The resolution to set out to find the new doctor had come upon Finn quite suddenly. He could not have spent the night with Roddie, and wanted to be away before he could return to stop him. So he had gone, and because of his need to be alone, the half-dark of the moor did not at first distress him. The haunted stone quarry—it was a lonely spot—set the hairs apart on his head, but he saw nothing, though a curlew gave him such a fright that his knees doubled in weakness and he felt sickish for a little distance.
As it grew darker, however, he slanted down to the outlying barn of a croft he knew. It was smaller than the one at home, and when he was sure he had it all to himself, he sat down, his back against the wall and his eyes to the door. At first, he lived entirely in his ears, but soon he grew assured, and presently experienced such a strange content in the heart of his misery that his head drooped.
The night was short, and in the new world upon which the dawn came he found a stillness that sometimes enchanted him and sometimes made him a little afraid. He came in time to croft houses strung at a short distance from one another along a road, and they were all so extraordinarily still that they might have contained the dead. Once or twice a dog barked, and he trod the grass on the side of the road very quietly, though his bare feet could have made little enough sound anywhere, and hurried past.
He was now on the road that ran right across the county of Caithness, from Latheron on the Moray Firth to Thurso on the Pentland, and the great inland moors seemed without end, except far to the west where the Scarabens and Morven marched northward in blue ramparts against the county of Sutherland. As he looked at them, he could see their tops take the light from a sun that he had often watched rise out of the ocean in golden and silver spangles. They had never looked so vast and impressive before, with something foreign about them, as if they were “a mountain range” in Spain or Africa, from one of Mr. Gordon’s geography lessons. Such immense vistas as he could now cover quickened all his senses, keeping his head up, alert and questing, and he felt an adventurous traveller.
Now and then he drank out of a burn, and wiped the water from his nose and hair, and looked about him. But at such a time he took only two bites of his bread, and chewed with slow relish. He had never realized before how delicious and fragrant was well-chewed oat-bread with new butter. He had always thought Roddie’s mother’s oat-bread was thick and tough compared with his own mother’s. He had hardly been fair to it; he could see that.
The sound of the little burns in the early morning, overhanging tongues of peat-bank, sailing bubbles and foam-flakes, all were strange, a little unfriendly, as if brown figures had passed here; yet for moments they were very friendly, too, and the tall rushes with their hairy brown buttons moved suddenly in the air as they did at home. And constantly, never leaving his mind at rest, was the anxiety to be on, to arrive.
He knew the road from hearsay, and began wondering if he would recognize the bridge before Halsary, because it was the most haunted spot in Caithness, with real bloodcurdling stories about it. He could go to Mybster and then strike east on the road to Watten, or he could cut in over the moor at Halsary, fetch the Acharole Burn, and follow it to Watten.
But though all this had been clear enough in the talk of people who had been this way, now in fact everything was on so vast a scale, the road seemed so without end, for ever stretching to far horizons, with lochs bigger than he had ever seen before, and in one place standing-stones, that when at last he came, while it was yet early, within sight of what might be the haunted bridge, and saw furtive human heads bobbing out of sight, his heart began to beat painfully and, almost without stopping, as if he had not seen the heads, he turned to his right and stepped off the road into the pathless moor.
A bridge, to Finn, was a high arch spanning a river, like the one at home. If there was a bridge down there it could be no more than a flat thing of a few feet over the little burn. But he had seen the heads, and not until the spot had fallen from sight behind him did he feel in any way at ease. They might have been poachers, but they looked brown, like heads out of the heather. He was lucky to have seen them in time.
Then he got lost. No matter where he gazed, there was nothing but moor, with lochans here and there. If he kept going straight across country from the Latheron-Georgemas road he was bound in time to strike the Thurso-Wick road somewhere in the Watten district. But such acquired knowledge seemed to have little relation to this vast world of reality. He grew very tired and, sitting down in a sheltered spot, with the sun’s warmth on him, he took out his food and ate a third of it. When he lay on his side to rest, his back curved, his knees drew up, and he fell asleep.
Hours later, as he was following a burn blindly, he at last saw a cottage with blue smoke rising from its thatch. Two dogs came barking furiously at him and then a man stood in the door. “Can you tell me,” Finn asked him, “the way to Watten?”
“Yes,” said the man, astonished; then he stared at Finn closely. He was a big man with a black beard. “Where are you from?” “Dunster.” A woman appeared behind his shoulder, and three children peered round their legs.
“Dunster! That’s a far road,” said the man. “When did you leave?”
“Late last night.”
