The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

Now he was uncomfortable, and because it was all so intangible, so obviously psychic, he grew a bit annoyed, even angry, for dammit it was reducing things to a pretty low ebb if he was to lose his sleep over this sort of business. But “this sort of business” was merely a cover-up of what he actually felt—and almost saw, namely, that he was between the skeletons of the woman and child and the living Anna and Sheena (who were now asleep). He was between them, as between players at opposite ends of a court. It was not that the two women played him. But he was there. When a blatter of rain hit the window, he jumped. Look, he said to himself, fancy breeds this sort of idiocy; it’s fresh air you need. He even remembered his illness. So strongly came this urge to go outside that he had to rationalise it by thinking: why not? This might be the very night for Andie! He turned to the window and saw that indeed it was the very night. The broken storm, the forming gargantuan cloud, the absence of every human from the landscape, the deepening dark and scurry of the wind: the elemental playground for the fellow. He listened, stole softly downstairs, got into boots and oilskin, and went out.

  Chapter Thirty One

  When he had crossed the footbridge, he held down by the stream for a little way to avoid going over visible skylines. In a country place there was always someone about, some sleepless face at a window, but apart from a skyline it was dark enough for any outline to be little more than a blur at fifty yards. The pines about Clachar House were a black pool and he could see no light as he came round the slope and began the ascent towards the cairn. The sky was overcast, but the fierce rainsquall had passed and the wind had dropped to a moderate breeze. The roar of the sea seemed louder.

  The brute cairn squatted, amorphous, the piled-up debris of an age. He circled it with a feeling of fragility, a lightness that could be crushed like a gourd. Inside, the skulls kept their “lidless eyes apart”. He needed a touch of macabre humour to steady him. But when he came by the covered-in passage and looked down towards the tall monolith, he could have sworn it moved. He broke out of the clutch of fear by walking slowly towards it. Again there was movement but now beyond the stone and he sidestepped to get a better view. It was a figure with lowered head, slanting away towards the sea, at once mysterious and uncouth. He fancied he saw the vague pallor of a face turned over a shoulder to look back, then the body began to merge with the dark. He quickened his steps and reached the monolith, caught a glimpse of something again, followed, lost it entirely and hurried. When he reached the steep slope to the sea, he paused and peered down, but could make out nothing. The sea thundered on the shore, for he was now above one of those narrow “faults” which broke the cliff line at irregular intervals. Through his mind flashed the thought: It’s Andie, making for the caves!

  There were distinct steps worn in the turf and he descended with care, pausing every now and then to stare. He knew be could dominate Andie and an eager cunning ousted fear. He had never tackled the caves from this end, for the approach from Clachar House was flat and easy. When he reached bottom a flick of spindrift from a breaking wave blinded him for a moment, but as he blinked he was certain he saw something move round the cliff. But the seas were running so high that before he could look round he had to step back, for the white froth came seething about his feet. It must surely be the very top of the tide. Anxiety swiftly got the better of him, for there were several caves and he might lose Andie. As he followed the retreating surf he saw a darkness some twenty yards along like a yawning mouth. After the next breaker had exploded he made a dash for it. But at a dozen paces the smooth stones gave on low broken rock; he stumbled; was soused to the knees by the next comber; jumped a narrow fissure; held on again; waded through a final gap to the thighs and had just got clear of it when a tremendous wave came piling in and swept him up the near cave wall; he had to cling to it against the sucking roaring recession before moving up the shingle.

  Listening beyond his breath and his heartbeats, he stood against the rock, but no inner sound in the great sounds came to him. His mouth closed; his tongue between his lips was surprised by the salt and he was strengthened warily, even in the instant that he realised he was half-trapped. The inner darkness was more solid than the rock.

  With one hand touching the wall he moved up the slope of shingle pausing at every other step to listen. His intense concentration increased the fearsomeness of the place until its reverberations opened up like dark petals of unearthly danger. The thought of Andie himself opened into nearer shapes until his foot was moving over the shingle like a hand before taking his weight. Amorphous bodies with smothering arms and invisible eyes . . . .

