Читать книгу The Flying Years - Frederick Niven - Страница 4

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Memory, as the years slipped past, always served Angus Munro with Loch Brendan through a web of yammering gulls, but his mother remembered it through a mist of tears.

There had come to her no omen that the Munros were to leave there. An omen would have hinted the Hand of God in it, however strangely, whereas there seemed to be only the callousness and rapacity of man. Not that any supernatural warning was needed in face of the bitter evidences, but her folk were prone to omens. Her grandmother, as she often told, when recounting the stories of the land, had been waked one night in the ’45 by her brother who was, as they said, out. She had sat up in bed, staring at him in the dusk of the kitchen. The smouldering seed of the fire had blazed to a sudden puff of air—and he it was, without doubt, in that flicker of light. He shook his head to her, forlorn-like, as in a sign that something had miscarried, and then was gone. “So you see,” Angus’s mother would say, “my granny was fully prepared when the news came that her brother was dead on Culloden Field.”

As for herself, when the news came that Angus’s brother, Robin, had been drowned in the Sound, she was prepared. She took it as his father did not. Daniel Munro seemed to lose his reason for awhile, marching to and fro like a soldier on sentry-go, back and forth. At each sudden advance he appeared to be going for help; then he would halt, aware that there was no help, stand dazed a moment, wheel, and stride off again—back and forth. But Mrs. Munro spoke slowly:

“That was the death candles burning over the Sound last night,” said she. “I should never have let him go this day. I was warned.”

She was intimate with ghosts Shadows, by the way, was the word for them among another folk in another land to which they were all going—the father grimly, the mother in tears, the lad with a sense of adventuring.

They were no great readers in Brendan in those days, though in the winter great story-tellers, while sleet scoured the window and night gave a hollow moan in the chimney, with narratives of the old days, myth and truth: of King Hakon; of the Norse woman with the flame-coloured hair; of Cromwell’s soldiers that bided in Inverness after the wars and, surrounded there by the Gaelic speech, kept pure amongst themselves their own tongue and passed on to their bairns the fine language of their time, so that, in after years Sassenach philologists would comment on how beautiful was the English the folk of Inverness spoke; of Prince Charles Stuart; of Cluny in his “cage” on Ben Alder when it was supposed by most that he was long since in France; of the smoking out of the Macdonalds in the cave of Sciur; of the pixies and the kelpies.

Angus’s rather saw the change coming and was for the boy conning his book. The English they had was thus book-English, their natural speech being the Gaelic. Even Mrs. Munro learnt to speak it—and with the prettiest lilt. But the point here is that between his mother’s old stories and the books that his father got for him, and a bent he had for knowing what was happening on the hills and the lochs and the sea—a sort of living with the weather—the boy (sixteen then) had his own kind of private excitement and happiness in life. He had his own gossip, too. He would sooner hear of a whiskered seal napping onto the Black Rocks with gruff bark like an old man’s cough, than any yatter of human follies and failings.

The eviction at Brendan was quieter than some. The Munros expected it. Daniel possessed a booklet—Information for Emigrants to British North America. PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY (that on the title-page gave them deep confidence in it), Price Sixpence—and he and Angus assuredly conned it, reading all its information on New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward’s Island, on Eastern (Lower) Canada, on Western (Upper) Canada, and were a little troubled that the Western Canada it touched upon was not the west to which they were going. They were going even beyond “Western (Upper) Canada.” They made themselves acquainted, hopefully, with the value out there of the sovereign and the guinea, and discovered what an American Eagle was worth, a Spanish minted doubloon, a Spanish milled dollar, and what was a pistareen. A great mixture of coins there seemed to be in the Canadas, from the French five-franc piece to the Mexican dollar. They learnt that there were Emigrant Sheds at the landing-place for those who could not “incur the expense of lodging,” in which they could sleep a night if necessary, and they made computation of how much food they should cook in preparation for their further journey into that west beyond the tabulated west of the booklet. It was cheering to note that the further one went the higher were the wages paid for labour.

