Читать книгу Wild Harbour - Ian MacPherson - Страница 3

THIS MORNING I said to Terry, 'I thought I heard guns through the night.'

'Were you awake too?' she asked.

Even before she spoke, as soon as the words were out of my mouth I was sorry I spoke, and hastened to say:

'That was funny, both of us lying quiet not to disturb the other.' I knew by the way she looked at me that she was not deceived.

'They sounded very near,' she said; 'in the direction of Inverness.'

'Oh, I don't know,' I returned. 'With this east wind it's very hard to tell how far away sounds are. I remember in nineteen-eighteen we used to hear the guns in France, often on a Sunday morning, if the wind was right, so near and clear you'd think they were close by. We knew when a battle was coming on by the noise, swelling out of the east like a heavy sea. Lord, what an age ago that seems! We didn't know each other then, Terry. How old were you? Seven? I was eight when the War finished, Gone eight, I used to say, bigsy, you know, making a grown-up of myself. But I can remember the guns and when there was fighting in the North Sea—'

'I heard that too,' she broke in. 'It was always a rumbling noise then, not distinct and separate like last night. Last night's noise resembled the Fleet at gun-practice in the Moray Firth. You know how we used to see the glare and flash in the sky before we heard the sound of the guns. I saw fire in the sky last night, on the horizon over there.'

'Wildfire,' I suggested. 'If it was, I hope we get this place properly tight and snug before the weather breaks. You always see wildfire when a storm's brewing in the hills.'

'I hope it was wildfire,' she said after a brief silence, and then: 'I'm going to start spring-cleaning.'

I began to laugh and say something about Nero, but she interrupted me angrily.

'You know how important it is for us to keep a grip on ourselves,' she cried; 'even if we are fugitives in a cave—all the more because of that. We daren't let ourselves grow careless. It might be all right to lounge and laze just now while the weather's good, but if we get into a slovenly way we'll never get out of it, and by winter we'll be savages, dirty and cold and demoralized. It wasn't to degenerate into savages that we came here.'

'No,' I said moodily; 'we had a lot of good reasons, but they don't look so good now. Och, Terry, don't heed me. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I don't mean it really. Only when I see ourselves making ourselves at home here, and settling down as if for ever, I feel it's going to be for ever. That sets me wondering what's happening, if anything's happening, or if we ran away from nothing at all but our own imaginations.'

'The noise wasn't wildfire,' she answered. 'I wish I could find an occupation to keep your mind busy, boy. I've got my job thinking out meals and how to economize our stores—why don't you write?'

'Write!' I exclaimed. 'Good God, is that what you'd like me to do? Didn't you hear the guns last night, don't you know the whole world's in a flame? What'll I write, now; fairy-tales maybe for cities drowned in gas, or shall I scribe moralities on the rock with a nail for future generations to wonder at my wisdom?'

'You needn't be so hasty to take me up wrongly,' she protested. 'What I was going to say was that you could write an account of the things that happen to us, about our coming here and living here. If we get out of hiding other folk might be glad to know how we lived, and if no one cares except ourselves, we shall be glad of something to keep us in mind of the past.'

'Shall we need written mementoes for that?' I asked bitterly. 'Oh, I think you could find a better occupation than that for me, Terry, something useful, like counting the clouds, if I'm too idle. Or I could take a hammer and break down rocks to dust—or go to the succour of my king and country—'

'Hush! hush!' she entreated. 'We came here because we thought it was right, because we would not be bullied into doing wrong or assisting at wickedness. If we commence to doubt that—'

'What cures doubt?' I demanded.

'Faith,' she replied simply, 'and my work in this place. Do you think, Hugh, it's easy for me to plan spring-cleaning when I know the world's in agony?'

She turned to carry stuff from the back of the cave to the entrance, now sunlit and warm, for the clouds had passed from the morning sky.

'That will soon dry out any damp,' she said with satisfaction. 'Look, Hugh, do you remember when we made up these?'

She showed me some notebooks and scraps of paper.

'What is it?' I asked. 'The lists we made! listen to this, Terry, "syrup, treacle, lard"; how much of that have we? What a hope we had to imagine we'd fetch everything we needed to make life comfortable into this place. It's a wonder we didn't mark down a kitchen range.'

'We didn't quite bring everything we hoped to bring,' she agreed.

'It seems years ago, in another world. It was in another world. We were children playing at desert islands.'

'Oh fine Crusoes! We didn't rightly believe that war would come. Catch! they'll be useful for lighting the fire some morning when we forget to dry heather. As if we were plotting a picnic! Lovely picnic!'

'Has it been so very dreadful, Hugh? I'd never dream of burning them. The excitement we had when we made them! and you'd come running every now and then to tell me something we'd forgotten—opening the kitchen door and spoiling my baking.'

'Aren't you going to burn them?' I asked. 'I thought you were spring-cleaning and getting rid of rubbish.'

'Must you go on hurting me?' she asked suddenly.

'I didn't mean to hurt you,' I said miserably. 'Oh, Terry, I'm sorry.'

'It's all right, now,' she replied. 'I felt low for a minute. I thought I might be a bother to you, or getting on your nerves. You're not angry because I want to do spring-cleaning, are you, Hugh?

'I knew this was bound to happen,' she said a little later. 'We were too exalted these past weeks.'

'It was such fine weather,' I said, 'and now there's an east wind.'

'It was lovely weather; but Hugh, we must keep a note of what happens.'

'For the foxes to read when they've their den to themselves again?' I asked with renewed bitterness.

'For ourselves to read, and other people, when this is all over.'

