The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  “I can’t help that.”

  “Can’t you? If you brought them here, you can drive them away? Surely you don’t suggest that the press is not omnipotent as well as omniscient?”

  “Do you imply, sir, that it’s omnipotent enough to get an exclusive interview from you?”

  “I might imply even that.”

  “I am prepared to obey all instructions and, where necessary, submit copy for your approval.”

  “You looked an intelligent fellow.” The Colonel turned to Blair. “Tell Grant I’ve been waylaid by a man who wants to grind his own stone axe.”

  Then Colonel Mackintosh seated himself and prepared to speak to the young man.

  Before returning to Clachar House for supper the Colonel thought he would like to have a few words with Mrs Mackenzie. “She seems a nice simple stupid woman,” he said.

  It was his use of a word like “stupid” at such a moment that made Blair smile appreciatively and got Grant a little on the raw, though he smiled also, for he knew it was an indirect way of baiting him.

  “We don’t want to crowd the poor woman out,” the Colonel continued, “so perhaps you’ll tell Mrs Sidbury I’ll be along presently.”

  “Very good.” Blair saluted.

  As the two men approached the cottage, the Colonel asked, “I suppose she’s quite compos mentis?”

  “Quite,” replied Grant.

  “You say she resents all this intrusion?”

  “I suspect she thinks it’s bad manners, but that’s merely because she doesn’t know any better.”

  “Not a radical defect in intelligence, you suggest?”

  “Possibly not.”

  As Mrs Mackenzie appeared in answer to his knock, Simon Grant, at once smiling and friendly, said, “Here we are troubling you again, Mrs Mackenzie, but Colonel Mackintosh was saying he did not have a chance of speaking to you properly today with all the people about. I hope we’re not intruding?”

  “Would you please come in?” Her grave face hardly smiled and her voice had a smothered note of distress. They followed her into the kitchen, where she hospitably saw them seated.

  “Is all this getting a bit too much for you?” asked the Colonel.

  “It is,” she admitted. “Too much.”

  They thought she was going to break down, but she swallowed and pressed her lips and then was calm again. She obviously had been having a struggle with herself before they appeared.

  “I asked you and Andie along today, because I did want you to meet my friends and we needed some help for opening the cairn,” Grant explained, “and your son is a capital worker.”

  “Excellent,” said the Colonel, watching her.

  She made a neat fold of her apron on her knee and then looked up at Grant. “If you don’t mind, sir, I would like that we stopped now working at the cairn.”

  “Why, what’s gone wrong?” asked the Colonel before Grant could speak.

  “Everything,” she said.

  “Nothing’s happened to Andie?” asked Grant quickly.

  “No,” she answered.

  It was the reticence of one who did not wish to trouble them with personal explanation, who was tired and wanted to be left alone, who knew that she may have let them down but could in herself and in her son do no more.

  “Surely you are not bothering your head about all these silly gaping people?” asked Colonel Mackintosh.

  “We are not used to it.”

  “You’re lucky,” he said heartily. “Mr Grant and myself have got used to it long ago.”

  She did not answer, sitting quite still, her face to the fire. The slight movement in her hands, pressing against her knees, drew Grant’s attention, and he saw them intimately and isolated, and read their lines and colour as he might some ancient script. He glanced at her face. The skin had the texture of the skin on a plate of cold porridge; a heavy face, with graven lines which he had not noticed before; her eyes had a strange glisten in them as though a weight pressed on her forehead.

  “Have you been keeping your son from going out at night?” asked Colonel Mackintosh.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re quite right. We’ll have to see that you’re not troubled any further.”

  Grant heard the remarks, but vaguely, so lost was he in apperception of her being. His eyes had withdrawn to the fire.

  “You have no idea at all, from your son’s behaviour, where he may have hidden the urn?” continued the Colonel.

  “None,” she answered.

  “If Mrs Mackenzie had any idea she would have told me,” said Grant suddenly, as though the words had been surprised out of him in anger, but when the Colonel glanced at him he was smiling.

