The actual journey with my son William, which I undertook a week or two later, was very different.
As a preliminary we dined at my club, and William, to my pleasure, wore a seemly and well-cut tweed suit. ‘It occurred to me,’ he said, ‘that a successful blackmailer should dress with as much propriety as our legislators. For they prey on hope, on our fear that worse may befall; while we, the unofficial predators, batten on present fear and the hope of better times to come. The order is reversed, there is no other difference.’
‘Has Robert paid up in full?’ I asked.
‘After you refused to help him, he had no option,’ said William, ‘and when I wrote to you—was it a fortnight ago?—I was able to tell you that I had made all necessary arrangements for our cruise through, or round about, the Western Isles of Scotland.’
‘Will you be in command?’ I asked, remembering with some trepidation the record of his war-time service in the Mediterranean.
‘Only nominally,’ he said. ‘The boat I have chartered is a 65-foot converted fishing-boat, utterly seaworthy and converted in such a way as to offer all reasonable comfort; and she is owned, sailed, and managed by two remarkable brothers called Roderick and Andrew MacPhee.’
‘How,’ I asked, ‘did you discover her?’
‘I think,’ said William, ‘that I must first tell you something about Theodolinda Culpepper Roach. It’s early yet, and you had better give me another drink. We don’t want to dine before half past eight, do we?
‘Very large ones, very cold, and very dry,’ he told the waiter, and when our Martinis came, in claret-glasses, he said to me, ‘You know her name, I suppose?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘But you should. Within the last couple of years she has become quite famous, and some day I hope to marry her. We have, for the last six weeks, been living together, and the indications are that we are compatible. Lindy—she answers to Lindy—is, of course, American. Only the Americans have the faculty and imagination to compile those sonorous, three-decker names, and Lindy, in the avant-garde of fashion, is in love with death. Haven’t you read We the Killers?’
Again I said ‘No.’
William became very serious and said, ‘She made her name when she was only nineteen or twenty. Nowadays, you know, if you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to be successful while you’re young, and Lindy took full advantage of her opportunities. She was born somewhere in Oklahoma—some very small town, I’ve forgotten its name, in a great, empty landscape—and her parents were rich. Not millionaires, but comfortably rich. So she was able to travel. She went to New York when she was sixteen, and had a very unfortunate experience in the Subway. Then she came to London, and was nearly trampled to death in a Tube station. Charing Cross, I think. It was the rush-hour, and she fell—’
‘Is that what you call taking advantage of her opportunities?’ I asked.
‘She acquired a point of view. She remembered her childhood as a period of freedom in a country where people were few, and was horrified by her discovery that most people lived in uncontrollable multitudes without knowing what freedom meant.’
‘I may find her sympathetic.’
‘Like most young people she began by denouncing her elders for their failure to make sense of the world; but unlike the majority she won her elders’ approval, and was handsomely rewarded. She wrote a devastating account of the failure of the Southern States of America to build a creative society after their defeat in the Civil War. It had an immense sale in America. They’re such perfectionists, such moralists, that they get a stern and splendid pleasure from the exposure of their next-door neighbours’ faults; if, that is, exposure has been the work of a friendly American hand. So Lindy made a lot of money, and spent the next three years on travel and research which produced an equally devastating and even more popular book, We the Killers. You really ought to read it.’
‘What’s her subject?’
‘She discovered death, and decided there was much to be said for it. After what she had suffered in the New York Subway and the London Tube she had an abiding horror of crowds, and it was a wonderful relief to realise how vulnerable they were: how closely subject to death, or even solicitous of death. She studied the history of all those people, those different peoples, whose primitive culture or abortive civilisation collapsed or was defeated by more progressive strangers. They were the victims, she believes, not only of the murderous temper that rules so much of the world—so much of history—but of their own wish to die. She writes about the Caribs and the Khmers, about Bushmen and Hottentots and Hereros, about Polynesians in the Marquesas and the natives of Tasmania; and all of them, she says, cultivated a way of life that invited death at the hands of fortuitously arriving, bloody-minded invaders. We the killers met victims who wanted to be killed, and the union was consummated in genocide. But we the killers are not to be blamed, because we did only what was expected of us.’
‘Is there any substance in her theory?’
‘She has sold nearly a quarter of a million copies.’
‘That ought to disarm criticism.’
‘It has,’ said William. ‘And many critics surrendered unconditionally when they saw her. She is tall and fair and very beautiful.’
‘And she’s now living in London?’
‘Temporarily, yes. She has begun to do research for her third and most important book.’
‘About us?’
‘How quick you are! Yes, she sees signs of early collapse in Britain. She didn’t find it easy to make up her mind about who should be next on her list—there are several countries teetering on the edge, or so she thinks—but already she’s seen enough to feel fairly certain that we’ll be the first to take the plunge.’
‘I hope we shall live long enough to read about it. Is she a fast worker?’
