The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  As he folded the map, he felt freed and competent once more. By the time he had covered the ground the Colonel and his helpers would be back. They would quickly open up the whole cairn with a systematic perfection that did the heart good to think of, and when that was finished, he would have his field plan ready for a systematic search of the surrounding terrain.

  The archaeologist stood back from the bog of human emotion. He smiled at the nursemaid. As he lay on his back before turning over to sleep, he even indulged in a proper romantic solution of what he now called “the Clachar complex”, whereby he would be the deus ex machina arranging the proper marriage to the tune of the Silver Bough, with Andie grinning over his present of the crock of gold, and Colonel Mackintosh, say, as best man! The irony was tonic and sent him to sleep, smiling.

  He set off in the morning in excellent spirit and was hungry for his lunch by the time he had reached the White Shore. It was a fine sweep of pale brown sand and pulverised shell. The foreshore, grass-grown, was narrow; a thin waterfall dropped a sheer twenty feet, with black glistening rock behind and a boiling pot below. It was a beautiful spot, all light and lightness, and before eating he bathed and trotted along the edge of the tide and sat puffing until he dried. He could not put his clothes on. He went in again and came out. He caught a glimpse of the meaning of immortal youth and laughed. Tiny shivers rayed over his skin as, clothed once more, he munched; then the shivers left him and a divine glow took their place. Drowsy, he spread his legs and half-dreamed. Martin’s face came before him.

  There was nothing you could do with a face like that. It was death. Even the sea-fishing was automatic. In anger at its intrusion, he roused himself and got up, and soon the face, like any nightmare vision brought to the light, faded away.

  That night he was full of a healthy tiredness and went to bed early. In his sleep, he saw Sheena sitting on the ground, exactly as he used to see the Neolithic child, but Sheena was making patterns with seashells on the black earth (black as peat dross). Sheena was utterly absorbed in what she was doing, but he could not enter into it because he was aware that someone was watching her. He knew this was not immediately dangerous to Sheena, but it so clutched him that he could hardly turn his head. When he did, he saw Martin squatting motionless on the ground, looking at the child. There was no expression on his face; it was bone-grey. His rebellious reaction to it awoke him. He had the feeling that he had cried out. Listening, he thought the house was preternaturally quiet. The grey half-light was in the window.

  It was no good dodging this kind of infliction with sleeping tablets, he decided. He must face it out. The anger that had spired in him faded, and he was actually falling asleep when his mind came awake on a plain quiet as a meadow. In the same instant, without conscious change of scene, it was the jungle, and for a long time he followed Martin in his death-hunt through the jungle. Tree boles, undergrowth, festooning creepers, staring colours, the human body slipping round, vanishing; the mysteriousness of shapes, of patterns, and in the midst, stared at then suddenly seen, a face . . . . Sentries, men carrying buckets, smoke, sleeping bodies, shallow trenches, felled trees, rifle barrels . . . .

  And now he is watching Martin; like an invisible eye he is following behind him, aware not only of what Martin is doing but why he is doing it. Martin is light on his feet, noiseless as a shadow, remorseless. Not hate, or other hot emotion in Martin’s mind, simply a concentration so intense that it goes out from him to its object, its victim. A thought transference that the victim feels. It compels . . . .

  Grant stirred, and when the vision faded he wondered just how much it meant. Psychic research; telepathy; the sending of a message from one mind to another at a distance. Hypnotism, with the compulsive action of one mind on another. Those authentic stories of friends of his, concerning African medicine men, Indians, whose power of the eye . . . .

  Plainly the effect on Martin of the unthinkably abominable destruction of the white woman had been abnormal; it must have acted like some kind of mental catalyst before it could have produced that intense singleness of intention, that gathering of his total psychic powers into so ruthless a focus.

  But the effect could have been abnormal only upon an abnormal sensitivity, an unusually high capacity to feel; and it could have been focused only by a mind of exceptional strength. And Grant thought with instant and complete conviction: That’s the picture of him.

