The Silver Darlings (21 page)

This droll question did not allay the mirth for it was deeper than it seemed, but a young woman falling
backward
among the boys set up a noisy tumult.

It was at this moment, as he turned his head away,
smiling
, from the scrabble on the floor, that Finn encountered Una’s face, the dark eyes full upon him. She was twelve years old.

There had been one memorable morning in Finn’s young life when, cautiously approaching a grey boulder in the burn, hoping to see a yellow trout, he beheld the long straight back of a sea-trout. The excitement had been so intense that it quivered with something like fear.

Once—and only once—he had seen a squirrel in the Steep Wood. He had been sitting quietly and, hearing a strange sound, had turned his head. From a fork in a tree, the
unknown
, beautiful wild thing had looked down at him.

Una was not unknown to Finn, but she lived a
considerable
distance from his home, on the other side of the river. Never before, however, had her eyes thus rested upon him.

In the bewildering stress of the moment, he turned upon unoffending Donnie and cried, “Watch who you’re
shoving
!” and dug him in the ribs with his elbow.

“You should take some lessons in arithmetic from Finn,” George was answering Wull. “Or the professor. They seem to know a lot about nets!”

“What’s wrong with arithmetic? Isn’t it according to law, too?”

“Pach!” snorted George. “If Meg there makes
thirty-six
meshes to the yard, how many will there be after the hemp has been in the bark and the sea once or twice? Ask the professor that.”

“That’s true enough,” said Daun. “They shrink a good lot.”

“Of course they shrink,” said George. “And
according
to law a mesh must not be less than one inch from knot to knot at any time. It’s herrings the net is for, not sellags.”

George was pleased with the laughter, for actually the mesh was on the big side, measuring a bare thirty to the yard. But here he was not merely keeping on the right side of the law, he was also following out Mr. Hendry’s private policy, for in the matter of price, big herring were better than small herring. The agents for the foreign market wanted them big. True, the large mesh might not catch so many herring, and if that was against the fishermen’s interests now, still, in the long run, it might not be. Who could say?

For what was deemed a terrible calamity had befallen the herring industry: the Government had stopped
payment
of the bounty.

Finn had listened to endless arguments over the last two or three years. Mr. Hendry at first had said that they might as well haul their boats and close down. From four shillings on the barrel the bounty had gone down to three shillings, to two shillings, to one shilling, to nothing.

There had been meetings in Mr. Hendry’s little room, meetings on the shore, meetings everywhere.

But if the price per cran had been reduced, the fishing had not stopped. On the contrary, all over the coasts, it had
gone ahead in a striking manner; and it looked now as if it might even still increase. So that the tension of concern was lessening, and Wull could say to George:

“You and your bounty! Why should the Government pay the curer the bounty? It’s the fisherman who should have got it anyway. Didn’t he catch the herrings?”

“And who paid the fisherman?” asked George.

“The curer,” said Wull. They all laughed, Wull with them.

“Would Meg be making this net? Would the thousands of pounds that came into Dunster these last years have come in, if it wasn’t for the curer? Would——”

“Would you be here yourself?” interrupted Wull.

“No,” began George.

“Ah, that would have been the greatest loss of all,” said Wull, wagging his head sadly.

They shook with the mirth they loved.

Una did not laugh; her eyes lighted up and glanced.

They were wide-spaced, and in the dim light looked black. To Finn, her clear face seemed so vivid, so unusual, that he wondered how others did not want to stare at her. He was inclined to be boisterous. Meg removed the small S-shaped piece of stiff wire; hitched the net forward, and fixed the wire again. The part of the net she was working on was attached to the wall and reached her in a downward slant. The flat bone needle, with its body of twine and pointed end, slid in and out with remarkable speed. A couple of hitches—over, under—in movements quicker than the eye could follow, and she was on to the next knot. The rasp of the needle could be heard quite distinctly, and
sometimes
she smoothed it with a touch of coarse fat. She spoke little when the men were talking, but sometimes she told very interesting stories of life around Banff and Macduff when she was a young girl.

“How could it pay the Government to pay the money out?” asked Wull.

“It paid them all right,” said George.

“If you think it will pay you to give me four shillings—put them there,” said Wull, holding out his hand.

“That’s all you know,” George snorted. “You can’t see farther than your nose.”

“Put them there—and watch if I can’t see farther than my nose.”

