by Neil M. Gunn
Then, for the third time, he walked out, but this time into his bedroom. He sat on his bed for a long time, profoundly moved, blinded. Against opposition and difficulty he could struggle dourly, unyieldingly, but against generosity he as yet knew no defence. Not that he thought of giving in. He did not think about it at all, for their quarrel was a small issue in face of this generous greatness that sat in the heart of his mother.
*
Sailing along the coast of one’s native land was a new way of reading its history, a detached way, so that instead of being embroiled in it, one looked on. The page, too, was large.
Here the castle itself, there the ruin, yonder the parish church, and everywhere the croft houses. Morven—the sailor’s landfall—was as clear in outline as the nipple of the Pap before it. The long, slow sweeps of the land rose and fell; one saw their beginning and their end, the ultimate horizon line of moor, the near gully that fell into the sea.
The other members of the crew were also caught into this pleasant detachment. The wind was holding, though Roddie looked now and then at the sky whose blue was too dark for his fancy. In his view, the morning sun had been over-brilliant; like the brilliance after frost, which is inclined to draw mist and fluky weather. But so far they could not have got a better day, the boat breaking through the short waves with enlivening speed, living up to her name by leaving foam in her wake.
This was what Catrine could not understand—this fellowship of men. Who would barter it for intrigue and miserliness and cruelty and law-suits and manses, all that is bred out of the urge for positions of importance? If people strove to be important like that, let them! But leave Finn with his own kind, where his heart grew warm. This was a profound, if wordless, impulse in him. Lairds and ministers were great persons in their own right, and he would shyly step off the road to avoid encountering them, if it could be done unnoticeably. But he did not envy them. He just wanted to have nothing to do with them, to avoid them, so that he could enter into the comradeship of his own folk.
“Ay, MacProcess they called him,” Rob was saying, referring to the previous minister of their parish, whose church they could now see, “because he was always having a legal process against someone. But the heritors were a bad lot. Poor fellow, he had to screw every penny out of them. Gordon of Swiney was at their head, and if ever a profligate got into bed … I’ll tell you a thing he did once to a lassie—look! that’s her house, with the peat-stack just showing …”
They listened to the forceful details with a smile. For the minor lairds could, on occasion, exercise a lurid authority over a defenceless tenantry. Though often enough, too, their more shocking ploys had a wild sanction rooted in the instincts that left a paralysis of wonder behind rather than laughter. The art of mean tyranny, exercised with a brutal lordliness.
Finn could enjoy the stories, but was glad to be outside their scope. Supposing he had been in the position of MacProcess, and had to beg money for his salary from a man like Gordon of Swiney, beg or go to law…. Finn knew he would never beg: he would walk out—or lay Swiney out! He would hate them, hate their jeering at religion, their roystering superiority….
“That’s why fellows like Sandy Ware and Peter Stewart are against the—the present state of affairs. No wonder the anointed themselves are often not much to speak of. They say there will be a split yet on it. I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Rob, “but——”
“It will have to split,” interrupted Henry, referring to the Church. “What has to depend on the cash of fellows like Swiney or the Black Doctor, that black dog …”
They chuckled. They were remote from iniquity, and the biggest landsmen grow small at a distance and their importance circumscribed and diminished. There was a taboo against naming ministers of the gospel at sea, and though circumlocutary talk could have its own dry humour, Roddie put an end to it by saying, “Well, boys, you can have a long look at your native parish, for here’s Clyth Head.”
It was a large parish, stretching to the high cliff of the Ord. Once they had chaffed Roddie for walking over the Ord to his boat in Helmsdale on a Monday morning. This was reckoned to be unlucky for him, because it was on a Monday morning that the Sinclairs had crossed the Ord for the battle of Flodden. Slowly Clyth Head closed on the parish of Latheron as Roddie fetched a more northerly course.
Off Sarclet the wind began to die away, and before they had opened out Wick the tide was against them and the sea calm. Mists smothered the horizon and a haze hung over the land. They pulled a slow, steady stroke on the four oars, but it was heavy work and it seemed a long time to Finn before they got Noss Head on their beam. When they did, they remained tied to it. Once or twice fitful airs of wind tempted Roddie to put up the mainsail, but they died out and the rowing went on.