  He remembered now something that Mrs Cameron had said about Martin’s early army troubles—with his colonel, was it? Martin would do his duty as a soldier, and do it all the more ruthlessly for his hatred of human killing, but to the sadist, superior officer or not, he would show that Neolithic face in stone.

  Grant knew this so absolutely that he was moved to an obscure affection. He glimpsed the figure again in its stillness, its strength, its inner integrity of being. Martin’s struggle to reach the cave had brought him so near death that he had flowered. Grant saw the cave-light on his face.

  He turned over in his bed. Self-destruction. In Martin it would not come about in a sudden spasm of revulsion. He was not that kind. Grant groaned, for now he knew that Martin was the kind that went slowly down the road to a final nihilism, as slowly and remorselessly as he had hunted the yellow devils. All belief, all capacity for belief in human kind, had been slain at that horrible moment in the jungle, that culmination for him to all the meaningless slaughter in the world.

  No one could help him now. His sister knew that; it haunted her, for she had an insight like his own.

  In an extraordinary stillness of revelation Grant saw that Martin could not be cured, he could not be cured unless he were reborn.

  Anna would be of no use to him She might save him from the sea, or he her. No use. Rebirth could not start that way. A woman like that might be his ultimate salvation, but he could not take the first steps with her. To look at her white body—good God!

  No. It would have to start, if start it ever could, from the beginning, with a selfless absorption in some simple kind of doing or making. Like the absorption, the utter unself-consciousness, of the child arranging seashells on the black earth. Simply that. No more than that. No thought beyond. Doing that . . . . Let him lean over once and move a shell.

  Let him lean over and move a shell! thought Grant into the silent reaches of the night.

  Then he became confused, feeling that he had merely let himself be moved by his dream of Martin watching Sheena arranging the shells on the black peat dust by the peat stack.

  Yet through this characteristic doubt there remained the uncanny conviction that if only Martin could lean over and move a shell something incalculable would be born in him at that instant.

  For it could only now be something like that, something he could gaze at for hours, that he could help, without exercise of intellect, without question.

  The child arranging seashells on the earth; pure pattern. Neither good nor evil; neither solid purpose nor self-conscious design . . . .

  But there was a design: she was making a little house, she was “playing housies”.

  He could lean over and move a shell into this primitive magical sign of a home. Let him do that one positive act and what would follow might be incalculable.

  For there was nothing fanciful about one thing at least: Sheena was there.

  When overtones of meaning had faded upon the air, Grant experienced a curious quietening, wherein everything thing was interpretation or understanding. Without thought of outcome or ending. Then all at once he had the notion that he would like to see his friends in the narrow box. Without a moment’s hesitation, as if someone like Anna had called to him, he got up and went into the dark room. But he did not open the box there; he took it with him to the mat, and, on his knees, unfastened the lid and lifted it back. The light was still a fine twilight; in the gloom of the box the two skulls were softly grey and the eye sockets dark and deep. After he had looked at them for a little time, he said gently, “When it’s all over and they h
ave gone away, I’ll put you back in your own place.”

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  After that night, Grant enjoyed his days on the hills. The feeling of liberation spread to his heels and he was often astonished at the degree of tirelessness in his energy. Certainly he was slim and of no great weight; there wasn’t much of him to carry! He often smiled to himself, and once he had the odd notion that if he shaved off his beard he would come up through like a boy. Why had he grown the beard at all? He decided it was sheer waywardness . . . or a nascent atavism!

  He discovered nothing of any importance and on the fourth day found himself in the Robbers’ Glen. The last thing he wanted to do was pry into Martin’s affairs, but he could not resist an elaborate scouting and spying and a final advance on the underground wheel-house with the feelings of a man poaching on his host’s ground. Not that he was altogether doing this. In the name of science . . . . He chuckled.