They stared at Finn. “If you tell me the house you are wanting in Watten, perhaps we could put you on your way,” said the man.
“I’m wanting to see the new doctor who has come to Caithness about the trouble.”
Finn read the fear of the plague in their faces far more easily than he could any story in Mr. Gordon’s English Reader. The man’s eyes hardened like Roddie’s, as he said, “If you keep going down the burn it will take you to Watten at last.”
“Thank you,” said Finn, and started off. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when the man shouted and came towards him. “If you wait a minute, we’ll get some food for you.”
“I have plenty, thank you,” cried Finn.
Then he heard the woman’s voice. They would be distressed because a stranger—a boy at that—had passed their door without receiving hospitality! He felt sorry for the struggle in their minds, particularly for the red-headed woman, she had such compassionate blue eyes. When he came at a short distance to the bend that would take him out of sight, he turned. They were all standing together looking after him. Finn waved, and at once the man and woman waved back, as if he were their son leaving them on a far journey.
Finn smiled to himself as he went on, heartened by the sadness that would haunt the woman’s mind for many a day. And the man would feel the more futile because of his strength. There were kind people everywhere.
The loch at Watten was so big it was like a small sea. Finn had many queer adventures in that district, before he found himself on the road to Wick. He was getting more cunning now in talking to people. This was rich farming land, not like the little crofts dug out of the Dunster moor. More than once he heard persons crying out to each other in English. They didn’t speak a bit like Mr. Gordon. He could not understand them, though he knew a word here and there. What if he could not speak to the doctor? His brow went cold with fear, and he started practising aloud on himself. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever. The word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him. The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”
They were not the words that one ploughman threw to another. So he tried to think of other English Lessons and repeated a little poem to a star. “How are you?” he asked himself. “I am well, thank you. How are you yourself? I come from Dunster …”
He got so interested in this, in having English words to tell the doctor exactly what he wanted, that he forgot he was practising aloud, and when the head of a man pushed up behind a dry-stone dyke and stared with round eyes and a silly open mouth, Finn blushed hotly, but kept walking on, gaze front. When well out of sight he could not help laughing, and the laughter grew so catching that he stopped and turned his face to the side of the road to have it out, not loudly, but in soft billows from the chest.
When it’s that way with him, a man will go out of his path to find bad luck, as Finn should have remembered, for now, like weasels, young heads popped up behind the grassy bank and stared at him through a fringe of bramble. They were tinker children, of the wandering clan Macafee.
Finn went on, consumed with shame. The children were soon running behind him, laughing mockingly. At first Finn was afraid, but soon his anger began to rise, and when he was sure there were no men with them, he turned and faced the four members of the clan, ranging from his own age downward, one of them a girl. He could see they thought he was silly, and therefore wanted to torment him. But when he had spoken, and picked up two stones from the road, they suddenly broke and ran back, laughing in shrill neighings. Whether it was he who frightened them or the man who came riding on a horse, he never found out.
The number of houses in Wick astonished him, and yet did not much astonish him either. He knew the old joke: you won’t be able to see the town for the houses. In his mind Finn could make a famous thing so big that the reality, when he saw it, rarely measured up to his expectations. In any case, the real movement in Finn’s mind now was one of fear against so many houses gathered in one place, as if the roofs, huddling together, had a sinister defensive purpose. The fear had in it, however, the tentative smile of shyness, and Finn waited until he saw a small, grey-bearded man in front of a cottage on the outskirts of the town before asking for the doctor’s house in his best English.
“Have you no Gaelic?” inquired the old man in that tongue.
“Yes,” said Finn, flushing slightly.
“I’ll show you where it is, for I’m going that way,” and as they went along he questioned Finn.
But Finn was now very unwilling to tell anything about himself or his message, as if by so doing he might let the enemy in on him. The old man did not seem in the least scared of his company. Perhaps in a town, thought Finn, folk were given to asking questions in order to get from one place to another.
“No, it’s not for ourselves,” replied Finn, “it’s for another woman, and I’m just on a message.”
“Did you say it was Lybster you came from?” The small dark eyes were quick and curious.
“No, it’s farther back a bit. Will the doctor be in, do you think?”
“It’ll be Dunster, then. I know the turn of your speech, I was in it once myself, but that was long ago. Well, well. And you have come all that way! Have you many cases of the trouble there?”
“No, not many,” said Finn. “Do you think the doctor will be in?”
“If he’s not, he will be some time. You look a fine, healthy lad yourself, and long may you be that way.”
