Second Sight

by Neil M. Gunn

  If there was nothing much to be seen except moor and mountain from the south, west, and north sides of the Lodge, on the east side (on which the gun-room door gave) the ground, after a level hundred yards, dipped fairly steeply down a short hill-side of birch and hazel by the Corr River. This small river made a winding wooded glen of intimate beauty, full of bird life and fresh scents and some obscure element of secrecy.

  Less than two miles farther down, it flattened out for a space into what was the old crofting township of Clachvor, now derelict, while about the same distance up stream, where it curved eastward, there were the cottages of Corbeg, from which the Lodge drew its necessary labour.

  As he went down the serpentine path the scent of birch and bracken drew his eyes to first traces of autumn colour in their greenness, to faintly stirring movements of the wind amongst them, and all at once his disappointment at not being on the hill passed from him. He got the feeling of being on holiday and all by himself; and something deep in him quietly exulted in this. He had had the experience once or twice before. You get away from everyone, not purposefully or by desire, but by what seems an unlucky chance, and then suddenly you find you have wandered right into yourself, and there you are standing upright, amused and pleased at finding yourself alone.

  He knew on the instant that he needed this holiday, and being in no hurry he would make the best of it. A fellow can be so long away from himself, he thought, that he loses the feeling of being an individual and in the round.

  The freshness, the fragrance, the ease.… It was a cloudy morning, with no blue opening showing, the sort of morning that in the Highlands can be grey and incommunicably sad, until, by looking at growing things near you, particularly after rain or mist, you get a vivid apprehension of colour and scent, a small delicious shock. Harry approached the bank of the small river and stood looking into a pool.

  The water was low and clear, with long fingers of greenish slime telling their tale of a dry summer. Salmon came up here to spawn, and for a day or two, after the height of a flood, the fishing was often excitingly good. But when the floods had gone down the salmon lay in deep rock pools and refused to come to any lure. How Maclean managed to get one now and then for the table was supposed to be a mystery.

  Of course, in a real sense, thought Harry, it is a mystery; and standing there by the pool he involuntarily visualised the rites. Cook—a woman of strong character and slightly deaf—informs Maclean on Monday that he must get a salmon for Wednesday’s dinner. After a certain interval of silence, Maclean solemnly replies that he will see what can be done about it, but that it might be as well if she did not rely on getting it, for the river is low and no fish are running. As she is not interested in the height of the river or the habits of salmon, she says no more on the subject, and they part like two Covenanters who have adequately encompassed the doctrine of predestination, Cook unswerving, Maclean’s bearded countenance gravely covering his annoyance.

  Then at daybreak on Wednesday, before anyone is astir, Maclean goes down to one of the rock pools on the Corr with his salmon rod, game bag, and book of flies. He selects a “Black Dog” of enormous size from which the dressing has been almost entirely worn away. Having set up his rod and line, he attaches the fly directly to the end of the line, dispensing with the refinement of a gut cast. Thus equipped, he approaches his pool with care, knowing precisely where a certain fish will be lying. It may be that he casts his fly out over the water—and over the fish—but as the fish won’t come to the fly he has perforce to make the fly go to the fish. Which indeed it does quite naturally by sinking, guided by the rod, down beside the salmon. The fish may now technically be said to have stopped the fly, whereupon Maclean, in the ritual of fishing, “strikes”.

  At first Sir John had been astonished at Maclean’s mysterious skill and asked him what fly he had used.

  “Oh just a ‘Black Dog’,” said Maclean.

  “Surely a very small size?”

  “Indeed, sometimes it seems small enough,” replied Maclean gravely.

  Sir John, in his innocence, had been deeply interested and had pressed the matter to the point of getting Maclean to accompany him during a whole day’s fruitless fishing in clear pools. “There was maybe just too much sun,” said Maclean at the end of the day, “and not enough wind.”

