by Neil M. Gunn
Perhaps because of his previous interest in the sea and of what he may have dreamed in his sleep, Grant had the feeling of having witnessed an act in a strange and enigmatic play. It had meanings beyond what he could formulate, beyond the players themselves as though he knew their story. He lay flat on his back with a suspense in his breast which stopped thought altogether.
He did not want to lose this curious sensation of pure suspended being, as if somewhere beyond it there was something which would explain it, not in words but in an enlightenment, like the light waiting on the sea. But all in a moment Norman was before him, kicking the stone and heaving it away, transferring the hurt from the child’s head to the stone, and this contained within it so much of man’s story, his ritual and magic, that the archaeologist heard the clear thought: That’s the man for Anna. Their very grouping, while the other man rowed away, was the significant core of the whole little drama.
Sheena’s cries made him turn over again. She was running about the small foreshore, picking up the cigarette cartons and other treasure trove which the visitors had abandoned. Anna was still sitting gazing out to sea, and with her green jumper and dark-red head looked like a creature that might have come up out of that element.
He lay flat once more and smiled, wondering if perhaps he was “escaping” too far. The word “visitors” (called by Norman) came into his mind and along with it the figures of Colonel Mackintosh and Blair. They must have arrived! The feeling of guilt, from which he had run away into such extraordinary dimensions of thought, stung him sharply. He should have been at home to receive them, to find accommodation, to help in every way he could.
Sheena saw him coming and ran to her mother. Anna arose and smiled. “Some visitors have arrived and are looking for you,” she said.
“Have you been hunting me?”
“Someone came and told me. They are at Clachar House.”
“That’s all right. Been picnicking? And how are you, Sheena? What a lot of bonny things you have got!”
Sheena was shy, though her eyes never left him.
“Well, I suppose I had better go.” He stretched a hand towards Sheena. “Coming?”
Sheena looked at her mother.
“We won’t go so fast as you,” Anna said.
As he went on his way, he thought about them. There was something in Anna, some deep secret life in her, that warmed him. A man could spend his whole life with a woman like that and grow richer in himself.
Mrs Cameron’s eyes steadied on him for a moment, then her face cleared and she gave him the news of the last few hours not without a dry humour which he relished. After he had washed and combed his hair, he hunted for his special pair of scissors and trimmed his beard. He liked it very short. With the nervous excitement of one prepared for battle, he set out. For well he knew that at last the dread hour had come, the bitter hour of arraignment before his peers. There was only one thing to do and live: carry the war to them.
Chapter Twenty Six
“You’re a fine fellow,” said Colonel Mackintosh, his deck chair creaking and staggering as he heaved himself up, “I must say.”
“Why, what’s gone wrong now?” Grant asked, laughing, as he shook hands.
“Wrong? Good God!”
“Our great new publicist,” declared Blair. “Let me congratulate you.”
“Thanks very much,” replied Grant modestly.
“I’ll get you a chair,” said Mrs Sidbury, and Grant went with her into the hall.
“Did you see Donald?” she asked him.
“Yes . . . well, at least—I saw someone in a boat, heading this way.”
“I sent Norman——”
“I think they made contact.”
She gave him a dark flash of understanding. “It would be so nice of you to help me entertain them. Colonel Mackintosh and my father were old friends.”
“I’ll do everything I can,” he said, lifting the folded chair, and they returned to the gravel in front of the house, where the two visitors were waiting on their feet.
Colonel Mackintosh was a big, straight, thick-set man with so short a neck that his shoulders seemed permanently hunched. His face was fleshy and his brown moustache so thick and droopy that his voice would have sounded like a growl from ambush if it hadn’t been husky. He wore a blue cap over a full head of faded brown hair, was sixty-six, and liked stories of a salty humour. His small eyes were now on Simon Grant.
“Do sit down,” said Mrs Sidbury, and as they sat down she added, “You’ll stop for supper, Mr Grant?”
