The Cone Gatherers

by Robin Jenkins

  The forester smiled. ‘We all say things in anger that we regret afterwards.’

  ‘Then none of us deserves mercy.’

  The forester made no reply. There was a pause.

  Neil’s fist slackened on the seeds; he withdrew it from the bag.

  ‘If it would help,’ he said, ‘we could stay till the end of the week.’

  ‘But you don’t want to, Neil.’

  ‘We would do it.’

  ‘Thanks. Well, it might help. I could get Raeburn and Yuill to transfer their gear on Saturday, so that they could start gathering on Monday. But what if the lady tells me she’s sorry, what if she apologises, would you be willing to stay then?’

  ‘I mean no disrespect to you, Mr Tulloch,’ said Neil, ‘but it would not be an apology at all if she said it to you.’

  ‘You mean, she ought to say it to you?’

  Neil nodded.

  The forester reflected, but said nothing.

  Then they reached the larch tree with the knapsacks and a bag of cones lying at its foot. As the forester ran his fingers through the sticky golden cones, Neil shouted up to Calum, who quickly came down to join them, shy but pleased.

  ‘Hello, Calum,’ said the forester, noting how like a collier the climber was from the tree. If they were as black-faced yesterday in the beach hut, with their jackets so torn, perhaps there was justification for the lady’s astonishment; but none of course for her callousness.

  They found a sunny hollow sheltered from the breeze, and in it ate their sandwiches. Tits and chaffinches hopped near to beg, and even a few seagulls ventured from the loch in amongst the trees which they distrusted so much.

  The forester talked about his boyhood on his father’s croft; with his young brother, since killed in the war, he had climbed cliffs for kittiwakes’ eggs, brought in the cows for milking, gathered seaweed to spread on the field, and all summer worked at peats. The brothers listened in a silence deeper than respect or interest. Their own memories were stirred, filling Calum with delight and Neil with profound cleansing sorrow. The lady could have no place in these recollections: she had then been a girl at an expensive school, acquiring polish, accent, and poise suited to her station. Between her and the sharny-toed brier-ragged heather-nibbling boys had been no kinship: just as now there was none, she in her many-roomed mansion perplexed by duty, they in a sunny hollow in her wood, throwing scraps of bread to her birds.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In none of her many rooms that morning could Lady Runcie-Campbell find decision and rest; the one where she sought them most was Roderick’s.

  As soon as they had returned to the house after the storm, she had insisted he take a bath and go to bed. Later, sniffling herself from an incipient cold, she had carried up to him some hot soup. He had had almost to be bullied into taking it, and was so lack-lustre and dilatory she had pulled the spoon out of his hand and fed him, accusing him in a childish pique of being childish. Though she had taken his temperature and found it high, she had known it was not fever which had deprived him of his vitality and optimism: he was, she realised, bewitched; and by her. Shame over her treatment of the cone-gatherers had numbed in him the zest and courage which for the past two years she had watched growing slowly in him, like some rare, beautiful, and fragile flower. Yet no matter how she looked at it, whether from the point of view of conscientious parent or responsible landowner or practical Christian, she could not see how in the circumstances she had done wrong.

  This morning, after breakfast, she went up to him again, prepared to have that long-deferred quarrel on the subject of pity. He would be hurt by what she would have to say, but this mawkish debilitating stuff in his mind must be cut out.

  She found him astonishingly changed. No longer supine with his head dampening the pillow and his eyes dead on the ceiling, he was sitting up, with a smile secret but eager. His breakfast tray was on a table by his bed; he had eaten everything. Earlier he had been so wan and dejected that she had gone straight downstairs, still in her dressing-gown, and telephoned for the doctor. Now the latter seemed unnecessary. It did not seem likely that food could have achieved so great a change, especially in a boy whose asceticism had so often affronted and irritated his father. The cause then must surely be spiritual. For her own sake, as much as for his, she must find out what it was.

  At first, dissembling her relief at his recovery, she remained brisk, matter-of-fact, and cool.