  By its very excess his imagination steadied him and his features sharpened. When the rock suddenly left his hand, he stumbled but was swiftly upright again. He felt for the torch in his pocket, but still could not switch it on, as though to be safe he must come invisibly, stealthily, upon what he sought. He got down on his hands and knees and at once felt more secure. As he crawled, he stretched each hand in front of him like a feeler, but his oilskin impeded him by getting caught under his knees. As he lurched, his hand landed on a smooth wet surface: it gave; it moved; he heard its astonishment, the crunching of the shingle, a flurry and threshing. He yelled as he reared and stepped back, but his hands could not get at his torch, could not find the opening in his oilskin, then found it, miraculously caught the torch as it fumbled out of his hands, and switched it on. The dark beast was flapping down to the sea. A barking cough came from behind him. Two eyes gleamed against the swinging light.

  The floor of the cave began to heave with monstrous life. His legs were suddenly shot from under him and he fell backwards on a body that threw him with a skelp against the stones. Presently he realised that the torch lay yards away but still burning. When at last he picked it up and shone it around, the whole nightmarish upheaval had vanished.

  Seals, of course, only seals, he thought, but he was trembling and slightly sick. He staggered on drunkenly. This cave, like the Monster Cove, took a leftward bend. When he had flashed the beam around its walls, he sat down and lowered his head, then threw his head back and breathed heavily. The sickness would not come out of him. As its flushes ebbed, he shivered.

  Andie could not have come in here. No one had come in here. He had better get home. His head drooped again and he closed his eyes, no longer afraid of the cave. If one of these brutes had passed over him . . . . The cliff wall trembled and he felt the solid rock and the earth beyond about to crumble and avalanche down upon him. He got up.

  As he followed the seething roaring downrush of the water and shone the torch on the outward cliff walls he realised two things: that the tide was still coming in and that he could leave the cave only by the way he had entered it. Towards the Clachar shore the water smashed solid against the cliff foot.

  At first attempt he retreated before the oncoming surge; at the second attempt he was caught in the gap and the wave broke clean over him. He took some salt spray into his lungs and the agony of this was sharper than anything he had ever experienced. Trying to draw breath so obsessed him that he did not retain any very clear memory of how he got back into the cave. Indeed there remained a sort of false memory of the sea helping him, lapping him up the shingly beach of the cave, to lie with his head on his arms. From there he crawled up, and, in a dim state of being, found the sheltered wall where he stretched himself full length and lay with closed eyes and stertorous mouth.

  Long after that the tide was still coming in and his mind was obsessed by a new danger: at full tide would the cave be completely flooded out? He knew now that he had never before been in this cave and he was beginning to suspect that it could be reached only at low tide. Certainly when he had visited the caves on the Clachar side he had gone along the shore as far as the sea would let him. This cave had been shut off and Mrs Sidbury had presumably never thought of mentioning it to him. When his torch had been shot out of his hand he had found it still alight because it had landed amid old sea wrack. But now he realised that the wra
ck was up to the inner base of the wall.

  He tried to keep himself warm by all kinds of exercises, including ploughing the shingle with a broken batten of timber. Between the gusts the wind died away and this was a little comfort, for its eddy got him searchingly even when he was crouching against the leftward wad. Time alone could answer the final question: how deep would the smashing seas swirl about him at high tide? At intervals he left his partial shelter to stare round the rock and flash his torch on the broken waters before they started their downward roar.

  When the upper edging of froth was hissing on the stones before the inner bend of the cave, he had a short spell of horrible panic, struggled in the murky foredeath, yelled—not yet abjectly but in a blind self-piteous wrath, lifting his arms, staggering blindly.

