First coming of the Egyptian
woman.
A learned man says in a book, otherwise beautiful
with truth, that villages are family groups.
To him Thrums would only be a village, though town
is the word we have ever used, and this is not true
of it. Doubtless we have interests in common,
from which a place so near (but the road is heavy)
as Tilliedrum is shut out, and we have an individuality
of our own too, as if, like our red houses, we came
from a quarry that supplies no other place. But
we are not one family. In the old days, those
of us who were of the Tenements seldom wandered to
the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw men
to whom we could not always give a name. To flit
from the Tanage brae to Haggart’s road was to
change one’s friends. A kirk-wynd weaver
might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it
until boys ran westward hitting each other with the
bladders. Only the voice of the dulsemen could
be heard all over Thrums at once. Thus even in
a small place but a few outstanding persons are known
to everybody.
In eight days Gavin’s figure was more familiar
in Thrums than many that had grown bent in it.
He had already been twice to the cemetery, for a minister
only reaches his new charge in time to attend a funeral.
Though short of stature he cast a great shadow.
He was so full of his duties, Jean said, that though
he pulled to the door as he left the manse, he had
passed the currant bushes before it snecked.
He darted through courts, and invented ways into awkward
houses. If you did not look up quickly he was
round the corner. His visiting exhausted him
only less than his zeal in the pulpit, from which,
according to report, he staggered damp with perspiration
to the vestry, where Hendry Munn wrung him like a
wet cloth. A deaf lady, celebrated for giving
out her washing, compelled him to hold her trumpet
until she had peered into all his crannies, with the
Shorter Catechism for a lantern. Janet Dundas
told him, in answer to his knock, that she could not
abide him, but she changed her mind when he said her
garden was quite a show. The wives who expected
a visit scrubbed their floors for him, cleaned out
their presses for him, put diamond socks on their
bairns for him, rubbed their hearthstones blue for
him, and even tidied up the garret for him, and triumphed
over the neighbours whose houses he passed by.
For Gavin blundered occasionally by inadvertence,
as when he gave dear old Betty Davie occasion to say
bitterly—
“Ou ay, you can sail by my door and gang to
Easie’s, but I’m thinking you would stop
at mine too if I had a brass handle on’t.”
So passed the first four weeks, and then came the
fateful night of the seventeenth of October, and with
it the strange woman. Family worship at the manse
was over and Gavin was talking to his mother, who
never crossed the threshold save to go to church (though
her activity at home was among the marvels Jean sometimes
slipped down to the Tenements to announce). when Wearyworld
the policeman came to the door “with Rob Dow’s
compliments, and if you’re no wi’ me by
ten o’clock I’m to break out again.”
Gavin knew what this meant, and at once set off for
Rob’s.
