The Silver Darlings (28 page)

CHAPTER XII

FINN'S JOURNEY FOR A DOCTOR

T
he resolution to set out to find the new doctor had come upon Finn quite suddenly. He could not have spent the night with Roddie, and wanted to be away before he could return to stop him. So he had gone, and because of his need to be alone, the half-dark of the moor did not at first distress him. The haunted stone quarry—it was a lonely spot—set the hairs apart on his head, but he saw nothing, though a curlew gave him such a fright that his knees doubled in weakness and he felt sickish for a little distance.

As it grew darker, however, he slanted down to the
outlying
barn of a croft he knew. It was smaller than the one at home, and when he was sure he had it all to himself, he sat down, his back against the wall and his eyes to the door. At first, he lived entirely in his ears, but soon he grew assured, and presently experienced such a strange content in the heart of his misery that his head drooped.

The night was short, and in the new world upon which the dawn came he found a stillness that sometimes
enchanted
him and sometimes made him a little afraid. He came in time to croft houses strung at a short distance from one another along a road, and they were all so
extraordinarily
still that they might have contained the dead. Once or twice a dog barked, and he trod the grass on the side of the road very quietly, though his bare feet could have made little enough sound anywhere, and hurried past.

He was now on the road that ran right across the county
of Caithness, from Latheron on the Moray Firth to Thurso on the Pentland, and the great inland moors seemed
without
end, except far to the west where the Scarabens and Morven marched northward in blue ramparts against the county of Sutherland. As he looked at them, he could see their tops take the light from a sun that he had often watched rise out of the ocean in golden and silver spangles. They had never looked so vast and impressive before, with something foreign about them, as if they were “a mountain range” in Spain or Africa, from one of Mr. Gordon's geography lessons. Such immense vistas as he could now cover quickened all his senses, keeping his head up, alert and questing, and he felt an adventurous traveller.

Now and then he drank out of a burn, and wiped the water from his nose and hair, and looked about him. But at such a time he took only two bites of his bread, and chewed with slow relish. He had never realized before how delicious and fragrant was well-chewed oat-bread with new butter. He had always thought Roddie's mother's
oat-bread
was thick and tough compared with his own mother's. He had hardly been fair to it; he could see that.

The sound of the little burns in the early morning,
overhanging
tongues of peat-bank, sailing bubbles and
foam-flakes
, all were strange, a little unfriendly, as if brown figures had passed here; yet for moments they were very friendly, too, and the tall rushes with their hairy brown buttons moved suddenly in the air as they did at home. And constantly, never leaving his mind at rest, was the anxiety to be on, to arrive.

He knew the road from hearsay, and began wondering if he would recognize the bridge before Halsary, because it was the most haunted spot in Caithness, with real
bloodcurdling
stories about it. He could go to Mybster and then strike east on the road to Watten, or he could cut in over the moor at Halsary, fetch the Acharole Burn, and follow it to Watten.

But though all this had been clear enough in the talk of
people who had been this way, now in fact everything was on so vast a scale, the road seemed so without end, for ever stretching to far horizons, with lochs bigger than he had ever seen before, and in one place standing-stones, that when at last he came, while it was yet early, within sight of what might be the haunted bridge, and saw furtive human heads bobbing out of sight, his heart began to beat painfully and, almost without stopping, as if he had not seen the heads, he turned to his right and stepped off the road into the pathless moor.

A bridge, to Finn, was a high arch spanning a river, like the one at home. If there was a bridge down there it could be no more than a flat thing of a few feet over the little burn. But he had seen the heads, and not until the spot had fallen from sight behind him did he feel in any way at ease. They might have been poachers, but they looked brown, like heads out of the heather. He was lucky to have seen them in time.

Then he got lost. No matter where he gazed, there was nothing but moor, with lochans here and there. If he kept going straight across country from the Latheron-
Georgemas
road he was bound in time to strike the Thurso-Wick road somewhere in the Watten district. But such acquired knowledge seemed to have little relation to this vast world of reality. He grew very tired and, sitting down in a
sheltered
spot, with the sun's warmth on him, he took out his food and ate a third of it. When he lay on his side to rest, his back curved, his knees drew up, and he fell asleep.

Hours later, as he was following a burn blindly, he at last saw a cottage with blue smoke rising from its thatch. Two dogs came barking furiously at him and then a man stood in the door. “Can you tell me,” Finn asked him, “the way to Watten?”

“Yes,” said the man, astonished; then he stared at Finn closely. He was a big man with a black beard. “Where are you from?” “Dunster.” A woman appeared behind his shoulder, and three children peered round their legs.

“Dunster! That's a far road,” said the man. “When did you leave?”

“Late last night.”

They stared at Finn. “If you tell me the house you are wanting in Watten, perhaps we could put you on your way,” said the man.

“I'm wanting to see the new doctor who has come to Caithness about the trouble.”

Finn read the fear of the plague in their faces far more easily than he could any story in Mr. Gordon's
English
Reader
.
The man's eyes hardened like Roddie's, as he said, “If you keep going down the burn it will take you to Watten at last.”

“Thank you,” said Finn, and started off. He hadn't gone more than a hundred yards when the man shouted and came towards him. “If you wait a minute, we'll get some food for you.”

