In the morning Simon Grant felt fresh and sprightly. The middle part of the night hadn’t been too good, but now he realised that he had fallen into a second deep sleep, and that, against the chances, was enough to make him more happy than if he had been victorious in a difficult argument. The cat had obviously licked up her porridge and milk and been shooed to the wall on which the sun was shining. It was going to be another glorious day. “And where were you all night?” But the cat bore his attentions with a sleepy indifference, arching her back only when she had to. The cock, in his polite fashion, was finding imaginary grain beside the peat stack for those members of his harem who wished to believe him. Grant wandered to the byre and found that the cow was already out at pasture. After a look behind him, he entered. The stall had not yet been cleaned, and the manure smell had a certain prehistoric thickness which he found not altogether disagreeable, reminding him as it did of the affiliations of homo sapiens with the animal kingdom.
Wandering happily back, he encountered Mrs Cameron on the doorstep. There were pleasant good mornings, and inquiries about sleep, and she told him that his porridge was in. He had insisted on porridge, and not entirely because it might help his hostess in her food problems. Beside the plate was a bowl of milk distinctly yellow in colour. It stuck to his spoon. As it happened, he was fonder of cream than a cat, and the porridge was well boiled.
When Anna came in with bacon and two eggs, he chuckled, excused himself, glanced at the plate and laughed.
“I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t!”
The warmth came into her face. “We have plenty of eggs.”
“But I couldn’t. You must take one back at least.”
Mrs Cameron appeared and asked what were two eggs for a grown man, and besides there was the old rule: one could just leave what one couldn’t take. But one couldn’t leave an egg! The thing, as he suddenly saw, had become moral. But Mrs Cameron saw it differently. “They first shrink your stomach,” she said, “and then make it a sin to leave an egg.” Laughter stayed with him.
The meal over, he explained to Mrs Cameron that he now wished to go to Kinlochoscar for his suitcase, in which were his ration books. She assured him that the bus could bring it tomorrow, for it ran three times a week between Kinlochoscar and Clachar. When they had discussed the local travelling and postal arrangements, he came at the matter which was nearer his mind. In a few words he explained why he needed labour to help him in digging the old cairns. Was there any such labour available? While she was being thoughtful about this, he said, “As a matter of fact, I was recommended to a woman who has a son working for the County Council, taking stones out of the stream. Do you know her?”
“You mean Mrs Mackenzie and her son Foolish Andie?”
“I could see he was a bit—foolish, yes.”
She was looking at him. “Who recommended you to that?”
“It was Mr Martin of Clachar House.”
A curious reserve invaded her face.
“Do you know him?”
“I met him yesterday. I had to get permission from him, seeing the cairn I want to open up is on his land.”
“I see,” she said, and she stared out of the window. “Did you get the permission?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“You have spoken to Mrs Mackenzie?”
“I’m afraid I have. It’s rather been worrying me off and on, because—it makes one feel sort of awkward.”
She nodded. “He’s a good worker. You need have no fear of that. And she’s a deserving woman. She’ll get him to do what you want, if it’s simple digging or stone lifting. She has had a very hard life, very. It’s a sad story. If you could give him something to do it would help her, and she needs all she can get.”
“Well, if you say so, I could take him on for a week and could see how he did.”
“That might be the best plan,” she agreed. “And if you needed better help I could see what I could do.”
“Thank you very much. That’s fine.”
But as he went up the road he wondered why she had quietened so unexpectedly. It clearly had something to do with Martin, and his dream and restlessness in the middle night came back to him. Martin had had a brown bear on a chain and as he made it perform, the bear turned its head and it had the idiot’s features. It was not, however, the monstrous grotesque beast that had worried him, it was Martin’s face. There was something in the face that was—the word or thought now came spontaneously—annihilating, and the more so because, in a way beyond explaining, it was not actively annihilating. The face had wakened him.
That Martin clearly did not want him about the place did not worry him; on the contrary, it made him all the more determined to go on with the work, for Martin’s attitude was an insult to the spirit of archaeology which was concerned with deciphering the hidden part of the story of man’s invasion of the earth. It was the fundamental story, the central drama, round which all the other sciences were grouped as lights about a stage. That any man should arrogate to himself the power to switch off the central bulb . . . .