‘She’s allowing herself five years.’
‘Then I shan’t ask my bookseller to keep a copy for me.’
‘Should we marry—’
‘Yes, I’d like to see you settled before I die. But you haven’t told me—though you started to tell me—about the connexion, if there is one, between your fiancée—shall I call her that?—and the boat that you’ve chartered.’
‘She’s a cousin of the MacPhees, who own it. Her maternal grandfather emigrated to America, and when she decided that Britain was to be her next subject, she thought it would be a good idea to look up all her relatives. Some of them gave her quite a shock, I gather, but among them she found Roderick and Andrew. And when I told her I wanted to charter a boat, she said, “Why don’t you hire them?” So I did.’
‘Will she come with us?’ I asked.
‘Not to begin with; but she’s going to Oban, where I hope to meet her. She’s making a quick survey of what she calls the progressive necrosis of Britain - she has a sharp eye for it, being American—and according to her it’s even more advanced in the Highlands of Scotland than in London; where, of course, stasis may come at any moment. She’s going about her job with a gusto that I find most enviable. I’m sure you’ll like her.’
‘You don’t think I’ll find her interests too morbid for my taste?’
‘Oh, no! She’s full of life and full of fun. She takes a long view of history, and in that perspective death comes to a tribe or a nation as naturally and inevitably as it does to an individual—and as beneficially. A literal or physical immortality, for men and nations, would soon make the world insufferable, wouldn’t it? Imagine the embarrassment of finding an ancient Assyrian in your railway carriage.’
I remembered, for a moment, the infinite embarrassment of my dream-journey to Glasgow, but decided to say nothing about it. Instead I asked: ‘And her cousins—these men whose boat you’ve chartered—are they also in love with death? I don’t want to find fault with your arrangements, but for a sea-voyage—’
‘No, no, they’re quite different. Well-contented, down-to-earth, practical people—and, by all accounts, first-rate seamen.’
We went upstairs and drank a very good Pommard with our saddle of mutton. The elder MacPhee, said William, had been a seagoing engineer till he found more profitable occupation with an oil company established somewhere on the Persian Gulf; from which, in due course, he retired with a substantial sum in the bank. His brother, a schoolmaster whose lifelong hobby had been boat-sailing, also retired, and together they went into business as joint owners of a converted motor fishing-vessel. They had taken charter-parties as far north as Trondheim, and as far east as Sicily. They were thoroughly competent, and they had known the west coast of Scotland and the Hebridean sea from childhood.
All that I found very reassuring, and after dinner we played a game of billiards, drank a glass or two of port, and caught the 11.10 from Euston. We arrived in Glasgow shortly after nine o’clock, and having breakfasted in a large, sombre hotel, continued our journey to Greenock. There we found our sturdy ship, the Independence, and saw to our delight the northern landscape, of hills and intrusive sea-lochs, emerging from a morning of rain and cloud into a marvellous brown-and-blue clarity. We embarked at once, for the brothers told us they had prepared our lunch, and sailed for Tighnabruaich in the Kyles of Bute; where we lay that night in great comfort.
I took immediate liking to the two MacPhees. In appearance they were quite different, but both had the gift of an easy, natural approach, and a sturdy Scottish intonation that gave their speech a sort of broad, intrinsic value. It wasn’t tormented into one or other of those urban dialects which are now too often regarded as essentially ‘Scotch’, but they spoke, I think, in the rather old-fashioned way of educated Scots of an earlier generation.
Roderick, the elder brother who had been a marine engineer, was massively built, with a large, round, deeply sunburnt face that silver-rimmed spectacles bestraddled. His eyes were pale blue and innocent, his nose had once been badly broken, and his white hair was thin and wispy. His brother, more slightly made, was taut and trim, with small, precise, expressive features, and hair still brown though receding from his forehead. Both were neatly dressed in high-necked blue jerseys, blue trousers, and white shoes.
Their boat was a fine, seaworthy craft, powered by twin diesels, and with a fair spread of sail—‘But more for the fun of it, than of practical value,’ as Roderick said. I like the fishing-boat style of building—the ample beam, the great sheer that lifts the bow so proudly—and the conversion had provided splendid accommodation that was furnished for comfort in a solid, masculine way. There was a double cabin aft, in which I slept, and two very good single cabins. The saloon was spacious, the deck-house large and well designed, and both galley and engine-room had been built for people who like room to move. The brothers’ quarters, in the forward end, were also comfortable, with their own lavatory and another small saloon. They could carry, they told us, as many as eight passengers, and with a full ship they preferred to eat apart; but with only William and myself aboard they were persuaded that the sensible thing was to mess together. Roderick was cook, engineer, and deckhand—the engines, he said, were well behaved and needed little attention—and Andrew was steward and skipper. ‘Women,’ said Andrew, ‘make a lot of fuss about housekeeping, just for the sake of asserting their indispensability. But it’s easy enough if you plan properly, get the necessary equipment, and go to work methodically.’ Roderick, who agreed with him, had been married but no longer lived with his wife; and Andrew, the schoolmaster, was a contented bachelor.
