THE OLD HOME was now occupied by strangers. He looked at it over his shoulder. Already he had seen the harbour deserted of fishing craft. How typical he was in himself of countless Highland lads who came back to the scenes of their boyhood! How many had returned after the Napoleonic wars to find that even the ruins of their homes had been obliterated!
The speculation produced no more than a momentary dry smile. His father had died a short time before Angus had been killed. There had been between these two a curious dumb relationship that one could understand but not express. It had always been there. He could remember— very early in his own life it must have been—seeing his father going apart to talk to Angus who had committed the terrible sin of playing truant from school. His father had stooped down and talked to him. That was all of the action he could remember, but it still held a mysterious significance. Angus had thrown over the sea, that was his father’s life, and emigrated. Then he had come back to Europe and been killed. His father had never seen him after he had left for Canada.
On all the little grey-granite war-memorials of the north, how often was that story told!
Six years after that his mother had died. Not before he had got her south to see him capped Master of Arts and Bachelor of Science. At least he had had the wit to do that!
During the capping ceremony, she kept her countenance. When he walked on amid the learned gowns, there was perhaps a moment’s difficulty, a slight stress, but she did not lower her head.
During her visit, in a way he had never foreseen, he was extraordinarily proud of her. There had been a supper celebration with two or three friends at an expensive restaurant. But the array of knives and forks merely made her smile. She smiled upon them all out of a good nature that enjoyed the perplexing abundance with a quiet humour. Life was good. ‘Well, well, bairns!’ she said and prepared to have every good thing that was going. ‘A little more of the wine, Mother.’ ‘Thank you,’ she said, and added, ‘I think it is going a little to my head.’ They all laughed, moved to pleasure by her wise naïvety. She looked around the room and then at her plate and ate modestly. To her, the room was full of ladies and gentlemen. She would have had no desire to be reminded of the grey, hard north. She would have had no sentimental illusions about the homeland. She knew its grain too well. Here at last life blossomed into its flower.
And if this was her illusion, it at least sprang out of some very deep instinct, some need for brightness and happiness, for the primordial goodness that so persists in haunting the minds of the children of women.
He took her up to her bedroom himself. ‘Goodnight, Mother!’ and he kissed her quickly, laughing. For a moment, she had nearly lost herself in a deep mother-surging of the body towards him, for this exhibition of southern manners had taken her by surprise. ‘Have a good sleep,’ he said and turned from her hungry eyes. Before going downstairs he had paused to fumble with his tie, smiling to himself at thought of her emotion—and of his own.
A moment worth remembering—together with that other moment when he had had the wit to bring the half-bottle of whisky to his father and Sandy.
Strangers now in the old home. Well, what of it? The thought of his father and mother being dead brought no sadness. Some conception of fulfilment rather, and of, on his part, an acceptance not at all stoical but at the moment full of a wise, bright pleasure.
And here once more the river. How small it had seemed when he had returned after the war! Everything had shrunken. What had been to him as a boy great journeys, were now short distances for a forenoon’s stroll. The forests had dwindled to decaying woods. The paths were little broader than sheep tracks and in places were overgrown, broken down, or eaten away. Even the little round house in the wall of the Broch, perfect in his boyhood as it had been for two thousand years, had now a breach in its side.
But in the years before his mother’s death, he had quite conquered this obvious grown-up reaction to childhood’s conception of size or even of importance, and the river had once more established itself, with values arising out of the old, but with a new intensity and meaning. Since his mother’s death, there had been no direct need to visit the homeland, had possibly been an underlying reluctance to visit it, and vacations for the most part had been spent on sea trips or in the cities of the Continent or in other parts of Scotland. Until in recent years, the simple fact that he had never actually gone to the source of his childhood’s river had quietly taken possession of his mind, and by a slowly growing impulsive need had started it on this long, intricate quest, a quest of lost times and places, but not for the mere sake of evoking them, or of indulging pleasant or sentimental memories, but of capturing, of isolating, a quality of awareness and delight in order to provide the core of life with warmth and light.
A careless happiness, derisively touched, thus sat at his heart as he took the path by the river, by the Intake Pool, to the Broch promontory where he paused to throw a glance up the green flat. The roses were once again in bloom.
When he had seen Annie Grierson six years ago, she was the mother of a young family and settled to the soil. She had been pleasant but perfectly matter of fact. He had laughed to himself afterwards, recognising his own male romanticism— as if he had expected to find a certain shyness, a veiled remembrance! Absurd! Yet what absolute guarantee had he that she did not remember?
