The Silver Bough (4 page)

“Splendid! May I ask—what?”

“Ah!” Grant was mysterious. “The truth is,” he went on confidentially, “I never do open anything—much less a cairn—but I find something,
if
I'm looking for it. That's the whole secret.”

“You find what you look for?” asked Martin.

“Yes,” replied Grant at once, “and I don't place it there beforehand, actually or metaphysically.”

Martin glanced at him and smiled slowly. “For instance?”

“We had been discussing the possible proceedings when a place like the cairn up there was being ceremonially used, and a colleague asked me, ‘Have you read the Iliad lately?' The question stuck in my head. So one night I opened the book—at the last paragraph. It's the description, you know, of the burial of Hector. They burnt his body on an enormous pyre of wood; then, when they wanted to get at his bones, there were still burning spots so they subdued these
with bright wine.
Then it tells how his comrades gathered his white bones, with tears running down their cheeks, and placed them in a
golden urn,
wrapped in soft purple
,
and placed the urn in a grave and piled over it a
huge cairn of stones;
and after that they went and feasted right well in noble feast at the palace of Priam.”

“How remarkable! And do you really think something like that happened—up there at the Stone Circle?” asked Mrs Sidbury.

“With the noble feast afterwards down here? Who knows?” said Grant.

“The same period?” asked Martin.

“It might be, if not the same Age. We were always a few centuries behind. The Iliad is clearly the height of the Bronze Age. The cairn up there was the Age before, the Neolithic. But whether the axe-head was made of polished stone or bronze may not imply a vast difference in the human head. I am inclined to think not, for reasons which I could elaborate.”

“You could?”

“Yes, I could,” replied Grant at once. “I crossed over the Highlands from east to west last time I was up, and saw on the east coast a four-plough tractor in operation and on the west a foot-plough that, but for its iron tip, might have come straight from the Stone Age.”

“Tell me,” said Mrs Sidbury, “do you really expect to find a golden urn?”

Grant laughed, his mounting intensity at once broken. “I may find a pot—but perhaps not of gold!”

“But, as you said, who knows?”

“Who knows,” he repeated.

“Some more coffee?”

“No, thank you. And I really must go now.”

“Well, we mustn't keep you. But please do look in and tell us how you are getting on. I am quite thrilled. And if we can possibly help——” She looked at her brother.

He nodded just perceptibly.

As he went on his way towards the houses of Clachar, Grant knew that it was something far other than a cairn that worried Martin. Colonel Mackintosh had said that Martin's father, for some local or sentimental reason, had hoped that no one would press for the cairn to be opened up, but that with young Martin it was different. It was! The fellow merely doesn't want anyone around, thought Grant, but I'm here and to blazes with him! It was a lovely evening for such an invigorating and adventurous thought and he proceeded, refreshed and in good spirit.

P
erhaps the exhausting and exciting nature of his day had induced a certain heightening even in his vision, for the houses of Clachar had, it seemed to him, a remarkable aptness to their location. Each had grown up in its own place and was well content, taking to the lie of the ground as a man might who had time to sit down, turning a gable here like a shoulder and a front there like a face. Where the ground tumbled in antique frolic the grass was thick and lush with wild flowers, and the scent from uncountable blossoms came to his nostrils like an immortal essence. An old tethered dun cow stared at him over a knoll. The wandering footpath found in the end a wooden footbridge and he looked down into the clear water that seemed a warm brown. Some way below him boys were wading in a pool, perhaps looking for sea trout which the tide had left behind. Their voices were shrill and yet strangely harmonious in the flat long-shadowed evening light. All at once, as, having straightened himself, he stood still and involuntarily listened, he had the odd illusion of that extra dimension into which our solid world stands back, and this experience, as always, had for him an air of beneficence and strange beauty.

His face turned to the west and for a moment an orange light shone on it, then he crossed the small bridge and went up towards the house to which the young woman had pointed. A big red cock by the gable-end lifted a yellow leg in high and brittle dignity, said “Kok—kok?” and winked. Along the front wall ran a narrow strip of flowers, hedged in with boxwood, a miniature border of colour all weeded and tidy, broken by the blue flagstone before the door. As he stepped lightly on the stone and raised his hand to knock, he heard an old woman's voice say. “Now will you go to sleep! It's ashamed you should be of yourself at this time of night and you not sleeping.”

