The Silver Darlings

by Neil M. Gunn

More than half the net was in and Torquil glittered with scales in the rising sun, when Ian said, “She’s coming very close.”

  She crossed their bow at a cable length, and then, slowly running up into the wind until her great sails shook, she came to a standstill so close that they could see the men moving about her decks.

  Fear touched them once more, because they had learned that everything that spoke of power and wealth had to be feared.

  “Pay no attention,” muttered Tormad. “The sea at least is free.”

  A voice as loud as a horn called to them, but they were not sure of the words, for what English they had was strange to them even in their own mouths. So they doggedly hauled away at the net.

  “There’s a boat coming,” said Ian.

  “Let it come,” said Tormad, giving it a quick glance.

  Four oars rose and fell smartly and the ship’s boat drew abreast. Two men sat in the stern, with long-nosed pistols. One man, standing, asked them in a loud voice if they heard the ship’s hail.

  “Careful, Torquil,” said Tormad softly. “Don’t lose the darlings.”

  Then the man with the loud voice expressed his anger in a terse oath which the four lads didn’t understand, though they gathered its intent. But they did not look at the man; they looked at the net whose back-rope Tormad contrived to haul steadily.

  Whereupon in the King’s name the man commanded them to drop the net and come alongside His Majesty’s ship of war and present themselves to the commander, and if they didn’t do this quietly and at once, things would happen to them of a bloody and astonishing nature.

  “There’s three crans in this net,” said Tormad to Ronnie, “if there’s a herring.”

  An order was whipped out. Smartly the visiting boat closed on Tormad’s bow and in no time a stout rope was passed through the ring-bolt in the stem. “Give way!” The four oars dug in, rose and dug in…. But Tormad, on the back-rope, held both boats stationary. “Let go there!” shouted the voice in stentorian wrath.

  Tormad, his face swelling with blood and anger, looked over his shoulder. “Let go yourself!” he cried in his best English.

  “Ease away!” As they stood down on the fishing-boat, the two near oars were smartly shipped and direct contact was made by Tormad’s feet. The man who was giving orders held a cutlass. He raised it above his head with intent to sever the back-rope of the net. Tormad dropped the rope and in a twinkling whipped his right fist to the jaw with such force that the man overbalanced against his own gunnel and went head first into the sea. With the lunge of the blow, Tormad’s boat had gone from under his feet and he, too, would have pitched into the sea if he had not grasped the gunnel of the other boat. In this straddled, helpless position, a pistol-stock hit him on the head with so solid a crack that the sound of it touched Torquil’s stomach.

  Tormad was pulled into the ship’s boat like a sack. From the sea they hauled a gasping, hawking, purple-faced man who doubled over his own knees in a writhing effort at vomit. In his surprise he had taken the water down both channels. Presently he lifted his head and glared with mouth askew and made the men jump with an ordering sweep of his fist.

  But Torquil now had hold of the back-rope.

  There was to be no more nonsense, however. When the pistol-point had no power over Torquil, a swipe from it numbed his arms so that he could not even hit the man who, grabbing him by the neck, thrust him against both gunnels, which were grappled.

  Ronnie and Ian immediately tried to haul him away, and there was a scuffle in which both of them were belaboured and finally forced back. Threatened by pistol and steel, they were ordered to throw their net overboard; but the voice of authority behind croaked, “Heave the bloody thing over yourselves!”

  Two men remained guard over Ronnie and Ian as their boat was taken in tow.

  Alongside the sloop, a rope was passed under Tormad’s arms and he was hauled upward, hands dangling, head lolling, with dark blood running down past one ear and under the chin. Torquil was made to climb the rope-ladder, then Ronnie, then Ian.

  The commander of the sloop looked over the rail. “Take all the fish and cast her off.”

  The little incident had provided an amusing diversion for the ship’s company. Tormad’s senseless body was regarded here and there with a wink and a smile of private satisfaction. He hadn’t done badly, he hadn’t. The leader of the press-gang was not a favourite.