  This ebbed from him and he felt eased, more spent, as though he had actually vomited, and he became aware of a faint greying in the atmosphere as if the moon’s dying crescent had suddenly risen over the hills—or, possibly, the morning itself was coming. As he stooped he even fancied he saw great shivering froth bubbles burst and vanish like bright mocking eyes. Very soon the water would be swirling about his feet. But his senses now were numbed and fear no longer physically active.

  He squatted against the inner rock again, felt it tremble as the wave thundered, and his mind grew strangely passive in the darkness, and, he became aware of himself as a cowering primitive man, a Palaeolithic cave dweller. It was a condition quite different from anything he had imagined. Nothing wild, farouche, snarling—but squatting here by the rock, waiting, strangely passive, part of the roar and the reverberation, at once inside them and penetrated by them as his jaw quivered, penetrated by the cold, and aware of something that rode the elements and flashed through them and yet was behind them as the mover. When his teeth were clicking he got up, switched on his torch and dug another bit of the floor, searching, with no sense of irony, for the crock of gold.

  As the greying of the light increased it had a curious almost supernatural effect upon him, as though some sort of translation to an extra dimension were involved. For still a little time he denied the urge to step out and look at the hurtling greybacks, but at last he did so and was surprised by the amount of light on the waters. Then his eyes were held and his breathing stopped. There was a boat on that tumultuous sea, a small boat, with one man in it.

  The boat was quite close in, its prow on the cave, but the man was not pulling the boat, he was backing it away, backing its stern against the seas, but now suddenly he was pulling, the boat rose high, coggled over and was lost, and the wave came rushing on, toppled over in a smashing roar, and the seething water swept his feet. But the boat was there, the man on the oars, pulling, digging in, holding against some undertow that gripped the keel, shoulders heaved and twisting at oars fixed like iron bars, then perceptible movement of the oars as the boat straightened, stern to the next one, and the next one towered, and up she went and out of sight. And she was coming again, knifing the back swing, the oars lifting the body off its seat; gathering way, coming, the wave mounting behind, the body flattening in every last ounce of strength for the final run. On the crest she came and grounded on the shingle in a smother of sea into which the man leapt. Grant rushed after the retreating water and gripped the stem of the boat already sliding away, fatally away, until suddenly she slewed and stuck, with Martin’s face rising above his knuckles on the gunnel, yelling “Take that!” pointing to the painter in the bow. Grant staggered up the shingle with the painter, twisted it round his waist, and lay back on it, heels dug in. As the next sea lifted the boat, he at once fell flat on his back, cursing his ineptitude, but in an instant had heaved himself forward, and, as the rope gripped him in a violent jerk, ploughed the shingle like a dragged anchor. Next time, he was better prepared; and the third time he belayed the painter round an edging of rock. The painter held.

  In a little while Martin said, “She’s all right there.” He stood looking back at the seas and Grant saw him smile, then he went in behind the boat which now acted as a windbreak to the inner part of the cave. “Put your torch on,” he said. Grant swung the beam around. Now there was a metal flask in Martin’s hands. He held the light as Martin poured. “Some vodka?” “Thank you,” said Grant, down whose gullet the liquid went like cold fire. He gasped and coughed until warmth burst upon him. Martin helped himself and screwed on the cap. “We’ll have a fire,” he said in a voice casual and friendly and from the boat heaved out a pile of sticks.

  Martin moved naturally, at his ease, in no hurry. As he sat against the sheltered rock, he ran fine shavings four or five inches long with his knife from a piece of white wood, but did not break them off, merely tilting them over, one behind the other, until they bunched like a torch of feathers. When he had made five of these, he grouped them on the flattest stone he could find, and built smashed pieces of wood against them. They searched around for every extra bit of timber they could find. Then he put his petrol lighter to the wooden feathers and a tongue of flame ran up. With extraordinary care, as if it were an art or a ritual, he built the fire up. Grant’s astonishment was complete when Martin leaned several whole peats against the crackling wood. “I thought you might be cold,” he said.

