The Works of "Fiona Macleod", Volume IV

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 ciàr 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 Mòr 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.

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 ghraidhB'idh mi falbh,Mùirnean!C'uin a thilleas tu,O mo ghraidh?Cha till mi an rathad so;Tha an't ait e cumhann —O Mùirnean, Mùirnean!B'idh mi falbh an drùghAm tigh Pharais,Mùirnean!Sèol dhomh an rathad,Mo ghraidh!Thig an so, Mùirnean-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 dàn! … 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.

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 sùla– 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 "Eòlas 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 eòlas. 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.

I asked her what she was doing. She said it was the right thing to do; that as soon as possible after the child was born, the mother should take it – and best, at noon, and facing the sun – and touch its brow to the earth. My friends (like many islanders of the Inner Hebrides, they had no Gaelic) used an unfamiliar phrase; "It's the old Mothering." It was, in truth, the sacrament of Our Mother, but in a far ancient sense. I do not doubt the rite is among the most primitive of those practised by the Celtic peoples.

I have not seen it elsewhere, though I have heard of it. Probably it is often practised yet in remote places. Even where we were, the women were somewhat fearful lest "the minister" heard of what the young mother had done. They do not love these beautiful symbolic actions, these "ministers," to whom they are superstitions. This old, pagan, sacramental earth-rite is, certainly, beautiful. How could one better be blessed, on coming into life, than to have the kiss of that ancient Mother of whom we are all children? There must be wisdom in that first touch. I do not doubt that behind the symbol lies, at times, the old miraculous communication. For, even in this late day, some of us are born with remembrance, with dumb worship, with intimate and uplifting kinship to that Mother.

Since then I have asked often, in many parts of the Highlands and Islands, for what is known of this rite, when and where practised, and what meanings it bears; and some day I hope to put these notes on record. I am convinced that the Earth-Blessing is more ancient than the westward migration of the Celtic peoples.

I have both read and heard of another custom, though I have not known of it at first-hand. The last time I was told of it was of a crofter and his wife in North Uist. The once general custom is remembered in a familiar Gaelic saying, the English of which is, "He got a turn through the smoke." After baptism, a child was taken from the breast, and handed by its mother (sometimes the child was placed in a basket) to the father, across the fire. I do not think, but am not sure, if any signal meaning lie in the mother handing the child to the father. When the rite is spoken of, as often as not it is only "the parents" that the speaker alludes to. The rite is universally recognised as a spell against the dominion, or agency, of evil spirits. In Coll and Tiree, it is to keep the Hidden People from touching or singing to the child. I think it is an ancient propitiatory rite, akin to that which made our ancestors touch the new-born to earth; as that which makes some islanders still baptize a child with a little spray from the running wave, or a fingerful of water from the tide at the flow; as that which made an old woman lift me as a little child and hold me up to the south wind, "to make me strong and fair and always young, and to keep back death and sorrow, and to keep me safe from other winds and evil spirits." Old Barabal has gone where the south wind blows, in blossom and flowers and green leaves, across the pastures of Death; and I … alas, I can but wish that One stronger than she, for all her love, will lift me, as a child again, to the Wind, and pass me across the Fire, and set me down again upon a new Earth.

FROM "GREEN FIRE"

Be not troubled in the inward Hope. It lives in beauty, and the hand of God slowly wakens it year by year, and through the many ways of Sorrow. It is an Immortal, and its name is Joy.

F. M.The HerdsmanI

On the night when Alan Carmichael with his old servant and friend, Ian M'Ian, arrived in Balnaree ("Baile'-na-Righ"), the little village wherein was all that Borosay had to boast of in the way of civic life, he could not disguise from himself that he was regarded askance.

Rightly or wrongly, he took this to be resentment because of his having wed (alas, he recalled, wed and lost) the daughter of the man who had killed Ailean Carmichael in a duel. So possessed was he by this idea, that he did not remember how little likely the islanders were to know anything of him or his beyond the fact that Ailean MacAlasdair Rhona had died abroad.

The trouble became more than an imaginary one when, on the morrow, he tried to find a boat for the passage to Rona. But for the Frozen Hand, as the triple-peaked hill to the south of Balnaree was called, Rona would have been visible; nor was it, with a fair wind, more than an hour's sail distant.

Nevertheless, he could detect in every one to whom he spoke a strange reluctance. At last he asked an old man of his own surname why there was so much difficulty.

In the island way, Seumas Carmichael replied that the people on Elleray, the island adjacent to Rona, were unfriendly.

"But unfriendly at what?"

"Well, at this and at that. But for one thing, they are not having any dealings with the Carmichaels. They are all Macneills there, Macneills of Barra. There is a feud, I am thinking; though I know nothing of it; no, not I."

"But Seumas mac Eachainn, you know well yourself that there are almost no Carmichaels to have a feud with! There are you and your brother, and there is your cousin over at Sgòrr-Bhan on the other side of Borosay. Who else is there?"