Old Michael

...There was all respect in the voice and the finger lifted to the old yachting cap...

...Grimly he handed her to a place...

...Mornin', sir...

...The river, carrying even in August a great weight of water, ran out westward between steep sandy banks to the sea...

...Rotten...

...I get fright, Mrs...

...Betta in bows," he repeated...

...Before she could protest she was bumped again, three or four times, with a terrifying crash of water under the bows: and Michael, with a sudden deliberate jerk of the oars, managed to ship a hearty lapful of water each for the party in the stern...

...A glance over his shoulder-farther down-farther down-Now...

...What do you want to do about it?' she asked...

...The sound of his voice died away, like the sound of a wave falling back from the beach...

...Rope...

...Good morning, Michael...

...Two others jumped in after her, but before the cook could follow he had grasped the oars, and was maneuvering the boat around...

...Rope...

...Thompson hesitated, made a grimace and scrambled into the bow, commenting audibly on the contrariness of some old men...

...She stood, loud and overblown, clasping her skirt...

...Above the Falls...

...You'd better go to Achraig, then," she said, with assumed determination...

...Michael, his face more like granite than ever, avoided the safe sandbank and pulled for the troubled waters...

...Below his cottage there had appeared, one winter after a storm, a tiny bay in the soft sand of the bank...

...Rope...

...Later on...

...Slithered would be a better word, for all his muscles were loose, and he laughed and sang with amusement whenever he found himself in a position unforeseen a moment before...

...It was instinct rather than sight that made Michael suddenly give three mighty jerks with his left oar, and head diagonally toward the bank, cutting across the steady current and adding a new lap-lap-lapping sound to the noises he had been making...

...But that was a week ago...

...I get a fright," he repeated: and his face at once lost all expression, and became remote and impersonal as a rock...

...It lent his face a kind of melancholy majesty, and, with his small supply of English, enabled him to avoid officially understanding any orders which he did not like...

...Thompson flying up and down like a melon in a basket...

...After a quick glance, Piers avoided the old man's eye...

...Piers hesitated, and then turned away abruptly...

...Row the maids round...

...Actually he had much more English than he pretended, but his speech was always slow and laborious, for whenever it was necessary to explain something to the gentry he had to translate from his native Gaelic, searching the recesses of his memory: preferring usually to begin with a noun or so, and supplement them with verbs as soon as they had impressed themselves upon his hearer...

...Straightening up, he silently offered his hand to the first girl...

...Michael stood there, eyed her, murmured, "Aye, Achraig," in such a tone as he might use to comfort a child...

...He bent his sad blue eyes upon her, wrinkling his brow in the effort to make himself understood...

...When the time came to return, the maids with one voice refused to go back in the boat, declaring that they would far rather walk...

...The old man watched him walking jerkily away, with shoulders squared and arms swinging self-consciously: and returned to his line...

...And the lady returned to her sewing, feeling that she had kept up appearances well...

...exclaimed the startled lady...

...And he noted it all subconsciously, instinctively, by the reflex action of a mind which from infancy had learned to be wary and cunning as a wild animal's...

...The water was pleasant, and as the rocks slid by and gave place to stretches of white sand, crowned with reeds, above which sloped a range of rounded hills ending in the rocky splendor of great Craig Colman, Michael's passengers were soon in high good humor...

...The picnic went off after the manner of its kind...

...The maids sat in a self-conscious little group a few yards away, scrambling up every now and then to wait upon their betters, and Michael, indifferent to both groups, bent over the fire and handled red-hot sticks with apparent impunity...

...He knew every lobster-hole in sixteen miles of coast...

...The boat shot forward, and her nose stuck with a soft full thuck upon the sand, tipping Michael over backward...

...Without a sign, Michael bent his back and began to row...

...Ah, those who knew him in the old days knew what a man he was...

...He looked down, hiding his dislike of her...

...Was he not called Michael Strong to this day, always, everywhere, so that half the neighbors even had forgotten his real name...

...Inside this, there stretched on the right a wide, innocuous shallow, normal passage for a rowboat: while the main current, visible from above as a streak of deep, wicked green, slewed powerfully round the edge of this sandbank, and shot out into the river mouth at an angle...

...As he sat, the mind of the old man grew sad and proud...

...What is the matter with it...

...he yelled, and bent back, straining at the oars, his eyes shut, his teeth bared in a jagged tobacco-stained line...

...He despised them, anyhow, but they had given him grounds for a more personal resentment by exclaiming against his old jersey and his trousers, all over fish scales, and refusing to have him sit at the same table with them...

...She was fast for the night...

...The fact was that he had turned to his new trade a brain sharpened by the hazards of the old, and won quick preeminence among fishermen who worked lazily by tradition...

...This indecision had been plain to Michael in the first minute of their meeting...