  ‘I’ve sent for the doctor,’ she said.

  He smiled and nodded. ‘Sheila told me. There wasn’t any need. I’m fine, mother.’

  ‘You do look better, thank heaven,’ she said. ‘But it’ll do no harm to have you looked at. Last night you had quite a fever. This morning even you looked so lethargic. Now you’re as bright as ever. What’s come over you?’

  From his smile she was sure he was thinking that the doctor with his appliances would never find out.

  ‘Don’t be selfish,’ she said, smiling. ‘If you’ve found the secret of cheerfulness you can’t keep it to yourself. It’s especially precious these days. It wasn’t some potion that Mrs Morton put in your porridge?’

  He smiled and shook his head.

  She stood by the window, clutching the curtains and gazing out at the wood.

  ‘It’s sunny again,’ she said, ‘but breezy. I’m afraid the fine spell’s over. We can prepare for winter now, I suppose.’ She could not keep from sighing: the war itself was a long bitter winter, with spring not even promised. She thought she might never see her husband and brother again, alive.

  ‘Do you think it will rain?’ asked Roderick anxiously. She glanced up at the massive clouds.

  ‘Not today. Tomorrow perhaps.’ She looked again at the wood: soon it would be cold, dreary, and repelling; and in the spring, when it would begin again to shine and be hospitable, it had to be cut down. There were few sights on earth more desolating than a decimated wood, especially one familiar and beloved. But melancholy was defeatist.

  ‘I came up to talk to you about those men in the wood,’ she said, her voice stern.

  He glanced at her in surprise, but without huffishness.

  ‘I see, however, you seem to have thought it over.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘With a different conclusion, I hope?’

  The smile went from his face; he looked sad but tranquil.

  ‘You still think I did wrong?’ she cried.

  ‘I don’t want to answer, mother,’ he said.

  ‘I can see that. But if I ask a question I want an answer.’

  ‘We were wrong then.’

  ‘We? No, Roderick, you do not get out of it in that way. I was wrong, you mean. If it had been left to you, your mother and your sister would have had to shelter under trees or in a filthy cave while those ruffians enjoyed the shelter and warmth of our hut.’

  He was shaking his head.

  ‘There was room for us all, mother,’ he said, with a gentleness that almost insulted her into angry frustrated tears.

  ‘How dare you pronounce judgment upon me?’ she cried. ‘Let me tell you, Roderick, your sister has a far more intelligent and mature attitude towards people below us in the social scale. I agree we ought never to be arrogant and overbearing; common decency itself, apart from any higher consideration, would forbid that. But that is not to say we must regard everybody as our equal. Such hypocrisy seems to me as abhorrent as arrogance. Mr Sorn-Wilson has several times warned me you were shaping to be such a hypocrite; but of course I’ve noticed it myself. Your father often asks about it in his letters. These cone-gatherers, for instance. Obviously, in any way you like to look at them, they are our inferiors; they would be the first to admit it themselves; it is self-evident. It is our duty to find an attitude to them, and to all like them, which recognises that inferiority, but not offensively. The maintenance of society on a civilised basis depends upon us. One can become irresponsible and slovenly in personal relationships; yes, and cowardly to
o. You wished me to give them a lift in our car? Didn’t it occur to you that the offer might have seemed to them patronising condescension? Surely such an attitude must humiliate them more than one of frank intelligent superiority?’

  She paused, waiting for his callow hesitant refutations, to pounce on them and tear them savagely to pieces: thus the tigress waiting by the pool for the shy ineffectual beautiful deer.

  His answer took her unawares.

  ‘I don’t know, mother,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you?’ she cried. ‘You have no right any longer to such ignorance, Roderick. You are not an infant now, to whom the world is a fairy-tale. You are growing up in a world at war. How often has your father impressed on you the supreme importance of asserting your inherited position in that world? How often have I? Every single person of our class has, by precept and example. Yes, Roderick, ignorance can be both cowardly and treacherous. Do you not know then whether I did right or wrong by ordering your precious cone-gatherers out into the rain?’