He got up again. “No, thanks. I know how difficult rations are and my supper will be under way.”
“I have warned them they’ll only get fish, but there is plenty of that, fresh from the sea——”
“Thank you, but, if you wouldn’t mind, I must not overdo my irregular appearance——”
“Huh!” interrupted the Colonel, and Mrs Sidbury withdrew, leaving Grant to change his mind.
“Irregular!” repeated the Colonel. “I should think so. What’s all this menagerie about?”
Roger Blair, a lanky thin-haired man in his fifties, wearing gold rimmed spectacles, stretched out his legs with a laugh that threw his head back.
“What menagerie?” asked Grant.
Colonel Mackintosh waved an arm over hillsides on which humans moved. “That.”
“I can’t help that.”
“No? Who then has produced this colossal spectacle?”
“Cnossal, you mean,” said Blair.
“My God, you would think it was,” agreed the Colonel. “Out with it! What’s the big idea? I thought you had some notion of the—the amenities of archaeology, if not the dignity.”
“Are you trying to make some point?” inquired Grant.
“Do you think I have travelled up here not to make one?”
“That’s for you to say. If I have given our normally arid subject some publicity, I should not have thought that altogether reprehensible in these days. But I may be wrong.”
“Normally arid!”
“From a public point of view. I have always maintained that there is a conception of archaeology which is not only scientific but also human. In a modest way, I have been trying to exemplify this.”
The Colonel’s humoured sparring got a check. His chair creaked as he tried to focus Grant more clearly. “You don’t mean the whole bloody thing is hocus-pocus?”
“You are referring, I presume, to the reports in the press?”
“What else would I be referring to?”
“I thought,” said Grant, smiling to his hat, “that I had managed those rather well.”
“Look here, Grant. For God’s sake don’t tell me that I shouldn’t have let you loose alone. I meant it for your health’s sake more than anything; a small-scale affair.” The Colonel, hitherto in holiday mood, had now let a note of real concern invade his thick voice.
“It may be a small affair but at least it’s my own.”
“Right down to the crock of gold?”
“Even to the crock of gold.”
Blair laughed. “I was right,” he said. “I told you the whole thing was too fantastic.”
But the Colonel was still inspecting Grant. “Why?”
“Well,” replied Grant, “it happened that way. And for the rest—we fought pretty well in the last war, well enough anyhow to be weary of barkings and snarlings from India and Egypt, not to mention Russia and the Holy Land. Don’t you think we were due some light relief?”
“A cnossal spoof to cheer up the great British public?” said Blair without a laugh, with almost a note of marvelling.
“Don’t you think the great British public has earned some fun?” inquired Grant with a sharp glance at him.
“I didn’t think you had it in you?” declared Blair.
“I beg your pardon?” Grant eyed him.
Blair laughed in a high echoing way, the throwback of his head being so sudden that his felt hat fell off.
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p; “But——” said the Colonel and paused, and he didn’t often pause when all set for the kind of elaborate inquiry or fooling that tied another man in knots. His blue eyes were small, shrewd, and penetrating.
“You think perhaps I have overdone it?” inquired Grant with open innocence. “I admit I have wondered myself. But then—people are dearly interested when the subject is presented to them in the right way. I think I may fairly say I have proved that. Now what I have been really wondering is this: why can’t we get some experts to deal with various aspects of the whole matter, as it appertains to the cairn, in a truly human way? If we can show man’s continuity on our own soil, in a human way, over thousands of years, his work, his arts, his ceremonies, his ornaments, show his thought and his courage, wouldn’t it help us now? Our island story has its inspirations as well as its splendours.”
The Colonel was manifestly beyond speech and even Blair had an odd look in his eye.
“As for myself,” Grant continued, “I am prepared to take up the religious aspect.”
“Religious,” croaked the Colonel.
