Eoin is the sort of friend who can always do ‘the very thing’ for you. If you have a vague idea of buying a motor-car or a house or any other little luxury beyond your means, it is unwise to mention it to him. One night as he was going out the door I said, ‘By the way, Eoin, you don’t know of a smart little craft, something about thirty feet, with cabin to sleep two, a sound engine—sort of boat a man and his wife could work around the West Coast and the Islands?’
‘Man,’ he said, turning with his dark smile, ‘I know the very thing for you. I saw her last week in Skye. She’s mahogany from the keel up and she has the lines of a girl. You could dance in her cabin and she has a wash-basin you tip up and a lavatory that cost over twenty pounds.’
‘Sit down,’ I said, and I got hold of his glass again.
We left Inverness at six in the morning and were at Dornie Ferry before half-past eight. It was a lovely cool April morning and the Kyle was a grey shimmer. The ferry-boat was on the other side, and Eoin, stretching himself after the keen run, filled his breast with all the West. This was his own land, and, having reached it, he left haste where it belonged.
‘I want to introduce you’, he said, ‘to a friend of mine.’
So I followed him until he found his friend, who from the byre took us into his parlour, where he was very hospitable, early though it was. Through the window I presently saw the ferry-boat coming across for us. When it could wait no longer it went away with the postman. But later on it came back, and, after a last round of words, we went with it.
In Kyle of Lochalsh the fishing boats—smart Loch Fyne craft—were coming in, and we arranged to buy two cod of next day’s catch to take home with us.
The business air of hurry and responsibility is difficult to maintain in the West; and when Kyle was behind us, and Broadford, and the small new bungalow with the boarded windows that no one will inhabit because it is haunted by a woman out of the stream behind, we decided that the day was opening up very well. Then the hill beyond Loch Ainort, with its striped tawny skin, and beyond that the round summit of Ben Glamaig, white with snow.
I have so many happy memories of Skye that its bareness has an intimate attraction. Peat smoke was ascending from the small hamlets by the sea. Folk were stirring here and there. The Island of Raasay, with its sugar-loaf hill, lay ahead of us, small Paby far behind, and Scalpay over from us on our right. The seaways between were quiet glimmering channels.
‘Think’, said Eoin in the drowsy voice of legend, ‘of sailing down them.’
I had been thinking of it for some time. To be passing out there, where no craft was visible, would be a sailing out of time. To cast our warps, not for escape, but for adventure—into that which all our moorings have kept from us.
‘That is the life I would like,’ he told me confidentially. Behind his tone was the echo of what may never be won—but for the hope that comes again on such a morning in the West.
The business he had in Portree was probably in his mind as well, for it was of an intricate nature—nothing less than attempting to get a drinking licence for an hotel which he had rented in the north end of the island.
But if he knew little about hotel-keeping, he certainly knew most of what any one man may know of the complex Gaelic mind. And here was occasion for exercise of the astutest in all the devious ways of its courteous diplomacies.
For the motives that move the licensing authorities of an island like Skye may appear on the surface bland as Ah Sin’s face but in reality are deeper far than Shakespeare’s well. This is no simple affair of a popular vote; no question of elected representatives carrying out the will or desire of their constituents. At one point I was called into an office, charged around with black deed boxes like children’s coffins, and asked to vouch for Eoin’s character (to a man who knew of him and his antecedents far better than I), so that he might be deemed a fit and proper person to hold a licence. This was a thing I could do, with my bonnet off, for if there is one matter that should be sifted out beyond all others it is the character of the man in whose company a drink would retain all its friendliest, most refreshing, and inspiring properties.
‘But wouldn’t the folk in his hotel area like him to get the licence?’ I asked innocently.
‘No doubt.’
Whereat I all but blushed.
Landowners, female teetotallers also landed, ministers of the Gospel, bankers, retired gentry—from such as these are the company of licensing authorities gathered together. And each in the light of his or her peculiar beliefs decides what is good for the commonalty.
