CHAPTER FOUR

1

THE following morning Clare realised that the sheer pleasure she got from watching the white curtain of drifting rain, as it crossed from Colin McKinnon the piper’s house over the hill-face, blurring the lonely cottages and the little green fields, to vanish beyond the sea-precipices, had something to do with the mere state of her health. She was getting stronger, physically and nervously. When she got tired out she slept. But there was something more than that. . . . Her mind took a long drift, and presently began answering the letter under her hand, her chief’s letter. . . . ‘The rain here is surely the wettest rain in the world. It penetrates. I sometimes think it penetrates so far in that it waters the old arid mud in which the primal serpents have been so long baked by all our modern electrical improvements, so dazed by jazz lights. The mud softens. They stretch themselves sluggishly. They lift their diamond heads and their awful inscrutable eyes keep looking while they yawn. They love the dark because their deeds are—unconscious. They come to the light to coil their dark beauty in the sun, which they love most of all in spite of the prophets. I sit at my bedroom window in this enchanted land watching the rain—and taking great care—not to get wet!’ And so on. She could see his smile. That momentary flicker of hesitation while he wondered just precisely how much she meant.

How much she meant?

She pondered. The mud and the serpent really meant—sex. He would see that. The symbols. But also of the unconscious, the vital. Therefore veiled. He would see that, too, the delicacy of it, and hesitate, with that odd considering smile.

Her face grew still and her eyes transparent with light. The pale cheeks had a faint underflush.

Sex after all meant life, came out of life. And this growing towards health and colour was warm and inviting. It made the body feel a lovely thing as if a lily had got flushed with rose.

And slightly restless.

Humanity—or was it puritanism?—was like that: it would kill anything lovely by giving it a ‘real’ name. . . .

But. . . .

She wondered.

Though secretly and in the clean ways of her heart she knew how lovely it was. And this awakening towards health—how exquisite among these hills, by loch edges, with the wind, the sea. The wind from the hills went round the body, rippled the skin. She had never quite felt like this before.

Before it had been too obviously an intellectual recognition of a sex emotion.

A faint smile shone deep in her eyes.

Her lips moved as if the flying mist had touched and softened them.

Her face was fair and slightly veiled.

But behind the veil—the playfulness, the hidden certainty, that life glowed and was iridescent. The body was in a condition of love . . . health struck a note in it like an under-sea bell . . . with whom? . . . with what? . . .

The flying mists that veiled the hillsides veiled her eyes, veiled her thought from herself. Or did it? Yes. She withdrew her eyes. They regarded her pale fine fingers that straightened themselves measuring each against each, and slowly rocked over, glistening in their nails.

Her elbow touched an open poetry book, which the artist’s wife had given her. She drew it in front of her.

‘Eilidh, Eilidh, Eilidh, dear to me, dear and sweet,

In dreams I am hearing the sound of your little running feet—

The sound of your running feet that like the sea-hoofs beat

A music by day an’ night, Eilidh, on the sands of my

heart, my Sweet!’

She read the three verses.

Her mind stirred; a smile trembled to her eyes, daringly. What about these verses—as the conclusion to the primal serpents stirring in the mud? To work it out without any apparent logical development—one verse, say. ‘Here is the Gaelic jazz, beating on sand.’ With a final nicely baffling remark, ‘Perhaps the primal serpents are sea-serpents after all.’ And then, ‘Anyway, a walk one must have—even in the rain. So good-bye. The glass has decided not to go any lower!’

But she sat looking at the rain and didn’t write a word. . . . ‘that like the sea hoofs beat a music by day and night, Eilidh, on the sands of my heart, my Sweet!. . .’

Romantic sentiment; weak; had its day; done. Art now looking to the classical or sculptural. What was the phrase in the latest highbrow criticism of the romantic? . . . ‘emotive fragments’ . . . that was it. An amused flicker passed over her eyes. They were clever, these men critics. They were positive scientists. They were so sure they knew—everything.

The letter she would write certainly wouldn’t be an ‘emotive fragment.’ She felt suddenly tired and pushed the writing material from her. Not quite so strong yet as she fancied. Her head fell on her arms. Closed eyes found the world dark. And sculptural art becomes invisible in a dark where is only the sound of sea-hoofs beating on sand.

After lunch, she escaped. The clouds were hanging lower down than ever, but the rain had lessened and was now drifting in a soft smother of tiny drops. As she swung down to the stone bridge she was delighted to find this outside world warm and tender. The near hill-slopes faded away mysteriously; even things quite close at hand became blurred and freighted and fragrant; while enveloping, all-pervasive, was the sense of strangeness, as of things under a wild spell; under, say, the crying of wild geese and wild swans.

When she crossed the bridge and came on the mouth of the road leading down to the sea, she turned into it at once. Faintly already she could hear the sea-hoofs beat. But very faintly, as though freighted also, and under a spell. Muffled hoofs—or muffled sand? . . . No. Muffled was the wrong word. How to describe it? How to tell of the heart listening, of the gaiety of mysterious mystical things? Here was escape indeed! Sitting inside thinking about it . . . like the wise critics in their studies . . . these human spiders, spinning so industriously, with such design! Here was a sense of relief, of being caught up, that was joyous, intoxicating; and when she suddenly saw a real spider’s web on a whin bush, beaded and beautiful in the small rain, she smiled. She hoped the poor fellow didn’t get wet; but she felt pretty sure he wouldn’t catch a wild swan, not even a wild goose! . . . Then she passed the two-plank bridge, down by the rock to the beach where by their sea boat stood Ewan and his sister Annabel.

