The King and the Lamp

by Duncan Williamson

  ‘Well,’ John says, ‘I’m sure the spare room is never used very much by you and me, and if the young man is needing a room for a few weeks I don’t see any harm in letting him have it.’

  ‘By the way,’ the old woman says, ‘what is your name?’

  ‘My name is Iain,’ ‘he said, and I’m an artist. I’ve come to do some landscape painting and I would be very much obliged if you would let me have the room for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Fine,’ the old man says.

  She said, ‘Would you like some supper?’

  So the old woman told him how much she needed for the room, and the young man was quite pleased at what he had to pay, and she said, ‘You can have your meals with us if you feel like it.’

  ‘That’ll do nicely,’ the young man said. ‘That’ll just suit me fine. I won’t be any trouble to you.’

  But he never as much as glanced at the seal sitting in the basket by the fire! He never paid any attention to the seal; he just treated it as if it didn’t exist. And the old woman thought this very queer. So while he was sitting down at the table having some supper with them the old woman looked at him, at the young man, and she thought she’d seen him some place before. When she looked at his eyes she thought she’d seen those eyes somewhere before. But she raiked her brains to think – who had she seen that he was like? He was like somebody she had seen before, but she couldn’t remember. Anyway, with talking to him and the old man, the thought of his resemblance went out of her mind.

  But the old man, old John, he and the young man got to talking and cracking, and they just made it off together like two peas. The old man started explaining to the young man, to young Iain, about his nets getting torn with the seals and how his fish were destroyed, how this affected his living and he’s wishing that something would be done to get rid of the seals round the bay so’s he could do more fishing.

  And old Mary said, ‘You’re always getting down upon the poor seals. I’m sure they must have their time, too, they must live just the same as everybody else. But anyway,’ the old woman says, ‘come and I’ll show you your room!’

  So she took the young man upstairs and showed him the room. He thanked her very much. ‘That’s very nice; that’ll just suit me fine.’ But she noticed all he had was one small package under his arm. He didn’t have any cases or anything … one package under his arm.

  So they walked out on the landing and the young man said, ‘I’ll be bidding you both good-night.’ She went down the stairs and they heard him shutting the door. Then all was quiet.

  Now, while the young man was in the bedroom, the seal got up out of the basket and started going ‘honk-honk-honk’ round the floor. The old man says, ‘What’s wrong with that animal?’

  ‘Och, he’s a wee bit excited tonight,’ she said. And the old woman sat and petted him, ‘You’re getting excited; I never saw you like that before.’ But she managed to calm the seal and got him quietened. She and old John talked for a while and then went off to their bed.

  The next morning they were at breakfast when the young man came down the stairs. He said to old John, ‘You wouldn’t mind if I were to go out with you, maybe sometime when you’re – when I’m not painting – if it’s too dull for painting, to watch you fishing?’

  ‘O-oh, no,’ he said, ‘Iain, I’d be only too glad to have you along for company! In fact, did you ever row a boat before?’

  ‘Well,’ Iain said, ‘I’ve never rowed a boat before, but I know how it’s done. I believe I could learn quick enough.’

  So, after breakfast the old man took him down; he showed him the boat and some of the spare nets he had hung up on the sticks along the beach to dry. And he showed him all the holes that the seals had caused and some of the carcasses of fish he had thrown away that the seals had left. But the young man never said a thing.

  He stayed there for a week. He had his meals in the house and he walked away every morning; some days he was away all day and sometimes he came back late at night.

  But one night the old man said, ‘You know, Iain, tomorrow I’m going to shift my nets farther round the beach to a place I’ve never fished or set a net before. And I wonder if you would come and give me a wee help?’

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ he said, ‘I’d be willing to help you. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be doing very much tomorrow, so I’ll go with you, if you want me to.’

  ‘I would like that very much,’ the old man said.

  To make a long story short, the next day after breakfast he said ‘good-bye’ to the old woman – Iain treated the old woman casually, just casually. But he loved old John, he loved the old man. He would do anything and go anywhere with the old man, and the old man was the same way with him: at night-time when the youngman was in his room the old man used to sit and talk to the old woman, ‘My, such a nice young man, that! I wish we had a son like him. What a young, strong powerful man. And you want to see him rowing a boat!’ The good things he would say about this young man to the old woman!

  That morning he and the oldman got ready to go away in the boat. He put a net in the back and they rowed away out, farther than John had ever been before, out in the bay.

  The old man looks up, ‘I hope it doesn’t come rain, or wind.’ And it got kind of dark.

  The young man says, ‘Maybe it’s a storm going to blow up.’

  The old man said, ‘I hope not, because I don’t want to have to come back out here tomorrow in rough weather.’ But no sooner were the words out of the old man’s mouth than it started to rain, then the wind got up. And it came a storm!

  They were a good mile and a half away from the beach. The net was out. And it got so rough they could barely make their way back. So the old man said to the young man, ‘You take one oar and I’ll take the other and we’ll row as fast as we can!’ They rowed hard against the waves, but the waves got too rough and they were battling against the heavy waves when the boat overturned. The old man fell into the sea. And the young man fell into the sea.

