The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  He appeared to consider. “Do you think it was the difference in your stations in life?”

  “There was that,” she said; “there was always that.”

  “Supposing,” he said, conscious of a tonic cruelty in his objectivity, “it had been Norman, his chauffeur, the one she used to go about with——” He stopped abruptly and turned his gaze on her. “If Norman really cared for her, how could he come back and be his chauffeur—in the circumstances?”

  Her eyes went to the window. Her still face looked as if it had taken, in the inner places, an unsearchable punishment, if not now then long ago.

  “You talk of your Highland pride,” he said, for he could not overcome the anger that was in him.

  “Norman,” she said in her even voice, “is the one whose life he saved when he got the decoration.”

  In the silence, Anna passed the window.

  “There’s Anna back,” she said, “I’ll not be keeping you.” She got up and smiled. “Thank you for the nice talk we had.” And she went out, wishing him a good night in her kindly way.

  Chapter Twenty One

  He stood for a while before the window. Anna’s voice could just be heard in the kitchen, doubtless giving her grandmother news of where she had been. The muffling of the voices set them in a distant interior, a far background that was yet a world of its own. His avid concern for his golden ornaments, his archaeological treasure, so sank away that it left no more than its gleam in front of that background. An intuition of the meaning of his labours came upon him, an apprehension of history that was profounder, it seemed to him, than any philosophy of history could contain. Warm human voices, muffled, and in front of them the gleam of gold. The one pattern, indivisible.

  It passed, and he was left restless, upset . . . . That fellow Martin was beyond him. That he shouldn’t want to marry the girl and that sort of thing—all right. Good enough. Sex was always number one mess anyway. He took a turn on the floor. And now, my God! this newspaper business. He looked at the sky. Grey; it had been grey all day.

  When the gloaming was deep he went out. But he did not go in the direction of the cairn; he wandered inland towards the hills with such cunning that presently he found himself able to command Mrs Mackenzie’s cottage and any solid shadow in human guise that might sally forth from it. For a while he was all ears, wondering just how many pairs of eyes might be intent as his own. Extraordinary how the hunt for buried treasure had always obsessed humanity. Was there more to it than the simple greed for gain? Clearly there was. In simple fact, there was the gleam. An ironic expression regarded the involuntarily evoked image of Colonel Mackintosh. The sharp-pointed beard tossed a trifle. But you, too (he said to the image), follow your gleam, and he was not put out by the Colonel’s effort at a withering smile. He felt subtle and diverse. Just as, he thought, the music of the Silver Bough was more than music. And then, in a moment, like the key that fits into a lock, like the forgotten word suddenly remembered, what the Silver Bough really stood for came back to him: it was the passport in those distant days to the land of the gods. As he stirred, he got the impression that something had stirred with him—over on the right and a little higher up. There it was again! a dark stooping body, hauling itself up the hillside. His breathing stopped altogether, for the action, the movement, of the body made him think of Foolish Andie.

  Then began the wildest feat of shadowing that he had ever undertaken. It was a warm close night and the sweat runnelled. His shirt stuck and his eyes smarted. When for intermittent periods he lost the figure altogether, he suffered anguish. Once he nearly gave himself away, for he had got to his feet and was running lightly on when all at once there was the figure only a little way in front. He stopped in a sickness of surprise. But the figure could not have heard him, for now it rounded onto the old drove track going into the hills. When it left the track and he found it again going up the Robbers’ Glen, something more than wonder touched him.

  It was pretty dark now in the deep hollow of the glen and often he stood and listened, waiting for the click of a footstep. But the time came when definitely he knew that he had lost the figure. Either it had arrived or it was sitting down and resting. This created so harrowing a state of suspense that he actually found himself going forward on hands and knees. He’s near the top of the glen by this time, you fool! said common sense. But there was another sense, which had no faith in common sense now, and it kept him to hands and knees like a tracking dog trained not to whimper. His eyes watered from the sweat of bitter vexation. Then he heard a sound.

