The Silver Darlings (26 page)

Finn was deeply interested, and here by the sea Roddie moved in his own element, assured and companionable. The land, with its plague, seemed far removed from the translucent green combers that broke in dazzling foam. The very smell of the sea, through the tangle, was tonic and clean.

Mr. Hendry appeared and began talking to Roddie and other fishermen, who leisurely gathered around. Very soon Finn found that the inn-keeper was disturbed. “The fishing must be kept going, men, whatever happens. Even if some of the south boats have gone home. And the healthiest place you can work on is the sea. You know that. Wick is going ahead, and the trouble is far worse down there than here….”

Finn gazed at the fat, broad, earnest face with the small eyes sharp and full of concern.

“I have my commitments, but it’s in your own interests more than mine to keep Dunster’s reputation to the fore. You know that.”

“I don’t think that any boat, unless the trouble touches the crew, will stop fishing,” said Roddie. “I think you can rely on that,”

How quiet Roddie’s voice was compared with the
urgency
and concern in the voice of the inn-keeper! thought Finn, instinctively aligning himself with the silent
fishermen
.

When the talk was over and Mr. Hendry seemed
reassured
, Finn was struck by a remark one of the older men let drop to a friend as they were walking away: “He would be wondering why we didn’t go to sea last night.” The tone was level, without any emphasis, but its dryness made Finn’s eyes gleam with understanding.

That evening Finn felt anxious when his mother did not seem to see Roddie and himself by the edge of the wood. They waited a long time, and then Roddie said, “She must have given us up.”

The shadows were heavy in the wood as they silently went along its steep side and came above the pool where the salmon lay. Their idea was to go with a cut of the fish and cry Catrine’s name outside the window. When they had made certain, after a quarter of an hour, that no human being could command the pool during the two or three minutes Roddie would be in action, Finn kept watch while Roddie stepped lightly down to the edge of the water. He had a few square yards of old net, and now, with the help of a stick, spread it out over the water and let it slowly sink. He could not see the fish from this side, as it lay against an under-water ledge whose face was turned from him. When the net touched the bottom of the pool, Roddie withdrew his stick and, reaching far out, the water past his knees, gave it a sharp, downward thrust. At once there was
turmoil
,
and Finn saw the flashing silver of the salmon as it bent and heaved to clear itself of the net that ever more maddeningly enmeshed it. It took less than two minutes for Roddie to get his hands on the turmoil. Then he walked out of the pool, with the doubling salmon clasped in his arms, and up into the trees.

Presently Finn led the way back through the wood
towards
the top corner. The head and gut they buried in a rabbit’s burrow, and then Roddie cut the fish in two. “We’ll take the tail piece,” he whispered; “it’s supposed to be more delicate.” Hiding both parts for the moment in a small thicket of hazel, they emerged from the wood, full of the pleasantest excitement from the short adventure.

Finn could not see his mother about the house, though now there was a single white cloth on the washing-line near the gable-end, so she must have been out since they went for the salmon. He turned to Roddie to mention this, but did not speak. He had seen that concentrated light in Roddie’s eyes once or twice, but never the face turned to stone. Finn felt the chill of the face freezing the life out of his heart.

“Kirsty has the plague,” said Roddie. “That’s the sign.”

His lips scarcely moved. No expression at all appeared on his face as he gazed steadily at the fatal white signal agreed upon between Catrine and himself.

Finn had trouble with his breathing and a sickening sensation beset him internally. Upon the world fell a
terrible
stillness.

“So it’s come,” said Roddie, and the breath issued from between his narrowed lips in a cold hiss. He looked down to the burn, to the moor, and back to the house, with its death-white pennant. There was no dismay in the face; only the coldness of stone, a coldness of clear anger that would take the utmost danger in life and break it, if only the hands could get a grip.

“Well, Finn, boy,” he said gently, “we have to face this now.” He did not look at Finn, because he was not yet
thinking about him. “Come,” he added. “We’ll go over with the fish.”

At once he went into the wood, and returned with the tail-piece under his jersey. Finn followed him down to the burn and up the slope to within fifty yards of the house. “You stay here,” commanded Roddie, and he went past the gable-end and up to the kitchen window. Finn heard his voice, saw him lay the tail of the fish on the stone sill, and stand back from the house as if he had been so ordered. His mother came to the door and presently leaned outward and saw Finn standing down below the house. She waved to him, with the quick waggle of the hand she used when she was gay. He could see the smile on her pale face. And at that, the strange unreality that had come upon him,
behind
the sickening, tremulous feeling and the world’s
stillness
, gave way, and he clenched his teeth. His mother, his indomitable mother, waving from the door of death. It was like her.

