The Silver Darlings

by Neil M. Gunn

  The sun was at the top of its arch, due south. When the clouds tore from it, the seas sparkled, a crowning green over deep blue. The wind was on their starboard quarter, strong, but with the snarl gone.

  The water swung, raced, glittering, alive. Long waves, not breaking, if with a whiff of drift now and then, particularly when it was a monster, with the little waters running at the top, smoking slightly.

  When the boat went clean from them and Rob said, “Ay, ay,” in solemn wonder, as if someone had told him a magic tale, Finn laughed from the belly, softly. It was fine being alive again, exhilarated, careless. And Roddie sat upright, drawn into himself, the gleam in his eyes, fighting the seas. He was at home now. He was a great skipper.

  Finn did not feel ashamed of the red anger against Roddie in the dark jaw of the rocks. For his challenging manhood was sweet in his flesh. That was past; and before them might be many a strange enough encounter. This weakening lack of food clarified the mind of all vain humours. And where it failed, the sea washed in!

  There was no doubt about the mainland of Lewis, when the mountains rose over their starboard bow. That was a lovely sight; and they stared at them as at a vision in a daydream. “It’s the land‚” said Rob.

  As if it might be something else! What a fine sound: “the land”. Only men who have been lost at sea know the beauty of that sound as it fades away in silent music through the head. Yet never quite fades, because the eyes continue to hold the wonder of the far blue outlines, unchanging and steadfast. With always that touch of the alien that is at the heart of true wonder.

  Roddie held to his course.

  Soon the flat land of Lewis was clear stretching far to the north, but not until they could see the waters white against great headlands, did Roddie bear away. “I think, boys,” he said, “we’ll try for the Butt.”

  The wind was now almost dead astern and the going easier. It was as well to be done with this ocean! The wind, too, was taking off. Within an hour, Roddie had the reefs out, driving the Seafoam all he could. Finn saw the stem lifting and racing, eager now to realize its own wooden dream. If Roddie took a risk he would be ready with a counter. And that stem would help him!

  “What about your eggs now, Finn?” asked Callum.

  Finn took the four eggs and offered the first one to Roddie.

  “There’s not one for us all,” said Roddie reasonably.

  “I wish you would take it,” said Finn, his expression darkening.

  “Thanks,” said Roddie. “Will you break two holes in the end for me?”

  This Finn did, and then he handed an egg to each of the others.

  “What about yourself?” asked Callum.

  “The thought of it still makes me want to spew,” said Finn, smiling. “I had four. This is only your third.”

  “Good health!” said Rob.

  “Your very good health!” said Callum.

  Henry raised his egg. Roddie nodded and glanced back over his shoulder. Finn felt embarrassed and very happy.

  In the late evening they rounded the Butt, but well to seaward to avoid the broken tumult, and as they came into the quiet waters of the Minch, they looked about them with marvelling, humoured eyes.

  Small boats out fishing. The entrance to the inlet of Ness. A queer reluctance came upon them to go into any populous place. “They’ll talk so much,” said Roddie, “the thought of it makes me tired.”

  A quiet little haven, all to themselves, to sleep the night through, that was what they craved. They were in the mood not to want humanity, to hold by a strange yet comforting perversity to the outcast world they had created about them. Only in that moment did they realize, dimly, the nature of what they had come through.

  When the wind died completely away, they took to the oars, shaking their heads over them in arrested laughter as at the final and culminating wonder.

  “Queer things happen,” said Rob, “if only you live long enough.”

  Roddie steered into a little creek and ran her foot upon the sand in a slow hiss.

  When Callum landed he staggered and fell. They all staggered, for they were weak and light-headed. A trickle of water came down into the creek, forming little pools higher up. “Don’t drink too much,” said Roddie.

  Finn and Henry went up over the rise, and in less than an hour returned bearing an iron pot between them and a tin pail in Finn’s left hand. On the tongue of sward by the strand the others watched and waited.

  “It’s hot porridge,” said Henry.

  “And a small drop of milk,” said Finn.

  “Take off your bonnets, boys,” said Callum. “Roddie, say the grace.”

