The Silver Darlings

by Neil M. Gunn

  “No, I must go home to-morrow,” replied Finn.

  “Nonsense,” said Isebeal. “You know you haven’t to go.”

  “I said I would.”

  “You didn’t. You said you might. And your mother said to you that if you didn’t come she wouldn’t be expecting you.”

  “How did you know?” asked Finn. And they all laughed.

  Out in the dark, beyond the door, the drover put a finger on Finn’s breast. “You gave me a vision—of the youth of Finn MacCoul himself.” And finger and man withdrew into the night.

  *

  The next morning Ronnie called for Finn. “I was sorry I missed you last night,” he said. Finn liked his quiet manner, and thin, distinguished face. Close-cut grey hair over the ears, a red scar below the bone of the right cheek, and grey eyes that seemed washed. He had a very slight stoop of the shoulders and his body was thin. All in a moment Finn felt that this man had something not to tell him but to give him. It was a curious feeling, and made him at once eager and shy.

  When Ronnie suggested that they might take a long walk up the strath of Kildonan, unless Finn had something special to do, Finn answered readily that he had nothing to do and would be glad to go. So they set off, and when Ronnie said, “Your father was my greatest friend,” Finn was strangely moved, as if the unknown and the half-known in time and the world were coming upon him.

  “This was our world,” said Ronnie, and as they walked along he described scenes from the early life of Tormad and Catrine and himself, the world before the clearances, in its pastoral ways. His voice was even and pleasant; and when he described the harrowing and brutal scene of their eviction, it was not vindictive; as though brutality were the common-place in life, out of which the poor man gathered a few joys like odd jewels—if he was lucky. And Ronnie had had the luck of his youth. There was something spent in Ronnie, like a spent wave, but he had come up clean.

  Finn sailed the seas with Ronnie, and names like “The Indies” had an enchantment for him. The exploits of the Seafoam were little enough now! Finn would have been ashamed to talk about them before this man. There was a strange dividing in his mind, and he moved in its two worlds—the world Kirsty had talked about, with its lairds and captains and foreign adventures, the very same that this man Ronnie, his father’s friend, had sailed through, and the world of home with the simple common people who were known to him and stirred in human warmth.

  The far world seemed bright and full of great adventure; the land of home awkward and dull-minded, without knowledge.

  “There are a great many things in the world we don’t know about here at home,” said Finn.

  “That’s true,” agreed Ronnie. “But I wouldn’t say you’d gain much by knowing about them.”

  “I wonder?” murmured Finn, sceptically.

  “Looking back on it now,” said Ronnie, “I can say that there was more wonder in one year of my young life here than in all the years I spent on the high seas and in foreign places.”

  “But you have been to those places,” said Finn.

  Ronnie smiled. “It’s a delusion, Finn,” he answered quietly. “It may be pleasant to see new things, but they pass before the eyes. Your own nature remains. Human nature does not change—except often for the worse. There were days of such tedium that they were a horror in the mind. Men craved for anything, for fights, for drink, for death, anything to break the horror that discipline kept rigid. There were only the two ways out: brutality and foul language, and they went together. They were a great relief. They were like a vomit that cleared you. They were helpful many a time.”

  “Were they?”

  “For a while I had the name of being the greatest swearer on board. I have seen an angry Englishman look at me in wonder and say ‘Holy Jesus!’ and laugh.

  Ronnie’s mind, opening in this unexpected way, kept Finn silent but anxious to hear more.

  “For it’s an odd thing,” said Ronnie, “that in our own language we have no swearing of that kind. So in English a swear to us hardly seems to be a swear at all, you sort of know what it means, but it’s funny, too. It’s new. A new sound. That’s about all. I have seen English sailors laugh at swears in Spanish in the same way. The worst fight ever I saw was between a Devon man and a Frenchman. There was a devil of a fellow in our crew, whose whole aim in life was to cause trouble. A ‘practical joker’ they called him. Well, he got hold of a simple Devon man, a nice fellow, and dared him to repeat two French words on shore to a French sailor. The knife was out before you could wink. What a night that was! There were fifteen casualties. It kept us going for two months.”

