by Neil M. Gunn
“I know it,” said Martin.
“It’s a matter simply of opening up the cairn, just to see what’s inside. But it means entry on your land, though, of course, I should see that nothing was really—uh—messed about.” A frank flash came from the blue eyes.
The flash was not acknowledged and the letter was quietly shoved into an outside pocket. “How is Colonel Mackintosh?”
“He’s very well; only wishing, he said, that he could come up himself to see you—and get the job done properly.”
Now a faint dry humour gathered about Martin’s eyes, a certain irony, which gave the face an aloof attractiveness. Grant heard the slight expulsion of breath from the nostrils and caught the smell of whisky. Presumably Mr Martin had had his afternoon tea not in the lounge but in the public bar behind the hotel.
“You’re going on there now, to the Stone Circle?”
“Yes. There is a stone circle round the cairn, but the actual work, of course, will be on the cairn—I mean, I shan’t interfere with the standing stones.”
“I see,” said Martin, the dry humour already gone. The jet-black hair, a certain pallor, the fine features—it could be a very expressive face. But the mask was habitual, indifferent, and as quiet as stone.
Grant had nothing more to say.
“Well, shall we go on?” With that objective look which seemed to pause and contemplate its object, Martin moved on.
“I hope you really don’t mind,” said Grant, his own tone firming.
“Not really,” answered Martin. “To tear the guts out of everything is characteristic, I suppose.” His tone remained uninterested.
“Characteristic of what?” inquired Grant.
“Of our age.” He half turned his head. “Or don’t you think so?”
“It all depends on the point of view.” Grant smiled ahead, for he could be angry as he could be merry, and as quickly.
“And your point of view?”
“Is that knowledge helps.”
“Helps what?”
“Humanity,” said Grant succinctly.
They walked on.
“Are you to do all the digging yourself?” inquired Martin presently.
“I hope to find some labour, though I had supposed that may be difficult.”
“Very difficult, I should say, if not quite impossible.”
They had come down the slope and now a winding belt of small birch trees ahead indicated a stream of which Grant presently caught a glimpse.
“I don’t suppose you could suggest,” he said politely, “any possible source of labour? A man of any age would do, so long as he can lift stones or dig?”
“I’m afraid—not. The old here cultivate their crofts or go to sea to fish occasionally. Productive labour—which they might be unwilling to forgo.”
With an effort Grant said nothing. The road came within a hundred yards of the stream, on whose bank he saw a woman knitting, a dark-brown shawl round her head. A man was staggering about in the water below her. A motor car came noisily towards them and Martin stopped. “You might,” he said, “get the man in the burn there to help you. I rather think the job he’s on is about finished. But the woman will tell you.” His talk was now easy and cool as his courtesy. The car drew up beside them. “Got her right?” he asked the driver.
“She needs a new gasket,” answered the fair-haired young man who seemed to have acquired some of his employer’s expressionless manner. “I’ll turn her here.” A rough cart track went from the road towards the stream, and while the car was being turned, Martin said to his fellow traveller. “If you care to come along and see us, do.”
“Thank you.” Grant’s nod was nearly a bow, but as the car drove off, he said to himself, “‘Productive labour’—damn him!” He hitched up his rucksack, wiped his brow, and started for the woman by the stream. All at once he found himself in a furious temper. He paused for a moment to let it rip, then, much relieved, he went on and removed his tweed hat with the friendliest gesture.
The aged face, framed by its shawl, was heavy and solemn, the unwinking eyes a faded blue. The expression was that of a woman quietly on guard, waiting to hear what had to be said. Grant said it straight away, and did not omit the fact that he had been directed to her by Mr Martin. It would be perfectly simple labour, he explained; neither so heavy nor so wet, he added with his engaging smile, as heaving these boulders from the stream. The crack of one boulder on another drew his startled attention. The shambling figure in the stream had now turned his face towards them and Grant saw that it was an idiot’s face. The trousers were tucked up to the thighs and the body staggered on bare feet.
