by Neil M. Gunn
He got up and poked at his side, which was still bothersome but not much. Her face came before him with the fear on it, the lips parted, the eyes wide, and—the solicitude. It was the only word he could think of. Care and thought, a natural kindness, for other people, that was what distinguished them, what was innate, he decided. And from them his vision jumped to social levels where this quality was not so innate, where on the contrary it was eaten up by an egotism that lived on itself like a rotten cheese.
The happy image restored some of his good humour and he got back to his inking-in. But after supper, with Anna gone to Kinlochoscar, he was in the mood for talk with the old lady, for he had noiselessly opened his door and overheard a new magic story and a new lullaby.
“No, it’s more than bairns’ talk,” he assured her. “It’s out of stories like these that we try to reconstruct the past. For, after all, why should there be magic stories, why should man have been pleased with a magic story? What is it in Sheena that makes her want a story like that above all else?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the old lady.
He laughed, as if her smile had communicated something esoteric, instead of showing an inaptitude for speculative discourse.
“But you see what I mean? Why is man haunted, for example, by the story of the Fall? Why should it have come into his head at all that he had fallen from anything? If we haven’t fallen, but actually climbed, why isn’t it the climb that—that’s the thing?”
“When you fall you hurt yourself,” she said, “and you remember that. Are you feeling quite well now?”
“Yes,” replied Mr Grant in mazed mirth. “Quite well.” He glanced at her to make sure his ebullience was not misunderstood. “And Anna was so kind to me.”
“Yes, she’s a kind girl.”
The quiet tones did not nearly express enough for him, and when he heard her even quieter tones, saying, “She was in the A.T.S. when she fell,” he was so full of his own fall and Anna’s solicitude, that he cried:
“Oh! Did she hurt herself?”
In the gaping silence, the true meaning, of Anna’s “fall” and the birth of Sheena came at him, and he stood appalled, his hot blood flooding his body, which went stiff as a grotesque figure in a magic story.
She was now looking at her knees, which her hands smoothed nervously, smiling in a strange way. The sad smile was being invaded by a queer earthy humour. She got up, muttering something about “keeping him”, and went out. Still transfixed, he listened without breathing and heard what sounded like cackles of laughter.
He moved about, stretched his legs and felt himself stretch longer, choked back his laughter and doubled over his bruised side. The choked laughter was grotesque and tragic; charged with a wild humour he wanted to let rip. “What an idiot!” Ashamed of himself beyond thought, he shook in the armchair.
Chapter Ten
Suddenly he saw the idiot and his mother sitting on the edge of the cairn, its grey bulk behind them, waiting for him. Pausing to take his breath, he turned towards the sea, which was a living blue, a deep sparkling blue, for the sun was still behind his left shoulder on this June morning. Fresh as Creation’s dawn, he tried to murmur to himself, but with no great success, for if anyone could tie himself in knots he was the man, though why this should happen to him, this labour force, this lunacy, the dark gods alone knew. More grimly he approached them, more smiling.
When he saw her bring her son and herself to their feet in respectful attention, he cried “Good morning!”, waded in, and lowered his gear to the ground.
Her grave manner was a help. She had the dignity that made the occasion as natural as it could be. She listened but not anxiously. He began to walk round the cairn, pausing now and then to regard it. “You see, this is a place where in prehistoric times they buried their dead. I want to open it up to get at the graves which are inside.”
She nodded; and, knowing how superstitious local folk were about opening graves, he realised that if he had said he was going to open up the entrance to hell itself, she would have nodded in the same way. It was work. He was flicked by a chilly thrill. Enlivened, he continued, “Now the problem is: Where is the passage that goes into the heart of the cairn where the chamber is with the—uh—the remains, the bones and things? For there is a passage, and if we can find it we can then go straight in.”
She nodded.
“Now usually,” he continued, coming to a definite standstill, “the passage goes in somewhere about here, for this is the east side, but not by any means always. Sometimes it’s in the south or the southeast or even the west. So we may have to do a lot of clearing before we come on it.”
She nodded.
“It’s a big pile as you can see. It’s over a hundred feet long and though not so broad as it’s long, it’s still roundish, and I have found that interesting for various reasons. However, I thought we might make a start here today and see how we get on.”
She nodded, but with a quiet movement now, preparing for action.
“There’s just one thing,” he said, and at once she grew still so that he heard her mind feel: Now it’s coming. “Just one thing,” he repeated, for, being a shrewd man, he had worked everything out, “and that is, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to stand by your son. I mean you can go on knitting, but I’d like you to watch what he comes on. For it’s absolutely important to me that nothing unusual should be moved before I see it. You understand that, don’t you?”
“What sort of thing?”
He met her steady pale-blue eyes in the oval of her shawled face. “I’ll tell you.” And with some animation he proceeded to tell her which stones didn’t matter and which did, together with the absolute importance of at once calling his attention, if he were not on the spot, to any unusual feature or find whatsoever. When he had finished and she had nodded, he proceeded to remove the first stone.