They came upon houses all stuck together on both sides of the road, with such a press of hurrying people that Finn became confused and self-conscious. The little old man stopped at last. “There’s your door. Only two or three cases in Dunster, you say?”
“Yes, thank you very much,” said Finn. After all, he was a friendly little man, with his bright, curious eyes, and perhaps so old that he had nothing to do but wonder about death.
As Finn knocked on the door with his knuckles, after a glance at the brass knocker, everything went from his mind but a quivering half-fearful intensity. No-one came to the door. People passed, seeing him standing there. He did not know what to do and felt his body going stiff and queer. The door suddenly opened and a young woman, dressed in dark clothes, with a very white cap on her head, white cuffs, and a small white apron, did not come forward but stood aloofly regarding him. Fortunately, he had his words ready: “Is the doctor in?”
“No.”
The rest of his words got scattered.
“Div ye want t’ see him?”
“Yes, please.”
“He’s expeckit back in an ’oor’s time.”
“When will he be home?” asked Finn, realizing that his English was fabulous.
Her eyes narrowed upon him slightly but with humour. He had such a soft, pleasant voice, and his dark eyes were shy and frightened of her. “I said in aboot an ’oor’s time.”
Finn now felt desperate. “I want to see him, about my mother.”
“Fat’s ’e name?”
“Finn,” he answered.
She smiled now.
“Far d’ye come fae?”
“Yes, it is a long way,” replied Finn.
She gave a little laugh. Finn reddened, body and mind in an agony. An elderly woman’s voice called within.
“Come back in wan ’oor,” said the girl.
Suddenly he understood. “Thank you. I am much obliged to you, M’am.”
She was barely seventeen, and he was tall enough to be as old himself. As she closed the door, her eyes threw him a mischievous glance.
When he had separated his head from his heels, he found himself approaching the harbour and soon got so lost in the immense concourse of folk who paid no attention to him that his self-assurance slowly filtered back. He tried not to gape, but his astonishment was very great, particularly at the number of shops and business premises, with their names in big lettering. Once he was caught in a crush of folk in a narrow street and had his bare toes trampled by a seaman’s boots. The high tumult of voices speaking and shouting and laughing all at once frightened him, but fascinated him, too. Such a scene his imagination had never pictured. But the harbour itself stopped his breath.
Great stone walls, endless yards and cooperages, immense stacks of barrels, the smell of brine, long wooden jetties, the clanking of hammers, the loud rattling of wheels, warning yells and the cracking of whips, herring-guts, clouds of screaming gulls, women in stiff, rustling skirts, and everywhere men and boats. This was Wick, easy mistress of all the herring fisheries. Her population at the moment was increased by thousands of strangers, not only from Moray Firth ports like Buckie but from faraway townships of the Hebrides.
By nature Finn would have wished to escape from that tumultuous and even terrifying place—a solitary life could easily get crushed and lost without slackening the onset—were it not for his love of the sea. The harbour basin drew him, and for a time he wandered by the boats, doing his best to note and memorize any peculiarities of construction or colour so that he might have something to discuss with Roddie.
But all this time at the back of his mind was the tremulous fear of going again to the doctor’s door. Suddenly he felt he would be too late and hurried away from the harbour. Now, however, he could not find the door. He had lost his way. But the first man he asked told him where to go and—there was the door.
He never told what an heroic effort it cost him to go to that door. From lack of sleep and food and a journey of well over thirty miles on his bare feet, a dragging came to his legs and a prickly heat of weakness to his forehead. But his real terror was lack of English. It was so clear now that Mr. Gordon did not speak in the right way. Sick at heart, but with that frail determination that would not have given in to death, he lifted his hand and knocked.
She smiled, raising her eyebrows in recognition. “He hesna come in yet, but if ye’d care to wait?” She stood aside, and more in answer to her action than her words, he entered.
After an hour in a small waiting-room, with several men and women, all anxious and ill at ease, Finn experienced an increasing light-headedness, and grew afraid he would fall off the chair. Sometimes they spoke to one another, but mostly they sat looking at the door, waiting for the girl to come and call one of them. If only he could have had a long drink of cold water! He grew restless, and an elderly woman asked him if he had come far. “Oh, a little bit,” said Finn, smiling but not looking at her. He tried to shut the dumb anxiety of the room, its veiled talk of suffering and sickness, out of mind. He had never conceived life as an imprisoned illness, a closed room. The fear that he might choke and fall off the chair and make a fool of himself started small internal tremors. He sent his thought over the moor, into the wandering wind. The door opened and the girl looked at him.
“Mister Finn,” she said, smiling only in her eyes.
