The Silver Bough (25 page)

Sheena's reaction had something of this stillness when at story-time that evening he presented her with the Silver Bough. She could not move, and when her grandmother suggested that she should at least thank the gentleman she did not seem to hear and certainly did not speak. But the remarkable thing was that she apparently could not put a hand out, could not accept it; she even pushed herself away from it against her granny's breast; but her eyes never left it. He closed the case, laid it on her lap, ruffled her hair and with a laugh went out.

T
hat night he was feverish and troubled with fantastic bits of thought and dream. Then all grew quiet and he was aware that a little girl of Sheena's age was sitting on the mat in front of the fireplace. She had black hair, wore a diminutive white linen nightdress, and was completely preoccupied taking pebbles from a painted bowl and placing them on the floor before her. She leaned forward to the bowl and then back, and had the air of communing deeply with herself though she was quite silent. Somehow this preoccupation was more arresting than if she had been doing something full of mystery. He knew quite well nothing was going to happen. He knew it did not matter which pebbles she picked or how or where she arranged them on the floor. It was the concentration on the doing that was remarkable; it was beyond or behind everything that could happen; it was so complete that he himself with a feeling of infinite ease got lost in it, and his eyes moved behind the child—and saw the feet. They were the naked feet of a grown woman. Instantly his whole being was gripped, and he could not move his eyes from the feet. He knew he had to look up at the woman but he could not. In the struggle with himself, he awoke. The grey morning was in the window.

As he lay back, the thought came to him full-blown: why did they drive me out to the cairn—the cave—the storm with death in it? For it was no good denying that he had felt a compulsion to go out. He had been pushed out by the “influence” in the room.

He was wide awake now, with the sea-shiver tremulous in his skin. It was not a true fever. He knew that. And he argued that the “influence” could be only in his own mind. He made this quite clear to himself, but the logic of it could not blot out what had happened, could not destroy even now, at this moment, his apprehension of an invisible traffic between the long narrow box and the mat before the fireplace. His sensitivity became so acute that he got up, opened the door of his “dark room”, felt queerly vulnerable as he stretched up and unpinned an edge of the black cloth which covered the skylight, looked down at the long box and around, closed the door, and got back into bed.

Inside his own mind: that's where it all happened. But logic now became uncanny and asked him: why did your mind produce the feet?

He saw the feet again, solidly moulded, clear in every toenail. He had been at ease, lost in the child's concentration and then—the feet, the clutch of fear.

Logic began to mock him, shifted its footing with every Why? until it became more evasive, more mysterious, than the “influence”. He grew very hot, and when the blood-pulse became audible in his head took a sleeping tablet.

That afternoon he felt pleasantry languid and was amused at Mrs Cameron's whispered references to Sheena who was still silent but utterly wedded to the case that contained the Silver Bough. It was as if something incredible and august had happened to the little girl. From hidden corners came an occasional note or two and once the voice had sung the melody with a pure solemnity, but during her movements through the ordinary world the box was shut.

Anna had gone to Kinlochoscar, and Mrs Cameron was explaining with exaggerated humour that she dare not even make a call on a neighbour who was ill, when he offered to take Sheena out for a stroll.

To their astonishment, Sheena silently went to him and took his outstretched hand.

“Well! Well!” said her granny. “But surely you are not going to carry the box with you, too? It might fall down and break.”

Sheena looked at Mr Grant.

“It would be safer at home,” he said seriously. “I'll tell you what—we'll lock it up in my box and I'll carry the key away with me.”

“Nobody would ever get near it in that case,” said Mrs Cameron.

“And we'll go away to the little shore and gather some pretty shells for your housie.”

They had much conversation on the way, for Sheena, relieved of the sweet tyranny of possession yet with the knowledge that the Silver Bough would be safely waiting for her, came right out of herself. She expended so much energy that he saw her flagging going up the slope and asked if she would like a lift. She raised her arms so naturally that she finished her question with one arm round his neck. The warmth and smell of her little body, the whisk of her hair on his cheek, stirred him so profoundly that it stirred him to his brightest humour. He was sweating before he set her down and sat down himself, wiping his forehead and laughing. In time they reached the little shore, where she had been with her mother when Norman had come to them and Martin in the boat.

He was sitting on a low rock, watching her gathering shells, when he happened to look to sea and saw a rowboat coming down the coast towards Clachar. It was Martin and as he drew abreast Grant stood up and lifted an arm in salute. Martin lay on his oars for a moment or two then turned the bow to the rock, where Grant met him.

