The Cone Gatherers (13 page)

‘It's not Neil's fault, lady,' he was saying. ‘He did it because I was cold and wet.'

‘For God's sake,' muttered the lady, and Neil felt rather than saw how she recoiled from Calum, as if from something obnoxious, and took her children with her. For both the boy and girl were present.

The dog had not stopped barking.

Even that insult to Calum could not break the grip shame had of Neil. Still with lowered head, he dragged on his jacket.

‘Get out,' cried the lady. ‘For God's sake, get out.'

Neil had to help Calum on with his jacket. Like an infant Calum presented the wrong hand, so that they had to try again. The girl giggled, but the boy said nothing.

At last they were ready.

‘I'll have to get my cones,' whispered Calum.

‘Get them.'

Calum went over and picked up the bag lying beside the hamper of toys.

Neil led the way past the lady, who drew back. He mumbled he was sorry.

Calum repeated the apology.

She stood in the doorway and gazed out at them running away into the rain. The dog barked after them from the edge of the verandah.

‘You'll hear more about this,' she said.

In the hut Sheila had run to the fire, with little groans
of joy. From the corner to which he had retreated Roderick watched her, with his own face grave and tense.

Their mother came in and shut the door.

‘I shall certainly see to it,' she said, ‘that they don't stay long in the wood after this. This week will be their last, whatever Mr Tulloch may say. I never heard of such impertinence.' She had to laugh to express her amazement. ‘Your father's right. After this war, the lower orders are going to be frightfully presumptuous.'

‘Did you see the holes in the little one's pullover?' asked Sheila.

‘I'm afraid I didn't see beyond their astonishing impudence,' replied her mother. She then was aware that Roderick still remained in the corner. ‘Roderick, come over to the fire at once. Your jacket's wet through.' She became anxious as she saw how pale, miserable, and pervious to disease he looked. ‘You'll be taking another of those wretched colds.'

He did not move.

‘What's the matter?' she asked.

His response shocked her. He turned and pressed his brow against the window.

She sprang up and went over to him. ‘What's the matter? Are you ill?' She felt his jacket and found him shivering. ‘Just as I said,' she cried peevishly. ‘You're taking a chill. It was silly of us to go walking in such weather.'

‘It was a beautiful day when we set out,' said Sheila sensibly.

‘Yes, but we ought to have brought raincoats. All the same, Roderick, there's no sense in sulking here while there's a good fire to warm yourself at.'

‘I know what it is,' said Sheila. ‘He's angry because we sent those men into the rain.'

‘I'm not angry,' he said.

‘Well, you're in a huff.'

He was about to reply to that too, but decided it would be safer not to try.

‘I don't understand,' said their mother.

Sheila was amused by such incomprehension.

‘It's their fire,' she pointed out.

‘Their fire? How can it be their fire if it's in our hut, and was made with our coal?'

‘They lit it.'

‘Yes, they did, which was part of their impudence.'

‘Well, I'm glad they did,' said Sheila, ‘and so is Monty. One thing you'll have to admit, mother,' she added, sniffing, ‘they've left a nice perfume behind them.'

Lady Runcie-Campbell stood beside her son. She had taken off his cap and was holding it in her hand. She noticed the perfume Sheila had mentioned.

‘It's off the cones,' said Roderick.

His mother spoke to him eagerly. ‘Surely you don't think, Roderick, we should have asked them to share the hut with us?'

He did not answer.

‘It's silly,' remarked Sheila, ‘but that's what he does think.'

‘How could we?' asked their mother, genuinely perplexed. ‘It isn't as if there were two rooms. Why, they would have been far more uncomfortable than we.'

‘The big one was just about dropping with shame,' said Sheila.

‘Yes, I noticed it, and I suppose it was to his credit. Oh, come now, Roderick, this quixotic sense of fair play leads you into the most ridiculous positions. If you must have your huff, at least have it beside the fire where it's warm.'

‘I'm almost dry already,' said Sheila, ‘and so is Monty.'

‘Men in their job must be accustomed to rain,' said her mother. ‘They'll come to no harm. But you might, Roderick, darling. Now be a dear and come over to the fire. All right, you think I was unjust in sending them out into the storm; please don't punish me by taking a cold and being ill. Please, Roderick.'

He turned and went over to the fire. There were tears in his eyes, as both his mother and sister noticed. The latter, though interested, offered no comment, much to her mother's relief. He himself said nothing, but taking off his jacket held it in front of the fire.

His mother stood looking anxiously down at him. To
take cold so easily was dangerous, and might lead to lifelong feebleness or even early death; which made this complication of over-sensitive conscience all the more exasperating.

Reconsidering the matter, now that her natural anger was past, she still saw the cone-gatherers' intrusion as dishonest and insolent; therefore her son's concern on their behalf was in some disquieting way unhealthy. She remembered what her father had once said, that scruples could burn a heart out, if that heart was not fortified with a robust and intelligent appraisal of humanity.

