by Neil M. Gunn
“Why don’t you give Una a dance?” Meg asked Finn.
“Why should I? Isn’t she getting plenty?”
“Yes. But you might give her one.”
“Do you think she would like it?”
“I’m sure she would.”
“She’ll be feeling lonely now that Boots has gone back to Wick? Very hard on her.”
“Hard on my granny!” said Meg.
Finn laughed. “It’s difficult to get near her—there’s such a run on her.” He added, “There’s the same run on yourself—but that’s different,” and he gripped her firmly. “How’s Donnie doing?”
“I can’t make you out,” said Meg.
“That’s pretty cool—seeing all the chance you give me.”
In the whirl and intermingling of the fast set dances there was little opportunity for talk. Twice Finn went to take Una up, but was forestalled by quicker feet. He did not try again.
Once he heard Una sing, for all the company contributed to the evening’s entertainment in song or chorus. A remark by Wull stuck in his mind, worrying him: “She has the richness of the blackbird.” He was sorry he had heard her.
It was a great relief to him when the wedding was over and he had no longer to argue himself each evening out of secret rebellions, and appear among the company, laughing and prepared to take part for appearance’s sake. He was now completely detached from his mother and Roddie; felt he had no interest in them, never wanted to have anything more to do with them, had for them a cold distaste.
In this last month he was conscious of having aged a lot. He was barely twenty, but it was as if the very flesh on his bones had lost its softness and drawn taut and sinewy. There was a similar change in his mind, and where formerly he would have been deeply moved to sympathy or emotion he now could harden his eyes and know only an impulse of intolerance.
Barbara and her mother remained with him for a fortnight and then an aunt, a widowed woman of over fifty, came to stay and help him run the croft. Her husband had been drowned on the Guillaim off Cromarty and her son and daughter were both married. Elspet was a medium-sized woman, with grey hair and a slight stoop of the shoulders from being perpetually busy. She had by nature a pleasant disposition and was an excellent housekeeper.
At first Finn had refused to take the croft from Catrine. Roddie’s mother had died some years before, but his father was still alive. Finn derisively understood Roddie’s pride. He had not married Catrine for her croft! He was taking her to his own croft, his own home, and Catrine would look after his father as was the custom in such a situation.
Finn had told his mother they could have this croft, too, for all he cared. His mother had produced the purse of twenty-one sovereigns. Finn had refused it. She had dropped it on the table. “It’s yours, not mine.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I can’t help that,” said his mother calmly.
The money lay there for nearly a day.
“I don’t want this money,” he said angrily, shoving it aside.
“You can put it in the fire, for all I care,” she answered.
He returned late that night, and in the light of the morning saw the purse with the money on the shelf by his bed.
Night after night he kept away from the house, but from the moment his mother had said she was to marry Roddie a steadying sense of finality had come upon his mind. At first the general greeting: “I hear you’re getting a new father, Finn!” had been bitter as gall, and if his laugh had been awkward, well, folk realized it was an odd joke for Finn right enough! What grown son or daughter liked a mother to get married? Naturally they couldn’t see the force of it! But Finn had played up well enough and now it was all over.
There had come a decisive turning point at a critical moment when Finn had all but made up his mind to clear out of Dunster and might readily enough, in a chance encounter with Roddie, have fatally lost his head. It came in the form of a question. There was Kirsty’s money; there was the croft. It was one of the best crofts in a district where the smallest plots of land were coveted. For the population had greatly increased since Finn had been born. Many who had been evicted in recent years—for these evictions were still going on—from the Heights of Kildonan had come to Dunster. Finn saw all this in a sudden clear light; his mind hardened in acquisitiveness; and he asked himself, “Why not?”
Why not? There was a coldness of revenge in the question. He would take these possessions. They would be his. His own croft, his own house, his own boat. He felt them surround him and give him power. At that moment, a cool shiver cleansing his skin and his mind, Finn entered with clear consciousness upon the estate of manhood.
