The Silver Bough (9 page)

I
n the last hour of the morning's work, they struck the peristalith, and the reason for the extra depth of the cutting was suddenly and excitingly revealed, for he perceived that the circle of uprights seemed here, on the south-west side, to be dented inwards.

There were two kinds of cairn, the long cairn and the round cairn. The ends of the long narrow cairn had an inward curve or bay, coming to points, like the thrusting horns of an immense snail. But the peristalith of the round cairn was always more or less circular. Some archaeologists considered that the long cairns with their horns were the older type. Grant now perceived that in his own roundish cairn there was, apparently, one feature of the long cairn. Anyway, here again would be something that might, when fully revealed, give his work an argumentative value! He was really so excited that he stopped operations for the day, for if they went further and found something like an entrance he knew he could never stop, and at the moment at least everything remained covered up from prying eyes over the weekend. Then on Monday morning! . . .

Mrs Mackenzie had asked for five shillings a day. He gave her ten, saying he always paid on Saturdays, shushed her to silence, and marched home, laughing inwardly. For well he knew that he was a hard-headed shrewd businessman. Three pounds a week for lodging, three pounds for labour; total, six pounds. They paid seven guineas a week in Kinlochoscar Hotel. Robbing the poor he was. Of course they could go fishing for brown trout at Kinlochoscar (and pay ten shillings a day for a gillie). Fishing! he thought. Just fishing!

His good spirits accompanied him to Clachar House.

“Archaeology a dry subject?” His coffee spilt over before he could set the cup properly in the saucer and have his laugh out. It had been an excellent dinner, with lobster salad, preceded by a glass of sherry which he knew as a bumper. “I should say it's the most interesting subject on earth!”

“And that's flat!” said Martin with his dry smile.

Grant laughed more merrily than ever. “Flat as a pancake,” he agreed with a generous irrationality. “All the same, it is!” he declared. “For at least it does one thing to us: it gives us some small sense of proportion. It puts our problems—or our self-importance—in some sort of perspective. And that's something these days.”

“You mean,” suggested Martin, “it has all happened before?”

“I do.”

“And you think that interesting?”

“Interesting enough to control the fuss we make about the—the wrong things. Not, of course, that it ever happens exactly as before. There is a difference, I suppose, between a stone axe and an atom bomb.”

Mrs Sidbury smiled. She was a generous hostess and had clearly set herself to charm her guest. “You haven't tried the liqueur yet.”

Gallantly raising the small glass to her, he tried, was stung, and coughed. “I—I forgot.” He forgot it was a liqueur and had taken too much. He wiped his eyes and his waistcoat, thoroughly amused at himself. “A—a vodka basis?” he suggested.

She nodded. “We are nothing if not international.”

She was a capital woman! The mad sort that throws her bonnet over the banister. He felt like throwing a few things himself at this stone-faced brother of hers, not but that he was acting the host with a certain automatic grace. But there was a fundamental lack of interest in the fellow; a burial urn from which the bones had been filched. He was not even supercilious. And now he was waiting for his guest to speak. Why couldn't he say something himself?

“And you have really found nothing yet, beyond the general shape of things?” Mrs Sidbury asked.

He glanced at her with twinkling eyes, stirred his coffee, and glanced again. “As a matter of fact I have,” he said, overcome by temptation; “only I—don't want it to be known.”

“How exciting!” she cried. “Do tell us.”

“Well——” He hesitated still; then looking at her, a brightness in his eyes, said clearly, “As a matter of fact, I have found two skeletons.”

Her brows knitted as she leaned back. “How gruesome!” she declared. “Phew!” and she shuddered.

“They're not really,” he said, taken with the frankness of her manner, “when you get to know them. Personally I am rather attracted by skeletons. But I realise that others aren't. That's why I would rather you didn't mention it.”

“I shan't! Do go on.”

“As a matter if fact,” he said, glowing inwardly from the liqueur that had gone the right way, “one of my first loves was a skeleton.”

