Читать книгу The Raiders: Being Some Passages In The Life Of John Faa, Lord And Earl Of Little Egypt - Samuel R. Crockett - Страница 5

The Raiders is an exciting, fast-paced adventure story in the style of Kidnapped or The Thirty-Nine Steps which carries the reader along by sheer narrative exuberance. Set in early eighteenth-century Galloway, it evokes:

… the graceless unhallowed days after the Great Killing [of the Covenanters], when the saints of God had disappeared from the hills of Galloway and Carrick, and when the fastnesses of the utmost hills were held by a set of wild cairds, cattle reivers and murderers. (p. xiii)

Patrick Heron, a straightlaced almost priggish character, tells how in his youth he had been caught up between these groups and entangled in a violent feud. Patrick is a generally reliable narrator who seems very much an innocent abroad in a world he does not fully understand. Even in retrospect he manages to sound thoroughly bemused by much of what he has to tell us, and quite often reveals himself to have had only the vaguest idea of the significance of the events he describes so vividly.

The first chapter is marvellous, from the romance of its title ‘Moonlight and May Mischief ’ and its mysterious first sentence, so reminiscent of the beginning of Treasure Island and countless other smuggling tales ‘It was upon Rathan Head that I first heard their bridle-reins jingling clear’, to the description of Patrick’s first encounter with the smugglers as he rows across the bay in the moonlight.

My skiff lay just outside the loom of the land, the black shadow of the Orraland shore on my left hand; but both boat and I as clear in the moonlight as a fly on a sheet of white paper. (p.2)

This is a very striking visual image. With its stark opposition of light and shadow, and the human figure seen as small and defenceless within a greater frame, it is emblematic of the whole book, and of how Patrick sees his world.

The calm, static quality of the image is shattered when the smugglers fire on the defenceless boy in the boat. Patrick is shocked into action and, seizing his oars ‘by instinct’, struggles to get back into the shadow as a musket ball flies towards him:

It knocked the blade of my left oar into flinders, just as the water dripped silver off it in the moonlight. (p.3)

This world of instinct, where things do not happen to plan, but are more spontaneous and unpredictable, is alien to Patrick who sees things in terms of a socially-defined morality. Although telling his story in retrospect, his words reflect his feelings at the time: he is self-righteously angry at the ‘cowardly, senseless and causeless cruelty’ of the attack. Yet the story he goes on to tell will describe how, for a time, he gained access to this other world.

The whole of the first chapter shows Patrick struggling to comprehend a world that has suddenly changed from the orderly universe he knows to something much more fragmented and disorderly. The entire episode takes place in moonlight with Patrick (and his readers) trying to form a clear idea of what is going on as shadowy figures and disconnected voices move in and out of his awareness. More than that, even, there are sudden shifts into yet another realm of being:

what we saw in the next moment brought us both to our knees, praying silently for mercy. Over the wall at the corner farthest from us there came a fearsome pair. First a great dog, that hunted with its head down and bayed as it went. Behind it lumbered a still more horrible beast, great as an ox, grim and shaggy also, but withal clearly monstrous and not of the earth. (p.6)

With the smugglers fleeing in terror from the ‘Ghaistly Hounds’ this is in the best tradition of melodramatic horror but there are other, more subtle shifts too.

There was a broad splash of moonlight on the rough grass between me and the tomb of the MacLurgs. The old tombstones reeled across it drunkenly, yet all was still and pale. I had almost set my foot on the edge of this white patch of moonshine to strike across it, when, with a rustle like a brown owl alighting swiftly and softly, someone took me by the hand, wheeled me about, and ere I had time to consider, carried me back again into the thickest of the wood. (p.3)

That ‘splash’ is a lovely touch, exact but lively and linking effortlessly with the water dripping silver from the oar when it was struck by the musket ball. The incident itself is genuinely mysterious – the image of the owl being apt but also profoundly disturbing – and offers a glimpse of a different kind of reality. It is real in its suggestion of the touch of the owl in a way that the ghostly hounds are not.

Almost every character Patrick meets in the course of the book is unconventional in some way (smugglers, gypsies, the ‘lost boys’ who move in to Rathan House, the splendid Lady Grizel) but two characters in particular represent for Patrick the possibilities of life lived freely and unconstrained by the dead hand of rigid social convention: May Maxwell and Silver Sand.

May is something totally outwith Patrick’s comprehension. Having been brought up by his father due to his mother’s early death, Patrick has absolutely no idea of how to deal with women. Like Miranda in The Tempest he lives in a world that is in many ways severely circumscribed, and it is a major theme in the book that in leaving his island and venturing deeper into the world, Patrick grows in awareness. Much of this comes from his deepening relationship with May.

When first we meet her, May is described in ways that highlight her lively, unconventional nature. In one of the many reversals that are part of the fabric of The Raiders, May is seen to be much more capable and adventurous than Patrick, the apparent ‘hero’ of the piece. Her dress, her behaviour, her language (so different from Patrick’s own ponderous language): all of these set her apart as a free and independent spirit who can be teasingly mischievous, ‘stately and dignified’ by turns.

Silver Sand, too, represents life lived outside normal social conventions and is one of the great successes of the book. With his great hound Quharrie by his side he flits in and out of Patrick’s story like the ghostly presence of a guardian angel. He is a very mysterious character whose quiet dignity has not been won easily and as he reveals late in the book he has his own dark secrets. He is a character right out of folk-tale and legend like some kind of nature spirit (Crockett also acknowledged his debt to Hogg’s Brownie of Bodsbeck): he can see in the dark; he has a strange affinity with animals; and unlike Patrick he has easy access to many different worlds and many different levels of experience. When Patrick was a child Silver Sand had been a figure of mystery and magic, a role he continues to play right to the end of the book when it is revealed that he is actually John Faa, the king of the gypsies, and so has been directly involved in many of the events with which Patrick has been struggling.