None, for she possibly remembered all right—only not with an airy grace! There was a delicious humour against himself in this. For the truth no doubt was that Annie saw him as the young man who had had a notable career, who, amongst the learned, would have forgotten his boyish pranks and, in any case, would scarcely want to be reminded of them. Yet Annie had oddly disturbed him for a year or so; and almost certainly had been the unknown factor that had so mysteriously interfered with the expedition to see the bull! Out of what strange deep in the mind does such early romantic idealism spring?
While his mind swithered in this vague debate, his legs suddenly decided to carry him round to the right. Yes, the white rose of Scotland was growing here still. And the scent—it improved on his memory, as it always did. No rose in the world had so lovely a scent. He had tried all the roses he had ever met and no scent was so fragile and so deep. Time breathed up warm from its yellow heart. The youth of the world, cupped in fragrant quietude forever. Upon the restless soul, a benediction and a wild cry.
He came away with a couple of blooms, a sun-warmth the colour of old ivory in their white petals. For he had sent the five petals of this rose to the nurse whose ear had, more or less inadvertently, touched his lips in Leicester—‘to prove to you that all the roses of England—and how many have I to thank you for!—may not compare with this wild rose out of the heart of my native country. Simply that—and nothing more.’ The ‘nothing more’ being designed (sweet youth!) as the obvious thorn that may not go untouched. As it hadn’t!
He regarded the roses in his hands, his eyelids quivering in amusement. Then he pulled off the petals and put them flat as shillings into his pocket book, and looked around and laughed silently, as he used to laugh to himself when a boy. He would give them to her when he got back. The blue in her eye that she had carried over from an Irish ancestor would be worth mocking for a moment. Such sweet havoc they had played with the English roses!
He did not go up to the Broch, but held by the river, passed the white house, came in sight of the lodge, and at last climbed up on to the Hawk’s Hol. From the heather, he arose and went along the wooded crest and down to Achglas Pool. Not a very large pool but still dark and impenetrable in the centre. And there was the ledge, too. Could he balance his six feet on its tiny shelf? It was not very easy, but he managed to do it, even to lean out over the brown foam-flecked water and peer down. He leaned a long time, his elbow bent out, his sleeve in the water, and when he looked up it was as if at the ghost of someone present, the trickle from his forehead unheeded. With silent care, he got off the ledge and, standing on the rock above the pool, stared all around him and listened, his mouth slightly open.
Spink! Spink! came from the trees above. Coloured bubbles, light as thistledown, tumbled from the branches. The summer sunlight was shafted by the clouds. All he knew in the world was that the large trout he had just seen must in fact be a salmon of twelve pounds.
Weakness beset his leg muscles. They grew tremulous and he sat down. When he found his hands searching through his pockets for a hook, he smiled. But the smile was fugitive and pale, and the ghost of his brother Angus looked through his face.
I’m in it now! he thought.
By the time he had passed the Smuggler’s Pool, the burying ground, the Serpent Pool, the falls, and reached the place where twenty years before he had lain naked in the sun, the river ran through him with all the ancient potency.
The excitement in this was deep because it was surprising. Somehow he had expected it would all, in a sense, be a looking back, or, at best, an effort to recapture something of the past in the present. Nothing altogether nostalgic or sentimental, because he was prepared for that, but still a certain deliberate use of the past to enrich the present.
And lo! he had entered absolutely into the present itself.
The sweat and sun on his face made the skin smooth and oily. His nails and knuckles were seamed with earth. He took off his shirt—after a look around—and bared his chest to the sun. Lord, you’re white! he muttered. As white as leprosy. This is good, boys! A chuckle rumbled in his throat. Lord, it was good, this! What! He was in complete command of the situation. He could imitate Angus imitating the showman in front of Pinder Ord’s circus. Walk up, gentlemen! Walk up! Lions and tigers, elephants and bears! Angus’s solemn boasting, his solemn eructation-with-variations, his less reputable variations, his fecund play-acting, rich and warm with laughter, warm as your face smothered in the pillow lest they heard you downstairs.
Life was flowing through him, thick with health. This was the health out of which one looked, as brown eyes out of a curled furry body, but with the understanding in the eyes that the wise call humour.
All the little lewdnesses and sexual movements of early boyhood are seen with a friendly chuckle, as young lambs racing and mounting one another in a field. What merriment they could arouse—often to the point of utter, of helpless laughter! Out of the simple game of seeing who could squirt his water the farthest, what a row of serious intentions, what ‘accidents’, what mirth! And even the more intimate little acts that one would have been so ashamed of—worth a humoured thought now!
