The Silver Darlings (33 page)

“Boys, we’re fairly shifting,” said Rob.

“We’ll be in the China trade next,” said Finn.

They chuckled away as they ate, casting amused glances at the young fellow.

“The China trade!” repeated Rob in his droll, solemn way, shaking his head. A speck of dry bread went down the wrong tube and he started coughing. Callum hit him a great whack between the shoulders.

“What’s the d-damn sense in hitting a fellow like that?”

“It cured you, though,” said Callum.

As they rounded Strathy Point, Roddie stood into the land a little. By the time they were approaching Roan Island off Tongue Bay they could see it was setting in for a dirty night. But again they held on, for the fine
seaway
they were making was exhilarating, and now it was going to be a final race with the falling night.

“It will be dark early,” said Henry, with a look at the low, ravelled sky.

“It will,” said Roddie, without any movement. He sat
upright, his eyes ahead, drawn in on himself, solid and emotionless. As if impelled by something in this carven attitude, Finn looked ahead, too, and again had the
impression
that the peak of the stem, in a dream of its own, was searching out the far distance with invisible eyes. All at once, he remembered the school-book illustration of the Viking longship, with its high carven head, and in that moment realized with a queer thrill of clear certainty the impulse that in the beginning moved those great wanderers of the sea to carve the lifting stem into a face.

Not a human face, but a boat’s face, for Finn felt how heedless the boat was of them in its concentrated onward drive.

As the Kyle of Tongue, with its islands and broken
shoreline
, its invitation to shelter beneath a glimpse of great mountains, fell behind them and the coast rose up into cliffs, the crew buttoned their heaviest clothes about them silently, for it was getting cold.

Soon the cliff wall reared to a great height and seemed to stretch before them into utmost night. Out to sea the leaden waves, running short, were white-capped and the smother of the horizon drew near. Under the shelter of the cliff-wall the deep water was smooth and black. Roddie kept far enough out for a steady wind, though sometimes it struck him in gusts, from the funneling of hill and cliff.

No one spoke. They could hear the gulls wailing in the cliffs. If the wind had been from an opposite direction what a smashing of seas would have been here! Finn would have liked to ask Roddie how far yet he thought Loch Eriboll was, but he could not. To ask any question would be
something
worse than futile now. Thus for the first time he got the feeling of the fatalism of the sea. They were committed.

And even when at last that great wall turned and fell inland, they all, by a natural instinct, waited for the skipper to speak. But Roddie was silent. His eyes shifting from feature to feature of the land, until he had fully opened the great sea inlet, when he said, “Yes, it’s Loch Eriboll.”

They all came alive, yet did not speak very much, for now started the exciting quest, that often grows tense,
of finding an anchorage in an unknown place where shoal or submerged rock may at any moment hold the keel to disaster.

When they had sailed for some four miles, they discerned a little bay in front of a river mouth. “It looks a likely enough place,” suggested Callum. The night was closing in now and visibility was poor. The rain was not heavy but it was penetrating and cold. An ugly raw night.

But Roddie, after a slow look around, said, “I think we should go farther in. If the wind changed we’d be open here to the full sea from the nor’ard.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Callum nodded.

So in they sailed between the land until they saw what looked like a small headland or island on their windward or port side. With canvas down, they finally nosed in on the oars, and in three fathoms of water Roddie let the anchor go.

It was the first strange landfall that any of them had ever made, and in the dark and the rain and the flurrying swish of the wind they felt relieved and quietly companionable.

The boat was open from stem to stern, without shelter or berth, but when they had eaten, they did what they could with the help of the sails and the soft bulk of the nets to get into a comfortable position for rest. Finn snuggled down, packed his hip bone, lifted the edge of the sail for breath, and prepared for sleep. But though he felt very tired, he was not sleepy. He was now more than ever pleased at having said things which had made the others laugh. His old shy self had opened, and to his surprise up the words had come. That one about the China trade. You could see it troubling Rob’s eyebrows for some time! The rain pattered on the stiff canvas over his ear. How fine it was to be voyaging! A soft warmth from fatigue suffused his whole body; and on a last consciousness of the cradling motion of the boat, he fell asleep. Once he awoke in the
thin light of the morning and, poking his head out, saw the humped forms of the other sleepers, the brown heath, the flanks of the barren peat land, the water, and the boat’s stem. It was still wet and blowing, and he pulled his head in. After that he felt sure he did not sleep, but only dozed, with long waking thoughts in which figures moved.