  For a little while he wondered if he was the victim of hallucination. After all, his particular trade did call for the use of imagination, for a certain capacity to reconstruct the past at least, to visualise it at ritual and ceremony, and he had found that occasionally he was able to do this so concentratedly that he could both see and hear. But the rumble of muffled voices which now reached him from the earth beneath had something other about it, while yet it seemed as real as the grass beneath his palms. If the long-dead robbers had been talking in their den . . . . As his thought was suspended, his head turned slowly upon the fearful air. The thing he had been following mightn’t have been solid . . . . There might be others of them about. He remembered that figure which had appeared from nowhere near this very spot . . . . There was a rumble of laughter. He backed away with the feeling that it had hit him in the belly.

  With a native pertinacity there goes a caution which can swallow the gulp of fear. He backed away and hid, but when no more things appeared he crawled out again. More than that: when at last he was satisfied there was no visible entrance to this underworld of muffled sound, he crawled back to his hidey hole, determined to wait on daylight and reason. He was a scientist and for his creed must, if need be, go down fighting.

  Also he found now that he could give the sound almost any effect he liked, while there was certainly nothing about the tumbled ground and odd boulders or stones to distinguish this part of a glen from hundreds of similar parts. The affair was not merely mysterious, it was quite definitely abnormal. He assured himself of this abnormality in order to keep himself as near the human norm as possible. The sweat dried. He smothered a sneeze.

  The deepest dark of the night passed and when at last he was certain that the air was faintly lightening, he heard a quite distinct thud. A head and body appeared coming up out of the earth perhaps thirty yards down the glen. When his full length appeared there was no doubt it was a man, though quite impossible to distinguish him. Another came up. In all, four; then the thud was repeated and the four men, talking in quiet human voices, walked away and were quickly lost to sight.

  Crawling forward he listened. The subterranean rumble had ceased. When he reached the spot of their emergence, he found only tussocks and boulders and a stone slab. But a slab had a special significance for him. He did not leave the slab alone. It was not lying flat but tilted against the earth. One or two stocks of old heather grew over its edges. When he put forth his strength he made no impression on its apparently rock-bound solidity. But once he had removed the cunningly placed flagstone on which he was standing, the slab gave under his pull and if he hadn’t been nimble it would have pinned his left leg when it fell over with a thud against a hump. A black hole yawned.

  As he went into this hole he clicked on his torch. It was a covered passage of about the same dimensions as the one in the cairn. But he could hardly have gone more than twenty feet when the passage entered a low chamber. As the beam shot here and there, the archaeologist thought that he had stumbled into an earth-house, an underground place of refuge, a dug-out of the Late Bronze Age, but as it more methodically disclosed a circular chamber, with radials of drystone masonry, he decided that here in unique fact might be a working specimen of the prehistoric wheel-house. This so astonished and excited him that at once he felt danger must lurk somewhere, in the black corners, behind the dykes which projected radially from the containing wall like spokes from the rim of a wheel w
hose bush has been widely cut away. When he put his hand out to crawl into the dwelling it sank a sudden foot and he landed on his head, but the bulb in the torch did not snap and he picked himself up with more of a snarl than a yelp. Nothing came at him, however, and he sat on until his heartbeats grew less fierce, then he warily got to his feet and found that he could just stand erect. A pungent odour came through a tobacco thickness like the very smell of the beast of danger. The torch isolated a white enamelled jug with black chips. He stood very still, listening, and for a moment or two fancied that he heard footsteps until he assured himself they were his own heart-beats; then he began to move.

  Old dried heather in sacks; a raised flagstone for a table with wet markings; a small recess or ambry in one of the radials containing drinking glasses; he lifted one of the glasses, sniffed it, and got the faintly pungent odour, not of the beast of danger but of vodka.

  Fear began to lift. A drinking party, a secret brotherhood! His mind flashed across Europe. Here was mystery stranger even than the prehistoric. Behind the next wall, in a built-in recess, he found a small cask, upended, with a copper tap a few inches from its base. He sniffed it, knocked with his knuckles, and nodded. Backing away, he swung the beam round until with a jerk it stopped on the figure of Martin leaning against the wall by the passage entrance.