  He was shouting, ‘Iain, Iain! This way, Iain, this way, Iain. Grab an oar, Iain, and try to keep yourself afloat, grab an oar and try to keep yourself afloat!’ The old man got hold of one of the wooden oars and he got it under his arm; he was swimming with one hand. But he looked all around for Iain … Iain was gone.

  And he swam on; he could see the land in the distance. He swam on and on till he was getting fairly exhuasted – he knew he was never going to make it – he lost the grip on the oar and was just about sinking into the water when he felt this thing coming up under him. He put his hands out. He thought it was a bit of floating stick – and he felt – it was a big furry seal! It came right up under him and he put his two arms round its neck and away the seal went as fast as it could go. Right to the beach, and the old man’s clinging on to the seal, fairly exhausted, clinging on to the seal.

  So it swam right in, on to the beach till it couldn’t go any farther with the weight of the old man, and the old man sprachled on his hands and knees and crawled up on to the shingle on the shore where he flung himself down completely exhausted. The seal turned and went away.

  By now the old woman’s out, waiting and waiting and walking up and down the beach, looking to see, spying away out, looking to see if she could see the boat. But she couldn’t see any boat. She never noticed the old man was lying on his fours on the shingle on the tidemark with his feet in the water. After she walked along the beach a ways, though, she saw him. She pulled him up and asked him what happened. Oh, he was in a terrible state!

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Iain is gone. The storm caught us and the boat capsized and Iain is gone. We’ll never see him again, he’s gone!’

  So the old woman oxtered him up to the house and made him take off his wet clothes and she put a blanket round him, put him sitting in the chair and gave him a drink of whisky. But all she could get out of his mouth was ‘Iain is gone; we’ll never see Iain again.’ Finally, the old woman got him kind of settled down. She asked him
what happened.

  He told her the tale … ‘I was finished, I was exhausted, completely gone – only for a seal.’

  She said, ‘A seal!’

  He said, ‘A seal,’ he said, ‘saved my life!’

  ‘How did it save your life?’

  He said, ‘It came up below me and I put my arms round it – and would you believe it, Mary,’ he said, ‘after all the things that I’ve said about these animals – it saved my life!’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s good that it did you a good turn; maybe now you’ll change your mind about seals.’

  He said, ‘You know, from now on I’ll never say another angry word against a seal, because it’s thanks to the seal my life’s been saved, been spared!’

  After a while they went to bed. But the old man couldn’t rest, he tossed and turned all night. ‘Tomorrow morning, Mary,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to go down to the village and notify the policeman, tell him what happened to the young man.’

  So, true to his word, the next morning the old man went down to the local police station in the wee village and reported the young man to the policeman – one constable that stayed in the wee village. John walked over to the hotel and asked them in the hotel if Iain had been staying there. And nobody – there were only about a dozen houses in the village and the one hotel – nobody had ever heard tell of the young man! Nobody had ever seen him! He had never come to the village the whole time he’d been with John and Mary. Nobody ever saw him coming, nobody ever saw him going, nobody ever sent him up to the old man and woman in the first place! It was a complete mystery: nobody knew him.

  So the old man walked home and he told the old woman. She says, ‘Somebody must have seen him somewhere about the village when he came here first!’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘nobody saw him at all. It’s a sheer mystery.’

  Anyway, by the time the old man had got back and had sat down for a cup of tea, the policeman had arrived with his bicycle to have a talk to the old woman and the old man about this missing young man. So the old man explained to him what happened … they went out in the boat and the boat capsized and he swam to shore – but he never mentioned the seal, about the seal saving his life, to the policeman, never mentioned it.

  Well, the policeman took all the particulars he could. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘how long had he been here?’

  ‘Well,’ the old man said, ‘he’d been here, he was with us for about ten days … such a nice boy, too, such a beautiful, a handsome young man. We got on so well together, he was just like a son to me. And I’m going to miss him terribly.’

  The policeman looked – the seal was sitting in the basket. ‘My, Mary,’ he said, ‘your seal is fairly growing!’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘it’s fairly growing; he’s getting a wee bit too big. It’s about time he was going back to the sea.’

  So, the policeman asked, ‘Did he have any identification or anything about him – where did Iain stay?’

  She said, ‘He stayed up in the bedroom, the spare room up the stairs,’ she said.

  ‘Well, you don’t mind,’ the policeman said, ‘if I go up and see, have a look through his papers and things? Maybe I’ll get the address of his parents or his family or something. Then we’ll know where he came from, for a report to his people that he’s a-missing.’

  ‘All right,’ say the old man and woman.

  So the old man and the woman and the policeman walked up the stairs, the old woman opened the bedroom door. And they walked in. They looked around – the bed was made the same way as the old woman had made it when she made it the first time – it never was slept on. There were no cases, there were no parcels, there was nothing! In the room – not one single thing – except over in the far corner next to the window was a picture-frame, a canvas picture framed. The back of it was turned to the old man and the old woman, the front facing the window. And the old man walked over.

  He says, ‘This is what he’s been working on the whole time.’ And he turned it round, he looked at it and stepped back – the old man gasped.

