Читать книгу Flemington And Tales From Angus - Violet Jacob - Страница 8

THE SIDE street of the Angus town was as grey a thing as could be seen even on this grey dripping day. The houses, thick-walled, small-windowed, sturdily uniform and old-fashioned, contemplated the soaking cobble-stones and the ‘causeys’ which ran like rivers on either side; the complacent eyes of their dark panes, made yet darker by the potted geraniums whose smouldering red gave no liveliness to a reeking world, stared out, endlessly aloof, upon the discomfort of the occasional passer-by. Under their breath they seemed to be chorusing unanimously the words of St. Paul and saying, ‘None of these things move me.’ The dried haddocks, which usually hung on their wooden ‘hakes’ nailed to the walls, had been brought in, as had the small children whose natural playground was the pavement; chalk-marks made by schoolboys in their various evening games had been obliterated from the flags. Newbiggin Street was a featureless place given over to the sulky elements.

All night it had rained steadily, for with evening the fitful drizzle of the day before had settled down to business. The woman who stood framed in the only open doorway of the street looked up and down, frowning. She was a thickset, bony woman, one of those who, unremarkable in feature, are yet remarkable in presence, and though in daily life she made no bid for attractiveness, it was because she did not happen to know where, or in what, attraction lay. Her eyes were steady, and full, at times, of a purposeful though not alluring light. Her hair was dark and thick, her skin sallow, and her head well carried. She was dressed tidily, in stout, ill-fitting clothes, in strong contrast to which she wore a cheap, new hat with a crude blue flower; this was a recognition of the occasion, for she had walked yesterday from her home, five miles away, with her bundle in her hand, to see an aunt whose voice could now be heard in conversation behind her. She was not paying the smallest attention to the old woman’s talk; her return journey was before her and the prospect did not please her.

A lad came up the street with his hands in his pockets and his head ducked into his collar under the downpour.

‘Bad weather,’ she observed, as he passed the doorstep.

‘Bad weather!’ he exclaimed, with a half-contemptuous laugh; ‘wumman, hae ye seen the river?’

Her face changed. She stood hesitating, staring; then, without a word to the unseen aunt within, she gathered up her bundle and stepped out.

Soon she was in the movement of the main street which declined in a steep hill to the lower levels; there were many others making in the same direction and as she went along she could hear, above the noise of wheels and footsteps, a steady roaring. Not a breath of wind was stirring to make the sound fluctuate, and the even relentlessness of it awed her a little. She crossed the way that lay at right angles to the bottom of the street and stood looking down over the iron-railed wall which held up the road at the riverside. The grey, moving mass that slipped by was almost up to the railings.

Beyond her and all along the row of houses, the people were gathered to watch the rising water. The doors of the one-storied dwellings were choked with furniture that was being lugged out and carried away. Chairs, tubs, tables, birds in cages appeared and disappeared up the hill; women screamed angrily to venturesome children whose curiosity had lured them from the maternal skirts, frightened infants cried, men pushed about laden with cooking-pots and bedding; boys shouted to each other, running about in the crowd, the thud of their bare feet lost in the changeless, covetous voice that rose from between the banks. A blind man was being led towards the rise of the hill; he too was playing his part, for he carried a ‘wag-at-the-wa’ ’clock with a gaudily-painted face clasped in his arms. She paused a few minutes to look up and down the torrent and then struck away from the crowd, seeking through the outlying streets for her straightest line home.

Janet Robb’s life had been much concerned with the elements. The house for which she was making at her steady, uncompromising tramp was a waterside cottage just above the spot where the river wound into a lake-like estuary on its way to the North Sea. Here she was born, here she had lived out her thirty-four years, for her father had been ferryman until the building of a new bridge a short distance up-stream had shovelled his trade into the limbo of outworn necessities. She had kept house in it almost ever since she could remember; for her mother, who had been an invalid, died when her girl was thirteen, and the ferryman, in spite of the prophecies of his neighbours, did not marry again. Women had no attraction for him, and the need of a housekeeper, which, more than any other cause, drives middle-aged working men into matrimony, did not exist while he had a daughter like Janet, so well able and so well accustomed to grapple with domestic needs. She was a hardy woman now, close-fisted and shrewd. She had been an invaluable help, both in the house and out of it; the two had worked the ferry between them, for the river was not wide and the traffic was small. Carts and horses had to go round to a point about a mile westward, and only foot-passengers on their way to the town troubled that part of the shore; when her father was out, she could leave her house-work to put them across to the farther bank without much interruption to it.