  “It must have been exciting often.”

  “It had to be,” said Ronnie. “Even when one or two of our own fellows got clapped in irons and we muttered to ourselves and swore and threatened mutiny—that was relief, too. A month of it; a year of it; year after year after year. It’s a long time—when your heart’s not in it.”

  “I suppose so. Were there fine fellows among them, too?”

  “Oh, yes. One or two of the world’s best. But you see, the fellows who would be your friends would be the fellows whose hearts were not in the business either. So you would talk of your homes and the old life. There were nights often enough when the strath of Kildonan ran through my mind like the glen of Paradise.”

  “Did it?”

  “It did.”

  Out of the silence Finn asked, “What was the worst thing?”

  “There were many things,” said Ronnie, “but the worst was the thing that was always with us or in the offing. I have taken part in it myself. I could be as good at it as at the swearing. And often it did me good. But too often it left a sickness in the heart, a bitterness of gall in the stomach. It was that awful, bloody thing, brutality. Jesus, I hated it. I never got used to it.”

  Finn was silent.

  “They can talk about religion, Finn, and the sins of the flesh, and the Ten Commandments, and good and evil, but there is only one sin and one evil, and its name is brutality. I wear its badge. Look!” And, taking off his bonnet, he showed Finn a little silver clasp in his skull. “Some day I may tell you the story about it, but not now. It does me good to touch it sometimes, and to remember how I got it. The children like to see it.” He smiled drily.

  They went miles up the strath, talking of many things, for Ronnie would point to this or that and tell Finn something about it. Finn, too, remembered some of his mother’s stories.

  “Your mother was a beautiful young girl. She was so full of life,” said Ronnie. He talked simply and frankly about her, not concealing his admiration, until Finn felt slightly embarrassed. “But I had no chance with her, when your father was about!”

  “Hadn’t you?” Finn tried to smile.

  “No,” said Ronnie. “I used to think about her often when I was away.” His tone was clear and frank and transcended Finn’s embarrassment. “The autumn is on us,” he said in the same tone, lifting his face. “The rowan berries are red.”

  Finn looked at the mountain-ash with its load of berries, blood-red berries over green leaves in the September sun. Their stillness and silence touched him, as if they were waiting or listening.

  “We’ll sit in their shadow for a little,” said Ronnie, “for I’m feeling a bit tired.”

  The moment had now come, Finn knew, when Ronnie would tell about the death of his father.

  As Finn listened to the description of how the line stuck in the bottom and they thought they were in a whale, he could not help laughing, for Ronnie himself was smiling; then the first white fish; and finally, in the dawn, the herring. He could understand the excitement, and wanted to prolong the moment, for he knew what was coming. But like fate it came, and when Finn heard how his father had behaved, his heart was bitter and proud, and the emotion that rose in him would not let him speak. He saw it all with a terrible clarity, and fought beside his father as he would beside a great hero.

  “We had not much English, and not the kind the
y spoke anyway, and we did not answer them but remained dumb. That has troubled my mind often since. Perhaps they used it as an excuse not to know or report anything about your father. There was a dumb anger in us—and we paid for it before they broke us. Your father was buried at sea. O God, that was a terrible moment when we realized who it was. Terrible beyond telling. I was always a peaceable enough man, but murder dwelt in me for many a long day. However, it’s no good going over all that. No good at all, Finn boy. Young Torquil—he broke out. They put him in irons. I thought he was going off his head. We were separated in the end. Time will do anything to a man. For we come of a tough enough breed, a breed that has endured a lot. Never mind. It all comes back to the one thing, Finn—brutality. Compel people into a position where they have to use the brute that’s in them in order to live and the brute will waken all right. When the brute is naturally strong in a man—that’s the man who becomes the leader of the press-gang. And there you have it. Where all is compulsion and enforcement, it’s the bully that rules.”

  Finn sat silent, a dark flush on his face.