  ‘They are not my cone-gatherers,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Oh, I think they are, Roderick. They are your toys.’

  Though quiet he was obviously angry.

  ‘They are not mine,’ he repeated.

  She misunderstood his anger. ‘Well, that’s something anyway,’ she said, with a forced laugh. She knew she ought now to end the conversation before she did harm. But she had not yet found the secret of his cheerfulness. Already his anger was past, and he was smiling again.

  ‘It is possible, I suppose,’ she said, ‘to renounce one’s privileges, rank, and money.’

  ‘Buddha did it,’ he said.

  His calmness, in uttering what seemed to her a grotesque irrelevance, caused her at first to stare and then laugh sarcastically.

  ‘How long ago was that?’ she asked.

  ‘Thousands of years.’

  ‘And ever since he has been squatting, in hundreds of absurd colossal statues, with a cynical smile.’

  His own smile was so far from cynicism she felt greatly moved. She could not bear it, and had to gaze out of the window.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind what to do about those two men,’ she said. ‘I’m going to do what your father would do. I’m going to send them away.’

  ‘Not today?’

  ‘The sooner the better. Their employer is coming here this afternoon, and I shall ask him to withdraw them. For me anyway the wood will feel healthier and look lovelier with them gone.’

  All he said was: ‘May I get up?’

  ‘Not till the doctor’s seen you.’

  ‘I feel all right, mother.’

  Paradoxically his apparent selfishness, his so casual dismissal of the cone-gatherers, brought uppermost in her mind her own guilt. Love for him sweetened it.

  ‘Thank God you do, darling,’ she said, going over to him. ‘And no thanks to me for coming here to thwart you and take away your confidence. Keep cheerful, please keep cheerful.’ She closed her eyes, with her cheek against his hair. ‘We are just not rich enough, darling,’ she murmured. ‘There’s a kind of innocence we can’t afford. That’s it, that’s it exactly.’

  Then, with her tears flowing, she rose and left the room.

  Roderick, smiling, knelt in his bed to gaze out of the window at the wood.

  The doctor was an energetic grey-haired man, whose own robustness was an advertisement for his profession. He practised in Inverard, a small town thirty miles away, so that his journey to Lendrick House and back would take over two hours. The request for his services by the local aristocracy was of course a potent testimonial, and he was besides sufficiently sincere to take as much pride and pleasure in alleviating the pains of a baronet’s son as of a ploughman’s; but he had also a native dourness which prevented him from feeling flattered at being asked to travel sixty miles along winding mountain roads to confirm a mother’s diagnosis that there was nothing the matter with her son.

  As gentleman and physician, he had to hide his dissatisfaction: the disguise he chose was over-confidence.

  ‘Absolutely nothing the matter, Lady Runcie-Campbell,’ he said, as she accompanied him downstairs. ‘In fact, the lad’s as fit as I’ve ever seen him.’

  ‘If you had seen him last night, doctor, you wouldn’t have said that. He was so feeble and listless.’

  ‘Storms do that to some people,’ he said. ‘They seem to empty them of strength.’

  ‘It was more than that. His recovery struck me this morning as nothing short of miraculous.’

  He smiled indulgently at this typically maternal exaggeration. On the point of remarking that medical science didn’t accept such miracles, he decided it would be tactless. The lady was reputed to be religious, which in his experience was extraordinary amongst the gentry. He thought that she herself was more in need of medical attention. She seemed thinner, and her beautiful face, once her fortune, so it had been maliciously said, was now considerably spent; her nose, for instance, was reddened with too frequent silken wiping. Her hair, reminding him of the autumnal scenes he had motored through, had the ashes of winter in it. Without doubt the war was no respecter of persons. The baronet and the farm-labourer were both mortal; their wives suffered the same sad forebodings, and would weep the same salt tears.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of sending him to school again, doctor,’ she said. ‘In a fortnight’s time his sister is returning to hers, and I thought it might be a good time to try him again. There’s so much he misses through not being at school. For one thing,’ she added, with a laugh he didn’t quite understand, ‘he wouldn’t be able to go off by himself, and brood, and hatch up absurd ideas. Last Sunday, for instance, he put us all into a panic by being away for hours. When I asked him where he had been, he told me, in all sincerity; “On a pilgrimage.” Now, doctor, do you go on a pilgrimage to seals?’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Well, a boy’s imagination is often very intense,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Do you consider he’s physically fit to return to school?’ she asked.