  Where so much was mental, he had at least to establish the actual existence of the underground dwelling. But when half an hour had passed in a close search on what he deemed the very spot, he began to be worried. The notion of Martin’s head pushing above a skyline complicated the worry. Then suddenly he found the opening. From the low dark tunnel came a thick pervasive smell he remembered. With the utmost care and no little effort, he replaced the flagstone, redressed its edges with the old hanging heather, and stepped away. He did not feel safe until he was nearly half a mile lower down, where he rested, had a plunge in a small pool, and ate his lunch.

  Perhaps some day, some year, he might do the wheelhouse in style. It would keep! That made him think of Martin. As he stared into the small dark whirls in the pool and got lost in the sound from its throat, there came before him the cairn in the darkening night and the figure behind the monolith. Martin had been there! Then the astonishing thought came with an underbeat of excitement: Had Martin called Andie to that spot at that hour?

  The significance of the question held him . . . . He was again in the cave and heard Martin say that he would probably have found the crock of gold if he, Grant, had not appeared.

  At the time he had thought the remark no more than an acknowledgement of a chance meeting in the night—did not Martin often wander along the dark shore?—with no particular significance. But now . . . .

  With a deep conviction he realised that Martin was the only man who could understand Andie, who could command him in his own unusual fashion, and who could therefore find the crock of gold. This was as near a certainty as anything on this earth could be.

  Why not get in touch with Martin? Why not call after dinner, and, at the right moment, put it to him?

  But at once he saw he could not do this, deliberately. He could not risk alienating Martin. When he found himself trying to understand this, a further astonishing question asked itself inside him: Supposing Martin had followed Andie and found the crock, what would he have done about it? And he found that he could not answer; he just did not know. He had no reason at all to suppose that Martin would in fact ever tell him anything about it. There was a dark place beyond the utmost reach of his intuition where Martin and the crock would be hidden.

  There was an excitement in this, a penetration . . . and the possibility at least of a small extra discovery of oneself. And the more he penetrated, the more he discovered of himself, the nearer he drew to the crock of gold. That was no myth: it was simple fact. In a momentary wonder that it should be so, he laughed. He had never before seen, he declared, what myth meant. The sunlight danced on the dark swirls in the pool.

  But he experienced quite a different kind of excitement the evening before Colonel Mackintosh and his party were due to arrive. It was his longest trip, and dropping into the Kinlochoscar Hotel for a glass of wine he found the manageress so pleasant, and the wine so pleasantly weakening, that he stopped for dinner. Yes, she told him, three rooms had been reserved for Colonel Mackintosh, a Mr Blair, and a Mr Scott—arriving tomorrow. These were the only rooms available and Colonel Mackintosh had booked them before he left. No, she didn’t know of others. He explained that the Colonel was not a very good correspondent and a question of labour was involved. However, he hoped that at least there would not be so much publicity this time! . . .

  On the way home he was in such good fettle that halfway along the road he left it to spy out some ground towards the sea. Every day there had been the possibility that he just might pick up with his field-glasses an unsuspecting Andie in some lonely place, and he approached the ridge, which should give a view of the valley in which Arthur had found the cist with the collar urn, more like a deerstalker than an innocent archaeologist. Then he saw the tents and his features so narrowed in wrath that his whole face, with its dipped pointed beard, gathered a tolerable resemblance to a Neolithic axe. The advance guard of the great British public had arrived! He could hardly take the binoculars from their leather case.

  Four small triangular tents, a larger round one, and, at a little distance, a rectangular affair of brown sacking that was all too plainly a latrine. Seven young men were squatting like braves—round the cist.

  As he approached the latrine, an eighth, with khaki shorts and bare legs, was shouldering a spade.

  “What’s all this about?” demanded Grant.

  “All what?”

  “Who gave you permission to camp here?”

  “I thought permission . . . . Are you the landowner, sir?”

  “No, I’m not. And if you haven’t got permission to camp here, I’d advise you get it before you squat. You can’t just dump your tents——”

  “Good evening, Mr Grant.”

