Sea Magic

By Fiona Macleod

"Manan mil air sloigh..."

In one of the remotest islands of the Hebrides I landed on a late afternoon in October a year ago. There was no one on the island except an old man, who was shepherd for the fourscore sheep which ate the sweet sea-grass from Beltane till Samhain (1st May till 31st October): one sheep for each year of his life, he told me, "forby one, and that will he right between them an' me come Candlemas next." He gave me water and oatcake, and offered to make me tea, which I would not have. I gave him the messages I had brought from the distant main-land of the Lews, and other things; and some small gifts of my own to supplement the few needs and fewer luxuries of the old islander. Murdo MacIan was grateful, with the brief and simple gladness of a child. By mistake a little mouth-organ, one of those small untuneful instruments which children delight in and can buy for a few pence, was in my package, along with a "poke" of carvies, those little white sweets for buttered bread dear to both young and old-though even they, like all genuine products of the west, great and small, are falling away in disuse! The two had been intended by me for a small lass, the grandchild of a crofter of Loch Roag in the westerside of the Lews ; but when the yacht put in at the weedy haven, where scart and gillie-breed and tern screamed at the break of silence, I heard that little Morag had "taken a longing to be gone," and after a brief ailing had in truth returned whence she had come.

And for the moment neither snuff nor tobacco, neither woollen comforter nor knitted hose, could hold Murdo as did that packet of carvies (for the paper had loosened, and the sugary contents had swarmed like white ants) and still more that sixpenny mouth-organ. I saw what the old man eagerly desired, but was too courteous and well-bred even to hint: and when I gave him the two things of his longing my pleasure was not less than his. I asked him why he wanted the "cruit-bheul," which was the nearest I could put the Gaelic for the foreign toy, and he said simply that it was because he was so much alone, and often at nights heard a music he would rather not be hearing. "What would that be?" I asked. After some hesitation he answered that a woman often came out of the sea and said strange foreign words at the back of his door, and these, he added, in a whinnying voice like that of a foal ; came, white as foam ; and went away grey as rain. And then, he added, "she would go to that stroked rock yonder, and put songs against me, till my heart shook like a tallow-flaucht in the wind."

Was there auy other music? I asked. Yes, he said. When the wind was in the west, and rose quickly, coming across the sea, he had heard a hundred feet running through the wet grass and making the clover breathe a breath. "When it's a long way off I hear the snatch of an air, that I think I know and yet can never put name to. Then it's near, an' there's names called on the wind, an' whishts an' all. Then they sing an' laugh. I've seen the sheep standing-their forelegs on the slit rocks that crop up here like stony weeds-staring, and listening. Then after a bit they'd go on at the grass again. But Luath, my dog, he'd sit close to me, with his eyes big, an' growling low. Then I wouldn't he hearing anything: no more at all. But, whiles, somebody would follow me home, piping, and till the very door, and then go off laughing. Once, a three-week back or so, I came home in a thin noiseless rain, and heard a woman-voice singing by the fire-flaucht, and stole up soft to the house-side ; but she heard the beat of my pulse and went out at the door, not looking once behind her. She was tall and white, with red hair, and though I didn't see her face I know it was like a rock in rain, with tears streaming on it. She was a woman till she was at the shore there, then she threw her arms into the wind an' was a gull, an' flew away in the lowness of a cloud.

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While I was on the island the wind had veered with that suddenness known to all who sail these seas. A wet eddy swirled up from the south-east, and the west greyed, and rain fell. In a few minutes clouds shaped themselves out of mists I had not seen and out of travelling vapours and the salt rising breaths of the sea. A long wind moved from east to west, high, but with its sough falling to me look a wood-echo where I was. Then a cloudy rain let loose a chill air, and sighed with a moan in it: in a moment or two after, great sluices were opened, and the water came down with a noise like the tide coursing the iynns of narrow sea-lochs.

To go back in that falling flood would be to be half-drowned, and was needless too: so I was the more glad, with the howling wind and sudden gloom of darkness and thick rain, to go in to Murdo's cabin, for it was no more than that, and sit by the comfortable glow of the peats, while the old man, happy in that doing, made tea for me.

He was smiling and busy, when I saw his face cloud.

"Will you be hearing that?" he said looking round.

"What was it?" I answered, for I thought I had heard the long scream of the gannet against the waves of the wind high above us.