“Granny, tell me, does the standing stone stop standing when it's dark and go walking away off?”

“Perhaps it's not away off it goes. But one thing is certain: it never comes near little girls who are good.”

“I'm good, amn't I, Granny?”

“You're only just middling good. But if you went to sleep, then you would be good indeed, and it's the other way the stone would go altogether.”

“Tell me a story, Granny”

As the old woman was asking the young one what story she would like, Grant's fist slowly fell and he looked around to make sure he was not being overseen, standing there as the queer stranger who didn't knock. The blue cat on the low garden wall had closed its eyes, and now with its whiskers sticking out from its squashed features it looked for all the world as if it had laughed in its sleep and forgotten to put its face right.

“The Silver Bough,” answered the child.

“Is it that one again? Very well,” said the old woman. “Once upon a time there was a king, and he was walking by his palace wall when who should he see but a young man passing by, and the young man held in his hand a silver branch—all right, all right,” the old woman interrupted herself as if she had been corrected, “a silver bough. He held in his hand a silver bough, and it was the branch of an apple tree and from it there hung nine golden apples, and when he shook the branch, the nine golden apples hit against each other, and made the sweetest music the king had ever heard in all his life. So sweet was the music that the king forgot all his cares and they departed from his mind, and he thought the world was fresh and beautiful. The king asked the young man if he would sell the branch to him, and the young man said he would, but if so it would not be for money he would sell it. What would it be for? asked the king. And the young man said it will be for your wife and your son and your little young daughter. And the king said in the end that he could have his wife and his son and his little young daughter, and so it was agreed between them, and the king got the silver bough. But when the king went and told his wife and his son and his little young daughter what he had done, then they were very sad, for they liked being with the king in the palace and didn't want to go away. It was the sadness that came upon them then, but in the middle of it what should the king do but shake the silver bough, and the sweet music sang from it again, and all sadness and sorrow departed, and the king's wife and his son and his little young daughter went willingly away with the young man. Now it was all right for a time, and for another time, because the king had his silver bough, but by the end of a year and a day he was missing his wife and his son and his little young daughter, and missing them very much he was, and soon he could not do without them any more, and so he set off to find them. Off he went, and on, and far away, and when at last he was very tired, a cloud came about like the darkness and he fell into a deep sleep. Then he awoke and lo! there was a palace, and a wonderful palace it was, set on a great dim plain, and he went into the palace and who should he meet but Mananan himself, the one who looks after the seas of the world—for wasn't it Mananan who had come in disguise as the young man with the silver bough in his hand. So the king knew he was on the right track now, and he spoke to Mananan, and to Mananan's wife, for she was there also, and told why he had come. And they understood that, for they were not bad people but only the great ones who can do what they like, except for the one thing they mustn't ever do, not even the greatest though he is a king itself or a lord of the seas, and that is he must never be unkind to the stranger who enters at his door. So they listened to the king and nodded and gave an order to the palace servant, and soon walking down the great stairs towards them came the king's wife and his son and his little young daughter, and right glad he was to see them, but no gladder than they were to see him. Well, at last the time came for them to go to sleep, and to sleep they went in Mananan's palace, for what would anyone be without sleep? And then—and then—the morning came and lo! there was no Mananan's palace, it had all vanished away, and the great dim plain had vanished away, too, and where were they but back once more in their own palace, all of them together, as if they had never left it, but behold! hanging on the wall in the morning sunlight was the silver bough with the nine golden apples on it.”

“That place where the palace of Mananan vanished away, was it like a moor and stones on it?”

“It was a bare moor and there was no stones on it as far as ever I heard.”

“Granny—sing the song of the Silver Bough.”

“Only if you promise to compose yourself and keep your hands in. For if your mother comes home and finds you still awake, it's not music you'll catch.”

The lullaby the old woman crooned was about as old as the sod the Silver Bough grew out of and as deep, and Grant knew when it had taken the child away by the slowing of the old woman's voice. In the silence, he knocked gently.

She came to the door with a wondering expression which steadied on him as he greeted her, then her eyes brightened, but at the same time with a quickened concern she asked, “Were you knocking before?”

“No.”