  Simply and sincerely Roddie said the “Grace before Meat”. Their hearts were filled; and then their stomachs were softly and divinely poulticed.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE GOLDEN CASK

  While it was yet early, Roddie woke Henry. “She’s afloat again.” Henry sat up, for they had slept on shore, and looked upon the quiet morning. The sun was well up and lay in a lively glitter upon a sea whose surface was darkened by a gentle land wind.

  “We’ve either to put her at anchor or go out,” said Roddie. “It’s a fine air of wind.”

  Henry did not answer. He wanted to sleep.

  “We’re a few days overdue,” said Roddie, “and I would like to get there myself.”

  Henry nodded. But the others were almost mutinous, Callum in particular, when they had nearly shaken the shoulder out of him.

  “This is dam’ nonsense,” he declared.

  Roddie had the water-cask full, and after a little while they all got on board.

  “Didn’t the old wife tell you,” Callum addressed Henry, “that there was no fishing in Stornoway in any case? Surely we could have had one day on our backs.”

  “You’ve been over five hours on your back,” answered Roddie. “And when we catch the wind you can go on your back again.”

  “Or my backside for all you care,” protested Callum. “What do you say about it, Finn?”

  “It’s a sort of nice morning, too,” said Finn.

  “Ach, you! Boys, I can’t tell you what like a sleep I had!” Callum shook his head. “It lasted, at the full, one moment.” He could not close his hands, they were so weak, and, in fact, when the sails were drawing, he fell off as he swallowed the last bite of his share of the two oat bannocks the old wife had given Henry and Finn when they had returned the pot and the bucket and made her a present of the three puffins.

  Finn was caught into the peaceful morning and lay half-dreaming as they slowly sailed along this strange shore. It was a different world altogether from the iron-bound coasts of home. There was a softness upon the land, in the air. His blood grew warm and sluggish with dream. It was a world of fable, where the mind was wafted upon its own adventure by the wind of desire. And images formed. One image—very clearly. And there came upon him the intimate wonder of her living face, her dark girl’s face, with light in the eyes. Never yet had he given in to it. Not even now would the unfathomable reluctance of his boyhood’s independence or pride let him give in to it, let him admit anything. She was not his companion. They could not walk at ease. And her eyes—he could hardly look into them. But—they were there.

  Conquering the stormy seas of the Western Ocean, climbing the cliffs of The Seven Hunters (as the old wife had called them), sailing by this far land on a beautiful summer morning—if she could understand that, if someone would tell her, tell her how he had climbed and brought back water (Callum might yet describe in detail how he had been saved, how he owed his life to Finn), then perhaps she would see that a fellow like Jim was not of such great importance after all. That he was of no importance whatsoever. That he would fade out in the glory of this peaceful morning, without Finn’s saying a word, because Una’s eyes …

  They troubled him. He saw her hair, like a blackbird’s wing, falling away from her neck, the warm, untouchable pallor of her neck. She walked beside him; like two who had met on a j
ourney, not looking at each other, they walked together. They sat on a green machair over a smooth strand, the morning sun in her eyes. They were in a house. They were here, they were everywhere…. A salmon in a waterfall pool, a gleam vanishing in dark whirls….

  Suddenly it came upon him that perhaps she was for him this gleam; she only. Body and mind went still, banked up in a wave, but his own eyes blinded and the wave burst, drowning all thought. The self-protective wave.

  Out of the darkness into which he had fallen from the sudden release of his imagery, he found himself on a cliff wall. For ages he climbed up its perpendicular face. It was a thousand feet high. In over the top was a little house where Una lived all alone, because the men of the place had perished in a cataclysm of storm and sundering rock. There was one enormous vulture-like bird, with a vermilion tip to its black beak, that screamed as it stooped at him. By flattening against the rock, Finn could just avoid its beak, though its pinions threshed his clothes. Una did not know that this was going on. She might never know. That was his agony. As the bird became bolder, drawing time to a climax, myriads of lesser birds circled and screamed overhead. Out swooped the foiled bird from underneath, banking upward in a magnificent wave, holding to the screaming crest, and now—now—coming down—down—straight for him, for his shoulder…. He started awake and blinked at Henry.

