The Silver Darlings

by Neil M. Gunn

  “I’ll find him,” replied Finn simply, “wherever he is.”

  The eyes glimmered and the bearded head nodded. As Finn took the food, the old woman’s hands came on his shoulders in blessing. She could hardly speak.

  “May God guide your feet,” said Roddie’s father from the peat-stack, as Finn took to the moor with the night coming down.

  CHAPTER XI

  CATRINE AND KIRSTY

  Catrine stood by the small window looking out upon the land under the half-moon. It was spectral and very quiet, and when she felt that figures might appear there, she turned to the fire. But the window remained like a face in her mind, and with a dragging reluctance she got up and covered it.

  She was very tired, and instead of sitting by the fire, this time she went and lay on her bed. Early, acute terrors of death did not trouble her so much now. When she had got over their attacks, a quietness had descended. For she could never desert Kirsty, not though the love of life sang in each vein and drew her—drew her—to sunlight, to life on the earth, the green earth, to life on quick feet. She loved life. She had always loved it. And only now did she see how lovely a thing it was.

  In the quietism there was this strange twilight mood of acceptance, in which she now no longer thought of her own physical death, but of the spirit of death itself, spectral under the moon.

  Like all of her generation, she never had any doubts of the existence of God, and the imagination that was strengthened in the stories of the ceilidh-house found little difficulty in seeing the figure of Christ as a child in a manger or as a grown man walking down by a ripe cornfield. The eastern imagery of cornfield and green pasture and still waters was their own imagery, and the desert was the waste of moor turned hot and arid, hot as it often was under a blazing July sun, when the shadow of trees or a rock in a little strath drew cattle with switching tails to its shelter and a human being to pleasant ease on his back.

  But religion for the young and healthy was beyond life, beyond the dark instincts, beyond even the superstitions and wild irrational fears that were in such mysterious fashion part of the core and quick of life. Religion was for death, for the unknown hereafter, and paradise a perpetual Sunday school smothering the quick laughter, the gay wonder of human love—should one ever attain paradise by avoiding the brimstone loch of hell. Better not to think about it, to keep it away, and meantime to have life.

  And meantime, too, whatever might happen at an infinitely remote Resurrection, ghosts walked. Ghosts, apparitions, spirits of the dead. Men like Sandy Ware said they were evil spirits, phantoms from unholy regions, and if a man stood his ground before them, and called upon his Maker, they would disappear.

  Had Sandy Ware ever met—the ghost of love?

  Catrine stirred on her bed. Tormad had come near to her again those last few days.

  Was this because, in her weariness, the urgency of her flesh had died down and her spirit, purified to lightness for long moments, could wander the woods and green river-flats of Kildonan, and out and in the small cabin in Dale where Tormad and herself had lived on the edge of want that was poverty, but not poverty of life? She loved the thick hair on his black head and the utter generosity of his nature. She felt him with her hands, her fingers going through his hair, sometimes gripping it and hanging on until he yelled and threatened her and they rolled and fought in an ecstasy of living.

  Tormad was strong and instinctive, with the moods and graces of the instincts.

  Roddie was strong and reasonable.

  Tormad was one she had had to deal with, as she often had had to deal with little Finn.

  Roddie was like a pillar that she herself could lean against.

  More than once she had had an almost overpowering desire to let Roddie take her and so find peace for herself and her body inside the circle of his strength. She could have wished him to break through the barrier between them, even while her face showed how inviolable the barrier must remain. The only thing that kept Roddie back was the thought that her husband might be alive. That was the barrier which Roddie would not break through. And when she saw it breaking down in his eyes, she could restore it with a look.

  Yet this did not make the matter clear in itself. She had never, for example, told Roddie the story of Tormad’s ghostly appearance to her and her own certainty of his death. Why?

  She was weak. She was terribly weak. She feared. She did not know what she wanted. Supposing it had been certified that Tormad was dead, and Roddie then had taken action into his own hands, would she have let him crash through the barrier of strange reluctance? She knew she could no more have stopped him than have stopped fate.