Right to the end Silver Sand guides Patrick in his growing awareness of a new way of seeing the world. Perhaps, though, it is in the wild, untamed Galloway landscape itself that Crockett found the perfect metaphor for this new state of mind. As Islay Donaldson says in The Life and Work of Samuel Rutherford Crockett1:

Crockett involves the reader to an extraordinary degree in the varied physical experiences which Patrick passes through – the movement of sunshine and shadows across great spaces, the texture of rocks and sand and boggy moorland … (p.121)

So successful is Crockett in this that it is now impossible for anyone who has read The Raiders to walk the hills around Loch Enoch and not remember his descriptions. That he knew this landscape we know because he spent some time with the MacMillans of Glenhead Farm in Glentrool and went into the hills with them. Dr Donaldson describes how much these visits meant to Crockett in her book, and I have just come across a passing remark by the singer Joe Rae in Sheila Douglas’ book The Sang’s the Thing2 which shows that Crockett also gave something in return.

When [my grandfather] started there in 1894, the great friend o’ these MacMillans was Sam Crockatt [sic], S. R. Crockatt – an’ my granfather heard a lot o’ the stories o’ the area fae him. There was ‘Tam MacKissock and the Mermaid’, ‘The White Worm o’ the Clachan’, ‘The Dole o’ the Thirteen Herrin’… (pp.38–39)

And Crockett’s accurate description of walking the Galloway hills will bring a rueful smile to the face of anyone who has walked them.

As I went the ground became wetter and boggier. My foot sank often to the ankle, and I had to shift my weight suddenly with an effort, drawing my imprisoned foot out of the oozy, clinging sand with a great ‘cloop,’ as if I had begun to decant some mighty bottle. (p.171)

While it is true that Crockett rearranged the geography of the region for his own artistic purposes, he still writes of the hills with the sure authority of one who has been there.

These hills are a strange territory for Patrick and it is much to his credit that he is willing to venture into this new world to rescue May from the gypsies despite being so obviously ‘lost’ in it. The strangeness is signified first of all by the names: The Dungeon o’ Buchan, Loch Enoch, Loch Neldricken, The Wolf ’s Slock, The Murder Hole. Throughout the book Crockett takes great delight in using actual placenames because he loves the sound of them or because they are so richly evocative. Perhaps only in the poetry of William Neill do we find a similar joy in the placenames and the landscape of Galloway.

Patrick finds the journey into this new world long and difficult and physically demanding. (He is, after all, an island dweller much more used to travelling by boat.) It is difficult, too, because he has to learn other and quicker ways of thinking and he has to learn something of the ways of the gypsies so that he can try to outmanoeuvre them. Having done this successfully on his first journey into the wild country he feels very pleased with himself and rather naïvely imagines that he has got the measure of it.

On his second journey to the Dungeon o’ Buchan, however, he finds that even this newly-discovered landscape has changed.

I looked down upon the desolate waste of Loch Enoch under the pale light of the stars … I saw a weird wide world, new and strange, not yet out of chaos – nor yet approven of God; but such a scene as there may be on the farther side of the moon, which no man hath seen nor can see. (pp.275–6)

The weird, boulder-strewn scene has become doubly strange because of its covering of snow. Such a vision seen by starlight must have suggested to Crockett that haunting image of the far side of the moon. As the snow comes on Patrick’s world changes yet again and his writing takes on a more threatening, almost Apocalyptic note as he and Silver Sand are caught in a ‘fearsome’ blizzard:

The darkness was white – above, around, beneath – all was a livid, solid, white darkness. (p.287)

They fight their way through this terrible storm and would almost certainly have perished had they not stumbled upon the House of Death, the cottage where Patrick had earlier been held captive. At this point in the book almost everything in his life is being turned tapsalteerie for it is now that he discovers the truth about Silver Sand.

Yet as always there is calm after the storm. Patrick gradually comes to terms with all that has happened to him and returns to May Maxwell and a happy marriage. Perhaps the ending is too pat for modern tastes (although it is traditional enough) and Patrick himself seems to think that the events he has described were simply a youthful aberration which he has no wish to re-live except in memory. It is as if he has chosen to renounce a new-found world of instinct only to return to conventional behaviour. This is true enough, but Patrick has still made some advance, for in marrying May Mischief he has accepted a partner whose behaviour (indeed, whose very name) suggests a liveliness and spontaneity he could not cope with at the beginning of the book. Perhaps for him that is achievement and reward enough.

There is much to praise in The Raiders. It is a book filled with a warm and generous humour as in the exchanges between Lady Grizel Maxwell and her servant Jen, carried out in a rich and vigorous Scots. Indeed Crockett’s handling of Scots dialogue is as good as anything in Stevenson, while his picture of the sharp but exceedingly droll humour of the people of Galloway is second to none. Above all, The Raiders has about it that surprisingly rare feeling that the writer actually enjoyed writing it – a wonderfully communicated sense of exhilaration and delight in the simple fact of being alive.

John Burns

1 Donaldson, I. (1989) The Life and Work of Samuel Rutherford Crockett, Aberdeen University Press

2 Douglas, S. (1992) The Sang’s the Thing, Polygon