by Neil M. Gunn
He saw her changing face, as she stood motionless. Her closed hands came up against her cheeks.
“Don’t get excited,” he said. “Take it calmly.”
“David!” She stumbled a step or two towards him.
“I can’t come in just now. I have something to do——”
“David! Is mother——”
There was a long moment. “Yes,” he said simply. He seemed to see her face, though the light was now behind her. Then she staggered away and flopped down on the floor.
He entered a step and stood watching her. He knew she had not fainted completely because there was a slight squirming motion in her body. Then, however, she lay quite still, her face to the clay. He sent his mind to help her so strongly that his own body went death cold.
Presently she stirred, whimpering; then all at once sat up and stared at him with a wild open face. She had brown sand-coloured hair with pleasant features and blue eyes that now glittered darkly.
“I can’t come in, Ina. For God’s sake try and take this calmly. Think of the child in you.”
She waited.
“Your mother died when I was there. I was in time.” He took a deep breath. He looked away. “There’s nothing wrong with me, Ina. Absolutely nothing, I’m all right myself, but—but they told me not to go near anyone for a day. It’s nothing. It’s just to make sure. I happened to go near a—a sick house.”
Her voice came small and hoarse: “She died of the plague?”
“Yes. Listen to me, Ina——”
She did not listen. Her face went blank. “Mother,” said her mouth in an appalled whisper.
He turned away and stood with his back to the outside wall by the door. When he heard her crying on her mother he became restless and irritated. She should think of herself, and as his irritation increased the tears came streaming down his face. She should think of the child anyway. What was the sense in weeping and carrying on like that? He grew angry, because her desperate, heart-broken voice brought the tears streaming down upon him readily. He felt the push of her empty fists on the floor, the burden of her awful grief, and turned away down to the corner of the little barn.
The truth was he no longer cared about the death of the mother. All interest in her had passed from him. He could only think of the taint. And he felt he had defeated it, expelled it from the outside of his body. If only—if only he had left that second accursed pitcher alone. Perhaps her mouth had been to the very spot where his own lips? … Yet it had been pretty full. There was every chance he was all right because the all-important thing he had not done—he had not touched the body.
After a time Ina grew sensible, and became extraordinarily calm as she realized the nature of the danger he was in. Not that he told her all he had been through. “Nan sent me home at once,” he said. “It’s just having been near the wind of the trouble. So I thought, for one night, I might curl up in the barn. You can always cry to me if you want me.” Her mother had been properly attended, doctor and all, right to the end. Nan had kept away because of the children. He spoke on, giving her time, though he was not a talkative man.
That night he slept heavily. On the second day he was back in the house as usual. On the third, he went down to the inn and bought a bottle of “special”. Two men were ordering a drink and called for an extra one for him. They were talking about the fishing and he was glad of their company. He left, carrying the bottle with him. The alcohol was going to his head, and this annoyed him, for though he drank very little, still a small whisky should hardly trouble his feet as it was doing. In times of illness, folk were always anxious to have a drop of whisky in the house as a restorative medicine. Suddenly he felt the liquor in a swirl in his stomach, and before he had gone three paces up it came. At a little distance a woman, bringing water from a well, saw him and stopped. He was bitterly ashamed for though men might take an extra drop at special gatherings, such as markets and rent-day, it was a deep disgrace to be seen the worse of drink in the broad light of a working day. However, he felt much better now and said nothing about the incident to his wife when he got home.
Against inclination, he took some supper, but shortly after they retired to bed he had to get up. His wife had been in a silent, miserable condition all day because she felt this was the day on which her mother was being buried and neither of them was there. David had offered to go, but an inscrutable fatal mood held them in its grip as in a circle which they could not step out of. “I’ll go if you like,” David had said.
She wondered what was keeping him outside. She grew alarmed. The minutes drew themselves out to a tension so fine that she heard the dark whisper of voices being borne on the wind to the sea. Such a mortal heaviness came on her body that she could hardly drag it to the door. “David!” she called. And when there was no answer, his name came the next time from her mouth in a scream.
She heard him coming, saw the deeper darkness of his body draw near and pause. “Ina,” he said quietly, “don’t be frightened. You must help me. There’s only the two of us. For God’s sake don’t break down, or we’re lost.”
The low, clear appeal in his voice helped her, drawing resources of strength about the dissolving turmoil in her breast.
“Are you ill?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “I think I’ve got a touch of it.”
The plague!
In that silence, wherein they could not see each other’s face, their love passed between them in a red glisten of anguish. Out of this love came release and action.
“If you put out a blanket I’ll make a bed for myself in the barn and sweat it into the straw. You’ll find I’ll be better in the morning.”
She bustled now, taking the warm blankets from their bed.
“No, not gruel,” he answered her. “Fill a big bowl with hot milk and grind a little of yon black nut into it.”
They became eager allies, conspiring in the dark against death.
Twice during the night she stole down to the barn. The second time there were no sounds of sickness, and she scarcely breathed his name. He must be sleeping. She got back to the house in a little run and fell to her knees by her bed and prayed to God. “Save David. Save him, save him, O God.” When her emotion rose with her cry and whelmed her mind, her mouth still cried, “Save him! Save him!”
