The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  “You—you got away finally?” Grant said, craving this cool strength.

  “Yes. But I did a few things before then. It was rather complicated, for I don’t mean I merely got to know how to live in the forest. Something more abnormal than that. I lived mostly on their rations, as a matter of fact. These five men—they got the uncomfortable feeling that I haunted them.”

  “Did they?”

  “Well, I had to get inside their minds. Which really meant inside my own. At that level we are all primitives, we possibly go back beyond the gods, before gods were, to a supernatural something. Isn’t that the psychic picture? You have a name for it, haven’t you?”

  “Mana.”

  Martin nodded. “A Melanesian word, I was told, for the mysterious energy that comes from the hidden or ultimate source of power. Have you never felt it—at a moment of intense experience? For it is not so occult as it sounds. All profound religious experience is full of it. I rather fancy the magicians up at the cairn knew quite a bit about it—in their own particular way. Didn’t they say that everything ultimately was one thing?”

  “They did,” said Grant.

  “I began to understand. For a psychic experience is very different from a metaphysical exercise about it, different in kind. These magicians or druids or whatever you call them——” He paused and a slow ironic smile came about his eyes. “I believe you debate as to who the druids were?”

  “We wonder if they came in with the first Goidels or Gaels or whether a certain aboriginal——”

  “I know. The name is everything!”

  In the silence the wave thundered and the cliff vibrated from a physical power which had in it something of exultance that seemed more than the water and the rock. When Grant moved and the shirt momentarily left his back, the skin there went clammy. The heat from the fire burned his shins and his face; sometimes his head jerked away from the smoke that stung his eyes. Rising above these physical sensations induced in time a curious mental sensitivity which was like another and heightened aspect of himself, tenuous as a vapour that at any moment might pass away altogether.

  “The words power, energy obscure the thing,” Martin was saying. “They make us think in physical or atomic terms, whereas these magicians were probably searching for—what may yet be found in the sub-atomic.”

  Argument never failed to goad Grant and now he made a valiant effort. “Are you trying to tell me that these primitive magic men of the cairn tried to identify themselves with the original cause of things, that they were practising mystics of that profound kind; not only that, but that they were Eddingtons trying to penetrate beyond the symbol in the equation?”

  “Well?”

  “I did not credit them with such knowledge,” replied Grant relapsing into a toneless voice.

  “Knowledge? Of what?”

  “Oh I see what you mean—the kind of knowledge, but the implication is,” and his voice rose again, “that primitive man, before he even began to make gods, had an apprehension of God.”

  “O God,” said Martin, pleased by the esoteric flavour. “You’ll be asking next whether there hasn’t been any progress in our notion of God. For it would certainly upset our scientists and psychologists to suggest that God was given, like a mathematical axiom, to man in the beginning.”

  “Do you believe He was?”

  “He? What’s He? You cannot get away from the anthropomorphic. Even legend has it that these magicians or druids got such an understanding of how the ultimate essence or power worked that they used it to change human beings into swans and fawns and trees. And even if that was no more than a piece of occult poetry to hold the ordinary mind in thrall—still, it took that shape. For the real druid was after real powers; he wanted to tap, the source.”

  “Did you tap it, in the jungle?” asked Grant, a little combatively, for the horror of the operation Martin had witnessed stirred in his vitals again like a sickness.

  “In my own way, yes. It took time.” Martin’s eyes considered Grant. “I also used certain small tricks, sounds, and after I had disposed of the second man of the five, I got a white sheet. By the time four were gone and only the sergeant left, I was becoming adept. The sergeant was now very jumpy, and he could not show it because he dare not lose face. Once the whole unit combined to comb me out—a very clever move it was—in broad daylight, of course, though it wasn’t broad in the jungle. I poked my face through some creepers and a man saw me. He stood and I, quite motionless, looked at him. He decided—his expression grew uncanny with fear—that he daren’t see me. He glanced here and there and made off.”

