The Silver Darlings

by Neil M. Gunn

But Roddie did not give up, and no one dared to suggest to him to do so, for though patience could dwell in this man as in a stone, there could at the same moment be in him the explosive lash.

  Then Finn gave up hope, and he saw that Una had no hope left either. The hands were limp and cold, the hands of the dead. He had never seen her as he saw her now, all the movement of her mind, its emotions, its courage, its fear; the sudden access in which she pressed the hand against her face, against her neck, and then continued to chafe it upward as Roddie had told her.

  “You’d better go home, Finn,” said Roddie, looking at him.

  “No,” answered Finn lightly, and clenched his hands and gritted his teeth to keep the idiotic trembling within bounds. At that moment he encountered Una’s eyes and they looked at him directly, knowing him, and he was aware of a movement within him, profound as tragedy, as death, before her eyes fell to their task.

  Then hope went from Roddie—not, after the first few minutes, that it had been very strong. But the curious automatism that his mind could achieve in certain situations, when time became obliterated in endurance, decided to keep him going for still a little while. But conscious hope now left him, and if the father of Duncan had told him to desist, he would have done so.

  Only the mother had any hope left, and it was hardly hope so much as a blind surging effort to give warmth back to the cold body. She nursed the feet against her breast as if she were giving them suck of her heart’s blood. She lay on her side, curved inward towards them, and the father who had to endure this strange sight, got held as in a trance, for he knew the warmth of life there was in this woman, and how as a woman she was the great fighter of death.

  And then it was, when hope was going to sink away from her also, that she roused herself against death, and called from the deeps of her spirit to her son, pouring her life into him, and for answer she felt a pressure of the cold feet against her breasts, and she gave a great cry to her far-wandering son, guiding him back to her.

  Roddie saw the slow tremor pass over the body, the lips part, and the head reach forward a little in a motion of vomit.

  “Dear God, he’s living!” he said, in a harsh voice of wonder.

  *

  They bore him to the house of the little boy, who had thought the crowd on the cliff-head was a market, because it was the nearest house. The mother now walked beside the father with her eyes to her son’s ease, but the father and Roddie and two other men carried him with such tender hands over the broken places that he floated as on a bed.

  Many went with them, but the great crowd stayed behind.

  Meantime the woman of the house and her daughter had hurried home to prepare the kitchen bed for Duncan, who had relapsed into unconsciousness. The daughter was a young woman of twenty, buxom and light on her feet and full of swift energy. As her mother drew the peats together into leaping flames, she swept the blankets off the bed and with outstretched arms held them to the fire, her brown head thrown back. As they brought Duncan in, she flung the warmed blankets back on the bed and straightened them out. When the father and Roddie began to strip the wet clothes off Duncan she left the kitchen with all the others except the man and woman of the house and Duncan’s mother.

  In a minute or two the three men came out. The man of the house said in a quiet voice to his daughter, who had prepared the bed, “They’re wanting you inside.”

  “Go in, Una,” said Una’s father calmly at the same time.

  The two young women glanced in a startled way, then dropped their eyes and went quietly in at the door, closing it behind them.

  All the others now looked away towards the crowd on the cliff-head. Some of the younger men could be seen stretching out on either hand, to get a view of the rocks from another angle, and Roddie, who had the little boy in his arms, said, “I hope these young fools will watch themselves.”

  “They can do nothing now,” said Una’s father.

  “Whenever it shows signs of taking off, we’ll get a boat out.”

  They glanced at the sky, standing back out of the wind, which came whistling round the corner of the house.

  “It won’t let down until the rain breaks it,” said a man.

  “In that case, it shouldn’t be long,” said another.

  The weight of fatality was heavy upon them and made their voices sound light and pleasant.

  “I’ll go in,” said Una’s father, and the man of the house went with him. The little boy now struggled to get out of Roddie’s arms, overborne by a desire for his mother, and as Roddie set him down, he ran after the two men and went in with them, holding fearfully to his father’s hand.