Clare came on them so unexpectedly that they stared at her as she approached.

Where so much was mere card-playing and disgruntled moods, they at least were of this land, were genuine. And the girl rather looked like a wild swan.

She greeted Ewan with a disarming friendliness. He touched his cap. Annabel hovered painfully on the point of flight, but Clare caught her with a smile.

‘Is this your sister?’

Annabel’s face was a flag of shy distress; her glancing eyes were very bright; her thin hand responded to Clare’s clasp with a nervous uncertainty.

It required no great imaginative effort to hear the fluttering of her heart. Something in Clare instantly responded to this vivid, sensitive being here on the sea edge.

She turned to Ewan, who had an old black oilskin about his shoulders. ‘You’re not going out, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really!’ She faced Annabel. ‘You’re not?’

‘No,’ said Annabel, with a start of astonishment.

Clare looked at the boat, the coiled brown fishing line with lead and hooks.

‘Going fishing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I say. Really. That does sound rather exciting.’ She looked past the spit where the foam swirled, to the heaving planes of the sea, dying into grey mist. ‘Rather a huge loch, isn’t it?’ Her teeth flashed; her eyes flashed, daring the sea. But in her heart she felt these two were hostile, were shutting her out. She turned to Ewan hesitatingly. ‘You wouldn’t—you don’t take—?’

‘The boat is always for hire,’ stated Ewan simply.

‘Oh.’ She felt pulled up. ‘You mean—I could hire it now?’

‘Yes . . . although I promised to get fish.’ He was plainly uncomfortable. ‘It’s not very nice today.’

‘I should like to go to-day, I think,’ she mused.

Ewan gave a sidelong glance at her clothing, at her face.

‘I think we’d better arrange a day,’ he suggested.

‘I have only one fishing line at the moment.’

‘And you must catch fish!’

The awkwardness persisted. Clare could not break through to them. Ewan slid away.

‘Do you always see him off?’ she asked Annabel.

‘Nearly always.’

‘And do you never go out yourself?’

‘Oh no!’

Clare watched the body in its black oilskin swing to the oars, the boat rise and dip. As it rounded the boiling point to the right it heaved tumultuously, the black body a heaving part of it, the face a pale blur. She suddenly remembered her uncle’s story of Ewan and his father; of Ewan who had managed to save himself anyhow. . . .

When the boat had disappeared she still remained looking at the waters. Annabel stole a glance at her and saw blue eyes flashing through a mist of thought or feeling. Clare turned and surprised her glance; smiled.

‘The women never go, of course.’

‘No.’

Clare saw that she wanted to be off.

‘You go up that way?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could I go that way—back to the hotel?’

Annabel hesitated.

‘Yes. But it’s very steep and the grass is wet.’

Presently Clare asked, ‘Do you ever think of leaving here?’

‘I don’t know,’ murmured Annabel. ‘My mother. . . .’

‘Ah, you have your mother.’

‘Yes.’

Clare decided she would not take to the hillside after all.

‘Good-bye. I’ll see you again, I hope.’ She paused. ‘If ever you did think of taking a post away from home, I hope you would give me the chance—’

‘Thank you,’ murmured Annabel, embarrassed, edging away.

Clare gave a final greeting and turned. As she crossed the bridge, she thought how splendid it would be having a personal maid, like Annabel, in London. How Annabel would, at trying moments, bring back all this land with her soft voice, her flashing timid eyes, her vivid mind. . . .

As she went up the road there came the vision of Ewan in his boat, adrift on that tumbling waste. She saw his face gone a little grey, cold and expressionless as the sea, and as fearless. . . .

That was the note of this place: beauty and elemental strength and fate. In their songs, their poetry. . . . That note of fate. She looked about her. No wonder.

Something stirred in her heart like a poem.

2

Ewan followed up that same road in the evening, a fish wrapped in brown paper under his arm, while Clare in the lounge was pondering some remarks that had been made at dinner about the palatableness of really fresh white fish, remarks which had led to the question of transport in the Highlands, though it was not lost sight of that the introduction of the tripper would affect disastrously the combined attractions of charm and exclusiveness; a sporadic but rather illuminating discussion in which, however, her table had taken no part, though the Colonel had manifestly restrained himself with difficulty. Clare thought mostly of the fish, and had a rather morbid vision of the mouths consuming it.

But while Clare was anxious to escape again, to go out for a final breath of air, possibly as far as Cladach sands, Ewan was heading for Colin McKinnon’s. He wanted to have a talk with Colin, to get some music, to have something cleared out of his mind that was growing sour there and bitter. He did not want to be going too often to Colin’s. But he needed to go sometimes. He had hurt Annabel again. They wouldn’t leave her alone. She would suffer yet. She was cut out for suffering. The suffering in the mind. He knew.

And no good blaming Miss Marlowe. She was trying to confer a favour, to be kind. He saw Annabel’s enthusiastic eyes again. She had thought Miss Marlowe the perfect lady, wonderful, her expression full of kindness, of understanding, and so cool and beautiful and distinguished. Annabel had wondered if ever she would know enough to be her personal maid. But she had been watching his face; she had stopped; she had said no more about it; had gone out at the back door. . . .

The degradation of poverty in a world where money was the supreme power. The old spirit had had its day; was being squeezed to death; the old land existed for the hotels and the shooting lodges, where money gathered; and what sort of money it was didn’t matter.