*
The winter and spring fishing was entirely for white fish. There were “small lines” for catching haddock and “great lines” for cod and ling. A winter season for netting herring was still far in the future. Finn’s long discussion with Henry had been devoted to a thorough prosecution of the cod and ling fishing, for, as Finn had said, there was money in it if they went about it in the right way. While in the Lews, Henry himself had observed how large was the trade in dried cod and ling. The folk of the Western Isles had taken no great interest in herring except as bait for their great lines. And look at the Shetlanders! Herring on the West were uncertain, but cod and ling were constant, were sure money. That was what the Lewis people knew.
Now they had been catching cod and ling, splitting and drying them, in Dunster, but in Finn’s view the business had been too easy-going, not taken seriously enough. They should use only their biggest boats, so that they could stand up to dirty weather, come to an arrangement with an export merchant in Wick at an agreed price, and then get going in real earnest. At an average price, say, of sixpence a head for each dried cod or ling, they might make something that would astonish a few people at the end of the season!
During the white fishing, the herring crews got broken up, because an ever increasing number, with no stake in a boat, engaged themselves only for the summer herring season. From the west of Sutherland and other distant coasts men appeared in early July prepared to hire themselves to skippers at ₤4 to ₤5 for six to eight weeks. When these “hired men”, including those from the local country districts, had dispersed at the close of the herring season, the real fishermen were left, and, to form crews for the white fishing, had to band together, so that two or more skippers might find themselves on the same boat.
In this way, Finn was able to break with Roddie without rousing any particular comment, for about the shore Finn and Henry had voiced their ideas whenever discussion got going, which was about as often as a group gathered to look at the sea.
It was cold, dangerous, and incessant work, but it suited Finn, though he was troubled with one or two bad cuts on his hands that never got time properly to heal. But they were making successful headway and other boats of the larger type began to follow their lead.
Roddie took no part in this leadership, and fished as one of a crew of five in the regular small type of winter boat. The four others were older than he, and prepared for reasonable work in reasonable weather. This suited Roddie who had never greatly cared for the white fishing, and whose home life now absorbed him. His marriage had had a deep effect upon him, far deeper than ever he had conceived possible; and whoever wanted to kill themselves splitting cod were welcome to the job! Indeed, he might have left the sea largely alone that season were it not for the pleasure he found in coming home.
Once, well into the spring, on returning home in the forenoon, he discovered Catrine waiting for him by the Steep Wood. Her face was white and large-eyed and his wits scattered as if he had been struck a blow on the head.
“Are all the boats safe?”
He hardly heard her. “What’s wrong?”
She read his face and tried to smile. “Nothing. Are all the boats safe?”
“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“No. The wind woke me early, and I was frightened. Oh,
Roddie, I cannot tell how glad I was to see you!”
“Are you sure that’s all?”
“Isn’t it plenty?”
Roddie blew a slow breath. “You fairly gave me a fright!”
“Are all the boats in?”
“I think so,” he said. “Why?”
“It felt up here like a wild storm for a while.”
“It blew a bit. But nothing to be upset——” He stopped and looked at her closely. “There was something?”
The wind blew fair strands of hair over her brow. She looked in front with an awkward smile. “I awoke out of a dream where I saw a boat being smashed. I got frightened—it was so real. I’m glad you’re home.”
“Now, my girl, you mustn’t be getting these fancies. They’re not good for you. You know that. You’ll end up by making me frightened myself!”
“Are you ever frightened of the sea?”
“I wasn’t thinking of the sea. You can leave the sea to me.”
She smiled as they walked on, but her eyes were troubled. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but—I can’t help it. The old fear of the sea is coming back on me.”
“You’re just having fancies!” he said with meaning,
She flushed.
He dropped the string of fish outside the door and followed her into the kitchen. The old man was still in bed, for he had been weakened recently by a heavy cold and did not get up until the afternoon. The porridge pot was plopping over the fire. “So you’re having fancies!” muttered Roddie, as he hung up his heavy jacket. He was going to tease her still further when, as if unable to bear it, she suddenly gripped him and dug her fingers into the flesh of his back and buried her face in his breast.
“Gosh! you’re hurting me,” said Roddie.
She did not speak.
He laughed gently, derisively, into her hair, then picked her up in his arms to relieve the sheer stress of pleasure that came over him.
When she was pouring the porridge into his plate, he said, “I’ll bring you home a rope from the boat.”