“Like some fish?”

“Nothing I like better. You've been lucky.”

“There's a good patch opposite the White Shore,” said Martin indifferently.

“Is that the white strip of beach you can see from the headland up there?”

“Yes. Can I heave them out for you or—I think I'll stretch my legs. You get cramped sitting.” He took the painter with him. Then he stood, arrested. A small face was showing beyond the low rock.

Grant, who had completely forgotten Sheena, said at random: “I'm acting nursemaid today!” He laughed. “This is Sheena. We're great friends.” Then he called, “It's all right, Sheena!” and went a couple of paces towards her. He did not know what to do, so went right up to Sheena. “How many shells have you got now?” He stooped; he inspected what she had gathered. “We'll need more yet for the path up to your housie.” But her attention was distracted; yet he refused to turn round; and did not do so until she had been persuaded to gather more. Martin was sitting on the rock, smoking a cigarette, his face impassive.

“I have come to the conclusion that seawater doesn't do anyone any harm,” said Grant as lightly as he could.

“Depends on how much you get of it,” said Martin.

“I got a fair amount,” said Grant, holding to his smiling air.

But Martin was watching the child. Grant looked into the boat. “What are the fish with the red spots?”

“Plaice.”

Grant studied the shape of the flounders and plaice carefully, the gear in the boat, a pipe, a tin of mussels, brown handlines on wooden frames. He suddenly remembered the boat that had been wrecked. This was a rougher, heavier one. “Was she a total wreck, the other boat?”

“She might mend, if we had the timber.”

Grant could not look at him, as though something destructive or savage had come into the very air. When he did look he was surprised to find that Martin's face was expressionless. His watching of Sheena was quite detached and Sheena at the moment was utterly absorbed with the mother-of-pearl shimmer in a shell. She was only a dozen yards away and they saw her try to scrape the shimmer off the shell with her fingernails but it wouldn't come. This was so wonderful that her face lit up with brightness and she cried, “Look!” and came with it at arm's length. Grant stepped down from the rock, took the shell and tried to wipe away the mother-of-pearl with the ball of his thumb; when he couldn't do it she jumped with excitement.

“It's a beauty,” he said, putting it back in her eager hands.

“I found it.” The tiny pink fingers with the transparent nails pressed against the mother-of pearl; the brightness shone again in her face as she looked quickly up—and saw Martin. The brightness faded and the small face grew solemn and thoughtful.

“Perhaps there are more,” suggested Grant.

Now she was looking up from under her brows and she came close to him; glanced at the shell and looked up again.

“Won't you try to find some more?” The position was becoming very awkward. “Run away now!” He turned to Martin, smiling. “We are keeping you.”

Martin's eyes came onto his face; they walked over it and stared in, without curiosity; they shifted to the child, held for a little while, then with a slow easy gesture he took a pull at his cigarette and said, “Well?”

Grant went along the rock to the boat. There was the question of how he should carry the fish. Martin went into the boat and threaded eight of them on a piece of string, shoving it under the covering flap of the gills and out through the mouth with a thumb.

“This is too many,” said Grant.

“Don't think you can carry them?”

“No, I mean—it's too much.”

“I could take you to the spit if you like.”

“That would be too kind, besides——”

“As you like.”

“Well——” Grant looked back and saw the child's face staring at them over the rock. “If you're sure it wouldn't be a trouble?”

Martin didn't trouble to reply.

Grant put the shells in his handkerchief and carried Sheena over the uneven rock. She was excited.

“You get in first,” said Martin; then he lifted Sheena in and Grant took her between his knees.

The sea was calm and the sun shining through a sky haze. Martin began to row away and Sheena's eyes grew round and looked at Martin and at the receding shore.

She could not understand Martin's face and turned sideways to it and Grant made conversation to her; but in a moment the lifting and falling of the boat over the slow impulse of the sea had her attention and she was looking at Martin again.

It was only then that Grant's inner acute embarrassment passed from him, for he realised that in Martin there was no awkwardness at all and had not been from the first moment. No abrupt talk, no stress, only that gaze in which there was neither curiosity nor indifference. He pulled a slow steady stroke; the seaman's oar. His face and shoulders had somehow an added distinction from the sea, an extra dimension of remoteness. When his eyes and Sheena's met, it was Sheena's that moved away. But he clearly did not frighten her. A slight wonder came upon her, a tendency to whisper: that was all; then she was looking at him again.

