by Neil M. Gunn
The suggestion of fear or danger generally induced in Grant a certain daring or even recklessness; not calm courage but a fiery pertinacity. In high accents he now carried the war directly to the enemy, his head clear as a whistle, and the dam burst.
Chapter Twenty Two
The words, the visions, grew ever more fantastic.
There was a time when the local schoolmaster would have applauded Grant very strongly for the striking way in which he sustained the British mythology against the Roman, Scandinavian or even Hellenic, not to mention the Hebraic. From his high horse, the archaeologist commanded the knights of the Round Table, set the whole Arthurian epic to the splendid movements of chivalry. What other body of myth in the history of the world, the whole world west to east, he demanded to know, had produced so lofty a concept of human behaviour or so wonderful an expression of it in literature? Romance that was poetry in essence; Irish colour and craftsmanship and saga; Welsh legend and poetry; all these islands, indeed, as the original home of the druidic mystique, beautiful and precise, magical and living. And if that was so—and who could gainsay it from all the evidence?—then at least the root of the matter was in us, and surely therefore the exploring of so potent a root was something more, and higher, than a futile spying or indulgence in curiosity, even if it took a no more distinguished form than the opening of a chambered cairn in a Highland clachan.
Martin watched the coloured procession with a detachment that at moments almost seemed interested. The word druidic even brought a smile. His eyes moved about the archaeologist’s face and steadied once upon a fume of bubble at the lips, curious to observe how small specks of it were liberated upon the air.
“I thought these druids performed in oak groves,” he said, “not at cairns or in stone circles.”
“We know little enough about how or where they behaved and then mostly from foreign sources. You might as well say that people were silent in their ceremonies at your cairn in Clachar because we do not know the tongue they spoke.”
“Wasn’t it some kind of Celtic tongue?”
“The Neolithic people did not speak even any kind of Aryan tongue, much less a specific Celtic. It was an archaic tongue of which we know nothing.”
“And it died with them?”
“No. It just died, but not with them. They took the invaders tongue, perhaps Pictish; but they lived on.”
“I thought we didn’t know much about the Picts’ language?”
“Neither we do, because there were more invaders and a new tongue called Gaelic. And you, who are still Neolithic in your bones, literally in your bones, actually speak yet another invaders’ language called English.”
“The bones remain but the languages die?”
“More than the bone remains.”
“And how are you so sure about my bones?”
“Because to be sure is part of my business as an archaeologist. I see the bone of your skull as I see the bones in your ankles.”
“And all this amounts to—what?”
“To knowledge.” And Grant lifted his glass and drank.
The analysis of the meaning of knowledge produced a considerable amount of arid sound, though the archaeologist achieved one or two interesting arabesques even here, until at last he swept the whole thing aside, including his glass which he retrieved unbroken from the earthen floor, and said that for him all this had yet a profounder significance, for knowledge qua knowledge was but the tools and the material.
“A moral significance?”
“Yes,” said Grant like a shot. Then he waved a dismissive left hand. “I am aware of the inflection in your voice. Let us dismiss the word moral. We can dismiss any number of words; if an abstract word offends you we can cut it out. There is nothing abstract in the significance I mean. There is, on the contrary, all that which, being alive, is potent and life-making, not life-destroying. The chivalry to which I have referred, the literature, the song, Arthur and Ossian, the craft of the hands, the colour, the greatness of the body in its tragic bearing, the courage—the courage that does not give in, that—that takes its gruel and fights on and pursues the high thing and the right thing though the heavens should come down in small bits.”
“A moral lesson?”
Grant stared at his glass, in no way self-conscious, but as one brooding a little over the greatness he had heard, even while its echoes passed away. Martin filled the glass once more, spilling a little of the liquor on the stone. The spilling produced a momentary wavering in Grant’s vision so that the stone tilted. He realised for the first time that he was getting drunk, but this drunkenness was a peculiar phenomenon, like a transparent screen between one world and another, and it shivered like a screen, wavered, so that what was known to be there was not quite seen, but did not need to be seen because it was known. He became aware that Martin was talking. With a peculiar deliberation, strangely in contrast with his recent visionary flights, he listened, looking at the face before him and seeing it with a remarkable clarity, so that it was no longer strange to him and unknown, so that even its death instinct was not a positive thing, a destructive force, but simply that condition which had been left when the positive had ebbed away. It was a face stranded on the modem shore.
“These primitive Celts, they ate each other,” Martin concluded, “they were cannibals.”
“That may be,” answered the archaeologist with profound solemnity, “but if so, at least they ate each other formally.”
Martin did not laugh. His face was arrested in an extraordinary, an involuntary stillness.
“All primitive peoples,” continued Grant, “have such formalities, such courtesies. If they eat the body it is always the body of the enemy, never their own bodies, and they do so in order to acquire his virtue and his strength and his valour.”
“This they do in remembrance of him,” said Martin.