  “Once we have got all these people cleared away, you’ll find everything will come all right,” the Colonel assured her.

  But Grant got to his feet with the unbearable feeling that she was going to break down in a way no stranger should witness. “I must get along,” he said briskly, afraid now to address even one word of sympathy to her.

  “You’re in a hurry.” Colonel Mackintosh looked up at him. To end the interview was surely his prerogative.

  “I think we should get along,” said Grant smiling.

  “People round here are very restless,” said the Colonel to Mrs Mackenzie, but he got up. With a cheerful good-bye, Grant turned for the door.

  Behind him he heard Mrs Mackenzie say, “No, thank you. We need nothing.” He felt pierced between the shoulder blades.

  There was a slight confusion on the Colonel’s features as they walked away. “An independent sort of woman, too.”

  “But stupid,” said Grant, relieved now, drawing in the outside air, prepared once more to give as much as he got.

  The culminating episode of the Colonel’s short visit occurred the following afternoon. The girl in the shorts appeared before the cairn and said to the policeman that she must see Colonel Mackintosh at once. But the policeman, who had already had cause to measure his resources against those of the press, was not impressed, and even less impressed when she said that she was prepared to crawl up the passage in order to deliver her urgent message in person.

  “I have heard that one before,” he suggested, stretching his six feet in sarcastic ease.

  “You go in yourself then and tell him,” she said.

  He perceived now that she had been running, that she was breathless, and that her eyes were very bright.

  “What’s your message?” he asked.

  She looked at him with such earnestness that she was plainly tempted to tell him. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s for Colonel Mackintosh.”

  “He is not to be disturbed by the public.”

  “I am not the public.” She spoke with such penetrating force that one or two hovering members of that great body drew a little nearer. In the desperate moment she took a step nearer him herself. Involuntarily he lowered his head. “We have found it,” she whispered.

  As his head went up again his lips parted in astonishment.

  “You mean the crock——”

  She stopped him with a swift nod. “Hsh!”

  His expression slowly narrowed as his eyes searched her face. Still far from being completely reassured, he got into the opening himself, stuck his head up the tunnel and roared, “Ahoy, there!” Grant’s figure wavered distantly against swinging lights. “That newspaper woman,” bellowed the policeman, “says she wants to see Colonel Mackintosh.”

  The Colonel rose out of the passage and as the girl was imparting her intelligence in a low swift voice his legs were butted by Blair who was followed by Grant.

  “Just see that no one goes in there, constable, till we come back,” said the Colonel, and the three scientists, with the girl in their midst, walked away. They passed the tall monolith in the south-west of the circle, dipped with the ground, went up between two shoulders of land, rounded the inland one and came into a tiny valley whose watercourse was dried up. From a swath of tall bracken A
rthur Black’s head reared up. He waved to them.

  The Colonel’s brows gathered, his moustache lifted, as he gazed not only at a short cist but at a baked-clay cinerary urn.

  Arthur’s eyes were brighter even than the girl’s. “It’s quite genuine,” he said and smiled at the Colonel’s puzzlement.

  “You mean it’s—genuine?”

  Arthur’s smile deepened. “Quite genuine.” He snatched a coloured silk neckerchief from the top of the urn. “Have a look.”

  Colonel Mackintosh got down on his knees, looked inside the urn, withdrew a burnt bone, examined it, withdrew another, looked inside again and put the bones back. Then he examined the exterior of the urn. It was an excellent specimen of the Overhanging Rim type, with decoration not only on the collar and the inside bevel of the lip, but also right round the shoulder below the collar; a particularly tall specimen, too, not much under two feet if his eye could measure anything.

  “You found this—here?”

  “Yes,” answered Arthur. “We saw him coming out of this valley fairly early this morning.”

  “Who?”

  “The idiot. We have been prospecting ever since.”

  “How early?” asked Grant.

  “Before eight o’clock.”

  The Colonel stepped to the edge of the cist, which was the usual affair of fair slabs on end, from which the covering lid, some four feet by two, had been heaved over.