Lying naked at seventeen. These pale idealizations of adolescent love, romantically conceived, hotly imagined. Even these—for understanding darkened with something akin to pity.
This feel of the earth, of the body; this goodness of health that flowed from the body over the mind, adder-cool, sun-warm; this thick richness of texture, for a laughing mouth to threaten.
No evil here; only immemorial good; life a centre-knot that draws individual consciousness out of eternal absorption, before letting it go again, soon or late.
He had only to stick his head up over the edge of the bank to see the eternal absorption, to see the moors, the dark brown rising to far low ridges, and passing over them the wind, and the cry of a hill bird. The wind touched his parched city skin to velvet; the bird-cry sounded the depth of silence that he had forgotten was in the world and in his soul.
Knots of mist gather and fade, but this moor-world remains, detached and unexpectant; so detached, so unexpectant, that nearness and urgency may rush the conscious soul to a listening that hears the flowing of the river under the ultimate silence.
What more may one expect? How acquisitive the personal gluttony that must hang on to everything! In the welter of the unclean that is evil is it not something to be certain that this will remain? That into this one may sink?
And as for the rest and the hereafter—if any (Kenn stretched his pagan legs)—what more certain than that only in proportion as one apprehends this now will one apprehend that hereafter? Perhaps this is why the folk have always seen something of divinity in the work of the artist. For the divinity consists in this: that he observes here and now. Precisely as the scientist observes; if working with a different set of values. The religious who is always trying to see hereafter is like one trying to occupy the last stance in a mathematical regression.
Or assume God. Assume God sets a paper in the final exam on the nature of His Creation. Will the religious who saw little but evil and engaged in little but sycophantic prayer. … A deep drowsiness was washing in upon Kenn from the upheaving moors; the smile on his face grew faint in pure beneficence; grew fainter still until it passed quite away, and left upon his features, the mouth fallen slightly open, the forewriting of death.
His eyes flashed open in frightened bewilderment; then his spirit came back into his face. I must very nearly have fallen asleep! he muttered, knowing even as he glanced at the sun that he must have been asleep a good hour. This gift of an hour’s sleep from the moor is very handsome, he thought, as his face came smiling through the neck of his shirt. Inside his clothes, his body, cooled by wind and cloud, rustled in lightness and ease,
As he stepped away, the quiver of humour in his eyelids was an answer to all the social voices of the world. But he did not debate with them. He heard no single disputant, for no single voice could come through to him now, no single voice of all the voices drowning far back in their own solemn concerns.
He was arisen right enough! Not difficult to understand why no traveller ever returned across the bourne!
The last of the birches were now behind him. The strath was flattening out. The heather came down to the grass. He passed over a rise and saw before him a wide shallow dip in the moor in which was a shepherd’s house. This was the last inhabited house on the way to the source, and, though he did not know the family’s name, he knew that the shepherd was employed, no longer by the estate, but by a club of crofters from round his old home. Was this the first step in the coming back of the folk to their own?
The rolling ground here was all green grass, acres and acres of it, clumped at wide intervals by grey ruins. It extended beyond the other bank where further heaps of ruins were visible. On an old large-scale map of this region that he had studied he had seen the words Picts Houses, and had been oddly moved, as by some pictorial reminiscence that cunningly evaded being focused by memory or eye.
When he saw a golden-brown caterpillar on a twig of heather, the rich hairy body seemed to have something to do with Picts Houses. So much for environment! But beneath the humour was the evasive magic. An exotic, lovely, crawling thing out of the heather. Not smooth; but rich and hairy and deeper in its gold than honey. It curled upon his palm, tickling his skin to the incipient panic that wanted to drop it.
At the first mass of ruins he saw a thing that pleased him instantly. The bulk of the ruins represented the ordinary rectangular croft houses, manifestly occupied in recent centuries. But at the head of the straggling cairn was the round building of one of the Picts Houses of the map, its thick prehistoric stone wall still almost as tall as himself. It had clearly been used as one of the gable walls of a rectangular house, and this effect of intimacy between old and new hit him strongly. Its dumbness was eloquent of the continuity of the folk. It solved for him in a flash the interminable debate as to the identity of the Pict. I am the Pict! he thought.
When he turned and looked at the river and saw it winding far on and leftward through this pastoral land, the effect of Stevenson’s ‘vanished races’ came full upon him. He had always been secretly affected by the poem.
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent
vanished races,
And winds, austere and pure.