When Eoin said he was not going to ask any favour from anyone, I saw the matter was getting too complicated for me, so I left him and went down to the harbour, and there saw a converted ship’s lifeboat about thirty feet long.
I had a prejudice against conversions and the sight of this one deepened it, for all her new paint. She looked top-heavy and swung to the fitful airs in a way that made it easy to visualise her flat bottom. Bravely tricked out, too, with her high cabin, brass portholes brightly polished, and small windlass forward. But the game of pitch and toss in a western sea needs more qualities than a stout stomach. So I left her and climbed the hill behind the harbour.
Portree is finely situated overlooking a noble anchorage. The town itself is not very interesting architecturally, and the new bungalows on the heights behind could hardly be said to have improved the scene. But perhaps it is all too easy to vision what might have been, for here surely is the very situation for the queen of the whole north-west. Certainly nature did her best. And man with his limited resources, harried by barbarians out of the south, doubtless did his best too—just as he did with the lifeboat conversion in the harbour, though that was a neat job.
But what I was looking for was the black reef—and when I saw it, out beyond the harbour to the left, I got a touch of the old thrill. I had gone across to Raasay with a girl in a row-boat, leaving another couple on shore, and on the way back a growing wind very nearly beat us. Feeling gone from wrists and arms and pulling with the dead weight of the body, I was lucky at last to beach on Skye, where all four of us managed to heave the small boat beyond high-water mark near An Tom Point.
Presently we saw a fishing boat leave Portree. It was now blowing half a gale and getting dark, so she could never be going to sea. At last, three of us got on board her in the shelter of a headland, and I went back along shore to launch our boat to be taken in tow. In the midst of this manoeuvre, the fishing boat’s engine broke down. Mast had to be stepped and canvas rigged. And then right in the teeth of it, we tacked back into Portree harbour.
The exhilaration of a sea-storm turns dull men vivid, dumb men into a shout, and slow men into the leap of a sword. There is no intoxicant to be compared with it.
As the skipper went for the black spit of rock, his two sons stood ready. At his quiet word, they leapt. She came up towards the eye of the wind, hesitated for one long desperate moment, then fell away again, defeated. The yawing swing of her head was a strange living gesture, like the movement of the head and neck of a horse I once saw drowning. Quietly, without word or movement, the skipper gave her defeated head its way, the canvas all the wind it could carry, and made straight for the root of the reef. When the last moment seemed long past, he spoke again. Bravely she came up from her steering way, strained through the desperate moment, then fell away on the new tack and passed the reef’s point with a plunging forefoot.
So naturally I should like to praise Portree, its people, and their kindness.
But the country folk feel that the inhabitants of their capital look down upon them as provincials and barbarians, and in heated argument they will damn the town as ‘a drunken hole’. But then Portree basks in the sun of the licensing authorities and city men do have their superior ways.
Eoin was certainly lost in labyrinthine ways, when I got hold of him hours later. I could see the dark entanglement in his eyes. While we sped northwards, he unburdened himself, and something bigger than an Admiralty chart would be needed to record all the soundings on that rock-infested sea of island diplomacy. There had been, moreover, a sensational crop of applications for new licences—no less than the staggering total of five. For tourism is increasing in Skye, and soon the ancient Gael of the Misty Isle may be living by selling beer, if he is lucky, or ginger-beer if he is not, and taking in washings in any case. Furthermore, these applications were for no low pubs or public bars. Each applicant would be fully satisfied with a refined ‘table licence’ for the use of tourists who know how to behave themselves and, coming from the south, would expect the usual civilised amenities.
But there was a snag that even the licensing authorities could not overcome, for the law had made no provision for the granting of an exclusive table licence. A licence must be a licence to retail strong drink, and accordingly the native, brutally indifferent to civilised refinements, might walk in the front door and in his quiet way demand his dram. A very difficult and complicated situation for landlords, female teetotallers, etc.
