by Paul Gallico
I, Thomasina, waiting on a gatepost for a somewhat grubby, red-haired, and not even especially beautiful child.
Sometimes I wondered whether perhaps there was not another bond between us: we were each to the other something to cling to when the sun went down and nightfall brings on fear and loneliness.
Loneliness is comforted by the closeness and touch of fur to fur, skin to skin, or—skin to fur. Sometimes when I awoke at night after a bad dream I would listen to the regular breathing of Mary Ruadh and feel the slight rise and fall of the bedclothes about her. Then I would no longer be afraid and would go back to sleep again.
I have mentioned that Mary Ruadh was not an especially beautiful child, which perhaps was not polite, since she thought that I was certainly the most beautiful cat in the world, but I meant especially beautiful in the unusual sense. She was a rather usual-looking little girl except for her eyes, which told you of some special quality in her or about her when you looked into them. Often I was not able to do so for long. Their color was a bright blue, a most intense blue, but sometimes when she was thinking thoughts I could not understand or even guess, they turned as dark as the loch on a stormy day.
For the rest, you wouldn’t call her much to look at, with her uptilted nose and freckled face and a long lower lip that usually stuck out, while her eyebrows and lashes were so light you could hardly see them. She wore her ginger-red hair in two braids tied with green or blue ribbon. Her legs were quite long and she liked to stick her stomach out.
But there was something else pleasant about Mary Ruadh: she smelled good. Mrs. McKenzie kept her washed and ironed when she was home and she always smelled of lavender, for Mrs. McKenzie kept lavender bags in with her clothes and underthings.
It seemed as if Mrs. McKenzie was forever washing and ironing and starching and scenting her clothes, because it was the only way she was allowed to show how much she cared for Mary Ruadh. Mrs. McKenzie was a thin woman who talked and sang through her nose. She would have mothered Mary Ruadh the way we will frequently look after somebody else’s kitten as though it were our own, but Mr. MacDhui was jealous and feared that Mary Ruadh would come to love her too much if she were allowed to cuddle her. Oh, Mr. Bristle-and-Smelly was allowed to cuddle her all he wished, but nobody else.
I loved the odor of lavender. Smells, almost more than noises, seem to bring on the happiness or unhappiness memories. You might not remember what it was about a smell had made you angry at the time, or afraid, but as soon as you come across it again you are angry or fearful. Like the medicine smell of Mr. MacDhui.
But lavender was the happiness smell. It made my claws move in and out and brought the contentment purr to my throat.
Sometimes, after putting Mary Ruadh’s things away after ironing them, Mrs. McKenzie would forget to close all the chests of drawers and leave one open. Then I would quickly nip inside and lie there full length with my nose up against a lavender bag, just smelling, smelling, smelling. That was bliss. That was when I was contented and at peace with the world.
3
Outside MacDhui’s surgery Geordie McNabb went wandering away clutching his box, in which the injured frog reposed on a bed of grass and young heather. Occasionally he proceeded with an absent-minded hop, skip, and jump, his usual ebullient method of locomotion, until, brought up by recollection of the more sobering aspects of his situation, he slowed down to a mere trot or saunter.
He was not aware of going in any particular direction, but was only glad to be away once more from the ken of grownups who loomed over one, tall, bristly, and unsympathetic, and hustled one about with a pat on the bottom, an indignity unworthy to be bestowed upon a Wolf Cub.
But ever and anon he paused to look into the box and give the frog a tentative poke, reaffirming his diagnosis of a broken leg, which prevented it from hopping and carrying on frog’s business. At such times he regarded the little fellow with a combination of interest, affection, and deep concern. He was fully aware that he had a problem on his hands connected with the eventual disposition of his charge, since take it home he could not, owing to house laws on the importation of animals, while at the same time to abandon it as recommended by the veterinarian was unthinkable. It was Geordie’s first encounter with the chilly and uncooperative attitude of the world toward one who has taken the fatal step of accepting a responsibility.
