The Silver Darlings (67 page)

The great happiness that came upon the crew was kept in control by their eager labour, drawn taut as the back-rope upon which Finn and Tomas hauled, hauled until their necks swelled and the blood congested in their faces.

Now Finn felt like a great hunter, like the leader of hunting men. Assurance of his strength and power was in him like a song. But when he spoke, he spoke quietly, as if deep in his throat was a gentle laugh.

And still in the nets the banks offish glittered, and from the banks shot away pale green arrows of light—the
herring
that had not been meshed and now vanished into the black deep.

Altogether out of that small shoal they drew, Finn
estimated
, about thirty crans. When the nets were hauled, they rested from their labour for a while, but in silence, listening.

“I can’t hear any of them moving at all,” said Tomas.

They would not wish poor luck to any boat; still, as they hearkened to the dead silence, a glee of conspiracy and close comradeship came about their hearts.

“I’m thinking,” Finn said, “that they are maybe too far east and a little too far out.”

“They may be indeed,” Tomas admitted, “though one never knows.”

“We know one thing now whatever,” said Donnie, and each face smiled in the darkness.

“We have drifted a good bit, hauling,” Finn said
presently
. “It’s yet only the dead of the night. What do you say if we go west, a little beyond where we were, and shoot again?”

There were now, however, no landmarks to be seen, and none of the boats carried riding lights. Finn had
accordingly
been careful to note many small signs such as the
direction of the last net, a scarcely discernible lightening in the sky that could be the rising of the waning moon, an occasional wash of water like a soft choking sigh from a skerry this side of the Great Cove. The sweeps dipped and stirred the water into vortices of silver that swirled
towards
Finn as he leaned forward, his right arm along the tiller.

Black the water, invisible the black rock, gone every last outline in the black of the world’s night. Finn felt this deeper darkness come from impending cliffs. It shrouded away his crew so that he lost sight of them, lost sight of that lightening of the sky which he had imagined in the east, lost sight of everything but the radiant pearls that fell from the oar blades, and the two whirling silver cones, and the vanishing flames, spectral green.

“Stop!” he cried softly, and for a hushed moment they floated at the core of darkness.

“Ah!” said Tomas, hearing the faint wash of the sea over the cliffs’ feet. There was relief in his voice at the known sound. They had it on their starboard side where it should be. Its faint murmur felt solid to them as a
towrope
.

The sun rose out of the sea to find the fleet hauling their nets. The sky was high and arched and of a blue lighter than cornflowers. The clouds had been herded away to the west where a last few galleon sails were going down the horizon. The dawn spangles glittered upon the water, and the level light was reflected in the chilled faces of the
fishermen
, who acknowledged its thin warmth in a delicate shudder.

“It’s a fine morning,” said a mouth in one boat or another, and the words were quiet as a line of poetry.

Presently an air of morning wind darkened the surface of the sea and here and there a brown sail went up.

On the edge of the beach in front of the gutting stations, girls and women and a few men slowly gathered in prospect
of the day’s work. But the boats first to arrive were blank. Then one came with three crans and her skipper said the herring were very spotty. Callum had two creels and Roddie four crans. When all the boats had returned, except one, the fishing was seen to be very light. The biggest shot was eight crans.

The boat that had not arrived was Finn’s. But after an hour or more they saw her coming. At once there were many voices, crying: Look how low she is in the water! But George’s voice rose above them all, triumphantly applauding a young runner in a great race. The girls of his curing station laughed with excitement. One gutting crew had their arms interlocked, and the middle one of the three, with dark eyes and flushed face, had to suffer elbows in secretive merry stabs. She swayed like a young full-foliaged tree, lissome and lovely in the warm morning sun. “Be quiet!” she said to Meg.