I had told William to make sure that a sufficiency of drink was put aboard—I had given him a cheque to pay for it—and on our first night, at Tighnabruaich, William and I, exhilarated by a day at sea, perhaps drank a little too much. But the brothers, though they sat with us after supper and drank level, showed no sign that whisky had any effect on them, and in their manner were polite but reserved. They were, of course, summing us up, and in the morning I was very pleased when they greeted us with manifest friendliness. We had, apparently, made a good impression on them; largely, I think, because William had told some very diverting stories of his war-time experience in the Navy, in which he portrayed himself as a well-intentioned clown who had survived recurrent danger only by sheer good luck or the timely appearance of some petty officer who had learnt his seamanship in the merchant service. He also, to my secret pleasure, exhibited me, his parent, as one of the fast-diminishing generation which had suffered—with good humour, as he pretended—the torment of trench warfare in those now scarcely credible years of half a century ago. The broad-minded MacPhees showed a generous respect for my far-off service with the Cameron Highlanders, and mentioned, briefly and with modesty, contributory details about those extraordinary years which they had learnt from their uncles and elder cousins.
The weather continued fine, the glass rising slowly and steadily, and the following day we sailed round Arran and anchored in Lamlash Bay. Twice at least I said to William, ‘Why, oh why, haven’t we done this before? Nothing could be more agreeable! But we, in our folly, have wasted our lives. We’ve wasted time ashore when we might have been at sea.’
‘The sea isn’t always as calm as this,’ said William.
But I was in no mood to listen to dull, drab, platitudinous, common sense. I was enjoying life as I hadn’t enjoyed it for years. On the one side rose the splendid hills of Arran, on the other the long heights of Kintyre, and the sea between was a lapping blue. The air was like the incense of youth, and when, off the southern end of the island, we began to roll and lurch a little, the movement reminded me of the delight in mere movement—in running downhill and jumping from a haystack—that gives boyhood such richness, and vanishes with boyhood.
I had a good deal of conversation with both Roderick and Andrew, and found them uncommonly easy to talk to. It was Bacon, I think, who said, ‘Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man,’ and it was evident that both had read widely enough to furnish their minds with opinion as well as knowledge; and though their knowledge was not ostentatious, their opinion was usually on tap. They were not chatterers, but they were not taciturn. By the end of the day I felt—as I had not felt for a very long time—that I had made new friends.
After supper, indeed—as if now they could trust us—they became remarkably communicative. The flow of talk was opened by William, who asked some pointless question about the Persian Gulf, and then, without giving Roderick a chance to reply, explained that he had no nearer knowledge of that hot and steaming sea than some intuitions that might have been planted by his youthful reading of Omar Khayyám. ‘And I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that they have left a very realistic impression.’
‘No,’ said Roderick, ‘they won’t have done that.’ And he told us that he had once taken advantage of local leave to make a difficult journey—almost a pilgrimage—to Nishapur, Omar’s birthplace in the north-east of Persia; for he, in his youth, had learnt the Rubáiyát by heart.
That I found very endearing, for in my second year at Cambridge, after the war, I had found Omar’s pessimism strangely comforting, and under his spell I had read, in a very desultory way, some indifferent translations of one or two of the better-known Persian mystics. I said something, rather tentatively, about this old enthusiasm, and discovered that Roderick, while earning a handsome salary in an abominable climate, had taken the trouble to acquire more knowledge of Persia’s classical literature.—Thus showing, as I thought, a typical aspect of Scottish character.—He spoke, very modestly but with evident knowledge, of Háfiz and Jalal ad-din Rumi, names with which I was distantly familiar, and of a poem called the Gulistan whose author’s name I did not recognise and have forgotten.
I refilled his glass, and he admitted that much of what he learnt had inclined him, at first, to sympathy with the poets of Sufism, and finally to a profound conviction that their mystical apprehension of union with God—or of the means to such understanding—had given him a closer view of what looked like ultimate truth than anything he had heard or read elsewhere.
At that his brother Andrew—who, till then, had listened with the patient and affectionate attention of a well-trained cocker spaniel—smacked the table so forcefully with the flat of his hand that the contents of his glass—which I had filled too generously—spouted like a small geyser, and with the most engaging warmth he declared, ‘But all your eastern poets and Persian philosophers aren’t worth a single paragraph of the Institutes of John Calvin!’
To which Roderick replied, ‘There’s a crow cawing in the thorn-tree, but white hyacinths grow under the garden wall’—a quotation from the Gulistan? I don’t know—and that started a very spirited argument of a sort which, in this godless age, is too seldom heard. It became evident that Andrew was a staunch Calvinist, with a firm belief in Election and Predestination—he, of course, was one of the Elect and assured of salvation, not by his own merit, but purely by the grace of God—and William, with some courage, as I thought, interrupted to ask, ‘But how can you be assured of grace?’