...Good stuff, good stuff, the soul of honey and fire...

...So that it became necessary to think of reasons for visiting the village: a task made no easier by the fact that his employers generally got wind of his purposes, and did not sympathize...

...He could remember the weather of every season, and give the year and month...

...It was a wonderful gift, his power of withdrawing himself from human affairs...

...And row the maids back again, when it's all over...

...It was coming dark from the northwest, and curling into plumed white horses...

...In his perplexity he went to one of the firm's patrons, and was taken on as assistant fisherman and handy man...

...High affected voices reached him -suddenly, and he looked up...

...Oh, Michael, we were thinking of going on a picnic above the Falls...

...Mrs...

...Moreover, he had to be back at the big house early, in time to draw the water, clean the boots, chop wood, and carry coal...

...Quick to see its possible advantages, Michael had worked hard for a whole morning with his spade: and there was now a sandy inlet some eight feet deep in the bank, holding at high tide a good four feet of quiet water...

...Whatever is the matter...

...I get a fright, Mrs...

...It was raining, and almost dark, when Michael went staggering down the rocks to the place where he had moored the boat...

...He opened his mouth slowly, as if to say something of great importance...

...He pronounced the last syllable soft, like spinach...

...He fell several times on his way to the boat...

...Longer time allowed, therefore...

...Aye, sir...

...A wonderful craft it was that he had learned in the years of his apprenticeship, till it came to be said of him that he could coax a fish from the sea by crooking his finger...

...He was given his meals and twenty-five shillings a week, but his own cottage stood over a mile away, and by the time he had eaten his supper he was too tired to go all the extra way into the village...

...The recollection of it kindled his eye for a moment...

...More power there, Strong...

...Very well, then, Michael...

...Then his grandfather had died of a chill caught on a raw wet February night, and the same summer his father poisoned his hand on a rusty nail and was dead within the week...

...He was passing it through his great blackened hands, disentangling the loose snoods, clearing the hooks of stale bait, and every now and then straightening out a knot or a muddle: but he did it all mechanically, his mind hunting for a fresh pretext that could take him to the village which lay behind the short humpy headland...

...None of His Majesty's servants could ask for more...

...Since then he had made all his living by the sea...

...She was reclining, trailing a fat hand in the water, when the boat bucked and hit her hard in the small of the back...

...A whole reasoned plan flickered behind the old man's eyes like a flash of summer lightning, but his face remained inscrutable...

...Good gracious, Michael...

...Rope-rotten," he repeated...

...Och, och, och," he exclaimed, with wide-open innocent eyes...

...The bar was shallow, and any kind of rough weather usually managed to shift a great deal of sand, so that the bottom would often be silted up into a bank, where yesterday there had been twelve feet of clear water...

...More safe...

...I'd rather sit with the others, thanks very much...

...Regular and certain the rowlocks sounded over the still estuary, though the boat was invisible in mist and darkness: belying with their methodical precision the drunken song which quavered in fragments along with them...

...Once on board he would be all right: for the specialized faculty of rowing back did not depend upon his consciousness...

...Boat...

...You'd get a bigger choice, wouldn't you...

...His father and grandfather ran the business between them...

...Pert cockney girls, strangers to the country and all its ways...

...He looked at her solemnly, and his eyes clouded: his voice trailed off...

...The cook, who looked up indignantly at the first jobble where the currents met, had settled comfortably back again...

...With a series of terrific jerks he bashed the boat's head against the waves, sending the hapless Mrs...

...Good day to ye, Strong...

...There was not a detail in all his life, of tide and bait and local peculiarity, that he had not noted and docketed and remembered, to be fetched out of its place maybe twenty years later, used with profit and put back again...

...I getting one in Achraig," he said at last, "or in the village...

...It was half an hour beyond high tide tonight, and it would be high tide at nine the next morning: which meant that by half-past seven Michael Strong would have no difficulty in sliding the boat into the water and getting round to the big house in time...

...Just as good a drink, but further to go...

...Of hazardous journeys, rowing on impossible nights from the islands to the mainland and back again, with the produce of that same still and of many another, which they sold at a bare eighteenpence a bottle...

...A wet leg just before he reached the boat was his worst accident...

...Soon they were near the mouth of the river, and he allowed himself a glance over his shoulder to make sure that his calculations were laid aright...

...He could last a week without going there, but no longer...

...Mrs...

...The maids came across the sandhills carrying tea-baskets...

...No good...

...Its mouth had an average width of 400 yards, and at certain tides the passage could be very tricky...

...Then, as the answer seemed too obvious, "Where could you get a new rope ?" Michael cast his eyes up to the ceiling, as if in thought...

...Hilton bit her lip, and looked out at the sea...

...as a result, Hilton was secretly afraid of him...

...At his feet a long line lay coiled in a tray...

...Terrible dangerous water...