“If I put four shillings there with this hand and received back five shillings from you with my other hand, I would be better off, wouldn’t I?”

“You would be a living marvel,” said Wull.

Una glanced up at her sister Mary, who was nineteen, and full of frolic; then Finn saw Una looking at him, though he wasn’t looking anywhere near her.

“What’s wrong with you,” said George, “is that you know about as much of the world and its commerce as Meg’s needle there. Here we are sending our barrels of herring——”

“And well-coopered barrels, I admit that,” said Wull with an innocence.

“All over the world,” cried George, who was getting angry. “Ireland, the West Indies, the Baltic——”

“You send the fulls to the Baltic.” Wull nodded with understanding.

“And—and what does that mean?”

Wull’s mouth opened respectfully.

“It means,” cried George, “that we are exporting all that. Money, export trade, sea-carrying trade, possessions abroad—and what does all that do, but increase the wealth of our country? And if the wealth of our country is
increased
, then the revenue is increased. And it’s out of that revenue that we got our four shillings. They gave us four shillings and got five back. But there are some who would need a few more brains to see that.”

It was a point! For a moment their little world opened out into the great world. They glimpsed regions far beyond the waters of their creek.

Una’s eyes looked from one face to another while she sat
quietly by her sister. Clearly this was the great world for her, with the surge and clash of personalities like the roar of the sea What was said did not matter except as it moved and swayed bodies and brought living words from their mouths and the warmth of fun.

But George was getting heated, and Wull, who could not let a personal thrust pass, was sarcastically hitting back. Other voices were taking points up. “George is right,” said Daun. “There’s something in it,” said Hamish
Sinclair
, scratching his ginger beard. “If the Government gets more money——” “But if the money——” “It doesn’t matter about that. It’s purely a question of the money——”

Discussing money gave a man a feeling of importance. Some of the girls got talking together, because the “points” about money, over which the men could become so heated, grew very dry after a time. Occasionally a girl would say to her brother, “Ach, be quiet!”

For the unity of the gathering was getting broken up. In twos and threes men argued under the louder noise of George’s main argument. The young lads listened. The girls got talking about their gutting experiences and more personal matters.

Meg’s needle went on, over—under, weaving the net that would catch the bigger herring for the bigger price, the white bone glistening in arabesques of movement.

When George felt he had sufficiently dominated the scene, he took his departure, carrying his measuring stick with him. But even the few things that were said behind his back created argument. A pest on their arguments! Men were like that!

They began to go home. Mary cried merrily to Meg, “We’ll be back to see you with the new moon.”

Outside, the old moon had just risen. It was a clear night. Dark bodies parted, sometimes calling back from a little distance with a girl’s laugh, then disappeared their various ways. Una looked small as she walked beside Mary.

Finn went home the top road with Donnie—the shortest way from Meg’s to Donnie’s house. Thus they did not require to come near the river and the ruins of the House of Peace. Finn now knew about the ruins’ being haunted and how grown men, with the exception of Roddie, would not pass them alone at night.

They talked away about the fishing and George and Wull and argued some of the points over again. For one day each of them would be the skipper of a boat. They would sail the sea and catch so many herrings that it would not matter whether there was a bounty or not. They began to tell each other how a skipper knew when there was herring about. Gulls and porpoises and whales. They talked in the friendliest, confidential tones as the whale grew in size before the inward eye, grew until each jaw was bigger than the floor of a room, as big as a field—it might easily be as big as a field, mightn’t it?—a great monster of a whale?—and then when the jaws closed …

“What would you do if he came up beside your boat?” Finn asked.

“I would spit in his eye,” said Donnie, “and that would blind him.”

They laughed, feeling they could master the whale all right.

“What would you do?” asked Donnie.

“I’d shove the oar down his throat,” said Finn.

Something scurried from their feet and they leapt. It could only have been a rabbit. But Donnie, to cover the scare they got, said it might have been a hare. A rabbit would have more sense than come near them! Their hearts were beating from the silly fright. But it was not so silly—if it was a hare.

“You heard about Dave?” Donnie asked.

“What?” asked Finn.

“He was going to sea—when he saw Margad on the path in front of him. He turned back home and said he wasn’t feeling very well. The boat went to sea without him.”

“I heard that,” said Finn.