“What for?”
“You could then tie me by one leg to the end of the house as you do a hen with chickens.”
She turned away, confused.
But Roddie smiled. He felt he understood her far more deeply than she imagined and enjoyed keeping the knowledge to himself.
*
But if Roddie for the time being was thus losing grip on the sea, Finn was being drawn to it ever more elementally. The weather was often wet and stormy, and occasionally it was intensely, bitterly cold. For spells, feeling would desert his hands and even the flesh on his back, and the cold would crawl along his bones. Working in the sea water, his fingers would experience the smoothness of washed stone—at a little distance from him, flexible like tangle-weed. They could only feel a hook-point dimly. The men were heavily clothed, however, and in frost, with a creeping haar, Finn sometimes achieved a sensation of bodily misery that was ultimate and strangely bearable. Not only his hands but his mind seemed washed by the cold sea water.
Then in April something happened which drew Finn into an even closer kinship with the sea.
Already Roddie had let it be known that he was not going to any West Coast fishing in May. He said he didn’t think it was worth it, and doubted if there would be much doing in any case, because curers seemed dissatisfied, unwilling to take bounty and other risks, and doubtful of the wisdom of a too early fishing. He was going to give it a miss for this year anyway, he said. But Finn guessed correctly what had happened. He was about the last to discover that his mother was going to have a child. For two or three months, he had seen very little of her. The estrangement between them was such that when they did chance to meet in Elspet’s presence they could talk to each other with that appearance of distant ease or restraint not unusual in members of the same family whose interests have diverged. When he suddenly found out about the child, he had a revulsion of feeling strong enough to snap the last cord between them, to make the estrangement complete. When the revulsion had slowly ebbed, he felt glad that the whole affair was over, that he was finally cut off from any consideration for his mother.
And he could afford to smile with contempt at the thought of Roddie, the great seaman, being overcome by his wife; Roddie making excuses—because he must stay at home! He even heard Roddie suggest in a very roundabout way to Henry that he might take his place with the curer. For Henry was expecting his own new boat within a week. Things had come to a pretty pass with the great Viking! But it suited Finn excellently. He would never have dreamt of going with Roddie in any case. Now Henry and he would carry on the winter partnership into the West, for which there was growing within him a deep nostalgia. He was longing to get away, longing for the sea-inlets of the West, the glimmer of twilight in the quiet nights, remote from Dunster. It was like a land that existed in a dream, though he never had the felicity to dream of it except with his eyes open.
And then the incident happened.
Dunster had been luckier than many places on the rocky coasts of that northern sea in so far as loss of life was concerned. Hardly a season passed without its storms and alarms, but actual tragedy had been rare. Perhaps Henry and Finn had set a high standard of daring against the weather, and though there was little overt rivalry among boats, yet no skipper liked hanging about the shore when another was at sea, not unless his weather judgement had been proved in the past and was respected. However that may be, several boats were at sea in the dawn of a darkling April morning, when an easterly gale sprang up. Henry and Finn had been a little uneasy, because the sea had a nasty “lift” in it; there had been a “carry” on the sky they did not like, and they could smell bad weather about. But in the winter-spring fishing particularly, such an uneasiness was not unusual, and did little more than keep the eye lifting and the ear alert.
They were about to start hauling a great line with its hundred hooks on snoods a fathom apart when they saw and heard the wind coming. Such an onset occurred frequently enough to have found a common form of description in the mouths of the fishermen: “A lump of wind struck us”. The lump now struck them with a sweeping flattening violence, and Finn and another threw themselves on the loosely stowed canvas. Henry’s face was into the weather. “It’s coming, boys!” he cried, when he had assured himself of what was behind the lump.
They were about five miles from Dunster, and Henry’s decision to leave the line and make for home was immediate. Over the blackened water, scuds of drift were racing. With a peak of sail to give steering way Henry ran his White Heather dead before it. The uneasy sea began to rise with great rapidity. But they were not frightened of the sea; what sat in Henry’s mind was fear of the shore, where in no time the rollers would be breaking. There was no harbour, no breakwater, nothing but the open beach and the stony river mouth. And apart from that crescent of beach, with some deathly skerries beyond its southern horn, there was nothing but gaunt cliff, whose base far as the eye could reach was already white spume. That the tide was low was an added anxiety.