The ferryman was not an inspiring acquaintance. Though he belonged, in company with publicans, barbers, and blacksmiths, to a trade eminently social in its opportunities, he cared nothing for that part of it. He could put over a boatful of people without addressing a word to any of them and with scarcely an answer to any man enterprising enough to attack his silence. He was not popular, and, as those who give nothing of their mind to the world must perforce submit to have the gaps they create filled up according to the taste of their neighbours, a whole crop of tales sprang up at the water-side like so much duckweed. He was a secret drinker; he was worth ten thousand pounds; he kept a woman in the town whom he ill-treated – had she not been seen with her head bandaged, crying ill names after him on the public road? – he starved his daughter; she starved him – all these whisperings surrounded his unconscious head. He was a spare man, smaller in build than Janet, lined and clean-shaven. Besides his recognised business he had a cart and an old horse by means of which he did a little carrying, going townwards three times a week, whilst she took charge of the boat; and though nobody outside the cottage knew anything about it, he received substantial help from a son who had left home early and was making a good income in Canada. While the neighbours went wide of the mark in most of the rumours they set afloat about him, one of these had a fragile foundation of truth. Davie Robb kept no woman and cared as little for drink as he did for company; there was only one thing that he cared about at all, and that lay in a box under his bed. The contents of this box did not amount to ten thousand pounds, but they went into several hundreds. They were his soul, his life. Waking, he thought of them; and sleeping, they were not far from his dreams. When he opened the lid to add to the hoard he counted and re-counted them, running up the figures on paper. It mattered not to him that he knew them by heart; he would roll them about in his brain as a child rolls a sweet about in its mouth.

Not even Janet knew the amount of these savings, though she made many guesses and was, perhaps, near enough to the truth. The box was never spoken of between father and daughter. It was the ferryman’s god, and in one sense it had the same place in their household as God has in most others: it was never mentioned, even when taken for granted. In another sense, its place was different: for it was continually in the mind of both.

JANET THRUST ALONG the road, leaving the country town quickly behind her, urged on by strong necessity. Her father was now permanently disabled, for some years almost crippled by rheumatism. He was an old man, shrunken and very helpless. The cottage was two-storied, and its upper floor was approached by an outside staircase running up at the gable end. There was a stair inside, too, which had been added later because of the occasional spates in the river, to allow the inmates to move to the upper room without opening the door when water surrounded the walls. Old Robb slept upstairs and was just able to get down by himself, though he could never manage to get up again without assistance; and yesterday, before leaving home, Janet had arranged with a boy who lived upstream near the new bridge that he should come in the evening to convey the old man to his bedroom. The lad had consented reluctantly, for, to the young, there was something uncanny about ‘Auld Thievie.’ Scottish people are addicted, perhaps more than any others, to nicknames, and the ferryman’s surname, combined with his late extortions as a carrier, had earned him the title by which he was known for some miles round. Nobody liked Thievie.

Not even Janet. It was scarcely affection that was hastening her. Perhaps it was duty, perhaps custom. Something was menaced for which she was responsible. That, with capable people, is generally all that is wanted in the way of a key to wind them up and set them going. The rain had stopped and she put down her dripping umbrella. The blue flower in her unsuitable hat had lost its backbone and flagged, a limp, large thing; there was a fine powdering of wet on her thick eyebrows and the harsh twist of hair at the back of her head. Mist was pouring in from the sea, the wind having sat in the south-east – the wet quarter on the east coast – for three days; and though it had dropped like lead with last night’s tide, the ‘haar’ was coming miles inland as though some huge, unseen engine out seaward were puffing its damp breath across the fields. The cultivated slopes of the Sidlaws, a mile on her right, diminishing in height as they neared the estuary, were hidden. The Grampians, ten miles away on her left, were hidden too; that quarter of the horizon where, on ordinary days, they raised their blue and purple wall, being a mere blank. The river whose infancy they cradled had burst from them angrily, like a disobedient child from its parents, and was tearing along, mad with lust of destruction, to the sea.

When she was some way out of the town a figure emerged from the vapour ahead, growing familiar as the two wayfarers approached each other. Her expression lightened a little as she recognised the advancing man. He was smiling too.

‘Hey, Janet!’ he cried, ‘I was wond’rin’ what-like daft wife was oot on sic a day.’