At it again! He would always be like this now; a chronic! They were too much for him, the Colonel and his kind. Why should a man lose his sense of dignity by acting as a ghillie, any more than by acting as a bank clerk or even as a colonel? No reason. And, in the beginning, he might not. But in the end, he did. The thing wore him down. Money has the power to insult, and poverty (with mouths to feed) must have the silence to accept. If not at first, then always in the long run. The end was certain. Regarded philosophically, one might say that it would be impossible to be insulted by the Colonel. But it wasn’t impossible. On the contrary, it was most maddeningly possible, as though one would rather accept it from anybody than from him. And the local saying, ‘Och, never mind him!’ with its fatalism and dry humour wasn’t anything but a way of giving in, a sort of inverted superiority in which there was nothing but the acceptance that damns. And when these people smiled at the Highlander and imitated his ‘speech,’ ‘Ach put it will be a ferry fine day whateffer,’ and laughed at his English solecisms and generally found him a source of humour, the Highlander himself would laugh with them, or perhaps, like Donald, flare into a sort of wordy temper which afterwards afforded these one-tongued snob-hunters the best fun of any. There had been that fellow from Edinburgh last year, with his diced stockings and goggle-eyes and ‘humour.’ They say that Stansfield had quietly insulted him. Stansfield would, because he was an Englishman with the decent manners of his own race. McAskill had been going with him for years and gave perfect service for good money. Though even there. . . . Hang, he would keep at it! . . .

A voice came to relieve him. In the half-dark, in a still rain-drenched world, it came with a stirring magic, floating out from the old schoolhouse, from the centuries, from the spirit of beauty long ago. It affected him like a knuckle at his throat. His weary body shivered, and all his smothered desires rose in him like ghosts. The ghosts of past lives in past generations; of men and women of his blood; of all the old unnameable desires, the great ways of joy and sorrow, the deep sad ways of death, to echoings of ancient heroism and tingling in the heart’s blood.

When the Gaelic song had ended, the thought of Mary McKinnon the singer came in with his breath. And after a little he looked at the grey schoolhouse. And when logic came, he reckoned that she would be in there going over her songs for the concert with the old schoolmistress. But he kept looking at the schoolhouse as though it might vanish.

Then Mary McKinnon came out. He heard her soft laugh on the doorstep; heard the schoolmistress saying, ‘And haven’t you one waiting for you at all?’ And Mary laughed, ‘Not one!’ And the schoolmistress said, ‘Well, well; but when they’ll be hearing you singing, my dear, maybe one of the young gentlemen from the Lodge itself will. . . .’ ‘You never know!’ Kindly leave-taking, and now she was coming. He moved slowly along the road. As she came up, he turned.

‘Hallo!’ he said quietly.

She started.

‘I heard you singing. I was just taking a turn up your way.’

‘Father will be glad to see you.’

‘There’s no one in?’

‘No. He was alone when I left.’

‘Were you going over your songs for the concert?’

‘Yes.’

They walked on.

‘It’s a fine night now after all the rain.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ And Ewan looked about him. But he found a slight difficulty with his breathing and could think of nothing worth saying. He added, listening to himself, ‘It was very wet in the morning.’

‘It was. You wouldn’t have been fishing, of course?’

‘No. I took a turn at the sea in the afternoon.’

‘Wasn’t it stormy?’

‘No. The wind was off the land.’

It was a long time since Mary and himself had walked together on a dark road. He had deliberately taken care that it should not happen. This had been easy, with the possibility always in his mind. And when it had chanced that Mary and himself had been thrown together for a moment, he had always been amused and jocular, in excellent spirits.

Mary could thus come to her own conclusions. She could throw over all thought of him. It would have been an exquisite relief if she had, an exquisite torment. He could gnaw at this torment till he had got his fill of it. A black dog gnawing at it in secret, sucking its marrow of defeat.

That was it, of course; he had been defeated. His spirit had been whipped into him and whipped down. And he kept it there with a sure pride. If there could be nothing for him henceforward, then assuredly he was asking nothing.

Pride can be amused, jocularly; it can cover itself with flashing lights—from the passes of invisible steel.

Or—it can be silent.

He was silent now. He could have kept a conversation going—but, at the moment, after the singing, the dark road, Mary here walking so that every movement of her body was like a movement within his own flesh, why should he?

Her body walked through his own. The soft stir of her clothes filled his ears, gave her over to his senses till they brimmed.

They had not yet walked a score of paces. A pulse started somewhere in which pride and sensitiveness tremored and blurred. He threw her a look, swiftly lifting his eyes from her face to the night. Her face was set in front. There was no one in the night, no one but themselves.

The tremoring lightness passed to his feet. They scarcely touched the road at all. His walking became at once airy and awkward. He could stumble with the utmost ease, almost in spite of himself. And all at once he lurched towards her and bumped her shoulder.

She gave way instantly. But no more quickly than he drew straight.

An exclamation had slipped out of her; a tiny sound sheathed in a nervous laugh. Before it had gone he knew her feelings. They were his own, but a woman’s.

He exclaimed, too; but the sound he made was idiotic. It tortured him in its futility. ‘Excuse me!’ Excuse me! He stumbled again.

Why not? A reckless mutiny whirled in him, a dark flame. Strength from it gripped round his mouth. All his flesh gripped. In the darkness, the two of them, sweeping and clashing, crushing together.

He stumbled to a pause, uncertain still. From a step in front, she half turned. His taut muscles at last squeezed from the brown paper parcel under his arm the large codling it contained, so that it fell with a noisy flop on the roadway.

