though he knew that in her silent heart his wife, who loved him well,
had only one lover, one dream, one hope, one passion, one remembrance,
one husband.
THE SMOOTHING OF THE HAND
Glad am I that wherever and whenever I listen intently I can hear the
looms of Nature weaving Beauty and Music. But some of the most beautiful
things are learned otherwise--by hazard, in the Way of Pain, or at the
Gate of Sorrow.
I learned two things on the day when I saw Seumas McIan dead upon the
heather. He of whom I speak was the son of Ian McIan Alltnalee, but was
known throughout the home straths and the countries beyond as Seumas
Dhu, Black James, or, to render the subtler meaning implied in this
instance, James the Dark One. I had wondered occasionally at the
designation, because Seumas, if not exactly fair, was not dark. But the
name was given to him, as I learned later, because, as commonly
rumoured, he knew that which he should not have known.
I had been spending some weeks with Alasdair McIan and his wife Silis
(who was my foster-sister), at their farm of Ardoch, high in a remote
hill country. One night we were sitting before the peats, listening to
the wind crying amid the corries, though, ominously as it seemed to us,
there was not a breath in the rowan-tree that grew in the sun's way by
the house. Silis had been singing, but silence had come upon us. In the
warm glow from the fire we saw each other's faces. There the silence
lay, strangely still and beautiful, as snow in moonlight. Silis's song
was one of the _Dana Spioradail_, known in Gaelic as the Hymn of the
Looms. I cannot recall it, nor have I ever heard or in any way
encountered it again.
It had a lovely refrain, I know not whether its own or added by Silis. I
have heard her chant it to other runes and songs. Now, when too late, my
regret is deep that I did not take from her lips more of those
sorrowful, strange songs or chants, with their ancient Celtic melodies,
so full of haunting sweet melancholy, which she loved so well. It was
with this refrain that, after a long stillness, she startled us that
October night. I remember the sudden light in the eyes of Alasdair
McIan, and the beat at my heart, when, like rain in a wood, her voice
fell unawares upon us out of the silence:
_Oh! oh! ohrone, arone! Oh! oh! mo ghraidh, mo chridhe!
Oh! oh! mo ghraidh, mo chridhe!_[10]
The wail, and the sudden break in the second line, had always upon me an
effect of inexpressible pathos. Often that sad wind-song has been in my
ears, when I have been thinking of many things that are passed and are
passing.
I know not what made Silis so abruptly begin to sing, and with that
wailing couplet only, or why she lapsed at once into silence again.
Indeed, my remembrance of the incident at all is due to the circumstance
that shortly after Silis had turned her face to the peats again, a knock
came to the door, and then Seumas Dhu entered.
"Why do you sing that lament, Silis, sister of my father?" he asked,
after he had seated himself beside me, and spread his thin hands against
the peat glow, so that the flame seemed to enter within the flesh.
Silis turned to her nephew, and looked at him, as I thought,
questioningly. But she did not speak. He, too, said nothing more, either
forgetful of his question, or content with what he had learned or
failed to learn through her silence.
The wind had come down from the corries before Seumas rose to go. He
said he was not returning to Alltnalee, but was going upon the hill, for
a big herd of deer had come over the ridge of Mel Mor. Seumas, though
skilled in all hill and forest craft, was not a sure shot, as was his
kinsman and my host, Alasdair McIan.
"You will need help," I remember Alasdair Ardoch saying mockingly,
adding, "_Co dhiubh is fhearr let mise thoir sealladh na faileadh
dhiubh?_"--that is to say, Whether would you rather me to deprive them
of sight or smell?
This is a familiar saying among the old sportsmen in my country, where
it is believed that a few favoured individuals have the power to deprive
deer of either sight or smell, as the occasion suggests.
"_Dhuit ciar nan carn!_--The gloom of the rocks be upon you!" replied
Seumas, sullenly: "mayhap the hour is come when the red stag will sniff
at my nostrils."
With that dark saying he went. None of us saw him again alive.
Was it a forewarning? I have often wondered. Or had he sight of the
shadow?
It was three days after this, and shortly after sunrise, that, on
crossing the south slope of Mel Mor with Alasdair Ardoch, we came
suddenly upon the body of Seumas, half submerged in a purple billow of
heather. It did not, at the moment, occur to me that he was dead. I had
not known that his prolonged absence had been noted, or that he had been
searched for. As a matter of fact, he must have died immediately before
our approach, for his limbs were still loose, and he lay as a sleeper
lies.