  As Harry pursued his way up the river path, he thought to himself what a torture that day must have been to Maclean. For he dared not tell his new employer of his unorthodox methods. Sir John, the Cook and Maclean. He began smiling to himself, seeing their personalities moving before him, in a grave elderly drama. Sir John innocent, Maclean with a scar on his conscience, the Cook dominant.

  It was a pleasant but somehow dark humour, as if there were in fact something of ancient ritual in it, and at the next pool, when he stopped to look into the water to see if he could see a salmon, he gave an involuntary shudder, for it suddenly came upon him that what he might see would be Alick’s drowned body.

  He actually had to visit the five deep pools to make sure that the body was not in any one of them, his legs dragging him, tremulous, to the last rocky ledge.

  It was rather a horrid experience and he did not like it, because it pierced his detachment. And when he stood back, there were the birches, with a drooping yellow streak here and there, and the dark mature green of the bracken, so graceful, so beautiful—so still.

  How swift the change in a mood from delight to fear! And back again—or half-way, holding consciousness of both! As if, in truth, there were some panic something or other inhabiting this half-mile of narrow wooded glen and rock-pool.

  Harry turned his face to the widening valley and presently saw the half-dozen houses of Corbeg on the other side of the stream on comparatively flat ground. They, too, seemed very still, with some motionless cattle and sheep dotted here and there on the slow-rising slopes behind. Two of the outlying houses were thatched, their humped roofs outgrowths of the landscape. The scene was more lonely than anything he had yet seen in this lonely country—until a movement in the river a little higher up arrested him. The head of an otter? he wondered. Some tilted flagstones and boulders made a perfect hiding-place. As he approached them stealthily, a little boy darted away on the other side, splashing through a yard or two of shallows, and was up the short slope and into the shelter of some stunted birches before he had quite seen him. Poaching! Hunting one of Maclean’s sacred and nominated beasts! The young rascal!

  Harry’s smile broke into a soft friendly laugh. These two young eyes would now be watching him with the glancing lights he had once seen in the clear, frightened eyes of a fawn. Lord, this sort of life did produce a capacity for sensitive vision! He had better look out or he might presently be seeing through things! That moment by the rock-pool he had seen exactly what Alick’s body would look like drowned in the pool. In fact, if they found the body so drowned.…

  But this was getting fantastic, so he lit a cigarette and went on to the swing-bridge that spanned the stream. As it heaved with him he held on to the two wire ropes, the boards coming up to meet his drunken feet. This put him into normal good humour, and when he met a tall man whose reddish hair was turning sandy-grey, he greeted him in a friendly way. Immediately the man answered, in his quiet voice, he knew he was Alick’s father. There was the same stillness of the body, the slow movement, the friendly yet reserved expression. Very courteous, very dignified, but with that tendency to turn the shoulder, to look away, which was new to Harry. He had seen it in Maclean, but there had thought it the natural habit of a man used to consulting sky and hill for indications of weather.

  “You are Mr. Macdonald, I think,” Harry said, smiling. “I should know you from your son, Alick.”

  “Yes, I am,” replied Mr. Macdonald, looking at him.

  “My name is Kingsley. Your son and I stalk together.”

  “I am glad to meet you, sir,” said Mr. Macdonald and shook Harry’s extended hand gravely and yet with a curious inherent warmth that
touched Harry’s heart.

  “Thinking of tackling your corn?”

  “Well, I was thinking of putting an edge on the old scythe.” Harry followed the downward glance and saw the long, sinewy forearm with its covering of reddish glistening hairs and the powerful tough hand. As he looked up again, he caught the head of a woman drawn rapidly back inside the front door, less than twenty yards away, for they were standing by the old thatched barn.

  “A good crop this year?”

  “Yes. We have no complaints. It was a good summer.”

  “For once!”

  “Well, perhaps, yes.” His smile had a shy humour. “It is not always so good indeed.”

  “Better than last year, anyhow!”