  Men jumped to their stations. The bows fell off. The great area of canvas above a fixed bowsprit stayed to the masthead, took the light morning breeze. The boom of the mainsail clacked over. The square topsail was set, and the royal sloop, white ensign over her stern, set a southerly course.

  The long suave lines of the hills by Kildonan caught a mist of rose as the sun came up. The little cabins were still as sleep in the chill of the silver morning. The sea glittered from Berridale Head to Loth, vacant in all that space save for one small derelict boat.

  CHAPTER II

  HOW THE NEWS AFFECTED CATRINE

  There was great excitement in Helmsdale that day. Most of the small fishing fleet beached on the coast south of the harbour as far as Portgower, their crews taking at once to the hills. The three boats from the south side of the Firth that made the harbour, even though each possessed a “permant” (a costly certificate exempting them from the attentions of the press-gang), tied up in haste, their crews leaping ashore, waking folk up and spreading the news. It was better to be sure than sorry in a matter of this kind. Hurry and scurry, with men of all ages, from boys to grey-beards, taking to the glen and the hills, and women running back and fore like a disturbed beehive. They knew what the press-gang could do. Three years ago, in broad daylight, a party had landed, armed to the teeth, and had impressed several men before the simple folk of the hamlet were aware of what was really happening.

  They were not so innocent now. And though those in the settlement of Dale had heard the story, the picture left in their minds was that of armed men, marching on land; men raiding the home and taking whom they wanted. It had not occurred to fellows like Tormad and Ronnie that they might be impressed at sea.

  The press-gang was, of course, a legal institution, and throughout past centuries had often been the chief instrument of recruitment for the Navy. A fisherman who had not bought himself out—a privilege allowed only in latter years—could be taken by force without redress, and often that force had been exercised with guile and brutality. In the nature of things, it could hardly be a gentle business.

  From the hill-tops men watched the royal cruiser for nearly five hours, until her sails sank below the land behind Tarbat Ness, and then some boys volunteered to keep watch until the darkening. Men returned to their homes, and a crew put off to pick up Tormad’s boat.

  Evidence of the struggle in the boat was clear in the remains of herring trodden to pulp. One man pointed to bloodstains on the gunnel. The four faces grew hard, and eyes, casting about the sea, saw the buoy. The net told its story very clearly, for part of it, in a lump, held dead herring, but the end near the big buoy came up with some living fish.

  Few words were spoken as if the men were assisting at a funeral, but one black-bearded man, his eyes on Tormad’s boat as she followed dumbly on the tow-rope, said with searing pity, “It’s a pure sin.”

  The bringing in of the boat made a deep impression on those gathered at the harbour. By an odd chance, Tormad had struck the herring shoal, and this luck gave to their old tarred craft, with its profusion of scales and solitary net, an air inexpressibly empty and tragic. The absence of the living bodies could be felt, as if their dark shadows still haunted the boat.

  What fun and happy sarcasm there would have been had they come in in the ordinary course, with a curer solemnly offering to engage them, complete with net! But now the three curers were grim as the rest. They had no right, one of them said, to take all the men. They should have left at least one man to navigate the vessel to port. It had been high-handed action and against the law in
that respect at least, and he would see about it. He would write the Navy Board. He would write to Dunrobin Castle. But old Murray, the best of the fishermen, shook his head. He had belief neither in the Castle nor the Navy Board, and his experience in such matters was longer and more eventful than that of any other of the group at the corner of the store, for he came of a Kildonan family, though he lived now, with many of his compatriots, in Macduff. “I know Tormad,” he said. “If he hit one of the press-gang he hit him hard. It won’t be easy for these lads for many a day. You can’t attack authority in this life and get off with it. It’s sometimes difficult enough to live itself and get off with it.”