‘What is it?’ asked Mary in a scared voice.

He stood fixed in an intense dismay.

A curse formed in the heart of laughter. He stooped and put his fingers in the gills. As he straightened himself, Mary, who had half-stooped also, drew erect. They looked at each other, then Ewan leant forward and kissed her fair on the mouth.

She started back.

They stared at each other for a second, then Ewan’s strangled laugh came through.

‘It’s a small cod,’ he said.

She did not speak.

‘I was taking it along to the house,’ he explained. His voice seemed large and full of merriment. His feet hit the road, grinding the small stones. He felt sure, he said, that they would like a bit of fresh fish. ‘Won’t you?’

She did not answer. Her steps seemed to be going more quickly.

He knew why she did not answer—precisely. That was his perverted power.

But the surge from his dismay was passing. Merriment was its froth. They were coming near her house. In this walking, step by step—there was no power. They would soon be there. Desire grew in him. A craving came upon him. This craving became urgent and shackled each footstep. He walked more slowly. Her face seemed turned away from him—as she walked more slowly.

He must have her, he must have her alone.

‘I say,’ he began and choked and came to a halt by the dark byre door. His voice was little more than a whisper. She stood still. A voice sang out:

‘Is that you, Mary?’

She heard the hiss of Ewan’s breath; then his forced laugh:

‘Is it you, Colin?’

‘Well, now, is it yourself, Ewan? Isn’t that lucky?’ Colin had been leaning against the black peat stack and stepped out to meet them.

Ewan presented the fish and explained how he had fallen in with Mary as he came up the road.

He rose into a laughing voluble mood.

When they were in the kitchen Colin saw that Ewan’s eyes sparkled. Colin felt his own spirit growing light. He was a capital fellow this Ewan. ‘What’s the news?’ he asked, settling comfortably.

‘Stirring times!’ said Ewan. ‘Ardbeg is in the papers, and the Colonel is busy!’

Colin plied him with questions and followed the Colonel who, ‘by way of it,’ had gone to fish at Ardbeg and had come on this Duffy fellow holding a meeting in a barn.

‘You remember how it came down at lunch time in buckets,’ Ewan rattled on. ‘We were on Loch Cruach and had to run for it.’

‘Yes. It fairly came down. We were thinking about you. But there’s shelter yonder at the mouth of the burn.’

‘Yes.’ Ewan suddenly remembered the burn—and Clare. ‘Yes.’ But in a moment he was off again. The Colonel had been refused admission to the barn on the hospitable score that he had better go to the kitchen to get dry. ‘It’s just a little private meeting,’ old Homer the Red had said to him. Oh, ever so politely—and, with his best wishes that the Colonel would be dry soon, closed the barn door again!

Colin chuckled.

But the Colonel worked himself up into such a steaming heat in the kitchen that he stalked down to the barn again—to meet the men coming out. He held up an arm. ‘Look here, men; I have had Highlanders in my regiment. Most of them were gentlemen. You can behave as you like, but you can behave as gentlemen. Anyway, I’d be damned before I’d take instructions from any rascally Bolshevist. You may have to go to prison: it’s dead certain he won’t.’ With that the Colonel choked and glowered at Duffy, and walked on, with Donald bringing up the rear in the heavy rain. As they came to the boat, the Colonel exploded—‘Gentlemen!’—and spat in the loch.

‘That’s like him,’ said Colin smoothly.

Ewan threw him a glance. Mary was in the out-kitchen cleaning the fish. He heard the sounds she was making. Colin’s smoothness! Ewan laughed. He explained how the real joke of the thing was that this Duffy fellow was of no use to them. Colin wanted to know how that could be.

‘The farm servants who work on the big farms have a Union. The crofters, of course, haven’t: they are employers.’

‘Employers of what?’

‘Themselves! The farm servant is supposed to say, If we encourage the small-holder we’ll merely lower our own standard of living and wages. If a small-holder will live in destitution, then a farm servant will be expected to do the same, for we are all in the same line of business.’

‘Is that it? And what was that one coming up here for then?’

‘To get first-hand knowledge—and to offer advice.’

‘Well, now,’ said Colin.

Ewan laughed, twisting in his chair.

Mary came in and Ewan threw her a quick glance. But she did not meet his eyes. She wore a jumper of some silken material with a bright ‘art’ design, which he had never seen before. It threw up her fresh skin and dusky hair in a striking way. Her eyelashes swept her eyes as she became aware of his glance steadying; then, the lashes lifting, she looked at him a moment. Stormy, shy, lovely eyes, they gleamed and passed. But that look with its half-veiled smile, its indescribable glimmer of something welling up and dying in a faint flush, affected him profoundly; so that he swooped on Colin, who had asked:

‘And what do you think about it yourself?’

‘About what?’

‘About the raiders at Ardbeg.’

‘Oh. The raid is illegal. To the sheep-farmer, it’s a matter of theft. To the crofters, a matter of life.’ His mouth closed.

‘Tell me this,’ said Colin, after a moment. ‘Have you ever done anything to help them?’

‘No.’

‘Why, now?’

‘What could I do?’

Colin glanced at him. Ewan’s smile held a waiting satire.

‘Oh I don’t know. I merely thought that with your education maybe you could write a letter for them or something.’

‘Write a letter?’ Ewan’s restraint gleamed.

‘Well?’

Ewan flashed him a look. ‘And in any case,’ he said, ‘there’s no fight left in us—no real fight. We have so recently won the British Empire.’

‘I see,’ said Colin.