“My son,” the woman said, “is engaged under the County Council for road work. But just now he is only taking the stones up to be ready for the breaking. There is no hurry for this. Indeed he has taken enough and he is only going on now in case they will be needing it all.”
“I see,” said Grant, quietened, hardly knowing where to look.
“So we would be very glad if you could engage him. He is a good worker and very strong.”
Grant felt the eyes on his face. The woman had talked in the matter-of-fact tone of one used to conducting such business, but there was a patience somewhere, a dumb waiting, that swept all anger away and left him uncomfortably but deeply moved.
“Very well,” he said, nodding. “We’ll see. Yes—I’ll think it over.”
“Five shillings for the whole day, if that’s not too much, though indeed he will be making much more when he is at the stone-breaking.”
“I think it’s too little,” he declared, hitching up his rucksack. “However, I must be going now. Could you tell me the nearest way to the Stone Circle?”
She was pointing to a footpath that left the road, when her son intervened. The face was upturned directly below them and through the thick protruding lips of the large mouth came sounds like “Gu-gu-gu——”
As though she perfectly understood, she pointed to certain stones. “Take them, and that should about do.” His gaze followed her pointing finger and saw the stones, then he made for them earnestly, his broad shoulders dipping to the wading shambling gait.
“Very well, then,” said Grant. “I’ll let you know. And thank you very much.”
“We stay in the first house, on the way in. You can just see it.”
He followed her hand and saw it.
“You will find him a good worker,” she said. “And I am always with him myself.”
“I can see he is a good worker,” he answered, smiling and touching his hat. “Good day, and thank you again.”
Chapter Three
He muttered to himself as he walked away and gave small embarrassed laughs. Hang it, it had been awkward! And oh lord, that look in her face, knowing he was wanting to clear out, to make no arrangement, having stumbled on the unmentionable. Her son!
Life is pure mystery, he said in marvel, thinking of the woman, aware again of the dumb patience, the silent knowledge, her face beside him on the air. Like a guilty schoolboy, he hardly knew how to contain his smile or where to look; so he looked for the path, saw it ahead, joined it by a short cut, followed its zigzag up the slowly rising ground, and emerged on a broad back of land whence Clachar in all its dimensions lay before him to the north.
It was still and somehow very old, caught by the sunlight and held, as in an ancient almost wearied enchantment. Two of the three islands were flat and green, unexpectedly green, and the sea between them and the land was a deep blue, changing inshore to patches of bottle green and of purple. The stream found the sea through a breadth of hummocky land where houses faced about in many directions, before they spaced themselves out in more orderly fashion as they came up the valley with the road to Kinlochoscar. Not more than about a score of them all told, but from the configuration of the land and the islands of shelter and retreat in the sea, Grant knew that human life had indeed been here since prehistoric times.
His eyes moved westward from the h
ouses, from the little fields with their green crops, the grazing land dotted with lying cattle, to a belt of trees about a large house; concentrated, with a sudden knitting of eyebrows, on the stone walls, the roofs, the outhouses, the narrow sea inlet like a private harbour; and withdrew over the brows of cliffs, upward towards himself, until they paused where the land flattened, and saw the circle of standing stones with the great stone mound in its midst. His eyebrows grew smooth and his eyes round and steady. “That’s it,” he said softly to himself, as if the stones were waiting for him to come home.
Forgetting to look where his feet went, he put one of them in a rabbit burrow and might easily have broken his leg as he fell headlong, but though it was fifty-two years old his body was light and even nimble. He sat for a little while, however, ignoring the tweed hat which had rolled on, because now he felt extraordinarily happy. I might easily have broken my leg, he thought, trying to sober himself. But it was so exactly the kind of place where he wanted to work, the very kind of world where he wanted to be. The time and the place and the adventure together. Lord, I’m lucky! he murmured, in slow wonder and gratitude as he rubbed a muscle. Then he went down more soberly to the circle of stones.
