The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  The Colonel’s examination was minute, then he straightened himself and turned to Grant. “I suppose you know that this is the finest specimen of the lunette extant?”

  “It’s the best I have seen.”

  “Uhm,” said the Colonel and stood staring out of the window, the magnifying glass drooping from his hand.

  They all followed his gaze, past some pine trunks, to the western ocean which had upon its evening face a mingling of light, a curious crawling effect like a marvelling. The horizon was very remote.

  The Colonel turned his head and looked at Grant. “A whole urnful?”

  Grant nodded, a faint smile on his face. “A gold hoard.”

  “My God.”

  “Congratulations,” Mrs Sidbury murmured, like one restraining with difficulty the airiest laughter. It was as if she had said: I did support you! “May I?” and she lifted the lunette in her fine nervous hands, delicately as though it were made of glass. “How wonderful! . . . To think of it then! How long ago?”

  “Goes with the food vessel, Food Vessel complex. Bronze Age,” muttered the Colonel.

  “How long?”

  The Colonel heaved his shoulders slightly. “Who can say—in the absence of the total contents?” He swung round on Grant. “What are you doing about this?”

  “What can I do?”

  “Do you mean you’re doing nothing?” This was the Colonel at last in earnest.

  Grant heaved his own shoulders. “What do you think the—the whole menagerie is doing, including the members of the press?”

  “Good God—what made you tell the press?”

  Grant was silent.

  “Heavens above, surely that was the last thing on earth to do! Why broadcast it to the public, if you ever hoped to find the urn?”

  “There is a more real danger,” answered Grant simply. “Talk is going around that if the urn could be found the gold could he melted down, secretly disposed of, and a small fortune realised.” And he had the satisfaction of seeing the wind knocked completely out of the Colonel, who for a little while indeed did nothing but gape; then he took the floor.

  By an hour later, Grant had given them a fair account of his whole work at the cairn, and Colonel Mackintosh, realising at last that his subject, which was his life’s devotion, had neither been lightly handled nor traduced by vanity, was simple and direct, appreciative and full of resource. With a gleam in his eye, he even complimented the gentlemen of the press. “That’s their trade as this is ours, and seeing the beans have been spilled in spite of us, I’ll get hold of that fellow Arthur and talk to him, on the record and off, as an ally. We have only one thing to do now—get hold of the hoard. You certainly had a bit of damned bad luck, Grant, even though you did go out at midnight!” He turned to Mrs Sidbury. “I’m talking in Edinburgh in three days time. Do you think you could manage to put us up for a couple of nights? Blair here can live on winkles.”

  “Delighted,” she answered.

  “That will be splendid.” “Thank you. I didn’t know the Highlands had started to crawl with tourists.” The springs of his armchair protested faintly.

  Two hours later, when a further supply of coffee was exhausted and the more intricate archaeological aspects of the discoveries in the cairn had been discussed in minute detail, the atmosphere was friendly and warm enough for expressions of probability and even of wonder. The past had come into the room in an almost palpable way.

  “It’s not so difficult to imagine yourself living two thousand years ago,” said Mrs Sidbury.

  “It’s often easier,” said Grant.

  “How?”

  “Because you can live and move the way you want. You can make a story of it, and every movement in that story means something—as important as you would like it to mean.”

  “Have you been making any stories?” asked the Colonel.

  “A few. Efforts at reconstruction, shall we say?”

  On the command to fire ahead, Grant gave a quite vivid description of the ceremonies accompanying and following a burial in the chamber when it was “the cathedral of its time”. He borrowed from recent anthropological field work among primitive peoples in Eastern archipelagoes, from Homer, from extant religious practices, but without parade of knowledge, for he had been thinking the matter over, or rather—though he did not put it like this to the Colonel—the matter, the reconstruction, had flowed into his mind. This had been one of the most remarkable things that had happened to him. In odd moments, before going to sleep, during a pause in his writing, on his back outside, while his mind was passive, there flowed into it scenes of a remarkable clarity. It was as though some invisible director had emptied his mind, as he might have emptied a stage, and then let his players flow in upon it in a drama which the archaeologist, as spectator, followed with surprise and profound understanding.

  When cross-questioned by Colonel Mackintosh, he had, of course, his factual answers ready: the music, the pipe, the primitive stringed instrument, the women with ornaments and make-up, the crowd, the dancing. On the dancing he was particularly effective, giving it a vastly wider range and variety than we dreamed of, borrowing here in particular from recent knowledge of native African dancing which had been praised in such extravagant terms by some European masters of modern ballet. And when the Colonel said that this was altogether too extravagant, Grant switched to the religious basis of dancing, the mimetic art that persuaded the gods, and wondered, anyhow, with an innocent smile for the Colonel, where the Neolithic people came from. He was ready even for Blair, who had been hoarding up the word “cathedral”. And when the Colonel said, “I suppose you can now answer the question: was the chambered cairn a communal burial ground or a private mausoleum for the headman and his family group?” Grant answered, “I could have a shot at it.” Even Mrs Sidbury laughed, but with pleasure.

