IT IS THE FIFTH of July. In an hour or so we shall have spent three full months here.
‘It doesn’t seem like months,’ Terry said when I reminded her of the date of our coming.
‘It scarcely feels like time at all,’ I agreed. I had a momentary vision of our tiny figures struggling under their load across the moor in that April night.
‘The nights are beginning to draw in,’ Terry went on. ‘I can see a difference in the light already, Hugh.’
‘Yes,’ I said with a sigh, ‘the year’s going downhill now; we must attend to our firewood though the weather is so hot. Soon it’ll be autumn; we can’t count on dry weather after August. And then winter—I hate the turn in the day, Terry. June’s so fine—’
‘No horse-flies and no thunder,’ she assented with a smile. ‘Those brutes of clegs! I’m all swollen with their bites!’
We have done no work to-day. Our peats are cut and stacked, in spite of the clegs, and we are content to rest.
We went down to Loch Coulter in the breathless morning to bathe before the heat of the day arrived. I had the .22 with me. I carry it habitually whenever I leave the cave. We heard black cock drumming on a green lawn amongst the birches. I slipped away to stalk the birds, leaving Terry splattering in the shallows of a sandy cove. I got near enough to my quarry to see how they danced; with their fan tails spread out like a turkey cock’s and their wings trailing the ground they advanced and retreated, head to head; they danced and drummed; sometimes a pair would face each other with their heads lowered to the ground and their eyes a couple of inches apart, until one of the birds gave way, and their see-saw backwards and forwards dance recommenced.
They heard me in the brushwood and flew away. I was not deeply vexed. We had meat enough in the cave.
We are growing familiar with the habits of our neighbours. We know where the black cock dance. I have seen the eagles make homewards for their eyrie in the Little Durc, and followed them until I came to the head of that canyon and saw the nest, and smelled the stench of rotting game. I know the solitary hill-side trees where hoodies nest, and have nested perhaps for a century; the ravens make their home in the rock above our cave. We never walk barefoot in the birch wood since I killed an adder, slender and vicious and as full of fat as a pike, beside an ant-heap there.
‘It gives me a shudder to look at it,’ Terry declared when I brought it for her to see. ‘What possessed you to bring it here, Hugh?’
‘Don’t you like it?’ I teased her. ‘I think it’s pretty. And full of fat.’
‘Why should pike and snakes and wicked brutes like them be so well lined?’ she wanted to know.
‘The wicked grow fat,’ I said, and laughed.
‘You’re not very fat yourself, Hugh,’ she declared, looking at me with a critical eye. ‘But you’re looking well, I never saw you looking so healthy. You’re as brown as a berry—’
When the sun went down to-day we made a fire of sticks outside the cave and ate a little.
‘If this hot weather continues we’ll save our stores,’ Terry declared.
‘It’s almost a fortnight since we came back,’ I said slowly.
‘Yes,’ she returned, ‘a long fortnight, long in passing. Looking back, our journey’s like the bad weather in June,’ she said a little later, ‘dark and miserable—and past.’
‘It’s past then?’ I inquired, looking intently at her quiet face.
‘It was sore, sore for a while,’ she murmured. ‘Our poor house—it did us good to see it though it hurt, Hugh.’
‘It brought us to earth,’ I asserted grimly. ‘It taught us that our game was earnest. We were like children playing at a picnic.’
‘Oh, it did more, far more than that, Hugh,’ she said.
We were dead beat when we reached the cave after our journey. We slept uneasy hours and wakened more tired than when we lay down. Our bones ached, our minds were drunk with fatigue, we moved in a stupor.
Everything I did was wrong and clumsy. When I reached out my hand to lift a pot or a cup I fumbled, and my nerves were on edge expecting the thing I caught to fall from my grasp and break. The least hindrance put me in a rage, and from sudden temper I fell into silence whose outward appearance was surly, whose inward cause and accompaniment was misery. Terry moved through the cave like a ghost, wan and silent and apprehensive-eyed. I would have given the world to be able to speak, to comfort her and unburden my own trouble. I was spell-bound to silence and the best I could fashion my lips to say was, ‘We must count our stores. It’s past time we estimated how long we can live on them.’
I laid out our hoard of boxes and parcels in the middle of the cave and Terry reckoned how much they held and how long the essential things like flour and salt would last us. We began by setting aside the stuff of which we had sufficient to last an indefinite time. The future was so uncertain and overclouded that a year ahead seemed like old age to youth, a fabulous distance away.