The whaup-cry from Vailima! Out of the marrow of the bone! ‘My heart remembers how.’
Stevenson had known the ‘influence’ all right! Sonorous or poetic or mot-justely as one likes, but there! The golden caterpillar warmth beneath the heart.
And his face—a queer vanishing face. It vanished before Kenn as he looked, and left his own heart touched to a dark embarrassment.
The pools were now new to him. The old red sandstone was no longer broken into boulders but thrust its strata through the river bed, through the hide of the earth, like elbows—running into smooth skin. As with a connoisseur of period painting, each new pool to Kenn was a new piece, full of its fascinating delights and judgments. He knew where the salmon would lie, to this side or that, resting at the bottom or ready at the neck.
Beyond the shepherd’s house, a large tributary entered. This occupied his attention for a long time. He was now in the spawning land.
From here onward the salmon in the autumn consummated their journey from the dark ledges of the Atlantic. How many hundreds of miles they travelled to this stream that wandered more lonely than any cloud! The glimmer on Kenn’s face held a friendly satire browner and older than a peat bog.
For he was at home here. He was drawing back into his own. He could feel the pull—as the salmon felt it—if to no such fruitful end!
The laugh could come through his nostrils in soft gusts. There was no one to see; and as for that inexplicable sensation of there being an eye about somewhere, a non-human eye, a peat-hag eye under heather tufts, he appreciated so well the sheer illusoriness of it, that—well—he could outstare it.
Turning, he saw the shepherd’s house away behind him, set in the green land of the vanished Picts. It was inconceivably lonely, its life so strange an intrusion that it emphasized more than anything could have done the static eternal quality of the scene. At such a moment, eternity was felt not as a dimension in time forward in the way the mind usually feels it, nor even as a dimension in time backward, but as the point of meeting where the circle starts and ends. Time held in suspension or poise and losing all dimension in an eternal now.
His mind became so held with correspondent mathematical speculation, that when he turned again the house was gone, and looking down and ahead he saw that the river had grown smaller, that the banks were hollowed peat, that flowing directly down upon him at last were the heather moors, with the mountain-tops riding beyond them to the west, and that this place—where he had never been before— no, he would not say it was familiar—that would be too obvious a paradox—besides, it would be wrong, because he had never been here before.
His mind trifled with itself, amused and happy. Time was gone. Human relationship was gone. He had entered into the non-human, not only in the moor but in himself. Perhaps it was this that was familiar!
The familiar strangeness he would take in his stride, not letting his mind dwell upon it. There were certain things one kept down, not out of fear but for the extra enjoyment of that healthy normality that holds all things in its sway.
One played with the queerer forces of the mind as one played with kittens. Lovely things they were—that turned all claw only when one lost the power to play, when sadism or masochism or other perverted fear craved the filthy abomination of cruelty, craved it in a paroxysm that turned the blood acid and squirted saliva about the fangs.
Almost any one of the small pools now was a good spawning pool. In the stalking season the gillies often saw the fish ploughing up the gravel beds. A great commotion they made. One would sometimes think, said the gillies, that they had gone mad or that an otter had got in amongst them.
Their love rites. Well, they had come a long way for them! thought Kenn. A fellow feeling made him hope that the emotions would match the strength and beauty. And certainly the strength was spent magnificently, utterly, almost to the point of death.
Lovely fish! So worked upon was his mood that the killing of them seemed a sad business.
But the whisper of this was far under his mind and soft as the wind. For a moment, without thinking the problem out, he held it sanely in the glimmer of his eyes. Then he passed away from it and from himself, as the wind passed, and the sunlight.
In the inconsequent way that images will come upon the mind when one is walking for a long time in a solitary place, Kenn saw an immense stretch of ocean with his father’s boat upon it, black buoys, and the thin dark line of a drift of herring nets. Morning, and they are hauling the nets, when a salmon leaps high in the air, all gleaming silver, his tail curving over in the pride of strength as he takes the water again.
His father’s voice comes clearly to him: ‘It was a fine morning.’
The calm, reminiscent voice and the leagues of the sea and the sun rising; the voice concerned leisurely with exact detail, and particularly with this detail—that they were fifty miles from land.