  Then the Dale men came over. Tormad’s father went to Murray and asked him about the meaning of what had happened in a quiet voice. No anger, no bluster; a nod now and then, and the eyes staring away through grey screens. What he wanted to know was how long they would keep him. “It’s difficult to say,” Murray answered. “But it’ll be a year or two anyway, I’m feared—unless he might not suit.” Murray did not know what to say. “Will it be five years, do you think? I have heard that.” “It might. A lot depends.” “What is the longest time you have known of anyone?” “Oh, I have known men nearly twenty years in it, but they came out at the end well and strong and with a pension. Some men like it. It agrees with them. It has got that side to it. There’s no need to worry in that way. Many men on the south side have joined the Navy of their own free will….” “Twenty years,” repeated Tormad’s father, looking beyond his own death. “Ah, well,” he added quietly, “I’ll be getting back. It’s hard on them at home. He has a young wife.” Then he thanked Murray and departed.

  Some of the women-folk appeared at a friend’s house. No-one could speak of anything else. All over the coast the news was known long before the day ended. No boats went to sea, less for fear of a return visit from the warship than in communal acknowledgement of the dread visitation.

  But the following evening all the boats went to sea and were fairly well fished. Coopers, gutters, and packers were busy as they liked to be, and life went on in this new exciting game of catching prosperity as it swam past.

  In Dale, however, the gloom did not lift. It settled deep. There was to be no end, it seemed, to destruction and loss. For some inscrutable reason the affairs of this world were so arranged that there could be no relief now for the old, perhaps no relief for all of them, except in death. Whatever was pursuing them, it was after them with bare teeth. Death would be a sleep and a forgetting, and beyond it, in God’s providence, there might be a happy quiet, a pleasant peace. Peace and quiet, and the mind relieved of what gnawed at it.

  There was an old way of life behind them that had produced in the centuries proverbial sayings and rhythms of poetry and music. But this did not help many of them now-for when despair found its ultimate rhythm, the eyes in, clined to stare and the hands to fall.

  *

  Catrine had not gone to bed until midnight. Her action over this time was strangely without any reason. It began with a dream she had three nights before. This dream had nothing to do with the sea, though it had to do with water. The scene of the dream was by the banks of a burn that ran into the Helmsdale River, not far from the Church of Kildonan. She had passed the ancient cross cut on the rock and the wood that in her own tongue was known as “The Wood of the Cell of Mary”, and then she had come on Tormad standing between two birch trees above where the burn falls over a rock into the haunted pool. This was not her own home area so that each little place with its name and legend produced a vivid pause in the imagination. The pool was said to be haunted by the spirit of a young woman who had been deserted by her lover and had died of a broken heart. At certain times—under the waning moon, for example—her voice could be heard moaning or rising out of the harsh throat of the pool in curses upon her faithless lover. In parts here the banks are high, with broken rocks and overhanging rowan trees, and altogether the scene on an early September day of bright sunlight was wild and beautiful. In her dream she saw Tormad’s face as she had seen it that first time, but with so much deeper a penetration that she was aware, as she walked along laughing and excited, neither looking at the other, of every movement, shy or exaggerated, of his body as the clearest expression of the disturbance in his mind. Again her two girl companions must have been with her, for she was conscious of their presence, though actually she did not see them in her dream. Suddenly, then, Tormad and herself were above the haunted pool, and now they were alone, with the pool below them no longer a boiling pot but a calm sheet of water like a loch, a loch that somehow in a moment stretched away from their feet. This was all perfectly natural, as if they knew the place well. But while they stood there, the emotion that held her mind in exquisite expectancy was touched by a thrill of fear and she looked over her right shoulder at a wood a little way off. In this wood, the tallest trees were rowans, heavy with clustered berries of a menacing blood-red, the clusters leaning slightly towards them, as watching faces might lean. As she looked, out of the wood came a black horse, and at once fear got such a hold of her that she gave a sharp cry and clutched Tormad’s arm.

