by Paul Gallico
Supposing God had made man, not in His own image, but in some reflection of His own love and spirit, and turned him loose on earth to work out his own destiny. Must not His heart, must not any great, creative, all-embracing heart be wrung with compassion for what His children had turned out to be? And perhaps bitterness too. For if earth was a cosmic test tube of the universe, a dead star on which the spores of life had been scattered to see how they would flourish, then it was already one of God’s colossal failures. Yet, too, He must be riven with pity for the fate of the wicked and miserable victims of the experiment.
Were the faithful like Peddie and the half mad like Lori all that He could look upon as salvage? Surely there was no place in any theological catalogue for one of His more signal fiascos, Mr. Veterinary MacDhui. Well, as he was, so was he. At the outskirts of Inveranoch he pulled himself erect to show the town the old, well-known figure of bristle and defiance, shoulders back, chin out—
Yet now that he was there he did not drive at once to the houses in the lane, but cut around behind the street to the track that ran through the lush green strip of woods leading toward Stirling Manor. Here he parked and got out and sat beneath the branches of a beech tree and where he could see the salt-blue of the loch shining through, for he was not yet done with thinking.
But now that he had found a peaceful place and a peaceful moment, his thoughts, as so often happened, refused to be marshaled or submit to order. Instead they provided him with an uncomfortable kaleidoscope, flashes of past and present, presentiments of the future in jumbled array.
He produced his pipe from his pocket, packed and lit it. A lesser egotist might have suspected that the man who had returned from Glen Ardrath was no longer the same one who had driven up there, and in some ways would never be again. But he was not used to solving his difficulties, his turmoils and confusions, through sober reflection. Introspection was something new to him and he did not know how to begin. And as yet he could not foresee the fearful and apparently insoluble dilemma that was to face him, or the trials that were in store for him, the dogs that would bait and worry him before he could snap the chains of the trap that held him fast and drag his remains in search of succor.
From above his head came a familiar chittering and scolding and a red squirrel slanted down the tree trunk beside him in fits and starts with nervous pauses. But he was hungry, familiar with humans, and had been hand fed before. When he reached the ground he sat up prettily on his bushy tail, his black paws folded over the white blaze on his dark red breast.
Mr. MacDhui reached into his left-hand jacket pocket, where he was wont to carry tidbits to distract or win the confidence of nervous animals, and fished up a piece of carrot. The squirrel came close, accepted it with tentative daintiness, whisked off, a red streak, some five paces, and sat up nibbling it.
Mr. MacDhui puffed on his pipe and said, “Contented now, aren’t you?” It was easier to watch and talk to the squirrel than to think. “Do not eat too quickly,” he admonished, “or you will have indigestion, which may lead to worms or some other form of parasite to which you little chaps seem to be prone, and that wouldn’t be very comfortable.”
The squirrel turned the carrot over rapidly two or three times in its paws and munched on, but sat so that he could keep a wary eye upon this talking man.
“If I may introduce myself,” Mr. MacDhui suggested, “my name is Andrew MacDhui, a veterinary surgeon by profession. That should interest you, since it is a doctor who treats animals belonging to people when they are ill. I am not very much liked hereabouts. Furthermore I do not believe in God or a higher power. And I have a daughter, a child of mine own flesh and blood, who will not speak to me because when her cat contracted a form of meningitic paralysis I had it killed to save its suffering.”
The squirrel ceased munching for a moment and looked up, masticating what it had in its cheek pouches, the carrot nearly finished.
“Ah, but did I indeed, you ask?” commented Mr. MacDhui, “and the exception is well taken. It is a query I have put to myself often enough in the past days. Could I have saved the beast or did I destroy it because I was jealous of Mary Ruadh? Did I even diagnose its ailment correctly? Mary Ruadh is my daughter’s name. She is called Ruadh because her hair is a shade between your coat and mine. She carried the wretched animal about with her wherever she went and slept with it at night. I would see her bury her face in its flank and hug it to her like a living doll and perhaps I could not bide that. The child is motherless, you know, and I have tried to be both to her. Now she cries and longs for her dead cat, but to me, her father, she will not speak.”