He got up too quickly and staggered a step, but gained the door. As she closed it behind her, she looked at him critically. His hands were twisting his round bonnet. She took the bonnet from him. “We’ll leave it here,” she said, and gave him a smile as if she were one of the girls at home. It was the sensible smile of an ally. As she turned the knob, she kept her face sideways towards him. “Mister Finn,” she announced, and then in the friendliest whisper, “in ye go.” If she had given him a push behind, it would not have surprised him.
The smell of the surgery cleared Finn’s lungs sharply. When he had completed his note, the doctor looked up into Finn’s face. “Well?”
“Sir, I have come from Dunster. My mother is in a house with the plague. I thought you might tell me what to do to keep the plague from her.”
“Have you walked the whole way?”
“Yes, sir.”
The doctor got up. “Sit down there.” He went over to a white basin near the window and came back with a glass of cold water. “Drink that. You’ll be feeling thirsty after such a long walk. Drink it slowly.”
He turned away and did not appear to hear the clink of Finn’s teeth on the glass, nor did he see how the glass shook in Finn’s hand as he set it down on the edge of the desk. All of which comforted Finn, while the water went down into his stomach like a cool, strengthening rod.
“Now, let me see,” said the doctor, looking up from the note he had written, in so natural a way that Finn did not feel frightened of him. “Why did you think of coming to see me?”
“We heard you were the special doctor for the trouble.”
“You did?” The doctor touched his top lip with the tip of his tongue thoughtfully. “I see. Well, I will try to help you if I can.”
Finn felt a great inrush of confidence, not only because the doctor said he would help him but, more immediately, because the doctor spoke the same kind of English as Mr. Gordon, and spoke it slowly and distinctly.
When Finn was stuck for a word, the doctor found it for him, but casually. Finn, however, could not tell him in what stage of the cholera his Granny was.
“And your mother is still with your Granny, nursing her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. Is she doing anything to try to keep the trouble away from herself?”
“She will be washing her hands and her face and she has saltwater for the feet from a man.”
“Has she?” The doctor’s face brightened. “Who is this man?”
“He’s a shoemaker, but he also does the doctoring.”
The doctor smiled. “Tell me——” But he was interrupted by a knock on the door. “Come in!” The door opened and a man’s head appeared.
“I’m sorry if I——”
“Come in. Here’s a young man who has walked thirty miles to see you. Your fame has spread!”
The new-comer looked quickly at Finn, and the doctor, getting to his feet, began explaining. They drifted to the window.
“I wanted to see you before going to Thurso. I’m off in an hour,” said the new-comer, speaking quickly. “Whisky, whisky, and if it’s not whisky it’s smuggled brandy! Is this the universal specific up here? We’ll have to wean them off that. I am more than ever satisfied that in the treatment of the preliminary diarrhoea—they will call it ‘the dysentery’!—the combination of calomel and Dover’s powders is the thing. I have now tested the calomel and opium separately and combined—definitely not so good. And if you want to keep your fishing going, we must get the people to understand that diarrhoea is not cholera—though it may become cholera if not treated properly and at once. This is very important and we must get it noised abroad. Give the powders and stop the number of stools, then a damn’ good sweat and they’ll be all right. Let your anxious fish-curers put that around if they want to go on making money! And if only at the same time they could tell them about ventilation—at any and every stage. But the marquee should be an object lesson there. The whole thing arises out of uncleanliness and lack of proper sanitary arrangements. I am convinced——”
“I wonder!” interrupted the doctor. “I admit that in a place like Wick the thousands of incomers have congested living conditions beyond all reason, but in the country, where they’re dying in scores, living conditions are as they’ve always been. And the people are over all a strong, healthy crowd——”
“Yes, yes, but I mean once you introduce the infection. However, we’ll argue that again! But I’m particularly optimistic at the moment because the Cormack case is reacting favourably. He was blue, cold, no pulse, and senseless, and now he’s pulling round under the compound decoction sarsaparilla. You’re taking notes? Grand! I’m going to do the pamphlet along the lines of the four stages: premonitory, cold stage, collapse, typhoid stage….”
While this talk was going on, Finn kept his attention to the table beside him so that it might not appear he was rudely listening. There was a white slip of paper on this table, under his eyes, containing the following writing:
Calomel, grs. 20;
Pulv. Doveri, grs. 15 to 20;
——Gum Kino, dim. ½;
——Catechu, scr. 1;
——Cretæ Comp. drm. 1;
Powders, 12.