It was beginning to look now as if they could not fetch Duncansby Head for slack water at the turn of the tide—the only safe time for risking the passage through the Pentland. Roddie was anxious to get through while the weather was good and took his turn at the oar. The whole coast here was exposed, and he could smell a sou’-easterly wind coming. The eyes could foresee it, too, by a raw darkness in the air. If they got the length of Scrabster, they would then be in a fine position to catch the first of the morning tide through the Firth, and with a fair wind they might fetch Stornoway that night. A sou’-easterly wind would suit them grand!
They were all inwardly excited now, though their faces showed little. For long spells no one spoke. They were adventuring into strange and dangerous seas and the haze put a great silence and brooding mysteriousness on sea and land. Finn at the tiller imagined he could feel the kick of Roddie’s oar, a discreet explosive kick before he eased up to bend forward again. Without looking directly at Roddie, he could see him, and he knew that what Mr. Gordon had once said of him was true: “He’s one of the old Vikings”. His hair was reddish-fair and cut close round the ears and back. The reddish tinge suffused his fair skin, too, in a warm blood-strength, faintly stippled with pin-head freckles. His eyes were blue, the hard blue of a winter sea, but seemed to vary a lot, though perhaps not so much in colour as in intensity. He was given to shaving—an unusual proceeding, for nearly all men let the hair on the face grow as it came, merely trimming it now and then with a pair of scissors. He had taught Finn to shave, and they were the only two in the boat with smooth faces. Roddie had, however, left his razor behind.
Finn felt the glow of excitement, a glow that brought him all alive to alertness and wonder and the fascination of danger. Through the haze loomed the shadowy darkness of a distant headland. “Duncansby Head—look!” he called.
“It’s a long way yet, boys,” answered Roddie. “I feel the tide easing under us. Give her all you can.”
“I thought I saw a boat—two boats!” cried Finn.
“It’s a long way,” said Roddie, his neck swelling under the pressure he was now putting on his oar. “If we could do it in an hour. After that it’s the mill-race. Whistle, Finn—but not too loud!”
Finn pursed his lips once or twice before he could get them to sound. And hardly had the sound died when a puff of wind fanned their faces.
“Wh-whistle again,” said Rob.
When Finn got his smiling lips straight, he whistled once more. A dark cat’s paw eddied after them. Then all at once there was a breeze.
They had the sails up in no time, and as they drew their shirts from their backs, they referred to Finn with head-shakes and mysterious nods, as to one in dark league with the elements.
But Roddie’s eyes were concentrated on the two boats, now quite visible, standing well out from Duncansby. This is what he had been hoping for, and he steered after them. He had known there would be boats making for Stornoway, and the easiest passage is that in the wake of a boat that knows the sea-road. But by the way he once looked steadily back over his shoulder, Finn could see he did not trust the wind.
As the tide turned, the wind fell away. Roddie put them on the oars, without lowering sail, for
there were no booms. The wind came again and died. They were making steady headway.
And so at last they opened out the Pentland Firth, the Pentland Skerries to starboard, and saw to the north, their great rock walls looming gigantic out of the haze, the Orkney Islands. They were in it now!
As the Seafoam was caught by the suction of the tide, Roddie lowered sail. The last he saw of the two boats they were disappearing round the north end of Stroma Island. “Take it easy, boys, and give it to her when I call on you.” He had been told that he could go inshore on the first of the tide, but he liked to have sea-room and, anyway, where other boats had disappeared, he could follow.
The first fright those on the oars got was when the boat suddenly spun half-round. Roddie gave a small smile. More than once it happened, and raised in the breast a helpless feeling of insecurity. Then when they seemed to be doing well and shooting ahead at a great rate, Roddie sharply called on the two starboard oars. He had the tiller hard over. His voice had such urgency that it exploded in their sinews. Minute—after minute—after minute. And then, “Good, boys! Good! You’re doing it!” sang his voice quietly in triumph.