Except for one tall monolith in the southwest, the standing stones were of no particular height, but the size of the cairn excited him. For a long time he wandered about in a restless way; occasionally he paused to touch a standing stone, to scrape the lichen off, to feel as well as to see the texture; he took out his pocket compass; he got on his knees; he studied alignments, real or imaginary, head to side like a connoisseur before a masterpiece; and once when he obviously and deliberately looked for something and found it by kicking some turf off a small hummock, he sat down on it. But in a minute he was up again, walking away from the cairn, head bent, as if he had lost money through a hole in his trousers pocket on an imaginary avenue. Actually, however, he was wearing knickerbockers of a greenish Harris tweed, which, being cut to the design of an older day, were not noticeably baggy about the knees and in fact clearly showed the buckle fastening over the stocking. Money, indeed, was about the last thing to worry him, not that he had much of it, but what with a lectureship and a banker who could be utterly relied on to look after a bachelor’s modest investments with discretion, he had enough. At last, turning round, he gazed back into the circle, standing very still now, his mouth open and the lower jaw with the clipped pointed beard twisted to one side. The blue eyes caught a glint as the eyelids quivered, for his concentration was considerable; then the jaw came back into position, the lips met and pressed, and just perceptibly the head nodded—not, obviously, in perfect assurance, but with that remnant of doubt which produces the true suppressed excitement.
After these and other preliminary skirmishings, including a diametrical spanning of the outer circle of standing stones in which he lost his hat without losing count of his yard-long paces, he approached the heart of the matter which was the cairn. Herein lay what mystery there might be, what treasure, archaeological or literal, time might have hoarded for this hour.
One thing at least was clear; the cairn had never been opened up. It would contain a chamber or chambers built and roofed over in the Neolithic Age, when man used stone implements and weapons. It might be many, many centuries older than Stonehenge. It might contain—what no chambered cairn had ever contained before. It was like a book that had never been opened—and might be a masterpiece. To skulls and bones there might be added something that his fingers would feel and his eyes look upon in revelation and in triumph. There is a sense, he had once argued (when his chief, Colonel Mackintosh, had called him an incurable romantic) in which all scientists, and particularly archaeologists, are romantics of the purest dye, indeed childish romantics (he was an impassioned arguer when roused), because why?—because they are forever hunting the unknown; even the aristocratic mathematicians hunt their unknown, the X in their algebra. X is their treasure trove (shouted Grant, growing warmer) and if there wasn’t an X, damned the hunt would they do at all. And that’s why (and with a sweeping gesture he interrupted his chief) when they do find it, like the mystery in the heart of the atom, that’s why they are so astonished when the other fellows, who are not romantics, use it to blow us all to blazes.
A yard was a longish stride for a man of his height, but when, pacing along a straight line by the cairn in order roughly to estimate its length, he was occasionally thrown off his balance by the uneven ground, he held to one rocking leg with a wonderful pertinacity. With a hesitating count of thirty-eight, for end stones were splayed out somewhat, he decided that, as cairns went, it might, without undue exaggeration, be called a whopper of a cairn. He climbed up it and down it; he walked round it; he climbed up it again and from his geological knowledge came at certain topographical and social conclusions as he gazed around, noting the shape of the hills, the alluvial flatness around the lower stretches of the small river, and the islands—one in particular now green as an emerald, with pearls that were sheep on it. Finally he began to poke and pull at deliberately chosen spots in the cairn itself until he began to evolve such theories that he felt it was time to stop. Even phantasy should be come at from rock bottom.
As he was shouldering his rucksack he missed his hat, retrieved it, and with a last lingering look at the cairn murmured happily that it was pure virgin. Then he went ahead towards the houses of Clachar, confident now of wheedling a bed out of an aged cripple. The ground began to descend and lo! here was a vast stone like a rock. The whole place was clearly reeking with prehistory. His approach, however, grew more tentative as he perceived something curled in the shadow at its base. It was a young woman with dark-red hair and a child of about four snuggled against her breast. They were both fast asleep. The child’s face had the dreamlike beauty that is hardly of the earth; the hair was amber, the skin fair as fine beeswax; the lips were parted in the innocence that comes by nature to the female child. The woman’s hair had a tawny depth, her face a strong but regular mould; a still, generous face and mouth, a straight nose and real eyebrows; but what took Grant was a fairness of skin which gave the odd impression that its light came from within, though perhaps the impression was enhanced by the freckles.