His face was red and moist with the mist.

‘I’ve been at Newbiggin Street. I’m just awa’ hame,’ said she.

He was a connection of the Robb family, so her words conveyed something to him.

‘An’ foo’s auntie?’ he inquired.

‘Weel eneuch – but I maun awa’ back. There’s an awfae spate, ye ken.’

‘Tuts, bide you a minute. I haena seen ye this twa weeks syne.’

She made no move to go on. Willie Black had a different place in her mind from anyone else. It was not easy to deflect Janet Robb from her way, but she would do more for this man, a little younger than herself and infinitely her inferior in will, than for any other person. He was the only male living being who approached her from the more easy and lighter standpoint from which such men as she knew approached girls, and their quasi-relationship had brought them into a familiarity which she enjoyed. He was one of those who looked upon women in a general way with a kind of jocose patronage, always implied and often expressed. He meant no harm by this manner; it was natural to him, and he was not nearly so bold a character as his attitude would suggest. Janet was so much unlike the other women he knew that he would have thought it right to assume superiority even had he, in her case, not felt it. She attracted him, not through his heart and certainly not through his senses, but as a curiosity to be explored in a mildly comic spirit. He knew, too, that Thievie was well off; for once, in a moment of confidence, Janet had hinted at her father’s savings, and Black felt vaguely, but insistently, that in the fullness of time he would be wise in proposing to her. The day was distant yet, but meanwhile he sought opportunities of considering her and discovering how far she would be endurable as a wife.

Janet fidgeted from one foot to the other. By one half of herself she was urged to continue her way; the other half being impelled to stay by the invitation in his eyes. She did not know for how much this counted, so great was her ignorance of the amenities of men. Black was the only man who had ever come nearer to her life than the baker’s cartman from whom she took the bread at her door or the cadger from whom she bought the fish. She had a great longing to be like other women, a factor in the male world. She was too busy to brood over the subject, and had inherited too much of her father’s love of money-making to be deeply affected by any other idea. But when she was with Black she was conscious of all she lacked and was lured beyond measure by her perception of his attitude. It suggested that she took rank with the rest of her sex.

‘I’ll need awa’,’ she began, ‘feyther’s himsel’ i’ the hoose. There’s an awfae water comin’ doon an’ he canna win up the stair his lane. I maun hae tae gang on.’

‘I didna ken ye thocht sic a deal o’ Thievie. Ye micht think o’ me a bittie,’ he added, with knowing reproachfulness.

She looked away from him into the blankness of the mist.

‘Heuch! – you?’ she exclaimed.

‘He’s an auld, dune crater. Ye could dae weel, wantin’ him.’

‘Haud yer tongue!’ she cried, actuated purely by a sense of what was fitting.

‘Weel, what’s the advantage o’ him sittin’ yonder, an’ a’ that siller just nae use ava’ till him – an’ nae use tae ony ither body?’

She made no reply. There is something silencing in hearing another person voice an idea one believes to be one’s own private property.

‘Ye’d be a real fine lass wi’ yon at yer back,’ he continued; ‘it’s a fair shame ye should be dancin’ after the like o’ yon auld deil when ye micht be daein’ sae muckle better.’

She withdrew her gaze from the mist and met his eyes.

‘What would I be daein’ better?’ she inquired, rather fiercely.

He gave a sort of crowing laugh.

‘What wad ye be daein’? Gie’s a kiss, Janet, an’ maybe I’ll tell ye.’

Before she had time to think he had flung his arm about her and the roughness of his dripping moustache was on her lips.

She thrust him from her with all her very considerable strength. He laughed again.

It was the first time that a man had ever attempted such a thing and her heart almost stopped. She was torn between wrath and a thrilling, overmastering sense of something achieved. She stood panting, her bundle fallen into the mud. Then she snatched it and dashed into the greyness. It took but a moment to swallow up her figure, but he stayed where he was, staring, his coarse shoulders shaking with laughter. She could hear his jesting voice calling after her as she went. When she had gone a little distance she paused, listening to discover whether he was following; but there was no sound of footsteps.