Folk ate well in the Canadas by all accounts, never there, as in Scotland, on the edge of starvation. A man could kill his deer without by your leave of any, and there were crops other than of poor oats and potatoes. There was even a sugar tree. Sugar from a tree! Now, there was a land for you! Think on it! Yes, there was a lot of talk of “the Canadas” before they were, indeed, started on their way thither.

Their neighbours, the Grants (Jessie Grant was the lass of Angus’s calf-love), were also leaving Brendan, but not for the Canadas. There were but Jessie and her mother, the father having been drowned in the boat accident that took Robin Munro. They were going to Glasgow to live with Mrs. Grant’s sister, married to an ex-soldier, Cameron by name, a big-hearted man who had set up as a smith, was doing fine there, and had offered, himself, to look after them. The events of the Highlands and the isles of that period put a kind of dolour into even the young, ageing them somewhat, gave them, too soon, a sense of distrust in Life. Happiness and trouble were blent in their eyes and the elders seemed always to be admonishing them in this fashion: “There’s no one can go courting these days.” “There’s no lad can plight troth with a lass these days.”

Nevertheless, there they were—Jessie and Angus—in the silver-green shade of a birch wood by Loch Brendan, betwixt Brendan and the point, on the morning of the day of departure. To each the proximity of the other was a rare, blessed, mysterious and secret anodyne for the public woe that they could not escape.

“If I make a way in the Canadas——” Angus began.

Jessie interrupted him.

“I’m sure of myself but I’m not sure of you,” she said.

What, exactly, did she mean? What was it in him, he wondered, that she was not sure of?

“Would you wait for me?” he asked her.

“I’ll not say yes,” she answered, “because——” she left the rest in air.

“Because of what, Jessie?” He repeated her name, urgently: “Jessie, Jessie ...”

She sighed his name for the only reply, held her face up to him. As he bent kissing her she turned it away in some young distress, then suddenly drew him close, responding to his caresses. Next moment she abruptly disengaged herself, shook her head, her cheeks pallid.

“No promises!” she implored. “I’m sure of myself but I’m not sure of you. There’s mother calling.”

She pressed a hand against his breast and ran from him as though she were running also, in agitation, in deep distress, from herself. At the bend of the road she halted and looked round. There they stood looking one to the other—for an eternity, it seemed; then she turned and was gone from sight and he walked home by the loch-side, the incoming Atlantic tide toying with the seaweed fringe of Scotland along the rocks.

By the door stood a group of men, talking. It was the old talk (repetitive as that of the young lovers on their uncertainties), talk upon the plight of the people in that grandly beautiful land that the Munros were leaving.

“Yes, that is so. Join the army! Join the army!” one was saying to Daniel. “That’s all for some of them.”

“It’s a poor consolation for a lad,” he replied, “sticking his bayonet into the belly of a Rooshian, to imagine that he is fighting for his own and stabbing into his real enemies, the men who have put him and his out of house and home. The army! It might be ordered against the French next, instead of to help the Turks against the Rooshians, for all we know, as it was when I was a lad. And the French were good friends to the Scots in the ’45.”

The old talk, the old talk. Another spoke.

“They say it’s not to make room for the deer that we must go,” he said. “They say that never was any thrust out to make room for deer for them to shoot. Quibbles! Quibbles! To make room for sheep it is—and then the sheep make room for the deer. They’ll bring up that lie if ever we get the Commission of Inquiry that some talk of.”

“Yes, and it’s been going on since the ’45,” declared Munro. “It was different, though, when it was the Sassenach that came with fire and sword. When a man’s foes shall be they of his own household it is bitter!”

Angus sidled past them into the house. Just then, from one of the further cottages up near the bracken and the heather (that soon would encroach everywhere there), came the preliminary sounds, the intermittent drones, of a bagpipe. Who could be thinking of piping over the tying of the last symbolic knots on the ropes round tin trunks and boxes? There was Mrs. Munro plucking and plucking at her under-lip, looking out of the window, perhaps at Ben Chattan or perhaps at a lone magpie veering by with some significance for her superstitious mind.

