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Education Scotland

Scottish Short Stories 2

The Drowned Rose

By George Mackay Brown

There was a sudden fragrance, freshness, coldness in the room. I looked up from my book. A

young woman in a red dress had come in, breathless, eager, ready for laughter. The summer

twilight of the far north was just beginning; it was late in the evening, after ten o’clock. The girl

peered at me where I sat in the shadowy window-seat. ‘You’re not Johnny,’ she said, more than a

bit disappointed.

‘No,’ I said, ‘that isn’t my name.‘

She was certainly a very beautiful girl, with her abundant black hair and hazel eyes and small

sweet sensuous mouth. Who was she - the merchant’s daughter from across the road, perhaps? A

girl from one of the farms? She was a bit too old to be one of my future pupils.

‘Has he been here?’ she cried. ‘Has he been and gone again? The villain. He promised to wait

for me. We’re going up the hill to watch the sunset.’ Again the ﬂash of laughter in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m a stranger. I only arrived this afternoon. But I assure you nobody has

called here this evening.’

‘Well now, and just who are you?’ she said. ‘And what are you doing here?

‘My name is William Reynolds, I said. ‘I’m the new schoolmaster.’

She gave me a look of the most utter sweet astonishment. ‘The new – !’ she shook her head.

‘I’m most terribly confused,’ she said. ‘I really am. The queerest things are happening.’

‘Sit down and tell me about it,’ I said. For I liked the girl immensely. Blast that Johnny

whoever-he-is, I thought; some fellows have all the luck. Here, I knew at once, was one of the few

young women it was a joy to be with. I wished she would stay for supper. My mouth began to

frame the invitation.

‘He’ll have gone to the hill without me,’ she said. ‘I’ll wring his neck. The sun’ll be down in

ten minutes. I’d better hurry.’

She was gone as suddenly as she had come. The fragrance went with her. I discovered, a bit

to my surprise, that I was shivering, even though it was a mild night and there was a decent ﬁre

burning in the grate.

‘Goodnight,’ I called after her.

No answer came back.

Blast that Johnny. I wouldn’t mind stumbling to the top of a hill, breathless, with a rare

creature like her, on such a beautiful night, I thought. I returned regretfully to my book. It was

still light enough to read when I got to the end of the chapter. I looked out of the window at the

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THE DROWNED ROSE

russet-and-primrose sky. Two ﬁgures were silhouetted against the sunset on a rising crest of the

hill. They stood there hand in hand. I was ﬁlled with happiness and envy.

I went to bed before midnight, in order to be fresh for my ﬁrst morning in the new school.

I had grown utterly sick and tired of teaching mathematics in the junior secondary school in

the city; trying to insert logarithms and trigonometry into the heads of louts whose only wish, like

mine, was to be rid of the institution for ever. I read an advertisement in the educational journal

for a male teacher – ‘required urgently’ – for a one-teacher island school in the north. There was

only a month of the summer term to go. I sent in my application at once, and was appointed

without even having to endure an interview. Two days later I was in an aeroplane ﬂying over the

snow-scarred highlands of Scotland. The mountains gave way to moors and ﬁrths. Then I looked

down at the sea stretching away to a huge horizon; a dark swirling tide-race; an island neatly

ruled into tilth and pasture. Other islands tilted towards us. The plane settled lightly on a runway

set in a dark moor. An hour later I boarded another smaller plane, and after ten merry minutes

ﬂying level with kittiwakes and cormorants I was shaking hands with the island representative of

the education committee. This was the local minister. I like the Reverend Donald Barr at once. He

was, like myself, a young bachelor, but he gave me a passable tea of ham-and-eggs at the manse

before driving me to the school. We talked easily and well together all the time. ‘They’re like every

other community in the world,’ he said, ‘the islanders of Quoylay. They’re good and bad middling

– mostly middling. There’s not one really evil person in the whole island. If there’s a saint I

haven’t met him yet. One and all, they’re enormously hospitable in their farms – they’ll share with

you everything they have. The kids – they’re a delight, shy and gentle and biddable. You’ve made

a good move, mister, coming here, if the loneliness doesn’t kill you. Sometimes it gets me down,

especially on a Sunday morning when I ﬁnd myself preaching to half-a-dozen unmoved faces.

They were very religious once, now they’re reverting to paganism as fast as they can. The minister

is more or less a nonentity, a useless appendage. Changed days, my boy. We used to wield great

power, we ministers. We were second only to the laird, and the schoolmaster got ten pounds a

year. Your remote predecessor ate the scraps from my predecessor’s table. Changed days, right

enough. Enjoy yourself, Bill. I know you will, for a year or two anyway.’

By this time the manse car had brought me home with my luggage, and we were seated at

either side of a newly-lighted ﬁre in the school-house parlour. Donald Barr went away to prepare

his sermon. I picked a novel at random from the bookcase, and had read maybe a half-dozen

pages when I had my ﬁrst visitor, the girl with the abundant black hair and laughter-lighted face;

the loved one; the slightly bewildered one; the looker into sunsets.