She hurried on though she had ceased to think of her goal. Her thoughts drove her, rushing and tumbling like birds with beating wings, crowding and jostling and crying in her ears. Black’s words had let them loose, stirring her as much as his action. Yes, it was quite true. She was tied, as she had been all her life, to her father and his box. She drudged for him, year in, year out, and got nothing by it, while he clung like an old dog in the manger to the thing he would neither use nor share. She would be a wife worth having for any man with the contents of that box to start housekeeping on! Willie Black would realise that. She remembered her years at the ferry in fair weather and foul, the picking and scraping she had done and suffered in the house, that the hoarding might go on that was no good to anyone. There had never been any love lost between herself and Thievie, and though he was her father she had long known that she hated him. Yes, she hated him. She had no fear of work and had taken it as a normal condition, but it had come between her and all that was worth having; the toil that had been a man’s toil, not a woman’s, had built a barrier round her to cut her off from a woman’s life. All this had lurked, unrecognised, in her mind, but now it had leaped up, aroused by a man’s careless, familiar horseplay.

Her breath came quick as she thought of her own meagre stake in the world. She knew herself for some kind of a power, and that was awaking the dormant realisation of her slavery, all the more bitter for its long sleep. She pushed back her hat and the drops came tumbling to her shoulder from the draggled blue flower, now a flower in name only, a sodden streak of blackened colour. She found herself shaking all over and she longed to sit down, but the milestone, which had often served her for a seat on her walks to and from the town, was a good way on.

The roadside landmarks were growing a little clearer. It was almost noon, and the flash of false brightness which that hour will often bring hovered somewhere in the veiled sky. She heard the ring of a hammer coming muffled from the smithy ahead, and pushed on, thinking to sit a little in some corner behind the ploughs and harrows. She was unnerved by the tumult in her; anger and self-pity were undermining her self-control; she was a self-controlled woman, and the agony of disorganised feeling was, in consequence, all the worse. It seemed that she had never been aware of the large injustices of life till now. Her difficulties had been small, physical ones and she had known how to scatter them with a high hand; but these new ones pressed round her like a troop of sturdy, truculent beggars, clamouring and menacing. Another woman might have wept but she only suffered.

She reached the smithy door and looked in. The smith was at his anvil, holding a red-hot horseshoe with the tongs. The blowing had ceased and in the dimness of the shed a pair of huge, patient Clydesdales were in process of being shod. A young ‘horseman’ was standing by, his hands in his pockets, watching the sputter of flaming sparks that rose with each blow and fell here and there. The hot scent of horses and leather and scorching hoof seemed one with the rich browns and warm shadows that hang about smithy fires. Behind the mysterious limbs of the bellows the elf-like face of the smith’s ’prentice-lad peered at Janet, though both the men’s interest in the matter in hand made them unaware of the woman who slipped noiselessly in.

She laid her bundle down behind a cart that stood jacked up with a wheel off, amid a medley of implements, and sat down, concealed by the litter, in a cobwebby corner of the long building. The hammering stopped and one of the carthorses shifted its feet and blew a shattering sigh into the rafters; the horseman gave one of those sudden expostulatory cries that his profession addresses to its charges, and all was still again. The smith threw down his hammer and left the shoe to cool a little.

‘They’ll be haein’ a bad time doon at the hooses yonder,’ said he, nodding his head backwards in the direction of the low ground.

‘Aye, coorse,’ said the horseman.

‘I wad believe that,’ continued the smith, whose noisy trade gave him less opportunity of hearing his own voice than he liked. ‘I mind weel eneuch when we got a terrible-like spate – saxteen year syne, come Martinmas. I was doon aboot Pairthshire way then, an’ I wasna lang merriet, an’ the wife was that ta’en up aboot it. She was fae the toon, ye understan’, an’ she didna like tae see the swine an’ the sheep jist rowin’ past i’ the water. Ah weel, ye see, we’ll jist hae tae dae oor best.’

‘Aye,’ said the horseman.

‘There’ll be big losses. Aye, weel, weel, we canna control the weather, ye see.’

‘Na,’ said the horseman.

‘An’ I doot auld Thievie doon at the ferry’ll be swampit. Aye, ye see, ye canna tell when yer time’s tae come.’

‘The auld scabbit craw,’ said the horseman.

The smith took up his tools, and approaching one of the horses, laid hold of an enormous hind foot and began, strenuously, to pare the hoof. The beast looked round with an all-embracing toleration. The horseman spat.