‘A man’s knowledge,’ said Andrew, ‘has two sources. It’s like the waters that nourish the earth. Some spring from beneath, and others fall from above. Those that spring from beneath inform him by the light of nature, the others by divine revelation.’
‘I seem to remember,’ said William, ‘that Bacon said something of that sort.’
‘Bacon?’ I said. ‘I was thinking about Bacon only this morning.’ But no one paid any attention to me.
‘It’s a great pity,’ said Andrew, ‘that so much time is spent in our schools on trying to teach dull boys and girls how to read the plays of Shakespeare; who often wrote obscurely, and often nonsensically. It would be far better to instruct them in the clear thought and well-turned sentences of Francis Bacon.’
That combative assertion threatened utter dislocation of the original argument, and it was only by great ingenuity—and my insistence that their glasses be filled again—that I brought them back to the line of basic dissension. My knowledge of Sufism, as of most things, is very slight, but Roderick, so far as I could understand him, claimed a mystic’s privilege of insight into divine love and comprehension of the universe, while Andrew counter-claimed a sort of spiritual primogeniture—peculiar, perhaps, to Scotland?—which assured him of an inheritance from which no mundane faults could exclude him.
The argument delighted me. Roderick with his strong Scotch intonation, and his great brown face straddled by silver spectacles, bore no resemblance to one’s common notion of a mystic—especially a Persian mystic—and Andrew, with a schoolmaster’s precision of speech and his small, neat features, his good-humoured expression, showed no trace of the harsh, ingrown, and absurd fanaticism that I, for one, had always associated with Calvinism. Their debate was hard, ingenious, and even-tempered—it was obvious that they were battling on familiar ground—and William and I both listened with fascination.
Like most people in this country, my son and I rarely go to church. I hayen’t been for years, and I don’t suppose he has. But I’m not so complacent, or so easily satisfied, as to accept a mechanistic or casual explanation of life and the universe, and I don’t imagine he is. William, as I know from occasional conversation with him, has read much more up-to-date scientific stuff than I have, and a lot of new scientific stuff seems to open the way for up-to-the-minute reassertion of what, in the past, was pretty generally accepted. About Creation, for instance. The farther we can look into the remote spaces of the universe, and find order and a mathematical precision in all of them, the more it’s necessary to predicate a predetermining Intelligence, by which I mean God.—And the intervention of Jesus Christ, whom some of our bishops would probably describe as his Public Relations Officer, meant that God the Universal Artificer had a tender regard for the little worm-like intelligence that he encouraged to escape from his happy insensitive fishes. What we now know about evolution doesn’t invalidate the Book of Genesis; it merely proves—what a lot of people must have suspected—that Genesis is a bold, dramatic fable written by a poet who hadn’t the science or the means to excavate its hidden prelude. He tells us not only that there’s order in the universe, but purpose; though as yet we haven’t discovered what it is. By the time we do discover that, we shall be living in something a lot better than the present state of humanity.
So, then, it was a totally unexpected delight to listen to men who, from utterly different points of view, acquiesced in their recognition of a purposive and dominating God about whose nature and policy—policy isn’t the proper word, but I can’t think of a better—they were wholly at variance.
How the argument came to an end I can’t remember. It didn’t reach agreement—that I know—and I rather fancy that, with William intervening, it reverted to academic debate about Shakespeare and Bacon. I think I must have drunk too much, because I have a confused memory of someone declaring that Shakespeare was very like God, because he spoke so loudly that no one could hear him; and someone else asserting that Bacon’s was more truly the voice of God because everything he said meant more than he said, though no one could appreciate it. But who said which I don’t know.
What I do recall is that this fundamental argument came to an end without ill will. Though it didn’t reach agreement, it didn’t provoke shouting or any display of anger. I remember quite clearly, however, that in the midst of an intricate discussion about the divine purpose I took note of an urgent need to replenish our supply of whisky. It’s curious to think that in many countries an excess of strong drink provokes lust and violence, but in Scotland, even today, it may prompt argument about the nature of God.
When I went to bed I fell into a profound sleep from which, after an unmeasured period of time, I was roused to a short dream of great and memorable splendour. It began with uproar and destruction, for a man, black-habited, was using a sledge-hammer to break down a ponderous door in a long wall built of Cyclopean blocks of white marble. The door, at last, was splintered, and fell, and we entered a well-gardened but deserted country. Its beauty was manifest, its desolation equally apparent. The man in black stood appalled, and I, who could not see his face, lurked inconspicuously in the shade of a tall tree.
The shadow of the tree spread quickly, the sky grew darker, and when it was quite dark the whole firmament changed suddenly to a blaze of light; for we stood beneath the Milky Way, and the Milky Way was incandescent a few thousand feet above our heads. We heard, to begin with, a sort of fizzing and buzzing as the celestial lights came on, and then there was an indeterminate noise as if a huge orchestra was tuning up. I told myself, ‘We are about to hear the Music of the Spheres.’ And perhaps we did.