  When Tormad saw the horse, he smiled. “That’s my horse,” he said. He was amused at her fear and a little proud of his horse, for it was a finer beast than anyone could hope to see in the valley of Kildonan, with a gloss on its skin and a powerful arch to its neck. As the horse approached, sinking its head and lifting it in a strong graceful way, her fear increased to terror. Tormad soothed her a little but not very much, because he was still amused. “You must have a ride on my horse,” he said. At that her terror got such a hold on her that she gripped Tormad with both hands and buried her face against him in a frenzy. He loosened her hands and looked at her in a strange smiling way as if his mind were now remote from her a little and critical. This look, though in no way unfriendly, left her stricken, unable to move a muscle. Then Tormad turned to the horse, caressed its shoulder lightly with his open hand, and, in a mutual understanding where Catrine was an intruder, leapt lightly on to its back. As the horse pranced and curvetted some yards towards the wood, Tormad looked down on her with the same smile. Then he turned his head away, and at that moment, as though checked by an invisible rein, the horse reared up, swung round, and, forelegs coming down in a thud, galloped straight into the loch. At first the water was lashed to froth, but quickly they were in deep water, where the horse sank out of sight, taking Tormad with it. Tormad slid beneath the surface, leaning back without making any movement, and in an instant the loch was smooth.

  She so clutched the Tormad who was sleeping by her side that he muttered, “What’s the matter?” She began to tell him her dream in a terrible urgency. He made one or two vague hushing sounds and patted her. “Yes, yes, go to sleep.” And then again, with protest, “Go to sleep now,” his breath thick. Between each sound he made he fell asleep, and in the morning remembered nothing about it.

  And in the morning she did not care to tell him. For though, in her dream, her experience had had a reality vivid beyond anything she had ever known, in the daylight it was, after all, no more than a dream—with all the blessed relief there was in that. Usually any dream she might have vanished shortly after waking, but this one remained complete in every detail. She could even remember—though without being able quite to re-experience it—the vivid compelling quality it had had, the quality of being absolute and inexorable. She wanted to tell Tormad the whole dream in detail, but found she could not. The same reluctance kept her from even mentioning it to anyone else. And she tried to make herself believe that this reluctance sprang from the superstitious folly of the dream itself. For the black horse was no other than, of course, the water kelpie of legend, the supernatural water-horse that lured unsuspecting humans on to its back in order to rush with them to its lair at the bottom of the loch. Only a few old women still believed the water kelpie existed, and even they were mysterious about it rather than frank, though the old stories repeated round the peat fi
re at night could make the hair rise on a young head.

  All the same, this dream remained with her, and probably it was the strongest element behind her fierce irrational clinging to him before he had left their home to go to sea in his black boat. All that evening she had kept going out and in, looking at the boat which was little more than a black speck on the sea, until at last she lost it in the gathering dark. She did not go to bed until midnight, sitting in the lonely house by herself, for she would have no-one to stay with her. When the silence got too oppressive, she put her head round the partition and spoke to the cow, a friendly old beast that mooed back at her.

  This was the first night she had ever been alone in a house, and she became so sensitive to its silence that she heard far-away sounds. Then she took herself in hand and said that this was nonsense, that she was no longer a girl but a grown woman with a child to be born in the new year. She had thought of leaving the fire burning, but now she smoored it as usual, covering the red embers with grey ash so that they would be alive in the morning. She was suddenly very tired, as if some great virtue had been drained out of her, and when she got to bed she fell into a profound sleep.

  She awoke with a start, with the awful fear that she was late for—she did not know what. The morning light came in through the tiny window on the edge of the thatch and down through the smoke-hole in the thatched roof. She dressed quickly, combing back her hair with her fingers as she went out at the door. At once her eyes picked up the little black speck, though it had moved some way from where it had been last night. The humped cottages of Dale were all asleep. Everywhere were quietness and peace on a lovely summer morning. But the other boats—where were the other boats? She could not find them. Away, far, far off, she could see a slim thing, straight as a finger, stuck on the sea, but could not recognize it as a full-sailed vessel. If the other boats had come home, why hadn’t Tormad? What was he staying out there for so long? Had he not got fish and did he not like to come home?