A small jetty pushed out from the northern shore of the spit and when Martin pulled alongside, Grant got out. Martin lifted Sheena out and then the fish.

“I can only thank you,” said Grant; but as they moved away Sheena looked back, dragging a little at his hand, but he did not care to turn round. He had thought he glimpsed Mrs Sidbury in the pine plantation, and as they went along the avenue through the trees he saw her in the distance. She was standing in the middle of the avenue looking half over her shoulder and turned to them as they came up.

“Mr Martin was good enough to give us a lift from the little shore,” he said, smiling, “
and
present us with these fish.”

She was pleased her brother had had such good sense and he presented Sheena. But Sheena had her right thumb at her mouth and curious eyes. Mrs Sidbury had to take her hand and shake it politely. Sheena drew back and regarded her with a child's complete gravity, and for the second time Grant saw Martin in her face. He spoke laughingly to Sheena, for he did not care to look at Mrs Sidbury.

As they went on again his embarrassment returned and he felt a fool. Mrs Sidbury might think he was introducing Sheena to the family. Good lord! he thought. He had caught the tail end of the piercing look she had given the child. He felt hot.

T
he whole involved business worried him. As if he had been a nursemaid arranging a sentimental tryst!

And Sheena, of course, was full of the boat and the sea and questions to her mother and granny in the cottage; so there was also their aspect of the affair and heaven alone knew what thoughts. He had better clear out for a few days—but he couldn't do that because of the famous crock of gold.

Late that evening he walked about his sitting room quietly, until the notion of escape produced its own plan. Each morning he would get his sandwiches and spend the day going far into the country behind Clachar; he would cover every glen and height in a vast arc from, say, the White Shore in the north to Kinlochoscar in the south.

With his large-scale map spread out on the table, he studied contour lines and place names. With compass and binoculars, he would get a sound general picture, and with luck he might happen on a particular find. As he narrowed the arc about Clachar, he had the notion that he was closing in on it, and this induced at once a feeling of clean satisfaction. It was the proper way to go about finding anything. These chance sallies in the night had always seemed futile, had gone against his scientific training.

As he folded the map, he felt freed and competent once more. By the time he had covered the ground the Colonel and his helpers would be back. They would quickly open up the whole cairn with a systematic perfection that did the heart good to think of, and when that was finished, he would have his field plan ready for a systematic search of the surrounding terrain.

The archaeologist stood back from the bog of human emotion. He smiled at the nursemaid. As he lay on his back before turning over to sleep, he even indulged in a proper romantic solution of what he now called “the Clachar complex”, whereby he would be the
deus ex machina
arranging the proper marriage to the tune of the Silver Bough, with Andie grinning over his present of the crock of gold, and Colonel Mackintosh, say, as best man! The irony was tonic and sent him to sleep, smiling.

He set off in the morning in excellent spirit and was hungry for his lunch by the time he had reached the White Shore. It was a fine sweep of pale brown sand and pulverised shell. The foreshore, grass-grown, was narrow; a thin waterfall dropped a sheer twenty feet, with black glistening rock behind and a boiling pot below. It was a beautiful spot, all light and lightness, and before eating he bathed and trotted along the edge of the tide and sat puffing until he dried. He could not put his clothes on. He went in again and came out. He caught a glimpse of the meaning of immortal youth and laughed. Tiny shivers rayed over his skin as, clothed once more, he munched; then the shivers left him and a divine glow took their place. Drowsy, he spread his legs and half-dreamed. Martin's face came before him.

There was nothing you could do with a face like that. It was death. Even the sea-fishing was automatic. In anger at its intrusion, he roused himself and got up, and soon the face, like any nightmare vision brought to the light, faded away.

That night he was full of a healthy tiredness and went to bed early. In his sleep, he saw Sheena sitting on the ground, exactly as he used to see the Neolithic child, but Sheena was making patterns with seashells on the black earth (black as peat dross). Sheena was utterly absorbed in what she was doing, but he could not enter into it because he was aware that someone was watching her. He knew this was not immediately dangerous to Sheena, but it so clutched him that he could hardly turn his head. When he did, he saw Martin squatting motionless on the ground, looking at the child. There was no expression on his face; it was bone-grey. His rebellious reaction to it awoke him. He had the feeling that he had cried out. Listening, he thought the house was preternaturally quiet. The grey half-light was in the window.