  “Did you get the sergeant?”

  “I left him wrapped in the white fabric. There were eight bullet holes in it. They must have thought it very mysterious because there was no bullet hole in the sergeant.”

  Grant had nothing more to say. A curious malaise was getting the better of him; his body was sagging, slumping, but not in sleep. He felt the flask being put into his hands and took a swig. It revived him but with the effect of bringing the night and the storm about him in an unearthly way. “You still can use this power?” It was hardly a question, little more than a last politeness in conversation; for his mind fell beyond the question itself into the place where the horror lay.

  “I dropped all that,” Martin said.

  “Did you? . . . “

  Martin sat quite still for nearly a minute. The storm, with death in it, might have been his flower. Then he looked at Grant and continued, “There are psychoanalysts who say that when the aggressive or destructive instinct in you is dammed up it injures you, and that you have to destroy other things, other people, in order not to destroy yourself, in order to protect yourself from self-destruction.”

  “Good God,” said Grant, groaning.

  “There is quite a lot in that—as far as it goes. You’ll have noticed that the egomaniac in a big way always becomes a figure of public attraction, for he stirs up the unconscious urge in humanity towards destruction. Let the old be demolished, he shouts, so that new wonderful constructions may arise—his constructions. For all that opposes him, that might expose the pathological inferiority from which he suffers, must first be swept away in order that his prestige may then reign supreme. Psychiatrists have made the picture familiar; in the world today the total or totalitarian picture. They point in the recent war to a whole nation having come under the sway of such a psychopath or group of psychopaths—for men moved by the same mad urge are drawn to one another by a sort of psychic magnetism. Quite . . . . But . . . you only get to know the real motive—when you yourself have gone far enough in experience, in pure destruction.”

  “What motive?” asked Grant out of a darkening stupidity.

  “You have to go far enough,” repeated Martin quietly, “to know what happens when the destructive instinct has actually had its way.”

  Grant met Martin’s eyes for an instant. Their dark concentration had yet about them something like a smile, something that came out of so much experience that they could rest amid the infernal knowledge they evoked with an ultimate calm; and yet they directly conveyed this knowledge; it came from them; Grant felt it piercing into and pervading him. In a sense he was outwardly blinded, so that meaning now swelled up inwardly. It was as if he had been taken to that vast inland country where all conscious analysis ceases and the mad impulses are themselves seen at work, where passion is no longer passion but pure violence in action, where violence in action feeds on violence, feeds and grows ever more gargantuanly, until nothing ultimately is left to be destroyed but the destroyer himself; and then in a final upsurge the destroyer turns on himself and achieves his last obliterating triumph in a frenzy of self-destruction.

  “In history it has taken many outward forms,” came Martin’s voice. “You know about the old races. Didn’t the Aztec civilization, for example, didn’t the old Aztecs become so obsessed with human sacrifice that they were destroying themselves, were actually in process of committing racia
l suicide?”

  Grant groaned. He could no longer think.

  “However, it might be interesting for a start to take this simple picture provided by the psychoanalyst, with its concealed self-destruction motive, and lift it from the individual case to the European level——”

  “Do you mean,” and Grant had the odd sensation that something was suddenly shouting the final question in him, “that humanity has got the wish to destroy itself, that—that the death instinct has got charge?”

  He glared at Martin who considered him with the steady characteristic look which Grant had always felt as something palpable; it now came out of the jungle of cave and storm and sea.

  Grant suddenly began to retch, as though the raw spirit was at last taking effect; but nothing came up. A wave of icy coldness went over him and he staggered to his feet. But his trembling was such that he could not stay on his feet and when he had stretched himself full length on the shingle, he let go.