'What if it's never all over and we crouch here till we die, and the world goes back to savagery—have you thought of how it'll be when we grow too old to skulk and hide and make shifts and stalk deer for to-morrow's dinner? Shall we come to thrive on grass and heather, or simply starve—what heart can I have for writing?'

'If you were crouching in a trench, Hugh, in wet and mud, and I was crouching in a cellar waiting for the sound of aeroplanes, and bad news—you'd have a certainty that we'd both crouch there for ever—and help the world back to savagery. If you're unhappy here and hankering to go, you hurt me more by staying. I'm not going with you. I can't chop and change my mind every time there's water in the wind. I came here and here I stay until the world changes its mind, for I'll not change mine.'

'What is there to write,' I asked, 'except the days of the week, and you mark that? Nothing happens; I haven't a pencil—'

'I have pencil and paper too,' she began in a matter-of-fact voice. But her voice trembled and she exclaimed, 'I hope nothing ever happens!' and then she commenced to laugh and cry alternately, saying, 'Hugh, I couldn't bear to lose you, I couldn't live without you, I'd sooner be dead. You won't leave me ever, will you? I don't care what happens to the world if I have you.'

I suppose I cried too, for the civilization that brought us to exile had first unfitted us for the life of outlaws. When that May storm was past we stood together in the mouth of the cave. The wind had fallen and the sun shone, altering the tumbled desolation round us from the appearance it bore while the east wind blew. Nesting grouse called in the valley, and an early deer calf, high in its lair in a corrie, lamented its hunger and its absent mother.

'If we could sleep winter through—' I sighed.

'We have all summer to make ready in,' Terry answered. 'We'll manage without sleeping, Hugh. Haven't we peats and bog-fir and a store of matches?'

'What am I going to write?' I asked.

'Write,' she bade me, 'how we saw war coming. And war came. Write that we would not be militarized nor suffer the shame and injuries people would put on us for hating war. Tell how we left our house by night. Soon we'll have enough grouse feathers to make a feather-bed, and our peats are ready for stacking—'

'Yes!' I cried, infected by her enthusiasm; 'and we made stuff to pickle eggs, and built a wall at the end of the cave—'

'A million things to write,' she said. 'Here's a pencil; put it all down every single thing we did.'

So I took a notebook in one hand and my telescope in the other, and slung my little rifle over my shoulder in case a grouse or hare came within range since we could not afford to let slip a single chance of getting food, though it was breeding-time and I was loath to kill. When I had spied to make sure that the country was vacant except for ourselves and birds and beasts I sat down in the lee of a great stone, warmed and illumined by the midday sun, and began to recall how we came into the hills, while Terry put water in a basin to clean the rocky cavern where we hid.

It was strange, but as I tried to recall the past which was so near in point of days, I found that the past, distant and near, was faint and scarcely to be recalled. Things no more than a month old, the fret and confusion of our escape which I thought was indelibly marked on my memory, proved suddenly as insubstantial and dispersed as the puffs of mist which float across a sunlit morning hill, dappled by clouds and sun. I could remember many times when Terry and myself said, 'We'll never forget this to our dying day,' and the fact of the event which made us speak so was clear enough in my memory, but I could not feel it. These old events seemed like things I had been told, and heard with a vagrant mind.

I looked round the wild empty scene; it had its terrors, winter, and storm, sudden cliffs and green bogs, but they were not such as fretted the humanity we had fled from; no sign of man or man's handiwork save a distant fence and burnt patches of heather on the moor was there to remind us of the man-made horror we had left behind us. Yet a mere month ago we were the fools of rumour, a prey to whispers, racked by fear and loathing. To-day the sun shone. We lived in the remote world which is not divided from men by miles alone; a greater distance than the rough hill barriers divided us from our kind; the callous earth, unchanged in war and pestilence, occupied time as if there were no men, and we lived there, in that strict country.

The wind abating to a breath lulled me. Even the brief unhappiness of the morning, which owed to the east wind, faded into the past, and I should soon have been asleep had not a movement on the hill-slope facing us taken my eye. I had reached a state of continual unconscious vigilance. Quite automatically, with my mind still turned backwards, I took my glass from its case and rubbed the lenses with my handkerchief and looked towards the facing hill. I saw a herd of deer, twenty or thirty stags with the new horn just visible, milling uneasily. They rushed now in one direction, now in the other. The wind though light was steady. It was impossible they could have seen me at the distance. I had not moved enough to attract their attention and I had taken care to blacken the brass of my telescope so that it should not shine in the sun and betray me. Once, long ago, I had been saved from a gamekeeper who tried to catch me poaching because I saw his telescope gleaming in the heather, and it taught me a lesson. Anxiety commenced to replace my beatific calm, until I heard Terry speak. She was standing at the door of the cave shaking out a deer-skin.

'Isn't it the loveliest lovely day!' she cried.

'Terry!' I retorted, 'what on earth are you doing, standing there? Don't you know to be more careful? Lie down and keep quite still.'

It was amusing to see the sudden change that came on her face, and the haste with which she flung herself on the ground, not even waiting to make sure that the place she chose was dry or smooth. She lay for a few seconds in absolute silence. Then she raised her head with exaggerated caution to peer about her, dropping her head almost as soon as she lifted it.

'Ostrich!' I murmured.

'Can I come up, Hugh?' she whispered. At my nod she crawled and dragged herself to where I waited.

'Did I do right?' she inquired anxiously. 'Is there any one? Was I bad? You were only giving me a fright!' Her startled eyes reproached me.

'All the deer in the country were watching you,' I stated.

She breathed her relief and sat up laughing.

'I thought for certain some one had seen me. My heart came into my mouth. What would we do if it had been a man, Hugh?'

'Leave here and find another hiding-place,' I told her grimly.