It was no good dodging this kind of infliction with sleeping tablets, he decided. He must face it out. The anger that had spired in him faded, and he was actually falling asleep when his mind came awake on a plain quiet as a meadow. In the same instant, without conscious change of scene, it was the jungle, and for a long time he followed Martin in his death-hunt through the jungle. Tree boles, undergrowth, festooning creepers, staring colours, the human body slipping round, vanishing; the mysteriousness of shapes, of patterns, and in the midst, stared at then suddenly seen, a face . . . . Sentries, men carrying buckets, smoke, sleeping bodies, shallow trenches, felled trees, rifle barrels . . . .

And now he is watching Martin; like an invisible eye he is following behind him, aware not only of what Martin is doing but why he is doing it. Martin is light on his feet, noiseless as a shadow, remorseless. Not hate, or other hot emotion in Martin's mind, simply a concentration so intense that it goes out from him to its object, its victim. A thought transference that the victim feels. It compels . . . .

Grant stirred, and when the vision faded he wondered just how much it meant. Psychic research; telepathy; the sending of a message from one mind to another at a distance. Hypnotism, with the compulsive action of one mind on another. Those authentic stories of friends of his, concerning African medicine men, Indians, whose power of the eye . . . .

Plainly the effect on Martin of the unthinkably abominable destruction of the white woman had been abnormal; it must have acted like some kind of mental catalyst before it could have produced that intense singleness of intention, that gathering of his total psychic powers into so ruthless a focus.

But the effect could have been abnormal only upon an abnormal sensitivity, an unusually high capacity to feel; and it could have been focused only by a mind of exceptional strength. And Grant thought with instant and complete conviction: That's the picture of him.

He remembered now something that Mrs Cameron had said about Martin's early army troubles—with his colonel, was it? Martin would do his duty as a soldier, and do it all the more ruthlessly for his hatred of human killing, but to the sadist, superior officer or not, he would show that Neolithic face in stone.

Grant knew this so absolutely that he was moved to an obscure affection. He glimpsed the figure again in its stillness, its strength, its inner integrity of being. Martin's struggle to reach the cave had brought him so near death that he had flowered. Grant saw the cave-light on his face.

He turned over in his bed. Self-destruction. In Martin it would not come about in a sudden spasm of revulsion. He was not that kind. Grant groaned, for now he knew that Martin was the kind that went slowly down the road to a final nihilism, as slowly and remorselessly as he had hunted the yellow devils. All belief, all capacity for belief in human kind, had been slain at that horrible moment in the jungle, that culmination for him to all the meaningless slaughter in the world.

No one could help him now. His sister knew that; it haunted her, for she had an insight like his own.

In an extraordinary stillness of revelation Grant saw that Martin could not be cured, he could not be cured unless he were
reborn
.

Anna would be of no use to him She might save him from the sea, or he her. No use. Rebirth could not
start
that way. A woman like that might be his ultimate salvation, but he could not take the first steps with her. To look at her white body—good God!

No. It would have to start, if start it ever could, from the beginning, with a selfless absorption in some simple kind of doing or making. Like the absorption, the utter unself-consciousness, of the child arranging seashells on the black earth. Simply that. No more than that. No thought beyond. Doing that . . . . Let him lean over once and move a shell.

Let him lean over and move a shell! thought Grant into the silent reaches of the night.

Then he became confused, feeling that he had merely let himself be moved by his dream of Martin watching Sheena arranging the shells on the black peat dust by the peat stack.

Yet through this characteristic doubt there remained the uncanny conviction that if only Martin could lean over and move a shell something incalculable would be born in him at that instant.

For it could only now be something like that, something he could gaze at for hours, that he could help, without exercise of intellect, without question.

The child arranging seashells on the earth; pure pattern. Neither good nor evil; neither solid purpose nor self-conscious design . . . .

But there was a design: she was making a little house, she was “playing housies”.

He could lean over and move a shell into this primitive magical sign of a home. Let him do that one
positive
act and what would follow
might
be incalculable.

For there was nothing fanciful about one thing at least:
Sheena was there
.

When overtones of meaning had faded upon the air, Grant experienced a curious quietening, wherein everything thing was interpretation or understanding. Without thought of outcome or ending. Then all at once he had the notion that he would like to see his friends in the narrow box. Without a moment's hesitation, as if someone like Anna had called to him, he got up and went into the dark room. But he did not open the box there; he took it with him to the mat, and, on his knees, unfastened the lid and lifted it back. The light was still a fine twilight; in the gloom of the box the two skulls were softly grey and the eye sockets dark and deep. After he had looked at them for a little time, he said gently, “When it's all over and they have gone away, I'll put you back in your own place.”