Sympathetically Eoin and I discussed their difficulties, as, heading northward, we passed croft houses and cattle and hens, living in the inoffensive quietude that seemed to have come down from the dawn of time. I could remember, too, from my recent reading of ancient statutes, that once in the Isles, hundreds of years ago, each man had his own still for making his own whisky, and then there was neither licence duty nor drunkenness. Legislation against drunkenness came in with foreign wines, which were forbidden except to the landlords, etc., and so the folk had to remain perpetually sober on whisky.
However, one thing was clear to us: the court, due to sit in a few days, would have to grant all five licences or none at all. Democratic logic acting on sets of similar circumstances made that sure. It was the general opinion even in Portree, said Eoin.
When the court did sit it granted two and refused three. Eoin was one of the rejected. Doubtless the bench could give reason for its wisdom. Equally doubtless it never did.
But while all this was going on, at the back of my mind was a boat sailing the seas. Skye is called in Gaelic the Isle of Mist. But its name is also traced to another word meaning The Winged Isle; and that surely is the perfect description. For one is always coming on the sea, on inlets like heron wings, on mountain tops about to take off or already above the clouds. Always I seem to have been rushing through the island. Though that is not true, for I have spent autumn weeks of perfect laziness on the west side of the Cuillin, when speed or haste in mind or body seemed an odd sort of treachery to the strange fact of being. There is one stretch of moorland, when Talisker distillery is left behind and the moor begins to roll down again towards Glen Brittle, that has an autumn tint of such austere loveliness that an ex-president of the Alpine Club once assured me he had never met anything like it in all his travels, and he had climbed in the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Rockies. It occurs when the early autumn sun has turned the bent not to gold but to a wine that in colour is somewhere between golden brown and amontillado. No trace here of the flamboyant, of the vivid primitive. An ancient mood, but still as honey in the comb. Heats and humours evaporate before it, and the stillness invites the mind away. Let the colour deepen into the dusk of evening—into that hour when the wings of the Cuillin fold on dark breasts and eagle heads sleep unbowed.
‘We go down here,’ said Eoin, pulling up at last. ‘They may be at her.’
It was not without some excitement that I followed him down the path to the beach. And there I saw her. She was high and dry, lying over against a grassy sea-bank, like a stranded sea-animal, and there was no one about her.
I became aware of Eoin’s voice drawing attention to her lines. He made me stand in front of her bows, drew me aft to the cockpit. Half the engine—a 14 h.p. Kelvin—lay about the grass, together with worn linoleum, floor boards, small bricks of pig iron ballast, oars, mast, rusty anchor, rusty chain, while the folding top of a teak table helped to support her side.
‘You are seeing her at her worst,’ he said, and stepped in over the stern seat. From this open cockpit aft we entered through a double door into the cabin. This door looked like mahogany but, as I learned later, was actually teak. She was built throughout of teak and pitch pine, except for the transom of the square stern, which was oak. The engine was on the threshold. A simple wooden seat ran down each side of the cabin full length, about fourteen feet, and the beds were two simple cots, opposite each other as one entered, that folded back against her unlined walls. Forward against the fo’castle bulkhead on the port side was a cupboard with little doors and drawers. Otherwise there was no locker accommodation. In the fo’castle the expensive lavatory faced the entrant, with chain locker to left and washbasin to right. There was some shallow but useful shelving right in the bows. As far as accommodation went, her slimness was evident, but that did not worry me at the moment, for you cannot fill a given space with lockers and mattress beds and still have it to move about in. Moreover, I had never yet struck a small boxed-in cabin that wasn’t smelly; and with a thick smell about, it doesn’t require much of a sea to upset a delicate stomach. The two skylights were large and healthy looking.
I took out my pen-knife and pricked her joints and planking all the way aft, and then performed the same friendly rite to her outside skin. She was hard and sound and the waterline rang to the knuckles. With his steel tape, Eoin measured her over all. From stem to stern she was twenty-seven feet. In beam, seven. And she would probably take a good three feet in draught. I must have wondered if she was a bit narrow, for I heard Eoin’s voice, ‘That’s where she’ll get her ten knots.’