Janet sat still, trying to quell the storm within her and to think connectedly. There had been no need for the blacksmith’s words to bring her father’s plight before her. In all likelihood the riverside cottage was already surrounded, and the fact that the few neighbours were well aware that none knew better than she how to handle oars might easily make them slow to bestir themselves on Thievie’s behalf. The old ferry-boat, still seaworthy, lay in its shed some way up the bank, ready for the occasional use to which it was put; and no one but the little boy who had been in to help the old man on the preceding night knew that Janet was absent; and the boy was probably at school.

Even now her freedom might be coming to her on the rising spate! She shivered, chilled after her excitement and her transit from hot heart-burning to the cold horror upon which, with the inward eye, she looked. Thievie could not get up the ladder-like stair – not even with the gurgling water behind him – without a helping hand. It was years since he had even been willing to try. Perhaps she had only to stay where she was and to take what gift this day might bring! Her hands were shaking, though she had clasped them tightly on her lap, and she set her teeth, almost fearing that their chattering would betray her to the smith and his taciturn companion. Of what use was that old withering life by the riverside to itself or to any other living thing? It was as dead, already, as the dead money in the box below the bed. But the money would be dead no longer. Willie Black would not think it dead. She would wait where she was; the smith might go to his dinner when the shoeing was done, but the smithy door stood always open and she would sit, unmolested, till such time as she judged…

Her thoughts stopped there and she closed her eyes, leaning her head against the wall.

She could not hang about the road in such weather, waiting. She had not the courage to do that, for fear of drawing attention and making her neighbours ask inconvenient questions … afterwards. Though she assured herself that no one would guess, or be sufficiently interested to try to guess, what was causing her to loiter, her nerves would not allow her to face so much as an innocent stranger. She wished the lad behind the bellows had not peered at her in that way. Suppose he should tell the smith – but anything was better than the public road! She tried to force herself into composure.

All at once a loud voice sounded at the door. She opened her eyes and recognised a local carrier through her screen of lumber. He took off the sack which enveloped him and shook it till the drops flew.

‘No muckle daein’ the day,’ he began.

‘Dod aye, the water that’s oot! Whiles I couldna get forrit.’

The smith looked up from the hairy foot gripped between his knees.

‘Queer times, queer times,’ he said. ‘Weel, we canna change it, ye see.’

‘How’s a’ wi’ you, Ake?’ said the carrier, turning to the horseman.

‘Whoa. S-ss-ss!’ cried the latter, for the horse, feeling the smith’s movement, tried to release its foot.

‘I was thinkin’ Thievie wad be drooned,’ continued the carrier, grinning from ear to ear and remembering the days when they had been rivals on the road.

‘And is he no?’ inquired the horseman, roused to interest at last.

‘No him. I’m tae hae a word wi’ some o’ they folk by the brig. I saw the river-watcher’s boat gaein’ oot nae lang aifter it was licht, an’ I cried on him, whaur was he gaein’? Dod, when he tell’t me he was awa tae seek Thievie, I was fair angert. “Let him be,” I says, “wad ye cast awa’ the Lord’s maircies yon way?” But there’s the auld thrawn stock safe an’ soond, and folk lossin’ their guid cocks an’ hens. Fie!’

The horseman gave a loud shout of laughter and relapsed immediately into gravity.

‘Aye, the ways o’ Providence,’ observed the smith.

‘Weel, I maun be movin’,’ said the carrier. ‘Thievie’ll be on the pairish yet. There’s mair water tae come doon frae the hills afore it’s finished. There’ll be naething left o’ the sma’ hoosies on the bank. A’thing ‘ll just gang traivellin’ tae the sea. There was naebody believed it wad be sae bad the morn, airly, when I was doon by the auld ferry, but lord! they tellt me an hour syne that there’s no been onything like it this aichty year past. An’ the tide’s comin’ in, ye ken.’

He called the last sentence over his shoulder as he turned from the door.

Janet had all but cried out aloud during the carrier’s speech. Her father was gone – sitting safe now under some sheltering roof above the reach of the insurgent river!

But it was not the thought of this which overwhelmed her. She knew from long experience that there was hardly anything he would not do to prevent anyone, even herself, from seeing his precious box, and she could swear that he would never consent to expose it to a strange human eye while there was the smallest possibility of keeping it hidden. At that hour, soon after daybreak, when the carrier had seen the boat go for him, the torrential rain which was to follow had not yet turned the ordinary spate into something unknown for half a century. That being so, it was plain to her that, sooner than disclose the box to his rescuer, Thievie would leave it in what had been, at other spate-times, the perfect security of the upper storey. So completely was she convinced of this that she would have staked everything she had on it. But she had nothing; and all that she had a prospect of having was surely lying in the rickety upper room waiting for the abnormal torrent to wreck the little house and carry its precious contents to the fathomless recesses of the sea.