  Martin gathered all that was left of the fuel and built it into a final blaze. He took off his oilskin and threw it over Grant’s body; went out and saw the clear light of morning on the sea. The tide had retreated a considerable distance. His weather-proof wristlet watch recorded 4.25. His eyes followed the waves and studied their impact, studied the formation of rock on the south side and the backwash. Then he went to the boat and began to examine the planking where the bilge had taken one or two heavy poundings. After bailing her out, he decided she was quite sound. She was only twelve feet long and even lightly built but of seasoned wood by a craftsman who had spared neither fine ribs nor copper rivets. He unhitched three wooden rollers, each about two feet long and ankle-thick, from under the forward thwart, and began clearing the shingle from under the after end of the keel.

  The fire had died down to an ash-flecked glow and the grey light in the inner cave made Grant’s face ghastly. It stirred as Martin stared down at it, then Grant sat up. He began to shiver violently.

  “We’d better go,” said Martin.

  As Grant arose, Martin lifted his own oilskin over his arm and they went out to the boat, into which Martin dropped his oilskin and the haversack with the thermos flask.

  Grant, swaying slightly, looked at him. “Are you going to tackle it?”

  “Yes. But you needn’t come, if you don’t want to. You’ll get out of here in two to three hours.” Martin’s voice had the ease of utter impersonality, yet his eyes remained in some remote way personal.

  Grant could not gather his wits; something persisted in a sort of myth of danger and largeness; he was desperately cold and tried to control, to hide, the chitter of his teeth.

  “We’ll try to slew her off, if you give me a hand here,” Martin said.

  By a manipulation, at which he was obviously expert, of the three rollers, Martin at last got the boat moving, but it was a heavy and difficult job because he wanted her over towards the south wall of the cave. After an initial breathlessness, dizziness, and furious pounding of the heart, Grant began to feel a warmth in his body. The cave faced west but the seas were running from south of west and he saw that Martin had chosen the only spot for the push-off. The wind and the whitecaps outside were almost gone but the seas looked big as ever and broke with an even greater thunder.

  It seemed to Grant an impossible venture, a death questing wildness. Pure green came through the curl of the wave. Martin was quiet and thorough, sparing and instant in movement; the pallor of his face was the pallor of the bone beneath.

  “Will you give me a push off?” he asked.

  Grant nodded.

  They both pushed; Martin leapt over the gunnel and whipped the oars into the rowlocks; Grant pushed on, and when the water was over his knees he jumped but got only his breast over the stern-post; there he wriggled impaled, until he fell over into the boat; but the boat was swinging back and he put out his hands to fend her stern off the cliff, felt his palms scraped by the barnacles without pain, got a skelp from the momentarily shipped blade of Martin’s oar, but now they were off on the recession, on the deep back eddy. Next time he fended off with one of the three rollers which, glancing off his chest, ripped through his oilskin and, as the boat left the rock, he all but fell into the sea. A wild effort at recovery landed him in a heap on the footboards. But Martin now was hanging on both oars over the threshold where the waves tripped, losing distance to gain a little more. Grant glimpsed his face and saw a strength in its pallor that was cold and more than human; a bleakness that was more than deathly: it was stoical and everlasting, as if the fellow was not drawing on his mysterious source but was part of it. A curious quietness came on Grant. A commitment, a sense of relief in his own act that was a cold gladness. They rose up over the wave and fell down into the swinging hollow, but they were leaving the cave.

  Grant saw when Martin began to tire, when the swing of the oars lost a living quality and became automatic. Martin had never spoken; had nodded once commandingly to the floorboard on which Grant now sat beneath the stern seat; he pulled steadily with a side glance for a coming wave. The sky had cleared into great blue patches, fresh and vivid from a sun Grant could not see; only on the south-west horizon were the clouds still dark and lowering, as though swelling about the storm’s root.

  Martin was pulling away towards the southern island and presently Grant, looking about him, at the cliffs, the tumultuous shore, at Clachar, began to get an idea of how Martin had fetched the cave in the storm. From the sheltered side of the spit north of Clachar House, he must have made out for the north island, brought her through the seas into the inshore lee of the middle island, then holding into the storm and slipping with it, had finally come down on the cave. As his eyes lifted from the imaginary passage to Martin’s face, he found Martin’s eyes on him. They did not smile; but there was an intuitive recognition in them, so cool and remote in its understanding of his calculations, that he himself smiled, as though detected in a naïvety, and glanced away. But he now knew that that was in fact the route which Martin had taken.