The pupils descended on the playground, and swirled round like a swarm of birds, just before

nine o’clock next morning. There were twenty children in the island school, ranging in age from

ﬁve to twelve. So, they had to be arranged in different sections in the single large class-room. The

four youngest were learning to read from the new phonetic script. Half-a-dozen or so of the eldest

pupils would be going after the summer holidays to the senior secondary school in Kirkwall; they

were making a start on French and Geometry. In between, and simultaneously, the others worked

away at history, geography, reading, drawing, sums. I found the variety a bit bewildering, that

ﬁrst day.

Still, I enjoyed it. Everything that the minister had said about the island children was true. The

impudence and indifference that the city children offered you in exchange for your labours, the

common currency of my previous class-rooms, these were absent here. Instead, they looked at me

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THE DROWNED ROSE

and everything I did with a round-eyed wonderment. I expected that this would not last beyond

the ﬁrst weekend. Only once, in the middle of the afternoon, was there any kind of rufﬂing of

the bright surface. With the six oldest ones I was going through a geometry theorem on the

blackboard. A tall boy stood up. ‘Please sir,’ he said, ‘that’s not the way Miss McKillop taught us

to do it.’

The class-room had been murmurous as a beehive. Now there was silence, as if a spell had

been laid on the school.

‘Please, sir, on Thursday afternoons Miss McKillop gave us nature study.’ This from a ten-

year old girl with hair like a bronze bell. She stood up and blurted it out, bravely and a little

resentfully.

‘And what exactly did this nature study consist of?’ I said.

‘Please, sir,’ said a boy whose head was like a hayrick and whose face was a galaxy of freckles,

‘we would go to the beach for shells, and sometimes, please, sir, to the marsh for wild ﬂowers.’

‘Miss McKillop took us all,’ said another boy. ‘Please, sir.’ Miss McKillop… Miss McKillop…

Miss McKillop… The name scattered softly through the school as if a rose had shed its petals.

Indeed last night’s fragrance seemed to be everywhere in the class-room. A dozen mouths uttered

the name. They looked at me, but they looked at me as if somebody else was sitting at the high

desk beside the blackboard.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Nature study on Thursday afternoons. I don’t see anything against it, except

that I’m a great duffer when it comes to ﬂowers and birds and such-like. Still, I’m sure none of us

will be any the worse of a stroll through the ﬁelds on a Thursday afternoon. But this Thursday,

you see, I’m new here, I’m feeling my way, and I’m pretty ignorant of what should be, so I think

for today we’d just better carry on the way we’re doing.

The spell was broken. The fragrance was withdrawn.

They returned to their phonetics and history and geometry. Their heads bent obediently once

more over books and jotters. I lifted the pointer, and noticed that my ﬁst was blue with cold. And

the mouth of the boy who had ﬁrst mentioned the name of Miss McKillop trembled, in the heart

of that warm summer afternoon, as he gave me the proof of the theorem.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Donald Barr. He brought a chessboard and a box of chessmen from

the cupboard. He blew a spurt of dust from them. ‘We’d have grown to hate each other after a

fortnight, trying to warm each other up with politics and island gossip.’ He arranged the pieces

on the board. ‘I’m very glad also that you’re only a middling player, same as me. We can spend

our evenings in an amiable silence.’

We were very indifferent players indeed. None of our games took longer than an hour to play.

No victory came about through strategy, skill, or foresight. All without exception that ﬁrst evening

were lost by some incredible blunder (followed by muted cursings and the despairing fall of a ﬁst

on the table).

‘You’re right,’ I said after the fourth game, ‘silence is the true test of friendship.’

We had won two games each. We decided to drink a jar of ale and smoke our pipes before

playing the decider. Donald Barr made his own beer, a nutty potent brew that crept through your

veins and overcame you after ten minutes or so with a drowsy contentment. We smoked and

sipped mostly in silence; yet ﬁne companionable thoughts moved through our minds and were

occasionally uttered.

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THE DROWNED ROSE

‘I am very please so far,’ I said after a time, ‘with this island and the people in it. The children

are truly a delight. Mrs Sinclair who makes the school dinner has a nice touch with stew. There

is also the young woman who visited me brieﬂy last night. She was looking for somebody else,

unfortunately. I hope she comes often.’

‘What young woman?’ said the minister drowsily.

‘She didn’t say her name,’ I said. ‘She’s uncommonly good looking, what the teenagers in my

last school would call a rare chick.’

‘Describe this paragon,’ said Donald Barr.

I am no great shakes at describing things, especially beautiful young women. But I did my

best, between puffs at my pipe. The mass of black hair. The wide hazel eyes. The red restless

laughing mouth. ‘It was,’ I said, ‘as if she had come straight into the house out of a rose garden.

She asked for Johnny.’

Something had happened to the Rev. Donald Barr. My words seemed to wash the drowsiness

from his face; he was like a sleeper on summer hills overcome with rain. He sat up in his chair and

looked at me. He was really agitated. He knocked the ember of tobacco out of his pipe. He took a

deep gulp of ale from his mug. Then he walked to the window and looked out at the thickening

light. The clock on the mantelshelf ticked on beyond eleven o’clock.