Having no answer, I asked Murdo if it was the bird it meant. "Ay, he might be a bird. Sometimes it's a bird, sometimes it's a seal, sometimes it's a creature of the sea pulling itself up the shore an' makin' a hoarse raughlin like a boat being dragged over pebbles. But when it comes in at the door there it is always the same, a tall man, with the great beauty on him, his hands hidden in the white cloak he wears, a bright, cold, curling flame under the soles of his feet, and a crest like a bird's on his head."

I looked instinctively at the door, but no one stood there.

"Was the crest of feathers, Murdo?" I asked, remembering an old tale of a messenger of the Hidden People who is known by the crest of cuckoo-feathers that he wears.

" No," he said, " it wasn't. It was more like white canna blowing in the wind, but with a blueness in it."

"And what does he say to you?"

"His say is the say of good Gaelic, but with old words in it that I have forgotten. The mother of my mother had great wisdom, and I've heard her using the same when she was out speaking in the moonlight to them that were talking to her."

"What does he tell you, Murdo?"

"Sure, seldom he has anything to say. He just looks in the fire a long time, an' then goes away smiling."

"And who did you think it was?"

"Well, I thought it might be Mr. Macalister, him as was drowned on St. Bride's day, the minister over at Uiseader of Harris; I've heard he was a tall, fine man, an' a scholar, an' of great goodness an' fineness. And so I asked him, the second time he came, if may be he would be Mr. Macalister. - He said no, an' laughed the bit of a laugh, and then said that good man's bones were now lying in a great pool with three arches to it, deep in the sea about seven swims of a seal from Eilean Mhealastaidh, the island that lies under the shadow of Griomaval on the mainland of the Lews.'

"An' at that," added Murdo, "I asked him how he would be knowing that."

"'How do you know you are a man, and that the name on you is the name you have?' he said. An' at that I laughed, and said it was more than he could say, for he did not seem to have the way of a man an' he kept his name in his pocket."

"With that he touched me an' I fell into an aisling. And though I saw the red peats before me, I knew I was out on the sea, and was a wave herded by the wind an' lifted an' shaken by the tide-an' a great skua flyin' over saw my name floating like a dead fish an' sank to it an' swallowed it an' flew away. An' when I sat up, I was here on this stool before the peats, an' no one beside me. But the door was open, an' though there was no rain the flagstone was wet, an' there was a heavy wetness in the room, an' it was salt. It was like a spilt wave, it was."

"' Seven swims of a seal." A seal is supposed to swim a mile on one side without effort, without twist ; and then to change to the other side and swim in the same way the next mile ; and so on.

I was silent for a time, listening to the howling of the wind and the stumbling rush of the rain. Then I spoke.

"But tell me, Murdo, how you know this was not all a dream?"

"Because of what I saw when he touched me."

"And what was that?"

"I have the fear of it still," he said simply. "His arms were like water, and I saw the sea-weed floating among the bones in his hand. And so I knew him to be a 'morar-mhara,' a lord of the sea."

"And did you see him after that?"

"Yes."

"And did he say anything to you then?"

"Yes. He said to me after he had sat a long time staring in the fire: 'Murdo, what age have you?' An' I told him. I said I would have eighty years come Candlemas. He said, 'You've got a clean heart: an' you'll have three times eighty years of youth an' joy before you have your long sleep. An' that is a true word. It will be when the wild geese fly north again.' An' then he rose and went away. There was a mist on the sea, an' creep-in' up the rocks. I watched him go into it, an' I heard him hurling great stones an' dashing them. 'These are the kingdoms of the world,' I heard him crying in the mist. No, I have not been seeing him any more at all: not once since that day. An' that's all, Ban Morar."

That was many months ago. There is no one on the island now: no sheep even, for the pastures are changed. When the wild geese flew north this year, the soul of Murdo MacIan went with them. Or if he did not go with them, he went where Manan promised him he should go. For who can doubt that it was Manan, in the body or vision, he the living prince of the waters, the son of the most ancient god, who, crested as with snow-white canna with a blueness in it, and foot-circt with cold curling flame-the uplifted wave and the wandering sea-fire-appeared to the old islander? And if it were he, be sure the promise is now joy and peace to him to whom it was made.

Murdo must have soothed his last hours of weakness with the cruit-bheul, the little mouth-organ, for it was by the side of his pillow. In these childish things have we our delight, even those few of us who, simple of heart and poor in all things save faith and wonder, can, like Murdo MacIan, make a brief happiness out of a little formless music with our passing breath, and contentedly put it away at last for the deep music of immortal things.