His seemingly unguided wanderings had taken him to the edge of the town, that is, to the back of it, where the houses ended abruptly and the several farms and meadows began, beyond which lay the dark and mysterious woods covering the hill of Glen Ardrath, where the Red Witch lived, and he realized that he had thought of this fearful alternative as a possible solution but had quickly rejected it as altogether too frightening and dangerous.
Yet now that he was there by the bridge crossing the river Ardrath, that peaceful stream flowing into Loch Fyne, but which was fed by the tumbling mountain torrents that came frothing down out of the glen, the prospect of paying her a visit seemed awesomely and repellently attractive and exciting. For it was a fact that the townspeople avoided the lair, or vicinity of the Red Witch, who was also known as Daft Lori, or sometimes even Mad Lori, and most certainly small boys, fed on old wives’ tales and fairy-book pictures of hook-nosed crones riding on brooms, avoided the neighborhood except when in considerable company.
But there were two sides to the estimate of the so-called Red Witch of Glen Ardrath, one in which the picture was supplied by the superheated imagination reacting to the word witch, and the other was that she was a harmless woman who lived alone in a crofter’s cottage up in the hills, where she made a living by weaving on a hand loom, conversed with birds and animals whom she nursed, mothered, and fed, and communed with the angels and the Little Folk with which the glen was peopled.
Geordie was aware of both of these tales. If it was true that the roe deer came down from the flanks of Ben Inver to feed out of her hand, the birds settled on her head and shoulders, the trout and salmon rose from the sunny shallows of the burn at her call, and that in the stables behind the cottage where she lived there were sick beasties she found in the woods or up the rocky glen, or who came to her driven by instinct to seek human help and whom she tended back to health, why then it might well be worth the risk to deposit his frog with her. At any rate it appeared to be a legitimate excuse for the having of a tremendous adventure, whatever came of it.
He crossed the saddleback bridge over the river and commenced the climb to the forest at the entrance to Glen Ardrath, past the gray bones of Castle Ardrath, of which the circular inner keep and part of the stone curtain was all that had remained standing.
The home of the Red Witch was supposed to be situated a mile or more up the glen where the forest was heaviest and it took considerable courage for a small boy alone, even though panoplied as a Wolf Cub and filled with some of their woods lore, to enter the darkening area of lichened oak, spreading beech, and somber fir and to push his way through the head-high bracken. He tamed his apprehensions by looking for and identifying the summer wild flowers in full blossom of July that cropped up beside the path he was following; purple thrift and scarlet pimpernel, yellow broom and the pink of the wild dog rose that grew entangled with the white-flowering bramble which in the late summer and fall would yield the sweetest blackberries. He recognized purple columbine, red campion, and the blue harebell, the true bluebell of Scotland, growing in profusion in a glade that seemed made by the traditional fairy ring of trees growing about a circle carpeted with flowers and warmed by shafts of sunlight that penetrated through the branches of the trees.
From there the hill climbed more steeply, and he could hear though not yet see the wild rushing of the burn. He sat down there a moment to rest and took the frog out of the box and laid it on the moss, where it palpitated but did not move. Watching it, Geordie felt his heart swell with pity for its plight and helplessness and, putting it back into the box, determined to see the matter through without further delay.
The stone cottage was long and narrow and had chimneys standing up like ears at either end. The lids of green shutters were closed over the windows of its eyes and it seemed to be sleeping, poised on the edge of a clearing of the woods on what seemed to be a small plateau, a broadening of the side of the glen, and where the burn, too, widened out and moved more sluggishly. Behind it and off to one side was another long, low stone building that had once been a barn, no doubt, or cattle shelter. Geordie hugged his box close to his beating heart and continued to study the surroundings.