But what I was really thinking was something quite other, if it could be called thinking at all, for it came over me, moving about her helpless condition, that she might become my boat.
Had I seriously thought of buying a boat? Had the jaunt to Skye been undertaken with any such real intention? Had it been anything more than one of those vague desires that torment us intermittently through life? Had I expected to find a boat that I would buy?
But there was something deeper than that, too—a feeling, almost uncomfortable in its excitement, that not only should I buy this boat but that it might completely alter my whole way of life.
Eoin may have thought me not very enthusiastic about his find. Possibly I looked more than a trifle vague.
We failed to see the owner, and as our appointment, by telegram, was for the following morning, I did not mind. Nor do I remember much of the journey that followed, except for two clear pictures: the first, of Uig Bay, for as you come in over its southern horn the white cottages on the green slopes opposite look like toy cottages set down between thumb and forefinger by one of those giants who stalk through the ancient legends; the second, of Waternish headland running far into the western sea and bathed in fiery mist. There was a distinct feeling of relief in the involuntary thought that at least one should never have to attempt to describe the marvel of that headland at that hour.
Not that surprise was done with, for as at last we stepped from the car we saw the full red ball of the sinking sun caught amid the ruins of Duntulm Castle. But that was an effect over-dramatic, and a sensible mind refuses the incredible symbol.
While we stood there looking to the west, we saw the Hebrides, low down on the horizon, like a band of purple cloud. Despite ourselves, we were held.
In that evening light, dimming through fire and purple to the illimitable grey wings of the sea, that autumn of the day with April in its breath, was all the West of legend—disturbing, inviting, leaving one very still, hearkening for one knew not what. Those who have never known the West like this may find it easy to jeer at phrases like ‘the Celtic Twilight’. But I have the uneasy feeling that that does not end the matter.
Eoin took me through his unfurnished hotel, and then in the gloomy loft of an outside building we started up the small engine that was to provide electricity. Engines are fascinating things to those who know something about them. This was a compact unit that would be set in motion at any time by the simple process of switching on a light, any light, in the hotel.
A rare game for children in the dead of night!
Still smiling, we stood outside again, drawn by the last edge of the sun as it disappeared. A shadow came in over the waters; there was a soft wash on the shore; the shrilling of two sea birds. The world was very quiet. ‘Who would want to go back?’ said Eoin.
So back we went, through Kilmuir, where Flora Macdonald’s grave is and the monument on a hill. All over Skye and the outer Isles you come on the shadowy track of the Prince. Bonnie Prince Charlie. The guide books are full of him. And of Flora, the heroine, who guided him through the meshes of the military net—cast by the authorities in London and dragged so relentlessly through the old Gaelic sea. Over there was her home, Kingsburgh. The Prince slept there—and, in the same bed, some thirty years later, so did Dr. Samuel Johnson. (‘I have had no ambitious thoughts in it.’)
But before Johnson came, Flora was writing to the Duke of Atholl: ‘My husband by various losses and the education of our children . . . fell through the little means we had, so as not to be able to keep this possession, especially as the rents are so prodigiously augmented; therefore of course must, contrary to our inclination, follow the rest of our friends who have gone this three years passed to America. . . .’
Prodigiously increased rents and America. It is the true Highland story: the tragedy, without the fine legendary air, of the folk themselves.
She is begging His Grace’s help for her son Alexander, who ‘is bordering on nineteen years of age . . . your Grace’s doing something for him would be the giving of real relief to my perplexed mind before I leave (with reluctance) my native land, and a real piece of charity. . . .’
It does not appear, however, that His Grace provided the charity, for a few months after the learned Doctor’s visit, Flora with her husband Allan and some of her family were on the high seas, and within three years Allan was writing, ‘I am here with one (Alexander) of my Sons, seventeen months a Prisoner. My wife is in North Carolina seven hundred miles from me in a very sickly under state of health, with a younger Son, a Daughter and four Grand Children.’ Allan Macdonald had helped to raise a Highland force in the American War, and after the defeat at Widow Moore’s Creek was taken prisoner with his two sons.