  “Life is a strange thing, too,” said Ronnie. “At first there is anger and murder in your heart. You feel that you’ll yet get your own back. You’re young. You can endure. You’ll have your revenge. But it does not work out like that. Not in life itself, Finn. Why? Because of this terrible thing—that the years pass. You had thought that you would work through it and get what you wanted yet. You even work out years of service and a pension and a cottage of your own. But all the time the terrible thing that’s happening is—that the years are passing. I have the little pension and the cottage but—the years have passed.”

  “But you are secure now,” said Finn, under the shadow of his father’s death.

  “Yes,” said Ronnie.

  Finn felt uncomfortable.

  “All I wanted to say, Finn, was that you are doing fine here. You stick to it, boy. This is a full enough life for any man. You have everything here—and freedom besides. Don’t go hankering after the wastes of the world. They were telling me of your story of adventure into the Western Ocean.”

  “That was nothing.”

  “It took you to the edge of death—and further than that no adventure can travel in this life.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Finn, feeling restless.

  “I know,” said Ronnie. And he added, with a quiet finality in his voice, a summing up of wisdom, “We were driven: you went.”

  Silence fell on them now and Ronnie lay back against the slope. “It’s fine here,” he said.

  But because of the mood that was on Finn, he felt in Ronnie’s simple words a deep, incommunicable sadness.

  Ronnie closed his eyes, Finn and all the brutalities of the world washed from him. Finn glanced at the face and saw it strange and remote, the skin taut over the bones beneath, the scar a shiny red, the whole fixed and set as in death—like a face washed up by the tides of an invisible sea.

  Finn began breaking a little stick in his fingers. It was dead and broke readily. He became aware of Ronnie’s eyes but did not like to turn his head and look.

  “It’s fine lying here. Man, I enjoy this,” said Ronnie, in a cheerful half-sleepy voice. When at last he got up and gazed at the tree, his whole manner was friendly and bright. “Look, now. What about taking a sprig of these berries home to your mother? I’m sure she would like you to take something to her from her beloved strath.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “It would show her you remembered her.”

  With a slow smile, Finn pulled down a cluster of the red fruit.

  *

  On the way home the following afternoon, Finn was in grand heart. He had thoroughly enjoyed his stay at Dale and felt now as if he had grown larger. Everyone had been extremely kind to him. Ronnie had come some distance with him and before saying good-bye had spoken of the change on the coast. The picture of a people happy again, with the coming of prosperity from the sea. The sea did not belong to any landlord and the use of the press-gang was dying out. By the new Act of Parliament, a man press-ganged could not now be held more than five years. But everything depended on the young men. “It’s for fellows like you to lead, Finn; to build up the ways of our folk once more. Your father and myself started—but we were beaten. You are the new generation. Justify your father, boy, before the world. And look after your mother, who suffered more than you’ll ever know.”

  It was good fun to think of these words now. Like marching to a tune. And Barbara—they had made Barbara blush. She had snatched her hand away at leave-taking. He laughed, thinking of it. He had a lot of news for his mother. He would lay himself out to tell her about everything! Ronnie—Ronnie … and his mother? His brows gathered over a smile. The idea that anyone like Ronnie should think of marrying his mother! Holy Jesus! as the Englishman had said. Finn felt hot and laughed. Old people had no sense. But, of course, Ronnie never meant—really. He couldn’t. He was too—too wise and fine a fellow, with fun in him besides. Good Lord, no! And, out of a sudden driving exuberance, Finn took to his heels and ran, and freedom ran with him.

  He would be home on the edge of the dark.

  CHAPTER XXI

  CATRINE AND RODDIE

  When Finn and Barbara had disappeared, Catrine turned and found she had the whole croft to herself. It was suddenly both intimate and vacant, and over her came an urgent impulse to work. Chairs and stools she whisked outside; the beds were stripped and armfuls of blankets spread to the, sun; everything was shifted or taken down, until the whole household was in an uproar. Then she settled to the attack.

  A fine girl, Barbara. Youth was away on the road.