  A ghost face and glittering eyes. The figure never moved and the beam wobbled, but it came back to the face again. Grant dropped the beam and stood speechless; then he jerked it up again. The fellow was still there.

  “Hallo,” he called.

  Martin did not answer. But after a moment or two his voice came level and dry: “Are you quite finished?”

  Grant could not answer.

  As Martin came away from the wall, his torch clicked on. He began looking around the stone table, then stopped and lifted a wallet, examined its contents, and put it in an inside pocket. “Making a long stay?” he asked.

  “No, I’m going,” replied Grant, “I’m just going. Did not mean to intrude.”

  “For one who did not mean it, you managed very well.” He stood with his head lowered and turned slightly towards Grant, upon whom he now set the beam of his torch which travelled slowly up the body to the face, where it rested with an inhuman curiosity.

  “I happened on the place. That’s all.” Grant shifted his feet.

  “Blind chance.”

  “Not altogether,” replied Grant, whose voice was distinctly firming. “But I was not looking for this place. I was looking for something else.”

  Martin did not answer. Then as if the whole thing hardly interested him, he said in the same cool tones, “Seeing you are here, you’d better have a drink.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “No? A small one might do you some good.” Without paying any further attention to the intruder, he set about lighting a candle and producing two glasses, a cut-crystal decanter of the colourless liquor, and the chipped enamelled jug which he shook, saying, “This water is quite fresh.” He poured out two large drinks and added water. “Try that.”

  Grant took the glass with a mutter of thanks. He was confused because he had been caught in the wheelhouse like a spy and angry because he smelt something deadly in Martin’s even manner. Martin raised his glass in a just perceptible gesture and drank a mouthful, whereupon he deliberately waited until Grant had drunk.

  “You still think it’s vodka?”

  “I don’t know a great deal about drinks,” replied Grant, gasping slightly.

  “You are inclined to judge by colour, perhaps.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “It has been matured in plain wood: that’s the whole mystery.”

  “I cannot say I feel enlightened.”

  “No? It’s an interesting subject. Won’t you sit down?” He got onto a stuffed sack, his back to the wall and his legs out, and indicated another.

  “Before the war a certain man hereabouts made his own whisky. Being a crofter he had not the wherewithal to buy the hotel stuff. The bother about making whisky in that fashion is getting it matured. He thought this an excellent place for leaving the liquor to mature. It has matured rather well, don’t you think?” He drank again then took out a pipe and began to fill it.

  “So it wasn’t vodka?”

  “Disappointing?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Things are not always romantic.” He lit up. “Even if this particular fellow had a rather romantic end. They trussed him up, then slowly, with a peculiarly deliberate art, they bayoneted him. He felt it was coming to him, he said, so before the actual event he told me of the existence of this place and its drink.” His sensitive mouth drew and exhaled smoke with an easy precision. The pipe was going well. “In these times, when whisky can hardly be bought, we who had helped to sustain the Empire thought we might reserve this map-reading for our own exclusive—uh—use. Won’t you?. . .” His left hand, palm up, indicated Grant’s glass in a gesture at once elaborate and negligent.

  Grant’s hand shook a trifle and as he drank he was aware of the eyes upon him, of their cold gleam. Replacing his glass on the stone table, he said, “I was looking for something and—and heard your voices underground. I thought it might be—I thought it might have something to do with my discovery which was stolen, removed, from the cairn.”

  “Your crock of gold?”

  “Yes,” replied Grant, experiencing a sudden stinging blood heat.

  “So it was quite genuine?”

  “Quite.”

  “You had no idea of the existence of this place?”

  “None.” His fumbling hands found his cigarette case. He felt passionately angry and drew the smoke in short puffing smacks. “I wouldn’t spy anyhow.”

  “Spying is a wide term—now.”

  “I don’t care whether it’s wide or narrow; I don’t do it.” He puffed. “I was indebted to you already.”

  “For giving you permission to spy—to investigate the past?”