  The doctor gazed out at the wide lawn, with the great wood beyond: these represented the garden of this large house, and it of course was home for the people who lived in it. Perhaps, he thought, his own six-roomed villa with its quarter acre was cosier, securer, and more fertile in such human values as parental love and filial trust. One of the most heart-warming sights in his own life was that of his two boys’ return each day from the local Academy, in their red blazers and caps.

  ‘Physically, yes,’ he murmured. ‘But it may be that the improvement in his health was caused by his being here at home. Not every lad is suited to the rough-and-tumble of public school life, I suppose. My advice of course must be based on theory. I never was at a public school myself. The Scots tradition of education has always linked the school with home.’

  She said nothing, but he could see she was not pleased at his insinuation that by sending their children to public schools the Scots gentry were aping a foreign tradition.

  ‘He would be among his equals,’ she said at last, and surprised him by the peculiar spurt of emphasis she put into the last word. ‘I shall think it over. It is his father’s wish, naturally.’

  He did not ask if it was also the boy’s wish.

  About lunch-time she telephoned Duror’s house. His cooperation might be necessary in ensuring that the cone-gatherers left as she had decided, but she felt reluctant to see or speak to him. His performance during her visit to his wife still perturbed her: it was indeed a part of the harassing and darkening of her mind: first, the war, and her husband’s and brother’s safety; then Roderick’s fabulous innocence; then these cone-gatherers, one so deformed and so inhuman as if to test her own humanity; and now this sinister transformation in Duror, itself an episode from a macabre fairy-tale, suddenly in the wood the straight stalwart immaculate ash tree turning to a squat warty bush swarming with worms. It might be, she thought, that just as in the war so many lives and properties had to be destroye
d to make hope struggle afresh in the wilderness, so the wood itself had to be cleared away, a necessary sacrifice. Over the raw stumps and the resurgence of weeds would be seen, summer and winter, the wide austere loch. Every turning towards it would for a long time be like a revelation.

  Mrs Lochie answered the telephone. She sounded more dismal and lachrymose than ever; indeed, she had hardly spoken three words before she broke into polite little sobs.

  Lady Runcie-Campbell was indignant. It must be, she decided, a plebeian weakness, to grieve in public and whine for sympathy; people of her class suffered too, but privately and with dignity.

  ‘What is the matter, Mrs Lochie?’ she demanded. ‘All I want you to do is to tell Duror I want to see him at half-past two. Is he at home?’

  ‘Yes, my lady. Will you speak to him, please?’ That was a shriek of beseeching, rather than humble inquiry.

  ‘No, it’s not necessary. Just you tell him. Half-past two, in the office here. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, my lady.’

  She was about to put down the telephone when it occurred to her that the weeping must really be an appeal for help and comfort. She was the mistress of this estate: if respect and honour were due to her on that account, they must be earned; the accidental possession of greater material wealth was not sufficient. Indeed, by heeding such an appeal, and by responding to it even in the midst of her own troubles, she would best demonstrate what she had failed to describe to Roderick.

  She softened her voice. ‘You seem upset, Mrs Lochie. Is it because of your poor daughter?’

  ‘It’s always that, my lady. But it’s John now.’

  ‘John?’ For a moment Lady Runcie-Campbell forgot this was Duror’s first name.

  ‘Aye. He was always clean-mouthed. I’ll say that for him. But this morning he came in with a doll.’