The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  With a slight sense of shock he realised she was now talking of Martin. “. . . A brave soldier, though never a regular soldier, like those before him. But he was in the Territorials, and some liked him as an officer and some didn’t. They said he was not too reliable—I don’t know. He had some queer opinions they said, and once there was a terrible row between him and the old Colonel of the regiment, but I don’t know.” She suddenly stopped, as if her objective vision had blurred. He looked at her quiet but strangely mournful expression and felt baffled.

  “He was a brave soldier?”

  “Yes. He was decorated.”

  “What for?”

  “Bravery on the field. They say he should have got the V C.”

  “What did he get?”

  “The M C. He saved the life of a local boy, he carried him on his back.”

  Though it remained quiet and contained, her expression was now beginning to embarrass him.

  “He wasn’t captured at Dunkirk?”

  “No. He fought through that and came home.” She lifted her eyes to the window.

  “Then he went out East?”

  “After a time, yes. Since he came back he has been strange. They say he walks at night along the shores.” She was going to add something when Anna passed the window. “I have been keeping you with all my talk,” she said apologetically.

  “I have enjoyed the talk very much. You have no idea how interesting I find it.”

  “Have you been talking with old Fachie yet?”

  “Yes. We’ve had a few words.”

  “A few words! Do you mean to say you were able to get away from him?”

  She was herself again and he chuckled.

  But when she had gone out, he could not help wondering what other odd things Martin did besides wander along the shore at night. For a time he stood staring through the window, aware of the silent wash of man’s history as of tides on shores, all the shores of the world. The evening was calm and silent, and its green light mounted the tumbled ground beyond the stream and caught the stone chimney of a concealed cottage, from which a clean blue smoke rose untroubled. The blue evoked a memory of the sea around an Aegean island. A woman’s voice in the distance cried her young son home. A dog barked. He looked about him, saw his hat, and went out.

  Fachie was going round the gable-end of his thatched cottage, his small old body bent like a bow, moving slowly as if shepherding visible things into the house for the night. It wouldn’t be dark until after eleven and even then a very deep dusk rather than a true darkness. The half-light, with its glimmer, had always had for him a curious historic reality, as though the world in this quiet hour turned itself into a stage whereon all that had been could once more be, but invisibly now and therefore magically. The word “magic” was as professionally real to him as the word “atom” to a physicist. He knew his learned theories. But, unlike the physicist, he had to translate his concepts in terms of human behaviour. He did not dislike doing this but he had to be very wary in doing it, or they would not permit him, even in method, the use of the word “scientific”.

  The trouble with this half-light was that it made the word “scientific” magical, and as the mood of the twilight grew in its airy and subtle delight, a silent and delicious mockery translated “scientific” into a mumbo-jumbo word, stripped its portentous solemnity from it and left it naked as any totem-pole. Once he had written an essay called “The Heresy of the Twilight”, but feeling that its irony was insufficiently concealed and its wit concealed only too well, he had modestly refrained from offering it for publication.

  From his medley of self-evolving thoughts, he awoke to find himself well away from Clachar, having followed a path which had brought him near the base of the first inland hill. Perhaps the sight of Fachie had unconsciously been heading him towards what that little old man had described as “the robbers’ glen”. He had got some old lore out of Fachie, though most of his talk had been of boyhood happenings, interesting but of no archaeological value. In talking to old inhabitants, one often went through the whole midden without unearthing the smallest of small finds; yet one had to be as patient and attentive as though excavating a real midden. But he had not properly begun on Fachie yet. So far, two points of interest had cropped up. The first referred to an uncouth human figure which haunted the Stone Circle. Mrs Sidbury had said something about this, which, though he joked about it at the time, he had mentally noted. Fachie had not been too willing to talk, apparently because it was “just old blethers”, but he had given the figure a name—Urisk. This hairy monstrous man of popular Gaelic legend lived in the cairn and came out only at night. “Ach, they would believe anything in the old days,” said Fachie, with a side-glance at the learned one beside him. “No one believes it now at all at all. There was a lot of superstition about such things in the old days.”

  “Perhaps there is more in superstition than always meets the eye,” Grant had suggested. And the little old man had asked, with the same quick sidelong look, “Do you think so now?”

  It had been an interesting half-hour, cram full at least of primitive psychology! But after all, the important point did emerge, namely, that such a superstition would have inevitably helped to keep the cairn intact. No natives of past generations would ever have had an urge to liberate an urisk! The boldest of them, the warrior who freed maidens from monsters and giants in castles, would merely have put more stones on his cairn to keep him down. They did stranger things to ward off the spirits of the dead.

  But the mention of a robbers’ glen had sent him back to his six-inch Ordnance Map in the hope that he might find thereon some reference to an antiquity. He had, however, found none. “In olden times they do say it was a terrible place for robbers. I remember my old grandfather saying they had a den there. No, no road went through that place, but they hid there, and came out to rob travellers. That was the story.” And it was clear from Fachie’s tone that he felt himself on much firmer ground with the robbers than with the urisk.

  “Has anyone been robbed by them in your time?” he had asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t say it was in my time; no, not in my time; though the place had an evil name, and as boys we wouldn’t readily have gone that way, no, not that way.”