...A boat driven resolutely against this main current could, if badly trimmed, bounce up and down quite briskly for a hundred yards or so, and even ship a tidy bucketful of water...

...Thomp-son...

...All of us...

...She is-" Michael wrinkled his brow, and gave up the effort to say what she was...

...Very well, then, Michael," said Piers at last, without looking at him...

...Grasping the sides of the boat, he swung himself round with an ape-like agility, unfastened the lines, and backed the boat in...

...The thoughts flitted across his brain like a breeze over a pool, but his face was expressionless...

...He had appeared, cap in hand, in the open door of the drawing-room where his employer's wife sat sewing...

...Piers Hilton was a colonial administrator of some consequence...

...Och aye, sir...

...That way of life had lasted till he was nearly twenty...

...I getting rope-at Achraig...

...Swerving first to one side, then to the other, he contrived to make such rough weather of it as surprised even himself, and once all but tipped him off the thwart...

...Two hours later, Michael sat in the bar, bemused...

...We are going on ahead in the car, and I want you to bring the maids round by boat, and land them by the rocks, if you will be so good...

...The tide had just turned, and, encouraged by a slight breeze, was noisily disputing right of entry with the descending current...

...He was rather like an ape, she reflected, with his long arms bowed outward, and his little sad eyes set close in his head...

...Leaning his chin forward and looking up toward the ceiling, he thought of his past glories...

...Muscle plus instinct could perform it automatically...

...You had better take the boat back by yourself...

...Last week he had hit on a fine excuse...

...A bobbing, jobbling line of water, dotted with spume and small debris, marked the first engagement of the opposed forces...

...and then come on and make the fire for us...

...What rope...

...It would be hard to say which of the old man's features moved, but a change came over his face, comparable only to the change of light on the face of a rock...

...Mournful as a great ape's, his eyes came back to her...

...His face would be all scarred with falls on the stony road...

...I get fright...

...Of the day when, a boy of eleven, he had parleyed with the excisemen and turned them away, a bare ten yards from the cave where his grandfather lay hidden with his still...

...A new pretext was necessary, and none offered...

...At the boat...

...In the winter, when he worked as a casual laborer, he could get to the village as often as he liked, and would give himself up altogether to drink when the craving took him...

...She hesitated...

...Triumph for the success of his plan...

...His strength, his wonderful strength...

...Hilton," he exclaimed dramatically...

...Rope...

...That wind was certainly rising...

...But in summertime he was attached as gillie and fisherman to one of the lodges on the big estate, and the gentry who rented it for their holiday took his services with the house...

...Sit still I Sit still...

...Five minutes later he had blundered into his dark cottage and fallen upon the bed...

...Hilton cleared her throat...

...There goes old Strong...

...He pulled steadily along...

...Crok-crok, crok-crok...

...Here," she cried in offended tones, "what about me...

...The two heaviest baskets Michael had brought down already and stowed under the stern seats of the boat...

...All the time he sang to himself in the gathering darkness, for his spirit was full of triumph: triumph over the maids, over his jumped-up employers, and over circumstance...

...Screams rang in his ears like music, but his passengers had soon no breath left, and their gasps were drowned in the outrageous smacking and slapping of the waves against the bow...

...So much the better, since he did not like the maids...

...He hated to conclude any interview without producing an obvious effect upon the person interviewed...

...Mrs...

...Besides, he was not going to row all the way back to the big house...

...There was not the like of it to be had now for any money...

...Achraig, och, aye...

...The new rope had been bought, twenty fathoms of it, and was neatly coiled in the boat's bow...

...She hesitated, giggled and took it, jumping in awkwardly and rocking the boat...

...Wind: bigger and bigger...

...In the bows...

...He was a handsome old fellow, or the remains of one...

...Crok-crok, crok-crok...

...He glanced out of the window...

...Tide: rough now...

...a well-groomed, personable man in the early forties, with a fresh complexion, a clipped moustache and an efficient, authoritative manner which covered vital indecision of character...

...Most of the gentry, yes, and two magistrates, used to buy it from him on the quiet...

...For another week his nroblem would not trouble him...

...Michael was out in the world, with nothing but his health and his muscles...

...He had moored her cunningly, and once he fell aboard it did not take him more than three times as long as usual to get away...

...As he sat now, brooding over his glass in a melancholy ecstasy, there was rotting in his brain an exact science, a delicate animal sympathy with the ways of fish, which could rival any civilized man's knowledge of his profession...

...and shambled out...

...Then, with astonishing suddenness, they were in calm water, and the old man rested on his oars...

...Indeed, no visitor could be sure, from the look of him, how much or how little old Michael understood...

...Michael grunted, and looked up, to see his present employer advancing toward him with brisk and purposeful step...

...I get a fright...

...Very good, sir," the old man assented gravely...