But now he caught her eyes on him. The room was suddenly skinned. He had gone too far. Yet it was remarkable to see the way the inner dark knot of her sanity held while she wondered if he, too, was a hidden neurotic. Her slight psychic shock touched his heart.

“It's really nothing out of the way,” he suggested. “Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it. It's our fundamental condition, the thing that endures. I mean there's nothing morbid in a skeleton for me. Far from it. On the contrary, once you have gone so far—you can hardly go farther, so there's nothing more to worry about or be afraid of. You have the whole story—the physical story anyway.”

“What sort of skeletons?” asked Martin.

Grant turned to him. “Actually, very interesting. As you know, in the chamber of the cairn I may find several skeletons. It may have been a sort of communal burial place—there were only very small pockets of humanity in those days or it may have been a family vault, perhaps for the original Clachar House—or headman's hut! But, as I told you, we haven't yet found the way in. These two skeletons were found in a short cist, a built-in stone coffin, which had been intruded well into the edge of the cairn. These cists were the new style of individual burials, brought to this country by a folk who arrived on the east coast. Roughly speaking, that is——”

“The individual beginning to supplant the communal even then, you mean?”

“Perhaps!” said his guest.

Martin lit a fresh cigarette. “But why did they intrude it into the cairn? Or should I say infiltrate it?”

“Even the fifth column
then
, you suspect?” Grant was amused. “Who knows? But archaeologists have imagined that they settled down together rather reasonably. We may think that strange now—but it seemed natural enough when I was a lad. There
may
have been reasonable people, you know, once upon a time!”

“You think so?” Martin's eyes had their cool disintegrating smile.

“Why, yes,” replied Grant. “Anyway, they weren't stopped when infiltrating the cist.”

“They had probably left none alive to stop them.”

“That's possible. But why then did they do it at all, why infiltrate without reason?”

“Once you develop—a peculiarity—you go on glutting it, without reason. Possibly that is even more fundamental than the skeleton.”

“Can no story be told without argument?” asked Mrs Sidbury with elevated eyebrows.

Grant turned towards her with a smile that warmed his face in the shy humour of a boy who has been caught out. “I sometimes think,” he suggested, “that the story exists nowadays only for the argument.”

“How true!” she exclaimed, reassured in a moment by her glimpse of the boy in the man. “Do go on with the story.”

“In this short cist, then, I found the two skeletons—not, I may say, without some excitement.”

“Two in the one cist? Is that usual?” asked Martin.

“No. In this case there is the extra and peculiar interest that they are the skeletons of a mother and child. She is a young woman, I should say in her twenties, and the child about four or five.” In a complete silence, he went on, “I could find no trace of anything having happened to them. Sometimes, you know, you can tell whether a person had been suffering from an abscess in a tooth, or from arthritis, or other troubles that affect the bone, while of course anything like a brutal attack with a stone weapon,” he added lightly, “leaves its story writ large.” He looked at their faces and felt slightly disconcerted. Mrs Sidbury's attention was white and extreme; Martin's sensitive features were expressionless in a carven aristocratic way, and the eyes, as always, seemed to see only what they were looking at—in this case Grant's face. “Of course,” Grant continued with a slight gesture, “they knew quite a lot in those days. We have remarkable instances of surgery, of trepanning—cutting out a piece of bone from the skull, an operation that is still one of the most delicate and difficult to our modem surgeons. And successful operations, too, as the subsequent healing over of the bone-edges shows. With stone tools they did it. So perhaps they weren't quite so brutally dumb as we are sometimes inclined to think!”

“Such an operation—then?” said Mrs Sidbury with polite interest. “How extraordinary!”

“Almost incredible when you really think about it,” her guest agreed in his effort to lighten the atmosphere. “For they only had bits of flint, and presumably they would have to begin by shaving the appropriate part. Then the operation itself—but surely they had some knowledge of anaesthetics or drugs, otherwise their stoicism was more remarkable than all? Yet it was not an unusual operation. One late Neolithic skull,” continued the archaeologist, warming to his subject, “found in France, had actually been trepanned in three places and quite successfully. And I must say I very much appreciated a learned colleague who wrote solemnly that the operation may have been performed in some cases to relieve chronic headaches.”