She sprang up, the frantic idea banishing all else; and she had dashed boldly out of the smithy under the astonished gaze of the two men before it struck her with measureless relief that she had now nothing to fear from the most suspicious eye. Her father was safe; her secret design thwarted by the river-watcher; the reason for anything she did was of interest to no one. She saw now how futile her fears had been; the outcome of disorganised nerves. Conscience had almost made her believe that she carried her thoughts outside her body like her clothes.

At last, breathless, the perspiration on her face mingled with the wet, she reached the diverging road that led to the river, and as she turned into it the mist began to lift. It grew brighter behind the cloud-wrappings that veiled the world. She stopped, listening for the river’s voice. The noonday gleam had strengthened and she came out suddenly from a belt of vapour into comparative clearness and saw the submerged levels lying some little way before her. The broken water above them was all that told her where the banks were, and here and there she could recognise certain tall clumps of alder above the swirl. She redoubled her pace till, at the place in the road from which Thievie’s cottage could be seen, she noted with rising hope that the flood had not yet reached the tops of the ground-floor windows. The outside stair was still practicable.

At the water’s edge, at the nearest spot to the little house, she stood still. She had hung her bundle and her umbrella on a stout thorn-tree growing on a knoll by the wayside. She would need both hands for what she was going to do. The boat-shed was safe, but she would have to wade almost to the knees to reach it. She drew up her skirts and walked into the chilly water.

She felt its steady push against her legs, and her riverside knowledge told her that the tide at the estuary’s mouth had turned and was coming in. It was thrusting the overflow out from the banks on either side and the area of dry fields was diminishing. She looked up apprehensively, for the gleam of brightness had paled in the last few minutes and she dreaded lest the mist should close in again before her task was done.

At last she reached the shed. The oars were afloat inside, kept from sailing away by the pressure of the incoming tide on the flood-water. She waded through the doorway and mounted, hampered by the weight of her soaking boots, on a projecting wooden ledge; then as she clung to an iron hook in the wall, she stretched out her foot and drawing the old craft towards her, stepped in. When she had secured the oars, she loosed the painter from its ring and guided herself out between the narrow walls.

It was easy work rowing, in spite of the slight current against her. The boat was not a heavy one, and only built to carry a few people at a time across fifty yards of water. She rowed as fast as she could, for the damp vapour was drifting in again, and the sun’s face, which had looked like a new shilling above her, had now withdrawn itself, leaving a blurred, nebulous spot in its place. Pulling across the shallows on the skirts of the spate, she refused to picture what might happen should she find, on emerging from the cottage with the box, that all landmarks were lost in the mist. Her only guide would then be the sound of that menacing rush from which it would take all the strength of her arms to keep clear.

When the boat’s nose bumped against the outside stair she made the painter fast to the railings and stood up, wringing the water from her petticoats. As she clambered out and ascended to the stairhead, small streams trickled down the stone steps from her boots. The door of the upper room was locked inside, but she was not much perturbed by this, having expected it, and moreover she knew the old crazy wood could not stand much ill-usage. Its thin boards were gaping inside and had been pasted up with brown paper by her own hands. She drew back to the outer edge of the stairhead and flung her whole weight against them. The door cracked loudly, and though the lock held, she saw that another couple of blows would split it at one of its many weak places. Again and again she barged into it, and at last the wood parted in a long, vertical break. She was down the steps in a moment and dragging one of the short, stout oars from the boat. She stood on the stairhead, looking round. She could still see the boathouse, a dark blur, no more, but from the south-east there came a splash of rain. She struck the door with the butt end of the oar, once, twice. It gave suddenly, almost precipitating her into the room. She recovered her balance, and then, with that boatman’s prudence which never left her, carried her weapon down and threw it into its place.

In another minute she had thrust her way in and was face to face with her father.

Thievie was sitting crouched under the tiny window with his box in his arms. His nostrils were dilated, his eyes looked as though he would strike, though his hand was still. He had sat listening to the bumping of the boat below and to the blows that burst in the rotten door; humanity seemed to have gone from him, leaving in its place the fierce, agonised watchfulness of some helpless, murderous thing, some broken-backed viper. His eyes fixed Janet, unrecognising. Not a word came from his lips.

