The Works of "Fiona Macleod", Volume V, The Children of Water
SORROW ON THE WIND
"The parable of Pythagoras is dark, but true; Cor ne edito. . . Eat not thy heart."
--BACON, Essay, xxvii."There's sorrow on the wind, my grief, there's sorrow on the wind!"--Song.
I give here, in narrative form, a story of two, one of whom I knew; and some will know "Father Angus," from whom also I heard it. Rury Macarthur died over a year ago, but not in his own place. He had gone away after Maev left, and settled behind the mainland coast, on an inland-lying farm where the cry of the seamew never came and where even from the last ridges of the upland the grey line of the sea never wavered on the horizon." It was the wet poor land and the loneliness out yonder that brought him here," the neighbours said. But I, who knew him, think that there was in his mind another reason also. It is for that I credit the singular story of a herd-lad, who said his master could never abide the crying o' peewits, and that he had time upon time seen him lift an arm and shake it at the score or more wheeling lapwings, saying at them swift, hoarse words in Gaelic; but that once, when a single peewit kept drifting and wailing above him as he walked up Netherton Brae, the tears were coming out of his eyes and down his face, like an old woman crying silently in the gloaming.
"Why will you not give up the girl, Rury?" asked Father Angus M'Ian, as he and Rury Macarthur walked along the grey machar, in the fading hours of a chill July day which had been all noise of wind and thin crying lash of rain and the endless wailing of mew and tern, with the desolate and lonely sruch of the tidelifted or tide-left wrack and the dull wave beating.
"Why will you not give up the girl? She has no heart, they say: and it would only be sorrow you'd be having, if you took her to your hearthside."
Rury Macarthur made no answer, but walked on, his grey eyes staring out across the long thistled greyness of the sandy machar, and upon the dull grey and wan green of the tumbling sea, that sometimes seemed like a flood coming swift across a narrow downborne ridge, and sometimes was like an idle and formless mist being furtively rolled back and, mysteriously gathered by obscure withdrawing hands.
"I'm not denying she has the fine looks, Rury: indeed an' it's true that she has the song and music of beauty. There is no other girl in Barra like Maev, just as I don't know one there or in any of the home-isles that has the old name either. But she doesn't want marriage, you say: nor to leave her grandmother, who is old and blind: and for this, and for that, an' I know not what all."
"She doesn't wish the thought of going away from the sea," said Rury dully. "It isn't the grandmother, no nor yet marriage. I would have old Janet with no thought but gladness: and Maev, if she hasn't the hawk's-hunger for me, hasn't her thought on any other. It's not that, Father Angus. It's the sea-water. It's because I have my croft away up yonder in the hollow of the great strath. There's nought but leaning heads of hills, north, south, east, and west; an' moorland an' bog sloping up against them. You will not have sight of the sea from any place on Tynavhona; no, not if you go up above the summer shillings, but at one place only, and that will be at the Cave of the Wailing Woman on the south-east shoulder of Sliav-Gorm. And Maev will not come to that loneliness of Tynavhona: no, that she will not."
"Loneliness? Why the girl lives at the very heart of it . . . not a croft near, in the wildness of this machar of the west! Loneliness at Tynavhona! Why there are five or seven crofts within sight of you, and Donald Maciellan's big farm, and not a mile from your door is the clachan of the Kern, it that would be calling itself a bailê but for the fear the crows would fly with the big news to the Morair's factor!"
"Well and that may be, an' is so, Father Angus. But it's loneliness for Maev. She has the wave of the sea in her heart. Ay, that's it. She has a wave in her heart. She hears the tides as you hear the church-bell of Our Lady of the Sea. You wouldn't be without the good sound of the bells, Father, Angus: and if you were in a place where there would not be the holy bells, no, not, once, you would be listening to them in your sleep, and at this hour and at that, you never knowing when or how, but something in you suddenly saying Whisht. An' if any day you heard them in the glen, or on the moor, or on the slope of the hill, or by the byres maybe, ay, or in your room with book and oil-lamp beside you, would you not start an' be on your feet with the beating heart in you, and your eyes like a stoat's in the dark, smelling the wind? Ay, you would have the restlessness, you would, and the fever: and then, or if not then, soon, ay, soon or late, you would rise and go away. You would follow the call of the bell. Ay, Father Angus, an' that is a true word. And what that call of the bell would be to you, the sound of the water an' the whisperin' of the waste and all that's in the sea for good and evil (peace to it, the good sea; I'd say no evil of it, or of any whose place it is)--ay, all that and more, is the sea-call to Maev."
"It's all a dream, Rury. The girl's a bit fey with youth an' loneliness."
"Dream or no dream, Father Angus, it's a daylong sorrow for me. I asked her to come up to Tynavhona an' I would give her all I could an' be asking no more than she cared to give. There's no need for her to work at what she has not the liking for. There's Morag an' Sine an Mary to do all that's needed. 'You've a peewit's heart,' I said to her, 'and I don't want to be lyin' beside you at night, listening to the wind and fearing that if I sleep you'll be up and away on wild wings.' She laughed at that. 'It's not a peewit's heart I have,' she said, 'but the heart of a tern. You might blow a breath and I'd drift to your feet like flyin' bog-cotton, with a sigh an' a cry: an' if it's another wind or breath that blows, then I drift away like bog-cotton too, an' with a sigh an' a cry, an' it's to the shore I go, to the shore in the dark, where there's nothing but blackness and noise of water an' whiteness of foam. An' there you cannot come, Rury, no, not for all your lovingness. No, no, the peewit to the moor, and the tern to the saltness and wildness of the water. Give me a peewit's heart, an' I'll come to Sliav-Gorm, I'll come to your hidden moors!' An' I pleaded an' argued, Father Angus, but no word more than that could I get. . . . 'Give me a peewit's heart, an' then I'll come to your bidden moors.'"