  “Find anything else?” The Colonel was staring at Arthur’s jacket which covered part of the interior.

  “Yes. We have found a hoard.”

  The Colonel’s mouth came adrift.

  “It surprised us, too,” said Arthur, reluctant to move. “It tells the story of a whole age.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Under that jacket.” He still could not move.

  Blair stooped and lifted the jacket, thus revealing the hoard. Items: a broken electric torch, five brass army buttons, a silver-bright Seaforth crest, a motor horn with perished rubber bulb, and a cheap cigarette case containing—of all things—a one-pound Treasury note.

  “My God,” said the Colonel more in awe than anything.

  “They’re coming,” said the girl quickly.

  Arthur glanced over his shoulder, then swiftly covered the mouth of the urn with the girl’s kerchief.

  “Will I give them the dope?” he asked Colonel Mackintosh.

  The Colonel glowered at some members of the public who were slowly, circuitously, but certainly, drawing nigh. “I should have liked a photograph of this.”

  “I have taken six,” said Arthur.

  The Colonel looked at him with an enigmatic humour. “The play is more realistic than we had hoped.”

  “We hadn’t counted on such a stage manager.”

  “By gad, we hadn’t! Or should I say Gu gad?” The Colonel’s humour was dry but flavoured.

  Blair carried the draped urn past many staring eyes as the three learned men headed for Grant’s lodging. “The meaning of the play,” the Colonel explained, “is this. The crock of gold has now been found and will be conveyed south for expert examination. The cairn will be completely closed up this evening. Colonel Mackintosh and his associates are leaving tomorrow. Everything is over. Let the public depart in peace and Clachar return to its ancient somnolence.”

  “Is that what Arthur is telling the world?” asked Blair.

  “It is,” said the Colonel, “with some ambiguous embellishments. It was the best I could do for you, Grant, in the way of getting rid of the menagerie, especially its scavengers.”

  “Not too bad,” Grant allowed.

  “There’s a way of handling these fellows,” suggested the Colonel. Blair so appreciated the remark that he glanced at Grant and stumbled and the old bones rattled in the urn.

  “Of course, Arthur being a bright young man,” proceeded the Colonel, “had his price. In the first place, I promised him one of your prints of the lunette and one of the jet necklace. That all right?”

  “It might be managed.”

  “Secondly, when we return here to open up the whole cairn in a week or ten days, we shall countenance him as a sort of press agent in chief, or vague words to that effect.” He negotiated an awkward cleft, puffing as he hauled himself up. “Talking about handling the press, did I ever tell you the one about the tomb and the mummy?”

  “You did,” said Grant.

  The Colonel cocked an eye at him and laughed as they continued on their way.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  With the Colonel’s departure the weather broke, wind and rain from the sou’-west drove flapping curiosity before it, and Grant stood looking from his little window as from a newer kind of earth-house. His feeling of seclusion was deepened by a fragrant warmth from the peat-fire which Mrs Cameron had insisted on lighting. “The bit fire is friendly,” she had said.

  The green of the grass was greener, fresher, as wind and rain swept along under the hurrying sky. The grasses flattened themselves, wiggled, in a green mirth that held on. The rowan tree was a more solemn riot, full of convolutions of itself and high bursts of abandon, but sticking to its own root at all the odds. For a miraculous moment the cat appeared on the garden wall. A blackbird whistled and was gone. Between the bursts he heard the pounding thunder of the sea.

  He took a turn about the room; he stood before the fire looking at the lazy flapping of the yellow flame. Friendly. He turned his face over his shoulder and looked about the room, alert and welcoming, wondering, and glanced out of the window where the riders drove fast. His smile broke into a soft laugh. It was amusing; it was gay and intricate and extraordinary. The landscape had been swept clean of all the chatter. The sea was having a thunderous holiday, smashing the rocks, roaring tumultuously into the caves.