'Leave our cave! We couldn't do that, after the work we've done. What a fright I got. My heart's going like a jakey mill. It doesn't matter for deer.'

'It might, Terry. They should be lying at peace just now, and if a gamekeeper saw stags running away from this direction a few times he'd soon grow suspicious. It's not the deer seeing us that matters but other people seeing the deer. Lie down and let them settle.'

'I should be working,' she protested feebly. 'What a gorgeous day! Who'd imagine there was trouble in the world?' She crouched low in the heather.

'Och, no need to lie so close as that,' I laughed. 'So long as you don't go moving abruptly there's no fear. Stags haven't very good eyes and the sun's against them. That's a pretty noticeable jersey you're wearing.'

'Don't you like it?' she asked, wide-eyed. 'I thought it suited me.'

'You know, Terry,' I continued, 'the biggest danger we have to contend with is that we'll become too contented here and give up all thought of the future.'

'I like being contented,' she returned.

'It's not easy to believe that men are killing each other,' I went on.

'How is the diary going?' she asked. I showed her the blank pages of the notebook.

'Terry,' I said, 'when we were so miserable, only a month past, I thought I'd never escape remembering.'

'It was an unhappy time, Hugh.'

'I'd never like to go through a time like it again. But Terry, it's as if it never happened for all I can feel of it now. Like a dream, or a tale in a book, or old gossip. I can scarcely believe there was a time when we weren't here. This country seems the only reality, and you can't feel with your heart that the affairs of men are important; it's hard to believe there are men, in a country so empty, so self-sufficient, as this.'

'A woeful dream, if it was a dream,' she whispered. 'A dream that murders men. Maybe this forgetting defends us.'

'Against—madness,' I took her up soberly. 'We were walking on a thin edge, Terry, when we were so uncertain and divided in our minds.'

'We were lucky,' she said. 'A great many couldn't have lived here, even if they had the opportunity. If you hadn't learned to poach—'

'If we hadn't been poor—' I went on. 'It's queer to be lucky by force of hard circumstances. If we hadn't been forced to poach, and dig bog-fir, and make shifts because we hadn't money to buy meat and coal and comforts we couldn't have lasted a week here.'

'You'd imagine things were shaped for a purpose,' she agreed. 'It was complete chance that made us find this cave. A thunderstorm—'

'And bad temper,' I said, and laughed.

'I remember finding it; I remember as if it was yesterday,' she said in a ruminative voice. 'Oh my, we were wet and cross and miserable! The midges almost ate us alive. When was it, nineteen-thirty-two, twelve years ago.'

We had gone fishing for pike on Loch Coulter, a tarn which lies a mile off the road between Dalwhinnie and Laggan Bridge and now shines beneath us to the east of our home. In the afternoon a thunderstorm came over. We hauled our boat ashore and walked up a gorge westwards in the direction of Ardverikie Forest and the high hills, looking for shelter and a place where we could kindle a fire and boil our kettle. Each boulder that tempted us to halt had another more tempting shelter-stone a few yards above it. We were at that stage between dry clothes and sopping when the pelting open seems preferable to a refuge which merely slows down the rate at which one grows wet and we clambered dismally from one inadequate covert to another up the steep north side of the ravine. I think there is iron in the cliffs which overhang that slope. Flashes of lightning dazzled us, so near we heard them crack like whips, and thunder reverberated amongst the peaks with scarcely a pause. Under that great sound the rising streams grumbled and rain beat on the earth.

A cloud of midges drove us half frantic and we climbed higher to escape them, though we carried them with us, through heather two foot long, over screes and gravel slides. We were soaked to the skin long before we discovered the cave, beneath a bulge of cliff. It was not strictly a cave. An immense slab of rock had fallen from the precipice. At the foot of the cliff it tumbled inwards to lean against the parent mass from which it broke away, making a long narrow tent open at both ends. Rubble had accumulated along the ridge. Heather took hold in it, and tough grass interspersed with tiny rowan trees wove a matted thatch which kept out the rain. It was dark and cold in the cave but since we had found what we were searching for we were perversely determined to make use of it in spite of the fact that we would have been warmer, and could not have become wetter, in the open.

The storm passed and we crawled out of the cave to sun ourselves and view the scene.

'Would this be one of Prince Charlie's caves?' Terry wanted to know.

'He passed this way to Benalder,' I told her, 'so no doubt it would be a Prince Charlie cave if people knew about it.'

'But why don't people know?' she continued. 'I'm sure there are dozens of places far more remote and wild than this and you can scarcely get near them for hikers and sightseers.'

'No one comes this way,' I explained, 'not even a gamekeeper. There's very little game; too many ravens and foxes and wild cats in this tangle of rock, and eagles from Benalder hunt here. Look, over there, under the Farrow, you can see the head of the Durc, where the eagles nest. Besides, it's a sort of dead corner with narrow angles of half a dozen moors and forests meeting. Each angle by itself is too small to be worth shooting. As for hikers, there's nothing majestic or romantic here, nothing but empty desolation.'

'I like it,' she declared. 'Well, we have our cave in No Man's Land, Hugh. What a place to hide in! like the Macgregors had, for desperate outlaws!'

'In summer,' I agreed. 'What are you looking for?'

'Things. Rock-drawings and flint arrow-heads.'

'Fox's dung more likely, and stinking bones.'

'Don't be cruel, Hugh,' she retorted. 'Now if you walled up one end the cave would be very snug. I'm sure people have lived in much worse places.'

'What food would there be?' I asked scornfully. 'You can't grow things here. What about the snowdrift? Were you thinking of flitting up here, Terry?'