  “You may call it spying on the past: I call it extending the range of our knowledge.”

  “All spying does that—in war it’s essential.”

  The sinister implication did not help Grant, who replied, “You may mix your categories if you like. I am not impressed.” His eyes now had their own flash.

  Martin’s eyes travelled over Grant’s face. “It is perhaps not clear to me how disturbing the bones of the dead helps—what kind of knowledge?”

  “Knowledge of ourselves.”

  “A rather gruesome sort of knowledge, don’t you think? And particularly gruesome in its beginnings. Not that I stress the adjective, but I should have thought it would be wearisome, messing about in it.”

  “We see things differently. I find it neither gruesome nor wearisome.”

  “You don’t think that a man’s bones—and even his crock of gold—should be left to moulder in peace?”

  “No. And your question, if I may say so, reflects a personal attitude which—to me, at any rate—is defeatist. Even peace is not achieved by mouldering.”

  Martin smiled. “Neither, according to the profoundest, is it achieved by action and interference, particularly in the process of acquiring material knowledge.”

  “Perhaps. But some of us go on finding knowledge—leaving it to others to philosophise upon it.”

  “That may be a somewhat superior retort, for it implies that knowledge is only of one kind, namely, your kind. Before a man achieves the peace that passes understanding, he presumably has acquired a knowledge other than your material kind of knowledge. Or would you say not?”

  “I can only speak for myself.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Well,” said Grant, with a sharp tug at one lapel, “have you achieved the peace that passes understanding?”

  “I should doubt it,” replied Martin with a smoothness of internal humour. “However, you really have evaded the point—perhaps characteristically. I referred to the peace of the skeletons and the crock of go
ld—not your peace or the future peace of someone else. I know we are cannibals, but is it worth while labouring the point? Why go on chewing up the dead bones and the bloody acts?”

  “Man is man because he has thought and investigated and found out. That’s the process. If you don’t like it, that’s your concern. Personally I know no other way for man to exist at all. If he hadn’t existed in that way he wouldn’t, in fact, have gone on existing at all.”

  Martin looked at him so steadily that Grant unthinkingly finished his glass. It was really a belligerent act.

  “It’s the vagueness of your words that’s so—extraordinary. Think, investigate, and find out . . . . Old bones and bloody acts—with a clear prospect of many more old bones and very many more bloody acts. I should have thought you would at least have found it boring.”

  “You contort the whole business.”

  “But you do in fact hunt out skeletons and stone axes and arrowheads and so on and try, I presume, to reconstruct their bloody acts and ceremonial sacrifices. I admit we have progressed in performing bloody acts and sacrifices on a universal scale since the days of your prehistoric cairn, but it does not seem to me that it’s anything to make a fuss about, much less build your edifice of knowledge upon.”

  “You think humanity took the wrong turning?” And Grant’s eyes shot a sudden irony.

  “That wouldn’t matter,” replied Martin with eyes that made Grant’s restless again. “It’s when you keep on along the wrong turning that, it seems to me, the whole thing becomes stupid, literally bloody stupid. However, it doesn’t interest me very much—apart from a question of discrimination involved, and that question being insoluble there is left only the sound of our voices. It generally comes back to that. And an analysis of the voice-sounds does not take you very far—at least no further than any other analysis, for it is characteristic of an analysis that it should analyse away. Let me help you.” And, ignoring Grant’s protest, he filled up both glasses.

  Grant had a poor head for alcohol and what he had already absorbed would normally be more than enough, but now the effect upon him was singular in that his flesh, instead of clogging his brain, seemed to lighten and thin away, leaving the mind to rise up into a subtler freedom than he had experienced even in a secret hour of twilight. His head was a reservoir full of millions of words and thoughts. The only difficulty was this fellow’s power of damming him up; for he did not seem to believe in anything, not even in his own curiosity, penetrating as it was. He appeared to be using talk to fill a vacancy; and his reference to bloody acts was a perverse reference to the annihilation that followed them. And this stillness about him, this living in his eyes, might, in an ultimate moment, use the death-thrust as a temporary full stop.