‘What are ye daein’ there?’ cried Janet hoarsely.

Her knees were shaking, but not from her exertions at the door.

His tongue passed over his lips. He looked as though he would bite. She sickened, she knew not why, but revulsion passed shuddering through her.

‘Foo is’t ye’re no awa’?’ she exclaimed, mastering herself.

‘I wadna gang.’

He smiled as he said this and held the box tighter. As she looked at it in his grasp, some inherited instinct rose in her, and though it had been mainly valuable to her for what it would bring, should it pass from his drowned hands into her living ones, it became, at that moment, a thing desired and desirable for itself. She did not know what sum was in it, but the rage for possession of it came to her.

He laughed quietly, his toothless mouth drawn into a long line. She pounced on him, shaking his arm.

‘Weel, awa’ ye come noo – the boat’s waitin’ on ye!’

He shook his head.

She had never laid rough hands on him before, but she gripped him now. She was strong and he was helpless; and he knew, in his helplessness, that she had come for the box. He had feared the river-watcher, and he now feared her. He did not know what she meant to do to him; his mind was obsessed by the box and the fear of its loss, and unhinged by the flood. He would have liked to resist her, but he could not, should he dare try. His concentrated hate shot at her like a serpent’s tongue.

‘I ken what’s wrang we’ ye!’ she shouted. ‘Ye’re feared for yer box! Ye’re feared yon man gets a sicht o’ it! Aye, but he’ll be here syne – he’s aifter ye! I saw his boat i’ the noo, an’ him in it – ye’d best come.’

His face changed. On the dusty window-pane the drops beat smartly.

‘Ach, ye auld fule!’ she cried savagely, ‘wad ye loss it a’? Div ye no see the rain? Div ye no ken the water’s creepin’ up? Muckle guid yer box’ll dae ye when the spate’s owre yer heid an’ you tapsalterie amang the gear the water’s washin’ doon! Haste ye noo. We’ll need awa’ frae this.’

She dragged him to his feet and he leaned on her, clutching his burden and unable to resist her violence.

They struggled across the floor and through the broken-down door. It was raining pitilessly. Thievie took no notice of it. He, who had known the river in every phase of drought or flood, should have had small doubt of the danger in which they stood. The roaring of its voice was increasing and there were fewer stone steps to be seen than when Janet made her entrance. It was pouring in the hills and the tide had yet a few hours to rise before it turned. Thievie looked this way and that. What he feared most was to see the river-watcher slide out of the mist in his boat; for the elements, the world and all the men and women in it were, to his disordered imagination, intent on one thing – the box. He would never sleep peacefully again should a strange eye see it. He would be robbed. He had long since been the slave of this one thought, and now it overwhelmed his dim, senile mind, even as the resistless water was overwhelming the land about them.

It took all her force and resolution to get him into the boat; he was so crippled and his arms so much hampered by the burden he carried. Though he cursed her as they went down the stair, his thoughts were of the river-watcher. In the middle of their descent he laughed his mirthless laugh.

‘God-aye, but he’ll be comin’!’ he said, ‘but it’ll no be there – he’ll no get a sicht o’t!’

At last she got him safely afloat, and having loosed the boat, rowed away from the stairs. The surrounding floods were peppered by the onslaught of heavy drops from the low sky, and then, as though a sluice-gate had been pulled up in the firmament, a very deluge was upon them. The little they could see was washed out and they were isolated from everything in a universe without form and void, at the inmost heart of the hissing downpour. The river’s noise was lost in it and all sense of direction left Janet. She pulled blindly, believing that she was heading for the boathouse. Soon they bumped and scraped against some projection and the stern swung round. She felt the boat move under her, as though drawn by a rope. She tried to straighten it, but the blinding descent of the rain bewildered her; a branch of an alder suddenly loomed out of it, the lower twigs sweeping her face. Thievie cried out and crouched, clinging with frenzy to his box, and she guessed they had drifted above the deep, wide drain whose mouth was in the river. Her blood ran cold, for its swollen waters must inevitably carry them into the very midst of the tumult.

The drain was running hard under the flood-water and she despaired of being able to struggle against it. They were broadside on; besides which she dreaded to be swept out of her seat by another branch, for there were several alder trees by the edge of the channel. The rain began to slacken.

