The Washer of the Ford: Legendary moralities and barbaric tales

“There is no hell, Culdee.”

“No hell!” Molios the Saint stared at the wood-man in blank amaze.

“No hell!” he said again; “and is there no heaven?”

“A hell there is, and a heaven there is: but not what Colum taught, and you taught.”

“Doth Christ live?”

“I know not.”

“And Mary?”

“I know not.”

“And God the Father?”

“I know not.”

“It is a lie that you have upon your lips. Sure, Cathal, you shall be dead indeed soon, to the glory of God. For I shall have thy dust scattered to the four winds, and thy bones consumed in flame, and a stake be driven through the place where thou wast.”

Once more Cathal laughed.

“Go back to the sea-cave, Molios. Thou hast much to learn. Brood there upon the ways of thy God before thou judgest if He knoweth no more than thou dost. And see, I will show you a wonder. Only, first, tell me this one thing. What of Ardanna whom I loved?”

“She was accursed. She would not believe. When Ecta took the child from her, that was born in sin, to have the water put upon it with the sign of the Cross, she went north beyond the Hill of the Pinnacles. There she saw the young king of the Picts of Argyll, and he loved her, and she went to his dûn. He took her to his rath in the north, and she was his queen. He, and she, and the two sons she bore to him are all under the hill-moss now: and their souls are in hell.”

Cathal laughed, low and mocking.

“It is a good hell that, I am thinking, Molios. But come … I will show you a wonder.”

With that he stooped, and took the moonshine dew out of a white flower, and put it upon the eyes of the old man.

Then Molios saw.

And what he saw was a strangeness and a terror to him. For everywhere were green lives, fair and comely, gentle-eyed, lovely, of a soft shining. From tree to tree they flitted, or passed to and fro from the tree-boles, as wild bees from their hives.

Beside Cathal stood a woman. Beautiful she was, with eyes like stars in the gloaming. All of green flame she seemed, though the old monk saw her breast rise and fall, and the light lift of her earth-brown hair by a wind-breath eddying there, and the hand of her clasped in that of Cathal. Beyond her were fair and beautiful beings, lovely shapes like unto men and women, but soulless, though loving life and hating death, which, of a truth, is all that the vain human clan does.

“Who is this woman, Cathal?” asked the saint, trembling.

“It is Deòin, whom I love, and who has given me life.”

“And these … that are neither green phantoms out of trees, nor yet men as we are?”

“These are the offspring of our love.”

Molios drew back in horror.

But Cathal threw up his arms, and with glad eyes cried:

“O green flame of life, pulse of the world.O Love! O Youth! O Dream of Dreams.”

“O bitter grief,” Molios cried, “O bitter grief, that I did not slay thee utterly on that day of the days! Flame to thy flesh, and a stake through thy belly – that is the doom thou shouldst have had! My ban upon thee, Cathal, that was a monk, and now art a wild man of the woods: upon thee, and thy Annir-Coille, and all thy brood, I put the ban of fear and dread and sorrow, a curse by day and a curse by night!”

But with that a great dizziness swam into the brain of the saint, and he fell forward, and lay his length upon the moss, and there was no sight to his eyes, or hearing to his ears, or knowledge upon him at all until the rising of the sun.

When the yellow light was upon his face he rose. There was no face to see anywhere. Looking in the dew for the myriad feet that had been there, he saw none.

The old man knelt and prayed.

At the first praying God filled his heart with peace. At the second praying God filled his heart with wonder. At the third praying God whispered mysteriously, and he knew. Humble in his new knowledge, he rose. The tears were in his old eyes. He went up to the Hollow Oak, and blessed it, and the wild man that slept within it, and the Annir-Coille that Cathal loved, and the offspring of their love. He took the curse away, and he blessed all that God had made.

All the long weary way to the shore he went as one in a dream. Wonder and mystery were in his eyes.

At the shore he entered the little coracle that brought him daily from the Holy Isle, a triple arrow-flight seaward.

A child sat in it, playing with pebbles. It was Ardan, the son of Ardanna.

“Ardan mac Cathal,” began the saint, weary now, but glad with a strange new gladness.

“Who is Cathal?” said the boy.

“He that was thy father. Tell me, Ardan, hast thou ever seen aught moving in the woods – green lives out of the trees?”

“I have seen a green shine come out of the trees.”

Molios bowed his head.

“Thou shalt be as my son, Ardan; and when thou art a man thou shalt choose thy own way, and let no man hinder thee.”

That night Molios could not sleep. Hearing the loud wash of the sea, he went to the mouth of the cave. For a long while he watched the seals splashing in the silver radiance of the moonshine. Then he called them.

“O seals of the sea, come hither!”