How bitterly our jests reproach us when the thing we mocked comes to pass. I answered myself eleven years later, in 1943, when war was in all our mouths, and daily rumours shook the world. We had never revisited the cave. We had spoken about it only once, to one man, a stalker who lived near our house and came often on a winter night to play draughts and recall the war in France where he had fought for four years. But wherever the conversation began, it always ended with Duncan telling us that we were degenerate compared with our ancestors.

'You don't require to talk to me, Hugh,' he declared dogmatically one evening in the summer of 1943; we were sitting before our house smoking and watching dusk hide the village of Newtonmore.

'You know as well as I do that folk to-day couldn't live on what made their fathers as strong as giants,' he went on vehemently. 'Take any man in a town and put him out here in the hills to live by himself and he wouldn't last a week. A week! not two days.'

'That's not fair,' Terry argued. 'You can't take a man in a town and compare him with country folk of old.'

'Take a man in the country, then,' Duncan persisted. 'Take myself, take Hugh. If we were forced to live by our own efforts, how'd we thrive? It stands to reason we couldn't do it. Our senses are blunted. We depend on a multitude of people to make our clothes and food and tools for us. We have noses that can't smell, ears that are deaf—'

'Nevertheless we have intelligence,' I stated.

'Brains don't keep you warm,' he declared.

'But they do,' I went on. 'And though we haven't the noses of deer nor the eyes of eagles, we hunt deer and capture eagles. All the same, you're asking too much, Duncan. Why, your very wild beasts, your deer for instance, can scarcely survive a winter, a bad winter, amongst these hills without artificial feeding. You give them bruised oats and Indian corn, don't you?'

'They're degenerate too,' he retorted.

'It's comparatively simple for men to live the savage life or like Robinson Crusoe in tropical fertile countries, Duncan,' I continued. 'Speed and strength and alert senses wouldn't avail a man much if he were flung out into the Grampians to live by what he could kill and grow. He'd die, pretty soon, however savage and undegenerate he was.'

We drifted into discussing how long one could survive the climate, the cold and hunger, of the mountainous north, if one were left entirely to one's own devices for food and shelter, clothing and fire. We agreed that without a great many tools and stores of clothing and such things as salt, one would die soon.

'And when your ammunition was all used up,' Duncan jibed, 'where would you find shelter?'

'There's shelter waiting in a cave in the rock above Loch Coulter,' I said. 'With a little work it could be made warm and tight. There are tons of peats and fir roots waiting to be dug just beside it. You could learn to use a bow and arrow. You could catch pike.'

'How would you avoid scurvy?' Terry asked. 'Would you dig a garden? Where would you get seeds? As far as I can see you would require pots and pans and dishes and needles and thread—'

'And a furniture removal van,' Duncan laughed.

We laughed with him. How easy it was to make a joke then. To laugh now is to raise apprehension in our minds, for so many things that we smiled to think on have come true, have come true and no jest.

'Trust the housewife,' I lamented. 'If ever you think of living the savage life, Duncan, consult Terry.'

'Oh, I don't think it's impossible,' she protested. 'It would be a dreadful life, but one could live. After all, Hugh, we ourselves require very little to keep us alive except clothing and flour and salt, and we could manage with less. We grow vegetables, we dig peats.'

'If living's all,' I said.

'If living's all.'

I used to think that these years of rumour, when war loomed, could never be remembered save with pain. Yet as I regard that decade, to-day, I wonder that I ever endured them, not because they were unhappy, but because they were futile and wearisome. I feel that custom alone made us live amongst the fears and murmurs of storm, and deferred our escape.

We started to speak once more about our cave in the autumn of 1943.

'You were in France,' I said to Duncan. 'You've seen—' I paused as a new thought came to my head. 'Duncan,' I said, 'did you know—did you ever know that you killed any one?'

He turned his dark-lined melancholy face towards the horizon of the Monadhliahs and kept silent until I began to think I had said what I should not.

'Once,' he said, in a low voice, 'the Jerries were coming over in the dawn, but light enough to see the sights of your rifle, a surprise attack, no guns, no noise, nothing but them—and us.'

He paused a moment.

'You know how it is when you've lived with a gun in your hand as I've done,' he appealed to me. 'The sights come in line afore you know it—I had a bead on a Jerry. He was dead, Hugh, as sure as God I had him dead like the hind I got last week, before ever I pulled the trigger. I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it.' His voice grew harsh.

'Likely some one else did,' he said.

'Not you,' Terry whispered.

'Would you go back?' I asked, after a while. 'Yes?'

'Yes. We'd not be asked,' he said in heavy tones. 'We'd be conscripted. Well,'—he shrugged his shoulders,—'every man has it coming to him some time.'

'Conscripted? Good God!' I cried, 'would you go for that? They'd call me up amongst the first. I wouldn't go.'

'It's easy to say that now.'

'Why should you be called up, Hugh?' Terry inquired in a strained voice.

'Oh, having been in the Terriers.' I avoided her eyes. 'I think you swear to take up arms in defence of your king and country.'

'You'd go?' Her voice had the horror of death.

'We wouldn't be asked,' Duncan explained.

'Christ, I wouldn't go,' I said in a rage. 'No, nor I wouldn't be flung in jail and beaten and abused, neither. I'll tell you what I'd do, I'd take a rifle and plenty of ammunition and hide amongst the hills, and if they wanted me they could come and take me, but not alive.'

'Back to your cave, Hugh,' Duncan said.

'Any place would do me,' I rushed on. 'Oh, I'd fight all right, I'm no pacifist when it comes to defending my own right, but I'll not fight in any bloody stupid war. War's not fun any longer; it's murder, and I'm not a murderer.'

'You'd be a lot safer and more comfortable in the army, Hugh,' Duncan declared. 'You might get a cushy job. Better than lying out on the hill, cold and hungry, scared of every sound and move.'