‘Always the same old story,’ said Eoin. We were heading in the Dunvegan direction. ‘Take Borreraig over there, the home of the MacCrimmons, the greatest pipers the world has ever known or ever will know. And not only the greatest pipers—but the greatest composers of pipe music. Creators. Think of their piobaireachd. My God!’ said he reverently. ‘And to think of the Macleod chief coming in the end to MacCrimmon and demanding a rent! He must not only retain him as his piper but he must at last have a rent, even if it was to be only half a rent. Nicely calculated, what! That finished Borreraig. They put up a fine commemorative tablet to the MacCrimmons there, short ago, in great style, pipes blowing an’ all.’
I laughed at the change in tone.
‘And what happened,’ I asked, ‘to Mary Macleod, your greatest Skye poet, and a great lyric poet anywhere? Didn’t she write a poem or something that the reigning chief thought was hardly respectful enough to him, and didn’t he banish her from his realm?’
‘He did,’ said Eoin.
‘You took that turn a bit sharp,’ I suggested.
‘Never mind,’ said Eoin. ‘Did you ever find the chiefs doing anything else?’
I had once heard him give a talk on the rising of the Glendale crofters, and as the car sped along, we spoke of our kinsfolk and of the way the chiefs or lairds had dealt with them.
It is a strange story, almost incredible at times in its vanity and greed and treachery and savagery. Wherever we went in the West we encountered it, until at last we hated the burden of thinking about it.
The key to its understanding turns in the lock of landlordism, particularly the money-landlordism that came in after the ’45 and culminated over half a century later in the unforgivable brutalities of the land evictions or Clearances. Many think that the ruthless driving or burning of the folk from their immemorial homes was peculiar to one or two regions of the Highlands, like Kildonan in Sutherland. This is not so. For over two generations these Clearances went on all over the Highlands.
I once talked to a man from Tiree who, as a boy, had seen his bed-ridden grandmother carried out from his burning home and placed under an upturned boat, while the landlord’s men stood by until the house was consumed. That man should have succeeded his father in the large comfortable croft on Tiree, but now after most of an adventurous lifetime at sea, he had the job of looking after the discharging and loading of boats at a West Coast pier. He could neither read nor write and had such fine character that he was simple and kindly. I remember the day he came across to the harbourmaster’s office, his face white with wrath. An order had come down from The Office up at The Works to stow a miscellaneous cargo in such a way that time might be saved at different ports of unloading. If ‘the Serang’ (as we called him) had obeyed this order the cargo might, in his estimation, have shifted in a heavy sea and so endangered the vessel and her crew. Not only was the fulfilling of such an order unthinkable to the Serang, but I truly believe he would have sacrificed his life rather than have carried it out. When his foreman appeared and publicly reprimanded him, he stood outraged and speechless. Then he found his tongue, gave it to the foreman for a raking minute, and walked off the pier. He came straight over to the harbourmaster and myself who were his friends. His English at such a moment was naturally uncertain. But I remember the culminating sentence: ‘I could have broken the pugger in three halves.’
He lost his job, and what finally became of that great man I do not know.
But somehow he stands in my mind as representative of his race, the race that was outraged and beaten and driven forth by the money-changers of a new age of greed and fear. The civilisation of the Celtic folk. Tenure of the land was the Gael’s by immemorial custom. Decency and character, kindliness to children and to strangers, love of heroic deeds and heroic men, came out in his oral literature and in his music. The chief in ancient times had been his heroic leader, his heroic neighbour, and so it was in his blood to trust and respect him.
A child of the mist? Everything but that—except to the nostalgic or cynical modern, or to the chief who cunningly provided himself with a charter—and acted on its imported ‘feudal rights’.