“Yes,” said Grant. “I have had time to give it considerable thought. We are inclined to think that the crock of gold in legend just meant a pot with gold in it. And so it did. But it also—and here we touch subtle duality—it also meant something more. The crock was at once, as it were, both real and symbolical. This raises the whole question of the meaning of the symbol, both in religion and art, not only then but now, in fact especially now: again a continuity which we should work out, and this time a spiritual continuity which might have a profoundly meliorating effect upon our present over-indulgence in materialism.”
“Phew!” blew Blair.
“I’m sorry if I have been monopolising the conversation,” said Grant with an apologetic smile, “and though there is much that I might usefully add, perhaps I have said enough to indicate my general attitude.”
“God it’s warm,” said the Colonel on a gust of solemn breath and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief.
“The weather has been exceptionally fine,” Grant agreed as one who knew it had gone out of its way to favour his designs, but secretly.
Blair put a finger inside his collar and pulled it outward to let air pass to his chest. “Subtle duality,” he murmured.
“Schizophrenia,” muttered the Colonel; and added, “This is even more than we had bargained for.”
“Speaking for yourself,” said Blair, and then he began to laugh his high-pitched laugh.
The Colonel started with a wheeze, but his head went up and such surprisingly forceful gusts came from his shaken body that the old canvas of his chair burst and the wooden struts cracked like a gunshot as his posterior found the gravel. Then Grant began to laugh and Martin came out of the front door.
The chair clung so tightly to Colonel Mackintosh that in the end Grant had to pull it off him from behind as Martin and Blair heaved him to his feet.
“Ho,” said the Colonel, “hm. Is this the kind of crockery you keep nowadays, Martin?”
“Sorry it could not stand the test,” answered Martin, with a smile. “It’s pre-war.”
“So long as Grant did not find it in the cairn,” said the Colonel, dusting his behind.
Amid the restored good humour Mrs Sidbury came out and the Colonel apologised for breaking her chair. It was decided, on examination, that the canvas had perished from old age.
“It’s what we all perish from,” said the Colonel, “when we’re supposed to be lucky,” and refused any of the other chairs. “Once bitten,” he explained, and added with a glance at Grant, “or should I say twice?”
“Do come inside,” invited Mrs Sidbury. “You’ll find something firmer there.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” said Grant, “but we feed rather early at the cottage.”
“Oh.” She looked at him. “If I cannot persuade you, would you come round later for coffee?”
“Thank you very much.”
From a little distance, he heard Blair’s laugh as they all moved into the house. But he did not mind. He was indeed quite pleased with himself, having led them up the garden path more successfully than he had thought possible. In the next bout, he could not expect to come off so well, but at least he would surprise them! Then he began to marvel a little at the words which had come to him, and as he went on they seemed to contain an inner truth. Otherwise, presumably, they would not have been effective! But he could not laugh the matter off entirely, and all at once, and with an effect of piercing sincerity, he said: It’s true. There’s Martin. He’s suffering, not from materialism, but from the end of materialism. He is what it arrives at. And that means woman, child, and everything.
His footsteps quickened, his eyes flashed.
Chapter Twenty Seven
“Now this is a somewhat serious business and we have got to get down to it. Apart from the invasion of Martin’s land——”
“I’m sorry about that,” said Grant, interrupting the Colonel, “and this morning I took what steps I could with the police about it.” He looked at Martin. “I wanted to see you, for the law of interdict is an involved and slow business, with its proof of individual damage and so on; I wondered if it would help if we got a notice put up.”
“Trespassers will be prosecuted?”
“I know it doesn’t mean much,” Grant admitted, “but I thought we might say that steps could be taken to prosecute anyone who interfered with the cairn or trespassed to the damage of this land, something that would make it clear to reasonable people that they mustn’t just damage things wantonly.”
Martin’s face held its still smile, then he shook his head slightly as if the suggestion were hardly worth discussing.
“I’m very sorry about it,” said Grant. “All I can say is that the policeman will make a difference. He reckons he has already got several petrol prosecutions on hand. By the way, Blair, I hope you’re all right?”