“I have plenty, thank you,” cried Finn.

Then he heard the woman's voice. They would be
distressed
because a stranger—a boy at that—had passed their door without receiving hospitality! He felt sorry for the struggle in their minds, particularly for the red-headed woman, she had such compassionate blue eyes. When he came at a short distance to the bend that would take him out of sight, he turned. They were all standing together
looking
after him. Finn waved, and at once the man and woman waved back, as if he were their son leaving them on a far journey.

Finn smiled to himself as he went on, heartened by the sadness that would haunt the woman's mind for many a day. And the man would feel the more futile because of his strength. There were kind people everywhere.

The loch at Watten was so big it was like a small sea. Finn had many queer adventures in that district, before he found himself on the road to Wick. He was getting more cunning now in talking to people. This was rich farming land, not like the little crofts dug out of the Dunster moor.
More than once he heard persons crying out to each other in English. They didn't speak a bit like Mr. Gordon. He could not understand them, though he knew a word here and there. What if he could not speak to the doctor? His brow went cold with fear, and he started practising aloud on himself. “Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever. The word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him. The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe
concerning
God, and what duty God requires of man. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”

They were not the words that one ploughman threw to another. So he tried to think of other English Lessons and repeated a little poem to a star. “How are you?” he asked himself. “I am well, thank you. How are you yourself? I come from Dunster …”

He got so interested in this, in having English words to tell the doctor exactly what he wanted, that he forgot he was practising aloud, and when the head of a man pushed up behind a dry-stone dyke and stared with round eyes and a silly open mouth, Finn blushed hotly, but kept walking on, gaze front. When well out of sight he could not help laughing, and the laughter grew so catching that he stopped and turned his face to the side of the road to have it out, not loudly, but in soft billows from the chest.

When it's that way with him, a man will go out of his path to find bad luck, as Finn should have remembered, for now, like weasels, young heads popped up behind the grassy bank and stared at him through a fringe of bramble. They were tinker children, of the wandering clan Macafee.

Finn went on, consumed with shame. The children were soon running behind him, laughing mockingly. At first Finn was afraid, but soon his anger began to rise, and when he was sure there were no men with them, he turned and faced the four members of the clan, ranging from his own
age downward, one of them a girl. He could see they thought he was silly, and therefore wanted to torment him. But when he had spoken, and picked up two stones from the road, they suddenly broke and ran back, laughing in shrill neighings. Whether it was he who frightened them or the man who came riding on a horse, he never found out.

The number of houses in Wick astonished him, and yet did not much astonish him either. He knew the old joke: you won't be able to see the town for the houses. In his mind Finn could make a famous thing so big that the reality, when he saw it, rarely measured up to his
expectations
. In any case, the real movement in Finn's mind now was one of fear against so many houses gathered in one place, as if the roofs, huddling together, had a sinister defensive purpose. The fear had in it, however, the
tentative
smile of shyness, and Finn waited until he saw a small, grey-bearded man in front of a cottage on the outskirts of the town before asking for the doctor's house in his best English.

“Have you no Gaelic?” inquired the old man in that tongue.

“Yes,” said Finn, flushing slightly.

“I'll show you where it is, for I'm going that way,” and as they went along he questioned Finn.

But Finn was now very unwilling to tell anything about himself or his message, as if by so doing he might let the enemy in on him. The old man did not seem in the least scared of his company. Perhaps in a town, thought Finn, folk were given to asking questions in order to get from one place to another.

“No, it's not for ourselves,” replied Finn, “it's for another woman, and I'm just on a message.”

“Did you say it was Lybster you came from?” The small dark eyes were quick and curious.

“No, it's farther back a bit. Will the doctor be in, do you think?”

“It'll be Dunster, then. I know the turn of your speech,
I was in it once myself, but that was long ago. Well, well. And you have come all that way! Have you many cases of the trouble there?”

“No, not many,” said Finn. “Do you think the doctor will be in?”

“If he's not, he will be some time. You look a fine, healthy lad yourself, and long may you be that way.”

They came upon houses all stuck together on both sides of the road, with such a press of hurrying people that Finn became confused and self-conscious. The little old man stopped at last. “There's your door. Only two or three cases in Dunster, you say?”

“Yes, thank you very much,” said Finn. After all, he was a friendly little man, with his bright, curious eyes, and perhaps so old that he had nothing to do but wonder about death.

As Finn knocked on the door with his knuckles, after a glance at the brass knocker, everything went from his mind but a quivering half-fearful intensity. No-one came to the door. People passed, seeing him standing there. He did not know what to do and felt his body going stiff and queer. The door suddenly opened and a young woman, dressed in dark clothes, with a very white cap on her head, white cuffs, and a small white apron, did not come forward but stood aloofly regarding him. Fortunately, he had his words ready: “Is the doctor in?”

“No.”

The rest of his words got scattered.

“Div ye want t' see him?”

“Yes, please.”

“He's expeckit back in an 'oor's time.”

“When will he be home?” asked Finn, realizing that his English was fabulous.

Her eyes narrowed upon him slightly but with humour. He had such a soft, pleasant voice, and his dark eyes were shy and frightened of her. “I said in aboot an 'oor's time.”