  Would she have desired it? Yes, often, madly … yes … she didn’t know.

  And now it didn’t matter. It was better, indeed, to have the pattern of her past life clear and simple. And that excitement and loveliness of living with Tormad could never have come again. In the ordinary workaday life, with its drudgeries and dependence and hours of hidden misery, here in another woman’s home, that early life had often seemed remote and insubstantial. But now it was coming back again, it was stealing in upon her with the quietness of sleep that carries the waking thought into the more vivid dream.

  She heard the tapping and wondered where she was; then she hurried into Kirsty’s room. The dawn was coming and in its faint light she saw the ghastly pallor of the rigid face. Death, she thought, and when her quick, whispered appeals were unanswered, her heart stood heavily in her breast.

  “Were you asleep?” The voice was a thick whisper but the opening eyes glittered in concentration.

  “Yes,” muttered Catrine, overwhelmed with shame. “I lay down for a minute. Are the pains easier?”

  Kirsty’s acute attack of what was locally called “the dysentery” and recognized as the onset of “the plague”, had been accompanied by an intense nausea and retching. As Kirsty’s mouth yawed open in a wild choking effort at vomit which would not come, her abdominal muscles squirmed and griped in cramping pains. A touch of flatulence added to her agony. She complained of a fixed burning pain in her stomach and a desperate thirst. Catrine had bathed her feet in hot sea-water, sea-water that Roddie had brought in a bucket, and given her cold water with a little whisky to drink, all on the advice of Hector Bethune.

  But the taste of the whisky, Kirsty bitterly complained, only increased her nausea and turned her tongue cold. She could not go to bed because of the almost incessant diarrhœa. But at last her exhaustion became such that Catrine had had to help her off the floor and into bed.

  Now, as her hand came on the bedclothes to smooth them under Kirsty’s chin, she found they were wet. Kirsty had been vomiting; and as she glanced at the watching eyes, Catrine seemed to see in them a cold malevolence. She knew how Kirsty loathed this personal uncleanliness, this loss of control. All at once new spasms started. The eyes shut and the body heaved and moaned.

  In the use of her capable hands, Catrine regained her assurance. The full kettle was for ever simmering on the fire. She removed the soiled gown and special bed-cloth and washed Kirsty’s mouth and body tenderly but firmly, then happed her warmly and hurried out to bury the bed-cloth. The gown she stuffed into a tub of water, astringent from a decoction of roots of the tormentil, which Hector Bethune sometimes used for tanning leather.

  While outside, she also sluiced her face and nostrils and hands. Hector had said she should do this always after handling the afflicted body. He had also said that she would do herself no harm by taking a good deep breath of peat smoke, for it might help her to cough up the beginnings of infection.

  As the acrid smoke caught her nostrils and throat, she coughed and spat into the fire and felt the better for it. In front of trouble requiring action, she had a native poise and ability.

  When she had heated a bowl of milk, she poured a glass of whisky into it, and went into Kirsty’s room. “Now, here you are. You’ll take this.” Her manner was cheerful.

  Kirsty ignored her.

&n
bsp; “Come away, Kirsty. You must keep your strength up. Come!” She put her arm round Kirsty’s shoulders, but they remained rigid against her.

  “Leave me,” said Kirsty. “I’m dying.” The tone was cold and repellent, the face a saturnine mask.

  “But you must take something,” Catrine wheedled her. “It’s your only chance of getting well.”

  “There is no chance.”

  “But take it, to please me. Do. Please, Kirsty.”

  Kirsty now turned her eyes upon Catrine and it looked as if hatred burned in their depths. “I order you,” she muttered, “to leave my house this instant.” The difficulty she had with her articulation gave the words an almost malignant deliberation.

  “But I can’t leave you now.”