As its fall abated, the river grew louder and the sky lifted a little and she could see the large alders, gaunt and threatening as spectres, blurred and towering over them. With that strange observance of detail, often so sharp in moments of desperate peril, she noticed a turnip, washed out of the ground and carried by the torrent, sticking in a cleft between two straggling branches, just below water-level. She made a tremendous effort and slewed the boat straight; and working with might and main at her oars, got it out of the under-tow that urged it riverwards.

All at once the river-watcher’s voice rang out from the direction of the boathouse, calling the old man’s name. She answered with all the breath she had left.

‘Yon’s him! Yon’s the river-watcher!’ shrieked Thievie, from where he still crouched in the bottom of the boat.

She ignored him, tugging at her oars and pulling with renewed strength towards the sound.

He raised himself, and clinging to one of them, tried to drag it from her. She wasted no breath but set her teeth, thrusting out at him with her foot. He clung with all his weight, the very helplessness of his legs adding to it. She dared not let go an oar to strike at him. She could not have believed him able to hamper her so – but then, neither had she believed he could get himself up the inside stair of the cottage unaided; and yet he had done it. It was as though the senseless god of his worship, lying in the box, gave him the unhallowed tenacity by which he was delivering them over to the roaring enemy they could not see, but could hear, plain and yet plainer.

She was growing weary and Thievie’s weight seemed to increase. Could she spare a hand to stun him she would have done so for dear life. She had heard of the many-armed octopus of the southern seas, and she remembered it now in this struggle that was no active struggle because one would not, and one dared not, lose grip.

The boat, with one oar rendered useless, swung round and drifted anew into the channel between the trees. Again the river-watcher was heard calling and again Janet tried to answer, but her breath was gone and her strength spent. The current had got them.

Thievie relaxed his grip as he felt the distance increase between himself and the voice. A branch stayed their progress for a moment, whipping the sodden hat from Janet’s head; her clothes were clinging to her limbs, her hair had fallen from its ungainly twist and hung about her neck. They went faster as they neared the racing river. Then the swirl caught them and they spun in its grip and were carried headlong through the mist. Janet shut her eyes and waited for the end.

Time seemed to be lost in the noise, like everything else. They sped on. At last they were not far from the estuary and the river had widened. Once they were all but turned over by a couple of sheaves, the spoil of the late harvest, which came driving alongside; once they passed within a foot of a tree which rode the torrent, plunging, its roots sticking up like gaunt arms supplicating mercy from the shrouded sky.

Finally they found themselves drifting in the comparative quiet of the broad sheet of tidal water, among the bits of seaweed carried inland above the deeps of the river-bed. The terrors of death had blinded Janet as they were swept along, and she now awoke as from a nightmare. An oar had been reft from her grasp in the stress of their anguished journey. Thievie was staring at her like an animal; his sufferings, as they were battered between one death and another on the boiling river, were nothing compared to hers. His god had upheld him. He had crawled back to his seat in the stern.

‘Aye, he micht cry on us,’ he said. ‘We’re far awa’ frae him noo – he’ll no ken what I’ve got here!’

He began to rock about, laughing as he thought of the river-watcher’s fruitless attempt to find him.

‘Haud still,’ said Janet sternly. ‘God, hae ye no done eneuch mischieve the day? Gin yon mist doesna lift an’ let them see us frae the shore we’ll be oot tae sea when the tide gangs back.’

‘Naebody’ll see us, naebody’ll see us!’ he exclaimed, hugging the box and rocking himself again.

Janet rose to her feet, fury in her eyes; she could no longer keep her hands off him.

As he saw her movement, he snatched the box from where it lay at his feet.

‘Stand still, or I’ll tak’ it frae ye!’ she cried loudly, making towards him.

He gave one cry of horror and, with the box in his arms, hurled himself sideways into the waters that closed over him and his god.

THE TIDE WAS on the turn and the rain had ceased. A wind had sprung up in the west, driving the ‘haar’ before it back to the sea whence it came. Some men from the fishing village near the lighthouse were rowing smartly out into the tideway where a boat drifted carrying a solitary human being, a woman who sat dazed and frozen and who had not so much as turned her head as they hailed her.

As they brought her ashore one of them took off his coat and wrapped it round her. She seemed oblivious of his action.

‘Hae,’ said he, with clumsy kindness, ‘pit it on, lass. What’ll yer lad say gin ye stairve?’

Janet thrust the coat from her.