Those who wrote about the salmon, judging from the books Kenn had read, would be glad of a detail like that. How many of the salmon followed the herring shoals? Were they chance raiders, fellows who set off on poaching forays? … Only once in his lifetime had his father caught a salmon in his nets. Many skippers never caught one. At fifty miles out, the land—
Kenn smacked his neck violently and smashed the horsefly and threw it to the ground with fierce disgust. A cleg! He had forgotten the loathsome, the silent-footed brutes. One thing he had never understood—would never make any effort to understand—why insects had been created. Of all forms of life, surely the most vile. The cleg was silent, the colour of old horse manure, a sort of living ghost of evil. The tenderest skin never felt him land. Not content with filling his belly with one’s blood—for which he might have been forgiven in a difficult world—he must go on to leave behind him a filthy poison to swell the flesh in maddening irritation for days.
Kenn abhorred them, and now looked about him with malignant wariness. There were Junes and Julys in the Highlands of Scotland that would be pure paradise but for these moor-emanations of some diabolic intelligence. They certainly gave pith to the belief in an evil principle in creation. The blister was already beginning to rise.
Sufficient for the moment to dispel imaginative images anyhow! Bringing a rough rake to the throat and sinking the heels solidly in the earth, hang it! with a wry laugh, the brutes!
This business, he considered, of finding background for thought itself went pretty deep. Perhaps it explained his reactions to some modern writers who would build up human life into the social complex of the beehive. How appalling! Quick-stinging insect intelligences creating an insect philosophy, an insect social order. Efficient to the nth, within their surface pattern. Made one think of the bees that sting the mouse to death and wax him over in a pale aseptic mausoleum. How dreadful, how sterile a nightmare!
Had his abhorrence of this started with boyhood’s experience of the cleg? Blue bottles laying their eggs on the hidden salmon; an attack by wasps; clouds of midges eating the eyelids. …
For what if one gained an insect world but lost one’s own soul? There was the idea, juggle with it as one liked. Any particular creedal significance was neither here nor there. A man had to find himself, had to hold himself with a solitary, lonely integrity. That always; and more imperatively than ever, when the mechanics of bodily sustenance—food and shelter—were themselves being elevated into a whole way of life, a religion. Good God (said Kenn to his multiple disputant) this business of political economy is at bottom a matter of pure animalism, a matter of arranging the production and distribution of the admitted abundance of what we as animals need. Because we make wars and commit social cruelties of incredible hideousness in its name, that’s not going to make me forget that it’s animalism, not going to make me talk of high ambition and holy endeavour and glittering prizes. That sort of sentimentality is surely beyond being borne, is surely the sin against any holy ghost that may inhabit the body. Oh, to hell with it! A cleg had landed on his thigh. He hit it a terrific welt and it rebounded to the ground.
Invigorated, he went on happily.
Since entering the barer country, he had been noticing the wild flowers. Eye-bright, butterwort, milk wort, cuckooflower, lousewort, stonecrop, tormentil, orchis, forget-me-not, scabious, trefoil, and a pink vetch were fairly common. Now the heaths and the lichens of the moor were drawing his attention. The bell heather proper clustered in deep blood-red, but the bells of the cross-leaved heath (erica tetralix) hung pale pink, so delicate and soft to the eye that they seemed to have an added bloom, like the peach or the blaeberry. The basic tone, too, had a wide range, now almost campion red, now fading away in moonlit pallor. Rushes grew in clumps along the green ways. Apart from sudden bends, where the peat hags directly overhung the water, the stream never lost the generous borderings of rich grass. Occasionally they widened into fair pasturage, into what old folk called ‘the leans’—a term that at once evoked the ancient shieling days and the summer herdings of cattle far from the townships or villages. How many centuries had slid down the peat water since the folk of the Picts Houses had pastured their small black cattle here where the rushes grew?
Crossing a boggy tongue of ground at a bend in the stream, Kenn came on a sundew. It immediately evoked the sensation of having something of the sea about it, as though allied to certain marine plants that filled the rock pools of his boyhood. This sort of subterranean linking of sea and land in his mind had its own strange potency, though precisely how or why he could not say. Possibly it was little more than a long subconscious enriching of what he had read in early days about the beginnings of all life on the sea beaches. He was prepared to accept that—were it only to avoid the exquisite difficulty of attempting further analysis—with a possible direction of speculation towards conclusions too utterly fantastic. In any case, thought of such analysis did not worry him now, for, alongside the sundew with the elongated leaves, he saw—what he had never seen before—a perfect specimen of the round-leaved sundew, shaped like the face of a small clock, with minute hands radiating at equal intervals and carrying on their tips their round hairy leaves.