But as the
Gannet
drew near, drew slowly near, helped by two sweeps, for the wind was light and she was indeed deeply laden; as she drew still nearer, slowly and
inexorably
, with Finn’s head and shoulders steady and his arm along the tiller, and a voice crying, “She has over fifty crans if she has a creel!” there came upon Una through the expectant silence of the crowd a momentary strangeness and everything stood still in that moment as in a fated land. The dark eyes glimmered deeply, and an irrational
happiness
quivered, all in an instant, on the verge of tears.

As Finn dropped a net from his shoulder on to the drying green, he saw Rob and Callum approach. He expected that they would express their congratulations by way of pulling his leg. And this they did. But then Rob began to scratch his beard and Finn grew wary.

“Of course there is a saying,” said Rob, “that the man who goes forth always with his net will catch birds now and then.”

“Why birds?” asked Callunu

“Haven’t you been hearing anything?” Rob asked him in solemn astonishment.

“No. What?”

“Oh, in that case, nothing,” answered Rob, “nothing. Only a fellow will be hearing a thing sometimes.”

“Who were you hearing it from?”

“Och, maybe it was just only a small bird,” replied Rob, with the wrinkled face of his special brand of antique humour.

“A small bird? Oh?”

“Ay.”

“And where was the small bird from?”

“They say she’s got a nest up somewhere about the Birch Wood——”

Rob yelled as Finn tackled him, and his voice grew angry, reminding Finn that this was not Stornoway and that he should be ashamed of behaving in such a way before his own people. The gleam, however, remained in his eye, and Callum’s delight was absolute and complete.

On a harvest evening, Finn moved stealthy as a wolf through the Steep Wood, over the grey dikes, round the edge of the little field, and up on to the knoll of the House of Peace. There, lying flat, he gazed around with a hunted look, and down towards the river path, commanding the approach to his home.

When he was assured that no-one was after him, he performed the mental act of describing the circle of sanctuary around the ground on which he lay. Then his eyes fell on the circle of low flat stones and he crept into its heart.

At once the hunted look caught a gleam of cunning relief. They would never find him here. They would never think of looking for him in this haunted spot. He would escape them yet.

The way in which men who had been his friends had specially leagued against him produced a new vision of
humanity. He saw their dark relentless bodies, conspiring against him, not to be deflected from their purpose,
mercilessly
closing in, like that image in the Bible of the fowler with his net.

From his own home he was an outcast. He had seen the alien gleam in the eyes of women; even in the eyes of his mother, conspiring beyond him.

He had caught a glimpse of her standing still, looking away to the moor, with the calm reverie which the singing girl of North Uist had evoked by her song. Her happiness had been so calm and profound that it had touched the fringe of sadness, of fatality, as in the song, as appeared to be the way with women. His mother would never alter. She would deepen and grow in her own wisdom. Beyond the accidents and tempers and fatalities of life, she was
encompassed
within herself, the mother-woman he knew,
different
from all other women, and between them the blood relationship of mother and son. But she was distant from him now, completely apart, and this estrangement was cool and whole, leaving the relationship of the blood
imperceptible
as a sleeping instinct.

“She’s a fine girl. I am very happy about it.”

“I’m glad you like her,” he murmured in reply.

They hadn’t spoken much more about it, for he had felt a certain restraint in his mother’s presence; but as he had been going away, she had said: “Take the
sweetness
of life, Finn, while still you have it.”

The sweetness of life!

Excitement stirred him in the circle of stones. He felt very nervous. Curse these fellows! He had seen Rob and Callum as thick as thieves, conspiring. They would go to Henry, to Roddie. Donnie and Ian and Davie and Duncan … right up to old Wull the smuggler. Hundreds of them, without decency, without mercy.

“We’ll see you married and properly married,” Rob had said.

“What do you mean by that, Rob?” asked Callum.

“Marriage,” said Rob, “is a
public
institution.
That’s why I never went in for it”

“We know the way you went in for it,” retorted Finn. “And I tell you now that if any of you try on any tricks, I’ll break your necks. Now I’m warning you. I mean it”

“But what trick would we try on?” asked Callum
innocently
. “Dammit, it’s not us who’s going to do the trick whatever.”