'Half an hour ago you were praising the men of old for lying out on the hill,' I told him.

'They could do it.'

'So can I, and so I shall,' I answered wildly. 'I saw as much of the army as I want and I've heard enough of war from you to know I won't take part in it. Better starve and shiver than be a frightened slave.'

When Duncan went away Terry said, 'I didn't know you'd been a Territorial, Hugh.'

'I was a stupid young fool,' I told her shortly.

'But why?' she wanted to know. 'It's not the sort of thing I'd imagine attracting you.'

'I was hard up and a crowd of us fancied the holiday. You get five pounds for attending the summer camp.'

'My little mercenary! Were you a good soldier, Hugh?'

'No, I was not. I don't want to hear more about it. I told you I was a young fool.'

'How in the world did you let yourself be disciplined?' she persisted.

'I didn't,' I admitted wryly. 'It was all so damned stupid. It revolted me. After all, I was good material. I could shoot, I had hit living moving things, which was more than most of the other men had done or would ever do. I had trained eyes, I knew how to take advantage of cover. But because I didn't wear my kilt just so, and polish my buttons properly, the best they could do with me was make me clean out lavatories, shovelling filth to learn the art of war.'

'Poor Hugh!'

'If there was any sign of intelligence in the business a man could take pride in doing it well, even though he knew it was a bad business at the best. But to charge in a bunch over open country with fixed bayonets and horses galloping, in the year nineteen-twenty-eight, as if the Great War was a myth! If I had a rifle with decent sights I could have killed most of the whole army. Duncan uses an army .303 for the hinds; they're fine weapons, dead true and practically flat up to a couple of hundred yards. He put on leaf sights. All you have to do is flick a leaf up or down when you're changing your range. That's not difficult enough for the army. The army doesn't want good, simple, workman-like sights. What's not good enough for killing deer is quite sufficient for defending your life and your country. And that's only one example of how much they learn from experience. Maybe wars are justified sometimes. They used to have a sort of justification before they became too big and dreadful for any justification. Justified or not, they're a stupid way of settling things, and as far as I ever saw, stupidly run.'

'They'd call you up?' she asked a little later.

'Right away,' I agreed.

'I think you'd go.' Her voice was harsh.

'I would not.' I was angry with everything, even with her.

'You say that now. When the pipes begin to play and all your friends to leave—'

'And all the neighbours to point at me and the little boys to throw stones at me—say it, Terry! God in Christ, don't you think it's difficult enough already for me to believe I'm right? Must you make it worse, disbelieving me?'

'It's going to be war,' men said in the winter of that year. 'War,' I said, when Terry heard the whispers and the words which swelled through our quiet valley. She turned her back on me and walked to the window and stared out over the valley, white from the black Spey's edge to the far scarp of the Monadhliahs.

'Terry!' I implored, going to her and turning her to face me. Tears ran down her white cheeks like rain. 'Terry, you mustn't grieve; my dear, you mustn't grieve.'

'So many men to kill and kill and die, what makes grief quiet?' she cried wildly.

'If I could see, if I could see clearly!' I cried. 'I've no doubt it's easy for some folk to believe that war's wrong. All the instincts I ever got are for trouble, and intellectual persuasion's cold comfort when it's against one's instincts. Oh, Terry, I don't think I could bear to live in this country, where we know everyone, where we are friendly with every one, if war came, for I'm not going to fight, and there'd be nothing but contempt and mockery for us.'

'People have changed since the last war,' she declared without much conviction.

'Do you believe that?' I asked. 'Do you believe that the people who beat and jailed pacifists in the last war will be any kinder in the next?'

'No,' she said, and then, 'Hugh, what are we going to do?'

'If only I could see—'

'They shan't take you,' she said fiercely. 'We'll go away from here. To suffer humiliation, to be a criminal in the eyes of every one—'

'Even myself. Where can we escape that?'

And in a little time the dark future became the present.

'They won't shame us,' I said harshly. 'We're not their clowns to beat and spit at. I'll take you to your people, Terry.'

'And you, what will you do?' she asked aghast.

'I'll go where they won't get me; or if they do, it'll cost them blood.'

'Hugh!'

'If you'd rather me be flung into prison and labelled a coward, because I won't be involved in murder and outrage—'

'I'll go too.'

'Better to hide with the fox,' I went on drearily.

'I go where you go,' she said.

'Have you forgotten what Duncan told you?'

'I forget everything except that I won't leave you. Hugh, would you really send me away?' she asked, trying to laugh. 'Who'd mend your clothes, and wash the dishes, and tell you where to find things? Oh! oh! my heart will break.' She wept and sobbed in my arms.

'Hush, hush, my love,' I besought her. 'Don't you understand? I'd be a fugitive, hiding from all the world in the roughest hills, listening for footsteps in every wind, starting at my shadow—'

She shook her head violently.

'I can hide too, and skulk in the rocks,' she said. 'I'm not afraid of anything except losing you...

'I'm all right now, Hugh,' she went on. 'I'm sorry—for a minute the world was dark, no light in all the earth, nothing but dark, dark, fearful dark. We must be calm! We must make plans, and be ready. Could we really live in that cave, Hugh?'

'It would be rough—' I began.

'Who cares for roughness!' she returned angrily. 'I'm not so weak that I must be nursed, Hugh, and kept from hearing the truth, like a fool or a child.'

'I'm sorry, Terry,' I said humbly. 'Other people have lived in caves, hermits and robbers and fugitives from tyrants—what fools we'll feel if there's no need to go.'

'What does it matter, then? You know as well as I do that war is coming.'

'You don't believe that I'm a coward?' I asked anxiously.

'I don't think so, Hugh,' she replied with a pale smile.