Grant met the eyes and cried wildly, challengingly, “Yes! Why not? Why shouldn’t they? It might be better for us if we still remembered. But we don’t. We have lost the love of God and the understanding of sacrifice. We destroy Christ’s body. We smash it to smithereens and dissipate it from our sight. We truss it up and bayonet it and leave it for the jackals. We destroy because we hate. We hate. We hate ourselves all. And because it feeds on itself, hatred is the ultimate cannibal that eats its own body.” He stretched for his glass and missed it, but caught it at the second attempt. The stone, however, tilted further this time. The liquor from the glass ran over his hand as he assumed a completely recumbent position. But he was growing weary of all this talk, and not without dignity he composed himself on the yielding softness of the hard floor and closed his eyes.
He opened them on the bare hillside.
Chapter Twenty Three
The hillside, the glen, was vacant of life, had the frozen appearance of being on another planet. As he held his head still, this impression of otherness grew. Distance, distance itself up the glen, was a very remarkable thing, for it existed in a new strange time and yet had all the astonishing attributes of space. His head moved and a jeweller’s hammer hit the grey matter; the flush of pain went forward to the bone of his forehead, knocked, and sank to the pit of his stomach. The skin of his face was sweaty, greasy, and hot. He shivered suddenly and sneezed and was blinded. Then rearing himself with care, he looked at the hillside again.
When, quite close at hand, he saw a flat slab leaning against a bank, he approached it. The heave set the flushes to a dark reel, so that this time the slab did pin his leg as it fell over. He wriggled like a half-smashed snake till he got his leg free. The shinbone ran blood beneath the rent in his stocking. Where the slab had been, however, were no more than dark earth, a large hieroglyphic red worm, and one or two centipedes that fell as if his eyesight had suddenly hit them. There was no hole to a passage. He stared at the spot until he heard the gurgling laughter of the water in the small burn.
The water stung him then ran out of his beard and eyes; it sizzled in his mouth
and astonished his stomach. Its innocence was, indeed, so cool and healthy that his stomach did not know what to do about it, then tried to heave up and couldn’t. The dark pain knocked on his forehead again, this time more firmly.
He lay back till the blood on his leg should stop running of its own accord, for it only ran all the faster when he tried to stop it. On this strange morning of the world things were apparently like that. But they could bamboozle him as they wished, he knew he had been in a wheelhouse. For if he hadn’t been, how could he be like this now? He failed to hit a horsefly that landed on his leg, hitting the wound instead. After he had wrung out his handkerchief in the burn, he tied it round the wound and got up.
It was the usual kind of tumbled ground, with more boulders and hummocks than could be seen from a hilltop. But he had no desire now to investigate further. It took him a little time even to hear the ticking of his watch, which registered seven hours thirteen minutes. Martin had no doubt hauled him out and away like a sack in order to defeat his curiosity. But perhaps—to leave him in the sun? Heaven alone knew. As he finished winding his watch, he started unfastening his collar, paused, looked towards heaven and found it bland and blue.
As there could be no question of climbing: he began to drift down the glen, with a stagger now and then and even an eye for a slab, but presently he was just going on “alone and palely loitering”. The words came to him from the poem with so peculiar an aptness that, for the first time, he smiled, if wanly. But it wasn’t exactly La Belle Dame sans merci that had had him in thrall! And yet for the life of him, by the dark gods for a moment, something flicked somewhere, and he realised that Keats was not only a great poet but a poet of many dimensions. Keats had rattled the Silver Bough!
This seemed so enlightening, so superb, a description of the poet that he had to stop; a private revelation which he hung on to through the blood gushes. The young magician had shaken the Silver Bough upon our earth and gone away.
He saw him going.
He went on himself again. Perhaps, he thought, with a sere humour, it’s that ancient and innocent cold water rousing the grey alcohol . . . .
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew . . . .
The magician knew about it. Grant nodded carefully, the humour softening his eyes. Suddenly birds were singing; chirping at least: wheatears. They, too, were innocent as the cold burn water. Remarkable the amount of innocence there was on the earth, sheer innocence, bright grass, clear air, immemorial freshness, everywhere, except in this spot of meandering clay, for which he could feel pity were he not so profound, so obliterating, an ass. But he must have dreamed a lot of the stuff he had said. Surely! O Lord, surely! he hoped. For suddenly he remembered the lingual knot. Neolithic, Pictish, Gaelic, English. Then Martin and his infernal eyes had asked, “What language next?” and he had replied, “Vodka.” High Heaven!
Debouching from the Glen of the Robbers, he turned right and followed the gushing Clachar; rested and went on; then, pulling himself together, started on a slanting downhill stalk of his lodgings. When he found himself being tracked by what looked like the black journalist he got to his feet in a blinding anger.
Little Sheena saw him coming, backed a shy step or two, then turned for the front door and met her mother. After a moment, they both went into the house. Anna was standing in the kitchen, visible to him, if he wanted her.
“Anna?”
“Yes.” She came quickly forward.
“Tea,” he said. “Just tea. A whole potful.”
“At once,” she answered.
“And would you—and would you take it up to my bedroom?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and smiled, looked at the steep stairs, then began to mount them.