He laid it on the ground several feet from the cairn. “I want a row here first to contain the stones, to keep them in, because we must make a tidy job. Then when we have found what we want, it will be easier to put all the stones back where they were, for we mustn’t have Mr Martin complaining that we are making a mess of his ground.”
Moving back, he watched them go into action.
“Andrew,” she said quietly, “take that one,” pointing to a stone at her feet. His head jerked to her face, from her face to her hand, from her hand to the stone, and, making his throaty sound, he at once stooped and lifted the stone. She walked with him to Grant’s stone and got him to place his beside it. “Another,” she said, pointing to the cairn. Off he set with shambling haste, while she waited. The next time, she didn’t speak, she just pointed. The third time she didn’t even point.
Unable to stand stolidly watching, Grant peered here and there at the cairn wisely. He had intended, of course, to do some carrying himself, but his side had given him a twinge as he had stooped to lift the first stone, and besides there was something so unusual in the scene that he wanted to have his face to himself. With his Leftish tendency in politics, he could not help feeling that Labour had been given a peculiar signification. It was so sudden a feeling that his smile to the cairn held the self-conscious twist of one who had committed an unexpected misdemeanour. And he couldn’t laugh. A sudden vision of the Colonel’s rather puffed face with its brown moustache, jutting somewhat in a scoffing irony, nearly undid him.
As he turned round, he saw that she was shaping the growing row of stones into a slight curve to follow the base of the cairn. Intelligent of her! And now she was going back with her son to the cairn. He was wearing a leather jerkin, of the sleeveless kind Grant had worn in the 1914 war, only she had manifestly reshaped it, and he wore it back to front, buttoned behind. Her object now was to get him to carry not one but two or three stones, according to their size. She succeeded.
He had a head so round that it seemed to he pushed in behind to keep the shape. The sand-brown hair was cropped short all over except for the fri
nge that invaded the brow, which was of normal height if narrowed somewhat from east to west. The mouth was pushed out as if the lips had been stung by bees. The eyes were small—and suddenly Grant saw that they were cute, which, locally, was not quite the same as cunning. This astonished him in a breath-taking way. Foolish Andie was enjoying his new game with the stones!
Not at all the usual picture of the hangdog brutal prognathous primitive, this. Merely a shambling half-idiot with a childish intelligence that had no utterance. And Grant had his moment of confirmation of his theory that the early primitives were wont to enjoy themselves immensely and gossip and laugh half the day. African pigmies were full of laughter. Primitive man, when not bedevilled, threw laughter about as naturally as flowers threw their scent or birds their songs. It was in the nature of things. A book should be written about it. Foolish Andie might not be a good example, still . . . . He strolled across to the woman.
“That’s fine,” he said. “We’ll have to put you on the pay-roll.”
For the first time she regarded him with uncertainty. Perhaps his words represented an order of intelligence beyond her customary grasp; perhaps she simply could not believe him. But when he had made himself clearer, she said, “That’s too much.” He turned away with the uncomfortable feeling that she had been moved by more than the monetary recognition.
But the fun really started when the few yards of containing wall were high enough for him to suggest that the stones could now be thrown from the cairn. Thrown they were, and shot and hurtled, to an accompaniment of guttural sound that was splendid. When the stones were small boulders, the staggering action was stupendous and the grunts in keeping.
Grant smiled, and skipped out of the way, and laughed, and laughed louder. Foolish Andie saw, and stopped, and looked at his employer with a light in the dark-blue eye and the mouth open. “Gu-gu-gu? . . .”
“Ga! Ga!” cried Grant in the happiest agreement.
Foolish Andie’s face crushed into a grin that broadened until the eyes all but disappeared.
Grant waved an arm and went round the cairn, his face hot and his mind off the record. It beats the band! he thought. It beats two bands! Ga! ga! he confirmed himself, and subsided by his gear.
But it is damn funny, he cried as he fumbled, in his haversack. He saw life as God’s happiest piece of fun. He also saw his camera. His hand landed on his day-book. Would he take a snapshot of life in action or enter his happy thought in the book? An obscure feeling or shyness about intruding too far too soon on his labour force made him open the day-book. He had got the length of (c) under the heading Primitive Social Behaviour when Mrs Mackenzie appeared round the cairn. Would he come? He jumped up and went.
It was no more than the cairn’s peristalith, but it interested him immensely. The upended stone was about three feet high, a small “standing stone” or orthostat. Loose stones were soon cleared away from it and from its neighbour on the right which was much the same height and distant about a foot and a half. Between them, the ordinary-sized stones of the cairn had manifestly been built up drystone-dyke fashion. These upended stones or orthostats would go right round the cairn forming its containing wall or peristalith. There were theorists who said that the great stone circles themselves were but a later development of this peristalith which kept back the cairn—or kept in the dead. But the true field worker was now leaving theory or hypothesis to wait on evidence. When he had cleared three of the upended stones, he decided to take a photograph, went to get his camera, and returned with all his gear. The overlap of loose stones seemed to him remarkable and he wanted to show its depth.
Foolish Andie regarded the camera with great interest and followed Grant’s movements with solemn open-mouthed attention. The sun was not quite where the photographer wanted it, having moved too far round, and as he was mounting the cairn itself in the hope of getting the northern side of the excavated bay square-on, he heard Mrs Mackenzie speak rather sharply. He turned his head. She was shooing Andie away from the prismatic compass which was lying exposed.