Often he was to awake like this in the future, and then, half-asleep, have a dream in which he could to some degree command the actions of the figures but more particularly his own actions.

Now he saw Una before him, and so clearly that the suppressed excitement, which always bothered him in her presence, got such a hold upon him that he could not think of one clever or cutting thing to say, for Jim Dewar, the new fish-curer’s clerk (Special’s nephew), was always
nosing
about Una’s section of the gutting station when the girls were there. A trash of a young fellow from Wick, with his fine English and fine boots, his laughs and little
readymade
jokes! But it was difficult to tell him off, for he would have been quite capable of laughing and saying, “You’re jealous!” And at least Finn knew, thank goodness, that he was not jealous. So when he saw Jim making headway in that direction he simply kept out of the way, indifferent. Once Una had flushed when he had come on them together and he had given what he had hoped was an amused,
sarcastic
smile. “Here, Finn!” Jim had called. But he had answered with a vague salute, hardly turning round: “I’m busy.” When he had reached the boat, however, his heart was knocking like a fist on a door. But he had done not badly. If only he could just cut them up with jocular
indifference
and move on, at some critical moment….

In his morning-dream, the desire to do this became so strong that he heard voices, and when he pulled back the sail and lifted his head, Roddie and Henry were talking together.

More than ever now was it strange to be upon the sea, and at the same time far in between the land. This had
struck him last night, but only as part of the background to the long day’s end. Here was a new world, with flat shores of peat bog rising on either hand to mountain ridges whose tops were blotted out in trailing mists. There was a chill in the wet wind that was yet soft on the cheeks, and beyond the rising ground on the off side the rain could be seen
like a white curtain, half transparent, moving, and yet
remaining
in the same place. Straight across the loch was a string of croft houses, and dotted here and there were single houses, but no smoke rose from any of them, for it was early yet. A curlew fluted overhead. Finn saw its brown body and long beak, and then along the shore ran the sharp cries of sea-birds whose names he did not know.

Rob poked his head up, blinking and saying, “Uh?” in a comical way, wondering for the moment where he was. The left side of his mouth twisted up, putting a wrinkle under the nostril. Hunching his shoulders, he blew a noisy breath through his lips. But Callum had to be gripped and shaken, when he said quickly, “What? Where? Eh?” and was ready for any attack.

The wind was not so strong as it had been last night. The rain had drawn the sting out of it, and even if, outside, they might have to take a reef in, they could not wish for it in a better airt. The only trouble was the poor visibility. A mile from shore and the land would be gone. But bright weather would now mean a shift of wind.

“We could go out and see what it’s like, anyway,”
suggested
Callum, who was fond of action.

“That’s what I think,” Roddie agreed. “We could
always
come back.”

The decision brightened them up, for to sit here in this weather with no shelter or warmth would become
wearisome
.

There was no hurry, however, because the tide was flowing, and their minds turned to hot food, which they hadn’t had since they left home. They brought the boat in near the shore and Finn leapt, followed by Callum and
Rob. If they couldn’t find any life in a croft house, they would be sure to find a dry peat and perhaps a dry stick, and Rob said that, given both and a tinder-box, he would raise a fire at the bottom of the sea—and they had the tinder-box.

About a mile from the boat, Rob fell foul of a collie dog while he was robbing a peat-stack. There was great
commotion
and much shouting, with Callum and Finn helpless in laughter at a little distance, when a man appeared in nothing but his shirt. High words from him, and Rob started talking in his solemn, natural way. Callum and Finn heard that they had been caught in a terrible storm last night after a long sea voyage and were all but
shipwrecked
, with two men left on board whose bowels were in a knot for lack of a drop of warm food. “I was
half-wondering
if I might take a peat from your stack, for we did not want to disturb decent folk at so early an hour, but your dog here….”