‘Donald MacCrimmon,’ pursued Ewan, ‘was telling me about an argument they had at the hotel the other day over getting married. The conclusion they came to was that a man could hardly ask any decent woman to share his lot nowadays unless he had a thousand a year—with prospects.’

‘I’ve heard them at that,’ said Colin.

‘They had been watching Hector McGruther cutting his hay. It came out that he was getting married and bringing his wife there, where his father and mother are also. The remarks were good! When John McAlpine happened along they appealed to him, and he said in his slow way, “Indeed he won’t be so badly off, because the old people are both independent, getting the Old Age Pension.” . . . It was a sunny day, and one woman gushed, “All the same, I do think there’s something idyllic in it!” The Colonel, who apparently did not think much of the lady, growled “Cattle!” And there’s something in what the Colonel said.’

Colin turned slowly and looked at him, but Ewan was concentrating his amused reflections on the fire.

‘I think Hector and Hughina will pull well enough there,’ observed Colin.

‘Oh, no doubt,’ smiled Ewan. ‘All the same . . . I don’t think I would like to tackle it—if I was Hector.’ And his smile held artificially. Then he stretched himself with clever laziness and grinned at Colin. ‘You’re surely full of politics to-night,’ he probed.

‘I’m full of nothing,’ said Colin.

Ewan got abruptly to his feet. ‘Come on, let us have a tune.’

‘Och—’

‘Come on!’

Colin got up. Ewan followed him. As he was passing out of the kitchen his body hung an instant in desperate hesitation, then went on without looking back. While Colin stumbled into the parlour for his pipes, Ewan stepped outside and gazed rigid on the night.

Nor when the music was over would he go into the house again.

Colin stood looking after him until he vanished. Usually he caught the drift of Ewan’s mind, but all along to-night he had been uncertain.

As he entered the kitchen, he saw Mary lighting her candle at the fire.

‘You’re for bed early surely,’ he said, looking suspiciously at her.

‘It’s not so early,’ she observed evenly.

He could not see her face. It seemed as though there were two of them at it!

He sat down for a final draw at his pipe. He sat very still and thought over what Ewan had not said to him.

After a time he got to his feet, his face firm and set. He stood gazing at the blind window. Then he turned inconsequently and looked at the clock, his eyebrows wrinkling, his lips puckering a toneless tune, which gradually passed on a whistled underbreath into the tune that Ewan had played so queerly.

3

The following day Ewan, the ghillie, was told on reporting at the hotel that he was not required. Humour flashed in his face as he returned by the steep path above his home. His had all the exciting uncertainties of a luxury trade in a restricted season. To compensate for which, the profits were large! For if he wasn’t exactly saving a penny, still there was the penny to spend.

And, anyway, a day off meant a day about the sea. Coming down on a sparkling morning upon a glittering sea was a luxury in itself. It lightened the spirit and banished time. The body came into freedom.

About the beach he moved in quiet leisure, handling odds and ends of gear with an easy strength, his lips whistling a few notes softly, then closing of their own will to let the throat carry the melody in an inner humming, again to pass the melody to the lips as the hands finished and the eyes appraised the completed act. When he lifted his head, there was the sea, glittering and uncoiling with an aimlessness that was entrancing. What a perfect command of leisure the sea had! Men wondered what they would do if they had nothing to do. And here the inanimate sea, with nothing to do for all eternity, doing it with a charm that varied eternally, that was forever fresh and vivid and full of flashing colour . . . and at moments positively suave in its brimming courtesy.

Annabel appeared upon the rock and gave him a wave. He laughed; and when she mocked him, the stone he threw hit the rock-face and bounded back through the air in a high singing curve. Whereafter, whistling an intricate tune rapidly, he boarded his boat and pushed off.

As he drew away from the spit, Annabel came round the base of the rock—and stopped, disappointed. He waved airily. Her thin body twisted ludicrously as it threw a pebble that didn’t even reach the water. But by the way she hurried back, she might have had a golden moment.

Upon the sea, the ease of his mind was still haunted by Colin’s question as to what he was doing for the Ardbeg men. It had haunted him through the night, just as though it had never interfered with his sleep before!

It’s not that he could do nothing for them. That was certain; for he could hardly persuade them to give in; and if he egged them on to fight then he was merely egging them on to prison. This was their affair. And it could be his affair also only if he with other men was prepared for some form of ‘direct action.’ Was he? Were they? The question had only to be asked for mockery to answer.

And yet for one good old flare-up, not for any Prince Charlie or other anthropomorphic conception, but for their own land and sea! His mind flashed across the ‘interests’ from factors and ground agents to the local press, from political agents who boasted that the only things the Highlands exported were men and women to the typical ‘correspondent’ who proved in himself that the only thing they exported was brains!

Yes, there might be some satisfaction in having a smash-up. Besides, something would be bound to come out of it. For wherever the spirit is alive, the spirit flowers—in the body.

This preoccupation with the spirit! Very amusing. In a way a sort of self-indulgence in a perverted flattery. As if his spirit was the spirit of race and land! But then probably it was, for after all wasn’t it underground and defeated?

And who anyhow could believe that a spirit should move anybody? And such a spirit! As if it were as important as any of the minor parts in the real human drama, not to mention major parts—like love and death and murder and money and success. Particularly success!

‘Och, never mind them!’ As he rowed past the fatal spit on the Black Rock, with its memory of that dreadful night when his father had been drowned, there came like a blasphemy on his mind, ‘I should put up a tablet there!’