He kicked the sod idly with his toes, glanced up at them again, and turned away. Though his emotion would have prevented his speaking naturally to his mother, in any case, yet he felt outcast, cut away from them, and somewhere deep in him did not resent this so much as feel futile in himself and therefore empty and forlorn. After all, it was his own mother. Why must he be beyond even what they were saying?

He moved away a step or two, and when he heard Roddie coming did not turn round, though he knew his mother was waiting to wave to him. He wanted to be alone, not to speak to Roddie.

“She’s got it all right,” said Roddie, lost in himself.

If I don’t turn this second, Finn thought, we’ll be out of sight. But he could not turn, and the world went desolate.

At the burn, Roddie stopped. “I’m going to get some more of that stuff from Hector Bethune. Will you go up and tell them at home, or would you like to come with me?”

“I’ll go up,” said Finn.

“That would be better. I’ll have to knock him out of bed. And then …” He seemed to be thinking at a distance. “I won’t be long,” he said all at once and set off. There never seemed to be much warm emotion in Roddie. A stone face with narrowed deadly eyes and the voice talking in quiet, friendly tones.

As he went up by the wood he looked across at his home, and its still desolation stopped his feet. The drooping white cloth glowed like a white fungus in the deepening gloom. The house lay to the gentle slope, with curved back like a patient, doomed animal.

Finn did not feel much now. His brain was numb. Indeed, for one moment, he had a sensation of being detached from it all, and of being astonished in a mild way, almost ashamed, that it did not affect him more. His mother came round the corner of the house carrying a bucket. With the graip she dug a hole in the manure heap, and there buried whatever was in the bucket.

As she stood back from the manure heap, she gazed in his direction. He waved an arm. She turned away without any response. He knew she could not have seen him against the dark edge of the wood, yet the disappointment made him more forlorn than ever.

When he told Roddie’s father and mother the news they stood in an appalled silence, as if an invisible hand had come down from the air upon them.

“Where’s Roddie?” asked the mother in a small voice.

“He’s gone to Hector Bethune. I heard at the shore
today
,” he added, “that a new doctor has come into the county. He’s an expert on the trouble. I’m walking now to Watten to see if I can find him.”

“To Watten! Now?” asked the old man. It was well over twenty miles away.

“Yes,” said Finn. “It’s the new half of the moon.” He lifted his round bonnet, shy of meeting their faces, and was turning to the door before they could find words to stop him.

When, at last, they saw not merely that he was bent on going but that he could not rest in the house even until the dawn, the woman started buttering oatcakes and sticking them together. The boy was touched by fate. “What if he’s not at Watten?”

“I’ll find him,” replied Finn simply, “wherever he is.”

The eyes glimmered and the bearded head nodded. As Finn took the food, the old woman’s hands came on his shoulders in blessing. She could hardly speak.

“May God guide your feet,” said Roddie’s father from the peat-stack, as Finn took to the moor with the night coming down.

CHAPTER XI

CATRINE AND KIRSTY

C
atrine stood by the small window looking out upon the land under the half-moon. It was spectral and very quiet, and when she felt that figures might appear there, she turned to the fire. But the window
remained
like a face in her mind, and with a dragging
reluctance
she got up and covered it.

She was very tired, and instead of sitting by the fire, this time she went and lay on her bed. Early, acute terrors of death did not trouble her so much now. When she had got over their attacks, a quietness had descended. For she could never desert Kirsty, not though the love of life sang in each vein and drew her—drew her—to sunlight, to life on the earth, the green earth, to life on quick feet. She loved life. She had always loved it. And only now did she see how lovely a thing it was.

In the quietism there was this strange twilight mood of acceptance, in which she now no longer thought of her own physical death, but of the spirit of death itself, spectral under the moon.

Like all of her generation, she never had any doubts of the existence of God, and the imagination that was
strengthened
in the stories of the ceilidh-house found little
difficulty
in seeing the figure of Christ as a child in a manger or as a grown man walking down by a ripe cornfield. The eastern imagery of cornfield and green pasture and still waters was their own imagery, and the desert was the waste of moor turned hot and arid, hot as it often was under
a blazing July sun, when the shadow of trees or a rock in a little strath drew cattle with switching tails to its shelter and a human being to pleasant ease on his back.

But religion for the young and healthy was beyond life, beyond the dark instincts, beyond even the superstitions and wild irrational fears that were in such mysterious fashion part of the core and quick of life. Religion was for death, for the unknown hereafter, and paradise a perpetual Sunday school smothering the quick laughter, the gay wonder of human love—should one ever attain paradise by avoiding the brimstone loch of hell. Better not to think about it, to keep it away, and meantime to have life.