“Don’t let him touch that!”
“No, no,” she answered. “It’s just that he likes bright things.”
“Sound fellow!” he called, as he got into position.
The work went on, and but for the angle of the light he might have forgotten the lunch-hour. “Yes,” she answered, “we have our piece with us,” and straightway she and her son withdrew round the cairn, leaving their employer to his sandwiches and his reflections.
And things were going very well, he decided, even fantastically well! They coincided in some hidden way with the notion of holiday, freedom, and mirth. Compared with Cnossos in Crete, a chambered cairn in the Highlands, where many cairns had been opened, was hardly a matter of exalted archaeological importance! But the grey stones lay there in the sun, and one of them, as his head moved, winked.
Munching his sandwich, he scratched the glazed spot on the stone with a thumb nail, stood back, and decided he would clear the ground for at least a couple of yards inside the peristalith. It struck him there might not be much sense in doing this, for the passage, when found, would go through the peristalith, but still he decided he would do it, moved by an impulse to finish tidily what he was at, rather than hurry ahead after any preconception.
His reward came the following afternoon just after lunch. With pursed features he was contemplating the next spot for an exploratory incision, when she came to him hurriedly.
“He’s found it,” she said.
He did not speak but went before her. There it was sticking through the loose boulders—an edging of flagstone.
“Gu—gar—r—r,” muttered Andie.
“You’re dead right,” said Grant. “Just dead right. Now—carefully now—we’ll clear the loose stuff away.” He began pitching the small boulders with a tremendous industry which Andie tried to excel. In no time the upright face of a flagstone or slab was completely revealed. It had a slab on either side of it, and another, as lintel, on top. But it looked small for a passageway. Yet passages were low and narrow. He tried to wrench, to move, the upright in front, but it was solidly embedded. He had to pull Andie from it. “Steady! We’ll clear all the stones off the top slab and then we’ll be able to lift that.”
There was a nasty moment, when, having undermined the cairn above, they let it come roaring down on them. Grant leapt off the ledge, fell, and rolled over, but Andie’s reactions were always slow. The first stones knocked his heels from under him so that he fell back, slid, and came to rest with his feet in the air and boulders on his belly. For a moment he lay still, then he scrambled up, shaking the stones from him, grinning noisily, as if he had had a paradisal ride. Breathing heavily, Grant went and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll have to be more careful,” he shouted, laughing and feeling guilty.
The work now was nothing and soon they had the whole lintel exposed. But, unless the next one had collapsed, there was only this one. And, by heavens! he thought, it looks more like a box than a passage, it looks suspiciously like the intrusion of a short cist. In his excitement he became very businesslike and saw that every threatening stone was removed from the face in front and all stones sufficiently levelled on either side. “Now then!” he said.
It was beginning to move when Andie slipped. Mrs Mackenzie said, “Let me.” They let her.
“Now then!” The lid lifted up and over and fell clear with a clash. In the short stone coffin were two skeletons.
Chapter Eleven
Grant paid no attention to Andie’s excitement, for the skeletons and their disposition fascinated him. On his knees he peered, knowing enough to realise that they were those of a mother and child, a growing child, perhaps of four or so. The mother had been laid to rest on her right side, with her knees tucked up, and in the bay of her body her child had been placed. The sight affected him even at that moment in the exultation of his find. The skulls were fine and fragile; the bones slender; a grace was in this slenderness like an imm
ortal story. Then he noticed specks like blackened oats. He bent right down but did not touch. Jet beads from a necklace. His eye caught a faint gleam from under the edge of the pelvis, and his heart hurt him, for it was the gleam of gold.
He got up and Mrs Mackenzie said, “He was just excited.”
“What’s that?” But he wasn’t interested. Very few people liked skeletons. Many found them depressing. Mr Grant, however, had met some beautiful skeletons in his time. He came back with his camera and drawing board. He was excitedly preoccupied and fiddled about with the drawing board trying to reflect some extra light into the cist. Far from satisfied, he nevertheless got Mrs Mackenzie to hold it in a certain position while he first lightly dusted the bones and then worked his camera through a variety of angles. When he had taken three photographs he said with great earnestness, “Now you watch here and let no one near it until I come back.”
“I’ll do that,” she promised.
But when he had gone a little way, he turned back. “Come along!”
“Go with him,” said Mrs Mackenzie to her son, and he went.
The archaeologist was already moving at a brisk speed and Andie seemed tied to him by an invisible string. Andie took long low strides, the edge of his heel hitting the ground first, in the peculiar motion of a rocking horse that could only rock forward. Gradually, however, he began to overhaul his employer and presently Grant was aware of the face beside him, excited and smiling and obviously saying that things had come to a mysterious pass. Grant agreed. Andie was delighted with the agreement and became a trifle more expansive. “Yes, yes,” said Grant. “I want you to carry a box for me.” The sounds seemed so good to Andie that his small twinkling eyes disappeared for a laughing moment.