Everyone knew that Margad was a witch. And everyone knew that a witch could turn herself into a hare. They glanced around and thought they might as well have a look at what was going on in old Lachlan’s house, which they could now see.

Lachlan’s house was a famous gathering-place—the real ceilidh-house—before Finn was born. Lachlan himself was nearly eighty now and his memory as good as ever, though the old fiddle-bow had grown husky, and indeed was used very rarely and only when a drop of whisky inspired him to forget the fulminations of such as Sandy Ware, who
denounced
the violin as the devil’s instrument. Above all, Lachlan was the great story-teller. You could listen to him for hours, and listen to him again the next night. He had a niece, Anna, living with him. She was a
quick-witted
, pleasant woman of thirty, and the girls called to see her and the young men called to see Lachlan.

As they approached the house, they heard singing. Involuntarily, Finn paused, and the rhythm went all through the night, over the land, and quivered in his heart.

“Come on!” cried Donnie, quickening his steps.

Finn followed. But when they were come by the house and Anna’s clear voice rose alone in the next verse, Finn paused.

“Come on,” said Donnie.

“No, I think I’ll go home,” said Finn. “It’s getting late.”

“Come on in, man.”

“No. You go. They’re all alone at home. Good night.” He turned away.

Donnie looked after him, but he knew Finn’s domestic difficulties.

When he got round the house Finn paused again to listen. The rhythm of the song was more intimate to him than his own face. With lips apart, he held his breath.
When all the voices surged together, rising, his body quivered as if sluiced in chill water.

Anna’s voice had made him think of his own mother.

Life in the dim night, under the stars, over the land, the old, old land, the curved thatch, the still birch trees, the surge of the singing, rising as smoke rises from a fire, spreading out over the immemorial land, under the dying moon.

He walked away.

By the time he came to the top of the wood, the cool quiver of the song had passed from his cheeks, and the dark things of the night were about him again. Not that he was exactly frightened of a hare or of any dark thing, but it was as well to be wary, so that the heart wouldn’t jump too quickly into the mouth. Down along the top of the wood was the place where he had killed God’s fool. Beyond, he caught a moonlit glimmer of the pool that lay to the west of the House of Peace. They said it was a monk, with a cloak and cowl, who haunted the ruins. There was a story which told that long, long ago a man with the second sight saw the monk in broad daylight standing in front of a little round house, like a large bee-skep, and saw going towards him a Viking with a battle-axe. The monk stood quietly and the Viking swung the battle-axe and split his head.

Finn was not frightened of the House of Peace in the
daylight
. To tell the truth, he rather liked being there then, though the stillness of the lichened stones would
sometimes
make one wonder. But the darkness was a different matter. What was hidden in the dark was the marrow that was hidden in the bone.

Other boys were more frightened than he was Donnie would not go down past this wood in the dark though you paid him. Many men, too—like Daun—were frightened of the dark. He had not heard all the stories that they had heard, because he had had to stay at home, stories about a ball of fire hurtling over the ruined broch; of music coming through Knocshee, the fairy hill; of the headless
horseman … he had just heard bits from Donnie. Kirsty told only true things about folk she knew when she was young in Kildonan. His mother…. There was the glitter of the burn below him. It was his own burn, and the sight of it quickened his heart. He heard its voice—but it had more than one voice now, quiet-speaking voices, low down in the dark hollow. He had to cut through the voices, right through them, and then he was up the slopes—not running (never run)—and into the house. A long story told by his mother about an underground passage, a passage that went right under the Helmsdale river, flashed through his mind, not in thought nor in memory, but in sheer vision. The place was called “The Maidens’ Field”, and the
subterranean
passage could be seen to this day—a mile or so below Suisgill. It was called “The Maidens’ Field”
because
of the two girls who followed the two calves, when, playing and skipping, they suddenly ran into the passage. The girls followed, and followed, in the dark, until one of them and both the calves disappeared, leaving the other girl all alone. She groped along in mortal terror, until she could get no farther. She now stood in a low chamber—and overhead heard voices. She pressed wildly against a flat stone in the roof, screaming for help, and the stone moved. This stone was the hearthstone of a house in Learabail, and when it moved under them the family ran out yelling with terror, for they thought it was the Devil himself coming up. But when they plucked up courage to come back, and found the girl, then they knew what had happened. For the mother of the girl who was lost was a witch who had pledged her daughter to the Devil, and the calves …