  Grant wheeled. “What—you, Jim Dickson?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jim, a smiling hefty young man. “We are the labour battalion sent on by Uncle James in advance.” Uncle James was Colonel Mackintosh.

  “Well I’m damned!”

  “All budding field-workers, at your service.” Jim half bowed, half-hitched his pants.

  Grant capitulated with a roar of laughter. He knew three of the lads well.

  An hour later, he left them, smiling. From their apparently innocent questions, he could see that they had worked out a foolproof system of night-shifts and super-boy-scout stalking, with the crock of gold as their Holy Grail. The farther they had to crawl on their bellies the better! When he had done his best to warn them about Andie, one of them had replied negligently, “We have done some deer-stalking, sir. If you don’t want him to see us—he won’t.”

  He glanced at his watch: it was nearly eleven o’clock. Anna would be coming out to look for him again!

  He came round the slope and saw a movement at the base of the tall monolith. At first, with a swift uncanny feeling, he thought it was a black dog; but as he stopped and stared he saw a human being on all fours: it was Andie. His head was down, like an Eastern man in prayer. Or was he scraping, like a dog? Andie’s head lifted and looked round the stone towards the cairn; then slowly he reared up and, one shoulder against the stone, kept on peering round at the cairn. All at once, as if something had touched him, he turned his head and saw Grant.

  “Hullo, Andie,” said Grant as he approached. “What are you up to now?”

  Andie’s face was a mass of grinning creases, the eyes reduced to thin slits. The ground at his feet was unbroken.

  Grant spoke to him again, humanly, smiling, ready to take part in the game.

  Andie spoke thickly and his shoulders began to heave. He was excited about something; but his grinning held also a sort of baffling embarrassment. Suddenly Grant wondered if Martin was about and his eyes travelled carefully over the cairn.

  Andie’s arms began to flap slightly.

  “Well, what is it?” asked Grant. “Want to go and find it? . . . Come on, then!” And he made a tentative but indefinite movement.

  Andie, however, was equally indefinite, waiting for a lead, waiting to follow: clearly he had no notion if going to any specific place himself. He was looking at Grant now a
s a dog looks at a shepherd, but with something behind the eye that no dog has.

  “Well, let us have a look,” said Grant in his friendly employer’s voice and started for the cairn. At once Andie was striding alongside, muttering away. A complete circuit of the cairn revealed nothing.

  “Doesn’t seem to be anyone around, does there?”

  “Gu—gu——” answered Andie, his eyes on Grant, waiting for the next move.

  Grant was completely baffled. But he did not want to give in. He rested against the cairn. The daylight was shadowed, easy on the eyes, a still grey silence. An oystercatcher swerved suddenly above them, and was gone over the cliff. The sea-floor rose slowly in a grey glimmer to a remote horizon.

  He must appear to Andie as a superior being, the mysterious one who has knowledge. He came, opened up cairns, found skeletons and pots of gold. Andie would at once expect something more when he saw him. Not what had been, but the new bright thing that would be.

  How was it possible to reverse this? “What brought you here?” he asked, hoping that something in his easy attitude would shake or confuse Andie. “Does your mother know?”

  A definite pause came into Andie’s being as if he had perfectly understood. He began to mutter and hunch his shoulders, then his mouth opened in a stare. Grant turned his head and saw Andie’s mother approaching. Her shawled head and shoulders gave her the appearance of a woman coming out of a remote place or remote time. Her skirt was down to the top of her boots, obscuring the movement of her legs, though she was plainly walking. Once or twice Grant had been touched by the legendary, by a feeling of something archetypal, larger and more enduring than the individual. He felt the strange shiver of this now, got up from the stones, spoke at once, “Good evening. Are you looking for Andie?” He smiled in his friendliest way, making the moment normal, preparing for his explanation of how he had come on Andie. “Don’t blame me this time!”