“Certainly,” answered Blair, with the smile that always provoked Grant. “It was not difficult to get a special supply of coupons from the Petroleum Officer once I had persuaded him of the national importance of your discovery of the crock of gold.”
The Colonel smiled. “Don’t be so cocky, Blair. You may yet be prosecuted for getting coupons under false pretences.”
Through the laughter, Mrs Sidbury asked, “Is this a veiled attack on you, Mr Grant?” and he knew that at least he had one ally.
“The veil is so thin that you needn’t notice it,” he answered.
“Martin tells me that in a way he was responsible,” said Colonel Mackintosh, “for your first extraordinary step, namely, engaging the village idiot.”
“Mr Martin was good enough to effect the introduction, yes.”
“And you engaged him? Odd thing to do, wasn’t it?”
“You imply that a village idiot is not qualified to be an archaeologist’s assistant? I think I see what you mean.” He was thoughtfully judicial.
Mrs Sidbury laughed.
“But you found him all right?” asked Blair.
“I found him a very good worker,” answered Grant, “and there seemed something familiar, too, about the cast of his mind. He is remarkably fond of stone implements, though not a trained petrologist.”
The Colonel could not restrain a soft wheeze over this thrust at Blair, who laughed also and said, “According to all accounts he was even fonder of your crock of gold.”
“That, unfortunately, is true,” agreed Grant, “but then, being an idiot, he probably thought it was worth being fonder of.”
“Wait a bit, you fellows,” said the Colonel “we’ll have your sparring afterwards. Now tell me, Grant, what on earth made you think of inventing a crock of gold?”
“I didn’t invent it.”
“Then who did?”
“I wish I knew. All I know is that a crock of gold was there.”
After staring for a few seconds, the Colonel asked, “Where?”
“I
n the cairn. In the small corbelled cell, which you saw pictured in the press.”
The silence lasted a little longer this time. “I’m not fooling now,” said the Colonel.
“Neither am I,” said Grant, holding the Colonel’s eyes.
“You mean you found a funerary urn full of gold ornaments?”
“I did.”
“In that cairn?”
“Yes. There was a false wall blocking the cell; I removed it and found the urn there.”
“And then?”
“Then it disappeared.”
“How did it disappear?”
“It’s the only part of the story the press doesn’t know. I had rather intended to keep it to myself, but if you would be good enough to respect my confidence, I’ll tell you.”
Then he told them the story of the discovery, the struggle with Andie, and his loss of consciousness.
“How long were you unconscious?”
“I don’t know. But it might have been anything up to an hour. I just can’t be certain.”
“All this took place about midnight? Wasn’t that a strange hour to have had such an experience?”
“You think the whole thing might have been a dream or hallucination. I understand that,” he assured the Colonel simply. “However, it wasn’t. Though the press might have got to know little about it, if I hadn’t, after leaving the cairn, met Mr Martin’s chauffeur and asked him if he had seen Andie who had run away with the treasure or whatever I called it to him. I was rather upset at the time.”
“Then you found Andie in bed and his mother had never missed him?”
“That is so.”
“You know me well enough, Grant, to know that I have always respected your work, but—I’m not doubting you went to the cairn—even at that hour—but, I put it to you, is it possible that while inside the cairn you may have slipped and got a crack on your head and fancied things?”
“Only one difficulty about that. I remembered that one of the ornaments had fallen out of my hands when I was surprised by Andie. I went straight back—and found it.”
“You mean you still have it?”
From his poacher’s pocket Grant took a small flat wooden box, which usually held some of his drawing instruments. Very carefully he withdrew what was inside, unwound handkerchief wrappings, and there was the lunula, gleaming in the light. As he walked with it to the west window and laid it on a small mahogany table, they all followed him. Without a word, he handed Colonel Mackintosh his pocket magnifying glass.