And when she had made her prayer she buried her face and cried through her sobs, “O my darling! My darling!”
In the afternoon of the fourth day David died, his strong body emaciated, his face bony and gaunt.
The carpenter, a small man, very skilful with his hands, and often of a broad humour, made a coffin so dovetailed and tight that he swore no breath of foul air could ever come out from it. One or two men, lounging in his shop, smiled uneasily. The carpenter’s eyes twinkled. “If it’s fated, it’s fated. But I’m giving fate little chance. You needn’t be frightened to carry David in this box. May he have his share of Paradise. He was a decent lad.”
The uneasy problem of who was to keep watch over the dead, and coffin the dead, was answered by Ina herself. Her husband’s folk and her own, she warned off, speaking to them at a little distance from below the wind.
On the seventh day after the funeral Ina died. The coffin was ready, and David’s father entered the house and put her into it, and they buried her beside her husband on the following day, watch having been kept near the house, with singing and praying, all night.
When the burial was over, David’s father, who now kept by himself, approached the dry thatch of the infected house with a flaming torch and set it on fire, and did the same to the barn, removing from either place none of the belongings of the dead.
Far and near, folk saw, or climbed to see, the burning house, and as the red flames rose above the dark smoke young women wept openly with a queer personal anguish, and old women cried sad, broken words of sorrow, and men stared at the red flames, the cleansing flames, as at some dread rite to the old dark gods.
In that way the
plague came to Dunster. The two men whom David had drunk with in the inn were shunned. The inn itself was avoided.
*
One day Catrine said to Finn, “I would like you to go to Dale to see how all are at home. I was dreaming about them last night. Would you care to go?”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t mind.”
Kirsty was inclined to be a little short in the temper and irritable, because through the broken winter she had never quite picked up her strength. There had been no long spell of hard frost to clean trouble away. Even the little snow that had fallen turned overnight into slush and mud. Sleet on a dark spring wind, and cold searching through every cranny in the walls and joint in the bones.
Catrine was diplomatic in her approach, but Kirsty was forthright. “Yes, anywhere out of this cold hole. And if he never came back, it might do him no harm.”
When Catrine was alone with Finn she said, “I can’t quite make her out, but I think she means you to go.”
“Well, when are you going?” Kirsty asked him the following day.
“I’ll go any time, Granny,” Finn answered simply.
“The sooner the better,” said Kirsty.
Finn looked after her, feeling she was blaming him for the thought of going, accusing him (and therefore, in some measure, his mother) of desertion. But Catrine, divining his thought, shook her head behind Kirsty’s back, and when Kirsty had gone outside and left them, she said, “She wants you to go.”
“I don’t know,” Finn muttered, looking out the window.
“It’s her humour to make us feel like that. But you’ll have to go now. She’ll see to that.”
Finn understood this, and all at once wanted to be away, to be gone from this place, anywhere. He was conscious of having toiled hard at the spring work and the peats.
“You’ll take a change of shirt and stockings with you,” said Kirsty that night. “We’ll see what the weather is like in the morning.”
The morning was overcast but dry. At parting, Kirsty gave him a wintry smile. He hardly looked at his mother, though he had been conscious of her about him, making him eat a good breakfast of porridge and milk and two eggs and packing something for his hunger on the journey. It was the first time he had ever been away from home and he felt excited. “Stay a week, anyway,” his mother had said. “And if Granny asks you, stay longer. The change will do you good.”
As he topped the hill beyond Langwell, and faced the empty stretches of moor towards the Ord, his spirit mounted with the tall wide day and a rare happiness came in about him. He liked being on the road, moving in freedom to a new place, and his home seemed little, and far away, and shut in. All Dunster, indeed, seemed dark, lying under the shadow of the plague, held by it, clamped down.
Soon he began watching for the Grey Hen’s Well, and when at last he came to it, he smiled eagerly and drank. Then he unrolled his little bundle and brought out his food. His mother’s invisible hands were all round it, and without distinctly thinking about her, he yet felt comforted. He had a little snuff hidden away in a twist of paper, and taking it out he snuffed openly and sneezed. But nobody saw him sneeze. It was a grand day now and all the better for the lack of sun because it made walking easier. He stretched himself out in the heather, where his mother had lain a few months before he was born, and looked up at the sky. What a tall great world it was for adventuring into and doing active things! A rush of the width and happiness of that summer world came down the wind from the clean, strong mountains, and unable to lie any longer he got up and went on.
As he descended the slope into Dale he met a man and asked him which was his Granny’s house. The man looked steadily at him. “Where have you come from?” “Dunster.” “That’s the house,” said the man, pointing; and at once walked away.
At the door he was met by a grey-haired woman whose dark-brown eyes looked for a long moment at him and then glimmered. “You’re Finn,” she said, and this surprised him only a little. “Yes,” he answered, feeling shy, for it seemed to him that her face, with its finely-cut nose and eyebrows, was distinguished. Then her eyes searched for his mind. “Are you all well?”