  Henry smiled, withdrawing his hand from Finn’s shoulder.

  The screaming birds were still in his ears. Finn gazed about him, and saw they had come round a point and were making for a fishing-boat inshore. Wheeling about this boat was a colony of demented gulls.

  “They signalled us in,” explained Roddie, with the old smile, detached and friendly.

  “What for?” And then in a word that was a stroke of wonder: “Herring!”

  “By God, cannot a fellow get five minutes’ peace itself?” demanded Callum angrily from the dark fumes of sleep.

  “Cold iron!” cried Rob.

  “Cold backside!” said Callum.

  “Cold iron!” cried Roddie sharply.

  “Cold iron,” muttered Callum, feebly stretching for the metal. Then he gazed about him and blinked at a boat not so big as their own. She was sunk to the gunnels.

  Sails down and oars out, they drew alongside. An oldish man, with sandy whiskers and a pleasant smiling face, called, “Can you be doing with some herring?”

  “We can,” answered Roddie. “You seem to be in them!”

  “We are up to the gunnels, and there are six nets still to come.”

  “We’ll haul them with great care for you,” cried Roddie with a smile.

  “All right.” The skipper nodded, scales to his neck. “Back in and take this lug here.”

  She had four of a crew, one young fellow about Finn’s age. A Stornoway boat, her hold a brimming well of net and glittering herring. As the crew wiped the sweat from necks and faces, the skipper asked where they had been shot last night. Roddie told him they hadn’t been shot; they had been coming from the west side.

  “The west side?” repeated the skipper.

  “Ay,” said Roddie; “we went round to see what was doing, but found it pretty stormy. Much doing in Stornoway?”

  “No, there’s been little so far.” He was looking at their faces. “You didn’t get caught in the storm, did you? It was blowing terrible strong in Stornoway the night before last.”

  “We ran for shelter,” said Roddie. “We were all right.”

  “What put you round there?”

  “The wind,” Roddie answered, with pleasant humour.

  “Where did you shelter?” The friendly sea-blue eyes in the ruddy face over the sandy whiskers were charged with curiosity.

  “In the Seven Hunters.”

  “The Seven Hunters!”

  Finn saw belief, against their better judgement, hold their staring faces.

  As the Sulaire drew away from them on four oars, flat as a beetle, Finn said, “Hold your breath.”

  It looked indeed as if a big breath would sink her.

  But they had to keep their laughter and excitement out of the Sulaire’s hearing. The hold was tidied; their own nets stowed forward; then, grouping aft, they prepared to haul, Roddie and Finn on the back rope, Henry at the sole, with Callum and Rob ready for the heavy weight of fish.

  “And you were grumbling at me,” complained Callum, “for rooting you out of sleep.”

  “She’s heavy,” said Roddie, leaning back with all his weight and strength on a rope that seemed anchored.

  “She’s solid,” said Henry.

  In their general bodily weakness, excitement so got the better of them, the excitement of happiness, of wild wonder at this extraordinary conclusion to their extraordinary adventure, that they could hardly pull.

  As the first herring came over the gunnel, Rob shook his head in husky beneficence. “B-boys, boys, th-the silver darlings!”

  Silver deep in the water, in the air, silver round their feet. All on a glittering silver morning, with the land quiet and the sea quiet; peace everywhere, except in the throats of the flashing gulls. Finn, leaning back on the rope, saw the gulls snow-white against the pale blue summer sky.

  *

  They shipped the oars, as a small breeze cooled them off Tiumpan Head, and they half-emptied the water-cask.

  Down the Eye Peninsula they slowly sailed until, rounding Chicken Head, they saw the unmistakable smoke of Stornoway a few miles in.

  “We have come at it, maybe, in a roundabout way,” allowed Rob, with his solemn air.

  “I wouldn’t say much about that ashore,” suggested Roddie.

  Finn knew that Roddie would not like anyone to tease him on his seamanship. So much had been plain from his responses to the Sulaire.