“They tell me there are places where they do not dare to do it,” Angus heard his father say, “even with the rent far in arrears. And why? Because clear it is that there would be bloodshed if they tried. They tell me that at some places they have answered the threat of eviction by driving the deer into the sea. Ah, well, by the grace of God some have bowels of compassion. There is a Macleod, now, when the potatoes failed, who fed his people himself to tide them over instead of turning them out. There would be no faith in any landlord left if it wasn’t for one or two like him. But they are not in the majority. ‘It’s my land to do with as I please.’ That’s the usual. It’s bitter! First of all driven off the good lands onto poor, and then we have it flung at us, ‘Would you not be better to go to a new country instead of trying to live on land like that—and be grateful if you have your passage money given you?’ Well!” He came indoors. “Give me a hand, Angus, with this trunk.”

They carried it out. When they went in again, Mrs. Munro had ended her reverie at the window and was drying her eyes.

“I remember a story my mother told me of a Highlander in Quebec,” she said, speaking as out of a dwam.

Her husband stared at her in amazement, thinking she was about to launch a tale of some omen, but it was not so.

“It was in the days when the colonists in America rebelled against the arrogance of King George the Third,” said she, “ ‘75 or thereby. A Cameron he was. He had not joined the Royal Highland Emigrants’ Regiment there but when the rebelling colonists came to assault Quebec he did do his part in the repulsing of the attack, whatever. So he was offered pay after the fight for his services. Says he, this Cameron lad who had gone to the Canadas after the ’45, says he, ‘I will help to defend the country from the invaders but I will not take service under the House of Hanover.’ That was the spirit! Now, what was I telling you this for?” she asked herself. “Oh, yes, I know—the spirit in that. Yes, we are going, but we’ll go proud.”

She raised her head and with a glare dared the tears to come again.

“Perhaps the clergy are right,” she exclaimed suddenly, over another thought.

“In what way?” asked Daniel.

“When they tell us it is the will of God that we go as a punishment for sins, and that any who offer resistance are in danger of hell-fire forever.”

“The clergy,” said Daniel, “have their livings from the landlords. They know who butters their bread.”

“That sounds like profanity!” she cried out.

“I’m not talking of the Almighty,” said he. “I am talking of the clergy—an entirely different consideration. They call me a heretic, and if trying to educate yourself and your issue is heresy, then heretic I am. But I’m not talking profanity.”

She looked at him, troubled. His thoughts were sometimes beyond her.

The blast of a siren sounded and Angus peered out of the doorway. There was the boat on which they were to embark, splitting the dark water as a plough’s coulter the dark spring loam. The high corries answered with their echoes to her bellow, the gulls rose and volleyed in air, their silver reflections flickering among the loch’s reflection of the hills.

Silently they looked their last on the shell of the home. Afternoon having come, an interior dusk was already in corners. It was as if they were ghosts visiting the place where once they had been part of the active life of earth.

“Scotland,” said Munro, and again, “Scotland. Just a few sad songs and old ballads! That’s all. I see it getting worse every year. God knows what the end will be. And yet—and yet—we’ll take Scotland with us: a kingdom of the mind.”

He stooped at the rear window. His wife stepped over and stood beside him, and he put an arm round her. By the way they bowed Angus realized that they were looking toward the graveyard where Robin lay, he who was drowned the day after Mrs. Munro saw what she called the death candles out at sea. Though he was but sixteen, Angus had some sense in him and hurried out, left them, so that when they turned they would not find him there indecently staring like a gowk of no understanding.

The surge of waves broke out on the rocks, an orderly smashing pulse of water from the steamer’s wake. She was out there, come to rest, waiting for them. It was then that Daniel Munro lost his control after that grand thought of how they would take Scotland with them, a kingdom of the mind.

“To hell with Scotland!” he broke out.

There was a silence then like the silence left when the wind passes through a wood of pines. It was as if Nature held breath, as if the spinning of the world ceased a moment—a moment that belonged to horror as over a sin against the Holy Ghost.

“You should not have said that,” Mrs. Munro whimpered.

“No, I should not have said that,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it.”

And as for Peter came the crowing of the cock, there rose the sound of the bagpipes through Brendan, in the slow measure of a coronach.