  “How is he doing?” asked Duncan’s father as he came by the end of the bed.

  “There is no sign yet,” said his wife.

  The father leaned over the bed and looked at the bluey-cold pallor of his son’s face. Behind it was the dark head and flushed face of his daughter, Una, and in front the warm face and glancing eyes of the brown girl, whose name was Janet Calder.

  “Do you feel any heat in him yet?” he asked gently.

  “No, Father,” said Una.

  Outside, Roddie said to Finn, “It’s high time you were home.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said another man, looking closely at Finn.

  “Sea-water never did anyone any harm yet,” remarked Finn, for it was held, out of experience, that no ill-effects followed immersion in sea-water. But now there might be another meaning to Finn’s innocent words, for the seawater had proved fatal enough that day, and Roddie asked, before the thought could be born, “Did the stone stick before it reached you?”

  “Yes,” replied Finn, twisting his body to keep the chitters from it, “yes—it stuck on a little ledge above. I saw it stick.”

  “That would be an anxious moment for you?”

  “It was,” said Finn, smiling, “—especially when I saw it going up again.”

  “It would be.”

  “Yes. I thought it was all up with us then,”

  “Boy, boy!” said a man, in thoughtful wonder.

  They glanced at Finn.

  “Did you see any sign of the others?” asked Roddie.

  “Yes, I got a glimpse of Tom’s dark head a few yards out, but when I looked again, as the wave went from us, it was gone.”

  They stared towards the dark figures on the cliff.

  Duncan’s father came out and said to Roddie, “He’s coming to himself now. He’ll be all right.”

  “That’s fine.” said Roddie. “Well, we’ll away home, Malcolm, because you know how anxious folk can get when they don’t know what’s happening.”

  “I can only thank you, Roddie.”

  “It’s little I did,” said Roddie, as they shook hands.

  As Malcolm shook hands with Finn, he suddenly, in a warm movement towards his youth and courage, brought his left hand over to his right, and cupped the lad’s hand in a pressure of deep emotion. “We won’t forget, Finn,” he said, smiling.

  “Och, it’s nothing,” said Finn, and if the words could hardly have been more inept, they were understood profoundly.

  Roddie and Finn and Donnie and three others now set off for the Dunster bridge, Roddie setting up a swinging pace, for the thought of Catrine and the rumours that might reach her ears had troubled him for some time.

  They had hardly got properly under way, however, when a soul-stirring sound came upon the wind and drew them up. For a moment it was like a surge of unearthly voices under the sky, but in a few seconds they recognized the swell and rise of the old Psalm tune to the words, O God, our help in ages past….

  They listened for a little to this singing from the cliff-head, then in silence moved on again.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  AS THE ROSE GROWS MERRY IN TIME

  The bodies of Daniel Bannerman and Tom Dallas were recovered two days later, and a few days after their burial, the White Heather lifted her brown sails in the bay and, rounding the Head, set her stem on Clyth Ness.r />
  “Boys, this is good!” said Finn.

  “Rob’s kist is still the biggest,” Callum observed, “and he had a narrow squeak with it last time.”

  “If it’s big it’s valuable,” replied Rob, “and if there’s to be any squeaking, we’ll throw the rubbish over first.”

  Henry smiled. There were only the four of them, which was the normal size of a home crew, unless for a young lad at the skimmer. And though they were now going to a distant shore, they reckoned they knew the way well enough to manage by themselves! A lad of sixteen who had been going to come with them had at the last been overborne by his mother, who was sister to the mother of the drowned Tom Dallas. They had refused other lads, for Henry said that this was only another voyage of exploration, as Stornoway had not yet awakened, and if Roddie’s news from Wick was anything to go by, might again be dead to the herring world as was all the rest of the Hebridean West.

  But, meantime, it was fine to watch the new White Heather going through her paces in a choppy sparkling sea. It was worth while setting an adventurous course for that alone! It was the real May weather, too, with a brisk wind out of the nor’-east and a bright sky.