They could see the other boats making for home. None of them had been so far out as the White Heather, and already several were approaching the bay, and three more, a little to the south’ard, were fighting hard against the drift for the wind was a little north of east. Two of them should make it, but the third, some distance behind, would have all she could do to keep off the skerries. Yes, it would be touch and go with her!
The crew felt exhilarated. Already in their bodies was the fight with the beach, the leaping overboard, the gripping of the gunnel, the heave upward of the bow to keep the bottom planking from getting stove in. To save the boat each in risking his life would know a high thrill. For the boat was more than all, it was their challenge to the sea, arousing in them not thought of risk but an exalted courage. And Henry was there, jealous of his seamanship, anxious in the moment of test that he should acquit himself creditably before his fellows.
Finn glanced back at him. Henry’s thin face
was set, calm, but its lines held as in a faint fixed smile, the irony that was characteristic of him. Somehow this touched Finn with the old emotion of comradeship and he glanced away—and saw well to the west and fairly low in to the rocks the heaving darkness of a small boat. He cried out and pointed. They all looked and their faces quickened, for they knew on the instant that that boat was doomed.
“It’s Daniel Bannerman,” cried Henry.
Their hands gripped what they rested on. They looked from the distant boat to the beach and back to the boat-again. They could see her losing way as if they were hanging on her iron-held oars. She was done for!
Now they wanted to give their own boat more speed. There arose in them the urge to land swiftly. They had no fear of the sea. Its spray stung their cheeks and eyes. The wind roared and whistled past them. Henry stood close into the Head to get what eddying shelter there might be by the river mouth. Bursts of spume were flying up the rock-face. Yes, he could save himself from landing on the beach. He could take the river-mouth. They could do it! Yes, they could do it with ease!
“The oars clear!” cried Henry, his eyes narrow and calculating.
But they hardly needed the oars, except, at the last, to hold her from broaching to, and, as her forefoot grounded, they jumped. There were some men on the water-edge. She was gripped, and went with them in their midst until only her stern was washed by the breaking waves.
The cry now rose about Daniel Bannerman. Already folk were appearing from the crofts, men and women and boys. Small boats were being drawn up the beach by seamen wet to the waists. Women with heads tightly shawled leaned against the storm, their wide skirts flapping. The seadrift whistled past in a stinging rain. Blobs of spume big as gulls’ eggs caught the ground, shivered and burst.
As Finn joined the surge of men along the crest of the beach the last of the three boats that had been seen fighting for the bay was being driven on the skerries. Seamen were leaping the boulders towards the black rocks, sloping like wedges into the sea, upon which it was now clear she would be piled up. Standing on an outer skerry, each wave as it came seething white round his feet, was a tall commanding figure with a coil of rope in his hand. Though at a considerable distance, Finn, running, knew that figure. It was Roddie. Then, through the roar of the breakers, he began to hear his voice. His left arm was out, directing them, indicating by a sweeping peremptory motion the narrow channel they must take between two skerries. Now could be seen the power of the storm and the desperate effort of the four men on the oars, pulling out to sea with the utmost strength of their bodies, pulling into the eye of the wind and being driven before it, keeping the ever-lifting stem into the weather while trying to guide the stern between the two skerries, which every surge of the sea submerged in bursts of tumultuous water. When at last she caught the ground-swing properly she came in a rush and crashed against the western skerry. The man on the bow oar was unseated by a severe blow on the chest from the end of his oar as the rock smashed its blade against the gunnel. The boat shot off the skerry, still plunging inward, and would have smashed her stern in on the living rock, had not the sucking recession of the water begun. As it was she shivered from the crack. There were cries as the men gathered themselves from the bottom boards, and Roddie’s voice rang out with the uncoiling rope. A side channel to the left gave on a sandy pool, but all human effort at direction was futile in the heave of the sea, and as she struck again she began to fill with water. But Roddie had now belayed the rope round a corner of the rock and managed to heave her nose inward to the channel; heaved her farther, until, taking their chance as it came, the five men, assisted by Roddie, scrambled on to the rock.
