by John Buchan
‘They can’t. They saw us come here.’
‘Then we’re for it. We might as well have stayed on the Tjaldar.’
‘Oh, Peter John, what a mess we’ve made of everything!’ the girl wailed.
Suddenly the boy’s eyes opened wide to a strange spectacle. Just in front of them the causeway made by the rib of the hill was somewhat broken, and a glimpse could be got of the swamp farther to the north. In this gap appeared the foolish heads and poised necks of a little flock of pink-foot. They were young birds who, having been hatched out in the Goose Flat had spent their early adolescence on the sea skerries, and had now, according to their ancestral habit, returned for a little to their birthplace. They were chattering among themselves, apparently alive to the presence of something novel in front, about which they desired to be better informed.
By the mercy of God Peter John remembered a piece of lore that he had learned from the wild-fowlers at Hanham in January. The pink-foot is not a skeery bird. He has resolved that his duty is not to live but to know, and he is nearly the most inquisitive thing in creation. If you want to get in range of him, Samson Grose had said, show yourself, and the odds are that he will move nearer you to discover what sort of thing you are. With young pink-foot, that is; older birds have learned wisdom.
To Anna’s amazement the boy got to his feet, while his right hand held her down… She saw the echelon of geese stop and confide things to each other. Every eye of them was on to Peter John, and after a moment’s hesitation they began to move forward. They seemed oddly self-conscious, for they did not keep looking in his direction. Some would stop for a second to feed, and all kept turning their heads every way. But the whole flock was steadily drifting south, as if there was some compulsion in their rear. In five minutes they had moved at least ten yards.
The pink-foot were in sight of the watchers, and Peter John was not. Would the watchers draw the inference desired? They must do it at once, for if the geese came too near, they would lose their heads, stream back, and all would be lost. To one who did not know their habits the conclusion must surely be clear. The children were behind them, and their presence there was making them move south. Therefore it was in the north part of the Goose Flat that they must be sought. They had been seen to disappear behind the rib of hill, but they must have crawled back and got in the rear of the geese.
Peter John’s heart was in his mouth, as he stood staring at the bobbing heads and projected necks of these absurd pink-foot, who to him and Anna meant everything. At any moment he himself might come within sight of some watcher who had shifted ground. Two lots of human beings, invisible to each other, were regarding some foolish winged creatures with desperate intentness. It was a new way of taking the auspices.
Then on the boy’s ear fell that which was like an answer to his prayers. A whistle was blown up on the hillside, and answered by another from the direction of the sea. The pink-foot had been correctly observed… A second later he had confirmation, for something had come north of the geese to alarm them. They stopped their leisurely advance, and straggled to left and right. The watchers had appeared to hunt for the fugitives in the north end of the swamp.
There was no time to lose, for when they found their search fruitless they would undoubtedly cast south. Peter John dragged Anna out of the foot of mud where she sat like a nestling wild-duck, and the two scrambled out of the bog and raced for their lives along the harder skirts of the hill. They did not stop till they had rounded the flank of the massif of the Isle, and were looking down on the Bird Marsh and the rolling barrens beyond it. Only once had Peter John glanced back, and that was to see the pink-foot, shaken out of their comfortable ways, bunching for a seaward flight. Once they were in the deep of the Marsh, where Anna knew the paths, they felt reasonably secure, and dared to draw breath again. As Anna cast herself on a patch of heather she could not resist one word of reproach. ‘I was right all along about the Martin man. If we had steered south as he told us we should have missed this heart-disease. We might even be home and having breakfast.’
When she had recovered her breath she spoke again.
‘That was very clever of you, Peter John. I’ll never laugh at you again for being silly about birds. I thought you had gone mad till I saw your plan. It was a miracle, and I feel happy now. We are going to win, never fear.’
‘I wish I knew how,’ said the boy dolefully. ‘We have slipped through them, but we have still to get into the House… I wonder if they’ve any notion there what’s happening… And after that?’ The brutes are three or four to our one, and they’re desperate.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Anna; ‘we’re going to win. There’ll be another miracle, you’ll see.’ She raised herself and sniffed the air. From where they sat they had no view of the Channel, but the southern part of Halder was in sight. ‘We can’t see the Tjaldar’s anchorage. I wonder if she has come back. Look at the sky over there, Peter John. I said the weather would change in the afternoon, and it’s jolly well going to. There’s the father and mother of a thunderstorm coming up over Halder, and after that it will blow like fury from the east… Lordie, it’s hot, and there’s a plague of daddy-longlegs. That should mean that the Grind are coming. That was what the Martin man said. He may be a scoundrel, but we would have been better off if we had taken his advice this morning.’
Peter John was almost cross. There was no need to rub in the good intentions of Martel, which he knew to be moonshine, and less to babble about pilot whales when the world was crashing about them. ‘Let’s start,’ he said. ‘We’ll have our work cut out getting to the House even from this side.’
Anna let her head sink back on the moss.
‘I feel dreadfully sleepy,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s the storm coming. All the energy has gone out of me… Martin said the Grind would rendezvous at the Stor Rock. That’s only about seven miles from the south end of this island – half-way between it and Kalso.’