Standing up, he looked about him, at the far, slow-rising moors, and beyond to where the shapely peak of Morven was half-veiled in mist. He saw the shower coming from the mountain towards him, a thin curtain trailing its lace along the heather, and going down under an overhanging hag he squatted on his heels and suddenly felt hungry. He looked at his watch. It was five o’clock.
As he munched his sandwiches, the fine rain drenched the air and the earth and drew small grey insects to their whirling dance. But it was too early in the year for the stinging midge to be really troublesome and, beyond wetting his face in absent-minded swipes, he was not inconvenienced greatly. He had nothing to drink, so chewed away at the sandwiches as he stared at the water at his feet, until the mood of communion with the sodden black earth—too often an imagined mood—became a mindless reality, with physical points of discomfort where the sweat was drying to a chill in the small of his back and the rain was wetting a knee and a shoulder. But he could not be bothered shifting the knee or the shoulder. Once his eyes glimmered in the humour that might have said, ‘This is fine,’ but his lips remained soundless and the glimmer passed.
The small pool in the black peat at his feet became a world of its own. It was separated from the stream by a green bank. The reflections of the rushes seemed more vivid than the rushes themselves, more intricate in their patterns. The end of his hazel crook stirred the pool and bubbles came to life on its surface. The bubbles had an attraction for one another. When two drew close together they rushed into a violent embrace and became one. The one sailed about for a time, then burst, and from the place where it had been went out an uncountable number of close concentric waves, as if the skin of the pool shivered. Idly the stick created more individual bubbles. They united; they died. Some never united. But they all died. The shadow of his stick lay on the pool. When a bubble crossed it the shadow at that point disappeared and the stick was broken. The bubble vanished and the shadow was made whole.
There was scientific knowledge in him to explain all this. Possibly an odd heap of symbols lay about somewhere as well. That the reflection of the rushes was more vivid than the rushes themselves had doubtless a meaning for art. He was beyond caring. The inertia was too profound. The objectivity absolute.
So still was he now that two birds came tumbling down the air in front of him, flirting in twists and spirals. They were smaller than skylarks. In a detachment finer than excitement, he realised that they were heather linties, the singing birds that an older generation had snared for the cage. Half-fabulous birds to him; yet all in a moment endowing the earth and air about them with attributes of home. Their home. His perception of this was clear as the sunlight that came after the shower and poised the birds in air in a ruffle of under feathers and threw a rainbow in the sky.
As he went on the chill passed from his skin and his emptied mind began to fill with emotion. He knew the emotion before it quite arrived and his lips parted in their friendly, half-derisive humour.
From heel to toe his body moved with a cool tautening of muscle as if about to race, to jump; and this explosive energy was held in check, as laughter is held in check, behind glistening eyes. For inside this buoyancy the emotion he smiled at was very familiar, very old, very ordinary, ordinary as the poised fluttering of the birds, full of kindness, of affection, affection for the beauty of the birds, the coloured arch in the sky, for earth and air, for life. And this affection, held coolly in the extreme buoyancy of his body, pervaded him with a feeling of inexpressible well-being.
Coolly he recognised that his body was purged of the passions of evil and fear and hate; was for the moment reintegrated and made whole.
And the expression of the eyes, admitting this, was a subtle challenge to all the forces from the world behind him, the world he had left. A subtle but not unfriendly challenge. For he recognised his own strength. The heather root, the wind, the running water, the undefeatable strength of the moor, the hidden eye. Delicious as a chuckle of laughter in a pool’s hidden throat. Nothing could ever throw this strength. And nothing could even approach an understanding of how to attempt to throw it—except in the spirit of a game, in the spirit of that excitement that is the pulse of the creative act.
But always with the instant power to step back into the detachment that makes the lid of the eye tremble in speculative primordial humour. A humour ready to smother sententious thought in a shout of bright fragments.
And consciousness of the mood to pass quietly, in an instant, into the quiet of the moor.
So quiet was this remote, twisting valley of the ever narrowing stream, that when he rounded a bend and saw the herd of hinds, he involuntarily stood still. The three hinds farthest out had their heads up watching him. They made no move. The hinds in the hollow had their heads down, grazing. As he stood looking, the whole scene took on the mood of arrested enchantment.
As he broke out of this mood, the farthest hind trotted a few steps, then turned its head again in that high flat-browed ear-pointed look that has something memoried about it out of some leprechaun world. The other two trotted and looked. More heads were lifted. Movement began in hesitant starts and pauses; rhythms taken up and broken, yet ever running together. The last to see him was a mother hind with her calf beside her. She wheeled round and was off, but holding herself in, too, her head thrown back and riding above her body with a lovely grace. He looked for the others. They were gone. The calf was pale against the golden tan of its mother and ran eagerly at its mother’s side. In no time they were gone also. In the soft ground there had been no sound of hooves. There had indeed been no sound at all.