He was suddenly moved, and at the same moment, as if his thought had touched her, she opened her eyes. After her first bewildered stare, her thought was for decorum, but she was all right and sat up.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, turning away. So natural had her instinctive movements been that she had not awakened the child, and Grant stopped. He was ashamed to stop, but he stopped. “I am very sorry,” he said in a quiet voice, “if I disturbed you.” He had a habit at such a moment of touching his hat, or rather of catching its brim between thumb and forefinger and giving it a tiny up-down movement, as though the total removal of the hat would be altogether too arrogant a gesture.
“It’s all right,” she said and smiled with a warming smother of confusion, which enriched the skin as she bent her eyes on her child.
“To tell the truth,” he said, coming back an uncertain pace or two, “I was wondering, when I saw you, if anyone could tell me if it’s possible to get a room anywhere in Clachar. I tried the hotel in Kinlochoscar and several houses, but every place is full up. The manageress of the hotel said I might find a room here.”
She supported herself with one hand as she answered thoughtfully, “I don’t know.”
“Any kind of place would do, so long as there’s a bed.”
“There are two houses—but they have visitors.” She hesitated.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “it looks as if I’m fated to sleep out all night.” And he smiled.
“My grandmother, sometimes . . . but we have no water in the house.”
It was on Grant’s tongue to say joyously that the whole world was his bathroom, but he had a natural modesty before women, so he said, “That’s nothing. I have been in countries where water is scarcer than wine, and as for a—water-tap——” He dismisse
d it as a fabulous wonder. “Please don’t let that trouble you.”
“I—could ask my grandmother. But——”
He thanked her a thousand times and asked her grandmother’s name.
“Mrs Cameron. That’s the house—the one with the white gable to the burn.” Once more he followed a pointing hand. “But,” she continued doubtfully, “I am not sure—”
“What an attractive cottage!” he cried so loudly that the child woke up. “And now I have wakened your child.”
“It’s all right,” she said, gathering the bewildered child towards her. “My grandmother was going up the road to a neighbour’s house, but if you cared to call in an hour or two——”
“I’ll do that. Thank you very much,” and this time he caught the crown of his hat, removed it wholly, and walked away.
Now as he walked what he saw were her fingers spread flat against the child’s back, each as naked of a ring as when it was born. “Your child,” he had said. Not that that would really have mattered, if in fact it weren’t her child. But even to a confirmed bachelor real motherhood has its signs. It was when the child had grown petulant and the mother had bent her head, that the naked hands had, so to speak, looked at him.
Chapter Four
Realising he was blindly heading for Clachar House, he decided all in a moment to head on. It was high time he had this business settled definitely with Mr Donald Martin. The whole way the fellow had behaved left much to be desired, apart from any question of manners. Even his invitation to call round had about it now not so much the air of a polite afterthought as a studied intention. He may have wanted time to make up his mind as to whether he should allow anyone to—to—what were his words—“to tear the guts out . . .” Pretty cool, not to say insulting. It was, really. As if these blessed fellows owned the earth itself! And then they wondered why there were socialists! He staggered, for he had had no lunch and his body felt featherweight. But his mind was wonderfully clear, and was now strengthened at the prospect of a bed in a cottage. Hotels worried him, for the things inside them got in his way. In any case he had fully intended, after a night or two in the hotel, to find a cottage. Two guineas a week instead of seven made a difference over two or three months; more than enough to take one on a tramp steamer to Greece and back, or even Egypt, though things were getting a bit messed up thereabouts these days. Perhaps the old Colonel mightn’t get east after all! Grant’s good humour returned, and he thought the young woman’s face had something generous, spendthrift, beneath the firm bone. Too much so, possibly. Enough anyhow for someone to have taken advantage of it. Then the explanation came in a flash: the father would have been a war casualty; no time to marry—and he didn’t come back.