As we drove along in the half-light, Eoin and I had an orgy of such talk. It is like the talk that comes out of drink or a terrible sobriety. The old values are seen with a profound clarity. They belong to the mountains and glens, to the curve and flow of the land, to the gleam of the sea, to that which exists static and eternal, yet flowing, before our eyes. The silence is inspired with the far sound of it. It is closely akin to the vision of the modern young communist poet, except that he is moved by a sort of intellect whereas we were moved by a sort of memory.
And the memory provided us with actual stuff to go upon. And individuals, too—very tangible indeed. Like Mary Macleod, who liked snuff and whisky. Or Mary Macpherson whom the folk called Mary of the Songs; their hearts went beating with pleasure when her face showed round the doorjamb of the céilidhe-house. She was welcomed by the common folk as, farther south, Burns, of the same stock, was welcomed when he followed his greeting into kitchen or tavern. But little of the real stuff that enchanted her listeners has come through in writing: only enough to assure us of her original force: the rest is with traditional memory.
There was, then, most certainly this life of the folk, full of the warm human hungers, of fun and laughter, of labour-songs and pipe-playing and story-telling, a life that seems now almost dark and secretive, well hidden behind the clan pomp of feudalised chiefs, with their vanities and bloody little warfares, behind the history or ‘romantic glamour’ of Bonnie Prince Charlies.
The more solemn snatches of it we find gathered into Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica. Little of the same kind in modern poetry can equal in intensity of utterance and perfection of form some of these short hymns or invocations recorded by Carmichael direct from the lips of old men and women towards the end of last century (published 1900). The evidence is there—and, in the Introduction, evidence of much else. ‘If not late, proverbs, riddles, conundrums, and songs follow. Some of the tales, however, are long, occupying a night or even several nights in recital. Sgeul Coise Cein, the story of the foot of Cian, for example, was in twenty-four parts, each part occupying a night in telling.’ Against which, Shaw’s Methuselah is a slight affair!
Possibly all this talk had some effect on Eoin, for when we arrived quite safely at his destination, which was an inn, I followed him down the passageway as if we were entering the old dark secret life of the folk.
And this, in a measure, we did.
There were young folk and fun everywhere, and good drink. As we had eaten little that day, a craving came on Eoin for salt herring and potatoes. The sharpness of salt herring affects the palate as satire the mind: both live on what they consume with a hunger for more. Too many potatoes induce in some the flatulence of boasting. And a bit of boasting is needed when visiting legs are being pulled. The number of herring seemed large, but they were small and sweet behind the salt, and anyway we refused a second dish. It is said that the Celtic people, for all that they were the first to distil whisky, had only beer in the beginning. And after salt herring, beer still comes first.
There was no respite that evening. Every voice was ready and, in merriment, a trifle beyond itself. The day’s worries and troubles were now rich with fun. Eoin knew his people, and a hundred others they all knew. Yes, he had met Tom Macleod. And did they hear about his boat? What! they hadn’t heard how the poor fellow had lost his boat. ‘Go on with you!’ said Eoin; ‘you needn’t tell me you haven’t heard!’
When he had them rocking with expectation, he told them the story, with a mimicry and stuttering that made it thick with life. But first he turned to me, the stranger, and said politely: ‘In Skye and the Islands you will understand that the boat is one of the family. It is like a son. Should it chance to get wrecked it is mourned as a breadwinner. For it is nothing less. Indeed perhaps there is many a member of a family of far less use to the home than the boat.’ He made this so clear that through restrained laughter the sea came to our feet; a truth so close that its intimacy might have embarrassed us had Eoin himself not been so simple and direct. Well, it appeared that Tom Macleod’s boat had got a plank staved in on the rocks, just off the pier. A gust of wind had swept her into the swing of the tide and before his half-brother could get her nose to it, ‘she was round on him—a thing that could happen easily enough to anyone’. But Tom and his half-brother were pretty quiet about it, for their next-door neighbour in the clachan, Mrs. Grant, had just died. A decent old woman. Now the minister, who was new enough to the place, didn’t he in the first of the darkening come to Tom Macleod’s door, thinking it the house where the corpse was. And knocked. (Three knocks gave Eoin.) The door opened and there was Tom.