The valley kept changing and was ever the same. The stream dwindled slowly. His thought wrapped him about in a half-dark oblivion, a half-dark sea on which two craft fell away and came again. Their names were Aristocratic and Thoroughbred. The meaning of their names had the virginal freshness of white sails in a burst of sun. The names had been degraded. He saw how far they had been degraded. The whole historic social process was apprehended by an unanswerable intuition.
The hinds would run through his mind, would run through the mind of the world, for ever.
Of that he was certain.
His eyes were abstracted but with a deep glow in them. His features paled a trifle in sensitiveness. When the spirit of man recaptured the grace of the hinds, the two words would once more have meaning. Not until then. Only occasionally now was the meaning amongst men. Radzyn. Though in Radzyn—he saw it now—there was something for ever tragic. Could not one hand to Radzyn this lightness and positiveness, this sun-brightness, this beauty of health. … His hands had begun to move forward but instantly relaxed and fell to his sides. His eyes quested about him with an odd, sardonic humour, as if they were not quite his own eyes. There was nothing one could do with the tragic conception of life except acknowledge it.
Bow to it, giving nothing away, and pass on the moor like sunlight, like shadow, with thoughts hesitant and swift as a herd of hinds. In this way one is undefeatable—until death comes. And as death is inevitable, its victory is no great triumph.
The stream narrowed in places to no more than a foot. The source could not now be far away. The sun was behind a bank of cloud that hung low over the horizon in the north-west. The shadow of evening gave a darker texture to the moors in the distance. The mountain of Morven that had been hard and bright all afternoon, its screes and growths clearly defined, was now gathering about it an imponderable blue. The mountain was retiring within itself. All mountains did this at night. They withdrew. They folded their shoulders and drew their mantles about their feet, like gigantic prophets. But once in the West he had seen them like gigantic beasts, immense squatting brutes, mammoth figures moulded by some cosmic youth already touched by the tragic brooding of mind.
A band of mist lay high up along the mountain’s shoulder, not settled to it, held in an immobile grace. The blue summit rose above it and in this way height was given to the mountain and a serene detachment.
Not the beast there, thought Kenn, but the prophet! His eyes glimmered, for there were two aspects of mountains that always either excited or drained his mind. This was one of them. The other was what he called their planetary light, in the dawn.
Suddenly, before his very eyes, the stream vanished into the earth.
His dismay was vague and ludicrous. From his map-gazing he knew that his river should rise in a loch. He could not have been mistaken. This loch was to have been the end of his journey. Like the yogi in his pilgrimage to Lake Mānas!
And here it was coming out of the earth itself. The realism mocked him. He had actually thought of a loch with shores of sand and water grey in the evening light.
Coming out of a black hole in the earth like life itself. A hole that was like death. Life and death in ooze. He poked into the dark hole with his stick.
He climbed over broken ground. Remembering how they listened-in to the earth when boys, he lay down and put his ear to the ground. Faintly he heard the surge of the stream away underground. So it was not lost! But listening more acutely, he realised that what he heard was the surge of the river of his own blood.
He went on over the broken ground and came to a round still pool. There was no sound of water running underneath. He leant over and thrust his stick out of sight in this navel-hole that was black as a death tarn.
About him the ground was broken and hag-ridden, but he could see he had not yet reached the crest of the watershed. There remained the suggestion of an upward hollow. He came on another small pool like the first. Then another. A primeval no-man’s-land of outspewings like waterlogged shell-holes.
The touch of uncanniness began to get lost in an earthy zest. The pale sands and the wan water would have been a bit too poetic anyhow! His own, his native land; the quagmires and mosses; the deathly oozes and shivering tussocks: a place of such utter disillusion that, fighting from it, one’s laughter could never be defeated. And then all at once before him again was the tiny stream and lifting his eyes he saw the far half of the loch, Loch Braighe na h’Aibhne, the water-head.
A deep humour flooded his sight as he stood still, and his tongue came out searching his lips. His expression was half shy as at the unexpected sight of a loved woman. Then he went on, looking at the streamlet, until presently its water grew quiet, seeming to flow neither way; and when he came to the loch he saw that its shores were not of dove-grey sand but of pure ground quartz, paler than any woman’s face in any old poet’s dream.
