The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  The door opened and Anna came in with kidneys on toast. “Oh,” she murmured, “I thought you would have finished your soup.”

  Grant looked at her and at his soup. He dropped the paper on the floor, sat down, and began to sup his soup.

  When Mrs Cameron came in later, he had his elbows on the table, and the fine point of his beard dipping into his coffee cup, as he stared out of the window.

  “I hope the kidneys were tender,” said Mrs Cameron. “Archie was in a good mood today, maybe because he had more in his van.”

  “Fine,” he answered, getting up.

  “I’ll just clear away, then. Anna had to go up the road.”

  “Been talking to Mrs Mackenzie?” he asked.

  “Yes, oh yes. I was there this morning when you came home.” She shook her head. “The poor woman is getting demented with them.”

  “With whom?”

  “The visitors, spying on her. Two of them—one was a girl, I’m sorry to say—got hold of Andie in the barn and gave him things, bonny things.”

  He stared at her. “What for?”

  “I don’t know, unless it’s to keep in with him.”

  “Do you mean,” he asked, “that they are trying to tempt him to disclose where he has hidden the—the urn?”

  “Maybe,” she answered. “Maybe too—it’s only what I was fancying—they’ll be thinking that he might go and hide the bonny things in the same place.”

  His lips parted but no sound came. Then he turned away, walking over the paper.

  Mrs Cameron picked it up. “I did not want Anna to bother you with this until you had enjoyed your food. It’s a poor photograph of you, whatever else.”

  “I suppose the policeman at Kinlochoscar is the only one in the whole district?”

  “Yes. He was here today. And it’s him that was important, too, for he had a busy time.”

  His brows gathered.

  “There was that many cars,” she explained. “Never before has so many been seen in Clachar, and as he was saying to myself, in these days of petrol restrictions it looked very suspicious. I heard just a few minutes ago that he has got two or three cases that he will be prosecuting.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “All to see the cairn and hunt for the crock of gold. And they made a fair mess of Alick Cruban’s young corn and flattened Donald Willie’s potatoes as flat as this door. I told the policeman——”

  “Was he here?”

  “He was. But I said you had been travelling all night and was not to be disturbed and he could see you tomorrow—or this evening itself if his business was very urgent. He said he had no formal business at the moment—that was his word, for he likes an important one.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “He’ll be here tomorrow to direct the traffic,” he said. There came a distant roar of two or three cars starting up. “You should have heard it earlier,” she commented.

  Quite silent he stood.

  She stole a glance at him. “Not that you can believe everything you hear,” she said.

  “Can there be anything else to hear?” he asked.

  “Plenty,” she said, “for rumour has a tongue longer than next week.” She spoke cheerfully, as one amused. “But at least I made nonsense of the story about melting the gold, for I saw Tom Alan of old Fachie’s myself, and he laughed and said ‘You never know’, so I knew.”

  “Melting the gold?”

  “The gold in the crock. For they’re saying that gold is now three times its own price; and they’re saying that if someone found the gold and melted it down, then no one could know where it came from and you could make a fortune out of it. I’m only telling you this to prepare you for the lies that will be going about would make Beelzebub blush—and he’s not the one for blushing.” She added the last words inconsequently out of her compassion.

  “Who is Tom Alan?”

  “Grandson to old Fachie. He happened to be one that Norman-at-the-Big-House ran into on that first night, so a yarn folk had to make. Just blethers. Don’t you be bothering yourself about that.”

  He had nothing to say.

  “I’m very hopeful yet,” she added desperately.

  He looked at her.

  “For with all their spying they’ll keep Andie from going to his hiding place. He’s not so foolish as many of themselves, stravaiging about as if grown people had nothing better to do in this world. Donald Willie says he will have the law on them for his potatoes.”

  A faint smile came to the archaeologist’s face, but it faded as, a little later, he set out for the cairn. The finding, the melting and the selling of the gold would be the simplest matter in the world, particularly in these black-market days with advertisements for gold in every newspaper. The exhilarating feeling of the treasure hunt would wilt before the face of the money shark. The youth of the world had been eaten up by the sharks. The youth and the beauty and the fun. Devoured by the grey monsters.

  He went on more firmly and didn’t cast a glance at odd watching humans. The world was a sea of sharks’ faces. The faces came up into the light and the teeth snapped.

  They had even been poking about in the cairn, holes here and there and boulders rolled away. But the passage was still covered, intact. The ground itself was getting burned up by their feet. This was really going beyond the limit. For the photographs to have been in the paper today, they must have been taken two or three nights ago. He tried to think, but time was the one thing which seemed beyond fixing. Its fluidity came about him like invisible water. Ten yards away, her legs apart, stood the girl in the short shorts, a thumb about the strap of her slung camera, contemplating him. As his gaze steadied upon her, she smiled her unexpected melting smile.

  Dizzied a trifle with wrath, he went straight to her. “Did you or your—your friends take the photographs inside that cairn?”

  She looked at him and her expression caught a certain archness. “You would really like to know?”

  “I would.”