They had left the suction and now saw the whirlpool well away from them. They had only touched its outer rim. They could see the tide behind them and to the left, running with short, piled-up waves like a mighty river in spate. A dull roar came to their ears. Here and there on the surface the water boiled in a whirling eddy, as it does in the tail-end of a water-fall pool. When an eddy came underneath, the Seafoam slid sideways on it, raising much the same feeling in their breasts as an earthquake tremor does in the breasts of landsmen. Roddie pushed the tiller from side to side, trying to counter the swinging head but with no effect, until the oars got way on again.
“Half an hour later and we might have been in the Wells of Swinna,” Roddie presently said, glancing over his right shoulder, the concentration that had sat in his eyes easing into an alert, smiling, questing look. They could see the island of Swinna (or Swena) on the other side, and Roddie’s reference to it was more a jocular reference to dangers overcome than any real belief that they might have been swept so far across the flood.
“If we had been caught in the Wells,” said Callum, who had pulled like a hero, “what do you think we would have thrown over?”
“It’s no joking matter,” said Rob.
“Who said it was?” asked Callum.
“What I told you is gospel truth. Why are they called the Wells? Man, I can see them now! See the foam rushing. Look!” cried Rob. “It’s the two whirlpools!”
After a short silence Roddie said, “I have heard of it more than once. If you are caught in the whirpool you throw a barrel or whatever you have over, and while the whirlpool is devouring that, it keeps quiet, and you slip across it.”
“Like giving a dog a bone,” said Henry.
“It would be a dog with no bottom to his belly, that one,” murmured Finn.
They all chuckled.
“Ah well, Rob, you can thank goodness your kist is safe whatever,” Callum added.
“Why would it have been my kist?” asked Rob.
“Because it’s the biggest,” said Callum.
“It’s a great lump of a rock, that,” Henry now said, following Roddie’s eyes.
“It must be Dunnet Head,” replied Roddie, “but we’ll know when we get round it, because we should then see Thurso.”
Finn was enlivened by his own remark, and so felt more than ever how splendid it was to be adventuring in this wild world of islands and rocks and headlands and dangerous seas. The Orkneys were like a fabulous tale he had heard of in some remote time.
Yes, there was Thurso—Thor’s town, as Mr. Gordon called it—with the houses by the beach and up the left bank of the river, and, over on the other side, the tower of the castle.
Roddie kept staring at the land, and after a while said, pointing with his left hand, “Yonder is Scrabster.”
A couple of miles or so beyond Thurso they saw it sheltering in its curve of green braes.
“Well, boys,” asked Roddie, “what’s it to be? We’ve had a long, heavy day.”
No-one spoke.
“It’s whatever you say, Skipper, but I’m fresh enough and the evening is long,” remarked Callum cheerfully.
“There’s just this about it,” said Roddie. “We’re going to get some weather, and it would be fine to be a little farther west. Even the Kyle of Tongue, if we couldn’t make Loch Eriboll. You can feel the wind, now we’re out of the shelter of the Head. What do you say, Finn?”
“Loch Eriboll for me,” answered Finn, “and I could whistle if you like.”
“The only bit of me that’s complaining,” said Rob, “is my behind. There’s a knot in the wood here …”
With both sails up and a wind that was gusty rather than steady, they slipped down the first at a spanking pace.
Henry filled a tin skillet from the small water-cask and they slaked their thirst. They had oaten and bere bannocks, milk and butter and cheese, and part of a haunch of salt beef in a firkin. After their long hours on the heavy sweeps, their bodies enjoyed the luxury of ease, and as they munched they stared at the land with friendly eyes. The sky was darkening, the wind freshening, and now and then a spit of rain hit their faces.
“Boys, we’re fairly shifting,” said Rob.
“We’ll be in the China trade next,” said Finn.
They chuckled away as they ate, casting amused glances at the young fellow.
“The China trade!” repeated Rob in his droll, solemn way, shaking his head. A speck of dry bread went down the wrong tube and he started coughing. Callum hit him a great whack between the shoulders.