The sea-sparkle darkened a moment. He lay over his oars, breathing through his teeth. The spit darkened. The water licked about it. As his thought held him, the spit slid out of focus and wavered and deepened—to an opening. He could not break the stare. He felt himself being drawn to the brink of revelation. The still sea water was beginning to lick like dark flames. The flamewaves curved upward, they increased in size and violence, they spouted and broke, flinging far curtains, while the rock beneath, like the back of a maddened beast, heaved tumultuously, water scudding over it in clash and welter of spume. . . . The sea, the raging, maddened sea . . . and now upon it, so that the eyes were held in horror, a small boat, with one struggling figure, tossed and driven towards that black opening. As boat and figure were swallowed up, the mist passed from Ewan’s eyes and he broke away in violent agitation, his skin shivering with cold, his stomach sick with excitement. He pulled fiercely. His mind rushing out to grasp reality landed on the kiss he had given Mary on the dark road. And the kiss, like that dark picture, was dark and fatal, a final act of lonely betrayal.

A moment or two, and he changed the fierce rowing into a strong, steady pull, so that any watching eyes might be deceived.

Then a smile formed. Had he, for the first time, got a touch of second sight? . . . Or was it merely the subconscious reconstructing what had already happened? He looked about the rock-crests to see if he could spot anyone. He didn’t often indulge in physical outbursts! Then he wiped his forehead. His hands were trembling and his face was deathly pale.

Slowly he pulled along, letting the blue and silver and the quiet sea’s rhythm heal his agitation, so that presently he knew he had been merely indulging in a daydream. Often enough he slid into daydream. He had to face and remember the tragedy of the Black Rock, were it only to keep his mind and the sea healthy and clean. Until at last indeed an intimacy had grown out of it—which, for the first time, had betrayed him, as though the daydream had taken the one step further into the horrible realm of second-sight.

It hadn’t, of course. But still . . . and he smiled speculatively and started fishing again. As his hand worked up and down, he looked abroad upon the face of the sea and got a new vision of its immensity, upon which he was cast, which his spirit rose to counter and to receive, until loneliness that might have been terrifying became a quiet strength, at the heart of which was peace.

Then in the evening he decided to go to the hotel, for it was as well to find out if possible what was in the wind for to-morrow.

‘If you see Jean, ask her why she’s never coming down,’ his mother called to him.

‘All right,’ he answered.

But there was no hurry. So he took the road up the burn side to the stone bridge, where he ran into Ronnie McAndrew, now a fourth year’s English Honours student in Glasgow.

Ronnie had always appeared a trifle shy of Ewan. There was a trace of it still in the sensitiveness that showed through an effort at assurance. He rarely came down the glen. Ewan had not seen him for many months, and now suddenly rather liked him. This came as a slight revelation to Ewan himself as showing how far he had travelled his own road. There seemed to be no longer that odd twist of emotion arising out of involuntary comparisons. Ronnie was expecting some friends, he said, by car.

‘In that case, why not come up above?’

Ronnie hesitated a moment. ‘All right,’ he said. They began walking up the steep road.

‘Busy at home?’

‘Oh, giving my father a hand.’

‘Stalking this year?’

‘I believe I am,’ said Ronnie, after a moment. ‘I’ll probably go out with Mr. Harold.’

‘Mr. Harold?’

‘Oh, he’s Mr. Denver’s son,’ explained Ronnie quickly.

‘I see.’ Ewan caught the tone. Ronnie would not like going stalking with anybody. But if he had to go, then it would be rather fun going with the proprietor’s young son. Not that Ronnie would mention even ‘Mr. Harold’ abroad. Ewan rather liked his delicate evasiveness. Besides, there was just this one little extra note in it: when Ronnie was fifteen and Ewan twenty, Ewan must have appeared rather a terrible fellow to him; now . . . well, Ronnie had his new standards, and Ewan the ghillie, sinking back into the soil, was something to feel uncomfortable about, to shrink from. Even Ronnie’s clothes were smartly cut. Ewan understood all this exquisitely.

Yet when he parted from Ronnie, who for some reason seemed anxious to avoid the hotel and walked hurriedly on towards the post office, his humour had grown the least trifle warped, and he had to make a slight effort to keep it in check.

Alastair bàn helped him. He had that day driven the Colonel and Clare almost to Cape Wrath. Near home the old Ford had developed a cough, and he was now busy with the magneto. ‘Your one,’ said Alastair bàn, ‘seemed to enjoy the trip all right.’

‘Did she?’

‘She did that. And old Bubblyjock gabbled away in great form. She knows exactly how to take him. She’s good at it. It’s in her all right.’

‘You seem impressed.’

‘Don’t mention it. She didn’t forget you anyway.’

‘Oh. She was confidential?’

‘She was.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ waited Ewan.

‘I won’t. Hold that—like that,’ ordered Alastair bàn. ‘She put her arm round my shoulder. She bit my ear. Then I woke up.’

‘Too shy even in your dreams.’

‘Right first go,’ said Alastair bàn. ‘No, but honestly, I heard her ask, “How does a ghillie get paid when he’s not actually out fishing with one?” That was you.’

‘How thoughtful of her!’

‘Won’t you get a whacker of a tip to-morrow!’ chuckled Alastair.

They talked and worked until the light began to fail within the garage. As Ewan came to the door he saw his sister Jean leave the back premises. At once he drew up and secretly watched her reach the road and turn down to the bridge. If she had been going home she would simply have crossed the road and taken the short cut along the top. Alastair bàn came forward wiping his hands.