'To be killed is nothing so dreadful,' I went on, 'if a man can see a just cause for dying. I think I could suffer pain—mutilation—'

'For God's sake stop!' she cried in a shrill voice. Her eyes were wild and her face was haggard.

'It's this madness, this war, it kills and kills, and when the killing's done, all that it accomplishes is to set the stage for more.' I could not stop. I could not cease from speaking and tormenting myself with horror.

'How much money have we?' she asked with an effort to control her speech.

I looked at my pass-book.

'Fifty-three pounds,' I said.

'I don't think we should let our minds prey on things,' she said. She drew a deep breath. The colour returned to her cheeks. 'We believe that we are doing right. We aren't willing to be mocked and ill-used and made the butt of fools and ruffians for doing right. Isn't it simple?'

'We should be willing—' I said.

'Yes.'

'We must arrange, we must think out the smallest details,' she continued. 'We have fifty-three pounds to spend.'

'I'll buy as much ammunition for the .22 as my permit will let me have,' I declared. 'It won't be wasted at any rate, even if we stay at home.'

'Stay at home!' she broke in. 'We'll be leaving our house! Hugh, I never thought of that! we were happy in it.'

So we began to make our plans, to write down lists of what we would require, if we were to live in hiding, in the hills, out of reach of our enemies. The occupation of planning our life, away from the hazards and ills of common life, freed us to a certain extent from our preoccupation with these ills. While we were making lists of food and tools and clothing the threat of war receded a little, so that when our lists were completed, and we were in imagination already escaped, the immediate necessity for escape was no longer there to urge us to action, though Terry was anxious to begin buying those things we needed most.

But I grew loath, as time wore on and rumours became a commonplace of our lives, to spend our money against a contingency which might never arise.

'I have a feeling there won't be a war,' I argued when Terry reproached me. 'Surely people have more sense by this time of day. Besides, war doesn't come out of a clear sky. We'll have warning in ample time.'

'So will other people, and prices will rise,' she said. 'Have you bought your ammunition?'

'Yes. It's not like flour and sugar and such perishables. It will keep indefinitely and one always finds use for it.'

'How much?'

'Five thousand rounds for the .22, all my permit allows. Five hundred for the .303. I had to pay through the nose for that, since I haven't a permit.'

We put off buying provisions until spring came. Our fears were slowly allayed, not only by the apathy which comes when one has made ready to face a difficulty which fails to appear, but also by a changed tone in the world's affairs.

'And all our worry and plans were wasted,' I said to Terry in early March. 'I'm going to begin digging the garden.'

'Not wasted, Hugh,' she reproached me. 'The fate that makes our worry vain is too happy for grudging.'

'I am almost sorry we aren't to go,' I went on, teasing her. 'We would have enjoyed being cave-dwellers.'

'Oh hush, Hugh!' she cried. 'I won't let you speak like that.'

I started to dig the garden and to buy seeds. On the third of April we went fishing on Loch Ericht. We brought a nice basket of trout home in the evening.

'I'll light the stove if you clean the trout,' Terry told me. 'Turn on the wireless until we hear the weather report. If it's to be fine to-morrow we'll go for a picnic to Fortwilliam, maybe. I'm longing for the sea.'

'Terry!' I shouted, when I heard the first words the loudspeaker gave forth. 'Terry!'

She came running from the kitchen with the frying-pan in her hand. We stood in front of the wireless, as if we heard our doom spoken by its inanimate voice. We were on the brink of war. The nations were mobilizing. War, war, war. Across the continent we heard that sound. Cheering crowds, hoarse orators, marching feet, drums and babel.

'Shut it off,' Terry said. It was there still.

'I never dreamt of this; that it would come to this,' she breathed.

'I should have known!' I cried in an agony of self-reproach.

'We must see how much we have in the house,' she said. 'I'll go out immediately and buy everything I can get.'

'I doubt if you'll get anything,' I told her. 'We'll be rationed right away. It's too late to get money from the bank. Why did I delay?'

'Some one will cash a cheque, Hugh.'

'What are we going to do, Terry?'

'Do? what we made up our minds to do. What else?'

'We counted on stores and tools.'

She went out to return in an hour with a burden of small parcels.

'I got a little here and there,' she said breathlessly. 'The place is mad, Hugh, bonfires, shouting, guns going off—'

We sat at our door until late, until after midnight, surveying the village with its bonfires, man's funeral pyre.

Two days later, on the fifth of April, Terry brought in an official envelope from the post.

'I won't, I won't!' I cried in a rage.

'Let's sit down and think matters over calmly,' Terry said. 'What—what does it say?'

I tore the envelope open.

'It gives me two days,' I answered. 'Two days!'

'And after that?'

'Well, if I don't appear—' I made a motion to indicate manacled hands.

'We must go at once,' she said.

We went through the house, picking out all we counted we'd need, and reading through our lists as we searched. By nightfall the kitchen floor was piled with parcels and tins and boxes and bundles of clothing. The house already wore a gutted look. In the dusk I could see Terry's pale face, drawn and weary, but with eyes that showed no yielding to weariness or doubt. I brought our baby car to the door.

'We'll load as much as we can into the car, Terry,' I said, 'and take it up by the Glentruim road until we get as near as possible to Loch Coulter. Then we'll dump the stuff and I'll carry it to the cave while darkness lasts. You'll come here again with the car. To-morrow you'll go to Kingussie, anywhere you can buy food. To-morrow night at ten I'll be waiting in the same place as we'll find to-night.'

We were but young in stealth. As we drove along the Spey, towards Loch Coulter, the silent night was full of ears that harkened to our passing. We laboured up the hill from the Spey, by Cattlodge with its crofts and staring windows and human folk in another world from us. It was midnight when our second journey ended, and dark, dark.