Mrs Sidbury smiled now.

“However,” said Grant, with his own smile, “I have also found some treasure trove.”

“Ah!” Light came back to her face.

“Yes. A jet necklace and a bracelet—of gold.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I am particularly pleased with the bracelet,” he admitted modestly.

“Well, you have been lucky so far,” she said. “I am very glad. Some more coffee?”

“Please. Thank you.”

“How do you account for the double death?” asked Martin.

The coffee pot shook in her hand as if she were about to protest, but she remained silent.

“I don't know,” said Grant. “The chances that they would both die naturally at the same time are unlikely. It may be that the child died, and, with no one to look after it in the next world, it may be that the mother—went also. Or vice versa. Who knows? Only,” and his brows gathered, “I am inclined to think that their human attachments, relationships, in those days were of a peculiarly intimate kind, an intimacy that we have, perhaps because of our civilised interests, in some measure lost.”

“An animal intimacy?”

But Grant was not put off. “Partly, perhaps,” he said thoughtfully. “But also with something more to it—possibly—than your implication would suggest.”

“In what way?”

Grant turned his face to his hostess. “Are we about to argue again?”

“You are!” she said, and he laughed, for more than a vague discomfort was now growing in him.

“You left the skeletons in the cist?” asked Martin.

“No. Oh no. I took them home in a box to Mrs Cameron's, but of course they don't know that they are in the house. That's why I asked you to say nothing about it. And there's nothing really to be—well, to be upset about. I mean, it was all so very natural. Even the position of the two figures—frankly, I was touched. Oddly enough, the very day I arrived I went to the cairn to have a look at it,” he continued, with a smile for his glass as he turned its stem between his fingers, “and then I came on Anna—you know, Mrs Cameron's grand-daughter—asleep with her child in the shadow of a small rock, and their position was identical——”

Mrs Sidbury arose and abruptly left the room. It was so dramatic an exit that Grant got up. “I'm sorry. I seem to be—saying the wrong thing.”

“Sit down,” said Martin coolly, and he drank his liqueur not with haste but completely.

“It's really time I was——”

“My sister is a trifle highly strung. Sit down. Some more liqueur?”

But his guest would have no more and insisted that it was time he went. “I have some things to write up, and it's a law with us that we write them up at once, otherwise the objective facts may get twisted.”

He felt rather ashamed of himself as he left the house. He hadn't said good night to his hostess, hadn't thanked her, hadn't supported her against that brother of hers, damn him! The fellow had wanted to talk, yet had made no further effort to detain him. Sitting there, he would have analysed every statement to its fibres, until there was no life left, nothing. Not with interest, much less with passion, but with that sort of deadly automatism. He's either an egomaniac or a walking death, he thought with a sudden mounting anger, for he realised that his own reluctance to stay had something to do with fear.

This so upset him that he could not go straight home. Veering right he presently reached the cairn and its tumbled stones, the evidence of his labours, worked amusingly on his spirit. To have done; to do: that is the question—solved. My God, yes, he thought; it takes you out of yourself, it takes you out of that jungle. The stones were silent and grey-clean, and the alley between those removed into a mounting pile and the cairn itself was like a place which children would use in a game. He was pervaded all in a moment by the extraordinary feeling that he had brought lightness, friendliness, to the two whom he had found in the cist. This was an intuition so strong that he could not disbelieve it. He felt it was true, because it was true in the very essence of himself, yet an essence apprehended outside himself, like the evening light. Then in the same still moment he caught the silent dramatic removal of the shadow of an arm; faint, very faint, something that was there like the shadow of a hair in the corner of his eye but not there when his eye blinked and turned. He turned right round and saw that the sun had set—in a line beyond a standing stone in the surrounding circle.