Chapter Twenty Four
It was late afternoon when he woke to a thrush singing in the garden. The thrush stopped and the world listened. He felt light as the listening and dwelt in it for a little time, then his eyes wandered about the bedroom and saw the teapot. The feeling of convalescence was distinctly pleasant until in a small snuggle of luxury he moved a leg. The leg not only pained him but had grown a shaggy hide, which turned out, however, to be no more than an unremoved stocking. Otherwise he was more or less undressed. He saw the face of a colleague who on occasion would admit: “I had a skinful last night.” He had never been quite sure whether the man had been ashamed or otherwise. He wasn’t quite sure yet. Sheena began to chant and was abruptly stopped. Had Anna really seen what was wrong with him? His breath must have been eloquent!
She was really a fine girl, but removed from Martin by exactly another world. There was no point of contact. This had nothing to do with social differences at all. Martin was beyond any human contact of the kind. The fellow had reached the end of everything, where there was nothing. This might have been remediable if he hadn’t possessed an intellect. Things can be done to the sick mind. Nothing can be done to the sick intellect, which at once and without effort analyses away the word “sick” and what is being done, exhibiting both elements as without meaning and futile, then waits for anything more to analyse away.
He tried to recollect one occasion during the night, even a passing moment, when Martin had shown a trace of real emotion, even argumentative emotion. He couldn’t. Yet Martin had clearly wanted to speak, and would have gone on speaking or listening forever. Surely that was something, a desire? Moreover he had gone with his war cronies to that place to drink. He wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t wanted to go, if drinking didn’t give him pleasure?
And then, in this present rarefied condition of his mind, Grant made what seemed to him a subtle psychological discovery. Martin would speak, and Martin would go, and Martin would drink, purely and automatically to do those things, because once he stopped doing them there was nothing left but to die, to cut the throat, to slip down into deep sea-water.
This was so strong a thought that it pressed the bone inward between his eyes. He got up and light-headedly began to dress.
Mrs Cameron knocked and came into his sitting room, asking him if he would like his food now.
“Thank you, I would, if you don’t mind.”
“Dear me, you’ve caught a cold!”
“No, no, just a trifle hoarse.” He cleared his throat. “The night air, you know!” He smiled.
“We were that anxious about you,” she murmured, “and the potatoes will take a while to boil. There’s some nice soup——”
“The very thing! Never mind about the potatoes. And if Anna makes some of her strong coffee, we can have a cup of tea later. How’s that?”
He often discussed the food position with her and knew, in considerable detail the idiosyncrasies of the butcher in Kinlochoscar. As she was hurrying away he said, “I hope you weren’t too anxious?”
“No, it’s just that we thought you might have fallen and hurt yourself. Anna—but it’s all right.”
“Anna what?”
“Nothing—she just had a walk.” Anna was behind her. “Oh, there’s this telegram; it came in about midday,” and the old lady took it from Anna and handed it to him. As the door closed, he burst the envelope:
“Hoping to arrive tomorrow Mackintosh.”
His face went bleak and a small throb was resurrected. Blair, the petrologist, would be driving him up in his old Bentley. Probably a whole carload of them!
Anna came in with the soup.
“Have you got today’s paper?” he inquired, for he had asked her to get it.
She hesitated a moment. “Yes.”
“Will you fetch it, please?”
It was unlucky for the archaeologist that his striking discovery had happened in one of those rare brief intervals when international relations did not threaten immediate world disaster. A powerful foreign leader had actually used the words “not unhopeful” on the day Grant had uncovered the short cist, and in sheer relief there was nothing that the British public could hug more closely to its heart than a croc
k of gold. A prescient editor at his conference board had clearly, and gleefully, said “Feature the Fabulous.” The world was going young again. Even the fairies were popping out of their gestapos. Man might yet laugh once before he died. The careless journalistic rapture of the old piping days of peace then ensued.
There were two photographs. The first was of Mr Grant, Foolish Andie and Mrs Mackenzie, with the cairn itself as background. The archaeologist bore a hatchet-faced look of intolerant worry which contrasted oddly with the drunken tilt of his tweed hat; he was also holding at arm’s length the wooden handle of a pickaxe as if he had but that moment grounded the sword Excalibur. Andie was grinning under his fringe in a manner that definitely, even astonishingly, looked the schoolbook picture of prehistoric man. Mrs Mackenzie, a yard or more in the rear, seemed folded slightly upon herself in a shrinking emotion. But it was the second photograph that knocked Grant’s chin up, for it was a photograph of the interior of the cairn. It was moreover a very good photograph and showed not only the corbelled cell from which the immortal crock had been removed but also the row of skulls. The way in which one skull eerily stared from its pelvic girdle fascinated the eye. Clearly there was no fake about all this. Here was the real stuff. And that the crock should have been “secreted away”, allegedly by the gentleman in the first photograph who replied “Goo-goo” and again “Goo-gar-h-hh” when questioned by a correspondent, added that touch of genuine mystery which had become all too rare a commodity in these scientific days. The sub-editors (among whom were three young Scots poets) had so distinguished themselves in the matter of simple captions that . . . .