A covin oak raised its thick bole a dozen or so yards before the cottage, and yet its spreading branches reached to the tiles of the roof, and the topmost ones overshadowed it. The great oak must have been more than two hundred years old and from the lowest of its branches there hung a silvered bell. From the clapper of the bell a thin rope reached to the ground and trailed there. And now that he was himself quiet, Geordie was becoming aware of movements and sounds. From within the cottage there came a high, clear, sweet singing and a curiously muffled thumping. This, Geordie decided, was the witch, and he trembled now in his cover of fern and bracken and wished he had not come. The singing held him spellbound, but the thumping was sinister and ominous for he had never heard the working of the treadle on a hand loom.
Overhead a red squirrel scolded him from the branch of a smooth gray-green beech; a raven and a hooded black crow were having a quarrel and suddenly began to flap and scream and beat one another with great strokes of their wings, so that all of the birds in the area took fright and flew up; blue tits, robins, yellow wagtails, thrushes and wrens, sparrows and finches. They circled the chimneys, chattering and complaining; two black and white magpies flashed in and out of the trees and from somewhere an owl called.
The voice from within rose higher in purest song, though no melody that Geordie had ever heard, yet it had the strange effect of making him wish suddenly to put his hands to his eyes and weep. The beating wings ceased to flail and the cries and the flutterings of the birds quieted down. Geordie saw the white cottontail of a rabbit, and the bristly round back of a hedgehog down by the burn.
Thereupon Geordie McNabb did something instinctively right and quite brave. He crept out from beneath his cover and advanced as far as the bell suspended from the covin-tree and the rope hanging therefrom. At the foot of it he deposited his box with the frog in it and gave the rope a gentle tug until the bell, shivering and vibrating, rent the forest with its silvery echoes, stilling the voice and the thumping from within the house. As fast as his stumpy legs could carry him, Geordie fled across the clearing and dove once more into the safety of the cover of thick green fern.
The peal of the bell died away, but the quiet was immediately shattered by the hysterical barking of a dog. A Scots terrier came racing around from the barn behind the house. A hundred birds rose into the air, making a soughing and whirring with their wings as they flew wildly about the chimneys. Two cats came walking formally and with purpose around the corner of the house, their tails straight up in the air, a black and a tiger-striped gray. They sat down quietly some distance away and waited. As Geordie watched, a young roe deer, a buck, suddenly appeared out of the underbrush, head up and alert, the sun shining from its moist black nose and liquid eyes. It moved warily, tossing its fine head, its eyes fixed upon the house, where the front door was slowly opening and with infinite caution.
Geordie McNabb’s heart beat furiously and he came close to giving way to panic and running for all he was worth. But his curiosity to see the Red Witch of Glen Ardrath, now that he had come this far and dared so much, and his need to find out what was to become of his frog, kept him there.
The door opened wide, but no Red Witch appeared, almost to Geordie McNabb’s disappointment; only a young woman, hardly more than a girl, it seemed to Geordie, a plain girl, a country girl, such as you could see anywhere on the farms surrounding Inveranoch, in simple skirt and smock with thick stockings and shoes, and a shawl around her shoulders.
She could not have been a witch, for she was neither beautiful nor hideous, and yet little Geordie found that he could not seem to take his eyes from her countenance. What was it that drew and held his gaze? He could not tell. Her nose was long and wise, and the space between it and her upper lip seemed wide and humorous so that somehow it made you want to smile looking at it. The mouth was both tender and rueful and in the gray-green eyes there was a faraway look. Her hair, which hung loose to her shoulders in the fashion of country girls, was not bound and was the cherry color of a glowing blacksmith’s bar before he begins to beat it.
She looked out of the door, brushing away a lock of the dark red hair from her forehead and the gesture, too, was of one who also is clearing away cobwebs from the mind. Geordie lay there on his belly, hidden by the ferns, loving her suddenly with all his heart, and he did not know why nor did he think of any spell cast upon him but only that she was there and he loved her.