  “Leave me,” croaked Kirsty, with such harsh anger that her jaw shook and champed. At once Catrine turned and left the room. She placed the bowl beside the fire, and stood still. There was no doubt about the reality of the hatred in Kirsty’s eyes. Catrine did not know what to think. It could hardly be because she had fallen asleep for an hour or so. Suddenly she felt very tired, weary, disheartened. Kirsty had said she was dying—not as a dying person would say it—but as if it were her own business. They were perhaps both dying. But why this misery—this destroying hatred—now? “Leave my house.” Life gave little inward clutches at Catrine’s throat. It might yet be time. Leave the house—leave it—go over the hills, taking food with you—over the mountains….

  She poured what was left of the milk in the pan into a clean bowl and added a thimbleful of whisky. As she raised the bowl her hands shook. She drank it slowly, sitting by the fire.

  She could not feel any more, could not think. For two nights she had had no real sleep. The sunless dawn was grey silver over the still land. She listened to the singing of two larks. Only now and then did one become conscious of bird-singing, because the place was alive with larks, and for months the air was rarely free of their mounting wings. In the grey of a spring morning they became possessed and all the upper air was a quilted ecstasy. Robins and wrens had their clear, ringing songs, and chaffinch and greenfinch their quieter melodies. These smaller birds loved this land of braes and bushes, of sheltered crannies and ledges amid grey rocks.

  The kitchen was a dim cage shut away from the silver morning, and because of the strange fatalism and loyalty bred from her race, Catrine listened to the singing, and its beauty killed urgency in her.

  In her despondency, her body for a little grew light as a wraith, and she passed on blind feet through singing and silence, in a vague sad wonder at the ordering of the world. Then her body came back upon her as she sat before the fire, her cheeks weighing heavily into her palms and the flames wavering as if seen through running water. The milk made her heavy and sleepy and she wanted to slip off the stool on to the floor and not care if she never awoke.

  Finn and the birds. He had always been so curious. “What bird is that, Mama?” Eager eyes and quick feet, trying to follow the bird to its nest … Finn faded; her eyes closed; and she slept where she sat, her head jerking now and then.

  At the first sound from Kirsty she was awake and hurrying; assisted her through her dreadful spasms; tidied bed and room, and presently returned with the bowl of milk. “Won’t you try a little?”

  Kirsty did not answer. She had become dreadfully emaciated. Catrine remained beside her, silent.

  “What you waiting for?” demanded Kirsty.

  “Try a little,” pleaded Catrine, who naïvely felt that Kirsty must get strength from somewhere if she was going to live.

  “Go ’way! Get out!” croaked Kirsty.

  “Just a little.” Catrine put her arm round the stiff shoulders and used some strength. It was a dead heave, but she got the head up and held the bowl to the lips. After a stiff but indecisive moment, Kirsty sucked at the milk. “Again,” said Catrine. Kirsty sucked noisily a second time, and then fell back, spilling some milk on her breast. Catrine, laying the bowl down, wiped her breast. “Now you’ll be the better of that.” Kirsty ignored her, breathing stertorously. In a very short time Kirsty was violently sick and Catrine thought it was the end.

  Kirsty recovered, glared at Catrine, and muttered something like, “Didn’t I tell you!”

  So it went on at intervals all through the day. Catrine could see the flesh wasting away, the bones coming up, hour by hour.

  In the early evening, Roddie was waiting below the byre and she told him that it must go one way or the other with Kirsty very soon. They arranged that if Kirsty died, she would put up the white signal.

  “Are you doing what I told you and eating your food?”

  “Yes,” said Catrine. “It gave me something to do. I have been careful.”

  “That’s fine,” nodded Roddie. “You have a great spirit, Catrine. Keep it up! And look here—whenever this is over, we have a little place all for yourself for a few days. All ready.” He smiled in that diffident detached way that had always attracted her.

  “But——” She paused. “Do you mean,” she asked, with widening eyes, “that our house will be burned down?”

  “Of course,” said Roddie. “We’ll burn it into the ground.” There was an inexorable quality in his quiet voice, a restraint that suggested a terrible strength, a strength balked and turned in on itself.

  “I’ll have to run,” said Catrine. “The spasms come on her suddenly.”

  His eyes narrowed and she saw that it would not take much for him to walk in, snatch her under an arm, and stride away with her, caring as little for her protests as for anyone else’s.

