The Silver Darlings (63 page)

The coming of the four seamen, from the continent
beyond
, had a quickening on the lives of these folk as they gathered in the evening, anxious above all things in the world for news, their faces bright and expectant. They were greatly astonished at the amount of money that was being made at the East Coast fishings, and questioned Henry closely, and shook their heads in wonder. There was a man up from South Uist on a visit to his mother’s sister. “Myself,” said this man, “I come from Lock Skiport, and the day before I left, and it’s no lie, the water was white, as if you were beating it with thongs, and that from the playing of the herring.” Henry’s eyes gleamed as he asked, “What did you do?” The man explained how they had shoaled many on the shore with bits of nets and blankets and other gear as the tide ebbed. Henry nodded twice as he looked at his crew with his slow, ironic smile. “What did you call the place?” he asked. “Loch Skiport,” answered the man. Far in the years to come, with his son setting out to fish for a curer in Loch Skiport, Henry was to remember how and where he had first heard that name. But now he thought of Bain and how he would move the fish-curers. The West was waiting.

That they were good seamen, Henry knew, for he had already found out that boats ran dried cod and ling to Greenock and Glasgow, and Callum had discovered from the women that young bustling men would come from Lochmaddy and buy up their eggs at twopence a dozen and send them to the same markets, “In what size of boat?” “There will be one or two fully seventeen feet.” “In that case,” said Henry, “we have little to tell you of seamanship.”

But they would not listen to this, and when these matters had been discussed back and fore, it came about that, to entertain the company, Finn had to start on the story of their first trip to the West.

By this time, Finn had gathered a few special sea names
and terms, mostly Viking, used by the people, and he
introduced
them skilfully. He had, too, the experience of having told his story to seamen in Helmsdale, and in the
simplicity
of his recital he smiled when the danger was at its worst and became grave when about to include Rob or Callum in a jest that made the company cry out with
pleasure
. His reward came when he saw Rob’s mouth fallen slightly adrift and his eyes set in solemn wonder.

Before Finn went to sleep that night on his heather bed, old Finn-son-of-Angus said to him: “You told the story well. You brought us into the far deeps of the sea and we were lost with you in the Beyond where no land is, only wind and wave and the howling of the darkness. You kept us in suspense on the cliffs, and you had some art in the way you referred to our familiars of the other world before you told of the figure of the man you felt by the little stone house. There you saw no-one and you were anxious to make this clear, smiling at your fancy. It was well enough done. It was all well done. It was done, too, with the humour that is the play of drift on the wave. And you were modest. Yet—all that is only a little—you had something more, my hero, something you will not know—until you look at it through your eyes, when they are old as mine.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Finn.

But the old man shook his head and turned away. “Go to your sleep, my boy. Many a one may come,” he
muttered
to himself, “in the guise of the stranger.”

The third night started as a merry night, for it looked like their last. Finn was now deeply interested in the
customs
and ways of the people, for the more he knew of them the more he seemed to discover what had long lain hidden in himself; and that not seriously, but with a humour prompting his eyes to glisten or his mouth to laugh. This was the night that revelation came upon him, and as with most men who are strongly male in themselves, it came through a woman.

It started with dancing. Hector, who had the great fund of romance stories, was ever curious to compare one place with another and to gather new material where he could. “Are you telling me that?” he would ask, with a deceptive air of wonder. “Now what …” And so in a moment he was at the heart of what he was after, his eyes watching.

When the talk had gone a little way on dancing, he asked, “Is that all you have? Do you mean to tell me you know nothing of the real ancient dances like, say, The Fight of the Cocks?”

“No,” answered Finn. “What’s that?”

“Do you know the dance called The Waddling of the Ducks?”

“No.”

“Nor The Reeling of the Blackcocks?”

“No,” answered Finn, laughing.

“Ah, well, you’ll know The Old Wife of the
Mill-dust
?”

“No.”

“Well, well. It’s little of the meaning of dancing you do know.” He shook his head. “Our world is passing away. It is going from before us. And soon, maybe, here itself all you will have will be an old man telling of the dances he once saw in his youth that are now no more. And already—already, my grief!—there are places in these islands where dancing of any kind is stopped by the new ministers. A terrible blight is coming upon the happiness of the human heart and upon the happiness of the world. Ai, ai, and you tell me you have never even seen The Old Wife of the Mill-dust?”

“No, but I would give anything to see it,” said Finn.

Hector cocked his eye at a young woman, and in a few moments she took the floor, followed by a tall fellow who was handed a short stick. She was fair and he was dark, and Hector tuned his fiddle and smothered the tail-piece in his bushy, grey beard.

Finn never before or after saw any dance like it. The
dancers faced each other, struck attitudes and gestured, with vigour and decision, speaking at each other through their bodies and arms, interjecting with the stamp of a foot, parting, quick-stepping, exchanging places, the man swinging his stick over his own head, over her head, until in the climax of that first part he brought the stick down with skilful lightness and stretched her dead at his feet.