But what a surprising music! It disconcerted the man in black, who slunk away into the darkness of the trees; but it delighted me, for it was the waltz-tune from that enchanting old musical comedy, The Merry Widow.
I heard myself singing, ‘Won’t you waltz the Merry Widow waltz with me’—and the orchestra was the whole choragium of the stars, a resounding glory of celestial noise that filled the firmament with its rollicking sweet tune. It came to an end, there was a pause, and again the lesser stars tuned their strings. Then a major constellation emitted a chord of heroic sentimentality, and the empyrean shook to a luscious torrent of sound. It was the waltz-tune from The Chocolate Soldier.
I, and all the stars in heaven, sang with heartfelt fervour—while Malcolm Sargent on the horn of Orion beat time with a baton as tall as a telegraph-pole—‘Come, come, I love you only, my heart is true! Come, come, my life is lonely, I long for you!’
Exhaustion, total exhaustion, followed, and I relapsed into a long and dreamless sleep that came sweetly to an end when our ship swung to its anchor and a shaft of sunlight through a porthole lifted my eyelids, and I got up to see the bright shore of Lamlash Bay. In that strong air I felt no ill effects from the indiscretion of the night before—none of us, in fact, had drunk with gross excess—but ate a great mound of scrambled eggs, which Roderick had cooked to a crisp perfection, and with simple pleasure drank several cups of excellent coffee.
Thereafter, in flawless contentment, I sat on deck to watch the hills of Arran—white cloud clung to the peak of Goat Fell—fall slowly astern as we sailed northward into the Sound of Bute and Loch Fyne. There was a light, southwesterly breeze, our three sails were all set, and their brown canvas was plumply filled. The deck heeled slightly to starboard, we could hear the shurring, slurring noise of the divided sea, and even William, who in the ordinary way is very talkative, satin silent satisfaction with the sheer bliss of natural movement in that perfect marriage of air and ocean.
We went no farther than Ardrishaig, at the entrance to the little Crinan Canal, and that night there was no conversation, for after supper Roderick and Andrew went ashore to visit friends. A small and tentative effort I made to revive their theological argument met no response, and I rather think they both regretted the freedom with which they had spoken on the previous evening. On our first night aboard, William and I had talked at large—William talked more than I did—and the brothers had accepted us as congenial companions; in consequence, their guard had fallen—their normal Scottish reticence had been breached—and they, in their turn, had allowed themselves a licence which they now remembered as extravagant, and were in no mind to repeat. Such, at any rate, was my judgement.
But because goodwill, and a little whisky, had permitted revelation of the inner seriousness which underlay their daily competence, I watched them, and talked to them, with an affection that I had never anticipated. They sailed and managed their boat with expert confidence—they cooked and served our simple but sufficient meals with clean and unassertive efficiency—and their innermost minds were alive with debate on the ultimate meaning of life! I felt infinitely grateful to William for having taken me on so rewarding a voyage.
The little Crinan Canal is barely ten miles long, and winds its way through very pretty country, with occasionally a view to the north of a strange expanse of flatness that reaches to the foot of large, grey-blue hills. William was very good at helping the brothers in the labour of moving from lock to lock in the uphill progress, and then in the easier descent to the basin from which one sails into the Atlantic. At one point in our land-locked voyage we lay to, for shelter, under a deluge of almost tropical rain, but the sun came out again, hot and strong, and that night we dined ashore in the hotel at Crinan.
While we were there—while we were still at dinner—a new topic of conversation was introduced, and I learnt that the brothers were capable, not only of a transcendental view of life, but of an earthy, even bawdy appreciation of its ordinary, day-to-day conditions or conditioning. We were joined, at our table, by a tall, massively built, and bearded man in a dark kilt of blue and green, who greeted Roderick and Andrew as old friends, and was introduced to William and me as Hamish Lamb. ‘A name you will know full well,’ said Roderick; and it did, indeed, evoke a faint, uncertain recognition which was clarified when William found opportunity to whisper, ‘A modern composer—well known, perhaps famous—in Glasgow, I believe, he’s known as “Schönberg-and-soda”.’
I am not able to pass judgement on Mr. Lamb’s musical genius, but I am more than ready to believe in it. It seemed to me that he could have become equally distinguished in any profession he chose to enter, for he was a man of almost overwhelming personality who, within a few minutes of sitting down and accepting a glass of port, was expressing opinions, frequently outrageous, in a voice of commanding volume, and at the same time exuding a geniality that disarmed opposition and reduced the waitresses to giggling devotion.
He commented on my choice of port. ‘You do well,’ he said, ‘to drink it from the wood. I haven’t drunk a vintage port for three years. I haven’t got an oil-well, and the price is beyond me. But wood port suits me very comfortably, though I like to drink it from a generous glass. Do you mind if I ask for a tumbler?’