  The policeman said, ‘What is it, John?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s this picture… would you come here and see this, Mary?’

  ‘What is it?’ she said, ‘What is, what has he been drawing? He said he was an artist.’

  ‘Yes, he’s an artist; he was an artist,’ he said, ‘poor boy, he was an artist all right, and a good one, too!’

  They turned the picture round: there was the most beautiful picture you’d ever seen in your life. The picture of an old woman gathering dulse on the shore – old Mary the way she was, exactly as if you were looking at the old woman herself, picking up a baby seal from among the dulse – was the picture Iain had made. And the policeman was amazed but old Mary never said a word.

  John said, ‘Mary, how did he manage to paint that?’

  ‘Och,’ she said, ‘I told him the story, he probably painted it from memory.’

  So the policeman says, ‘Well, there’s little we can do about it.’

  But time passed by and there never was another word about the man, young Iain’s body never was found. About a week after that, the old man and woman carried the seal down to the shore, put it back in the tide and away the seal went. But there never was another word about Iain, and the old man never complained about seals. And whenever the old woman went down to gather her seaweed along the shore, she would look out and see the seals in the bay floating about; she would give a wee smile to herself and say, ‘Well, Iain, you’ve finally proved your point!’ She knew he’d been a selkie.1

  1 That was a selkie that came to teach the old man a lesson for being so bad to the seals and cursing their life away. It was a story kept in his family and ours. The island folk believed in these things, and, after all, there must be something in it.

  Neil McCallum, the old stonemason I was apprenticed to when I was fifteen at Auchindrain, told me this story and he believed that this really happened. It was a story kept in his family and ours. The Highlanders were a very close-knitted kind of folk and didn’t go telling the whole world about their stories and tales and cracks because people would have thought they were crazy. But Neil maintained that his great-great granny told him this story, ‘the old woman and the seal’, because she had the picture in her house.

  Mary and the Seal

  This is a Gaelic tale from the Western Isles. It was told to me when I was only about fifteen years of age, doing the stone-dyking in Argyll at Auchindrain with Neil McCallum. He was from crofting stock; he was a crofter, his brother was a crofter. And, just to sit there listening … I can still hear his voice in my ears; you know, his voice is still there after, maybe, nearly forty years. And every little detail is imprinted in my memory. And when I tell you the story, I try to get as close as possible to the way that he spoke to me. Do you understand what I mean?

  MANY years ago in a little isle off the West Coast of Scotland – it could be Mull, Tiree, or any island – there lived an old fisherman and his wife. And the old fisherman spent his entire life fishing in the sea and selling whatever fish he couldn’t use himself to keep him and his wife and his little daughter alive. They lived in this little cottage by the sea and not far from where they stayed was the village, a very small village – a post office, a hall and some cottages. But everyone knew everyone else. And his cousin also had a house in the village.

  This old man and woman had a daughter called Mary and they loved her dearly, she was such a nice child. She helped her father with the fishing and when she was finished helping her father, she always came and helped her mother to do housework and everything else. The father used to set his nets every day in the sea and he used to rise early every morning. Mary used to get up and help her father lift his nets and collect the fish. After that was done she used to help her mother, then went off to school. Everybody was happy for Mary. And her father and mother were so proud of her because she was such a good worker. But she was such a quiet and
tender little girl and didn’t pay attention to anyone … she did her schoolwork in school. But the years passed by and Mary grew till she became a young teenager. This is where the story really begins, when Mary was about sixteen or seventeen.

  She always used to borrow her father’s boat, every evening in the summer-time, and go for a sail to a little island that lay about half a mile from where they stayed, a small island out in the middle of the sea-loch. And Mary used to go out and spend all her spare time on the island. Every time she’d finished her day’s work with her father and helped her mother and had her supper, she would say, ‘Father, can I borrow your boat? Even in the winter-time sometimes, when the sea wasn’t too rough, she would go out there and spend her time. Her father and mother never paid any attention because Mary’s spare time was her own time; when her work was finished she could do what she liked. Till one day.

  Her mother used to walk down to the small village to the post office where they bought their small quantity of messages and did their shopping, it was the only place they could buy any supplies. She heard two old women nattering to each other. Mary’s mother’s back was turned at the time but she overheard the two old women. They were busy talking about Mary.

  ‘Och,’ one woman said, ‘she’s such a nice girl, but she’s so quiet. She doesn’t come to any of the dances and she doesn’t even have a boyfriend. She doesn’t do anything – we have our ceilidhs and we have our things and we never see her come, she never even pays us a visit. Such a nice quiet girl, all she wants to do, she tells me, is to take her boat over to the island spend all her time there on the island. Never even comes and has a wee timey – when our children have their shows and activities in school – she never puts in an appearance! And her mother and father are such decent people … even her Uncle Lachy gets upset!’

  This was the first time her mother had heard these whispers so she paid little attention. She came home, and she was a wee bit upset. And the next time she went back to the village she heard the same whispers again – this began to get into her mind, she began to think. But otherwise Mary was just a natural girl: she helped her daddy and she asked her mummy if there was anything she could do, helped her to do everything in the house, and she was natural in every way. But she kept herself to herself.