The Silver Bough (18 page)

“
N
ow this is a somewhat serious business and we have got to get down to it. Apart from the invasion of Martin's land——”

“I'm sorry about that,” said Grant, interrupting the Colonel, “and this morning I took what steps I could with the police about it.” He looked at Martin. “I wanted to see you, for the law of interdict is an involved and slow business, with its proof of individual damage and so on; I wondered if it would help if we got a notice put up.”

“Trespassers will be prosecuted?”

“I know it doesn't mean much,” Grant admitted, “but I thought we might say that steps could be taken to prosecute anyone who interfered with the cairn or trespassed to the damage of this land, something that would make it clear to reasonable people that they mustn't just damage things wantonly.”

Martin's face held its still smile, then he shook his head slightly as if the suggestion were hardly worth discussing.

“I'm very sorry about it,” said Grant. “All I can say is that the policeman will make a difference. He reckons he has already got several petrol prosecutions on hand. By the way, Blair, I hope
you're
all right?”

“Certainly,” answered Blair, with the smile that always provoked Grant. “It was not difficult to get a special supply of coupons from the Petroleum Officer once I had persuaded him of the national importance of your discovery of the crock of gold.”

The Colonel smiled. “Don't be so cocky, Blair. You may yet be prosecuted for getting coupons under false pretences.”

Through the laughter, Mrs Sidbury asked, “Is this a veiled attack on you, Mr Grant?” and he knew that at least he had one ally.

“The veil is so thin that you needn't notice it,” he answered.

“Martin tells me that in a way he was responsible,” said Colonel Mackintosh, “for your first extraordinary step, namely, engaging the village idiot.”

“Mr Martin was good enough to effect the introduction, yes.”

“And you engaged him? Odd thing to do, wasn't it?”

“You imply that a village idiot is not qualified to be an archaeologist's assistant? I think I see what you mean.” He was thoughtfully judicial.

Mrs Sidbury laughed.

“But
you
found him all right?” asked Blair.

“I found him a very good worker,” answered Grant, “and there seemed something familiar, too, about the cast of his mind. He is remarkably fond of stone implements, though not a trained petrologist.”

The Colonel could not restrain a soft wheeze over this thrust at Blair, who laughed also and said, “According to all accounts he was even fonder of your crock of gold.”

“That, unfortunately, is true,” agreed Grant, “but then, being an idiot, he probably thought it was worth being fonder of.”

“Wait a bit, you fellows,” said the Colonel “we'll have your sparring afterwards. Now tell me, Grant, what on earth made you think of inventing a crock of gold?”

“I didn't invent it.”

“Then who did?”

“I wish I knew. All I know is that a crock of gold was there.”

After staring for a few seconds, the Colonel asked, “Where?”

“In the cairn. In the small corbelled cell, which you saw pictured in the press.”

The silence lasted a little longer this time. “I'm not fooling now,” said the Colonel.

“Neither am I,” said Grant, holding the Colonel's eyes.

“You mean you found a funerary urn full of gold ornaments?”

“I did.”

“In that cairn?”

“Yes. There was a false wall blocking the cell; I removed it and found the urn there.”

“And then?”

“Then it disappeared.”

“How did it disappear?”

“It's the only part of the story the press doesn't know. I had rather intended to keep it to myself, but if you would be good enough to respect my confidence, I'll tell you.”

Then he told them the story of the discovery, the struggle with Andie, and his loss of consciousness.

“How long were you unconscious?”

“I don't know. But it might have been anything up to an hour. I just can't be certain.”

“All this took place about midnight? Wasn't that a strange hour to have had such an experience?”

“You think the whole thing might have been a dream or hallucination. I understand that,” he assured the Colonel simply. “However, it wasn't. Though the press might have got to know little about it, if I hadn't, after leaving the cairn, met Mr Martin's chauffeur and asked him if he had seen Andie who had run away with the treasure or whatever I called it to him. I was rather upset at the time.”

“Then you found Andie in bed and his mother had never missed him?”

“That is so.”

“You know me well enough, Grant, to know that I have always respected your work, but—I'm not doubting you went to the cairn—even at that hour—but, I put it to you, is it possible that while inside the cairn you may have slipped and got a crack on your head and fancied things?”

