The Silver Darlings
Page 58
He had caught a glimpse of her standing still, looking away to the moor, with the calm reverie which the singing girl of North Uist had evoked by her song. Her happiness had been so calm and profound that it had touched the fringe of sadness, of fatality, as in the song, as appeared to be the way with women. His mother would never alter. She would deepen and grow in her own wisdom. Beyond the accidents and tempers and fatalities of life, she was encompassed within herself, the mother-woman he knew, different from all other women, and between them the blood relationship of mother and son. But she was distant from him now, completely apart, and this estrangement was cool and whole, leaving the relationship of the blood imperceptible as a sleeping instinct.
“She’s a fine girl. I am very happy about it.”
“I’m glad you like her,” he murmured in reply.
They hadn’t spoken much more about it, for he had felt a certain restraint in his mother’s presence; but as he had been going away, she had said: “Take the sweetness of life, Finn, while still you have it.”
The sweetness of life!
Excitement stirred him in the circle of stones. He felt very nervous. Curse these fellows! He had seen Rob and Callum as thick as thieves, conspiring. They would go to Henry, to Roddie. Donnie and Ian and Davie and Duncan … right up to old Wull the smuggler. Hundreds of them, without decency, without mercy.
“We’ll see you married and properly married,” Rob had said.
“What do you mean by that, Rob?” asked Callum.
“Marriage,” said Rob, “is a public institution. That’s why I never went in for it”
“We know the way you went in for it,” retorted Finn. “And I tell you now that if any of you try on any tricks, I’ll break your necks. Now I’m warning you. I mean it”
“But what trick would we try on?” asked Callum innocently. “Dammit, it’s not us who’s going to do the trick whatever.”
“Let us hope not,” said Rob, “But however that may be, the point is that marriage is a p-p-public——”
“Not a public-house, Rob. No, no,” intervened Callum sensibly.
“A public institution,” proceeded Rob, “and as such it has to be—to be——”
“Ay, ay,” agreed Callum.
“I forget the legal word,” said Rob, “but it means that it has to be it before—before all, so that no question can arise b-but that—that—it was it”
“That’s enough, Rob. You’re making the poor boy nervous,” said Callum. Finn strode away.
This was the night before his marriage, and Finn knew that if they got him in his home they would put him through certain heathenish practices. He had more than once assisted at them, and assisted with great glee, and the harder the prospective bridegroom raged and fought, the deeper the glee. They made him one of the company of men, beyond all false pride, before they were done with him. But now Finn saw the whole proceedings in an entirely different light.
The wedding would last for days. And they were not beyond certain stealthy forms of semi-intrusion on the marriage bed itself. This was what Rob had been hinting at
Finn curled up like an adder that had accidentally stung itself.
But he was safe here meantime and he needn’t go home to-night
Underneath all this, a turmoil of happiness seemed for ever to wash up in his breast and recede like a pulse of the sea. There had been one moment of revelation that would outlast all others. It occurred in the Birch Wood. Una and himself had been sitting talking, and from them all self-consciousness, all stress, had fallen away. She was talking quietly of something they would do together, when suddenly he did not hear so much what she was saying as the tone of her voice, and its intimacy put about them a ring of silence. They were within this ring alone, in league for ever, the two of them, cut off from all others in the world. An intimacy, a trust, clear as her unselfconscious voice, clear as a singing in the hills, near as the deepening tenderness in his breast. She turned her head, for his silence had touched her.
Finn turned his head and looked at the grey-lichened stones. They were very old, and their age gave him a feeling of immense time on whose threshold he lay. What he had lived of life was only its beginning. Its deeper mysteries were ahead.
As if all hitherto had been but accident and skirmish, there came flooding through him a deep blood-warm realization of the potency of life. It uncurled in his limbs stretching them in slow strength, in a divine feeling of well-being. Odds and ends of vision touched his thought from his own boat, the sea, the busy communal life; flashes moving him to restlessness. George’s voice, declaiming his congratulation: “There’s nothing like marrying young, and I’m telling you your children and your children’s children will see many a great change….”
His children and his children’s children! These old fools could think of nothing but children! A touch of Rob’s antique humour came through the confusion of Finn’s thought and expression. He saw himself as an old enough man by that time! a white-haired old man, head of a tribe, sitting on this knoll in quiet thought, his sea days over! How distant and fantastic—how pleasant and amusing, with kindliness about it and peace! Like the figure of the white-haired man he had once imagined here…. Finn’s thought suddenly quickened, and for an intense moment the knoll took on its immemorial calm. Time became a stilled heart-beat. Stealthy, climbing sounds. Finn’s body drew taut, heaved up on to supporting palms. Whisperings, the movement of the top of a small birch-tree here and there whose trunk invisible hands gripped. The hunters in their primordial humour were closing in. Life had come for him.
About the Author
Neil Miller Gunn (1891–1973) was a novelist, critic and dramatist, one of the most influential Scottish writers of the first half of the 20th century. He was born in the village of Dunbeath in the county of Caithness, the northernmost county of mainland Scotland. His father was the captain of a herring boat, and Gunn’s preoccupation with the sea and fishermen can be traced directly back to his childhood memories of his father’s work. He began his working life as a Customs and Excise Officer, and turned to full time writing after he was awarded the 1937 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Highland River. He continued to write prolifically both as novelist and essayist throughout his life.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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All rights reserved
© Neil M. Gunn, 1941
The right of Neil M. Gunn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28267–8