The Cone Gatherers (11 page)

On Sunday morning Lady Runcie-Campbell walked slowly in the absolving sunshine across the policies to visit Mrs Duror, carrying a bunch of bronze chrysanthemums and pink dahlias specially cut for her by young Harry. She had telephoned that she would call at eleven and did not wish to be even a minute early.

The visit would not be enjoyable. Mrs Duror, far more obviously than most, was under the jurisdiction of God, but she never suggested that awesome allegiance. By merely enduring, she could have achieved a superiority over any earthly visitor: even a queen in her resigned presence must be humble. Instead, monstrous and feeble, she would fawn and simper and suggest obeisances almost obscene. During the previous visit two or three months ago, it had taken all Lady Runcie-Campbell's self-control, buttressed by good breeding, not to shudder and show disgust; but nothing had been able to prevent her using a tone of voice higher, shriller, and more imperious than any she had ever used before. She had uttered strained pleasantries and platitudinous encouragement in that haughty voice, and had felt horribly ashamed. No quarter of an hour had ever seemed longer or more piteously degrading. When she had left, almost fanatically grateful for slimness and the simple motion of her legs, she had at the same time been full of admiration for Duror who, all during the visit, had sat alertly, never saying the wrong thing in spite of the spawning opportunities, and never betraying by wince or frown or bowing of his head how painful he must have found his poor wife's pathetic garrulous abasement. His marvellous restraint had been in contrast with his mother-in-law's petulance. At least twice the latter had whined that God's ways were hard to
understand, for to human eyes it looked as if He punished the innocent and allowed the wicked, such as Hitler, to prosper. Such sayings, even with the qualification of clasped hands and upward snifflings, must always be blasphemous; but in a time of war, with Britain in danger and her enemies triumphing, they were also disloyal, cowardly, and treacherous. Duror's resignation and trust, on the other hand, were in the finest sense patriotic.

Remembering that last visit, therefore, Lady Runcie-Campbell could not look forward with pleasure to this impending one. But there was another reason for her foreboding. She could not deceive herself into believing that her motive was altruistic; it was, she knew, an act of penance on her part, a propitiation; and as such it was inevitably false.

Last night, while praying, she had been overwhelmed again by knowledge of her own unworthiness. All her faults and shortcomings had contributed to it, but especially her contemptuous and instinctive refusal to listen to Roderick's plea that she should give the cone-gatherers a lift home in the car.

To obey Christ by being humble must mean to betray her husband, and also, perhaps, to amuse her equals. Sir Colin was franker, bolder, and more sincere than she: he believed in God, he said, and therefore in heaven; but it was a heaven where there must be rank as on earth. It was beyond even God's ingenuity to achieve an equality that would work. As his wife, and the cherisher of his title, she had to agree with him; but as ambitious Christian, and as her father's daughter, she could not help seeing how barren and impious was that argument.

If she had not altogether inherited her religion from her father, certainly it had been much influenced by him. Accustomed to seeing humanity in its most vicious aspects, he had been uncompromising, imperturbable, and ironical in his Christianity. For the Church as an institution he had often expressed a distrust all the more effective for being so judicially delivered. Towards Colin, as a typical master of that Church, with his own feudal enclosure in the local kirk, he had been similarly tolerant
but distrustful. She would remember all her life his murmuring to her at her wedding feast, held during a time of hunger-marching, a verse from the grim old ballad which so well represented his own view.

He had given her marriage his enigmatic blessing, so that his fondness for her first-born, Roderick, had seemed to many, certainly to Colin himself, perverse and revengeful: the boy, so puny in body and backward in mind, was his proof that the marriage had been a misalliance.

She knew her father's love had been genuine, and also that Roderick had deserved it. Although naturally timid, so that riding a pony was an ordeal, her son had nevertheless always shown a self-forgetfulness in opposing any act of injustice or cruelty; and in his attitude towards people, whether lords or labourers, he had maintained out of infancy a tenderness and sincerity, disappointing to his own father but as refreshing as faith to hers. Now her father was dead, but Roderick was now stronger in body, keener in mind, and still with that simplicity in his soul which so often showed up the twisted doubts in hers.