  “It seems simple enough to me,” said Grant. “At first, in the early stages of arriving, settling, hunting, it would be communal, but as the settlement grew, became stabilised, it would tend to become the private mausoleum.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “Human nature is always as simple as that,” replied Grant. “Economic conditions would merely tend to swing the thing either way.”

  “The motives never change?”

  “Not the deep-seated ones.”

  “You were going to tell us,” said Mrs Sidbury, “and I hope I am not upsetting your argument, how the crock of gold came to be there, I mean the story about it.”

  “I’m afraid, for the first time, that might be a bit fanciful.”

  “‘For the first time’ is good,” said Blair.

  “I rather think,” said Grant, “it has something to do with the woman and the child in the cist. But it is difficult here to link the whole thing up because there may have been a time interval. Not that there need have been. Terms like Neolithic Age or Bronze Age are, as Colonel Mackintosh has made so clear in his distinguished published work, convenient working terms, but there always are in different places overlaps of centuries in tools, practices, cremation, inhumation, and so on. Even today in the world there are people still in the Stone Age.”

  “Let’s hear your story,” said the Colonel.

  “The trouble is,” said Grant, “it isn’t yet quite clear. But it very nearly came to me last night. I got a sort of preliminary feeling of the whole thing.”

  Blair threw his thin face up in genuine amusement. Grant smiled in good humour, but with a light in his eye. Colonel Mackintosh’s face seemed to have grown slightly fatter, his eyes smaller, in a puckishness that blew through the hairs of his moustache. Martin had spoken very little but was unobtrusively one of the company; when he did speak his voice was natural and at ease. Mrs Sidbury’s eyes had flashed on Grant when he had mentioned the woman and child and, without looking at her, he had been aware of the momentary tension.

  “Leaving the question of feeling alone—in deference to Blair—I think a few simple facts do come through. In
the first place, the woman and the child, if skulls and bones mean anything, are of the same family or racial group as those in the cairn.” He looked at the Colonel. “You can check that tomorrow. In the second place the bracelet which I got in the cist is exactly like the pair of bracelets which I hurled out of the urn and had a look at. You must take my word for that—meantime. Also the jet necklace bears a marked resemblance in design to this gold lunette. There is thus in the workmanship a definite relationship of period and place. Third: manifestly this was a woman of importance or she would never have possessed gold. Obviously it was a rare metal or we should have found more of it in our fieldwork. The notion of a crock of gold did not become a legend for nothing presumably. Fourth: it seems to me that the grave gear of a woman of such importance is pitifully slight. Remember, too, a woman and her child—and I am not sure that we know enough about the constitution of their society to say only a female child. Taking all these points together, I submit it is not too fanciful to assume a relationship between the woman in the cist and the gold hoard.”

  The Colonel leaned back. “Your points are interesting, decidedly interesting—but your final assumption!” He shook his head. “But you would first have to do some jugglery between burial in a chambered cairn and burial in a short cist.”

  “Well of course,” agreed Grant. “That’s where the drama comes in. We take it as established that the individual cist burial was a method of burial introduced by a round-headed people invading us from the Continent and landing on the east coast——” He paused.

  “Well?” The Colonel waited.

  Grant smiled also. “I agree it’s difficult. But let us assume for a moment that this woman’s man was the headman of this settlement. For gold to have been about at all, raiding must have been going on, either raiding or trading. Let us assume he was away on a raiding—or trading—expedition.”

  “What would he trade with—from a place like this?” asked Blair.

  Grant nodded. “You may be right.”

  “And if it was a case of a sudden invasion of a peaceful people—how had they managed to get the gold?” asked the Colonel. “You’ll have to assume, I’m afraid, that they were a fighting raiding lot, not unlike the clansmen of a later date.” The Colonel was enjoying himself.

  “Very well. Let us say the headman was away fighting, and while he was doing this Clachar was invaded by round-heads from the east coast. The local home guard would do their best, rallying round the woman and child, but in the end they are overcome and the woman, to avoid capture, decides to pass out, taking the child with her—poison or drowning, something like that, for I can find no evidence at all of violence to a bone.”

  “And the roundheads buried her cist-fashion in the cairn out of respect for so noble an enemy?” suggested Blair.

  “They might,” said Grant. “It’s the kind of thing they did in those days.”

  Blair laughed in enjoyment of his scepticism.

  “And in the hurry and alarm, the aged medicine man would block up the urn in the corbelled cell?” suggested the Colonel.

  “He might,” said Grant. “It would certainly be the best place to hide it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if the old boy was then done in and the headman came back and drove out the invaders, the first thing he would notice when he had opened up the passage and entered the tomb of his forefathers was that the corbelled cell had been built up. Investigation would reveal the urn, and the headman would bless the memory of the aged priest.”

  Colonel Mackintosh laughed. “You seem to have thought it all out!”

  “I admit I thought of that bit only this minute. Actually I am not at all sure that it happened like that.”

  “No?” The Colonel eyed him.