  In time, Martin brought her to run before the weather. The wind had died away and, as he baled, Grant for the first time felt safe from the lift and swirl of the waters. To begin with, he had waited for each towering mass to smash in on them, not in fear so much as in a sheer tension of expectancy, but now, in a queerly miraculous way, he felt safe. His mouth, losing its leathery dryness, was growing softly slimy. The wound-up tension inside his skull was easing.

  They were making way now. Martin’s pallor had taken a grey tinge. Grant, facing Clachar House, could see that the intention was to clear the spit and land on its lee or northern side. The final passage to the boathouse was too narrow, too shallow, for the swing of the seas. The waves were spouting on the broken rocks that ran out to the point of the spit. But once round the spit, there would be no trouble.

  Presently Grant was aware that Martin’s eyes glistened, that the man had come out from the blind automatic action of the will. Casting a glance over his shoulder, he saw that the dark clouds in the south-west had swollen up upon the sky; a flurry of wind spat a few sea-drops into his face; a darkness was coming racing over the sea with an edging of spindrift; Martin was almost rising off his seat in the effort to get power into his left oar; then the gust hit them.

  For a few seconds it seemed to sweep them over the sea with a tremendous flattening power. It took off, but only as a man might pause to take a deeper breath. The next time its violence drenched Grant in a smother of spray. Martin hung on his oars, and when they shot out he dug them in again, holding to the solid sea.

  Grant at last saw the danger that the rower had seen too late. With his back to the spit and watching the near seas, Martin had unknowingly been cutting his passage round the spit too fine. The wind was now driving them right on the spouting rocks, and the more Martin pulled his left to nose her seawards the more the wind caught her. Minute followed minute in iron tension until it was clear that, unless the wind’s grip instantly slackened, they would smash
. It was then Grant saw the figure of a man staggering over the spit towards them and knew it was Norman the chauffeur; and then he saw another figure, her skirts about her legs, swung this way and that, but lying forward on the wind, coming, and knew it was Anna. His body was whirled round and he was facing the oncoming seas. In a long trough, Martin had put her about and was trying to hold her, stem to the onrush. Grant saw his eyes find the two figures and a white stillness of implacable concentration steady him in a last exercise of his strength. As though infuriated by this relentless obstinacy the wind rose to its last and final pitch. A scraping shudder, white spume, a heave and a wrecking crash, and Grant’s body was thrown on a dark rock and the sea went over him.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Adrumming in his ears, dimmed eyes, and, as the dragging on his crumpled pitching body eased, a bursting desire to get up for air; a cessation of the onward thrust, a brimming choking instant and the water was going back and his head was through; a jagged black edge of rock and his hands on their own had it and gripped while his mouth spewed and the recession roared and the air was sucked in a trickle of pain; drunkenly and dimly he saw Anna coming, but he could do nothing, could not move, for he had to get more air first, and the sea hit him, pitched him over the low rock, and covered him again. But the holding of his breath this time was easier than the time before because he was drowning; then a clutch was holding him against the recession and his head was through once more. Anna was hauling him too strongly, too harshly, but he was too stupid to tell her, so he crumpled up for ease, but she was merciless and would not give him the moment he craved; his arms were about her as they fell in the water, but she had no mercy, would not lie still for the life-easing moment, and he was being dragged like a sack, tied at the throat, choked; he was being carried and the pressure at his throat eased; he was alone, his body in a slow wriggle, squeezing itself, like a dark octopus. A formless spot inside him, that was his will, hardened, and pushed its thin spire like a screw upward through the desire for obliteration; it was merciless as the woman had been and told him that there were others.