His father anxiously, in almost every letter, inquired after him, and particularly wanted to be reassured about his manner of speaking to servants and the lower orders generally. In an infant friendliness towards inferiors was quaint and excusable, Sir Colin pointed out; in a boy it was unfortunate; but in a man it would be downright disastrous. He hoped she was doing all she could to educate their son in this, the most important fact of life. Even in a church itself, Colin informed her, there could be none of this fatal throwing away of the privileges and responsibilities of rank. If the minister was socially inferior, he must even with his robes on be treated with that correct degree of condescension which
was never offensive but which indubitably was the true preserver of society. It was her duty to see that Roderick acquired it; and she had made, and still was making, efforts to fulfil that duty.

As she walked through the grounds this bright Sabbath morning, on a visit so painful and yet so false, she knew the problem was far more complicated than Colin thought. She wished her children to grow up and possess this beautiful earth as their rightful inheritance, but as the truly meek. Therefore, as she gazed at the vast wood, in which Duror's house stood so peacefully, she felt glad that in the spring its grandeur and loveliness would be cut down by the axe of war. Colin had vowed to plant another as soon as he came home. He would return home then, thanks to God, and in that prospect the trees still unborn, still in their cones, seemed dearer than these silent aloof giants which represented the barren past and the anguished stunted present rather than the green abundant future.

She was smiling as she pushed open the gate at Duror's house and walked up the path to the door.

She was not smiling when she came back, as both Roderick and Sheila noticed at lunch. The flowers on the table displeased her; she ordered the maid to remove them at once; she did not, she snapped, enjoy her food with decay before her eyes. Sheila, who had helped to arrange the flowers, ventured to say she thought them fragrant and fresh. For her interference she was snubbed, and spent the rest of the meal in practising nonchalant impervious smiles. Roderick said nothing: he had planned that afternoon to go to the cone-gatherers' hut, and he was worried that he had not yet asked his mother's permission, and would probably have to go without it.

After lunch Lady Runcie-Campbell retired to the drawing room where under the portrait of her father in his robes she sat down and tried to read a magazine. Roderick came in quietly and stood by the window looking out onto the lawn.

His quietness irritated her.

‘Is there anything wrong?' she asked.

He shook his head.

‘Well, if you've got nothing to do,' she said, ‘why not get on with your studies? I thought you promised Mr Sorn-Wilson you'd keep at them?'

‘I've done some Latin and maths,' he murmured.

Suddenly she flung the magazine down.

‘Would you please ring the bell for Mrs Morton?' she asked.

He rang it.

‘It's a private matter I want to discuss,' she said. ‘I think you ought to be out enjoying the sunshine. This fine spell is sure to end soon.'

He frowned as he lied. ‘Will it be all right if I go down to the beach to look at seals?'

‘With Sheila?'

‘She doesn't want to go.'

‘Are you going alone?'

‘No. I'm going to ask Harry to come with me.'

His mother considered. There might be a little danger in his going down to the beach, but to forbid him might be to drive him back into his old timidity. To admire seals in one's own waters was of course permissible, even laudable, in her husband's code.

‘You'll be careful,' she warned.

‘Yes, of course.'

‘I suppose it should be all right. Harry's a sensible boy, who knows his place and keeps it admirably. Don't be long though. Be back by four.'

As she was speaking Mrs Morton knocked on the door.

‘Come in,' cried her mistress.

As the housekeeper entered Roderick appealed to her.

‘I'm going down to the beach to look at the seals, Mrs Morton,' he said. ‘Harry's coming with me. May we have a cake to take along with us?'

‘Surely, Master Roderick,' she replied, smiling. ‘As soon as your mother's finished with me I'll look you out the biggest in the pantry. You'll need it, if Harry's going with you.'

‘Don't let him be a bother to you, Mrs Morton,' said his mother irritably.

‘He's no bother, my lady,' murmured the housekeeper.

‘Thank you, Mrs Morton,' said Roderick, going to the door.

As he was closing it behind him he heard his mother burst out: ‘It's about Duror I want to talk to you, Mrs Morton. Have you noticed any extraordinary change in him recently?'