An exasperated Peter John got to his feet and regarded the girl as she lay with her eyes half-closed. She certainly looked very weary – and different, too, in other ways. She had become like her father – her skin had suddenly acquired his pallor, and her eyes, when she opened them, his light wildness. And her mind was still on her preposterous whales.
‘You stay here and rest,’ he said, ‘and I’ll go and prospect. There may be some difficult ground to cover, where one will be safer than two.’
‘All right,’ she said sleepily. ‘Come back before the storm begins, for I hate being alone with thunder… I didn’t know there were so many daddy-longlegs in the world.’
Peter John, in a mood between irritation and depression, hopped over the tussocks of the Bird Marsh, struck the shore, and trotted northward on the edge of the shingle. Halder was beginning to veil itself in a gloom as purple as a ripe grape, but the Channel was clear, and there was no sign of the Tjaldar by the other shore. The air was oppressive and still, but he had the feeling that some fury of nature was banking up and would soon be released.
The road, which the other day had seemed but a step or two, was now interminable to his anxious mind. He came in view of the harbour and the cluster of cottages to the south of it; all was peaceful there. Then by way of the channel of a stream he climbed from the shore, and looked suddenly upon the shelf where the House stood.
There was peace there, too, but he saw various ominous things. There were pickets posted – one on the near edge of the main lawn, one on the hill behind, and one above the voe on the road up from the harbour. These pickets were armed. Their business was to see that none entered the House and that none left it. Even as he stared, the one nearest him detected some movement in the back parts and sent over a warning shot; he heard the bullet crack on the stone roof of an outhouse. These watchers were the terriers to guard the earth till the hunters arrived.
Peter John’s first impulse was to dodge the cordon and get into the House. He believed that he could do it, for he must know the ground better tha
n they did. But if he once got in he would not get out again, and Anna would be left deserted. If the House was to be entered it must be in Anna’s company.
There was no time to lose, so he turned and made for the Bird Marsh again, no longer hugging the shore, but taking the short cut across the hill. His last glance back showed the Tjaldar rounding the cliffs north of the harbour. He felt miserably depressed and utterly feeble. The people in the House must know their danger now, but what good was that knowledge to them? There were three men there to face a dozen and more – the crew of the Tjaldar had seemed to him unduly large, and its members had not looked innocent. If Anna and he joined the defence they would only be two more non-combatants… Where, oh, where was Lord Clanroyden? Peter John had come to regard Sandy as the sheet anchor in this affair, the man who had planned the whole strategy, the regular soldier among amateurs. His absence gave him a dreadful sense of confusion and impotence.
Before he reached the Bird Marsh the weather had changed with a vengeance. The purple cloud had crossed the Channel from Halder, and the afternoon had grown as dark as a winter’s gloaming. There was no lightning, but the gloom suddenly burst in a tornado of hail. So violent was the fall that the boy was beaten to the ground, where he lay with his back humped, protecting every inch of exposed skin from that blistering bastinado.
This lasted for perhaps five minutes. But when the hail ceased the sky did not lighten. The ground was white like winter and a wind as icy as the hail blew out of the east. He threaded the Bird Marsh to where he had left Anna, listless in the heat of the summer afternoon… The girl had gone. Peter John lifted up his voice and called her, but there was no answer.
She had not followed him, for in that case he would have met her. It was scarcely possible that the enemy could have arrived from the Goose Flat and captured her. East and west lay impassable lochs. She could only have gone south on to the low dunes which stretched to the butt of the island. The hail had obliterated her tracks in the heather, but a few yards on there was a deep scar in a peat-hagg as if someone had slipped. A little further and there was another foot-mark in the peat. Peter John followed the trail till he was out of the swampy ground and on the thymy slopes.
Suddenly he became aware that there was another sound in his ears beside the whistle of the wind. It came from in front of him, a strange blend of excited shouting and what seemed like the dash of waves on a skerry. At first he thought it the screeching of gulls over a dead porpoise. And then there came a note in it which was human, which must be human – deep voices in the act of giving orders – a note which no animal can compass. He stumbled over the last ridge, and looked down on the big voe into which one of the lochs of the Bird Marsh discharged its waters, and the network of lesser voes which made up the south end of the Island.
The shores of the voe were dense with people, and its surface and that of the lesser voes black with a multitude of boats. But at the heads of each inlet was a spouting and quivering morass in which uncouth men laboured with bloody spears. It was a scene as macabre as any nightmare, but it was orderly too. There were men with papers on the shore pricking off figures… For a second his mind wandered in utter confusion, and then he got the answer. Anna’s tales had come true. The Grind had arrived.
At first he did not realize that this meant salvation. The strangeness of the spectacle lifted it clean out of his normal world. He only knew that Anna was down there, and that he must find her. But as he raced down the slopes, the scene before him began to change. Men left their toil and moved to a post midway up the big voe. The boats from the lesser voes began to draw to the same place. The people with the papers in their hands did likewise – one of them was shouting what sounded like an order. Long before Peter John had reached the point at least three-fourths of the people had moved there… Then as he came nearer he saw a group make a platform of their arms, and someone hoisted on to it.