The squirrel finished the carrot and got down on all fours, whisking its tail. The voice of the man was making him nervous and he was of a mind to move off.
“Wait,” pleaded Mr.MacDhui. “Do not leave me yet. It is good to have someone to talk to. Look here; I will bribe you to stay a little longer.” He produced another carrot and made clucking noises. “And we won’t speak of my troubles any longer, but yours.”
The squirrel reflected, accepted the carrot, and this time, soothed by familiarity coupled with generosity, sat up quite close by.
“What do you do when you are ill?” Mr. MacDhui asked, for it struck him that, strangely, he had never thought of this before. “To whom do you go? Is there a wise old squirrel who tells you what herbs or roots to eat, or does your instinct tell you? Or do you just crawl away under a bush and die, with no one to know or care? Angus Peddie, my neighbor and a minister, says of his God that not a sparrow falleth but that He is concerned. But what arrangements has He made? Strange, but I have never come upon a dead squirrel or hedgehog or deer. What happens to you? Are you all eaten by the birds or the carnivores? Where are your graveyards?”
MacDhui continued to catechize: “Do you have friends? Are you ever lonely? And what about your young? Do you understand and feel for them? Do they touch your heart so that when you look at them sometimes you think you cannot bear the grief caused by the gulf between you and the fact that you cannot communicate with them, that their little minds have already gone out from you? Do you, too, love them and lose them so quickly?”
And he asked finally, “Do you live out a whole life of your own, with love and happiness, or worry and heartbreak? Or is there nothing but food and flight, nesting, mating, and dying, and are you more fortunate to be born a little forest animal without a soul than I, a human being, with all my wonderful intelligence? Who is to answer me that?”
The squirrel, the carrot finished, prepared to pack up. “Well, I can see that you are not going to,” Mr. MacDhui concluded, and arose. The squirrel ran off but stopped short a few yards away, sat up and winked an eye, and then vanished up the far side of a tree. Mr. MacDhui, sucking on his pipe, feeling curiously relieved, walked to his jeep, got in, and drove home. It was shortly before Mary Ruadh’s bath and supper time.
Each night that he returned Mr. MacDhui hoped that his daughter would be waiting for him in the entryway; each time he suffered disappointment. His anger had long since given way to bewilderment and heartache.
On the advice of Mr. Peddie, he tried to take no notice of her silence. He talked to her even though she would not reply and behaved toward her as much as possible as though nothing had happened. He bathed her as usual, supped with her, and then put her to bed—but with one difference. She refused to say her prayers while he was in the room and he had had to defer, while Mrs. McKenzie came and heard them.
But he had made it a point to return to her room each night, bend over her cot, and kiss her good night She suffered him to do so without protest, her eyes staring upward at the ceiling, her gaze and thoughts turned inward or far from him. She never kissed him back.
As he came in, the entry and hall were bare. MacDhui could hear Mrs. McKenzie at work in the kitchen. He went on into his daughter’s room, which was on the ground floor on the opposite side of the hall from his. She was sitting on one of her play chairs. Her favorite dolls w
ere in a corner. She was doing nothing.
He picked her up in his arms, saying, “Hi, chicken. Your daddy’s home. Anything to say to him?”
No one who had seen them together could have denied father and daughter—red hair, blue eyes, and each with truculent, immovable, stubborn chin turned toward the other.
As he held her in his arms, silent and irreconcilable as ever, he noted that her skin was clammy. “Hello,” he said, “I don’t much like the feel of this. Perhaps we will have Dr. Strathsay stop by in the morning and have a look at you. Are you feeling ill, Mary Ruadh?”
When she maintained her accustomed silence, he said, “Right then. Let’s have our bath and supper and early to bed, warm and snug. And while I am bathing you I’ll tell you a story of a brave badger who lived in the woods above Glen Ardrath and how the Red Faery of the glen who dwells in a stone house with her friends of the forest, field, and stream, saved his life.”