"Well, and have you not asked again? The girl's thought may have changed. You know the way the herring have: for a score years, it may be, they will come from the wildness of the sea round one headland, and in the same week of the same month: and then all of a sudden, when the boats are dappling the haven, they sink fathoms deep, and take a veer like a scythe going through green grass, and are gone like a shadow, and will not be seen again for weeks maybe, for months, perhaps, perhaps not for years on years. It's their way. And there's women as incalculable as that."
"Yes, Father Angus, an' for sure I have, an' again an' again too. And it was only three days ago that I went to her, for the last time. I said it was for the last time, and she said that was well, for she could never have any word more to put upon that thing between us. Old Janet is passing swift, she said, and when that is come which cannot be long coming, then she will go away. She has the thought of the lonely islet in her mind, I know: the little bit of rock and grass out yonder that's called Eilean Caorach. She said once she would be glad to be there alone for a time. And then, when she goes away to the great towns, the mainland towns or the English towns or in the Americas--for go she will, and be lost and broken like a wounded seamew, and sink and be sucked down like that seamew oh yes, I know that well, as a man hears death whispering a long time before the cry and the silence--when Maev will go away to these towns, and with the man she loves then, or dreams she loves, or with one who will master her and have her secret anger, then all that's in and around Eilean Caorach, and all about Ardnatoon where she now is, will be in her heart, like moonlight in a pool of water. For her heart's of water."
"What were her words, Rury? " asked Father Angus quietly.
"They would be like this," Rury answered, after a pause. "They would be like this: 'Put your trouble away, Ruaridh a gradach, Give it to the peewits up at Tynavhona, but don't be hearing them calling my name for ever and ever. I loved you, I thought, but I have not that thought on me, now. But it would not matter--no, it would not matter. You told me I had a wave of the sea in my heart. I'm not knowing that, nor why, nor the meaning to it. But it may be. I can't love you, for you have a heart like a mountain. It would always be there: I could never get out of sight of it. There would be no going this way and that way. It is a good mountain--but, oh yes, I have the wave in my heart. I cannot be staying ever in one place, Rury. No, that I cannot. I could not be living month-in month-out at Tynavhona. Where would I be for the sea? There is no water up there. But you would have gladness to be living, here, anywhere--yes, yes, I know that, caraid dileas, but there's no change in you. There's no wave of the sea in your heart. You have not the understanding of all this, Rury? No, nor is it with me any better. But I cannot be living here any more. In the time of the sorrow that's coming it's to Port-na-long I'll go, to sail away, and I shall not be back again: no, never here. It is no sorrow I am wishing you: peace be with you. Forget.' And that was all."
'Well, Rury, I have the true sorrow for you. It's a hard thing to be in the fowler's snare, as the saying is. What old tale is there that is not full of the sighing an' sorrow of vain love and wild beauty that's like a flame leaping in the wind an' falling away to ashes and black grief?"
"Ay, it is a hard thing, Father Angus."
The two walked on awhile in silence. The grey hour grew dusky with thick shadow, though there was no night there in Barra, at that season: only, in times of gloom and storm, a coming of dull shadow into the half-night and half-day.
A guillemot flew with rapid whirling scream overhead. The harsh cries of scarts came from the weed-covered rocks at the sea's edge. Terns drifted past like flying foam, with a wail that fluttered behind their flight as a blown feather idly whirled in the wake of the wind. From the peat bog beyond the machar, they could hear cries and sounds that might be the drumming of snipe or the harsh screech of the solander or the melancholy flute of the binne-bheul, but were not quite as these are, coming as they did out of a gloom full of menace and the obscure furtive ways of untrodden morass.
Father Angus sighed as he thought of the smallness of the little island-world that was all in all to him and his. How vast and grey and illimitable seemed the long machar, how vaster and sadder and more illimitable the sea beyond, how vast and shadowy the inland hills, The lifting of a Hand, nay but the least breath of the Unknowable, and these hills would be as blown dust, and the machar as a handful of ground sand, and the great sea no more than a cup of water spilt and thrown upon the wind. How futile all human longing, all passion of the heart, all travail of the spirit, beside this terrible reality of wind and vastness, of wind baying like a hound in a wilderness--a wilderness where the hound's voice would fall away at last, and the hound's shadow fade, and infinitude and eternity be beyond and above and behind and beneath.
But in Rury's heart there was only a dumb revolt against the blind forces. He did not know them, nor what they did, and even in his secret mind he did not put his hatred upon them. That would be to bring swift evil upon him. They hear, the everlasting ones. They hear a whisper in the dark: the wise will keep even thought of them screened from the proud, unrelenting eyes. But in his heart he hated them. It was they who put a wave of the sea between him and all his hopes. If Maev were a woman as other women--perhaps, even, he thought, if he could love as other men- - But no, it was their will that some should be children of water, and no love and no hope and no supplications would avail, no, not till the whole world was drowned in the sea, or till the sea was gathered to the leaning lips of the sky, as the sun sucks the midsummer dew.
The night-wind rose out of the west. In the vastness of shadowy gloom over sea and land it moved like a lamenting voice, a creature blind and without form, homeless, seeking what is not to be found; crying sometimes, as a lance, slanting on the wind, an ancient sorrow; deepening sometimes in an immense, gathering, multitudinous sound, as though the tides of night broke against the shores of the stars.