After that, it was the inside of the kitchen, with the wife behind the curtain across the bed, and three eager young faces staring at them from a low bed like what Finn
himself
had once slept in. Only everything here was poorer, more congested. His breeches on, the man was now on his knees blowing the kindling to a flame, when his wife called him. “If you take them out,” she said in a whisper they all heard, “I’ll get up and have the porridge ready in no time.”

Outside, as Rob was telling the man about the Wells of Swinna, Finn, in order to avoid the wink that he knew was waiting in Callum’s face, looked away and saw a boat
coming
clear of a long island in the middle of the loch, and heading for sea. She was plainly a fishing boat of their own class. At the same moment a piercing whistle reached them.

“It’s Roddie!” cried Finn. “He’ll be wanting to follow her,” and he pointed to the boat.

“We’ll maybe be back,” said Rob to the man.

They hurried over the bogs. Roddie was holding the shore with the boat-hook and they quickly got on board. Up went the sails, and when they had cleared their
anchorage
they could just see the boat a mile or more ahead. “She’s a Wick boat,” said Henry.

They lost her for a time, but got a glimpse of her again as the inlet opened. She was clearly holding to the west side and therefore, beyond any doubt, bound for
Stornoway
. The curtains of small white rain, that made the wind from the hills visible, were troublesome, but in a clear space they saw her standing towards a tall, dark rock (Dubh Sgeir) and, once round it, head for the west.

She was probably a foot or two longer than
Seafoam
,
and seemed certainly to have more canvas, for though Roddie gave his own boat all she could carry, he could not reduce the distance between them. For a long time, until they made Faraid Head, they lost her, and Finn called out
excitedly
when they picked her up again.

But Roddie was saying little. The wind was not anything like so strong as it had been last night. He did not care for the sky. His problem, without a compass in this thick weather, was complicated. He knew that the Butt of Lewis lay pretty nearly west of Cape Wrath, but the westerly stream would take them down the Minch. However, by going straight out past the Cape on the line of the land and then bearing a few points south, it would be impossible to miss the Long Island, the whole Outer Hebrides, which stretched in a line for over a hundred miles! And the
distance
to Stornoway was not so long as their yesterday’s trip.

All the same, his sight strained after the boat in front, and held her, off and on, until she reached the Cape.

Finn had often heard of Cape Wrath and now had plenty of time to gaze on its towering crags against which white sea-birds floated like blown feathers, their high cries
sounding
afar off and inward, in echo of rock and cavern. It
inspired
the crew with awe and held them to silence, and
none the less because the sea around it was to-day
comparatively
calm with, however, that ominous long swing and heave of the waters that broke in deep white. Peril was clearly held on uneasy rein, and the rock-brows stared over crested seas to an uttermost Arctic. Roddie alone paid no attention to the precipice and, holding his boat towards the Stag Rock, which was awash in the hollows of the swell, scanned the westerly sea. Then for the last time he caught a glimpse of that fugitive vessel which had led him on so elusively. To Roddie it seemed she was heading straight west. His instinct for a moment troubled him for it wanted to bring the
Seafoam
a few points to the south’ard. He had to make his decision now and he made it without consulting anyone. They saw him look at the sky, searching for the sun, for in between the showers its presence could be vaguely discerned in a dissipated silvery brightness. Then he settled to the tiller, his body upright, his eyes ahead, and followed where the vessel had disappeared. No-one spoke.

As Finn lay against the nets looking back, he watched the Cape slowly being shrouded, until insensibly it passed from his sight, and he shut his eyes and opened them to make sure that it really had vanished. As he gazed around, he could see nothing but tumbled waters over a radius of several miles, it seemed to him, for it was weather that lay on the sea rather than fog. “There’s weather on that sky” was the home saying.