  A vision of the Monster Cove came before him; in an instant submerged contacts were made and he saw that the electric torch which had been found in the short cist was the torch which he himself had dropped in that cave. There was just no doubt about it. He hurried upstairs and hauled out the hoard, unscrewed the cap of the torch, and found the piece of cardboard which he had used to keep the cell from rattling inside the case. There might even be some juice in it yet. He transferred the bulb from another torch and produced a red thread of light. Proof positive.

  He had gone back to the cave and looked for the torch; had failed to find it and decided it had got covered over by wrack or shingle; had promptly forgotten it in exploration. Now it was not only clear that Andie had found it but had found it in the dark. Which means he had used a light. Andie liked striking matches. He enjoyed pressing the button of a torch and producing the magic in so novel a way. But here was a use of light in a prehistoric cave for a definite purpose—or—at least—from a definite urge.

  He put the hoard away and went downstairs. As he left his sitting room Anna happened to come out of the kitchen and stopped at sight of him.

  “I thought I’d have a turn out,” he said.

  “It’s stormy, isn’t it?” She smiled.

  “It will do me good. And how is Sheena today? I have hardly heard her.” The child’s voice had drawn his attention but now it was silent. As Anna looked back into the kitchen, he took a step or two forward and saw Sheena sitting under the table, her face pale in the dim light.

  “She’s been having a game with herself,” murmured Anna.

  But Sheena’s face exhibited solemn wonder at the new vision of their guest in oilskin and sou’wester, and when the guest stooped and spoke she continued to gaze at him with grave reserve. He laughed and went out.

  As the wind staggered him at the corner of the house he laughed aloud. He had instantly understood what Sheena was doing under the table. Even when quite a big boy of seven or eight he himself had been fond of odd corners, of going into hidey-holes. A certain piece of the attic had been Aladdin’s cave. Suddenly he wondered if these early centres of the brain were those which still actuated Andie. If the later centres were inhibited
, would the earlier deepen much as a blind man’s hearing sharpened?

  The rain pattered noisily on oilskin and sou’wester; it stung his face, it was cold as well water, it was fresh, it became fresher, and as he stood for a moment on the other side of the little bridge, where the wind’s force was broken by the slope, he felt exhilarated, as though there was no joy like a clean cold joy, no colour like this colour, no dancing wildness like the world’s own.

  He kept low, avoiding the upward paths, and was soon in sight of the sea. Beyond the pines that surrounded Clachar House, his eye caught the white plumes tossed from the southwest corner of the southern island. Breaking seas to the horizon, an inward rushing, a roar of surf on shores, a deep booming from cliffs.

  As he came low by the boathouse, he saw how the islands sheltered the sea-way to Clachar, how boats in a storm would run for the islands, and knew that thus it had been since man first hollowed a tree-trunk and adventured upon the waters. Clachar was old. No wonder he was sometimes confused by the centuries, even by the millennia! Confused with the humans rather, who were the millennia, so that the woman and child from the cist in the cairn . . . . His thought passed into a visionary warmth and press of life. But Donald Martin’s face came expressionless and old as the grey rock. All at once he was aware of someone beckoning to him from a corner of the boathouse. He stood for a moment as before some illusory trick. Then he saw that it was in fact Mrs Sidbury.

  She greeted him with her usual cheerfulness, her restless flyaway manner, but he saw that she was quivering.

  “It’s the cold,” she said. “Phoo-oo!” and she shivered right into the core in an exaggerated way that was at once frank and friendly. Her dark eyes looked at him and flew away. Her yellow oilskin was buttoned across her throat and the strings of a yellow translucent head-cover were tied under her chin.

  When he suggested that if she got colder it mightn’t do her any good, she laughed and asked, “What brought you out?”

  Suddenly he felt warmly attracted by her, dangerously because he felt that she needed handling. There was something worrying the woman and once again he got the impression that her bits might fly asunder. But now this did not embarrass him, though it induced a certain excitement. When he found the most sheltered corner she jumped up and down in a light dancing movement, trying to throw off the shivering cold.