  “No. You see, a rather extraordinary thing is taking place in my lodging just now. I have the two skeletons in a box in a small room—a cell—just off my bedroom. The first night they were there they came out while I was asleep and were . . . very much alive . . . on the rug in front of the fireplace. They appeared a second night. The third occasion was last night, but last night, for the first time, they saw me.”

  All eyes were on him and in the silence the summer night came into the room, for the curtains had not been drawn.

  “Did they get a shock?” asked Blair, but no one laughed.

  “Well?” asked the Colonel.

  “That’s all,” said Grant.

  “You mean you woke up?”

  Grant hesitated. “I terminated the interview by coming to my ordinary senses.”

  “You think the woman might have spoken?” probed the Colonel.

  “She might.”

  “In English?” asked Blair.

  “I don’t think it would have mattered whether she spoke in words or not. An experience is an experience—not speech.”

  “But you can’t communicate it without speech.”

  Grant looked at Blair. “Can’t you?” Then he got up, apologised for stopping so late, and in a few minutes was on his way home, wondering in the light-hearted aftermath of parting whether he understood the silent look Mrs Sidbury had given him.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  For two days Colonel Mackintosh took control and things got going. To his solid body was added his solid reputation and all irrelevances and foolish speech bounced off him. He joked with the policeman, and if anything further was needed to draw the law to his heels, he unconsciously achieved it by mentioning the Home Office as if it were his private club. The passage in the cairn was reopened, and as the Colonel’s extensive hindquarters slowly disappeared the policeman started an eagle-eyed patrol, which had small consideration for human curiosity even in its more cunning guises.

  For naturally the public, not to mention the press, were in a state of suspense about what might be happening inside a cairn peopled at the moment by three archaeologists and the village idiot. But Colonel Mackintosh was quite simply in his element. He snuffed the air, he handled the bones, he lifted a skull as it were an apple. His manner was off-hand while he spoke to no one in particular. He ruminated, squatting like a Buddha. The outside world of time was no more as he dredged the dust of millennia and ordered Blair to hold the light to it. When Blair spoke out of his knowledge, the Colonel said “Hm” or “Hmf” through nostrils fashioned to blow such knowledge away. He poked here and scraped there. His finger of electric light travelled so deliberately from doorjamb to lintel that it wrote the architectural story as it advanced. When Blair felt called upon to indicate the more fascinating aspects of that story in plain and even excited English, the Colonel still contented himself with sounds that may have been Neolithic. At last he entered the eastern chamber, and before the raped cell his features gathered, lifting the moustache bushily and closing the eyes to slits. Grant had laid his hand-lamp on a stone on the floor. Blair withdrew his torch from the cell and straightened himself. The Colonel turned to Foolish Andie, who was by his right shoulder, and stared at him.

  As Andie held the stare, his mouth opened a little more; as his head moved his eyes glistened. “Gu—gu——”

  “Gu gad!” said the Colonel sternly.

  Andie’s shoulders began to move. His eyes swept to Grant, who was by the Colonel’s left side.

  “Gu—gar——”

  “By gad you did! And this is what you did!” roared the Colonel. Whereupon he swung round and embraced Mr Grant with such unexpected violence that that slim figure lost its balance and grabbed at the Colonel.

  “Look out!” yelled Blair.

  The Colonel felt his shoulder wrenched by a paw, but Grant tore in, and forced Andie back with imperious shouts.

  Andie stood flapping his arms like great wings, gabbling in tremendous excitement, but dominated by his employer, who continued to address him sharply until the eye-glistening rage subsided.

  “That was a near thing!” said Blair and blew a chestful of air.

  But the Colonel, though breathing heavily, did not seem p
ut out. “He did it all right,” he muttered, watching Andie. “Point is: does it convey anything to him, does he remember?”

  Through the flying dust of the centuries, Grant said, “I’ll give him something to do.” He turned to Andie. “Come on; we have got to shift these stones—from here—to there.”

  The Colonel watched Grant shifting the first stones himself, then turned away, and did a minute examination of the cell.

  “Odd that this should have been the only place,” said Blair, still shaken with amazement, “where this overlapping—this corbelling—should have been done.”

  The Colonel straightened up. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “I once had a dog that buried bones in the garden. I came to the conclusion that he had forgotten where he had buried some of them, if not all.”

  Blair looked at him. “You’re thinking of the crock of gold?”

  “God knows what happens inside that mind,” muttered Colonel Mackintosh as he watched Andie stack the last of the loose stones against the off wall; then he proceeded to examine the row of skulls.

  It was after lunch when the Colonel was tackled by Arthur. Blair and himself had gone back to Clachar House to eat, for it was no great distance and Mrs Sidbury had alleged that it was easier to spread something on a table than wrap it in paper.

  “And you are Arthur——?”

  “Arthur Black, sir,” replied Arthur with a smile.

  “Hm,” said the Colonel with a glance at his black head. “What do you want?”

  “I was wondering what you thought of the cairn?”

  “Why, is there something you think you could learn about it?”

  “From you, sir, everyone could learn.”

  “So you brought everyone to the spot? You think that’s helpful to us?”