The girl looked about her for a moment and then, to Geordie’s surprise, gave a high, clear call on two notes. For a moment Geordie thought that the silver bell was still ringing, so clear and piercing was the call, but the sides of the metal had long ceased vibrating and it was only her throat that produced the marvelous sound.
It acted upon the buck, who came stepping nimbly out of the woods and walked slowly across half the clearing as she stood contemplating the animal out of her faraway eyes, with the rueful smile at her lips. The deer stopped and lowered its head and stood there gazing up at her mischievously and playfully so that she burst into laughter and cried, “Was it you then, at the bell again. For that ye’ll wait for your supper—”
But the buck, as though suddenly alarmed, or sensing the presence of another, turned and bounded away into the forest. The cats came sedately forward, walking almost in tandem, and began to weave in and out her feet. But the Scottie dog ran to the box containing the frog and began to sniff it, thus calling her attention to its presence.
She crossed the threshold then and Geordie watched her run to the box with quick, little steps that had in them something of the movements of the deer. She knelt, her hands folded in her lap for an instant, and peered into the box. Then she reached out and removed the weary, injured, palpitating, little reptile.
She held it gently in her hand and the broken leg spilled from the side of it and hung limp. Carefully she probed it with a finger and looked into the beady yellow-green eyes of the frog, and the odd space between her nose and upper lip twitched most movingly as she lifted the frog and held it to her cheek for an instant while she said, “Was it the angels or the Little Folk who brought ye here to me? Puir wee frog. I will do what I can for you.” Then she arose and disappeared into the house, shutting the door after her.
The cottage slept again, its eyes tightly shut. The two cats and the dog retired whence they had come. The whirring birds quieted down. Only the squirrel in the tree, who knew where Geordie was, continued to scold. Geordie felt as though the greatest load he had ever known in his life had been lifted from him and he was free at last. The frog was safe and in good hands. His heart filled now almost to bursting with a new and strange kind of joy and singing, he left the shelter of the bracken, and as fast as his legs would carry him hopped, skipped, and jumped along the path alongside the foaming burn, downhill toward Inveranoch and home.
That same summer’s morning Mr. MacDhui, finishing with his waiting list of clients, motioned with his head to his friend Mr. Peddie, who had waited until the last, to go inside with his groaning animal. He followed him, remarking, “Come in, Angus. I am sorry you have had to wait for so long. These fools with their useless pets seem to take up all of my time. Well, what is the trouble? Have you been overfeeding the beast on sweets again? I warned you, did I not?” He seemed hardly aware he had included his fr
iend in the category.
Mr. Peddie, who really did not have the proper physical aspect for it, contrived to look both guilty and sheepish. He replied, “Of course you are right, Andrew, but what am I to do? He sits up and begs so prettily. He is mortally fond of sweets.” He looked fondly upon the pug dog, who lay belly flat upon the enameled examining table with an occasional belch disturbing his normal wheezing. He rolled his creamy eyes pleadingly in the direction of Mr. MacDhui, who, memory and experience told him, possessed the formula to pardon overindulgence.
The vet leaned down to smell the dog, wrinkling his nose in distaste; he probed his belly and took his temperature. “Hmph!” he grunted, “the same complaint—only aggravated.” He stuck his chin out and bristled his beard at the divine and mocked, “A man of God, you are, speaking for the Creator, and himself having no more self-control than to stuff this wretched animal with sweets, to his own detriment.”
“Oh,” replied Peddie, squirming uneasily, his usually joyous moon face exhibiting the sadness of the scolded child, “not really a man of God, though I do try. No more than an employee of His in the division of humans who must make up in love what they lack in brains and grace.” He made a deprecating gesture. “So many good men go into the Army or politics, or law, He is often compelled to take what He can get.”
MacDhui grinned appreciatively and looked at his friend with affection. “Do you think He really enjoys all this sycophancy, flattery, bribery, and cajoling that you chaps seem to think necessary to keep Him good-tempered and tractable?”