At that all the furred swimmers drew near.

“Is it for the curse you give us every year of the years, O holy Molios?” moaned a great black seal.

“O Ròn dubh, it is no curse I have for thee or thine, but a blessing, and peace. I have learned a wonder of God, because of an Annir-Coille in the forest that is upon the hill. But now I will be telling you the white story of Christ.”

So there, in the moonshine, with the flowing tide stealing from his feet to his knees, the old saint preached the gospel of love. The seals crouched upon the rocks, with their great brown eyes filled with glad tears.

When Molios ceased, each slipped again into the shadowy sea. All that night, while he brooded upon the mystery of Cathal and the Annir-Coille, with deep knowledge of hidden things, and a heart filled with the wonder and mystery of the world, he heard them splashing to and fro in the moon-dazzle, and calling, one to the other, “We, too, are the sons of God.”

At dawn a shadow came into the cave. A white frost grew upon the face of Molios. Still was he, and cold, when Ardan, the child, awoke. Only the white lips moved. A ray of the sun slanted across the sea, from the great disc of whirling golden flame new risen. It fell softly upon the moving lips. They were still then, and Ardan kissed them because of the smile that was there.

THE SHADOW-SEERS

I

THE SIGHT 7

THE “vision,” or second-sight, is more common in the Western Isles than in the Highlands; now at least, when all things sacred to the Celtic race, from the ancient language to the degenerate and indeed all but vanished Beltane and Samh’in rites, are smiled at by the gentle and mocked by the vulgar. A day will come when men will lament more what is irrecoverable than ever a nation mourned for lapsed dominion. It is a bitter cruel thing that strangers must rule the hearts and brains, as well as the poor fortunes, of the mountaineers and islanders. Yet in doing their best to thrust Celtic life and speech and thought into the sea, they are working a sore hurt for themselves that they shall discern in the day of adversity. We of the passing race know this thing: that in a day to come the sheep-runs shall not be in the Isles and the Highlands only – for we see the forests moving south, and there will be lack, then, not of deer and of sheep, but of hunters and shepherds.

That which follows is only a memento of what was told me last summer by a fisherman of Iona. If I were to write all I have heard about what is called second-sight, it would be a volume and not a few pages I should want. The “sight” has been a reality to me almost from the cradle, for my Highland nurse had the faculty, and I have the memory of more than one of her trances.

There is an old man on the island named Daibhidh (David) Macarthur.8 It was Ivor McLean, my boatman friend, who took me to him. He is a fine old man, though “heavy” a little; with years, perhaps, for his head is white as the crest of a wave. He is one of the very few of Iona, perhaps of the two or three at most, who do not speak any English.

“No,” he told me, “he had never had the sight himself. Ivor was wrong in saying that he had.”

This, I imagine, was shyness, or, rather, that innate reticence of the Celt in all profoundly intimate and spiritual matters; for, from what Ivor told me, I am convinced that old Macarthur had more than once proved himself a seer.

But he admitted that his wife had “it.”

We were seated on an old upturned boat on the rocky little promontory, where once were first laid the innumerable dead, brought for burial to the sacred soil of Iona. For a time Macarthur spoke slowly about this and that; then, abruptly and without preamble, he told me this:

The Christmas before last, Mary, his wife, had seen a man who was not on the island. “And that is true, by St. Martin’s Cross,” he added.

They were, he said, sitting before the fire, when, after a long silence, he looked up to see his wife staring into the shadow in the ingle. He thought she was brooding over the barren womb that had been her life-long sorrow, and now in her old age had become a strange and gnawing grief, and so he turned his gaze upon the red coals again.

But suddenly she exclaimed, “C’ait am bheil thu dol?” (Where are you going?)

He looked up, but saw no one in the room beside themselves.

“What has come to you?” he asked. “What do you see?”

But she took no notice.

“C’uine tha thu falbh?” (When are you going?) she muttered, with the same strained voice and frozen eyes. And then, once again, “C’uine thig thu rithisd?” (When will you come again?) And with that she bowed her head, and the thin backs of the hands upon her knees were wet with falling tears.

For the fourth of an hour thereafter she would say nothing except moan, “Tha an amhuinn domhain; tha an amhuinn domhain; fuar, fuar; domhain, domhain!”9 (Deep, deep is the river; cold and deep; cold and deep!)

And the man she saw, added Macarthur, was her nephew, Luthais, in Cape Breton, of Nova Scotia, who, as they learned before Easter, was drowned that Christmas-tide. He was the last of his mother’s race, and had been the foster-child of Mary.

II

THE DARK HOUR OF FERGUS

IN September of last year I was ferried across the Sound of Kerrera by an old boatman.