‘I am very grieved’, said the minister, ‘very grieved indeed to hear the sad news.’
‘Och yes,’ said Tom, ‘it’s s-sad enough.’
‘Very hard on you, very hard truly.’
The deep ministerial sympathy moved Tom to make the best of things. ‘Ah well,’ he answered, ‘it’s maybe not so h-hard as all that. It’s my b-brother that was mostly going about with her. And we have been th-thinking that with a good strong patch on her b-b-bottom she should be all right.’
Sometime before midnight Eoin suddenly decided that I must meet a special friend of his. (Wherever he goes he has special friends that you must meet.) So three of us set off, the slight bulge of a pocket denoting a friendly gift in tissue-paper. We felt sure the family would be in bed. But the light was in the window and Eoin followed his knock and greeting and we were welcomed with exclamations of delighted astonishment as if we were accompanying Mary of the Songs herself.
When toasts were drunk—the woman of the house touching the glass with her lips as I had seen many a time done in the northland—Eoin demanded a song. This was far too quick a demand, for song follows a natural mellowing of the mood. But Eoin, on the crest of himself, was well beyond the niceties of social usage. So being pressed in the argument to sing himself, he sang an old Skye Gaelic song. And he sang it well, with the young lads of the household unable to take their shining shy eyes off him. In which mellowing of the atmosphere, Eoin was toasted.
And in time the man of the house sang. His voice might have been no better than my own, to put it kindly, but when he stood mid-floor, his eyes staring beyond the wall, his chest full, and his hands clenched, I lost all sense of time, hardly knowing whether I was myself now or a thousand years ago. The simple interior might have been a thousand years old, except that then the fire would have been in the middle of the floor, like a camp fire, or the fire of a million years ago.
How the eyes of the lads glistened when Eoin told his stories! They had been shy of their father’s singing, but Eoin was the bard himself, carrying the strange birds of life about with him in his pockets. At any moment he could let the strangest one flutter in their faces. You could see the wings of excitement tickle their skin and flash in their eyes, while their thin arms circled their bodies like withies a lobster-pot.
But the great gift of the evening was the woman’s song. It was as unselfconscious as the sea, and had a note of legend in it old as the earth. We were far beyond criticism of singing as singing. As though one should pause to criticise the tone of a cry of terror or joy, as though tragedy or beauty could express itself only through the mask of a perfect face! None of these art tricks, here, where the elementals lived unconditionally, and the queer fleering break in a harsh voice could set cold bird-feet walking on sorrow’s race!
In the effect it has on the minds of native singer and listener there is something about this Gaelic folk-song that transcends purely musical or intellectual values, though that something may be impossible to define. Indeed the effect can be most disturbing, most profound, when the rhythm, sustained by meaningless or exclamatory syllables, repeats itself in a monotony growing so surcharged that it almost becomes unbearable (cf. ubban, ubhan . . . in the song, Grigal Cridbe); so that it is no longer an individual song that we listen to, nor is the singer an individual singer. The song and the singer become oneself; then a faceless individual who sits bowed under it, nameless as a boulder in an immemorial landscape, about which the ever-shaping wind of destiny blows. Or like a rock that the sea swirls around, covering it, smothering it, to recede and come again in its undefeatable rhythm. More than this the living quick of the mind may not experience, because beyond it there must be surcease, a drowning, death.
I recall a night in an hotel on a little Hebridean island, many years ago. The hour was advanced and an argument on Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát intricate and challenging. On a purely literary appreciation I was not disposed to give in to my army antagonist despite his experience of India and Persia and the amount of liquor he had consumed. Until he leaned towards me, eyes distended, and asked, ‘Have you ever heard the beating of a distant drum?’ I had never been conscious of not hearing it until that moment. So I capitulated with all the grace I could summon.
