It took all her force and resolution to get him into the boat; he was so crippled and his arms so much hampered by the burden he carried. Though he cursed her as they went down the stair, his thoughts were of the river-watcher. In the middle of their descent he laughed his mirthless laugh.
‘God-aye, but he’ll be comin’!’ he said, ‘but it’ll no be there – he’ll no get a sicht o’t!’
At last she got him safely afloat, and having loosed the boat, rowed away from the stairs. The surrounding floods were peppered by the onslaught of heavy drops from the low sky, and then, as though a sluice-gate had been pulled up in the firmament, a very deluge was upon them. The little they could see was washed out and they were isolated from everything in a universe without form and void, at the inmost heart of the hissing downpour. The river’s noise was lost in it and all sense of direction left Janet. She pulled blindly, believing that she was heading for the boathouse. Soon they bumped and scraped against some projection and the stern swung round. She felt the boat move under her, as though drawn by a rope. She tried to straighten it, but the blinding descent of the rain bewildered her; a branch of an alder suddenly loomed out of it, the lower twigs sweeping her face. Thievie cried out and crouched, clinging with frenzy to his box, and she guessed they had drifted above the deep, wide drain whose mouth was in the river. Her blood ran cold, for its swollen waters must inevitably carry them into the very midst of the tumult.
The drain was running hard under the flood-water and she despaired of being able to struggle against it. They were broadside on; besides which she dreaded to be swept out of her seat by another branch, for there were several alder trees by the edge of the channel. The rain began to slacken.
As its fall abated, the river grew louder and the sky lifted a little and she could see the large alders, gaunt and threatening as spectres, blurred and towering over them. With that strange observance of detail, often so sharp in moments of desperate peril, she noticed a turnip, washed out of the ground and carried by the torrent, sticking in a cleft between two straggling branches, just below water-level. She made a tremendous effort and slewed the boat straight; and working with might and main at her oars, got it out of the under-tow that urged it riverwards.
All at once the river-watcher’s voice rang out from the direction of the boathouse, calling the old man’s name. She answered with all the breath she had left.
‘Yon’s him! Yon’s the river-watcher!’ shrieked Thievie, from where he still crouched in the bottom of the boat.
She ignored him, tugging at her oars and pulling with renewed strength towards the sound.
He raised himself, and clinging to one of them, tried to drag it from her. She wasted no breath but set her teeth, thrusting out at him with her foot. He clung with all his weight, the very helplessness of his legs adding to it. She dared not let go an oar to strike at him. She could not have believed him able to hamper her so – but then, neither had she believed he could get himself up the inside stair of the cottage unaided; and yet he had done it. It was as though the senseless god of his worship, lying in the box, gave him the unhallowed tenacity by which he was delivering them over to the roaring enemy they could not see, but could hear, plain and yet plainer.
She was growing weary and Thievie’s weight seemed to increase. Could she spare a hand to stun him she would have done so for dear life. She had heard of the many-armed octopus of the southern seas, and she remembered it now in this struggle that was no active struggle because one would not, and one dared not, lose grip.
The boat, with one oar rendered useless, swung round and drifted anew into the channel between the trees. Again the river-watcher was heard calling and again Janet tried to answer, but her breath was gone and her strength spent. The current had got them.
Thievie relaxed his grip as he felt the distance increase between himself and the voice. A branch stayed their progress for a moment, whipping the sodden hat from Janet’s head; her clothes were clinging to her limbs, her hair had fallen from its ungainly twist and hung about her neck. They went faster as they neared the racing river. Then the swirl caught them and they spun in its grip and were carried headlong through the mist. Janet shut her eyes and waited for the end.
Time seemed to be lost in the noise, like everything else. They sped on. At last they were not far from the estuary and the river had widened. Once they were all but turned over by a couple of sheaves, the spoil of the late harvest, which came driving alongside; once they passed within a foot of a tree which rode the torrent, plunging, its roots sticking up like gaunt arms supplicating mercy from the shrouded sky.
Finally they found themselves drifting in the comparative quiet of the broad sheet of tidal water, among the bits of seaweed carried inland above the deeps of the river-bed. The terrors of death had blinded Janet as they were swept along, and she now awoke as from a nightmare. An oar had been reft from her grasp in the stress of their anguished journey. Thievie was staring at her like an animal; his sufferings, as they were battered between one death and another on the boiling river, were nothing compared to hers. His god had upheld him. He had crawled back to his seat in the stern.
‘Aye, he micht cry on us,’ he said. ‘We’re far awa’ frae him noo – he’ll no ken what I’ve got here!’
He began to rock about, laughing as he thought of the river-watcher’s fruitless attempt to find him.
‘Haud still,’ said Janet sternly. ‘God, hae ye no done eneuch mischieve the day? Gin yon mist doesna lift an’ let them see us frae the shore we’ll be oot tae sea when the tide gangs back.’
‘Naebody’ll see us, naebody’ll see us!’ he exclaimed, hugging the box and rocking himself again.
Janet rose to her feet, fury in her eyes; she could no longer keep her hands off him.
As he saw her movement, he snatched the box from where it lay at his feet.
‘Stand still, or I’ll tak’ it frae ye!’ she cried loudly, making towards him.
He gave one cry of horror and, with the box in his arms, hurled himself sideways into the waters that closed over him and his god.
THE TIDE WAS on the turn and the rain had ceased. A wind had sprung up in the west, driving the ‘haar’ before it back to the sea whence it came. Some men from the fishing village near the lighthouse were rowing smartly out into the tideway where a boat drifted carrying a solitary human being, a woman who sat dazed and frozen and who had not so much as turned her head as they hailed her.
As they brought her ashore one of them took off his coat and wrapped it round her. She seemed oblivious of his action.
‘Hae,’ said he, with clumsy kindness, ‘pit it on, lass. What’ll yer lad say gin ye stairve?’
Janet thrust the coat from her.
The Disgracefulness of Auntie Thompson
AUNTIE THOMPSON came round the corner of her whitewashed cottage with a heavy zinc pail in either hand. The sun beat hot upon her back and intensified the piercing scarlet and yellow of the climbing nasturtiums which swarmed up the window-sills and seemed likely to engulf the windows of her dwelling. The whole made a strident little picture in the violence of its white and scarlet and in the aggressive industry of its principal figure; and the squeaking of one of the pails, the handle of which fitted too tightly in its socket, seemed to be calling attention to Auntie Thompson all down the road. There lacked but one further touch to the loud homeliness of the scene, and that was added as the two immense pigs in the black-boarded sty for which Auntie Thompson was bound raised their voices to welcome their meal. There is no