  They went on talking for a little time, Harry wondering how he could ask after Alick. Mr. Macdonald gave an opening by saying, “You are not on the hill to-day?”

  “No, I thought I’d better have a day off. I think you appreciate the hill better by having a day off now and then.”

  “Perhaps you will then,” said Mr. Macdonald politely.

  “Yes. So I thought I’d have a stroll round your country instead.”

  It was going to be difficult, because he had the clear feeling that Alick was not here and that the father was wondering how he, Harry, came to be here, seeing Alick was supposed to be on the hill with him.

  He was deciding to move on, and had actually taken a tentative step or two away, when the head appeared at the door again, and was in a hesitant and yet impulsive manner followed by the whole woman.

  She was if anything under middle height, dark, with dark eyes, and stout. She glanced at Harry once, then spoke to her husband: “Won’t you ask the gentleman in for a glass of milk?”

  Something in her approach, in the way her expression seemed to melt in kindness, decided Harry to accept at once. “Thank you very much,” he said, with his quickest smile. Merriment edged his voice. He told how dry he was, making a joke of it.

  She showed him into the parlour, and this he regretted, not merely because it was small and crammed with awkward bits of furniture and photographs and smelt of Sunday clothes, but because he wanted to be in the ease of the kitchen with its peat fire. He took off his cap, and presently Mr. Macdonald took off his cap too, while Mrs. Macdonald came with a jug and a glass on a round metal tray. The milk was creamy and delicious and he paid no attention to remarks he had once heard (though he involuntarily remembered them) about dirt and insanitary conditions.

  In the dim light (there were flower pots inside the small window) and stuffy air, with Mr. Macdonald sitting awkwardly upright on a cloth-bottomed dining-room chair and Mrs. Macdonald at first standing and then sitting on the edge of a similar chair, Harry lolled in the hair-bottomed arm-chair with an almost exciting sense of discomfort, his face to the window.

  There was a tremendous contrast between husband and wife, both of whom were probably over sixty (the man possibly nearer seventy). The woman’s hair, combed smoothly from a middle parting, was still quite black. Harry, out of a natural interest in his sporting ground, had read a bit about the racial history of the Highlands, and some tentative thoughts were suggesting themselves automatically when the woman said, “We felt sure you would have been on the high ground to-day, seeing Alick did not come home last night.”

  “No,” Harry replied, smiling, and drank again. “This is delicious milk. No, thanks—really, I couldn’t take any more. Thank you ever so much. No, I didn’t go to-day. I took a day off. The others left quite early. They are going far in.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” said Mr. Macdonald drily.

  “Does he not come home at night sometimes?” Harry asked conversationally.

  “It’s very rarely indeed he stays away,” she replied. “Sometimes, if they are late on the hill at night or want to make a very early start, he sleeps over at the Lodge. But he hasn’t done that”—she looked at her husband—“for three years, isn’t it?”

  “About that.” He smiled with a humoured knowingness. “She does not get to sleep very well until she hears him coming in!”

  Harry laughed.

  “I don’t mind him being away at night at all—so long as I know not to expect him. Last night I got—I don’t know.” She looked confused for a moment and then smiled, asking Harry to excuse her. She was full of those quick tentative kindnesses and emotions.

  “Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, I am very happy to have your son’s company. We get on extremely well together. And he has taught me to use my eyes—and perhaps my mind—better than any teacher I can think of. He is really a fine fellow.”

  “That is very kind of you, Mr. Kingsley,” she said, her voice pitched low and quick in gratitude, in pride, her eyes on her knees where her hands were.

  “It’s only the truth,” he said, getting up. “Well, that was a very pleasant rest.” And, after unhurried farewells, he turned his back on Corbeg, his brows immediately wrinkling, his voice coming audibly, “Now where in the name of God can that fellow have gone?”