Alasdair kneeled and raised his kinsman's head. When it lay upon the
purple tussock, the warmth and glow from the sunlit ling gave a fugitive
deceptive light to the pale face. I know not whether the sun can have
any chemic action upon the dead. But it seemed to me that a dream rose
to the face of Seumas, like one of those submarine flowers that are said
to rise at times and be visible for a moment in the hollow of a wave.
The dream, the light, waned; and there was a great stillness and white
peace where the trouble had been. "It is the Smoothing of the Hand,"
said Alasdair McIan, in a hushed voice.
Often I had heard this lovely phrase in the Western Isles, but always as
applied to sleep. When a fretful child suddenly falls into quietude and
deep slumber, an isleswoman will say that it is because of the Smoothing
of the Hand. It is always a profound sleep, and there are some who hold
it almost as a sacred thing, and never to be disturbed.
So, thinking only of this, I whispered to my friend to come away; that
Seumas was dead weary with hunting upon the hills; that he would awake
in due time.
McIan looked at me, hesitated, and said nothing. I saw him glance
around. A few yards away, beside a great boulder in the heather, a small
rowan stood, flickering its feather-like shadows across the white wool
of a ewe resting underneath. He moved thitherward, slowly, plucked a
branch heavy with scarlet berries, and then, having returned, laid it
across the breast of his kinsman.
I knew now what was that passing of the trouble in the face of Seumas
Dhu, what that sudden light was, that calming of the sea, that ineffable
quietude. It was the Smoothing of the Hand.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] Pronounce mogh-r[=a]y, mogh-r[=e]e (my heart's delight--_lit._ my dear
one, my heart).
THE WHITE FEVER
One night, before the peats, I was told this thing by old Cairstine
Macdonald, in the isle of Benbecula. It is in her words that I give it:
In the spring of the year that my boy Tormaid died, the moon-daisies
were as thick as a woven shroud over the place where Giorsal, the
daughter of Ian, the son of Ian MacLeod of Baille 'n Bad-a-sgailich,
slept night and day.[11]
All that March the cormorants screamed, famished. There were few fish in
the sea, and no kelp-weed was washed up by the high tides. In the island
and in the near isles, ay, and far north through the mainland, the
blight lay. Many sickened. I knew young mothers who had no milk. There
are green mounds in Carnan kirkyard that will be telling you of what
this meant. Here and there are little green mounds, each so small that
you might cuddle it in your arm under your plaid.
Tormaid sickened. A bad day was that for him when he came home, weary
with the sea, and drenched to the skin, because of a gale that caught
him and his mates off Barra Head. When the March winds tore down the
Minch, and leaped out from over the Cuchullins, and came west, and lay
against our homes, where the peats were sodden and there was little
food, the minister told me that my lad would be in the quiet havens
before long. This was because of the white fever. It was of that same
that Giorsal waned, and went out like a thin flame in sunlight.
The son of my man (years ago weary no more) said little ever. He ate
nothing almost, even of the next to nothing we had. At nights he couldna
sleep because of his cough. The coming of May lifted him awhile. I hoped
he would see the autumn; and that if he did, and the herring came, and
the harvest was had, and what wi' this and what wi' that, he would
forget his Giorsal that lay i' the mools in the quiet place yonder.
Maybe then, I thought, the sorrow would go, and take its shadow with
it.
One gloaming he came in with all the whiteness of his wasted body in his
face. His heart was out of its shell; and mine, too, at the sight of
him.[12]
This was the season of the hanging of the dog's mouth.
"What is it, Tormaid-a-ghaolach?" I asked, with the sob that was in my
throat.
"_Thraisg mo chridhe_," he muttered (My heart is parched). Then, feeling
the asking in my eyes, he said, "I have seen her."
I knew he meant Giorsal. My heart sank. But I wore my nails into the
palms of my hands. Then I said this thing, that is an old saying in the
isles: "Those who are in the quiet havens hear neither the wind nor the
sea." He was so weak he could not lie down in the bed. He was in the big
chair before the peats, with his feet on a _claar_.
When the wind was still I read him the Word. A little warm milk was all
he would take. I could hear the blood in his lungs sobbing like the
ebb-tide in the sea-weed. This was the thing that he said to me:
"She came to me, like a grey mist, beyond the dyke of the green place,
near the road. The face of her was grey as a grey dawn, but the voice
was hers, though I heard it under a wave, so dull and far was it. And
these are her words to me, and mine to her--and the first speaking was
mine, for the silence wore me:
Am bheil thu' falbh,
O mo ghraidh?