“What’s the d-damn sense in hitting a fellow like that?”
“It cured you, though,” said Callum.
As they rounded Strathy Point, Roddie stood into the land a little. By the time they were approaching Roan Island off Tongue Bay they could see it was setting in for a dirty night. But again they held on, for the fine seaway they were making was exhilarating, and now it was going to be a final race with the falling night.
“It will be dark early,” said Henry, with a look at the low, ravelled sky.
“It will,” said Roddie, without any movement. He sat upright, his eyes ahead, drawn in on himself, solid and emotionless. As if impelled by something in this carven attitude, Finn looked ahead, too, and again had the impression that the peak of the stem, in a dream of its own, was searching out the far distance with invisible eyes. All at once, he remembered the school-book illustration of the Viking longship, with its high carven head, and in that moment realized with a queer thrill of clear certainty the impulse that in the beginning moved those great wanderers of the sea to carve the lifting stem into a face.
Not a human face, but a boat’s face, for Finn felt how heedless the boat was of them in its concentrated onward drive.
As the Kyle of Tongue, with its islands and broken shoreline, its invitation to shelter beneath a glimpse of great mountains, fell behind them and the coast rose up into cliffs, the crew buttoned their heaviest clothes about them silently, for it was getting cold.
Soon the cliff wall reared to a great height and seemed to stretch before them into utmost night. Out to sea the leaden waves, running short, were white-capped and the smother of the horizon drew near. Under the shelter of the cliff-wall the deep water was smooth and black. Roddie kept far enough out for a steady wind, though sometimes it struck him in gusts, from the funneling of hill and cliff.
No one spoke. They could hear the gulls wailing in the cliffs. If the wind had been from an opposite direction what a smashing of seas would have been here! Finn would have liked to ask Roddie how far yet he thought Loch Eriboll was, but he could not. To ask any question would be something worse than futile now. Thus for the first time he got the feeling of the fatalism of the sea. They were committed.
And even when at last that great wall turned and fell inland, they all, by a
natural instinct, waited for the skipper to speak. But Roddie was silent. His eyes shifting from feature to feature of the land, until he had fully opened the great sea inlet, when he said, “Yes, it’s Loch Eriboll.”
They all came alive, yet did not speak very much, for now started the exciting quest, that often grows tense, of finding an anchorage in an unknown place where shoal or submerged rock may at any moment hold the keel to disaster.
When they had sailed for some four miles, they discerned a little bay in front of a river mouth. “It looks a likely enough place,” suggested Callum. The night was closing in now and visibility was poor. The rain was not heavy but it was penetrating and cold. An ugly raw night.
But Roddie, after a slow look around, said, “I think we should go farther in. If the wind changed we’d be open here to the full sea from the nor’ard.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Callum nodded.
So in they sailed between the land until they saw what looked like a small headland or island on their windward or port side. With canvas down, they finally nosed in on the oars, and in three fathoms of water Roddie let the anchor go.
It was the first strange landfall that any of them had ever made, and in the dark and the rain and the flurrying swish of the wind they felt relieved and quietly companionable.
The boat was open from stem to stern, without shelter or berth, but when they had eaten, they did what they could with the help of the sails and the soft bulk of the nets to get into a comfortable position for rest. Finn snuggled down, packed his hip bone, lifted the edge of the sail for breath, and prepared for sleep. But though he felt very tired, he was not sleepy. He was now more than ever pleased at having said things which had made the others laugh. His old shy self had opened, and to his surprise up the words had come. That one about the China trade. You could see it troubling Rob’s eyebrows for some time! The rain pattered on the stiff canvas over his ear. How fine it was to be voyaging! A soft warmth from fatigue suffused his whole body; and on a last consciousness of the cradling motion of the boat, he fell asleep. Once he awoke in the thin light of the morning and, poking his head out, saw the humped forms of the other sleepers, the brown heath, the flanks of the barren peat land, the water, and the boat’s stem. It was still wet and blowing, and he pulled his head in. After that he felt sure he did not sleep, but only dozed, with long waking thoughts in which figures moved.