He saw then, as she sat naked at the bottom of the tub that she had grown thinner, that the color and tone of her skin was not good, and that she was no longer the little pink frog who used to splash her toys in the water, or squirt the cake of soap out of her hand, or make noises, and who did not even try to avert her face from the trial of washing.
Nevertheless he was aware that she was listening to his story.
He was surprised himself how it grew in the telling, and the strange affection he felt for the animal as he visualized it for his child.
In the story the badger became a person, heroic, noble, brave, possessed of feelings and a soul. It ranged the forest, loving life and the world in which it found itself. When it was caught in the trap he felt the pang at his own heart, and a cry was wrung from Mary Ruadh, the first that he had heard from her lips. But it was for the unfortunate beast and not for him.
He waxed eloquent over the badger’s gallant struggle to live even when attacked, and described the great effort it had made to snap the chain of the trap and drag himself to the cottage of the Red Faery. And when he told how Lori had cradled and cuddled and comforted the poor wounded beast, he saw tears flow from Mary Ruadh’s eyes and these were the first he had seen, too, since she had cried to him to spare her cat
That night when he came in to complete the ritual and give the unwanted good-night kiss, he leaned over the bed and said, “The brave badger will get well—and someday perhaps you shall see it—”
He picked her up and kissed her. Her arms seemed to fall naturally about his shoulders, and as he held her thus he whispered, “Mary Ruadh, I love you—”
Was there the faintest return pressure of those thin arms? Had there been? The surging of his heart within him told him that it was so. For an instant they had closed about him, clinging to him.
He laid her back upon the pillow, and though she did not speak to him yet, there was as a great singing inside him, for there were tears in her eyes again and he felt that the beginning had been made.
He kissed her again and went away, but that night he left her door open so that he would hear her, should she stir or call out. He himself went to his office and busied himself with district and county reports for a few hours before retiring to bed with a heart lighter than he could remember.
1 7
I, Bast-Ra, goddess, am about to do a godlike thing.
I shall invoke the power that lies within me bestowed by the great gods Ra, the sun, and Hathor, the moon.
I shall punish.
I shall doom.
It is not a simple matter to be God. I know this, for I have been and am one.
Men have envied the power of God. I envy man. To him has been given the power to choose between good and evil.
There is no good and there is no evil for God—only God’s will.
This night it is my will to work a mischief and destroy the Man with the Red Beard.
And the doom I have foreseen for him shall be one that is worse even than death.
Not for nothing am I known as Sekhmet-Bast-Ra, the tearer and render.
1 8
Sometimes in the summer when the warm air from the south was rebuffed by the cold seas of the north, a hot, strong wind blew up the long corridor of the valley of Loch Fyne, as the pressures built up through the mazes of sea and land down by the Firth of Clyde and Kilbrannan Sound went whistling away to escape through any vent that offered itself.
Rarer, but not unlike the foehns of Switzerland and Austria or the mistrals of the South of France, it brought unease and discomfort during its brief stay, rattled doors and windows, made eerie sounds about the chimneys, not associated with honest winter gales, plucked at loose shutters, and ruffled the waters of the loch into unfamiliar splashings, gurglings, and suckings. Dogs whined during its blowing and were irritable, and people more so. Usually in twenty-four hours it blew itself out, funneling into the sky to form the alto-cumulus clouds which later would discharge themselves in the form of the rare but severe Highland thunderstorm.
Such a visitation announced itself that night already mentioned, when Mr. MacDhui certain that the Coventry his daughter had imposed upon him was about to end, was closing off his paper work in his study and preparing to retire.
It manifested itself with the violent crashing of an upstairs shutter and sent Mr. MacDhui dashing aloft to fasten it. As he leaned from the window, the wind tore at his sleeves, his hair, his eyelids and cheeks, disconcertingly and with a kind of evil glee, and he was glad to put his head inside and lock the window firmly.