  He would talk many times with old Fachie were it only to be enchanted by the rhythm in his voice. The rhythm went on like the ridges of the hills or the slip and slide of the waves, and could use repetition for solemnity or wit, together with a light in the eye. Was he physically a stunted growth from Palaeolithic times? One of the little folk who followed the receding glaciers in the last Ice Age, while the island of Britain was still part of the continent of Europe, and the Thames flowed northward up through the middle of what became the North Sea and was joined by the river Ness from Inverness somewhere off the coast of Norway? Hunting reindeer in the Robbers’ Glen like any Lapp?

  Sweating by the time he got to the first ridge, he hardly noticed it, he was so interested in checking what he saw by the contour map in his head. He dipped down, to rise along a slow shoulder of dead-brown heather, with occasional pale-pink blooms of the cross-leafed heath and other growths that sometimes brought him to a standstill. For everything interested him, a flower, a bird, grass or moss, in a natural factual way that was friendly rather than emotional. He knew them as things come upon; now and then his eyes lit up.

  The Robbers’ Glen was nothing much to look at; it was indeed as bare as a scoop, except for some small birches on a steep slope in its lower reach before it faded out where its tiny tributary ran almost at right angles into the Clachar burn.

  The old drove road (long disused) went up by the mountains. Doubtless it was this cross-country traffic of the old days which the robbers had attacked! But where was their stronghold? At least, where could it possibly have been? For there wasn’t even a croft ruin to Grant’s practised eye, and his eye saw the whole two or three miles of the simple glen as it rose slowly towards the mountains. No life moved on it; not ev
en a sheep. Indeed it seemed too deserted, too silent, with something dimly ominous in its air. Feeling he was now being moved by Fachie’s long-pondered fancies, he smiled and turned to the west.

  The sun was sinking beyond the rim of the western sea in a stupendous glory. Fiery cloud convoluted in a slowness that matched the majesty. A red visor veiled the sun god’s eyes; the wide-spaced shoulders humped; the great arms flattened and came to rest upon the horizon bar. Behind the red visor, seeing but unseen, the eyes. From them, Grant’s own eyes ran along the floor of the sea, tripped over the islands and fell into Clachar. Quieter the place was than the god’s thought; more secretively subtle than that thought’s vast extension might encompass; more innocent its mask than one who had never lost innocence might know. In stretching himself upon the hill-top, he slid happily behind the mask, behind the still faces of the cottages that gave nothing away; then quietly, invisibly, moved hither and thither, until he came to rest by the cairn in its circle of standing stones.

  The stones were like men turned to the cairn in homage or worship; but they were also like men guarding the cairn, motionless as soldiers he had seen guarding the tomb of a dead king, one tall like a leader, the others squat; and then in a moment he perceived, with a strange and disturbing twist of thought, that they were not only guarding the tomb, they were also hemming it in.

  No one really knew why these stones had been set in a circle; and it might now be taken as fairly certain that no one ever would. He had long ceased to wonder about it. Before some ever-youthful theory of sun worship, he smiled, with a tolerant “Perhaps—who knows?” All he did know was that man’s worship was devious beyond following and vastly more ardent than the mystery of the stones.

  Then, as always in such fluid fancy, a knot formed about the one solitary fact, namely, that the cairn was a great tomb; and instantly, as if his mind were indeed a radioactive substance emitting thoughts of an inconceivable swiftness, he completed the destruction of the world by atomic bombs, saw the cairn of Westminster Abbey and a future race of archaeologists opening it up. The evidence would disclose that this had been a chambered tomb in the Pre-Atomic Age. And to the inevitable idealist who would put forward the theory that something—perhaps an Ancestor—had been worshipped here, a future Simon Grant would tolerantly reply, “Perhaps—who knows?”

  Westminster Abbey and Stonehenge, the Kremlin and the Stone Circle in Clachar. Up swooped his thought upon its metaphysical air and he comprehended in a flash that idealist and materialist were both right, that they separated in order to gather their strength to come together in higher fusion; to separate and come together again. And then, induced like the flash between positive and negative, his thought apprehended that they were never really separated, that the famous dialectical process was merely another of man’s illusions, helpful as crutches or Euclidean figures were helpful but essentially an illusion; much as the physicists, long contending between their theories of waves and particles, were now accepting the notion that waves and particles were but different aspects of the same thing.

  He gave an involuntary shiver, for he had been heated in his climb and an air came coolly from the sea. Swivelling round for a last look at the Robbers’ Glen, he was stilled on his supporting palms.

  A man was walking down there who had come from nowhere.

  Shocked beyond thought he lowered himself to the heather. The figure was too solid for an apparition, yet had all the solitariness of one. He watched him for quite a time, just watched him, fascinated. The man continued in his purposeful way down the glen.

  During the few minutes he had been fancifully contemplating the west, the man could not conceivably have come from the mountain and down the glen to where he now was. The place had been empty, and lo! there the fellow was with a small bundle over his back, held by one hand, walking away down below by the side of the stream.

