The Silver Darlings (42 page)

Seumas had already told Finn about the religious revival in the district and so had prepared him. It was the new evangelicalism rising against privilege and moderatism in the church, and here it had taken an acute revivalist form. Finn believed he had only to imagine Sandy Ware in control.

There was, however, an extraordinary quietism in the scene and the hour that had a new faintly apprehensive effect upon Finn; so much so that for a minute he wondered if he could still retreat. He did not want to lose the core of himself, even if it was a core of misery. Better to be by oneself, lost in the night, in the bog, than to be invaded. Better to gnaw the core of misery to black nothingness and
be done with it, than to carry it, shielded over, into an alien night-world where the cottages had faces like masks.

But Seumas was going on confidently, with his light springy stride, and presently led Finn up off the path to a cottage door, which he opened without knocking, crying at the same time, “Are you in?”

Stooping, Finn followed him, and saw a man of about forty get up from a stool by the fire, shadow flickering over his welcoming face.

“What’s kept you at all?” he asked pleasantly, after he had shaken hands with Finn. “Was it the inn?” When Seumas said it wasn’t, he laughed: “I can smell the black balls on your breath!”

“Would you like one?” asked Seumas, producing a small paper bag of sweets.

“Thank you, thank you. Sit down.”

“But aren’t you going to the meeting?” asked Seumas.

“Och, well, what do you think? Sit down anyway. I said I would wait for you.”

They sat down and Alan asked them all sorts of
questions
about the week’s doings in Stornoway, until at last Seumas said, “I think we’d better be going.”

“Ach, you’re fine! What’s all the hurry?”

“I should have been home before now,” said Seumas. “They’ll be wondering.”

“Ach, all your folk will be at the meeting. My own sisters are there long ago. Take your time.”

Finn could see that Alan, for some reason, did not care much about going to the meeting. He had a practical
cheerful
manner and was full of questions to Finn about
Caithness
and the way things were going there.

This went on for a long time in a curious mood of gathering tension, in a timeless carelessness slowly being drawn taut, until at last, with a laugh, Alan said all right they might as well go.

As Finn passed over the doorstep, the other two hung behind, and he heard Seumas whispering to Alan.

“Surely, surely,” answered Alan loudly, and they came out. He was of average height, with strong bone, and a deliberate walk. From the cut of his shoulders, he would be tough.

They walked about half a mile and came to a thatched house unusually long for this part of the world. Hovering figures melted away into the darkness as they approached it. A little distance from the door, Alan hesitated, and looked at the sky as if wondering about the weather. But Seumas went on and they followed him. “Go in yourself first,” Alan whispered intolerantly to Seumas.

Finn had heard the raised voice of the evangelist long before he followed Seumas across the threshold, nor did the voice cease as they unobtrusively joined the group in a deep circle round the peat fire. Room was quietly found for them on the inner circle, but Alan shook his head, implying they were fine where they were, they could stand, and he looked at the preacher as if his interest were entirely taken up. There was a slight shuffling movement and the deal plank by their knees emptied sufficiently to permit them to sit down.

To Finn’s astonishment the preacher was not an old man; it was doubtful if he was forty. He had a high brow, with bare temples, and fine dark hair. His skin was pale, almost sallow, but his eyes burned in a black fire from under bony pronounced eyebrows. They had an extraordinary power of concentration, and as Finn stared and listened he found his mind emptying—and reforming far away, as it seemed, in a place where the figures and moods of the preacher came to a compelling life of their own.

He was very tired. The walk for a time had seemed to freshen him, but he had toiled hard and slept very little that week: an hour or two during the day between the spreading and lifting of the nets and again an uneasy hour or two at sea. He had not had his clothes off since last Sunday, and this was Saturday night. On top of all that had come the dreadful struggle in the inn.

For a little while, his exhaustion induced in him a feeling of soft dreamy luxuriousness. This preacher was as expert in his biblical evocations as Sandy Ware, created as
intricate
a pattern, as rich an involvement, while his intention progressed clearly towards enlightenment, fulfilment, on a tide of emotion that seemed as profound, as inevitable, as a tide in the sea.