I ordered another bottle, and an elderly waitress, who evidently knew him, brought a good, cut-glass tumbler. Roderick and Andrew beamed and chuckled with pleasure, as though they were proud parents whose prodigy of a son had won general admiration for his brilliance, and I saw that William—who is not readily given to enthusiasm—was equally pleased by our guest’s extravagance. I asked him about the tartan he wore, and as he stood up to display it, his kilt seemed voluminous enough to make a bell-tent. ‘The tartan of Clan Lamont,’ he said. ‘We are a branch, a limb, or offshoot of the clan, and this sporran is the head and hide of a badger that my great-grandfather killed on the shore of the Holy Loch in 1848.’ His sporran, indeed, looked its age, but his short coat, of a pale-blue tweed, was well cut, and a dark-blue tie on a yellow shirt, above yellow stockings and heavy black brogues, gave him a conspicuous but acceptable appearance.
It was my question about the tartan that led to the major topic of the evening, for Andrew—I think it was Andrew—made some comment on clan society— ‘It was static,’ he said, ‘it gave no opportunity for change or development’—and that provoked Mr. Lamb to a warm defence of the clan system, and, by simple extension, to intemperate denunciation of the modern world. He exposed, as most of us have done, grave defects in our contemporary way of life, and then, to the obvious embarrassment of some elderly females at a near-by table, divulged the root-cause of our predicament.
‘It can all be brought down to one thing,’ he said, ‘and that’s the low cost of fornication! Whisky’s gone up in price, and houses have gone up in price. Fifty years ago cigarettes were five a penny, and today they’re threepence apiece. Whisky used to be three and six a bottle, now you pay thirteen or fourteen times as much. My father used to buy a suit of clothes for forty shillings, but I pay forty guineas and daren’t go out in the rain. From a loaf of bread to a battleship the cost of everything’s been multiplied by insane accountancy, but against the whole tide of rising prices the cost of fornication had gone down and down and down.
‘It used to have its recognised tariffs,’ he continued, ‘and paltry enough they were in a back street; but there was a tariff. Then, progressively, the old labour force was diluted, the amateurs moved in, and a traditional profession became a parlour-game in which even forfeits were abolished. If a girl’s unlucky, the state takes care of her, and unmarried fathers have no more social conscience than the virus of the common cold. Now don’t misunderstand me! I’m not disputing or denying the pleasures of fornication. What I’m saying is that free fornication—uninhibited, irresponsible fornication that no one pays for—has undone the gravity of life and destroyed man’s faculty of aspiration by downgrading a traditional reward of aspiration to the level of milk for the bairns at eleven o’clock in a village school.’
To my great surprise, both Roderick and Andrew were delighted by this wild assertion. They lay back in their chairs, they leaned forward on the table, and laughed with wide-open pleasure as if they were schoolboys released from childish ignorance and childish awe by the loud pronunciation of a forbidden word. Andrew, the old schoolmaster, normally so well controlled by conventional good manners, pointed with glee to the elderly females who now hurriedly left their near-by table, and Roderick removed his spectacles to wipe tears of happiness from his pale-blue eyes.
Encouraged by their approval, Mr. Lamb continued his dissertation. ‘Consider the situation solely on its economic level,’ he said, ‘and how ruinous is the feather-bedding of legalised fornication! In the world today married men and women should be penalised for procreation. But it’s the very opposite that happens, and their redundant cradle-fill are subsidised, fed, and miseducated by witless governments still dominated by the ghost of a desert tribe’s ambitious god. Jehovah said “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,” and I don’t blame Jehovah. Jehovah in his day did a good job. But our government, and every other government, ought to recognise the fact that Jehovah knew nothing about the cumulative effects of sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, and alphabetic vitamins; and if he woke up tomorrow morning, Adam in Birmingham and Abraham in Bremen would be gelded before night.’
It was I, at that point, who applauded him, for I have long held that all our present difficulties are primarily due to the grotesque over-population of the world—to such a redundancy of humankind as no government can legislate for, or properly control—but I was given very little chance to expound my views. Mr. Lamb listened to me for a moment or two, and then, with a somewhat theatrical gesture, declared, ‘That’s admitted. All you say I welcome and admit. But what I want to say is that fornication must either be restricted by government edict, or paid for in accordance with economic facts.’
Again the brothers gave way to helpless laughter, and Mr. Lamb had some difficulty in silencing them before saying, with impressive solemnity, ‘I am a lifelong Socialist—I fought for Socialism in Spain—and now I’ve come to the conclusion that Socialism must admit its implications. Socialism is paternalism rewritten for a community that often doesn’t know who its real fathers are, and a responsible surrogate-father must legislate for his children’s good. Which means that fornication should either be forbidden or priced beyond their capacity to pay for it. What did Karl Marx say about surplus value? What did he say about unearned increment?’