That afternoon I went with my friend, a peasant farmer near the south end of Kerrera, and lay down in the grassy, bouldered wilderness beneath the cliff on which stands the ruin of Gylen Castle. The tide called in a loud insistent whisper, rising to a hoarse gurgle, from the Sound. The breeze that came from the mountains of Mull was honey-sweet with heather smell. The bleating of the ewes and lambs, the screaming of a few gulls, – nothing else was audible. At times, it is true, like a deep sigh, the suspiration of the open sea rose and fell among the islands. Faint echoes of that sigh came round Gylen headland and up the Kyle. It was an hour wherein to dream of the sons of Morven, who had landed here often, long before the ancient stronghold was built; of Fionn and the Féinn of the coming and going of Ossian in his blind old age; of beautiful Malvina; of the galleys of the Fomorians; of the songs and the singers and all the beautiful things of “the old ancient long ago.”

But the tale that I heard from my friend was this:

You know that my mother’s people are Skye folk. It was from the mother of my mother that I heard what you call the Incantation of the Spirit, though I never heard it called anything but old Elsie’s Sian. She lived near the Hart o’ Corry. You know the part? Ay, true, it is wild land – wild even for the wilderness o’ Skye. Old mother Elsie had “the sight” at times, and whenever she wished she could find out the lines o’ life. It was magic, they say. Who am I to know? This is true, she knew much that no one else knew. When my mother’s cousin, Fergus MacEwan, who was mate of a sloop that sailed between Stornoway and Ardrossan, came to see her – and that was in the year before my mother was married, and when she was courted by Fergus, though she was never for giving her life to him, for even then she loved my father, poor fisherman of Ulva though he was (though heir, through his father’s brother, to his crofter-farm on Kerrera here) – when Fergus came to see her, because of the gloom that was upon his spirit, she foretold all. At first she could “see” poorly. But one wild afternoon, when the Cuchullins were black with cloud-smoke, she bade him meet her in that lonely savage glen they call the Loat o’ Corry. He was loath to go, for he feared the place. But he went. He told all to my mother before he went away next dawn, with the heart in him broken, and his hope as dead as a herring in a net.

Mother Elsie came to him out of the dusk in that wuthering place just like a drifting mist, as he said. She gave him no greeting, but was by his side in silence. Before he knew what she was doing she had the soles of her feet upon his, and her hands folding his, and her eyes burning against his like hot coals against ash. He felt shudders come over him, and a wind blew up and down his back; and he grew giddy, and heard the roaring of the tides in his ears. Then he was quiet. Her voice was very far away when she said this thing, but he remembered every word of it:

By that which dwells within thee,By the lamps that shine upon me,By the white light I see littenFrom the brain now sleeping stilly,By the silence in the hollows,By the wind that slow subsideth,By the life-tide slowly ebbing,By the deith-tide slowly rising,By the slowly waning warmth,By the chill that slowly groweth,By the dusk that slowly creepeth,By the darkness near thee,By the darkness round thee,By the darkness o’er thee —O’er thee, round thee, on thee —By the one that standethAt thy side and waitethDumb and deaf and blindly,By the one that moveth,Bendeth, raiseth, watcheth,By the dim Grave-Spell upon thee,By the Silence thou hast wedded…May the way thy feet are treading,May the tangled lines now crookèd,Clear as moonlight lie before me!Oh! oh! ohrone, ochrone! green the branches bonnie:Oh! oh! ohrone! ochrone! red the blood-drop berries:Achrone, arone, arone, arone, I see the green-clad Lady.She walks the road that’s wet with tears, with rustling sorrows shady…Oh! oh! mo ghraidh.

Then it was that a great calm came upon Fergus, though he felt like a drowned man, or as one who stood by his own body, but speechless, and feeling no blowing of wind through his shadow-frame.

For, indeed, though the body lived, he was already of the company of the silent. What was that caiodh, that wailing lamentation, sad as the Cumha fir Arais, which followed Elsie’s incantation, her spell upon “the way” before him, that it and all the trailed lines of this life should be clear as moonlight before her? Oh! oh! ohrone, ochrone! red the blood-drop berries; did not these mean no fruit of the quicken-tree, but the falling drops from the maimed tree that was himself? And was not the green-clad lady, she who comes singing low, the sprouting of the green grass that is the hair of the earth? And was not the road, gleaming wet with ruts and pools all of tears, and overhung by dark rustling plumes of sorrow, the road that the soul traverses in the dark hour? And did not all this mean that the Grave Spell was already upon him, and that the Silence was to be his?10

But what thing it was she saw, Elsie would not say. Darkly she dreamed awhile, then leaned forward and kissed his breast. He felt the sob in her heart throb into his.