Finn began to feel himself sinking. The need for sleep became an agony. The figures that the evangelist evoked grew blurred, wavered, until nothing was seen but the evangelist’s eyes. Far places and figures grew dark and mythical. A wild face raised to heaven, clasped hands, a knife, sacrifice, sacrifice. Angels ascending and descending.

I must keep awake, Finn thought. I must not disgrace myself. He drew a blind over his open eyes and wandered desperately in the hinterland of his own mind, stinging
himself
awake. This was bitter agony and he wanted to groan and fall over in a dead heap.

Slowly, however, these obscurities of the flesh thinned and he felt easier, and was very glad of this, even if he now experienced the curious sensation of not being quite
himself
, and at the same time of being more than himself.

He was glad and cunning about it, because he did not want to lose the bodily relief of this state. If he could hang on to it, he would be all right.

But soon the need for such assurance did not even trouble his mind. He was fully awake and followed the evocations of the preacher with clarity and comprehension. He had a deep-sounding voice, as if his chest were resonant. It was the finest, most sounding voice Finn had ever heard, and those rhythms, which flow in Gaelic like the waves of the ocean, or the sigh of the wind, were flawless and
inexorable
.

This was the case even in his devious attack on the Established Church and its carnal-minded ministers (after reference to the birth-bedroom in Bethlehem’s inn over against “this Babel tower”): “When Christ comes to
build a house for himself in the soul of man, his first work is, by his word and spirit, to pull down all towers and
turrets
of man’s imaginations and open a door on his heart and a window in his understanding—open his grave that his dead devils may get a resurrection in his heart, mind, memory, and in all the faculties of his soul and body; make his heaven a hell to him, his strength his weakness, his faith his delusion, his light darkness, his sun blood, his moon sackcloth; turn what were once the heavenly
meditations
in his thoughts into a hell of corruption, and his
reformed
heart into a cage of all abominations; his spiritual mind, once a library of divinity within himself, now becomes the mail packet to the devil’s emissaries; his summer joy is now his winter grief, and he cannot mourn, pray, or sigh, under his sad case, all blasted with the north wind as he is and grown over in his old days with young follies and lusts. Where is this poor man’s minister now? Where is the anointed of the church who will lead him at that dread hour through the valley of the shadow?…”

Finn saw all the places in the valley of the shadow. He found indeed that he could think of and picture many things, and hear at the same time the words of the speaker and accompany him not only in his thought but in the accent of his speech, the persuasive rhythm of his voice, and still have time to himself, time for meditations between the words, time to look upon his own images. There was one
visualization
of extraordinary clarity: the terrible magnificence of Roddie in the pub; the flattening of lower lip and flesh over the jaw, the rocking power of the body, the roar. Beyond the littleness of man to-day, looming like the far solitary figure of another place and time. Not evil, not good; imminent and terrible. Even the breath that Finn hardly breathed came in cold upon his lips, while his brain cleared still more. So that he could also look round upon the faces of the assembled folk; and these faces, too, he saw with an unusual clearness.