'I'll be waiting here for you to-morrow night,' I told Terry. 'Go home and sleep, my dear, you'll need all your sleep.'

'Oh, my dear!' she cried, 'how can I leave you here alone! Hugh, Hugh, this dreadful night—'

'This night makes us free,' I murmured, little feeling free.

I made heavy progress with my loads through the mire and stones to Loch Coulter. Stumbling and falling, saving my precious luggage at the expense of my hands and knees, I went back and fore, half-asleep though I kept a straight course. We had not thought about making the parcels easy to carry; we had omitted to wrap things that would break in blankets or clothing to protect them. I had even forgotten to leave food unwrapped and easy to get at. At length cock-grouse, whose wings I had heard many a time when I disturbed them in the gloom, commenced to hail the approach of day. Our stuff was hidden safely amongst heather in a jungle of young birch at the head of Loch Coulter. It was impossible to carry it to the cave in darkness and when light came I was too tired to lift another burden. I dragged myself up the hill to the cave with a couple of blankets and a dry loaf. I was too tired to eat. I was too tired to sleep. Yet I did not wake. The moist dark cavern lightened from the east, and the sun rose, and reached the south, and went down, while I lay waiting.

Terry came to the meeting-place at ten o'clock.

'We must hurry,' I said. 'We have to get rid of the car. I hope it won't be as dark as it was last night. I put my feet in every hole between here and Loch Coulter. Could you drive the car to Dalwhinnie and up the side of Loch Ericht until you find a steep place, and run it over into the loch? That would hide it safely. Then walk back here and wait for me, if I'm not already waiting.'

'You're wet, you're shivering,' she said. 'When had you food last? I'm not going to leave you, Hugh; I'm staying with you.'

I was loath to send her away from me again, and I agreed that we could hide the car in a gravel pit for two or three days. There might be things on it which would prove useful, once we had time to look about us.

Although we had less to carry this night we were both dead-beat. The nervous excitement and the anger which had goaded us so far were failing; we trudged in leaden gloomy silence, lacking energy even to speak when we tripped over tussocks, or walked into bogs. Yet, bereft of elation and anger as we were, weariness itself seemed to carry us on. Like men in despair who may as well struggle forward as yield, we laboured on our journeys; the dawn came in grey and misty; we could hear, but not see, water flowing to the loch, and waking birds.

'The mist is lucky for us,' I told Terry when our final load was carried to the head of the loch. 'If you go and make a fire beside the cave I'll fetch up as much as I can before the mist rises.' She preferred to help me so that we could rest without worrying because all our belongings were not in safety. The fortunate clouds kept low until ten o'clock, enabling us to complete our task. At length we could see an end to our flight. I huddled over the fire, wrapped in blankets, while Terry spread out my wet clothes to dry. She commenced to hunt through the bundles on the floor.

'Rest, Terry,' I besought her.

'We must have food,' she returned, and gave me the kettle. I filled it with a cup at the pool beside our cave which was fed by trickles of water down the rock face. Terry put fat in the frying-pan; she fried a piece of steak, with onions, and two eggs, and a slice of bread. So we ate our first meal in the cave. When it was done I scattered the fire. We rolled ourselves in blankets and fell asleep on the ground.

It was a heavy yet troubled sleep I enjoyed, with many dreams of which vivid fragments persisted into my waking mind. We wakened at the same time, in the mid-afternoon. I turned to find Terry watching me with a bewildered childish expression on her face.

'What is it, Terry?' I asked.

'I had a dream—' she began, and hid her face in her hands for a moment. When she took them away the baffled look had gone from her eyes. They were content. I went out carefully to our pool. She washed herself in the basin of water I brought, and brushed her hair, talking the while of what we must do. We made a tally of our goods, piling them as neatly as possible against the inner wall of the cave so that we could move freely.

'How long it seems since yesterday,' Terry remarked as we worked.

'You got a good few things,' I returned.

'Yes, at a price. I had to beg for everything. I went as far as Inverness. And oh, I worried about you!'

'Poor lassie,' I murmured.

'Then Duncan came. I dared not let him into the house. He would have known something was wrong if he saw it. He's been called up. He kept on asking where you were. Of course he saw the car at the door. I'm sure he thought you were poaching.'

These were the things we brought with us.

Of clothes, two pairs of shoes besides the pair she was wearing for Terry and two spare pairs of boots for me. We had agreed that it was possible to make garments out of deer-skins if need be, and we had brought nitre and alum to cure skins, but we could not hope to make shoes which would stand wear amongst the rocks and in the heather. We had not grudged to buy the very best. I generally wore shoes, but we decided that boots would keep me drier when I was out hunting food, and that they would save my stockings.

Tackets and rivets and cobbler's twine, and a stout needle to repair our boots and shoes.

A good leather coat each; Terry had a suède jacket as well and I a leather jerkin.

A couple of knitted tams for Terry; two caps and a sou'-wester for me. When we bought our footwear and the ammunition we were afraid our money would not be sufficient to buy new clothes so we determined to use only such as we had in the house. The .303 ammunition cost me six pounds, and the 5,000 rounds for the .22 cost almost eight. We paid practically ten pounds for boots and shoes which left less than thirty pounds to spread over all our other requirements. Of course it proved ample, and we could have bought more, if I had taken Terry's advice to budget exactly and in time. Terry had bought some warm woollen underclothes for herself. When we came away we wore as much as we could to make our parcels less bulky. Terry wore two pairs of stockings, her leather coat and the suède jacket, a jersey and a knitted blouse above her underclothes. I was wearing a khaki shirt, two pull-over jerseys with long sleeves and polo collars, a grey plus-four suit, the jerkin and the leather coat.