William—again with commendable courage—interrupted to ask, with a simple desire for information, what, in fact, Karl Marx had said about unearned increment; but Mr. Lamb brushed his question aside, and declared, ‘The over-population of the world today is the unearned increment of permissive or subsidised fornication, and if Karl Marx were alive today he’d bring revolution to its proper end by sterilising four-fifths of the proletariat, and crippling the middle classes by a thundering tax on houghmagandy.’
His reference to Karl Marx had a curiously discouraging effect on the debate—if debate it could be called—and all of us, I think, were temporarily silenced while we tried to recall the significant Marxian utterances. I could remember what Ricardo said about rent, and Adam Smith about freedom of enterprise and division of labour; but Marx and his judgements had receded into the darkness of the nineteenth century as if into a November afternoon. Mr. Lamb took advantage of the interlude to drink a little more port, and then grew confidential.
‘If you want to know the truth,’ he said, ‘the fact of the matter is that in the last few years I’ve come to admit that I like birds and beasts—especially the birds and beasts of prey—much, much better than any human being I’ve ever known since my dear mother died; and if birds and beasts are to have a chance of survival, the number of human beings now living must be drastically reduced.’
That admission I found very endearing, and I was quite captivated when he put his hands to his mouth, and by some curious use of his fingers blew a loud, high, brazen call, exactly like the sound of a hunting-horn. The manager of the hotel ventured to suggest that some of our fellow-diners might not appreciate so clamorous and urgent a noise—though to William and me, and to the brothers, it had given much pleasure—and to avoid trouble I paid my bill and invited Mr. Lamb aboard our boat. Fortunately we had a bottle of port, as well as whisky, in the drinks locker, and presently Mr. Lamb insisted that Andrew should produce what he called his ‘boxie’. This instrument, as we discovered, was a kind of concertina; and Andrew was an expert performer. Mr. Lamb had a fine baritone voice, and a large repertory of Highland songs and ballads; so for the next two hours we enjoyed—until I grew rather tired—what the Highlanders call a ceilidh. In the morning William told me that he had had some difficulty in conducting Mr. Lamb along the gangway and back to his hotel; but the brothers were convinced that we had had an evening of quite exceptional pleasure. And indeed we had, though perhaps it lasted too long.
It was late in the morning before we put to sea, and leaving the basin at Crinan sailed north through the rough-and-tumble of a tide-race called the Doruis Mor into the Sound of Luing, and so, through the Sound of Kerrera, to Oban; where William hoped to meet Theodolinda Culpepper Roach.
He was disappointed, however, by a long telegram that read: ‘Am visiting with old-time noble peasant in ruined castle where a piper plays us in to cold mutton and pump-water. Here is perfect acquiescence in the death that encompasses us all and I cannot bear to leave it. But if I can break the spell I will try to join you in Oban within two or three days. All love from Lindy.’
William fell into a very sulky mood, and under lowering skies—that, in the evening, broke to reveal a sunset of supernal splendour—we sailed through the Sound of Mull to Tobermory. And there the brothers again grew talkative. But not in a transcendental way.
Recurrently during the day they had chuckled happily—as if a ripe flavour remained in their throats—to recall some phrase or other from Hamish Lamb’s conversation; or monologue is perhaps the better word. They set a large value on his acquaintance—as had been obvious from his first appearance—and talk of him reminded them of other men they knew, or had known in the past, whose magnitude or extravagance of being, in some form or fashion, had won their admiration. Some eight or ten—more, it may be—were freely discussed or carefully described, and I was led to believe that the Highlands and Islands either attracted men of unusual and eccentric character, or encouraged and developed eccentricity. It was a day of good, gossiping talk, though William, still regretting Theodolinda’s absence, took little part in it.
Then, in the evening, we sat on deck under a western sky that slowly filled, as it seemed, with a vapour of gold, and Hamish Lamb again became our topic. His discovery of a single cause for all the world’s ailments had appealed, more strongly than I would have thought likely, to the brothers’ sense of humour. Its boldness pleased them, its simplicity went straight to the bawdy heart of the matter. And on the foundation of Lamb’s diagnosis, Andrew, as we learnt, had concocted an elaborate joke. It was a very Scottish joke, that took a long time to get going.
‘I’m no expert on economics,’ he said, ‘and I couldn’t give Hamish any useful advice on how to settle the cost of fornication. But if he’s looking for a good, quick way of reducing its incidence—not for any moral reason, but simply to reduce the population to manageable limits—I think I could help him. In fact, I’m sure I could.’
‘Andrew was a schoolmaster for five-and-twenty years,’ said Roderick.
‘And a very embittering experience it was,’ said Andrew.
‘It can’t have been wholly unrewarding,’ said William. ‘Surely you had good pupils as well as bad.’
‘All the good ones emigrated,’ said Andrew. ‘Most of them to Australia, but some to England.’