He should have got his permission in writing. So much was axiomatic. I am making a bad beginning, he thought. And now there was this business of the idiot. Excruciating! For what would they think, the Colonel and the others? It would be the joke of the club. Gales of laughter. Did you hear the latest about Simple Simon? He knew they called him Simple Simon. Blair, the petrologist, made a cult of retailing titbits about Simple Simon, which he hadn’t the wit to make up himself. Usually he was more than a match for Blair, but they all knew, with a schoolboy cunning, how to work up to his weakness, which was a sudden consuming wrath in a torrent of spluttering language. With a touch of pricking heat, he dismissed them—for he was never inwardly dominated by them—and came back to his immediate problem.
To employ an imbecile on work requiring so fine an exercise of care and discrimination was, he realised, despite his extraordinary thoughts during the night, quite impossible. That Martin, who obviously suffered from too much intelligence, should have suggested it was enough to make wrath bubble. He had never really intended to employ him—until he had had these fantastic night thoughts, about the idiot as a prehistoric personation. Now, in the daylight, he could afford to show some ordinary sense for a change.
Every now and then his eye had been lifting to the stream, and at last he saw them. A primitive grouping right enough! A Palaeolithic hurtling of stones! The glottal stops of the missing link! . . . There had been something in his dream! He was smiling vaguely in an embarrassed way as at last he approached the woman. Except for the automatic movement of fingers and needles, she sat watching his approach like a figure in softstone. Her still, heavy face was a dumb question in the distance. He waded up against it and cheerfully bade her good morning. She got up but he made her sit down again, aware that she had read his face. That she had had to become skilled in this art was more than embarrassing, it was pathetic, a tragic comment on life. He moved about, considered the stones geologically, and saw the idiot pause to stare at him and then shift his glance to his mother with a sort of wondering cunning or gleam of primitive intelligence and vague noises. “It’s all right, Andrew,” she said in a quiet natural voice, with a simple nod and a glance of her eyes that set him to work again.
“Well, Mrs Mackenzie, I don’t think really that I’ll need your son’s help. I—I have been thinking it over, and actually I would need someone with some knowledge of the work. It’s special work and—and therefore I would need someone who knew just what to do.” He went on to express the same idea in other words, for she remained completely silent.
“Very well,” she said when he had finished. Her fingers began to work of their own accord; she did not look at them as they worked.
Five minutes later he left her, smiling vaguely as he called himself a Mousterian ass, for he had engaged Foolish Andie for a week’s labour beginning next Wednesday, which was five days hence. Also he had engaged her to knit him two pairs of stockings and promised to provide the coupons for the wool.
Presently he was enjoying the joke himself and felt oddly relieved. The only thing to do with colonels and petrologists and landowners was to challenge them on their own lake middens. And after all there was a psychological or realistic argument in employing someone of primitive intelligence inasmuch as one might test his reactions, if any, to a primitive creation like the chamber inside a cairn! That might put at least the unimaginative Blair on his back—even if the fellow hadn’t a real back to be put on.
The internal argument grew until it burst, for it was a lovely morning and the sky serene. These five days would give him time to do preliminary mapping and hunting for local lore on an exhaustive scale, while by the end of them a telegram should have brought him his box of gear. Blessedly, there was no hurry in the world, and he was going to prove himself no “barrow-digger”, that term of abuse for the old antiquary who thought he could tear the secret out of the heart of a barrow or cairn in a few hours by digging a hole in from the top!
The eye that now kept lifting to the landscape was the archaeological eye, the trained observing eye which found the most delightful interest in its exercise. Nothing was too large in mountain conformation nor too small in rabbit scrape to fail to be read like print. His research had in fact been mostly fieldwork, and in map-making he excelled, being surprisingly ingenious where correlations were involved. He could speak with warmth on the geographical approach to his subject, and here he was today with a spot of actual digging on his hands and all to himself. It made him feel like a small boy with a tight secret.
The postmaster at Kinlochoscar accepted his telegram and inquired how he had fared in getting a lodging. Grant told him he had fared extremely well. When the postmaster had extracted the detail he said, “She has the girl and the child staying with her. Ay, a sad business.” “You don’t feel it’s sad,” replied Grant, “but I must be off. I want to get a car. Thank you and good day.”
The hotel manageress was delighted to hear of his success, but when she had got the detail she said, “Anna Cameron is a very nice girl and you should be all right there.”
“I’m sure I shall,” replied Grant so genially that he dropped his hat.
She had a car, too, which she could let him have at once. “Or are you staying for lunch?”
“No, I said I would be home for lunch,” He looked at his watch. “But perhaps—a glass of sherry?”
“Certainly.” She pressed a button.
“Oh and by the way, I’ve just sent a telegram for a box, a wooden trunk. It has some of my working gear. If you see it lying about anywhere, would you——”
“Surely.”
“Bless you!” And he went to the lounge to await his sherry.