  He must have been sitting down resting. But the thought was not convincing. He did not move like a figure that had been resting. Besides, he never looked up, and Grant had been striding about on the skyline.

  When he had passed by him, Grant crawled forward a little. His long sight was good, but he now made a small funnel of his fist and peered through it with his right eye, and at once the movement of the figure was vaguely familiar.

  It’s Martin! he thought.

  There could be no certainty, because the distance was long and the light beginning to go, but all the same he was quite certain. He followed the figure until it dwindled at the glen mouth and turned away out of sight by the Clachar burn. It was a very roundabout way of going home to Clachar House!

  For a long time he wondered; then feeling like a spy who must not be seen, he retreated down the hillside to his lodging.

  Chapter Nine

  It was Tuesday, blue-skied, and Simon Grant was enjoying himself with the earnestness which time leaves alone. He had his reflex camera, with large focusing-screen, whose reactions were known to him intimately, naked or in filter, together with its head-like movements on the universal joint of its telescopic tripod, and he called it, with obscure but pleasurable irony, his innocent eye. Before its pictures, the scientific critics bowed down. His prismatic compass, which he could carry before him as a deacon his church-offering, gave him his ground angles, and his Abney clinometer his vertical angles. He had his linen measuring tape, his rulers, his numbered pegs, and many odds and ends besides. He had his daybook for recording both his actual doings and his vagrant ideas. And finally there was the drawing-board, with its squared paper, upon which were set down in their true spatial relations all things that he deemed necessary for an accurate plan of cairn and circle.

  It was exciting work because he made it exquisitely exciting; he was so happy that he looked stern; and not, indeed, until he was finally rough-checking the height of the cairn, as ascertained by line and angle, did his world collapse. The check consisted in the simple process of measuring the cairn against his own eye-height: thus, he climbed up until he got the top of the cairn on a level with his eye and then noted with care the stone upon which he stood; having climbed down backwards until he got this stone on a level with his eye, he now noted the next stone upon which he stood and saw that when he got to earth he could measure its height from the ground against his yard rule; but as he kept his eye on this final mark and stepped down an unstable stone threw him backwards and, but for the luck that was with him, he might have dislocated his spine.

  Anna found him lying twisted on the grass, but when she kneeled and put her hand on his brow, he opened his eyes at once, stared at her for a moment with an odd remoteness, and sat up. Slapping a hand to his side, he yet smiled as he saw the death fear fade like a frost from her face.

  “I had a tumble and felt a bit sick,” he explained. “Am all right. Absolutely.”

  “Granny was wondering why you never came home for lunch.” Warmth was invading her face.

  “It’s not that time!” He looked at his watch. “Three o’clock! Good gosh!” He had anticipated being finished with his map-work by one, and had hoped to spend a pleasant afternoon at home inking-in the pencil on his plan and having everything ready for a working start on the cairn in the morning when Foolish Andie and his mother were due to appear. “I’m sorry, Anna.” He looked at her with mirth in his eyes, for in his five days at the cottage he had grown fond of her in the friendliest way.

  “It’s all right,” answered Anna smiling, for it didn’t matter how many hours he was late if he was all right himself. It was that kind of blessed cottage. “Are you finished?” The reserved politeness of her voice had its unvarying charm.

  “Yes. Do you think you could give me a hand home with some of the gear?”

  “Yes, sir. Surely.”

  He got up carefully but was all right except for a bruised feeling down his right side. He stretched himself exaggeratedly, saying, like an embarrassed schoolboy, “Don’t call me sir, Anna. I have a great respect for your granny and yourself—and especially
for Sheena. If we left these pegs in the ground I don’t suppose anyone would touch them?”

  “I don’t think so. But I could easily——”

  “We’ll chance it.”

  They went home together.

  Later that afternoon, with his plans and inks before him, he found himself thinking about her as he stared out of his sitting-room window. The Colonel might say he was a romantic, but he knew himself as very shrewd. Her unfortunate predicament naturally drew his sympathy but did not cloud his judgement. She was no wanton. That was certain. But she had a softness, a kind deep softness. Yet even that lay, as it were, like a beauty between her strong bones. There was a certain light in her eyes, when she was momentarily embarrassed and glanced away, which had something beautifully tragic in it. She was no wanton, but, with her affections stirred, she might be misled, wholly and fatally, and, he concluded, perhaps with no vast difficulty.

  He nodded, pressing his lips together, and a frown came between his eyebrows. He had a hunch that some soldier had done it who wasn’t engaged to her and wasn’t killed. Had it been a true case of her boy being killed, he would have heard the story before now. This was the kind of cottage that did not make up such a story for appearance’ sake. And from many signs—the postmaster’s expression in Kinlochoscar, to begin with—he had come to know that there was no story but the very ancient one of a lassie being left with the baby. His frown deepened as anger probed, for it still remained amazing to him how any damn fellow could have deserted a girl like Anna. She was a practical, hardworking, kind-hearted girl, but she was also at moments a distinguished woman, who, dressed up and bearing herself with her natural reserve, would stand out in any company. I should think so! And not much of the right company left for her to stand out in, by God! he concluded with some spirit and wrath.