  “Well. I could tell you a whole lot,” she admitted. “But—what are your intentions?”

  “Intentions? What do you mean?”

  She pivoted perceptibly without moving her feet and glanced at him sideways. “Supposing I told you—what would you do about it?”

  That momentarily stumped him, for clearly it would be witless to inform her that he would convey the intelligence to the police.

  “You see,” she said, “your technique of handling the press has not proved very good. Has it?”

  “Better than the press deserved.” He managed to stop himself abruptly.

  “Perhaps,” she agreed. “But I have found it pays to speak nicely even to a wild dog.”

  He could have spanked her. “I haven’t,” he said. “And what pays you is no concern of mine.”

  “Are you sure?” Her raillery was gentle.

  “Dead certain!”

  “Well—all right.” She gave a shrug that was a bodily pout. “I merely thought you wanted information.”

  “Breaking into private property and photographing private belongings—it’s actionable by the police, and I shall see that the proper action is taken. I don’t need your information. Your newspaper will have to provide that. And you can tell your friends that; and you can tell them that if they don’t make themselves scarce—” He stopped once more and tugged a lapel. Having to talk like this to a young woman made him angry beyond measure.

  “I doubt if photographing distinguished men—or even an old cairn—is actionable,” she said. “I should hardly think it’s even a moot point. But it’s a wealthy paper. And at least, so far, you have been treated with the respect due to a distinguished archaeologist.”

  The impertinence of her! The damned impertinence!

  She smiled shyly and attractively. “If only—you would be nice, we would be so willing to help. And at the moment we are rather at a loss.” Then she looked at him with really intelligent reserve. “Would you be able to re
cognise certain articles of prehistoric make—if you saw them?”

  In a flash her self-confidence, her superb bargaining position, was made plain. They had found the urn!

  “I should,” he said, unable to say more, for a tremor had come to him.

  “You would recognise certain ornaments—a bracelet, for example, or a necklace?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I—certainly.”

  “Anything else?” She looked away to give him time, for though she was a gentle girl she had to be reasonably certain in so important a matter.

  “Gold discs,” he said, “with ornamentation inside concentric circles.”

  She nodded. “Gold torcs?”

  “I didn’t examine all the contents of the urn. I hadn’t time. It was nearly full and I—in the circumstances—I hadn’t time.”

  “Is there anything unusual in the make or—or—material of this cinerary urn?”

  “Yes,” he answered, his excitement mounting intolerably, “it’s made of soapstone, not of clay.”

  “And in height about——”

  “Eighteen inches.”

  She nodded. Then she smiled to him in the friendliest, most helpful way. “How did you let your assistant make off with it?”

  He was just about to tell her the whole story when there came an awful pause in the universe. He took a step nearer to her, his head lowered, shooting forward slightly, his eyes like blue-hazed steel. “Have you found the urn?”

  “Well,” she pivoted again, “not exactly, not yet, but we shall, and when we do we’ll—know it now.” Her eyes lifted. “Oh, there’s Arthur. I must go.” She flashed the archaeologist her sweetest smile. “Thank you very much.” And she went.

  Presently he became aware that there were faces quite close, looking at him as at one bereft of all inwardness. Automatic as wrath, he followed the direction the girl had taken. Presently he saw her running, the scanty shorts giving her bare legs a flashing ease. The dark-haired Arthur was running with her and she was shouting her news to him as she ran. He could hear the high pitch of their gleeful voices. Suddenly she fell and could not get up, but apparently she was overcome by no more than laughter. Arthur hauled her up and gripped her hand and they ran on. Their small racing two-seater went out of Clachar as a comet with a dusty tail though there was still ample time to get their full description of the urn and its contents, as conveyed to them in an exclusive interview by Mr Simon Grant, over the wires from Kinlochoscar for the early morning edition.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  After lunch the following day, Grant decided to escape. The policeman and himself had walked the lands of Clachar in high and purposeful striding during a forenoon that had looked like the prelude to some immense gala performance, charged with colourful humans and with motor cars which manoeuvred so expertly that up until 12.37 (policeman’s time) only nine of them had got bogged in wayside ditches. The correspondents of five different newspapers had approached Grant before the reporting fraternity as a whole decided that the archaeologist was disinclined to be helpful. But the amount of material for comment of every kind was so great, and newspaper space so restricted, that the need for selection engendered the happiest devotion to their art, while the staffs of two weekly picture papers so manipulated their expensive cameras that they achieved for their wondering public a higher synthesis of a civilian rout in war-time, Miami Beach, and a nostalgic throw-back to the far-away innocence of Bali in the ancient days of peace.

  Craning out of both sides of the rather small window in the thick wall, Grant got a crick in his neck, rubbed it in an anger which smouldered with guilt, went to the door, jammed his tweed hat on his head, and walked away uprightly but without haste towards Fachie’s cottage. Within half an hour he had won out on the track which went beyond Clachar to no inhabited place. Twice he hid as research parties returned to Clachar, hurrying as though in their out-field work they might have missed something.