‘Let’s go in and have a glass of beer before you go. As a matter of fact, your lady remembered me to-day.’

Ewan smiled. ‘Poaching! Well I’m hanged! And then you hold your offer—until it’s too late.’ Against Alastair bàn’s entreaties, Ewan walked off laughing. He had helped him too long as it was, he said.

He reached the bridge. There was no sign of Jean. The home road was vacant. So she had gone up the glen! He filled his pipe and started off after her.

There was a strained speculative expression on his face. His eyes were quick and watchful. His pipe went out in no time and he put it in his pocket. Then he put it back in his mouth again but did not light it. Now and then he carried it in his hand as if he were listening intently. Coming to a bend in the road, he saw her ahead walking alone. He waited until she was out of sight, then went on. From the next bend, however, he could not see her and after he had walked about a mile he knew that she must have given him the slip by going into the trees. At that he pulled up. She would have watched him going past, walking quickly, as if he were anxious. He screwed the mouthpiece out of his pipe and blew through it violently. ‘Blast it!’ he thought, feeling self-conscious about the whole thing. ‘What the devil is she up to?’ He walked on slowly a few yards, lit his pipe, then suddenly turned and began coming back.

The dusk was falling now, but in off the road he saw by an odd chance her legs to the knees. It was a mute and extraordinary sight. His heart began to beat heavily. His instinct was not to look at them, to look away, to go on. As he came abreast, however, he stopped.

‘Is that you, Jean?’

There was no answer, no movement.

He brushed his way in and rounding a low-spreading thicket confronted her. She was standing quite still and her pale face met his.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. His voice was thick and nervous.

‘Nothing,’ she said moodily, and slowly turned her face away.

He took a step nearer.

‘Look here, Jean, is there anything wrong with you?’

‘No,’ she said. Then she added, ‘Leave me alone.’

He saw that his coming distressed her.

‘Mother is wondering why you never come down.’ He tried to speak evenly.

Her moodiness looked as if it might break, as if his presence tortured her. ‘I’ll be down soon. I’m just taking a walk.’

He turned away, saying ‘All right,’ in as cheerful a tone as he could. He even paused to light his pipe before turning down the road. But immediately he had gone out of sight, he went into hiding.

About half an hour later Jean came down alone. She walked slowly as if she were worn out and her face in the gloom was set in a misery so profound that it was vacant.

When she had passed, Ewan sat up, his mouth slightly open, his face drawn and staring. Then he got nimbly to his feet and went after her. He saw her go up the road from the bridge to the hotel. After hesitating a moment, he followed.

Over against the hotel door, he caught the Colonel’s glowing cigar. Someone was with him. He did not look, lest it be Clare. Leaving the road, he went along the valley crest, but not down to his own home. His body disappeared to the right and got swallowed up by the cliff-heads.

3

That greenness of the mountains where Clare had expected to find heather . . . sudden glimpses of the sea caught in winding inlets, flashes of colour drawing the eye to the blue unknown . . . between mountain and sea, the land in myriad shape, fantastic, ancient, grey, brooding in peat black, jewelled in loch blue, unexpected in goblin green, dreaming in brown . . . not lonely but withdrawn . . . the wind passing over it, touching it . . . touching it. A day of escape . . . more than escape—penetration. . . .

Before her reflective eyes, Ewan passed going towards the cliff-heads. He faded behind her uncle’s cigar smoke. Bidding her uncle a pleasant good-night, she turned from the hotel doorway and went up to her bedroom, where, however, she could not reconcile herself to the day’s end.

Even this trick of the wind’s dropping in the evening and leaving the world so still that one involuntarily listened for—one knew not what, and had frighted sensations of something at once imminent and far, left one restless and vaguely craving. If one listened too closely the dark laughter of the hills came down through the hollow of the mind, pursuing and mocking, with a black strength.

Turning from the window, she regarded her reflection in the glass without thinking about it. Presently she paused before the wardrobe, took out her warm travelling coat and, after considering it a moment, put it on. She would see McAlpine and go for a short stroll.

There was the relief of meeting no one in the lounge, and, deciding she would see McAlpine when she came back, she slipped quietly out. This business of escaping! She smiled doubtfully.

But she did not take the road down to the stone bridge; instead, she turned to her right round the garage in the direction of the post office. A quarter of a mile farther on, she entered a cart track. This track, irregularly bounded by grey croft dykes, faded out in a grassy path which zigzagged steeply to the sands of Cladach whereon slow waves creamed in the finest weather. Her desire became clear. She would go right down to the very sea-edge.

In the last of the evening the sands held a strange fascination. Dead pale they spread below her, the sea weaving upon them its broidery of arabesque with a slow, long, hissing caress, creating and blotting out and creating, as if all the time its intense heart lay coiled like a sea-serpent in deepest ocean, while its children crept forth to play in the only way they knew with their forbidden mother, the earth.

Clare walked on the sand, which was quite firm, and stood for a time watching the mesmeric game. Then lifting her eyes, she looked about her and had an involuntary vision of herself as an infinitely lonely figure on a remote shore. . . . To her left were low dark rocks. She would go there and sit for a little. As she approached, a figure suddenly uprose, the figure of a man . . . of her ghillie, Ewan Macleod.

Clare stopped short, her heart thudding. He had risen out of the low weeded rocks, his face to the sea, like an apparition. Then she went over to him.

‘Is it you, Ewan?’

He did not speak.

‘I’m glad I’ve seen you. About to-morrow—it will be all right?’

‘Yes.’