  For he had not slept at the Lodge and he was not on the hill. A real concern touched Harry now, a waking fear—not unlike the fear he had had in that wretched dream last night.

  Manifestly something had gone wrong, or Alick wouldn’t have put that mother of his to such concern. And by not turning up at the Lodge this morning the silly ass was simply asking for it, for was it not inevitable that someone should go to his home and spill the news? It’s a search party he’s asking for! thought Harry angrily. And then his mounting fear was suddenly allayed by remembering Angus’s return that morning with the information that Alick was not at home. For it was now perfectly obvious that Angus had not gone near Alick’s home. Why? Because he knew beforehand that Alick was not there. Which implied that he knew where Alick had been last night. Which further implied—that there was no need to contemplate tragedy quite yet!

  Harry smiled to himself. These intricacies of the mind! The fact that one could depend on the other like that, to understand and cover up! Typical of them somehow. And probably they had cursed each other as well.

  Out of sight of the cottages, he pulled up and was gazing in front of him when Geoffrey’s words came loudly into his mind: “Blind drunk!”

  And there it was, no doubt of it! Geoffrey had cut clear to the truth. Which was annoying to Harry at that moment. Alick had been after drink, had tried brutally to force Mairi to give him drink, had failed, and so had gone and got blind drunk. The process was clear enough to Geoffrey. No doubts or refinements needed. Swept all feelings and emotional difficulties and fears, all the dark or tragic patterns of mind, into the dustbin. An apprehension of the overpowering force of Geoffrey’s complacency swept Harry’s mind so strongly that it left behind it for one moment a wrung-out, dry hatred.

  Then he went automatically towards Corr Inn, which lay over three miles to the north-east, at a road junction.

  It looked a lonely enough place, as he saw it from a last low hill-crest. Any sort of revel could be carried on there at night. And drunk men could sing and stagger around it and lie and get up and fight or mutter their inmost thoughts to each other and sleep or disappear into the moor, and no one in the wide bright world be a bit the wiser. When Harry saw it, its dark-slated roof lay low upon it, and no life moved about it.

  No life moved over all that vast landscape of moor and hill, flowing in lines of smooth beauty. If beauty was the word? If beauty could lie at ease beneath these lines, could inhabit such barrenness? If beauty, then beauty with a bowed head and an empty mind, the wind whistling through its vacant mind, and dying away in a sigh. The wind came in a soft eddy, warmed from the lower ground, and his vacant mind was filled with the fragrance of wild bee’s honey. It was the heather, of course, which was everywhere in full bloom. Leagues of purple under the grey sky, mounting to dark horizons. Harry dropped in the heather and lay flat out and closed his eyes and let the wind pass over his face and through his hair.

  He did no
t actually fall asleep, but lay on that borderland where all is ease and a quiet forgetting, where to forget is to be full of peace, of release, of a wandering like the wind that wanders and yet never goes. It was a trick from the sunny meadows of southern England he knew as a boy, and from one place in particular, where the wind came blowing from a distant common of gorse, golden flaming gorse, whose toonear scent could almost make him sick or make him swoon.

  Ten minutes and he got up, completely emptied of all humours, and then down he went until he got by the bank of the small and almost dried-up stream, which he followed with his boyhood’s eyes, noting chance wild flowers and once or twice being startled to a standstill at the brilliant enamels of vagrant beetles.

  So that he approached the inn with open frank eyes, remarking to himself conscientiously that what he desired now was a mug of good beer.

  The place appeared tidy enough, if bare and unused looking. A few vegetables in the garden, but more weeds, with straggling unpruned currant bushes against a low drystone wall. And the usual rank-looking rhubarb. He tried the door but found it locked; knocked; and waited some time before it opened and disclosed a strongly built man of middle years with thick black hair neatly combed, an unshaven but ruddy and fresh face, and eyes that were taking him in completely while the mouth said “Good morning!” and the whole man waited.

  Harry returned the greeting and asked if he might have some beer.