The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

At length Eva asked: “Mr. M‘Crae, what’s the matter with you?”

He said: “Nothing.” And there followed another long silence.

Then, without a word of introduction, he began talking to her about his childhood. A long and disordered story. He didn’t seem to be considering her at all in the recitation. She might not even have been there, she thought, if it had not been that his eyes were always on her. It was a remote and savage story, which began in the island of Arran, fifty years ago: a small farm of stone in the mountain above Kilmory Water, dreaming above a waste of sea in which, at night, the lighthouse on the Isle of Pladda shows the only token of life. But by day all the mouth of the firth to Ailsa Craig would be streaked with the smoke of steamers making for the Clyde, and others reaching out from those grey waters to the ends of the earth. “If it hadn’t been for the shipping,” he said, “I might have lived all my life at the Clachan and never known that there was anything else in the world. I should be living there now. Let me see . . . July. . . . It’ll be over-early for the heather. I can see my father there now. But he must be dead for all that. When I left him he was a strong man of sixty without a single grey hair to his head. Strong. . . . Ay, and just. But hard. Hard as granite. I don’t judge him harshly. I often see, now that I’m not so young as I was, that if I had stayed in Arran, as my brothers did, I might have grown into something very like him. Sometimes I catch myself in a gesture or even a turn of speech which is him to the life. That is the outside of me. All the battering about the world I’ve had hasn’t been enough to get rid of the externals. Inside it’s very different. My father’s eyes never saw farther than the firth or the sound; his life kept inside the Old Testament, while I’ve seen more of the world than most people, and played skittles with the Ten Commandments too. Understand that I’m not sorry for it. There aren’t many regrets in my life. . . . Just a few. I’ve missed things that are a consolation when a man grows old . . . a home . . . children . . . but I believe the balance is on my side. They taught me the whole duty of man in a thing they call the Shorter Catechism. They would say that I’ve failed in it. But there’s more than one way of glorifying God, and there are more gods than the God of my fathers . . .”

He was sixteen when his mother died, and her loss had desolated him. He was only a boy, but he saw already that life at the Clachan must resolve itself into a struggle between the two strongest wills within its walls, his own and his father’s. If he had lived in some inland valley it is possible that he would have found no way of escape, even though the most inland Scotsmen have a way of escaping. As it was, his prison, however remote it may have seemed, overlooked one of the great highways of the world, and escape was easy. He left Lamlash one day in a ketch-rigged, round-bottomed barge that was sailing for Glasgow, and from that day forward he never saw his home again. Sometimes, he said, he had felt a sudden impulse to return. He had a little theory of his own that for a man to be completely satisfied he must see every place that he has visited at least twice; no more than twice; for the first return was an inevitable disillusionment, the only cure, in fact, for the wanderer’s hunger. Once indeed, in the early years of his sea-faring, he had returned to the port of Glasgow in the stokehold of a cattle ship rolling over from Brazil. He had been talking to the third engineer, whose home was a village called Kirn, on the Holy Loch; and this man, who glowed with anticipation at the thought of nearing home, had promised to call him when they should draw abeam of the Pladda light. “A sight for sair eyes,” he had called it, and M‘Crae had half persuaded himself that he was going to share in this tender emotion. It was three o’clock in the morning when the good-natured engineer shouted to him as he toiled, sweating and stripped to the waist, before the fires. He had thrown a shirt over his shoulders and climbed up the iron ladder of the engine-room, where the pistons sighed and panted, to the dark deck. It was a pitchy night, the sky full of a howling wind and cold flurries of snow. In the ‘tween-decks sea-sick cattle were stamping and making hideous noises. “You’ll see the light of Pladda over on the port bow,” the third had shouted, and the word “bow” was caught in the tail of the wind and borne away astern. M‘Crae could see no light. There were no stars in the sky; only a riot of windy space in which the feeble headlight of the ship made dizzy plunges, lighting for a moment ragged flakes of snow. Flying scuds of snow, driven through the darkness, spat upon his sweating chest. Over there, in the heart of that wild darkness, Arran lay. The shoulders of Goat Fell stood up against the storm; Kilmory Water should be in a brown spate; there, in the Clachan, they would all be sound asleep, all but the two sheep-dogs lying with their noses to the hearth, where fiery patterns were stealing through white ashes of peat. M‘Crae stood waiting in the cold for the expected thrill. It didn’t come. . . . He could only think in that perverse moment of sunshine and light; of the green mountain slopes above Buenos Ayres and blue, intense shadows on the pavement of the Plaza where dark-skinned ranchers from inland estancias lounged at the scattered tables of the cafés. His utmost will was powerless to enslave his imagination. He shivered, and turned gratefully to the oily heat of the engine-room.

“Well, did ye see it?” the engineer shouted. “Yon’s a fine sight!”

“Ay, I saw it,” M‘Crae lied, and his reply was accepted for the proper Scots enthusiasm. He was not sorry when the ship sailed south again. All the time that she stayed in the port of Glasgow was marred by snow and sleet and rain.

For all that, in later years he had thought of returning more than once. One day, at Simonstown, he had watched a Highland regiment sailing for home at the end of the Boer War. Someone had started to sing The Flowers of the Forest in a high tenor voice. Tears had come into his eyes, and, having a heap of gold sewn in his waistcoat, he had almost decided to book his passage on a mail-boat, until, loitering down Adderley Street on his way to the shipping offices, he had fallen in with a man who had found copper in Katanga, near the shores of Tanganyika, and in half-an-hour they had decided to set out together by the next northward train. And it had always been like that. Some chance had invariably stood between him and his old home. “Now I shall never see it again,” he said.

“I wonder,” said Eva softly.

“You needn’t wonder,” he replied. “It’s one of the things of which I feel certain. I shall never leave Africa now. Even in Africa I’ve come across things that made me think of Arran. I remember. . . . There’s a place up above the Rift Valley, eight thousand feet of altitude. It’s called Kijabe. One of these Germans built a hotel there. N’gijabi had the meaning of wind in Masai. And it can blow there. Long before the German came near the place I was there . . . before the railway ran to Naivasha. I camped there for a week, and all the week I never so much as saw the valley or the lake. Nothing but thin white mist, mist as white as milk, just like the stuff that comes dripping off Goat Fell. I remembered. . . . But it’s a long digression.”

He laughed softly. And then he told her of many voyages at sea in which he had come upon strange things that are no longer to be seen. Once in a sailing ship he had doubled the icy Horn; and later, sailing out of ‘Frisco, had been wrecked on Kiu-Siu, the southern island of Japan, being cast up on a beach of yellow sand where the slow Pacific swell was spilling in creamy ripples. A woman found him there, an ugly, flat-faced woman, who carried a baby on her back. It was a little bay with a pointed volcanic hill at either horn all covered in climbing pine-trees. At the back of it stood the reed huts of fishermen and on the level plats of sand brown nets were spread to dry. “A beautiful and simple people,” he said. “In these days, they tell me, they have been spoiled.” For a month he lived there, lived upon dried fish and rice, wandering over the red paths which climbed between the pines on those pointed hillocks. It was February, and peerless weather. By the wayside violets were hiding, and in the air flapped the lazy wings of the meadow browns that he had known in Arran. “I have seen those butterflies in Africa too. It’s strange how a thing like that will piece together one’s life. I could tell you things of that kind for ever, if it weren’t that they would tire you. And they don’t really matter.