For a moment or two, so glum was Andrew’s expression, I feared he had lost heart—lost faith in his projected solution to the problem—and I said to Roderick, ‘I want to sample that whisky we bought in Oban this morning. Do you remember where we put it?’
On Roderick’s advice I had bought a small quantity of a malt whisky called Talisker, distilled in the Isle of Skye, and Roderick, quick to appreciate the value of my suggestion, promptly went below and returned with a bottle, a jug of water, and some glasses. It was a truly noble whisky, and under that golden sky we all responded to the invigoration which underlay its superlative flavour. Andrew recovered his spirits, his neat features dimpled with pleasure, and in a solemn voice that contrasted agreeably with an animated expression he embarked on his narrative.
‘In darkest Africa and many parts of Asia,’ he said, ‘I’m led to believe that boys and girls go willingly to school. Oh, better than that! They’re eager for knowledge, avid to acquire the education that’s offered them. They’ve a starving man’s hunger for learning. But that’s not the case here in Britain. No, indeed. Our pupils come reluctantly to school, and leave as soon as they can to earn inflated wages in a dead-end occupation that needs no education at all. So a schoolmaster’s job—in the ordinary kind of school, that is—has become a very pitiful sort of profession. But there’s riches in every rubbish-heap, and wisdom to be found where fools congregate. That’s what I’ve learnt.’
It still seemed to me that Andrew’s contribution to Hamish Lamb’s bold diagnosis might lack spirit—might lack interest, indeed—and I encouraged Roderick to refill our glasses. A little more Talisker had its effect, and in due course Andrew came to the heart or nub of his proposal.
‘Every year, for twenty-five years,’ he said, ‘I tried to teach a class of thirty-five or forty boys and girls to appreciate the beauty and skill with which William Shakespeare wrote a play called The Merchant of Venice—and the net result was that none of them, after leaving school, ever went to the living theatre to see a play by Shakespeare.
‘I had to instruct them, you see, not in my own way, but in a way that would equip them to meet the examiners’ requirements.—That’s how it was stated, by government regulation.—And that way instilled in them a lifelong hatred of Shakespeare.
‘An embittering experience, as I told you before. But from a well of vinegar you can fill a cup of wisdom, and now I know what should be done if you want to prevent precocious adolescents from acquiring an anti-social addiction to the pleasures of fornication. All you have to do is to make sexual education compulsory in schools. Teach it as we teach Shakespeare, with close attention to the text and annual examinations at Ordinary Level and Advanced Level, and copulation will become as unpopular as writing an essay on the true character of Shylock, or learning by heart “The quality of mercy is not strained.” My method’s infallible, Mr. Gaffikin. Make sexual theory and practice a schoolroom subject, under the menace of examination, and copulation will become as rare as voluntary attendance at a performance of The Merchant of Venice.’
He had taken a long time to come to the point, but when he reached it we all applauded him, and the Talisker went round again. Under its influence, I regret to say, we contributed several more-or-less bawdy additions to what we cheerfully called ‘MacPhee’s Panacea’ or ‘From Shylock to Celibacy’, and when at last the sky darkened and the air grew chill we went very happily to bed.
Our plan, for the following day, was to venture into the Atlantic, beyond the Point of Ardnamurchan, and make a circular voyage round the islands of Eigg and Rum. We set off under a sky disappointingly grey, and within an hour or two the boat began to rise and fall, rather violently, to the Atlantic swell. To Roderick and Andrew, of course, it meant nothing at all, and William, proud of his experience in the Navy, pretended to be enjoying himself even when the green tip of an unexpected wave lifted over the port bow and caught him slap on the face. I wanted very much to see the cliffs of Rum, and beyond them the great shore-line of Skye, and when I could no longer pretend to enjoyment, and my face exposed the pallor of my spirit, Roderick did what he could to fortify me with a helpful mixture of brandy and dry ginger-ale.
We circumnavigated Rum, and the swell became worse. I did not disgrace myself, but I cannot remember paying much attention to the southward voyage until we reached the shelter of Coll and eventually found a good anchorage under the lee of Tiree. To be at sea, when the sea is rough, is very tiring, and as soon as we reached our harbour I went to bed and slept, I think, for fully ten hours.
In the morning we returned to Oban, for William’s benefit, and because the sky was still cold and grey I made no objection to Andrew’s decision that it would be unwise to pause and land on Iona—though I dearly wanted to see Iona—and our voyage round the Ross of Mull was uninterrupted.
William went ashore to seek news of his Theodolinda, and sent back a message to say she had engaged rooms at a small but comfortable hotel; and mere courtesy, as he put it, would compel him to sleep ashore that night. But he and Theodolinda would join us in the morning.
I was quite happy to spend the evening with Roderick and Andrew, and from the quays and wharves of Oban we removed, a little way, to a very pleasant and well-sheltered anchorage of which they knew.