It was Anna, but an Anna whom he had not known before. Around her was bent and shingle grimed with blood – men with conical caps, and beards like trolls and wild eyes and blood-stained whale spears – a few women like maenads – and as a background a channel chocked with animals dying or dead. She stood on a human platform, like a Viking girl in the Shield-ring, the wind plucking at her skirts and hair, her figure braced against it, her voice shrill and commanding. Something had been re-born in her out of the ages, some ancient power of domination; and something too had been re-born in her hearers, an ancestral response to her call.
She was speaking Norland, of which he understood not one word. What she said, as he learned afterwards, was that pirates were attacking her house and her father, and she summoned the men of the islands to their defence. She struck a note which reverberated through all their traditions, the note of peril from strangers – Norse and Scots rovers, Algerian pirates, who had driven the folk to the caves of the hills. The Norlander is not a fighting man, but he has fighting strains in him if the right chord be touched. Moreover, these men had their blood hot and their spirit high from the Grind hunt…
She saw Peter John, and she seemed to use him to point her appeal. An older man spoke and was answered with a frenzied shouting. Certain men were detailed to keep watch on the Grind – they drew themselves off from the rest as the speaker called their names… Then suddenly Anna was no more on her platform. She had Peter John’s hand in hers, and behind them, racing northward, was the better part of a hundred islanders, babbling like hounds, and in each right hand a reddened whale-spear.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Transformation By Fire
For sheer misery I give the night when the children were missing the top place in my experience. By dinner-time I was anxious; by midnight I was pretty well beside myself; but when morning came with no word of them, I had fallen into a kind of dull, aching torpor. Haraldsen, Lombard and I were on our feet for ten hours, and we dragged the ancient servants after us till their legs gave out. My first thought was naturally for the kayaks, and we ascertained that they were not in the harbour. Gregarsen, the skipper of the now useless motor-boat, was positive that the children had been out in them in the morning, but he had a sort of notion that he had seen them return. The sea was like a mill-pond, so they could not have come to grief through ill weather. My special job was to range the coast, but nowhere on the east side of the island was there any sign of the kayaks, and I had to put the west side off till the next day. Lombard tried the fishing-lochs in case there had been a mishap there. As for Haraldsen, I don’t know what he did except to prowl about like a lost dog. He seemed almost demented, and hardly spoke a word.
When I returned to the House about 5.30, the riding lights of the Tjaldar across the Channel were just going out. I had a momentary idea that the children might have gone there, but I at once rejected it. Neither Peter John nor Anna was the sort of person to condemn their belongings to a night of needless anxiety.
At the corner of the lawn, where a high trellis had been erected to shield a bowling green, I found Haraldsen looking a good deal the worse for wear. But he did not look maniacal, as I must have looked. It was rather as if his mind had withdrawn itself from the outer world altogether. His eyes were almost sightless, like those of an old dog which moons about the doors. He had been in a queer ‘fey’ mood ever since we arrived on the Island, but Anna’s disappearance seemed to have taken the pin out of his wits altogether.
He was staring owlishly at something which was making a commotion at the top of the trellis – staring helplessly and doing nothing about it. It was a bird which had somehow got tangled in the top wires, and was flapping wildly upside-down on the end of a string, and was obviously in a fair way to perish from apoplexy. I saw that it was Morag, caught by the lead.
It didn’t take me long to extricate her, and get savagely bitten in the process. I saw the paper round her leg, and with some difficulty unwound it. My first feeling, as I read it, was a deep thankfulness. At any rate the children were still in the land of the living.
&nb
sp; They were on the Tjaldar. I saw the little ship across the Channel. She had got up steam, and was moving away from her anchorage with her head to the north. But she would return. The message had said that she was our enemies’ base, and that on that day they would attack us.
The news pulled me out of my stupefied misery into a fury of action. I shouted at Haraldsen as if he were deaf. ‘They’ve got the children,’ I cried. ‘Out there on the Tjaldar! God knows how, but they’ve got ’em. They’ve cut the telephone and wrecked the motor-boat, and today they are coming for us… D’you hear? The children are safe so far. But we must prepare to meet an attack. Don’t look like a stuck pig, man. At any rate now we have something to bite on.’
I hustled him into the House, where we found a very gummy-eyed Lombard. I raked up some breakfast from a demoralized household, but I remember that none of us could eat much, though we swallowed a good many cups of tea. And all the time I was discussing our scanty defences, simply to keep my mind and those of the others from ugly speculations… We had a pretty poor lay-out. None of the old servants could be trusted with a gun, for your Norlander knows little of firearms. The only man who might have been of any use was old Absalon the fowler down at the clachan, and he was bed-ridden. The fighting-men were Haraldsen, Lombard, myself and Geordie Hamilton – all of us fair shots, and Haraldsen, as I had discovered, a bit of a marksman. Happily we had plenty of weapons and ammunition. But we had a big area to hold, and the House was ill-adapted for defence – it could be approached on too many sides. We were bound to be outnumbered, and we were badly handicapped by the fact that the enemy had the two children as hostages. From what Sandy had told me of D’Ingraville it was not likely that he would be too scrupulous in the use of them…