“Let us hope not,” said Rob, “But however that may be, the point is that marriage is a
p-p-public
——”

“Not a public-house, Rob. No, no,” intervened Callum sensibly.

“
A
public
institution,”
proceeded Rob, “and as such it has to be—to be——”

“Ay, ay,” agreed Callum.

“I forget the
legal
word,”
said Rob, “but it means that it has to be it before—before all, so that no question can arise b-but that—that—it was it”

“That’s enough, Rob. You’re making the poor boy
nervous
,” said Callum. Finn strode away.

This was the night before his marriage, and Finn knew that if they got him in his home they would put him through certain heathenish practices. He had more than once assisted at them, and assisted with great glee, and the harder the prospective bridegroom raged and fought, the deeper the glee. They made him one of the company of men, beyond all false pride, before they were done with him. But now Finn saw the whole proceedings in an
entirely
different light.

The wedding would last for days. And they were not beyond certain stealthy forms of semi-intrusion on the marriage bed itself. This was what Rob had been hinting at

Finn curled up like an adder that had accidentally stung itself.

But he was safe here meantime and he needn’t go home to-night

Underneath all this, a turmoil of happiness seemed for
ever to wash up in his breast and recede like a pulse of the sea. There had been one moment of revelation that would outlast all others. It occurred in the Birch Wood. Una and himself had been sitting talking, and from them all
self-consciousness
, all stress, had fallen away. She was talking quietly of something they would do together, when
suddenly
he did not hear so much what she was saying as the tone of her voice, and its intimacy put about them a ring of silence. They were within this ring alone, in league for ever, the two of them, cut off from all others in the world. An intimacy, a trust, clear as her unselfconscious voice, clear as a singing in the hills, near as the deepening
tenderness
in his breast. She turned her head, for his silence had touched her.

Finn turned his head and looked at the grey-lichened stones. They were very old, and their age gave him a
feeling
of immense time on whose threshold he lay. What he had lived of life was only its beginning. Its deeper
mysteries
were ahead.

As if all hitherto had been but accident and skirmish, there came flooding through him a deep blood-warm realization of the potency of life. It uncurled in his limbs stretching them in slow strength, in a divine feeling of
well-being
. Odds and ends of vision touched his thought from his own boat, the sea, the busy communal life; flashes
moving
him to restlessness. George’s voice, declaiming his
congratulation
: “There’s nothing like marrying young, and I’m telling you your children and your children’s children will see many a great change….”

His children and his children’s children! These old fools could think of nothing but children! A touch of Rob’s antique humour came through the confusion of Finn’s thought and expression. He saw himself as an old enough man by that time! a white-haired old man, head of a tribe, sitting on this knoll in quiet thought, his sea days over! How distant and fantastic—how pleasant and amusing, with kindliness about it and peace! Like the figure of the
white-haired man he had once imagined here…. Finn’s thought suddenly quickened, and for an intense moment the knoll took on its immemorial calm. Time became a stilled heart-beat. Stealthy, climbing sounds. Finn’s body drew taut, heaved up on to supporting palms.
Whisperings
, the movement of the top of a small birch-tree here and there whose trunk invisible hands gripped. The hunters in their primordial humour were closing in. Life had come for him. 

Neil Miller Gunn (1891–1973) was a novelist, critic and dramatist, one of the most influential Scottish writers of the first half of the 20
^th
century. He was born in the village of Dunbeath in the county of Caithness, the northernmost county of mainland Scotland. His father was the captain of a herring boat, and Gunn’s preoccupation with the sea and fishermen can be traced directly back to his childhood memories of his father’s work. He began his working life as a Customs and Excise Officer, and turned to full time writing after he was awarded the 1937 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
Highland River.
He continued to write prolifically both as novelist and essayist throughout his life.