As Finn could make no sense of this “English”, he was again being troubled by the greatness of his ignorance, when the specialist suddenly exclaimed: “But Lord, I must run and you’re busy! Give this boy the powders and keep a record of what happens. Results in country cases may be interesting.” He paused and looked at Finn on his way to the door. “Have you seen your mother treating the case?”
The doctor was about to intervene, when Finn said hesitatingly, “I saw her burying something in a hole.”
“Did you? What was it?”
“I thought it was stuff from—from my Granny.”
“Was it? By God, she seems an intelligent woman!”
Finn thought none the less of the specialist because he took God’s name in vain. The doctor said, “I’m going to hand him over to my wife. They can tear the tartan between them.” And, after taking leave of the specialist who had come into the county to study the disease, this he did.
She was about the age of Finn’s mother, graceful in her movements, with a slow, pleasant smile, and at the sound of her voice, he felt shy to respond, his own Gaelic, before he spoke, being harsh in his mind. But she led him to describe his home, and what had happened, and how he had walked through the night at his own impulse. In a short time she had him almost at his ease.
She left the room and returned with two packets of powders and began explaining to him how they were to be taken, how often, and when. “This packet here is for your Granny—because her case is advanced. I’ll write ‘Granny’ on it. And this is for your mother—and, remember, she must take the powders at the very first signs of the dysentery. If it is not very bad, she’ll take one about every two hours. But if it’s very bad, she’ll take one every half-hour. Now let me hear if you have got that right?”
Finn repeated her instructions correctly.
She then told him about bathing the feet in warm saltwater, the importance of raising a good sweat, the need for fresh air inside the house, and other simple precautions.
“When the trouble is gone from the house, your mother must burn all the dirtied clothes. If the clothes are too good to burn, she must boil them in the big iron pot for at least two hours. You understand? Then you’ll take all the furniture outside, everything, and leave it for two or three days to air. Then you’ll scrub out every corner and whitewash the walls. Only in that way can you be sure of getting rid of the trouble, so that anyone coming into the house will not catch it. Have you got that?”
But Finn could not answer. A brightness was in his eyes. “Do you mean,” he asked, with a slight gulp, “do you mean—we won’t have to burn down the house?”
“You won’t,” she said, and the slow, lovely smile came to her face.
“Mother will be glad of that.” He flushed and began repeating her instructions.
She complimented him. “And now, won’t you need a rest before you start back?”
“Oh, no, M’am. I’ll be going now.”
“You’ll have something to eat, and then we’ll see.”
“I’ll be going now, if you would not mind.” He wanted to be off, running. But he did not wish to appear rude. He felt awkward, standing and smiling, the precious packets gripped in his hands. As she remained silent, looking at him, his awkwardness increased, for his eyes were anywhere but on her face. “I’ll take the coast road back, and that’s much shorter. I won’t be long.”
“What road did you come?”
He explained how he had taken the roundabout way through the moors to Watten. From there he could have gone either to Thurso or Wick. In this way he was letting her see how sensible he was. He had heard in Watten that the doctor was more likely to be in Wick.
She got up abruptly and left the room, and his heart sank. He must have been rude. Perhaps it was even a greater rudeness here than at home not to accept hospitality, particularly when on a journey. Distress got hold of him. He would do anything for this woman or the doctor, the most desperate thing. Why was she not coming back? What would he do? Perhaps she was telling the doctor! As he began to stow away the two packets, he suddenly paused and regarded them with dismay. It might not have occurred to him that he would have to pay for the doctor’s advice, but these real powders …!
The door opened and she entered with a smile.
“Here is a packet of sandwiches for the road, seeing you cannot stay for a meal. I quite understand your hurry to be home.”
He accepted the sandwiches but remained in an intense awkwardness, making no effort to move. “I forgot,” he said in a low voice, “that—that—I forgot—I have no money.” Then he raised his face and looked past her. She saw that his teeth were shut against the movement of his features. “We have money,” he said, “at home. I—I’ll come back to-morrow.”
She looked as if she might walk out abruptly again, but the doctor appeared in the doorway and glanced at his wife’s eyes. Her mouth gave a humoured twist that he knew, and she remarked, “He forgot all about money. He says he will walk back to-morrow with it.”
There was a moment’s silence. “Good God,” he said. “Haven’t I told you the soft disease your folk will die of? Tell him,” he added, with a wry humour, “that we usually send a bill.” He turned to Finn and stretched out his hand. “Good-bye. If you save your mother, it’ll cost you nothing.” And away he went.
Then she ctretched out her hand. Finn called on his last resources, looked at her eyes, and thanked her. After that he did not see anything very distinctly, until Wick was behind him.