  They were all laughing. Callum’s arms fell from him in helpless weakness. “We’re like the one family of kittens.” As they cleared the Point, and stood into the broad bay that is Stornoway harbour, Roddie spoke to them. “Go slow, and they won’t notice anything,” he finished.

  “And if they do, we can put it down to drink,” added Finn, filling the skillet once more.

  Soon there was no doubt about its being Stornoway. Beyond a green island in the wide fairway they saw the piers about a broad rectangular promontory, crowded with buildings, that stuck far out into the water, the shore curving away to either side from its root. At anchor off this promontory, Finn counted nine vessels—smacks, schooners, and no less than two three-masted barks. Straight over them, on the treeless slopes across the bay, stood a round tower, and over from it to the right, Stornoway Lodge, the residence of the island’s proprietor.

  The harbour wall was crowded as, in a calm, the Seafoam was pulled into a berth by the side of the Sulaire, still discharging. There were shouts from the wall, but the skipper of the Sulaire got Roddie’s ear. “Are you engaged?” he asked.

  “Well——” Roddie hesitated.

  “Because if not, you couldn’t do better than engage to Mr. Maciver. He’s a decent man.”

  “Thank you. I’ll go up,” said Roddie.

  The quay was crowded with men, women, youths, and girls, in a babble of sound. “You’re from Dunster?” called a man eagerly to Roddie. “You were engaged——” “Oh let us get out of here,” said a second man; “come over to my office”; adding, as they entered a tiny room, “there’s no need to tell the world our business.” He turned to Roddie, “Are you engaged?”

  But the first man at once said: “Aren’t you engaged to Jameson of Wick through your own home curer, Hendry?”

  “Well,” said Roddie, “Mr. Hendry did say he would arrange——”

  “But you were not actually engaged?” asked the second man.

  “Look here, Maciver, that’s not fair. Dammit, you can

  “Keep cool, Bain,” said Maciver. “You were not actually engaged?”

  “I am Jameson’s representative here, and I hold that you are engaged——”

  “Can’t you let the skipper answer fo
r himself?” suggested Maciver, with some sarcasm.

  “I was not directly engaged,” began Roddie, “but——”

  “That’s enough,” said Maciver. “My point is this——”

  “To hell with your point,” interrupted Bain. “You’re not the only one with a point. This is a clear case. The man is engaged to me if ever man was. And, further, let me tell you this——”

  “I know, I know,” interrupted Maciver. He faced Roddie and, speaking through Bain’s voice, said, “The Sulaire is my boat. You have the Sulaire’s herring. You were not directly engaged to anyone. The herring therefore is mine. Do you agree?”

  “You cannot agree,” said Bain, “if you were engaged to me. You can go back on your word to Hendry, if you like, but by God, if you do——”

  Maciver saw Roddie’s eyes harden, and at once offered: “I’ll give you a pound a cran for your shot, and engage you at ten shillings and ten pounds bounty.”

  There was complete silence, for it was a startling offer. The Seafoam had thirteen crans.

  Roddie slowly faced Bain.

  “I make you the same offer,” said Bain.

  Roddie turned to Maciver and, looking him in the eyes, gave a small smile. “I just did not want to force myself on any curer,” he said quietly. “But Mr. Hendry did say he would see me right with Mr. Jameson, and I could not go back on his word. He’s been decent to me. Otherwise, you could have had me and my herring.”

  Maciver, looking narrowly back at Roddie, nodded and smiled. “If you feel bound—that’s that.” It was a dry smile, but friendly.

  As Roddie got back into his boat, the Sulaire skipper asked him if he was fixed up with Maciver. “I am sorry,” replied Roddie, “but our curer at home had already engaged us to Jameson.”

  “In that case,” said the skipper, looking on Roddie’s face, “it couldn’t be helped.”

  “No,” said Roddie. “But I would have liked to have obliged you—and Maciver.”

  “You may yet. Who knows?” said that friendly countenance.

  “I hope so.”

  The crew, sensing disappointment in Roddie’s attitude, stood expressionless. He turned to them and said, “Well, we’ll get the herring out”; and in the same casual tone added for their private ears, “I have sold this shot at one pound a cran.”