_B'idh mi falbh,
Muirnean!_
C'uin a thilleas tu,
O mo ghraidh?
_Cha till mi an rathad so;
Tha an't ait e cumhann--
O Muirnean, Muirnean!
B'idh mi falbh an drugh
Am tigh Pharais,
Muirnean!_
Seol dhomh an rathad,
Mo ghraidh!
_Thig an so, Muirnean-mo,
Thig an so!_
Are you going,
My dear one?
_Yea, now I am going,
Dearest._
When will you come again,
My dear one?
_I will not return this way;
The place is narrow--
O my Darling!
I will be going to Paradise,
Dear, my dear one!_
Show me the way,
Heart of my heart!
_Come hither, dearest, come hither,
Come with me!_
"And then I saw that it was a mist, and that I was alone. But now this
night it is that I feel the breath on the soles of my feet."
And with that I knew there was no hope. "_Ma tha sin an dan!_ ... if
that be ordained," was all that rose to my lips. It was that night he
died. I fell asleep in the second hour. When I woke in the grey dawn,
his face was greyer than that, and more cold.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] _Baille 'n Bad-a-sgailich_: the Farm of the Shadowy Clump of Trees.
_Cairstine_, or _Cairistine_, is the Gaelic for _Christina_ (for
_Christian_), as _Tormaid_ is for Norman, and _Giorsal_ for Grace. "The
quiet havens" is the beautiful island phrase for graves. Here, also, a
swift and fatal consumption that falls upon the doomed is called "The
White Fever." By "the mainland," Harris and the Lewis are meant.
[12] _A cockall a' chridhe_: his heart out of its shell--a phrase often
used to express sudden derangement from any shock. The ensuing phrase
means the month from the 15th of July to the 15th of August, _Mios
crochaidh nan con_, so called as it is supposed to be the hottest, if
not the most waterless, month in the isles. The word _claar_, used
below, is the name given a small wooden tub, into which the potatoes are
turned when boiled.
THE SEA-MADNESS
I know a man who keeps a little store in a village by one of the lochs
of Argyll. He is about fifty, is insignificant, commonplace, in his
interests parochial, and on Sundays painful to see in his sleek
respectability. He lives within sight of the green and grey waters,
above which grey mountains stand; across the kyle is a fair wilderness;
but to my knowledge he never for pleasure goes upon the hills, nor
stands by the shore, unless it be of a Saturday night to watch the
herring-boats come in, or on a Sabbath afternoon when he has word with a
friend.
Yet this man is one of the strangest men I have met or am like to meet.
From himself I have never heard word but the commonest, and that in a
manner somewhat servile. I know his one intimate friend, however. At
intervals (sometimes of two or three years, latterly each year for three
years in succession) this village chandler forgets, and is suddenly
become what he was, or what some ancestor was, in unremembered days.
For a day or two he is listless, in a still sadness; speaking, when he
has to speak, in a low voice; and often looking about him with sidelong
eyes. Then one day he will leave his counter and go to the shed behind
his shop, and stand for a time frowning and whispering, or perhaps
staring idly, and then go bareheaded up the hillside, and along tangled
ways of bog and heather, and be seen no more for weeks.
He goes down through the Wilderness locally called The Broken Rocks.
When he is there, he is a strong man, leaping like a goat--swift and
furtive. At times he strips himself bare, and sits on a rock staring at
the sun. Oftenest he walks along the shore, or goes stumbling among
weedy boulders, calling loudly upon the sea. His friend, of whom I have
spoken, told me that he had again and again seen Anndra stoop and lift
handfuls out of the running wave and throw the water above his head
while he screamed or shouted strange Gaelic words, some incoherent, some
old as the grey rocks. Once he was seen striding into the sea, batting
it with his hands, smiting the tide-swell, and defying it and deriding
it, with stifled laughters that gave way to cries and sobs of broken
hate and love.
He sang songs to it. He threw bracken, and branches, and stones at it,
cursing: then falling on his knees would pray, and lift the water to his
lips, and put it on his head. He loved the sea as a man loves a woman.