Over and above what we wore we had two spare jerseys each; Terry had two Harris tweed jackets and two extra skirts and six or seven pairs of stockings; I had a light strong jacket of cotton and wool, an old tweed jacket, eight pairs of stockings, two pairs of corduroy breeches, a pair of shorts and three khaki shirts. With the exception of the dark brown breeches all my clothes were greys or checks which harmonized with the hill.

We had packed our pockets with small things, needles and thread and several ounces of wool for darning; scissors and a ball of strong twine. Terry produced a set of knitting needles.

'When our knitted things wear through I'll unravel them and reknit them,' she explained.

'If we stay long enough to wear what we've got, it means being here for years,' I said.

'Clothes won't last so long here,' she answered.

We had three double blankets, a ground-sheet, and two dark army blankets to spread over the ground-sheet, underneath us.

Of equal importance with our clothing were our weapons and tools. I had taken great care that they should be good. I had a B.S.A. single shot .22 with Martini action which had often killed a hare at nearly two hundred yards. It had leaf sights for fifty, a hundred, and two hundred yards. I made sure that I got non-fouling rust-preventing ammunition for the .22. The barrel would never rust, nor would it require cleaning. Only too late, when I lifted the .303 from the heap of our stuff, did I realize that I had not brought oil or a ramrod to clean it.

The .303 was an old long Lee-Enfield. I had 500 rounds for it, and I had filed away the noses of the steel-jacketed bullets to make sure that they would spread and kill.

I had a good telescope in a leather case and a pair of cheap binoculars.

I brought also a good sheath-knife for bleeding and skinning deer, and a small oil-stone to sharpen it.

We had fifty rabbit snares all ready made up, and a roll of wire to make more snares.

A hundred yards of flax line for catching pike in Loch Coulter. Treble hooks for pike. Fly and bait hooks for trout; fifty yards of silk line for trout, a gaff, and a net. A spool of artificial gut.

We had a seven-pound axe with a spare handle, a small axe with a hammer head in reverse; files to sharpen them.

A small saw. Cotton rope from Woolworth's. A spade and a kitchen shovel.

Our food was mostly packed in biscuit-tins which we had sealed with brown paper and paste against the damp. We had half a hundredweight of salt in tins. We were worried about salt; it was essential, it was difficult to keep dry, and when it was gone we had no way of getting more. We therefore brought what seemed to ourselves a ridiculously large quantity. It did not appear so large when we began to reflect how useful salted meat would prove.

The same quantity of flour. Two stones of sugar, to be used grudgingly. Two stones of oatmeal for oatcakes. Without fresh milk we did not relish porridge.

We knew we could get plenty of fat from the deer we killed; we brought only two pounds of roast fat and a pound of lard.

Two pounds of baking-powder, a pound of baking-soda, two dozen tins of unsweetened condensed milk and two dozen tins of sweetened. Ten two-pound jars of home-made jam, the remainder of what Terry made on the previous year.

Six pounds of tea, a pound of coffee as an occasional luxury. A stone of salt butter in an earthenware jar. A stone of split peas. To make the beginning of our stay more pleasant Terry had bought six tins of fruit, a box of water biscuits, two dozen fresh eggs, ten pounds of ham in half-pound parcels; she bought them at a dozen different shops; two pounds of frying steak, a stone of carrots, a stone of onions and two loaves of bread. We had a small bag of turnips left over from what our garden grew, and a bag with a hundredweight of potatoes, which almost broke my back when I fetched it to the cave.

We had bought enamelled dishes for picnics in Woolworth's long ago, and we brought them. We packed them in a small bath which would be useful for washing dishes and clothes. We had three soup-plates, three mugs, two small enamelled basins, two good china cups from our own cupboard, four knives and forks and table-spoons and tea-spoons, a ladle and two wooden spoons.

We brought good pans, of cast aluminium or iron, to stand rough usage. We had a large cast aluminium frying-pan and an iron stew-pan, a four-pint aluminium kettle and a gallon iron kettle, an aluminium tea-pot, an iron griddle for baking, a deep iron pan to make soup or for roasting.

A small barrel, packed with tools, would hold water, if there was a drought. We had also a large galvanized iron pail to carry water.

We brought four towels and ten pounds of soap in bars, and an old cotton sheet for washing dishes or making bandages. I had a roll of surgical tape and iodine and a jar of vaseline in my pocket. A bottle of whisky completed our medicine chest.

Amongst the things we forgot to bring were nails, and a wedge to split roots. These at least were missed almost at once. Before we lived long in the cave we discovered many other things we should have taken. But I had alum for skins and saltpetre to make match for flint and steel, if our store of matches ran down.

It was the commonplace necessities we found ourselves most apt to forget. I remembered four pounds of tobacco, but I forgot matches. When I found eight dozen boxes amongst the other stuff I recollected that matches were not on our list, even on the list we made in the easy winter time when we played at planning our life in a cave.

'You did remember matches,' I said to Terry. 'If we hadn't matches! The one essential and I forgot all about them.'

'Thank Duncan,' she replied. 'When I saw him, he asked for a match; there wasn't one in the house; I flew to Newtonmore and bought all I could get.'

'We were lucky,' I said with a great breath of relief.

Before night we knew all our store. It seemed a very haphazard collection; we had not reckoned how long we expected to live in the hills, nor suited our purchases to each other so that our necessities would last the same length of time. We were too tired to think. Terry took a sharp stone and scratched on the inner wall of the cave—

April 7, 1944, and behind the figures she scratched a deep

I

'What's that for?' I wanted to know.

'To keep track of the days, We'll make a mark for each day.'

Then we slept again.