The Gulls
IWAS out fishing for mackerel in the autumn silence of the Hebrides, and the gulls stirred my mind with strange fancies. It was a calm and glassy sea, grey as the mist. The islands, the lonely islands of the north, lay faint and cloudy on the far horizon. And there was no wind at all, no lightest stirring of the air, so that the brown sail of my boat mocked me as it hung lifeless from the mast. How soundless the sea is when it talks neither with the wind nor the land ! As I hauled in my lines, breaking the loveliest pearls of the sea over my hands, I shivered as I looked away to the shore. " I will have done with this fishing," I told myself, " for I would not be out here when the night comes down, without moon or stars, for all the silvery mackerel that swim. This is no ordinary mood of the sea ; it is a desolation." And then it was that the gulls began talking. I had not noticed them before, afloat out there on the sea's face. But now I looked and saw them, slate-blue shadows on a monotony of grey, and listened. Those magical voices, that far, faint calling that is surely the ultimate expression of mysterious and mournful music— those magical voices fell on my ears with the effect of a spell. I dropped my lines, and forgot the fish going about below in the shadowy deeps. What were they saying, the gulls, why were they crying suddenly in dolorous chorus on the breast of the sea ? No commonplace bird-talk, theirs, of rain and sunlight and the falling leaves, nor of nesting-sites, nor of love, nor gardens, nor of feeding-places among the marshy hollows of the hills. No liquid, troubling melody such as the nightingale throws out upon the June woods. No, nor homely gossip such as the rooks delight in when fires burn with blue ascending smoke on the side of the September hill. The voices of the gulls are different : echoless across the waste of sea : they awake an old echo in my heart and I know they are different. I walk on the uplands. I hear the missel-thrush singing his wild sweet song in the windy rowans, the peewit crying in the red dawn alone. And I say, though the scientist and the man of reason laugh me to scorn, " these birds have souls." The lark has something more. And the small brown wren is happiness caught in a bundle of feathers. But the gulls—no ! The voices of the gulls are the voices of lost things. They are a race apart, a bird-people aloof and alone. Not for music's sake do they lift up their voices far at sea. The desire a man has, or a linnet has, to make songs and melodies, the desire to sing, is a deep desire of the heart. But look in a gull's eye—is it not plain ? He has no heart. Only a questing, unshriven sorrow where his heart should be. These winged mariners, they say, are inhabited by the souls of fisher-folk and seafarers drowned long ago. What tales men make, what fantasies, and how they deceive themselves I The old people of the Mist White island—the island of green and saffron storm lights and pearly winding shells that are washed up there on the Atlantic shore—know better than that. And the old man of the lobster-pots knows better, waking to the sea-mews' cries in the grey forsaken morning : " They're lost," says he—" aye, lost and wi' a curse on them till the end o' the world." And what would the soul of a poor sailor or of a fisher-lad drowned in his boat be doing in such company ? Yet I wished I were one of them, I only wished I were one of them buoyed out on the foam of the sea. For theirs are the voices of the past and of the irrevocable things. . I paid out my lines again and rowed away from the calling gulls towards the islands. The blue shadows faded from my sight, the melancholy voices died. And then I lay on my oars, and the spell was broken. What stuff was this I had been thinking—that the past is all that matters, that sorrow for I know not what aimless vanished cause is to be desired ? " You mourners of the world ! " I cried, " you are no birds at all, but sea-spirits of grief and illusion. And to think that when winter comes in the south I shall feed your kind with bread tossed upon the swirling river!" And then a fish took my bait, and I hauled it in shining and silver at the near fall of night.
HAMISH MACLAREN.
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