Our ammunition came first in this category. If I kept on using it as carefully as I had in the past, I could not conceive an end to it; I suppose we were desperately avoiding thought of the far future. If we planned years ahead, we were dooming ourselves irrevocably to a life of exile.
‘We needn’t look so far ahead,’ I answered when Terry asked how long the ammunition would last. ‘Every other thing that makes life sufferable will be finished long before the ammunition is used up.’
‘Very well,’ she agreed. ‘There’s not much point in planning for the distant future when a thousand things may happen to upset our arrangements.’
‘How much salt have we?’ I inquired.
We had sufficient to carry us on to spring at our present rate of use, but, as I pointed out, in winter we would have storms and we must salt a store of meat against them.
‘And how we are going to do it is beyond my imagination,’ I went on, ‘for we have neither tub nor barrel.’
‘Can’t we dry-salt the meat and hang it from the rafters?’ Terry asked. ‘Or if the winter’s hard meat will keep in the snow.’
Our flour likewise was enough for seven or eight months. ‘We’ve been using a quarter of tea a week,’ Terry said. ‘We have no more than three pounds remaining. We’ll miss our tea when it’s done.’
‘Then we must drink water and spare the tea,’ I declared. ‘What about sugar?’
‘We haven’t used a great deal,’ she replied. ‘The condensed milk has eked it out, but the milk’s practically used up.’
‘It’s a luxury, anyway,’ I declared.
‘No doubt it is,’ she agreed, ‘but lots of things which are luxuries in themselves become necessities when they are all lacking. We can live without sugar and butter and vegetables, I don’t say we’ll starve while we have meat and flour, but I don’t believe we can keep healthy. Our jam’s a luxury—’
‘How much is left?’ I interrupted.
‘Three jars; we used it heavily for a while. You were supping it with a spoon, Hugh.’
‘I never did!’ I declared indignantly, and was forced to smile. ‘How did you find out?’ I asked.
‘You forgot to clean the spoon,’ she told me.
‘It was very wicked and thoughtless of me,’ I said. ‘But oh, Terry, I was so sick of meat! meat! meat! I thought I’d die for something sweet.’
‘I’m not blaming you,’ she continued, ‘but I was counting on the jam to keep us healthy through the winter.’
‘We can make more,’ I informed her gleefully.
‘Can we?’ she cried. ‘Is that true? Is there fruit hereabouts?’
‘Yes, cranberries,’ I said, ‘and probably crowberries and blaeberries too, and I saw the averans in full flower on the top of the Farrow; we’ll get them in the autumn if the frost doesn’t take them. There’ll be heaps of rowans and we could go down to the Spey where the rasps grow. You need a lot of sugar for rowans—’
‘If we have enough sugar to preserve them, the sourer they are the better for us,’ Terry declared. ‘That’s a great load off my mind.’
When we concluded the tale of our stores we knew that we had as much salt and flour as would suffice us until spring.
‘Then they’re likely to outlast us,’ I commented bitterly when Terry told me her conclusion.
‘The biscuits and the butter are nearly done,’ she went on.
We have ten dozen eggs preserved. The ham is mostly all eaten. Our vegetables are finished. The potatoes grew soft and Terry had to throw most of them away. ‘We’ve more of some things than we had to begin with,’ Terry said.
‘That’s a blessing,’ I said ironically.
‘Why are you angry with me, Hugh?’ she asked. ‘Why do you speak to me as you do?’
‘How do I speak to you?’ I inquired with defensive roughness.
‘Are you tired of me?’ she asked in low tones.
I stood staring at the floor of the cave with its litter of tins. Though it drove a knife into my heart to see her sad and hurt I could not help hurting her, and I waited a long minute before I muttered, ‘No.’
‘What about tobacco?’ she said in a strangled voice.
‘It’ll go done. Oh, what does it matter, what does anything matter?’
‘We can live well enough until spring,’ she continued in the same voice.
‘And what then?’ I demanded.
I felt her hand on my arm, and her voice, full of tears, asked gently:
‘Is it the house, Hugh?’ Then she came near me and said: ‘Look at me, Hugh.’
I raised my eyes unwillingly. My cheeks were burning hot.
‘My dear, my heart, my love, my only love,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I could help you—can’t you tell me—’
‘What’ll I tell you?’ I cried wildly, ‘that every mortal thing is drear and hopeless and my heart’s dead in my body, dead as a stone, and I wish I was dead too.’
‘Hush, hush,’ she entreated, ‘we’ve each other still.’