And meantime, too, whatever might happen at an
infinitely
remote Resurrection, ghosts walked. Ghosts,
apparitions
, spirits of the dead. Men like Sandy Ware said they were evil spirits, phantoms from unholy regions, and if a man stood his ground before them, and called upon his Maker, they would disappear.

Had Sandy Ware ever met—the ghost of love?

Catrine stirred on her bed. Tormad had come near to her again those last few days.

Was this because, in her weariness, the urgency of her flesh had died down and her spirit, purified to lightness for long moments, could wander the woods and green
river-flats
of Kildonan, and out and in the small cabin in Dale where Tormad and herself had lived on the edge of want that was poverty, but not poverty of life? She loved the thick hair on his black head and the utter generosity of his nature. She felt him with her hands, her fingers going through his hair, sometimes gripping it and hanging on until he yelled and threatened her and they rolled and fought in an ecstasy of living.

Tormad was strong and instinctive, with the moods and graces of the instincts.

Roddie was strong and reasonable.

Tormad was one she had had to deal with, as she often had had to deal with little Finn.

Roddie was like a pillar that she herself could lean against.

More than once she had had an almost overpowering desire to let Roddie take her and so find peace for herself and her body inside the circle of his strength. She could have wished him to break through the barrier between them, even while her face showed how inviolable the barrier must remain. The only thing that kept Roddie back was the thought that her husband might be alive. That was the barrier which Roddie would not break through. And when she saw it breaking down in his eyes, she could restore it with a look.

Yet this did not make the matter clear in itself. She had never, for example, told Roddie the story of Tormad’s ghostly appearance to her and her own certainty of his death. Why?

She was weak. She was terribly weak. She feared. She did not know what she wanted. Supposing it had been certified that Tormad was dead, and Roddie then had taken action into his own hands, would she have let him crash through the barrier of strange reluctance? She knew she could no more have stopped him than have stopped fate.

Would she have desired it? Yes, often, madly … yes … she didn’t know.

And now it didn’t matter. It was better, indeed, to have the pattern of her past life clear and simple. And that excitement and loveliness of living with Tormad could never have come again. In the ordinary workaday life, with its drudgeries and dependence and hours of hidden misery, here in another woman’s home, that early life had often seemed remote and insubstantial. But now it was coming back again, it was stealing in upon her with the quietness of sleep that carries the waking thought into the more vivid dream.

She heard the tapping and wondered where she was; then she hurried into Kirsty’s room. The dawn was coming
and in its faint light she saw the ghastly pallor of the rigid face. Death, she thought, and when her quick, whispered appeals were unanswered, her heart stood heavily in her breast.

“Were you asleep?” The voice was a thick whisper but the opening eyes glittered in concentration.

“Yes,” muttered Catrine, overwhelmed with shame. “I lay down for a minute. Are the pains easier?”

Kirsty’s acute attack of what was locally called “the dysentery” and recognized as the onset of “the plague”, had been accompanied by an intense nausea and retching. As Kirsty’s mouth yawed open in a wild choking effort at vomit which would not come, her abdominal muscles squirmed and griped in cramping pains. A touch of
flatulence
added to her agony. She complained of a fixed
burning
pain in her stomach and a desperate thirst. Catrine had bathed her feet in hot sea-water, sea-water that Roddie had brought in a bucket, and given her cold water with a little whisky to drink, all on the advice of Hector Bethune.

But the taste of the whisky, Kirsty bitterly complained, only increased her nausea and turned her tongue cold. She could not go to bed because of the almost incessant
diarrhœa
. But at last her exhaustion became such that Catrine had had to help her off the floor and into bed.

Now, as her hand came on the bedclothes to smooth them under Kirsty’s chin, she found they were wet. Kirsty had been vomiting; and as she glanced at the watching eyes, Catrine seemed to see in them a cold malevolence. She knew how Kirsty loathed this personal uncleanliness, this loss of control. All at once new spasms started. The eyes shut and the body heaved and moaned.

In the use of her capable hands, Catrine regained her assurance. The full kettle was for ever simmering on the fire. She removed the soiled gown and special bed-cloth and washed Kirsty’s mouth and body tenderly but firmly, then happed her warmly and hurried out to bury the
bed-cloth
. The gown she stuffed into a tub of water, astringent
from a decoction of roots of the tormentil, which Hector Bethune sometimes used for tanning leather.

While outside, she also sluiced her face and nostrils and hands. Hector had said she should do this always after handling the afflicted body. He had also said that she would do herself no harm by taking a good deep breath of peat smoke, for it might help her to cough up the beginnings of infection.

As the acrid smoke caught her nostrils and throat, she coughed and spat into the fire and felt the better for it. In front of trouble requiring action, she had a native poise and ability.