He was tempted to linger there and eavesdrop, but hurried out and walked about the lawn, where he could be seen from the drawing-room windows. The temptation continued. It would be easy for him to stroll casually out of view of the windows and sneak up the steps into the hall. There he could pretend to be waiting for Mrs Morton to come out, but all the time he would be listening to their conversation about Duror, whom he disliked.

He had yielded so far that he was standing in the hall when Mrs Morton appeared. She was flushed and worried-looking. When she saw him she tried to smile, and came over to lay her hand for a moment upon his shoulder.

They walked downstairs to the kitchen.

‘I suppose you'll be going through the wood?' she asked.

‘Yes. That's the only way to the beach, isn't it?'

‘You'll be careful. Now won't you?'

It seemed to him that she must be warning him against greater dangers than spraining his ankle over a root. Her voice shook as if she was about to weep.

‘Of course, Mrs Morton. I'm afraid I'm always careful.'

She ignored his rueful self-criticising smile.

‘Always be careful,' she said. ‘There's evil about.'

He wondered what she meant. Was the evil to be feared from Duror?

‘Those men who gather cones,' she said. ‘You'll keep well back from them.'

‘Why?'

She did not answer immediately.

‘Because they're not to be trusted, that's why,' she said at length.

He remembered that Duror too had accused the cone-gatherers of being evil. She was Duror's friend.

‘I'm not blaming them,' she said. ‘They're poor unfortunate men. They've not been lucky. But all the same keep back from them.'

As she handed the cake to him, carefully wrapped in paper, she smiled.

‘No harm will come to you, laddie,' she said, ‘if God looks after His own. If,' she added, turning away.

‘Is Alec all right, Mrs Morton?' he asked shyly.

She turned back to him with an appearance of briskness; but there were tears in her eyes.

‘Oh, yes,' she said. ‘He's in America, I think, living on the fat of the land. Now off you go, and enjoy yourself.'

As he went he felt sure that she would weep, but why or for whom he could not say. He was old enough to know that every human being had private griefs, which no outsider could ever assuage.

Carrying the cake in the gamebag which his father had given him, and which he meant to offer to the cone-gatherers to collect their cones in, he was soon knocking at the door of the white-washed bothy where Harry lived with old Graham.

Graham came yawning to the door. When he saw who his caller was he immediately added to his customary acerbity a grin of liking and respect. Harry, he said, had gone off half an hour ago with Betty the landgirl to gather hazel nuts and carve their initials on trees. Harry had taken his mouth organ as well as his knife. Betty was wearing a red coat more suitable for Glasgow streets than for thickets of hazel.

Roderick thanked him and made straight for the wood.

He was afraid that he was going alone, and yet he was glad too. Had Harry been with him, he would have been nigglingly inquisitive as to the exact purpose of this visit to the cone-gatherers' hut; and the explanation that it was a kind of pilgrimage would never have satisfied him. Harry did not approve of mysteries. When he had been
told about Sir Galahad he had appreciated that shining knight's prowess with a sword and also his rescuing of maidens captured by ogres, but he had been sceptical and indifferent about his quest for the grail of goodness. As for Christian in the
Pilgrim's Progress
, he had scoffed at him as dreary and old-fashioned. These were Roderick's heroes, and this visit through the silent sunny wood was in their company.

Therefore there was magic and terror. The wood was enchanted, full of terrifying presences. A knot in a tree glowered like a green face. Low-hanging branches were evil birds swooping with talons ready to rip his face and pluck out his eyes. The sky was now a vast kingfisher's wing, now myriad eyes blue and watchful. Here were clusters of juniper, grey with fungus, jungles of withered willow herb, taller than himself, piles of dead leaves like graves, rashes of slimy yellow black-spotted toadstools, dark glades entered through gates of sunshine, and sunny spaces where on the green grass nothing moved. Every creature he saw was a prisoner of that enchantment: each was alone, a squirrel on a pine branch, a rabbit in rhododendron undergrowth, a blackbird amidst those dying junipers, an insect with a golden back at his feet, and a deer flitting through far-off pillars of sunshine.