocent babe born to die on their behalf. “Sighing, crying, / Bleeding, dying, / Shut in the stone cold tomb,” they sang, and the glory faded to heartbreak and desolation, the bleak light of afternoon.

She thought now of something which had happened the previous summer. Early one morning four students from Edinburgh University had stolen a fishing boat from the harbour and merrily set course for deep waters. The sun, an enormous orange disc, cleared the misty horizon, the air was still, the sea sparkled. They dived from the high bow and swam and frolicked. Then they realised that they had forgotten to put a ladder down; there was nothing, no rope, no lifebelt, only the steep black sides of the boat, slippery and glistening in the cold sunbeams and a great stretch of empty sea. They all perished; the paintwork was scored and runnelled by their fingernails. “Many waters cannot quench love.” That could be so; the sea nevertheless had taken them and there had been no help from God. Some of course said that it was a judgement; they should not have taken the boat. Mr. McConochie was of this opinion; he had discussed the incident with her parents outside his church one Sunday morning: “Aye, well, they kent the rules fine and they broke them. The commandment is there to be obeyed, whether ye be a floozy wee student or the Lord High Advocate. Ye’ll recall the words of Knox: ‘And if thou wilt not, flatter not thyself; the same justice remaineth in God to punish thee, Scotland, and thee, Edinburgh, in especial, that before punished the land of Judah and the city of Jerusalem.’ ”

It did not seem to Janet that this was justice; it was a most cruel quenching of merriment, and there was little enough of gaiety or recklessness around those rocky shores. She thought of that moment when Lorna Doone’s father, riding ahead of the family carriage up a mountain road in Italy, turns in his saddle, doffs his plumy hat, and bows, laughing; then he spurs his horse into a gallop; around the bend they vanish, to plummet over a precipice. There seemed no place for gallantry or romance among Calvinists. They would say that he should have looked where he was going. Clearly he had not been one of the Elect, who were distinguished by perseverance or grim stoicism, and were offered secret divine assistance. But another memory came to her. At the top of a great flight of rickety steps two small boys had paused; the sun shone down on them; they looked back at her and waved and then they vanished into a black void. She had felt no pity for them then, did not feel any now.

Two by two in their prickly tweed coats and their damp felt hats the girls of St. Uncumba’s marched in crocodile through empty streets back to their boarding houses. Bells were clamorous. Cynthia ogled the occasional male passer-by and sang a revolting song about babies,