  “I was cold,” said Grant. The boat seemed to lurch. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes,” answered Martin, “it’s the top of the tide.” He came back from the boat with a khaki haversack, which contained a flask of coffee and a brown loaf.

  Chapter Thirty Two

  “It was Andie all right,” Martin answered. “He seems attracted by that tallest stone.”

  “You’ve seen him there before?”

  “Yes. It’s the only thing I have ever seen him lean against.”

  “Did he come down this way?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At the cairn. I rather fancy I might have found your crock if you hadn’t appeared.” He leaned forward and pushed a slim log into the fire. The increased glow shone on their faces.

  “You’ve been watching him?”

  Martin smiled and gave Grant a slow, measuring, but quite friendly look. “I wondered where you had got to when you didn’t come back. You were taking chances, weren’t you?”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I happened once to see the flash of your torch.”

  “It was very good of you to—come.”

  “It was a gamble. I wasn’t quite sure what the storm would do in here at the top of the tide. I tried earlier, but was beaten.”

  Grant was steaming warm, but every now and then his teeth chittered. There was a self-possession about Martin, a curious slow largeness, which seemed to come out of the storm and the night. A flowering of the man in unearthly danger.

  “What do you think of Andie?”

  Martin looked at him, then attended to the fire again, this time with extended care, building and balancing with a precision which the flames acknowledged.

  “I mean, do you think he has forgotten where he hid the crock?”

  “No,” answered Martin, sitting back and lighting a cigarette. “He is merely extra cunning about it. Boyish.”

  “You mean primitive?”

  “No. I hardly need to tell you that a primitive society is highly complex in its human relations.”

  “But, you would think that he would respond to his mother. He must see the condition she’s in—or does he?”

  “Does a boy really appreciate his mother’s concern about the secret he insists on hiding? Does he not, in fact, become more obdurate the more she pleads?”

  “You think it’s like that?” murmured Grant, staring at the fire. “You think his is just an arrested intelligence?”

  “No. We live not in our intelligence but in something else. It’s not the boy’s intelligence that stops him responding to his mother.”

  “I understand what you mean.”

  “I wonder.”

  Grant glanc
ed at him. Martin acknowledged the glance with a faint smile but said no more.

  “Have you ever done any anthropology?” Grant asked, stirring from a vague uneasiness.

  “Not in books. But I’ve seen a few things happen.”

  “You mean out East?”

  “Among other places. But out East I perhaps had the opportunity of seeing it naked.” He added, as on an afterthought, “Quite literally naked, in fact.”

  “Did you?” muttered Grant.

  “Yes. She was a very charming woman, too; a white woman. Her husband was manager of a rubber estate. They had polished him off. They took longer over the woman.”

  “Did they?”

  “Yes. There were five of them, and if you want to go one better than a sexual orgy mere killing isn’t enough. The whiteness of the skin of her body obviously roused their perverse interest. It became clear that the little yellow sergeant coveted the skin. He took out his knife——”

  Grant’s body suddenly heaved forward in a retching spasm, but nothing came up. He straightened and, as he wiped his eyebrows, stuttered, “Excuse me—but—a man once described it—it’s my stomach, I can’t stomach——”

  “Have a drop,” said Martin.

  Grant took a suck at the flask and presently in a husky voice added, “I was in the First World War. It’s not that I—but——” He shuddered from the raw spirit. “You saw—the flaying?”

  Martin was watching his face. In a light even voice he said, “I managed afterwards to break away. I shadowed that unit for a long time. I became knowledgeable in forest craft. In fact, I couldn’t have done what I did do if certain dormant instincts hadn’t come to life. That’s what I meant by saying I didn’t get my anthropology out of books.”

  Grant was grateful for the cool ease of Martin’s voice, for an objectivity so impersonal that the man might have been looking on at what had happened to him. Moreover, the talking itself, the cool fluent talking, seemed as natural in this wild time and place as had his silence elsewhere. And yet, as it went on, he gave little away, came no nearer.