Not only the faces of the old, with the emotion of the
moment wrought deeply upon them, not only that which stirred the lips to a soft moan, the head to shake, the body to rock, but, as if written upon a white page in daylight, the story of their toil and care and pain and forgetting, writ with an iron pencil on the brows, around the eyes, down by the nostrils, at the corner of the lips, upon the lips
themselves
, in the very shape of the wondering mouth, so that Finn knew them with a profound and loving intimacy—that remained aloof, not intruding. Each face, too, had a physical resemblance to faces he knew at home. He had time to think about this with a faint cool surprise. And the faces of the young, especially of some youths and girls about his own age, were particularly self-revealing. There were two girls of contrasting colour: one reddish-fair, with large blue eyes and a soft formless mouth, and the other dark, with a perfect oval face, a broad face, coming to a pointed chin, with eyes dark and set wide apart. There was a lovely stillness about the dark girl, like still dark water, with a soft tender gleam. He had seen her likeness before in a tinker girl in Caithness, walking the roads with a child, wrapped tightly in a tartan plaid, slung to her back. He had glanced after her and been surprised at the contented look on the pale face of the child that could move neither foot nor hand. This girl had the same kind of dark blue-green plaid wrapped round her, and Finn, listening all the time to the speaker’s words and wandering with them in Caithness and Bethlehem … the star in the east … there was no room in the inn (Roddie flaming magnificent in the inn) …
suddenly
thought of this dark girl before him as Mary, the Mother of Christ. That was so unexpected, so heretical, so blasphemous an image that his own thought stilled—and stilled every other process in the room for a moment that was a very long time. Then the fair girl sobbed. She was a warm-hearted untidy girl. But others had moaned or groaned. The Word was knocking at their hearts. They knew the evilness of their hearts. They glimpsed far, far away, in hopeless hope, “the lovely state of grace”.

But the dark girl remained serene, her face a great
sweetness
, the soft tenderness deepening in her eyes.

Then Finn became aware of another thing: that Alan, though only giving a glance at this dark girl and never a direct one, was bothered and taut in his emotions because of her, arid in less than an instant he understood every
previous
act of Alan—the reluctance to go to the meeting, the haunted uncertainties, the covering laugh, the mask of friendly talk. Alan was probably forty and she was
twenty-one
or twenty-two. Moreover, the awful fear that held Alan now was that this girl might break down like some of the others.

How extraordinary! For the girl plainly had no thought of Alan’s presence or of anything that might disturb him. But how revealing!

An old man prayed, haltingly at first, but then fluently and fervently. The preacher led them in singing a psalm. The music brought into the stream of communion those minds that suffered from an individual hardness. The
fervour
of the meeting increased.

Time as measurement now ceased. Often, indeed, such meetings, starting at ten or eleven at night, would be carried on until four or five in the morning.

Time was a vanity, with other vanities. Youthful vanity—that sensitive braggart vanity, that hurt in the pride, that rushing in, that screaming and yelling, that clawing of futility on the figure of terrible magnificence.

Time disappeared in a darkness.

But always the dark girl’s face looked up serene. She sat on the floor. All the young sat crowded on the floor, their faces hanging down or uplifted.

The tenderness in her eyes deepened and glimmered.

Her shoulders and head uprose like an obstruction, a smooth rock, in the river of time running round and past her. It was shape in the void, it was constancy in the flux, it was beauty’s still flower in eternity.

The eyes gathered all the light from the candles.

“There is disputing and anger, there is accusation against false teachers and profane followers, the divisions of Reuben are upon the pinnacles, but oh! how few are our tears for a sight of the beloved Jesus!”

The eyes filled, and down each cheek a tear rolled.

Finn heard a smothered grunt by his side. He turned his face. Alan’s head was between his hands, the fingers
working
in the hair, the left ear showing between curved thumb and finger that closed on it and gripped it. It was like a giant’s head in a fable. Finn looked at his own hands in the shadow of a man’s back and they were remote from him.

They were in the realm of holiness, of God’s holiness, and thought was soft and warm with it. This holiness was in the inner texture of the flesh; like the memory of a scentless incense in the nostrils; it was in all their minds; it was their minds; it flowed upward with the river-movement of light and shadow from peat-fire and candle; it spread under the floor of heaven and outward beyond the confines of the world. They were under the shadow of the wing of God’s holiness where all uncertainty ceases….

Finn found himself outside. Seumas was whispering to him, light-toned and friendly as before. “There’s no room in our place. But Alan will take you.” Personal and
detached
from it all, sounded Seumas; cool as the stirring wind, with a hidden fun of its own.

All right. He would go with Alan. To go with Alan was what his heart needed. The dawn was in the sky and grey along the grass. But the gable-ends were no longer still and secretive. They went striding away. There was a
movement
within all stillness. There was invisible movement everywhere. “We’ll go,” said Alan.