  Bran (successor to Oscar who had died from injury) lay at a few yards on the grass considering her now and then with some misgiving, but keeping well clear of this odd frenzy that attacked humans occasionally. The cock was astonished as usual. One or two of the hens croaked in the quiet, reflective way they had at times, speaking to themselves like old women, while two or three young ones indulged in a luxurious bath near the peat-stack, fluffing now and then the fine black dust through their feathers.

  Not that she wanted to be with Finn and Barbara. She was well content where she was. Though it would be lovely, too, to see her mother. There was a queer pleasure in having the place to herself. It was like having herself to herself. The byre was empty. The little barn. There was a silence in Finn’s room; and in the guest-room. Kirsty’s wooden trunk looked at her. She got the key, sat down on the floor, pushed back the lid, and forgot all about her labours in the very middle of them.

  The past came back with a sweet sorrow. A brooch of Kirsty’s was a love-token from a life beyond her own. All hers; the trunk itself; not Kirsty’s now, but hers. Yet it would never be hers as it had been Kirsty’s. All that was really hers were the little precious things of her very own that she had hidden away here. Green … cairngorm-yellow…. At the sight of them, she began to weep; and she wept heavily, like a child, the tears flowing copiously.

  She wiped the tears away and smiled, but with little embarrassment, for she was not ashamed of herself. She knew perfectly well that all this was weakness and sentiment. But there was no-one in the world to see her. So what business was it of anyone? She could weep if she liked. And enjoy it, too. There were little things that could break the heart; that could make the heart young and break it.

  She felt young. Perhaps it was the sight of Barbara and Finn setting off….

  Catrine was now thirty-eight, a fully-developed woman, her shoulders rounded and firm, her chest deep, her face more full than it had been in the old days but with the eyes still large and the mouth red. The texture of her fair skin retained much of the smoothness of youth, of girlhood. Life, too, had taken care that the texture of her mind would not grow insensitive or complacent. At times, indeed—now, in a measure, by Kirsty’s old chest—her eyes would quicken as in clairvoyance and her whole body grow alive to a condition or emotion remote from her in time
or place. The fire could sweep her, not so recklessly as in youth, perhaps, and not so often, but sometimes with a deeper force; for—as Ronnie had said—the years pass….

  She had been sorry for Ronnie. Oh, desperately! He would never know how profoundly she had understood him. She had come nearer to an understanding of life, of that ultimate something final and tragic in it, than ever she had before. Sorrow had not burdened the mind and blinded the eyes, but had been seen clear in its pattern, beyond chance or mood, distant and fixed as an outline of the Kildonan hills.

  Ronnie could not expect her to understand this. Yet in his way, he had understood, too, and that somehow had been the hardest part to bear. She had seen it coming from the first moment she had met his eyes. “Catrine!” “Ronnie!” And there it was. How confused she had been! The past calling to her, rising in a wave. She had turned away to look at her son in Roddie’s boat, leaving her for the West. That was excuse enough for any emotion. And when the boat had disappeared beyond the Head, she found herself all in a moment delighted to speak to Ronnie, anxious to speak to him, with the terror of what he would have to tell her about Tormad—and then about himself—making her eyes brilliant and her body bloom. There had been early moments when she had been almost overcome with excitement, with intolerable suspense.

  But Ronnie had been so wise and practical that her gladness at seeing him increased. Barbara was there, too, and that was good for restraint; so he could stay for a day or two, as he had intended, quite well. Of course he could. She would hear of nothing else.

  The first night Ronnie had told her of the manner of Tormad’s death. He had told it so simply and straightforwardly, that death was given a dignity, a heroic air. “We are no longer children, Catrine. These are the chances that come to life. They are bitter, but we learn to face them. It took me a long time, for I slept with murder many a night.”

  When she wept, he offered no sympathy. His voice remained quiet-toned, distant from her a little, but gentle with understanding. That delicacy—afterwards, in the sleepless hours of the night—had a curious steadying effect, for it was as if she remembered it without having noticed it at the time.