It was his light o' love: his love: his God. Than that desire of his I
have not heard of any more terrible. To love the wind and the salt wave,
and be for ever mocked of the one and baffled of the other; to lift a
heart of flame, and have the bleak air quench it; to stoop, whispering,
and kiss the wave, and have its saltness sting the lips and blind the
eyes: this indeed is to know that bitter thing of which so many have
died after tears, broken hearts, and madness.
His friend, whom I will call Neil, once came upon him when he was in
dread. Neil was in a boat, and had sailed close inshore on the flow.
Anndra saw him, and screamed.
"I know who you are! Keep away!" he cried. "_Fear faire na h'aon
sula_--I know you for the One-Eyed Watcher!"
"Then," said Neil, "the salt wave went out of his eyes and he knew me,
and fell on his knees, and wept, and said he was dying of an old broken
love. And with that he ran down to the shore, and lifted a palmful of
water to his lips, so that for a moment foam hung upon his tangled
beard, and called out to his love, and was sore bitter upon her, and
then up and laughed and scrambled out of sight, though I heard him
crying among the rocks."
I asked Neil who the One-Eyed Watcher was. He said he was a man who had
never died and never lived. He had only one eye, but that could see
through anything except grey granite, the grey crow's egg, and the grey
wave that swims at the bottom. He could see the dead in the water, and
watched for them: he could see those on the land who came down near the
sea, if they had death on them. On these he had no pity. But he was
unseen except at dusk and in the grey dawn. He came out of a grave. He
was not a man, but he lived upon the deaths of men. It was worse to be
alive, and see him, than to be dead and at his feet.
When the man Anndra's madness went away from him--sometimes in a week or
two weeks, sometimes not for three weeks or more--he would come back
across the hill. In the dark he would slip down through the bracken and
bog-myrtle, and wait a while among the ragged fuchsias at the dyke of
his potato-patch. Then he would creep in at the window of his room, or
perhaps lift the door-latch and go quietly to his bed. Once Neil was
there when he returned. Neil was speaking to Anndra's sister, who kept
house for the poor man. They heard a noise, and the sudden flurried
clucking of hens.
"It's Anndra," said the woman, with a catch in her throat; and they sat
in silence, till the door opened. He had been away five weeks, and hair
and beard were matted, and his face was death-white; but he had already
slipped into his habitual clothes, and looked the quiet respectable man
he was. The two who were waiting for him did not speak.
"It's a fine night," he said; "it's a fine night, an' no wind.--Marget,
it's time we had in mair o' thae round cheeses fra Inverary."
EARTH, FIRE, AND WATER
In "The Sea-Madness" I have told of a man--a quiet dull man, a chandler
of a little Argyll loch-town--who, at times, left his counter, and small
canny ways, and went out into a rocky wilderness, and became mad with
the sea. I have heard of many afflicted in some such wise, and have
known one or two.
In a tale written a few years ago, "The Ninth Wave," I wrote of one whom
I knew, one Ivor MacNeill, or "Carminish," so called because of his farm
between the hills Strondeval and Rondeval, near the Obb of Harris in the
Outer Hebrides. This man heard the secret calling of the ninth wave.
None may hear that, when there is no wave on the sea, or when perhaps he
is inland, and not follow. That following is always to the ending of all
following. For a long while Carminish put his fate from him. He went to
other isles: wherever he went he heard the call of the sea. "Come," it
cried, "come, come away!" He passed at last to a kinsman's croft on
Aird-Vanish in the island of Taransay. He was not free there. He
stopped at a place where he had no kin, and no memories, and at a
hidden, quiet farm. This was at Eilean Mhealastaidh, which is under the
morning shadow of Griomabhal on the mainland. His nights there were a
sleepless dread. He went to other places. The sea called. He went at
last to his cousin Eachainn MacEachainn's bothy, near Callernish in the
Lews, where the Druid Stones stand by the shore and hear nothing for
ever but the noise of the waves and the cry of the sea-wind. There,
weary in hope, he found peace at last. He slept, and none called upon
him. He began to smile, and to hope.
One night the two were at the porridge, and Eachainn was muttering his
_Bui 'cheas dha 'n Ti_, the Thanks to the Being, when Carminish leaped
to his feet, and with a white face stood shaking like a rope in the
wind.
In the grey dawn they found his body, stiff and salt with the ooze.
I did not know, but I have heard of another who had a light tragic end.