  Henry drew her so close into the wind that Rob, lips apart and eyes on the sails, at last shook his head in admiration. “She’s good. I’ll say that.”

  Henry smiled and eased the tiller a little.

  “It’s long legs to-day, boys,” said Callum; then he winked at Finn. “Can you remember, Finn,” he asked solemnly, “the name of a public-house in Stornoway where—tuts! what’s its name?—it’s an awful thing, the memory—but it was run by a very pleasant, rather stout armful of a widow woman …”

  When life is good it is warm. Its warmth came about Finn’s heart, and it had known the cold for many a long day. These days had culminated in the drowning of Daniel Bannerman and Tom Dallas, and in that hour, as he had clung to the crevice in the rocks and held his breath against the swirl of the water and its lung-stinging suffocating spume, he had know the final coldness, the coldness that is washed and cleansed of all warmth and feeling, the death-coldness of the sea.

  Afterwards, he could feel himself rise out of that tragedy, with the cleansed, cold feeling that bound him to the sea, that took fear away, for beyond what he had seen, which was death, there could be no further earthly experience. The sea had drawn close to him, close as the bone-skeleton that held the mesh of his warm flesh. When all doors were closed—there was that door to the sea. Whatever should betide him, there would be the sea always.

  The sparkling laughing sea, throwing its little bursts of drift about the stem, a new stem but with the same eagerness as the stem of the Seafoam, with eyes for nothing short of the horizon. It was the way to travel and to sail.

  The parish fell away behind them as Henry put her on the last long leg that would bring Clyth Head abeam; and, as on the previous trip, they had the odd sensation of seeing all that belonged to it both diminished and made clear in its proportions. Feeling in particular was eliminated, and Elspet’s hauling the recalcitrant Bel by the tether that sometimes got round her skirts was a picture pleasant and laughable to the inward eye. Barbara would not arrive until the end of the month, and would then stay on for the summer gutting.

  He was glad, too, that he had got through the business of saying good-bye to his mother quite naturally. Roddie had been there, and that had made man’s talk easy. He felt that he had nothing against his mother now. He had somehow just lost taste of her. That was all. His desperate, terrifying feelings had been an odd sort of madness, so odd that a sudden thought of it could still close his fists and grip his body in a slight rigor. But all that was passing. Growing pains! A man had to live long enough to learn many a thing! All that was really left over from it was a feeling, haunting him now and then, of incommunicable loss. Not the loss of his mother, but the loss of something from his own life. And even that was fading.

  Not that he even thought of it to-day, for his mind refused to contemplate his mother and Roddie about their own home; or, rather, banished the thought as not worth bothering about. For it was extraordinary to Finn himself how, despite that moment of communion with Roddie on the cliff, when their spirits had been held, known each to each, finally, as if the gale had calmed in a little still circle of eternity, they had thereafter withdrawn into each other, man apart from man, and the old relationship had been established, but with the difference that they could now talk when they met normally if not readily or lightly.

  White round the foot of Clyth Head, and now no more legs but the wind on the starboard beam and the White Heather flying. “They’ll be talking about their steamships,” Rob remarked with his droll air.

  “A great day!” murmured Finn, smiling abroad upon the sea and looking back at the land.

  “I bet you, Rob, he’s thinking of that girl in Stornoway?”

  “Which one?” asked Finn.

  Rob shook his head sadly.

  “Between them both and their women,” cried Callum to Henry, “O God, we’ll have——”

  “Cold iron!” yelled Rob.

  When they had gripped iron, Rob turned on Callum with some anger. “What’s the good in behaving like that? Surely you’re old enough to know better and this a new boat. There’s many a man would refuse to sail with you for less.”

  “I’ll hold the iron till it’s warm,” said the abashed Callum. “It was the thought of you and Finn with your women did it.”

  “If Finn and me need women, we won’t shout for anyone’s help,” replied Rob with crushing sobriety.