Dazed, and knowing that she had seen more than she had dreamed of seeing, and that his hour was striding over the rocky wilderness of that wild Isle of Skye, he did not know she was gone, till a shuddering fear of the silence and the gloom told him he was alone.

Coll MacColl (he that was my Kerrera friend) stopped here, just as a breeze will suddenly stop in a corrie so that the rowan berries on the side of a quicken will sway this way and that, while the long thin leaves on the other will be as still as the stones underneath, where their shadows sleep.

I asked him at last if Elsie’s second-sight had proved true. He looked at me for a moment, as though vaguely surprised I should ask so foolish a thing.

No sleep came to Fergus that night, he resumed, quietly, as though no other words were needed, and at daybreak he rose and left the cot of his kinsman, Andrew MacEwan. In the gray dawn he saw my mother, and told her all. Then she wished him farewell, and bade him come again when next the Sunbeam should be sailing to Portree, or other port in Skye; for she did not believe that her mother had seen speedy death, or death at all, but perhaps only a time of sorrow, and even that she had done this thing to send Fergus away, for she too had her eyes on Robert MacColl, that was my father.

“And so you will come again, Fergus my friend,” she said; and added, “and perhaps then you will be telling me of a Sunbeam ashore, as well as that you sail from Ardrossan to the far away islands!”

He stared at her as one who hears ill. Then he took her hand in his, and let it go suddenly again. With one arm he rubbed the rough Uist cap he held in his left hand; then he brushed off the wet mist that was gray on his thick black beard.

“You are not well, Fearghas-mo-charaid,” my mother said, and gently. When she saw the staring pain in his eyes, she added, with a low sob, “My heart is sore for you!”

With that he turned away, and she saw him no more, that day or any day of all the days to come.

“And what thing happened, Coll?”

“They kept it from her, and she did not know it for long. It was this: Fergus McEwan did not sail far that morning. He was ill, he said, and was put ashore. That night Aulay Macaulay saw him moving about in that frightful place of the Storr Rock, moaning and muttering. He would have spoken to him, but he saw him begin to leap about the pinnacled rocks like a goat, and at last run up to The Old Man of Storr and beat it with his clinched fists, blaspheming with wild words; and he feared Fergus was mad, and he slipped from shadow to shadow, till he fled openly. But in the morning Aulay and his brother Finlay went back to look for Fergus. At first they thought he had been drowned, or had fallen into one of the fissures. But from a balachan, a ‘bit laddie,’ as they would call him in the town over the way [Oban], they heard that a man had pushed off that morning in John Macpherson’s boat, that lay about a mile and a half from the Storr, and had sailed north along the coast.

“Well, it was three days before he was found – stone-dead. If you know the Quiraing you will know the great Needle Rock. Only a bird can climb it, as the saying goes. Half-way up, Finlay Macaulay and a man of the neighbourhood saw the body o’ Fergus as though it were glued to the rock. It was windless weather, for he would have blown away like a drifted leaf. They had to jerk the body down with net-poles. God save us the dark hour of Fergus, that died like a wild beast!”

III

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 kirk-yard 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 the 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 in 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 gray mist, beyond the dyke of the green place, near the road. The face of her was gray as a gray 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 ghraidh?B’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 gray dawn, his face was grayer than that and more cold.

IV

THE SMOOTHING OF THE HAND

GLAD am I that wherever and whenever I listen intently I can hear the looms of Nature weaving Beauty and Music. But some of the most beautiful things are learned otherwise – by hazard, in the Way of Pain, or at the Gate of Sorrow.

I learned two things on the day when I saw Sheumas McIan dead upon the heather. He of whom I speak was the son of Ian McIan Alltnalee, but was known throughout the home straths and the countries beyond as Sheumas Dhu, Black James, or, to render the subtler meaning implied in this instance, James the Dark One. I had wondered occasionally at the designation, because Sheumas, if not exactly fair, was not dark. But the name was given to him, as I learned later, because, as commonly rumoured, he knew that which he should not have known.

I had been spending some weeks with Alasdair McIan and his wife Silis (who was my foster-sister), at their farm of Ardoch, high in a remote hill country. One night we were sitting before the peats, listening to the wind crying amid the corries, though, ominously as it seemed to us, there was not a breath in the rowan-tree that grew in the sun’s-way by the house. Silis had been singing, but silence had come upon us. In the warm glow from the fire we saw each others’ faces. There the silence lay, strangely still and beautiful, as snow in moonlight. Silis’s song was one of the Dana Spioradail, known in Gaelic as the Hymn of the Looms. I cannot recall it, nor have I ever heard or in any way encountered it again.