  As she ran, giving him a wave and a smile, he stood quite still and, inside, she listened, ready to block the door against him. Once or twice at a market it had taken a few men to hold him. But that was with a drop of drink taken. Now he was sober, and the plague was not a thing he could break on his knee.

  She felt heartened and looked at herself in the small glass. She was pale, perhaps, but her eyes were larger and browner than ever, and the lips of her wide mouth had colour still. While she smiled at her eyes, they looked back at her and filled with tears. She hastily wiped the tears away. She was thirty-four, but her skin was smooth as it had been in her twenties. She felt in her twenties, in her ’teens. She moved quickly about the kitchen. She didn’t feel she was going to die. She was not going to die. Burn down the house? Her house and Finn’s? Somehow that awful thought had not attacked her before.

  All day she had kept going, cleaning, washing, looking out sheets and clothes, shifting the tethers, mucking the byre, feeding the horse, and attending to Kirsty, the visits outside being swift sallies from which she returned panting the good air. The early morning tiredness passed away entirely, and she felt she could spend another night without sleep easily.

  Only there was nothing much more to do now, except wait for sounds from Kirsty. And outside there was the spectral light again. She feared it. The grey light of dawn and gloaming. The hour when the spirit walked alone—one’s own spirit, out through the eyes; and the spirit of a dead loved one, in the strange brightness that can inhabit the grey light, coming down, drawing nigh….

  Kirsty’s stick tapped, and with a quick catch of breath, Catrine went into her room. Already the face was in shadow, and she lay quietly; then looked up at Catrine standing by her bed, a basin in her hand, asking gently if she felt the spasm coming.

  “Why didn’t you leave me when I told you?” The voice was clearer than it had been, but also weaker.

  “I couldn’t leave you, Kirsty. You know that.”

  “Why?”

  “How could I, and you ill? You have been so kind to me, to me and Finn.”

  “Not been kind. You more than worked your way here. But while I’m alive, I’m mistress here, and you should have obeyed.”

  “I couldn’t. Please don’t hold that against me now. Please, Kirsty,” pleaded Catrine.

  “Very well,” said Kirsty. “But I could have died alone. Could you not think of y
ourself? Isn’t one enough?”

  Catrine did not answer, seeing in that clear moment Kirsty’s inexorable common sense. It was selfless and austere, yet with a final pride in it. Everything had been hard and clear, matter-of-fact and precise, with Kirsty always. Waste not, want not. Her sense of economy was still at work!

  “Would you have left me if I had been ill?” asked Catrine.

  There was a pause. “Nothing to do with it. The end is not far off now and we have a little business to do. Sit down.”

  Catrine sat down on the wooden chair beside her bed. Kirsty’s hands lay extended on the patchwork coverlet and her eyes stared over them down the bed.

  Sometimes her voice was little more than a whisper. She spoke in a monotone, with intervals of silence, and at times indeed it seemed that the spirit alone was talking through the gaunt, exhausted flesh. The eyes were deeply sunk and, in an interval, when the spirit seemed arrested by its own thought, the pupils tended to roll upward.

  But the intellect was clear and the burden of what she said was:

  “My father wanted you to inherit this croft. That was right. I would not want the home of my people to pass to a stranger. But this was never our home. We, like you, were driven out. But I do not want brother or sister of mine, who left us here, to benefit now. I told my brother that when he arrived too late for his father’s funeral. He knows. But when it comes to worldly goods, trust no one. Remember that.” Her head nodded slightly but firmly. “So—feeling this was coming on me—I wrote it down on a paper. That paper—in the shottle of my kist. Keys are there, in that small box. Get them.”

  Catrine found the keys, under some brooches and faded letters, coloured beads and other “bonnie things”, surely as old as her childhood.

  “Open the kist.”

  The rectangular wooden trunk was solidly made. When Catrine had lifted its lid, an old scent of wild thyme came up from folded dark clothes. Fixed to the back, like a rectangular sleeve, was the narrow, boxed-in shottle. From this Catrine took the letter.