‘And so,’ I said, ‘may she come back often to the school-house, if it’s only to look for this

Johnny.’

From Donald Barr, no answer. Silence is a test of friendship but I wanted very much to learn

the name of my visitor; or rather I was seeking for a conﬁrmation.

Donald Barr said, ‘A ghost is the soul of a dead person who is earth-bound. That is, it is much

attached to the things of this world that it is unwilling to let go of them. It cannot believe it is

dead.

It cannot accept for one moment that its body has been gathered back into the four elements.

It refuses to set out on the only road it can take now, into the kingdom of the dead. No, it is in love

too much with what it has been and known. It will not leave its money and possessions. It will not

forgive the wrongs that were done to it while it was alive. It clings on desperately to love.’

‘I was not speaking about any ghost,’ I said. ‘I was trying to tell you about this very delightful

lovely girl.’

‘If I was a priest,’ said Donald Barr, ‘instead of a minister, I might tell you that a ghost is a

spirit lost between this world and purgatory. It refuses to shed its earthly appetites. It will not

enter the dark gate of suffering.’

The northern twilight thickened in the room while we spoke. Our conversation was another

kind of chess. Yet each knew what the other was about.

‘I hope she’s there tonight,’ I said. ‘I might even prevail on her to make me some toast and hot

chocolate. For it seems I’m going to get no supper in the manse.’

‘You’re not scared?’ said Donald Barr from the window.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not frightened of that kind of ghost. It seemed to me, when we were speaking

together in the school-house last night, this girl and I, that I was the wan lost one, the squeaker

and gibberer, and she was a part of the ever-springing fountain.’

‘Go home then to your ghost,’ said Donald Barr. ‘We won’t play any more chess tonight. She

won’t harm you, you’re quite right there.’

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THE DROWNED ROSE

We stood together at the end of his garden path.

‘Miss McKillop,’ I murmured to the dark shape that was fumbling for the latch of the gate.

‘Sandra McKillop,’ said Donald, ‘died the twenty-third of May this year. I buried her on the

third of June, herself and John Germiston, in separate graves.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Donald, ‘for I do not know the facts. Never ask me for a partial account. It seemed

to me they were happy. I refuse to wrong the dead. Go in peace.’

There was no apparition in the school-house that night. I went to bed and slept soundly,

drugged with fresh air, ale, fellowship; and a growing wonderment.

The days passed, and I did not see the ghost again. Occasionally I caught the fragrance, a drift

of sudden sweetness in the long corridor between kitchen and parlour, or in the garden or on

the pebbled path between the house and the school. Occasionally a stir of cold went through the

parlour late at night as I sat reading, and no heaping of peats would warm the air again for half-

hour or so. I would look up, eagerly I must confess, but nothing trembled into form and breathing

out of the expectant air.

It was as if the ghost had grown shy and uncertain, indicated her presence only by hints

and suggestions. And in the class-room too things quietened down, and the island pupils and I

worked out our regime together as the summer days passed. Only occasionally a ﬁve-year-old

would whisper something about Miss McKillop, and smile, and then look sad; and it was like a

small scattering of rose-petals. Apart from that everything proceeded smoothly to the ﬁnal closing

of books at the end of the school year.

One man in the island I did not like, and that was Henrikson who kept the island store and

garage, my neighbour. A low wall separated the school garden from Henrikson’s land, which

was usually untidy with empty lemonade cases, oil drums, sodden cardboard boxes. Apart

from the man’s simple presence, which he insisted on inﬂicting on me, I was put out by things

in his character. For example, he showed an admiration for learning and university degrees

that amounted to sycophancy; and this I could not abide, having sprung myself from a race of

labourers and miners and railwaymen, good people all, more solid and sound and kindly than

most university people, in my experience. But the drift of Henrikson’s talk was that farmers

and such like, including himself, were poor creatures indeed compared to their peers who had

educated themselves and got into the professions and so risen in the world. This was bad enough;

but soon he began to direct arrows of slander at this person and that in the island. ‘Arrows’ is too

open and forthright a word for it; it was more the work of ‘the smiler with the knife’. Such-and-

such a farmer, he told me, was in ﬁnancial difﬁculties, we wouldn’t be seeing him in Quoylay

much longer. This other young fellow had run his motor-cycle for two years now without a

licence; maybe somebody should do something about it; he himself had no objection to sending

anonymous letters to the authorities in such a case. Did I see that half-ruined croft down at the

shore? Two so-called respectable people in this island – he would mention no names – had spent a

whole weekend together there at show time last summer, a married man and a farmer’s daughter.

The straw they had lain on hadn’t even been cleaned out… This was the kind of talk that went on

over the low wall between school and store on the late summer evenings. It was difﬁcult to avoid

the man; as soon as he saw me weeding the potato patch, or watering the pinks, out he came with

his smirkings and cap-touchings, and leaned conﬁdentially over the wall. It is easy to say I could

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