He had experienced this Scotch mistral once before, and went about the house seeing to shutter and window fastenings, and making certain that the back door was firmly shut. He looked into the room of Mary Ruadh to see whether the banging of the loose shutter had disturbed her, but he noted that she was sleeping peacefully. He closed her window but for a crack, for later the wind would strengthen and try to enter houses. When he was satisfied that his home and his family were shipshape, he retired to his own room opposite, undressed, and went to bed.
It was half past ten when he looked at his watch before putting out the light and he lay there in the darkness, listening to the wind strumming the telephone and utility wires and the small crashes as the agitating loch began to burst its wavelets against the pebbly shore. His relief that the miserable, upsetting duel between his daughter and himself seemed about to end offset the disquiet of the night and a few minutes later he drifted off to sleep.
He was awakened, he knew not at what time, by the long-drawn-out mournful calling of the cat, somewhere close by, singing to the maddened night. The mistral was in full cry now, every tree branch bending to it, every leaf a-rustle, as the wind soughed through them relentlessly; the loch was roaring, answering the pressures that stirred its surface; loose things were flying down the street; a roof shingle was vibrating.
Mr. MacDhui awoke, chilled with the fear that grips humans suddenly returned to life with nature on the rampage. His nerves were twanging like the wires without and every sound and vibration seemed intensified and exaggerated.
The cat cried again. “Mrow—Mrow—MRRRRRRRROW.” This time the call came from directly beneath his window, raising the hackles at the back of his head as he sat up in bed on one elbow to listen.
He would have been less than human had not the thought of a vindictive Thomasina, returned to haunt him, crossed his mind, and he shivered in the darkness, before angrily laughing off the notion. The neighborhood was alive with cats—there seemed to be one in the window or on the doorstep of every household in the lane.
Yet when he heard the thump and scratch at the sill Mr. MacDhui snapped on the light in time to catch a glimpse of the cobalt-glowing coals of the eyes, the pink muzzle and white teeth, and then it was gone.
Mr. MacDhui, unnerved by the vision and the whooping of the wind, remained leaning upon his elbow, waiting and listening, staring at the empty windowpane. A corner of his eye caught the time; a few minutes past midnight.
Then the cat yowled again, but this ti
me there was an answering cry that rang through his head with fearful impact.
“Thomasina!”
It came from Mary Ruadh’s room and sent a shudder down his spine. The next moment he heard the patter of her feet and saw the white flash of her pajamaed figure as it whipped past his bedroom, then heard the front door thrown wide, and the next moment the hounds of the summer mistral were within the house, raging through the corridor, upsetting the umbrella stand with a clatter, whirling papers, whisking a picture from the wall.
In the grip of fear and night panic, Mr. MacDhui leaped from his bed, pausing only to slip into his trousers and seize the electric torch from his night table. Switching on the beam, he ran from the house, filled with a thousand dreads and apprehensions.
He located the child immediately in the beam of the torch, a slim white figure with hair flying, bare feet whisking over the cobbles in pursuit of the cat. Immediately, too, the wind swooped upon him, buffeting, befuddling, pushing and pulling at him, further outraging his nerves.
“Mary Ruadh!” he shouted against the hundred noises of the night, “Mary Ruadh, come back!”
Either she did not or would not hear him, but the cat she was pursuing suddenly turned at right angles and ran across the street. With a great cry of rage, Mr. MacDhui drew back his arm and let fly the heavy torch at the animal.
It clattered and shattered against the cobbled pave, ringing as it turned over and over like a dislodged ninepin, missing the cat, which gave an agonized shriek and in a night-blurred streak vanished over a garden wall. Then it was that the child faced about and saw her father, his arm still rigid from the throw, his shirt flapping, his mane blowing wildly, his figure outlined against the light streaming from the cottage door.
She stood there, a slender trembling reed swaying in the grip of the wind, upon her face a look of such horror as Mr. MacDhui never hoped to see again. She opened her lips as though crying something, or wishing to cry out, but no sound emerged from them. Then her father reached her and gathered her trembling and shaking uncontrollably to his breast.