“Yes, thank you. My mother wanted me to come and see how you were keeping.”
She let out a deep breath and took him in, full now of questions and hospitality, treating him like a high and welcome guest, and seating him in a chair before the fire.
But he had seen the searching look and knew now why the man had walked away.
During the next two days he saw that folk were avoiding him, though Angus was kind and took him into Helmsdale to visit Isebeal, who was married there. Isebeal was so overcome with joy that she shed a tear or two while laughing and welcoming him. He admired the tall buildings and yards and the harbour wall that banked the river. The fishing had started, and the whole place was busy, but no-one went near the upper part of the village. The plague had just come to Helmsdale.
One of a group of men at the end of a store called to Angus. They were disputing about a Reform Bill, which, according to one fluent speaker, would yet give the people power to curb the high-handedness of the great lairds. Angus agreed with the man, adding that the only thing wrong with it was that it did not go far enough. Finn liked Angus because he was quiet and strong. And he liked also the flavour of the talk because it was defiant. One of the men asked who Finn was and Angus replied that he was his nephew, but did not say he came from Dunster.
By this time Finn knew that he was disappointed in his visit, and though his cousins and other children now began to accept his company more freely, they would ask him questions about the plague, and what it was like to look at, when they got him alone. Thus he gathered that the folk in and around Helmsdale believed the plague was so virulent in Dunster that houses were being burned every day. He stayed a night with Isebeal, and she asked him so many questions about his mother and what was happening on the croft—she had been there more than once—that he grew homesick.
On the Monday morning he said to his Granny, “I think I’ll go home to-day.”
She begged him to stay, for from his answers to her simple questions she had seen that his mother had sent him to be out of harm’s way. But Finn replied politely, “I must go, because they’re needing me on the croft.” In the end he agreed to stay until next day, and that evening everyone was very pleasant to him, as though they would make up for any disappointment he had experienced, for it was extraordinary how they all knew one another’s feelings without speaking about them. In the morning his Granny said tentatively, “I think, Finn, your mother would like you to stay longer.”
Finn now knew quite well what she meant, but replied as if he didn’t, “I must go. There’s a lot to do.”
She saw he understood, and her eyes filled with a gentle light. “Very well, Finn; you know best.”
“I’ll tell mother how you asked me to stay,” he remarked, not looking at her.
She laid her hand on his shoulder. “I know you’ll always be kind to your mother.”
He was glad to be on the road again. He hated that quick uprise of emotion that nearly brought tears to the eyes. It could be very awkward. One little cousin with black hair, named Barbara, kept waving to him, but he only waved twice back to her.
And then at last the precipices, the Ord, the great seawall of rock all the way to remote Clyth Head, the moors, the mountains, and the freedom of going back home!
It was blowing fairly hard and the great shore of sand stretching mile upon mile from Loth to Brora and beyond, with the waves curling slow and white, was a startling and memorable thing to see; but, ah! the rocks, the precipices, they were his own, and he remembered the day he had climbed down for the gulls’ eggs with Donnie on top screaming to him to come back. And when he had climbed back, using only one hand (for the other held ten eggs in his round bonnet), he found Donnie shivering and white and so angry that he wanted to fight. Donnie had said that the deep water, swirling against the rocks far below, had cried to him t
o throw himself over. Finn now smiled, remembering.
There was a wise humour in the smile, that moved his sensitive mouth and crept up around brown eyes which, unlike his mother’s, had one or two pin-point grey flecks in them. He was tall for his fourteen years, going lightly on his feet, his face up. The face had, the same kind of distinction that he himself had found in his Granny’s, but the clean-cut regularity of bone was less noticeable, more smoothed over. When his eyebrows gathered in swift concentration all his features came vividly and arrestingly alive. His hair was dark-brown rather than black, though to a first glance it looked dark enough.
Down into the deep Langwell glen and up the other side, and here were coast-line and sea again, and far in the distance the outline of the land of home. It was difficult to keep the smile away from the mouth sometimes, though now he was near houses and greeted an occasional fisherman or scholar he knew. Then, less than a mile before he came to Dunster itself, he saw a girl coming along the road all alone, and if there had been any side-path or other means of escape, he would have taken it in the shock of the moment. His feet he could manage, though they seemed to hit the road an instant too soon or too late, but the idiotic way his face wanted to crease up was almost beyond him. At ten yards the difficulty of straightforward advance was an elaborate form of torture. Just as he was passing he threw her a glance, and in a tone positively hearty, said, “Hullo!” She answered, “Hullo”, but quietly, out of a dark, entrancing smile.
Undeviating, chin up, and eyes above the horizon, he held a steady course.
He was in Dunster before he realized it, because it had taken quite a little time to tell himself the sort of fool he was. He had spoken to a girl three miles back, and even inquired after her father, quite at his ease. He knew Una’s mother as well as her father, and could have made a joke, asking: “Has she started on a net yet?” He could have made a score of jokes. If only (he thought) she were coming towards me now, how differently I would behave! Just to test himself, he might take a walk out this way of an evening, as if he were going somewhere. Then she would see that he was neither up nor down!