She remembered Duror so savagely callous to his wife.

She determined later to have a long talk with her son on this subject of pity.

As Mr Tulloch walked through the wood to visit the cone-gatherers, he stopped to look at a beech split almost to the ground by yesterday's lightning. The freshness of the tortured wood was for him the most powerful of all the fragrances this sunny windy morning. He lingered beside the tremendous tree, pitying it. Anyone sheltering under it during the storm would have been squashed like a wood-louse under a thumb; and anyone clinging to its upper branches would have been sizzled like a flea in a fire. Before he moved on, he plucked up a handful of old leaves still damp from yesterday's deluge, and scattered them in the air. One or two fell upon him, but he did not immediately brush them off. This was his gesture of grief.

Last night, in the conversation by telephone, Neil had told him where they would be working that day; if they were not there, they would be in the hut, being too ill to work, although the hut itself, flooded by the rain, was no fit place for an invalid. Neil at first had been almost incoherent; he had had to be calmed before he could explain that he and Calum wished to be taken away from the wood, because of some encounter they had had with Lady Runcie-Campbell. The forester had promised to come and investigate. That morning, as a first step in the investigation, he had telephoned Lady Runcie-Campbell, asking for an interview. She had granted it for the afternoon: his men, she had said briefly, had offended her, but she had not yet made up her mind what she ought to do about it. Their offence, it seemed, had consisted of taking shelter in her beach hut during the storm. In spite of his respectful, almost encouraging expectancy, she had not been able to make it sound as heinous as she wished.
He had consulted his own wife; she had promptly declared that in such a storm a body might run into a lion's den for shelter. Smiling, he had carefully kept his mind empty of decision.

When he caught sight of Neil ahead of him, he halted and watched from behind a slender spruce long ago wind-blown, with its roots in the air. From that distance, judged only by his gait, Neil appeared like an old man. He was gathering beech seed, which he had been instructed to do whenever bad weather kept him from climbing. He would cautiously go down on his haunches, wait, apparently to gather strength and endurance against the pain of that posture, and then would begin to pick up the seed-cases or mast, squeeze each one with his fingers to find if it were fertile, and drop it if it were not. The watching forester knew most of them would not be, unless this luckily was the tree's year of fertility: otherwise as many as ninety out of a hundred would be barren. To fingers crippled with rheumatism it would not be easy to examine them with the necessary patience. When that area had been searched, Neil hobbled on his haunches to another. Thus he would go on until break-time. Such fidelity to so simple but indispensable a task was to the forester as noble and beautiful a sight as was to be seen in that wood so rich in magnificent trees. To praise it would be to belittle it, so inadequate were words; but to fail to appreciate it or to refuse to defend it, would be to admit the inadequacy of life itself.

He stepped out from behind the hanging roots, and without hurry approached the intent seed-gatherer.

Neil looked up, saw him, stared a moment, and then went on with his inspection of the beech nut. That one was fertile. He held it out to his employer.

‘That's the first good one in the last half hour, Mr Tulloch,' he said.

‘Well, it's a slow business, Neil,' replied the forester, smiling, ‘but look at the result.' Walking forward he touched the huge grey trunk.

Behind him Neil began to sob. He did not turn to look, but kept stroking the tree.

‘Don't fret over it, Neil,' he said.

‘It's not for me,' sobbed Neil. ‘It's for Calum.' And he began to pour out an account of the expulsion from the beach hut, all mixed up with the story of the insult in the hotel bar. The forester had heard about that episode from one of his workers, but he had been given to believe that the soldier had apologised, and that afterwards the sympathy of nearly everybody in the pub had been with the brothers.

‘I'm responsible for him, Mr Tulloch,' said Neil. ‘If you were to ask me to whom I'm to give account for the way I've looked after him, I couldn't tell you; but I'm responsible just the same.'

‘No man on earth has ever looked after his brother so well,' replied Tulloch. ‘We all know that. You can give a good account, no matter to whom.'

He turned round and saw, with a shock he did not show, how stooped and contorted Neil was then, by rheumatism and despair: it was as if, in some terrible penance, he was striving to become in shape like his brother.

‘Why is it, Mr Tulloch,' he asked, ‘that the innocent have always to be sacrificed?'

‘Is that really true, Neil?'

‘Aye, it's true. In this war, they tell me, babies are being burnt to death in their cradles.'

The forester was silent; his own brother had been killed at the time of Dunkirk.

‘I suppose it's so that other babies will be able to grow up and live like free men,' he said. ‘But I see what you mean; in a way, aye, the innocent have to be sacrificed.'

‘We were driven out like slaves, Mr Tulloch. Her dog was to be saved from the storm, but not my brother.'

‘I think maybe she was taken by surprise, Neil. She didn't expect to find you there. After all, you did get in by the window. Maybe she got a bit of a shock.'