Some say he was witless. Others, that he had the Friday-Fate upon him. I
do not know what evil he had done, but "some one" had met him and said
to him "_Bidh ruith na h'Aoin' ort am_ _Feasda_," "The Friday-Fate will
follow you for ever." So it was said. But I was told this of him: that
he had been well and strong and happy, and did not know he had a
terrible gift, that some have who are born by the sea. It is not well to
be born on a Friday night, within sound of the sea; or on certain days.
This gift is the "_Eolas na h'Aoine_," the Friday-Spell. He who has this
gift must not look upon any other while bathing: if he does, that
swimmer must drown. This man, whom I will call Finlay, had this eolas.
Three times the evil happened. But the third time he knew what he did:
the man who swam in the sunlight loved the same woman as Finlay loved;
so he stood on the shore, and looked, and laughed. When the body was
brought home, the woman struck Finlay in the face. He grew strange after
a time, and at last witless. A year later it was a cold February. Finlay
went to and fro singing an old February rhyme beginning:
_Feadag, Feadag, mathair Faoillich fhuair!_
(Plover, plover, Mother of the bleak Month). He was watching a man
ploughing. Suddenly he threw down his cromak. He leaped over a dyke, and
ran to the shore, calling, "I'm coming! I'm coming! Don't pull me--I'm
coming!" He fell upon the rocks, which had a blue bloom on them like
fruit, for they were covered with mussels; and he was torn, so that his
hands and face were streaming red. "I am your red, red love," he cried,
"sweetheart, my love"; and with that he threw himself into the sea.
More often the sea-call is not a madness, but an inward voice. I have
been told of a man who was a farmer in Carrick of Ayr. He left wife and
home because of the calling of the sea. But when he was again in the far
isles, where he had lived formerly, he was well once more. Another man
heard the sobbing of the tide among seaweed whenever he dug in his
garden: and gave up all, and even the woman he loved, and left. She won
him back, by her love; but on the night before their marriage, in that
inland place where her farm was, he slipt away and was not seen again.
Again, there was the man of whom I have spoken in "Iona," who went to
the mainland, but could not see to plough because the brown fallows
became waves that splashed noisily about him: and how he went to Canada
and got work in a great warehouse, but among the bales of merchandise
heard continually the singular note of the sandpiper, while every hour
the sea-fowl confused him with their crying.
I have myself in lesser degree, known this irresistible longing. I am
not fond of towns, but some years ago I had to spend a winter in a great
city. It was all-important to me not to leave during January; and in one
way I was not ill-pleased, for it was a wild winter. But one night I
woke, hearing a rushing sound in the street--the sound of water. I would
have thought no more of it, had I not recognised the troubled noise of
the tide, and the sucking and lapsing of the flow in weedy hollows. I
rose and looked out. It was moonlight, and there was no water. When,
after sleepless hours, I rose in the grey morning I heard the splash of
waves. All that day and the next I heard the continual noise of waves. I
could not write or read; at last I could not rest. On the afternoon of
the third day the waves dashed up against the house. I said what I could
to my friends, and left by the night train. In the morning we (for a
kinswoman was with me) stood on Greenock Pier waiting for the Hebridean
steamer, the _Clansman_, and before long were landed on an island,
almost the nearest we could reach, and one that I loved well. We had to
be landed some miles from the place I wanted to go to, and it was a
long and cold journey. The innumerable little waterfalls hung in icicles
among the mosses, ferns, and white birches on the roadsides. Before we
reached our destination, we saw a wonderful sight. From three great
mountains, their flanks flushed with faint rose, their peaks, white and
solemn, vast columns of white smoke ascended. It was as though volcanic
fires had once again broken their long stillness. Then we saw what it
was: the north wind (unheard, unfelt, where we stood) blew a hurricane
against the other side of the peaks, and, striking upon the leagues of
hard snow, drove it upward like smoke, till the columns rose gigantic
and hung between the silence of the white peaks and the silence of the
stars.
That night, with the sea breaking less than a score yards from where I
lay, I slept, though for three nights I had not been able to sleep. When
I woke, my trouble was gone.
It was but a reminder to me. But to others it was more than that.
I remember that winter for another thing, which I may write of here.
From the fisherman's wife with whom I lodged I learned that her daughter
had recently borne a son, but was now up and about again, though for
the first time, that morning. We went to her, about noon. She was not in
the house. A small cabbage-garden lay behind, and beyond it the mossy
edge of a wood of rowans and birches broke steeply in bracken and
loneroid. The girl was there, and had taken the child from her breast,
and kneeling, was touching the earth with the small lint-white head.