She nodded, relieved at that, and hospitably invited him into the parlour, where the light was dim but soft, with a round table in the middle of the room, gilt ornaments on the mantelpiece, and an armchair of slippery horsehair upon which he was invited to sit.

“My grandchild was telling me about you,” she said, and it took him a moment to fit the word ‘grandchild' to the red-haired woman, but already he felt at home. There was a kindliness about the old lady, a brightness of eye and movement, and at the same time such an air of practical good sense that he knew he could go on talking to her with ease and pleasure.

“Anna was thinking the place was not good enough for you, what with water no nearer than the well and food that's difficult to get, but I said to her that you would be the best judge of that. We can't have what we haven't got.”

He laughed. “And I wouldn't be surprised but you may have some things that we haven't got. I haven't eaten a fresh egg for three months.”

“Fresh eggs, is it? Och!” She lifted her hands and dropped them. “There's as many eggs as you can eat, and we have our own cow, so there's milk and cream, and butter and crowdie. Indeed when sometimes the milk is going wrong on me I'll be thinking of the starving children in the world, and sad I'll be and wishful I could give the poor things some of it.”

Now his doctor had told him to stuff himself with as many eggs and as much fresh milk as he could naturally accommodate, and when he told Mrs Cameron this, she made a dramatic little gesture as though words failed her, and he laughed again. But something had also been worrying her and now, emboldened, she said, “Won't you let me help you take that thing off your back?”

He dropped the rucksack to the floor and she said, “Before you make up your mind, just come and see your bedroom.”

“Could I have this sitting-room to myself?” he asked. “I'll have a lot of writing and——”

“Surely, surely,” she said. “And no one to trouble you.”

Before the steep narrow stairs, she waited for him to go up, but he bowed her before him. She was a small woman and climbed actively. At the top he complimented her on her youth. “I feel as young as I look,” she said, “and I won't be seventy until next month.”

“Good for you! And you don't look it.”

“Och, I'm only a great-grandmother so far. Now this is your room.”

It had a light-coloured wallpaper, a wash-basin and ewer in brightly-patterned blue, and a solid old-fashioned wooden bed. The window was open and the linen smelt faintly of wild thyme. “Perfect,” he said.

“There's a little placie here.” She opened what looked like a cupboard door beyond the bed in the wall towards the stairs. It was a tiny room with a skylight window and he thought of it as an impossibly small dressing room. His eye landed on a low boxed-in piece of furniture that looked like an antique in commodes. When he saw that it had a lid on top
,
he smiled with his back to her.

“We are glad to do what we can,” she said as he closed the door.

“Well, it'll do me fine, and I'll be very glad to stay with you, Mrs Cameron, if you'll have me.”

“If you take us as you find us, it will be a pleasure,” she assured him. “And now I'll hurry and get you something to eat.”

But he explained that he had had supper and they settled on a glass of milk. She brought it to the sitting room on a tray with a plate of biscuits.

“I might be staying a long time, perhaps two months,” he said. “I hope that's all right?”

“I hope so indeed,” she said. “But you'll see how you get on with us.”

“I'll risk that! And now about paying you, for we may as well settle that, too.”

“Och, never mind just now. We'll be seeing later what you think it's worth, for it's not much we'll have for you, I'm warning you!”

“Have you never had anyone staying with you?”

“Oh yes. The last I had was two years ago, but there was the long spell of the war when I had nobody, though Anna was good to me and made me an allowance. She was in the A.T.S., but then—she had to come home.”

He immediately thought of the child.

“She should be home now, but she went in to Kinlochoscar for some things. She knows how to attend to a gentleman, because she was in service before she was called up. And she's been working in the hotel, but she always wanted to come home at night to see the child, and that was not easy and she got run down, but she's better now, and, to tell the truth, I would rather see her occupied at home, for a spell whatever. She has ever been a good girl to me.”

“In that case, we should all be suited,” he said lightly but with understanding.

“Indeed that's what I was hoping,” she responded at once. “And next month, as I'm always saying, I'll be independent.”

“Really?”

“Yes. My birthday falls on a Friday, and they're telling me I'll be able to draw my first old age pension on that day.”

“We'll make it a spree!” he said.

When she had gone he stood looking out of the window, touched deeply by something brave and nameless at the end of his long journey.