‘How can I hush?’ I raged. ‘We’re here for ever, Terry, we’ll never escape, we’ll starve and rot in this den, this hole in the rocks. Was it for this we were born, to live like beasts without hope?’
‘We’ll go and cut more peats,’ she said gently. ‘Soon it’ll be better, soon we’ll be done with remembering the pain of the thing that’s in our heads, a little time changes the worst things out of their shape and makes us masters again in the house of our own minds.’
I was deserted suddenly by the raging energy, compounded of anger and pain, which possessed me since we returned from our journey; it made me fly from one task to another, now cutting a bench of peats in the bog, again counting the time our stores would last, then trailing roots of bog-fir from their mossy resting-place beside the loch; it left me and I grew so tired that I could scarcely stand on my feet.
‘What’s the good?’ I asked wearily when Terry said we ought to go to our peats.
‘Are you tired, Hugh?’ she asked.
‘I’m blind with tiredness,’ I answered. ‘Tired and sick.’
‘Then rest,’ she urged. ‘You’ve been overdoing it of late. No human being could stand up to the pace you were setting yourself.’
‘Oh, Terry, Terry!’ I cried. ‘It’s a dreadful thing to be outcasts and fugitives.’
‘Other people have been fugitives before us,’ she said.
‘We’ll go to the peats,’ I muttered.
We climbed to the hill-top and I cut the turf from a new bank of peat. The day was hot but fresh with a brisk wind from the south. There were as yet no clegs on the high ground to plague us and make the heat of summer a scourge instead of a pleasure. The spade went smoothly into the black moist bank, the sun shone in its azure world, the wind came sweetly over peaks that still kept snow in their north corries facing us. My spirits rose, gloom lightened, and as my strength returned and I worked I felt the content of the summer day that reigned over our country enter my heart. And Terry, with a red handkerchief knotted at the corners on her head to keep her black hair from her eyes and the force of the sun from her brain, bare-armed and bare-legged and eager, ran back and fore with peats in her arms to spread them out to dry. I commenced to feel free from my nightmarish oppression. I could think clearly. In a moment of realization when I knew that I was escaping from the horror which preyed on me I let the spade fall from my hands. The wind was like water on my arms. I breathed the air like a blind man who with restored sight gazes on the clear outlined world. Terry cried, ‘Isn’t it grand, up here, on the top of the world!’
‘It’s very fine,’ I answered gravely. She began to laugh like a happy child and dance amongst the peats, waving her bare peat-smeared arms over her head.
We bathed in Loch Coulter; we lay at the mouth of our cave to attend night’s summer shade; we saw the rough hills climb up against the sky and it grew dark enough for stars to shine. There are moments when misery departs that require no voice; we waited in silence until night reached its deepest, though it was only twilight still.
‘Our garden was no more our own than this,’ Terry said.
‘This!’ I cried, startled. ‘We made our garden, Terry—’
‘Poor garden!’ she sighed. ‘No one watering it in this heat!’
‘And all the weeds spreading like fire,’ I took her up. ‘I wonder what creatures broke into the house, Terry.’
She did not answer.
‘Will we ever leave here?’ I asked a few minutes later.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I scarcely care. We are free, here’s no fret nor rumours. Are you happier, Hugh?’
‘Happy? I don’t know—I’m not unhappy.’
‘You were unhappy.’
‘What else could I be? Oh but we shouldn’t have been so weak, Terry, we shouldn’t have let it overwhelm us. We came back without a single thing to help us. After all our planning, after that long journey, we came back without one of the things we went for—’
‘Excepting resolution,’ she interrupted quietly.
‘We didn’t find out anything,’ I continued.
We knew, without any evidence of our eyes and ears, but by the instruction of instinct merely, that it was not the state of our house by itself which appalled us and drove us back to the hills. Our house was a portent of the world. That blind squalid fate which happened to it, and involved us, was general, though we had no proof to give our minds, assuring them they thought truly, or to tell our hearts that the woe which lay on them was justly felt. When we saw our house we knew, suddenly and without doubt, that it had fellows more horridly destroyed, and we had fellows too. We were afraid; we were overwhelmed by the knowledge of events that we had never heard of, but for which our house stood as a token. I remembered the lightless valley of the Spey.
On this day of passing June, throughout this night, we escaped into the country where the sun and the moor existed by themselves; and in this place, divorced from the land of men, we escaped from fear and unhappiness. We were as the wild creatures of our wild country.