When she had heated a bowl of milk, she poured a glass of whisky into it, and went into Kirsty’s room. “Now, here you are. You’ll take this.” Her manner was cheerful.

Kirsty ignored her.

“Come away, Kirsty. You must keep your strength up. Come!” She put her arm round Kirsty’s shoulders, but they remained rigid against her.

“Leave me,” said Kirsty. “I’m dying.” The tone was cold and repellent, the face a saturnine mask.

“But you must take something,” Catrine wheedled her. “It’s your only chance of getting well.”

“There is no chance.”

“But take it, to please me. Do. Please, Kirsty.”

Kirsty now turned her eyes upon Catrine and it looked as if hatred burned in their depths. “I order you,” she
muttered
, “to leave my house this instant.” The difficulty she had with her articulation gave the words an almost
malignant
deliberation.

“But I can’t leave you now.”

“Leave me,” croaked Kirsty, with such harsh anger that her jaw shook and champed. At once Catrine turned and left the room. She placed the bowl beside the fire, and stood still. There was no doubt about the reality of the hatred in Kirsty’s eyes. Catrine did not know what to think. It could hardly be because she had fallen asleep for an hour or so.
Suddenly she felt very tired, weary, disheartened. Kirsty had said she was dying—not as a dying person would say it—but as if it were her own business. They were perhaps both dying. But why this misery—this destroying hatred—now? “Leave my house.” Life gave little inward clutches at Catrine’s throat. It might yet be time. Leave the house—leave it—go over the hills, taking food with you—over the mountains….

She poured what was left of the milk in the pan into a clean bowl and added a thimbleful of whisky. As she raised the bowl her hands shook. She drank it slowly, sitting by the fire.

She could not feel any more, could not think. For two nights she had had no real sleep. The sunless dawn was grey silver over the still land. She listened to the singing of two larks. Only now and then did one become conscious of bird-singing, because the place was alive with larks, and for months the air was rarely free of their mounting wings. In the grey of a spring morning they became possessed and all the upper air was a quilted ecstasy. Robins and wrens had their clear, ringing songs, and chaffinch and greenfinch their quieter melodies. These smaller birds loved this land of braes and bushes, of sheltered crannies and ledges amid grey rocks.

The kitchen was a dim cage shut away from the silver morning, and because of the strange fatalism and loyalty bred from her race, Catrine listened to the singing, and its beauty killed urgency in her.

In her despondency, her body for a little grew light as a wraith, and she passed on blind feet through singing and silence, in a vague sad wonder at the ordering of the world. Then her body came back upon her as she sat before the fire, her cheeks weighing heavily into her palms and the flames wavering as if seen through running water. The milk made her heavy and sleepy and she wanted to slip off the stool on to the floor and not care if she never awoke.

Finn and the birds. He had always been so curious.
“What bird is that, Mama?” Eager eyes and quick feet, trying to follow the bird to its nest … Finn faded; her eyes closed; and she slept where she sat, her head jerking now and then.

At the first sound from Kirsty she was awake and
hurrying
; assisted her through her dreadful spasms; tidied bed and room, and presently returned with the bowl of milk. “Won’t you try a little?”

Kirsty did not answer. She had become dreadfully emaciated. Catrine remained beside her, silent.

“What you waiting for?” demanded Kirsty.

“Try a little,” pleaded Catrine, who naïvely felt that Kirsty must get strength from somewhere if she was going to live.

“Go ’way! Get out!” croaked Kirsty.

“Just a little.” Catrine put her arm round the stiff shoulders and used some strength. It was a dead heave, but she got the head up and held the bowl to the lips. After a stiff but indecisive moment, Kirsty sucked at the milk. “Again,” said Catrine. Kirsty sucked noisily a second time, and then fell back, spilling some milk on her breast. Catrine, laying the bowl down, wiped her breast. “Now you’ll be the better of that.” Kirsty ignored her, breathing stertorously. In a very short time Kirsty was violently sick and Catrine thought it was the end.

Kirsty recovered, glared at Catrine, and muttered
something
like, “Didn’t I tell you!”

So it went on at intervals all through the day. Catrine could see the flesh wasting away, the bones coming up, hour by hour.

In the early evening, Roddie was waiting below the byre and she told him that it must go one way or the other with Kirsty very soon. They arranged that if Kirsty died, she would put up the white signal.

“Are you doing what I told you and eating your food?”

“Yes,” said Catrine. “It gave me something to do. I have been careful.”

“That’s fine,” nodded Roddie. “You have a great spirit, Catrine. Keep it up! And look here—whenever this is over, we have a little place all for yourself for a few days. All ready.” He smiled in that diffident detached way that had always attracted her.