The unexpectedness of the encounter did not lose in excitement by what she saw. He had no longer the air of a ghillie. His face seemed grey-dark as graven rock. She looked over her shoulder at the sea and at once became aware of his eyes. Before discomfort could get the better of her, she met his look, her brows slightly arched, ‘Thanks,’ faintly smiling.

His eyes simply lifted off her face.

There was silence for several seconds. It cost her a real effort to say, ‘We had such a lovely run to-day,’ and even the words were trivial. She was looking again at the sea.

Her woman’s intuition knew all at once that he was considering her. She felt it in a slight burning all over her body. Something forceful and black, and, perhaps, brutal.

She resented this, particularly resented its getting the better of her.

‘Well, I think I will go up.’ But her tongue added, ‘Are you coming?’

Once he gripped her elbow as she stumbled going up the steep zigzag. His fingers were so strong that they quivered nervously.

In his voice, when she got him to answer, she detected a restrained excitement. His words slid out on a breath that stopped.

On top of the declivity, they paused a moment. She was breathing heavily.

‘I go this way,’ he said. ‘Good-night.’ And touching his cap, he immediately walked off, as though contact had to be broken.

Really! she thought, going on a few paces to a cairn of stones on which she sat down, feeling weak, as if an immense virtue had been drained out of her.

Really this was—too amusing. She tried to give her body comfort, her lips wide for air. Her body was so warm. Good heavens! The whole thing was so—coming all at once—humiliating. Really she. . . . But a thought was forcing its way in as to what would happen—what might happen . . . she pulled her coat open at the neck . . . the next time.

4

Ewan, who had thrown himself down farther along the rocks, was thinking the same thing. The agitation in his body made his breath quick in his teeth.

He plucked grass in slow iron fistfuls. The excitement increased and his flesh grew warm and tremulous. A dark lust of life swam behind his eyes.

In this lust was an underswirl of triumph, so that his wide-open look did not waver but stared steadily, letting realisation seep about the inner retina, letting the full possibility rise up and flood hotly the mind.

She was fair and beautiful. She was so fair and beautiful that she was a cold pillar. She was distinct from him, untouchable, alien as a statue in a garden of evening dews. And she had come to life beside him, her flesh flushing warm, and looked at him—or not looked at him. He had caught the hidden pause in her thought.

The possibility faintly distorted his face with a power out of which the eyes gleamed. The distortion held like a smile, lingering and relentless, as if his recent meditations were behind it and the enigma of his sister, Jean, and the Black Rock he had gazed at.

Slowly he began to throw the fistfuls of grass from him and the smile on his face spread, the eyes holding. The smile spread to a silent satyr laugh and the eyes snapped. He sat up and looked about him, breath held and listening.

He got to his feet and started for home.

But in the kitchen with his mother he felt trapped. An inner restlessness increased, as if there was a wild and reckless fire in his blood. His mother watched him staring over his open book into the fire.

‘What are you thinking of, Ewan?’

‘Oh, nothing!’ he said, his body breaking instantly. A slight colour came to his face of impatience or surprise.

When his mother bowed her head to her knitting again, he looked at her with a cold appraising glimmer. He knew what she would like to say, to do, and his spirit revolted at the mere manner of it.

‘Did you see Jean?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Where did you see her?’

‘Up by the hotel.’ The vision came back of his sister’s legs beneath the trees. His restlessness became intolerable, and he had to get up. He went towards the back door.

‘What are you wanting?’ she asked, almost with dismay.

‘It’s all right,’ he said coldly and went out.

A convulsion of feeling gripped him as he stood by the back door. Muttering, he ground his teeth. He did not know what was wrong with him.

He walked away as if by action he could burst the strands about him. His spirit grew harsh and ruthless but with no more direction than a curse.

‘This is what it’s come to!’ he said. That last night in his Edinburgh room slid before him. He saw Lothian’s face. He thought of his own attitude before all their faces. His spirit writhed. ‘O God!’ it laughed.

He threw himself down and pressed his face into the grass, pressed it until his mind flattened and emptied, then slowly he turned over, sat up, and gazed at the sea.

The dream is for failure, the simple life an escape for the weak spirit, the past a delusion and its brave ways a snare. Behold the marsh lights leading the sensitive spirit through darkness to tragedy!

It was hardly worth a laugh—with tragedy ahead. Hardly. Ewan’s face grew very still. His life was like something that a dark blade severed, the future, on its hither side, caught in its own fatality. It was something at least to be committed to that! With no going back. Not now.

The hopeless challenge caught the pride of stone. Before him the sea glimmered in the night. He could just see the Black Rock, low to the water, crouching. There came upon him his vision of the figure in the boat being driven through the leaping flamelike waves to the fatal opening and engulfed. There had always been something about that figure disturbingly familiar. Now in a moment he realised who the figure was.

Incredulity crept over him in a chill shudder. The world drained, leaving it thin and fine and cold. He got to his feet like one who has witnessed a dreadful entertainment and with a white look over his shoulder passes on.

The figure had been his own.

As he went on his spirit was uplifted with the incredulity which is so often but the veil of belief. The tragic end being known, he was freed! His head rose, his mind flickering in the chill gaiety. Within this fateful pattern he could quest hither and thither at liberty. . . . Clare Marlowe entered his mind again and possessed it. Far behind her stood Colonel Hicks. Ewan hung on his steps. He was freed now from all obligation—except the pagan need to right the balance, to satisfy the manhood that had been repressed—before he passed out. He stood thinking of Clare Marlowe, watching her image as it approached.