  What peace it was to come on this tiny deserted beach, this break in the cliffs, this haven! But for some cigarette cartons, a scattered newspaper, thrown balls of lunch wrappings, five empty beer bottles, one lemonade bottle, two broken bottles on the edge of the tide, and similar artless evidence of the playfulness of a modern day, the haven might have lain in the hazed sunlight undisturbed since native feet had left the solitary crumbled ruin in its green fold of ground by the little stream that tumbled over ledges to meet the great sea.

  Grant stood for a while looking on this scene and was so obscurely moved by conflicting reflections or emotions that he went to the stream and got down on his knees and drank. Then, without further thought, he left the place, climbed up the steep face beyond, and moved down towards the edge of the headland, from which he could not only see the haven itself but also the walls of cliff which stretched on either hand, the northmost point of one of the three islands off Clachar, and outward over the ocean to what seemed, low down on the distant horizon, either a purple band of cloud or a fabulous land. He stood like one who, having escaped from all behind him, might at last take off. And for a little while something in him did take off, so that presently when his eyes saw the cormorant sunning itself on a spit below and the calm sea turning snow-white on the spit’s point, these objects appeared of so primordial a freshness that they might never have been seen before. Moreover the refluent movement of the brimming green water that lapped the cliff or broke in small thoughtfulness on the shore rose up towards him and he experienced the singular sensation of moving with it. So finely heady was it all that he sat down and, after further gazing, lay down, whereupon the peace and wonder of it rose upon the air itself and up to the sky.

  The cleansing sea, the great sea that could cleanse forever the utmost human refuse. But even that thought was too thick or too sticky. The movement itself was so thoughtless and divine. He perceived, with an effect of astonishing discovery, astonishing not in a disturbing way but merely with a divine lucidity, what the philosophers were arguing about when they discussed the abstruse concept of subject and object, the knower and the thing known, being one. Only, unless he had ever been a blind fool, most of the philosophers whom he had read on the subject had themselves never achieved this wordless fusion, this momentary oneness of the seer and the thing seen. Doubtless that was why they had been so arid. How divine, in yet another moment, to let that thought go, and once more take the sea upon the air and float to the high blue that did not need to smile.

  He was wakened by a shout. The sky stared down at him as he pulled the tweed hat from his face. He rolled over on his side and saw a man on the grassy slope above the shingle of the small beach. It was Norman, Martin’s chauffeur. A little child ran out from under the slope and stood at gaze. The fair head and the tartan of the diminutive kilt told him it was Sheena. All at once she ran back out of sight again calling “Mammy!” Norman followed her slowly and as it were doubtfully. By crawling a few yards through the heather, Grant brought the small party into view.

  Anna was sitting by the wall of the old ruin, pushing back her hair, while Sheena was gripping her off shoulder and peering round at Norman, who was now standing a few yards from them. He was asking her something and as her hands came away from her hair she answered him. He looked about him for a moment then clearly spoke again, but Grant could not hear their voices. They obviously had not much to say, and for the watcher the whole scene had something strangely static about it. Norman neither advanced any farther nor went away and Anna sat where she was, turning once to the child who was excited and inclined to climb up on her.

  At last Sheena grew so restless that she left her mother, but spasmodically, inclined to walk sideways so that she could keep her eyes on Norman. As she tripped and fell headlong, he heard her scream. A few long strides, and Norman had picked her up. Anna was beside them at once. Sheena had clearly hit her head on a stone and Anna finally got to her knees to chase the hurt away.

  “It was that nasty stone that did it,” said Anna in a raised voice.
/>   Sheena looked at the stone and yelled, “Yes!”

  Norman kicked the stone and heaved it away, an act of retribution and justice which so astonished Sheena that it silenced her. As she looked up at Norman, her eyes caught a stranger sight beyond him and she called, “Boat!” They followed her pointing hand. Rounding the small headland from Clachar came a rowboat with one man in it, his back to them as the oars dipped and rose in creaking rowlocks. When he realised he was in the tiny bay the man rested on his oars and turned his body round while the boat moved slowly on.

  It was Martin. Anna got up from her knees. Norman still stood motionless a little while before walking down over the crunching shingle. Then he called in a voice which Grant heard very clearly, “Mrs Sidbury wants you. Visitors have arrived.”

  Martin sat on, his forearms to the elbows flat on the oars, like one enchanted by the scene. Then he straightened up, nodded, and, dipping an oar, slowly pulled the boat round and gave way with both oars to the same easy rhythm as that with which he had appeared. Before he had gone far, Anna turned away with Sheena towards the ruin. Norman stood alone, watching Martin until he rounded the point; then he looked over at Anna and Sheena, went slowly towards them, said something, and took the path up the green slope. When he had gone over the crest, Anna stopped gathering her belongings and sat down.

  She sat with her hands not on her lap, but abandoned to the grass, looking out to sea. Sheena, however, had not received enough attention and Anna took her on her lap, examining the sore spot on the fair head, soothed it, kissed it, put both arms round the small body, and rocked it gently, gazing over the head at the sea again as she quietly sang.