“Only one difficulty about that. I remembered that one of the ornaments had fallen out of my hands when I was surprised by Andie. I went straight back—and found it.”

“You mean you still have it?”

From his poacher's pocket Grant took a small flat wooden box, which usually held some of his drawing instruments. Very carefully he withdrew what was inside, unwound handkerchief wrappings, and there was the lunula, gleaming in the light. As he walked with it to the west window and laid it on a small mahogany table, they all followed him. Without a word, he handed Colonel Mackintosh his pocket magnifying glass.

The Colonel's examination was minute, then he straightened himself and turned to Grant. “I suppose you know that this is the finest specimen of the lunette extant?”

“It's the best I have seen.”

“Uhm,” said the Colonel and stood staring out of the window, the magnifying glass drooping from his hand.

They all followed his gaze, past some pine trunks, to the western ocean which had upon its evening face a mingling of light, a curious crawling effect like a marvelling. The horizon was very remote.

The Colonel turned his head and looked at Grant. “A whole urnful?”

Grant nodded, a faint smile on his face. “A gold hoard.”

“My God.”

“Congratulations,” Mrs Sidbury murmured, like one restraining with difficulty the airiest laughter. It was as if she had said: I did support you! “May I?” and she lifted the lunette in her fine nervous hands, delicately as though it were made of glass. “How wonderful! . . . To think of it then! How long ago?”

“Goes with the food vessel, Food Vessel complex. Bronze Age,” muttered the Colonel.

“How long?”

The Colonel heaved his shoulders slightly. “Who can say—in the absence of the total contents?” He swung round on Grant. “What are you doing about this?”

“What can I do?”

“Do you mean you're doing nothing?” This was the Colonel at last in earnest.

Grant heaved his own shoulders. “What do you think the—the whole menagerie is doing, including the members of the press?”

“Good God—what made you tell the press?”

Grant was silent.

“Heavens above, surely that was the last thing on earth to do! Why broadcast it to the public, if you ever hoped to find the urn?”

“There is a more real danger,” answered Grant simply. “Talk is going around that if the urn could be found the gold could he melted down, secretly disposed of, and a small fortune realised.” And he had the satisfaction of seeing the wind knocked completely out of the Colonel, who for a little while indeed did nothing but gape; then he took the floor.

By an hour later, Grant had given them a fair account of his whole work at the cairn, and Colonel Mackintosh, realising at last that his subject, which was his life's devotion, had neither been lightly handled nor traduced by vanity, was simple and direct, appreciative and full of resource. With a gleam in his eye, he even complimented the gentlemen of the press. “That's their trade as this is ours, and seeing the beans have been spilled in spite of us, I'll get hold of that fellow Arthur and talk to him, on the record and off, as an ally. We have only one thing to do now—get hold of the hoard. You certainly had a bit of damned bad luck, Grant, even though you did go out at midnight!” He turned to Mrs Sidbury. “I'm talking in Edinburgh in three days time. Do you think you could manage to put us up for a couple of nights? Blair here can live on winkles.”

“Delighted,” she answered.

“That will be splendid.” “Thank you. I didn't know the Highlands had started to crawl with tourists.” The springs of his armchair protested faintly.

Two hours later, when a further supply of coffee was exhausted and the more intricate archaeological aspects of the discoveries in the cairn had been discussed in minute detail, the atmosphere was friendly and warm enough for expressions of probability and even of wonder. The past had come into the room in an almost palpable way.

“It's not so difficult to imagine yourself living two thousand years ago,” said Mrs Sidbury.

“It's often easier,” said Grant.

“How?”

“Because you can live and move the way you want. You can make a story of it, and every movement in that story means something—as important as you would like it to mean.”

“Have you been making any stories?” asked the Colonel.

“A few. Efforts at reconstruction, shall we say?”