His sorrow now when he sees what he has done! Round her he dances, gesticulating wildly, sadly. He looks upon her; gets down on a knee. He lifts her limp left hand and stares into its palm. He breathes on the palm and touches it with the stick. At once the hand comes alive. The hand goes up and down, to left and right, up and down, to left and right, keeping time to a music as old as the dance. With this sign of life the man is delighted, and dances round the figure in joy. Now for the right hand … the right foot … and now all four limbs are active. But the body—the body remains dead. Down over it the man kneels, and breathes the breath of life into its mouth and touches the heart with the druid’s wand. Whereupon the woman leaps to her feet, and together they dance as in the first part, with vigorous happiness.

After that, the woman who next moved Finn was a girl of no more than nineteen, though she looked older because of the strong bone in her face. From the very beginning Finn had thought the face unusual and even remarkable, though he had not been particularly attracted by it. She had a pointed chin, high cheek-bones, a broad, rather low,
forehead
, and eyes large and set wide apart. Her hair had the blackness of peat in the moss, but her eyes were blue, with black lashes. There was at once something a little ungainly about her and at the same time very old, archaic, a dark one out of the old race. Though usually those of this race are noticeably small in stature, and dark-eyed, Matili Maccuithean was, in height, above the average of the rest
of the girls and rather slower in her movements. She was a grand-daughter of Black John.

From actual dancing the talk had turned to fairy-dancing, and Rob had upheld the honour of the strangers with an extremely circumstantial story about the origin of the little people themselves, told to him, he said, by his mother’s mother, who had heard it from her mother’s mother in a little hollow of ground on a summer’s day, and the hollow is there yet, and that wasn’t yesterday. But if Rob knew a thing or two about fairies, it was nothing to what they knew in North Uist, where there was one family itself called Black-fairy. And for all they knew about fairies, it was little enough compared with what the fairies
themselves
would be up to, especially when it came to stealing human children.

There was a little old woman, Hector’s sister, who put a quickening down Finn’s spine by introducing into her story the golden butterfly that is man’s soul. “And if you catch that butterfly and kill it you kill the soul in its flight. Like God’s fool, it flits …”

Finn listened, fascinated, and when they turned to Matili and asked her to give them a song, he gazed at the girl with such concentration that he saw for the first time the antique beauty of her features. When she had sung two notes, all his skin ran cold.

The song was a lullaby that illustrated in its own way the subject matter under discussion. But for Finn it was charged with a power that held his quivering body in its invisible hand. It was a lullaby his mother had sung to him on the green brae with its bushes and birds above the little stream in the time of the herding.

Matili sang it as if the song were evolving itself,
effortlessly
, out of a memory so old that it was quiet with
contemplation
. The girl’s voice had in it the innocent note of the child, and surrounding it the primordial innocence of the mother.

For Finn the evocation of his mother was so strong that
he had the extraordinary sensation of smelling her breast and breath as a child, and in the same moment of
recognizing
her withdrawn destiny, without losing his own identity as the grown man.

At first it was the mother and child in communion, but, as the rhythm went on, the mother’s face lifted from her child and stared away over the green braes and over the burn. And the child felt this withdrawnness in the mother and felt it too in himself, yet could neither protest nor move, held by the song’s intangible loveliness with the half-terrifying, sweet sadness at its core. And the child was apart from the mother, and the mother from the child, though he was sitting on her lap, close, close to her.

The effect upon Finn was deep and self-revealing. Love for his mother cried out in him, the love that now
understood
the withdrawn fatality of the mother. He had been blind, blind. The awful inexorable simplicity of the singing became too much to bear. He tried to put it from him, not to listen; he moved his head and pressed his right heel into the clay floor, so that his body be kept within control. He wanted to cry out, for the relief of the cry. They were all so still, listening to the girl singing the old lullaby of the mother whose child was stolen by the fairies:

Finn shook his head with a strained smile when they asked him to sing. “The only one who sings here,” he said, ‘is Rob.”

“That’s what they said the last time we were in a house,” Rob explained sarcastically. “But when I did sing a stave or two—the trouble then was getting them to stop. No, no. It’s not me that will be taken in again.”

This drew the whole house upon him and it was a packed house. Rob was at last clearing his throat, when he saw Callum wink to Finn. “Look at him winking. If he can wink he can sing.” He shut his mouth.

For some reason this set up a wave and a roar of mirth, and the girls in particular would not leave Rob alone.

Finally he gave in. “Well, if I give you a verse it is on the one understanding: that we haven’t to listen to them for the rest of the night, because if so I’m going home now.”

Rob had a harsh, tuneless voice, concerned with the story in the words rather than the music. As he started to sing, he stared straight before him, and did not break the look until he had finished. When the girls joined in the chorus
he was so inspired that at the next verse he went off the key and his voice cracked, but back he came and found it again. Before the compliments that fell on him, he scratched his beard. “Och, it’s not often I do much at it,” he said negligently,

“But when you do you make up for it,” observed Finn, who seemed extravagantly happy.

So nothing would do but that Finn himself must sing.

“Well, with Rob’s permission——”

Rob groaned. “Didn’t I tell you? I’m off home.”

The girls pressed down his shoulders as he made to get up.

“This”, said Finn, “is a song I heard from a woman in my native county of Caithness, and the name of it is: As the Rose Grows Merry in Time.”

“Say that again,” requested Black John, looking at Finn.

“As the rose grows merry in time,” repeated Finn, smiling.

Black John savoured the words in sound and meaning. Finn saw that the house was caught by the surprise that the words had first roused in himself. The bright eyes of old Finn-son-of-Angus were on him.