He realised precisely the joke that had been played on him. Nature had a sly way of behaving like this occasionally. The goodness of it sank deep into his heart. He walked along the shore. He lifted handfuls of the ground quartz and let it run through his fingers. There were no footprints anywhere. The wind had fallen with the evening. The clegs had gone with the sun. There were no midges, no life of any kind. Perhaps no life ever came here. In front of him he saw marks on the white sand, delicate hoof-marks—of the hinds that came to drink.
He sat down, for he was tired now, suddenly tired. The surface of the loch before him was divided; on the right reflecting a turbulent glory of clouds, red and pearl and dark; on the left reflecting nothing, a grey shield, a mere, too wan for thought to gaze at.
He lay over on his side. He realised that it was some excitement in him that made him tired and unequal to the scene. He closed his eyes and let the place come about him. This it did with a caressing wash softer than any wind. But every now and then his eyes opened stealthily to set it back, and through his lashes the grey water receded to an infinite shore.
A strange fret ran along his bones. A surge from all the ways of life behind him pressed up, unvisualized and unresolved. Into what was around him he could not enter. He was not equal to it; or it was not equal to the ways of life, to the humoured flesh, the sardonic awareness that may never be imposed upon.
Unheeding, remote, without fret or passion, it waited, and would wait through aeons of time.
The suns died in it and rose again.
It was greyer than the marrow in his bones.
The familiar note that had haunted him all day—its excitement was now passing along his laboured flesh as in the preliminary pains to some creative act.
Giving birth to a vision! He felt his humour going nihilist, felt himself on the verge of some awful and irrevocable denial. For it was writ in his nerves that he could have no vision, that no figure could appear to bless or to fulfil.
He was a solitary.
That was his destiny. He saw its meaning in his people, even in their religion, for what was the Calvinist but one who would have no mediating figures between himself and the ultimate, no one to take responsibility from him, to suffer for him.
It was not pride—unless it was the pride of austerity.
Responsibility; the inexorable search for truth; the vision that came to the scientist, not of personal salvation, but of an unending spiritual drive into the unknown. Man’s greatest of all poaching forays: leading him to what inconceivable water-head?
The gathering clot of moody denial dissolved like tiredness from his flesh, and his body lay to the sands lightly in a desire for sleep. As his eyes looked across the water, they smiled. Out of great works of art, out of great writing, there comes upon the soul sometimes a feeling of strange intimacy. It is the moment in which all conflict is reconciled, in which a timeless harmony is achieved.
It was coming upon him now.
An hour later, he left the white shore and encountered two or three tiny lochs, called dubh lochs. The inland moors were full of them. He had heard stories of their treacherous depths. The one in front of him was barely six feet across, its water hardly a foot deep. When his stick touched bottom in the middle it went sinking into the soft, dark ooze under its own weight. With his finger tip and the slightest of pressures, he sank it its full five feet. He had only to take one step forward and not all his struggles or clawings at the bank would save him from being sucked to death.
He was aware of an irrational pleasure, arising out of an absolute absence of fear. He had once thought of Radzyn’s mind as a remote place with chasms.
As he looked back at Loch Braighe na h’Aibhne, his lips moved in their characteristic humour, but in his eyes was a deep, secret tenderness.
The intimacy was very close now. In the last few moments before he had risen he had seen himself walking towards the mountain, much as, in the last year or two, he had seen the little figure of the boy Kenn adventuring into the strath. What older mind, in this curious regress, was now the observer might be difficult to say, for its apprehension seemed profounder than individual thought. Pict, and Viking too, and Gael; the folk, through immense eras of time; sea and river, moor and loch; the abiding land: of which the departing figure was a silent emanation, more inevitable than any figure in any vision.
From the high summit, the solitary figure would watch the dawn come up behind the Orkneys; would see on the mountain ranges of Sutherland the grey planetary light that reveals the earth as a ball turning slowly in the immense chasm of space; would turn again to the plain of Caithness, that land of exquisite lights, and be held by a myriad lochs and dubh lochs glimmering blood-red. He could then bow his head and see what lay in his heart and in his mind.
Kenn withdrew his eyes from the source of his river and, turning, saw about him here and there on the moor the golden spikes of the bog asphodel. He picked one and found it had a scent. He searched for the name of the scent and remembered the taste of a golden candy Sans used to sell out of a glass bottle. At that, little Kenn’s face vanished goblin-like across his mind. He could not all at once throw the flower from him nor could he put it in his buttonhole, so he forgot it in his hand as he went over the watershed and down into the valley that lay between him and the base of the mountain.