On the command to fire ahead, Grant gave a quite vivid description of the ceremonies accompanying and following a burial in the chamber when it was “the cathedral of its time”. He borrowed from recent anthropological field work among primitive peoples in Eastern archipelagoes, from Homer, from extant religious practices, but without parade of knowledge, for he had been thinking the matter over, or rather—though he did not put it like this to the Colonel—the matter, the reconstruction, had flowed into his mind. This had been one of the most remarkable things that had happened to him. In odd moments, before going to sleep, during a pause in his writing, on his back outside, while his mind was passive, there flowed into it scenes of a remarkable clarity. It was as though some invisible director had emptied his mind, as he might have emptied a stage, and then let his players flow in upon it in a drama which the archaeologist, as spectator, followed with surprise and profound understanding.

When cross-questioned by Colonel Mackintosh, he had, of course, his factual answers ready: the music, the pipe, the primitive stringed instrument, the women with ornaments and make-up, the crowd, the dancing. On the dancing he was particularly effective, giving it a vastly wider range and variety than we dreamed of, borrowing here in particular from recent knowledge of native African dancing which had been praised in such extravagant terms by some European masters of modern ballet. And when the Colonel said that this was altogether too extravagant, Grant switched to the religious basis of dancing, the mimetic art that persuaded the gods, and wondered, anyhow, with an innocent smile for the Colonel, where the Neolithic people came from. He was ready even for Blair, who had been hoarding up the word “cathedral”. And when the Colonel said, “I suppose you can now answer the question: was the chambered cairn a communal burial ground or a private mausoleum for the headman and his family group?” Grant answered, “I could have a shot at it.” Even Mrs Sidbury laughed, but with pleasure.

“It seems simple enough to me,” said Grant. “At first, in the early stages of arriving, settling, hunting, it would be communal, but as the settlement grew, became stabilised, it would tend to become the private mausoleum.”

“As simple as that?”

“Human nature is always as simple as that,” replied Grant. “Economic conditions would merely tend to swing the thing either way.”

“The motives never change?”

“Not the deep-seated ones.”

“You were going to tell us,” said Mrs Sidbury, “and I hope I am not upsetting your argument, how the crock of gold came to be there, I mean the story about it.”

“I'm afraid, for the first time, that might be a bit fanciful.”

“‘For the first time' is good,” said Blair.

“I rather think,” said Grant, “it has something to do with the woman and the child in the cist. But it is difficult here to link the whole thing up because there may have been a time interval. Not that there need have been. Terms like Neolithic Age or Bronze Age are, as Colonel Mackintosh has made so clear in his distinguished published work, convenient working terms, but there always are in different places overlaps of centuries in tools, practices, cremation, inhumation, and so on. Even today in the world there are people still in the Stone Age.”

“Let's hear your story,” said the Colonel.

“The trouble is,” said Grant, “it isn't yet quite clear. But it very nearly came to me last night. I got a sort of preliminary feeling of the whole thing.”

Blair threw his thin face up in genuine amusement. Grant smiled in good humour, but with a light in his eye. Colonel Mackintosh's face seemed to have grown slightly fatter, his eyes smaller, in a puckishness that blew through the hairs of his moustache. Martin had spoken very little but was unobtrusively one of the company; when he did speak his voice was natural and at ease. Mrs Sidbury's eyes had flashed on Grant when he had mentioned the woman and child and, without looking at her, he had been aware of the momentary tension.

“Leaving the question of feeling alone—in deference to Blair—I think a few simple facts do come through. In the first place, the woman
and
the child, if skulls and bones mean anything, are of the same family or racial group as those in the cairn.” He looked at the Colonel. “You can check that tomorrow. In the second place the bracelet which I got in the cist is exactly like the pair of bracelets which I hurled out of the urn and had a look at. You must take my word for that—meantime. Also the jet necklace bears a marked resemblance in design to this gold lunette. There is thus in the workmanship a definite relationship of period and place. Third: manifestly this was a woman of importance or she would never have possessed gold. Obviously it was a rare metal or we should have found more of it in our fieldwork. The notion of a crock of gold did not become a legend for nothing presumably. Fourth: it seems to me that the grave gear of a woman of such importance is pitifully slight. Remember, too, a woman and her child—and I am not sure that we know enough about the constitution of their society to say
only a female child
. Taking all these points together, I submit it is not too fanciful to assume a relationship between the woman in the cist and the gold hoard.”