  Rob was a great stickler for the old beliefs, and Finn thought of last night’s doings when Rob raised the neidfire. Henry had had to lead the way to the shore in the dark to sprinkle some of the water on the bow of the White Heather. Many said they no longer believed in these old superstitions, and the Church was against them. All the same, when the affair had been carried through in complete secrecy, there had followed an inflow of comradeship and confidence, a gaiety that made them feel ready for anything. And even if no more than a feeling, still it was a pleasant one! There was little point in being on the wrong side of the dark ones.

  To be on the right side of the dark ones, and to have the bright ones, from the fields of the sky, driving over the blue ocean with a white mane showing here and there—and the White Heather bounding onward trying to keep up—made a day of days.

  As they brought Wick abeam, Finn thought of his boat now building there. She was to be ready for the first week in July and he would be the youngest skipper in Dunster.

  “What are you going to call her, Finn?” asked Callum.

  “Keep the name to yourself until you christen her with it,” advised Rob darkly.

  “I’ll do that,” agreed Finn.

  “It’s a difficult thing to get a name that suits you completely,” said Henry.

  “Perhaps so,” said Finn, but with a smile, because his mind was made up to call her Gannet, the white bird that lives in far and stormy seas and is a great fisher. Not a warm name, perhaps: cold and white and distant, but of the sea’s core.

  The Orkneys rose from this deep-blue sea and the Pentland Firth like a vast river in flood. Finn liked the way the islands lay in the water, with their great rock sides sheering to headlands as the sides of a boat to her stem. Mighty monsters they were, guarding the Beyond.

  Henry said they would dodge about until the tide turned, and offered Finn the helm, “just to feel what she’s like”.

  “In a boat like this,” said Finn, “I would sail round the world.”

  Callum and Rob mocked him.

  “All right,” said Finn. “Watch me.”

  After a while Rob’s brows gathered. “Where away now?”

  “Course set for the Fair Isle! Shetlands beyond!” sang out Finn. Presently it got beyond a joke when cross seas set up an uncomfortable jabble. They shouted at him. “Are you frightened?” challenged Finn. When they threatened to rush him, he put her about smartly.
“One year, boys, we’ll go the Shetlands. What do you say? Isn’t it a great thing to have the whole ocean for the wandering over?”

  When fishermen arrived at the Pentland Firth and found the tide had been running for two or three hours at full spate westward, they gave their boats to the stream and, with wits and hands ready, hoped for the best. But now, as the tide turned along shore, Henry could afford to take the passage inside the island of Stroma without any risk of having the tide turn against him before he was clear of the great stream.

  “Boys, this is like a holiday,” said Callum, as they sailed by the white strand of John o’ Groats, with its fabled shells. They looked inquisitively at all they could see, discussed the condition of the crops, made comparisons with Dunster, and remembered what someone had said sometime. As Holborn Head shut Scrabster away, Rob got slowly launched, through intricacies of relationships, upon an ancient story about a bishop who had been roasted on his own fire in these parts, and Finn, settling down, listened, until the voice seemed as far back in time as the characters it evoked.

  The wind died away in the evening as they entered Loch Eriboll, and over the quiet, dark waters they pulled their oars to anchorage. The birds cried along the shore. The air was soft. After the hot day, the mountains were hazed as by a faint blue smoke. The sound their oars made travelled a long distance, and when at last they stood up and listened, they heard the silence going farther and farther away. A slow glimmering came into Finn’s eyes. They had reached the land of peace, the long sea-inlets of evening and morning, the world of the West.

  “We’ll go off to yon crofter that Rob hauled out of bed in his shirt to see if the porridge is boiling yet,” said Callum. Finn was the first to jump.

  The darkness was fallen and Henry asleep before they came back along the shore, making much noise, for the hospitality had been good, as the folk in this region held the curious belief that barley had been created by God and not by the London Parliament, and if so it wasn’t God that had made the regulations and charged the whisky duty,