‘Did she think we were monkeys that would bite her?'

‘I think she was in the wrong, Neil, but I would like to be fair to her. She's a good woman really; but she's got a code to live by.'

Neil shook his head dourly.

‘My brother's the shape God made him,' he said. ‘What right has she, great lady though she is, to despise him?'

‘No right at all, Neil. But don't think about it any more. I'm seeing her this afternoon, and I'm going to tell her I'm taking you back to Ardmore.'

‘But what about the cones?'

‘If she's willing to let me send two others in your place, good enough; if not, we'll just have to go elsewhere.'

The two whom he had in mind to send were conscientious objectors; he intended to tell her so, to find out if they too were ineligible. He saw her confronted by a vast multitude of people, as thick as his own conifers at Ardmore: even though she had her hands outstretched, she must repulse them all, because of her code. She seemed to him to be a victim, rather than a persecutor. In nature knapweed grew beside wild roses, scrub oak near gigantic redwoods: birds and bees visited all indiscriminately.

Neil asked him if he would get into trouble with his superiors. The truth was, he might: the District Officer, if she complained, would naturally take her side and wish to have the brothers reprimanded or even dismissed. But he did not think she would complain.

‘Never mind that, Neil,' he said. ‘Where is Calum?'

‘He's gathering larch along there.'

‘He's none the worse then of his drooking?'

‘He's just got a bit of a cough.'

‘You haven't come off so well though, Neil. I notice your rheumatics are bad.'

‘Not too bad, Mr Tulloch. They've been worse before and they got better.'

‘That's the spirit. Well,' the forester looked at his watch, ‘it's just on break-time. Where are your piece-bags?'

‘Beside the larch.'

‘If you've no objections, I'll eat along with you. I brought a sandwich and a flask of tea. Mary was baking last night. She insisted I take along a sample for you. Bramble tarts. Do you like them?'

Neil nodded: all his gratitude was in the stiff little gesture.

They walked towards the larch tree.

‘What bothered me most, Neil,' said the forester, ‘was the thought that your beds were wet. I wasn't comfortable in my own, though it was dry enough. I knew the hut was no palace, but I was sure it was weatherproof.'

Neil held his head high. Inside his gathering-bag his fist tightened on his tiny yield of fertile seeds; if he squeezed too hard, he would destroy them.

‘I told you a lie last night,' he said. ‘The hut was dry. There was a puddle on the stove, but the beds weren't wet. It was a lie.'

The forester was silent.

‘It worried me, Neil,' he murmured.

‘I knew it would. That was why I said it. I wanted revenge.' Neil paused; his fist was still round the seeds. ‘She was beyond me, so I told you a lie that would hurt you. You have been a good friend to us, the best we have ever had that I can remember, and I wanted to take my spite out on you. I deserve no mercy.'

The forester smiled. ‘We all say things in anger that we regret afterwards.'

‘Then none of us deserves mercy.'

The forester made no reply. There was a pause.

Neil's fist slackened on the seeds; he withdrew it from the bag.

‘If it would help,' he said, ‘we could stay till the end of the week.'

‘But you don't want to, Neil.'

‘We would do it.'

‘Thanks. Well, it might help. I could get Raeburn and Yuill to transfer their gear on Saturday, so that they could start gathering on Monday. But what if the lady tells me she's sorry, what if she apologises, would you be willing to stay then?'

‘I mean no disrespect to you, Mr Tulloch,' said Neil, ‘but it would not be an apology at all if she said it to you.'

‘You mean, she ought to say it to you?'

Neil nodded.

The forester reflected, but said nothing.

Then they reached the larch tree with the knapsacks and a bag of cones lying at its foot. As the forester ran his fingers through the sticky golden cones, Neil shouted up to Calum, who quickly came down to join them, shy but pleased.

‘Hello, Calum,' said the forester, noting how like a collier the climber was from the tree. If they were as black-faced yesterday in the beach hut, with their jackets so torn, perhaps there was justification for the lady's astonishment; but none of course for her callousness.

They found a sunny hollow sheltered from the breeze, and in it ate their sandwiches. Tits and chaffinches hopped near to beg, and even a few seagulls ventured from the loch in amongst the trees which they distrusted so much.

The forester talked about his boyhood on his father's croft; with his young brother, since killed in the war, he had climbed cliffs for kittiwakes' eggs, brought in the cows for milking, gathered seaweed to spread on the field, and all summer worked at peats. The brothers listened in a silence deeper than respect or interest. Their own memories were stirred, filling Calum with delight and Neil with profound cleansing sorrow. The lady could have no place in these recollections: she had then been a girl at an expensive school, acquiring polish, accent, and poise suited to her station. Between her and the sharny-toed brier-ragged heather-nibbling boys had been no kinship: just as now there was none, she in her many-roomed mansion perplexed by duty, they in a sunny hollow in her wood, throwing scraps of bread to her birds.