We left that kindly house, after breaking bread, and entered a circle where the fun was more natural than ever. Songs came at intervals, but what sticks in the mind most is the subject-matter of some of the stories. Humour and vivacity and richness of texture. My sparse Gaelic was hopelessly insufficient to follow Eoin at his best, and he would turn and translate, saying, ‘It doesn’t sound nearly so bad in the Gaelic.’ And I believed him, though it occasionally required some effort of the sympathetic imagination! The English translation was, by the normal social standards of mixed company, so shocking that one wonders whether Urquhart, in his great masterpiece, did yet achieve the translation of the social spirit that encompassed Rabelais. Clearly Eoin could talk of things in Gaelic to his compeers that were untranslatable into English without a complete loss of original innocence. Of this I have no doubt, because certain nouns were known to me in both tongues. In Gaelic, the old woman in his story could use a word by way of exclamatory objurgation that, if I were to translate it into the only English equivalent we have, would certainly worry the censor.
At that hour it was clear to me as a vision that such original innocence could come only out of a long tradition. It went back beyond original sin, perhaps all the way to that ‘golden age’ when the humours and practices of the flesh could illustrate a life story, as bubbles, rising and plopping, indicate a healthy ferment—with the assurance, when all is distilled, of a pure spirit.
But then I admit the hour was getting pretty early. At half-past five I thought I had better get to bed, for I had had only three hours sleep the night before, and the boat was still sailing her dark sea. So I left them to their songs of innocence and fell asleep, trying to bring her to a mooring.
The effort must still have been in my head when I heard the door open and saw Eoin enter carefully with a glass of whisky. ‘Are you feeling dry?’ he whispered. He sat on my bed. ‘Take that, it’ll do you good. I’ve been thinking about the boat.’
Solemnly there, and with the voices of conspirators, we talked about the boat and what she was worth and what should be offered for her. It was a long earnest talk. The hour was six-thirty, there was frost on the grass, and the sunlight, bright in its morning innocence, was watching us through the window. We came to extremely intricate yet perfectly clear decisions regarding methods of procedure, and as there was nowhere to set down the glass (there may be a greater abomination than whisky at such an hour, but I do not know of it) I drank it, and it did me good. In fact I got up and dressed.
Skye was a poem that the poets have forgotten how to make. It held me to the window, startled more than a little, as if I had just missed the passing of silver wings. The brightness they had left behind held the magic that, in after thought, one believes to be no more than the deceptive by-product of a mood, but that at the moment provided the strange and almost terrible certainty that one should never recapture it.
After breakfast we bade goodbye to our charming hostess, and set off for the place of the boat.
I was never much use at bargaining, finding it easier always to say yes or no. Yet true bargaining is a fine art and requires character. To see two Irishmen bargaining over a horse at a Kerry fair is one of the liveliest and most heartening things in life. I can just remember the old hillmarket at home, the scoffing, the sarcastic witticisms, the derisive toss of the head, the walking away, the coming back, up to the spitting on palms and clasping of hands, and the withdrawal to the long white tent where healths were drunk with cordiality and mutual esteem. As boys, the spectacle to us was of the greatest mirth, with a thread of admiration in it for the finer points.
I could not hope to achieve anything like that, yet the owner and I walked away from the others, and after courteous preliminaries I found myself obliged to name my figure.
Absurd! Impossible! No use talking! For that matter he did not want to sell the boat at all! No, no! On my part I explained truthfully how at the same figure I could obtain a bigger and stronger boat in Lewis and offered to provide name and address. However, if he was not selling, of course that ended the matter. We became distant and even more polite. We rejoined the others. We entered his house. The talk went to and fro, detachedly, as if boat-selling were a matter of remote interest. Until at last the two protagonists regarded each other across the table and the owner said, ‘It is the old custom: let us split the difference.’ I gave him my hand.
Down to the sea we all went and inspected the boat. Assurances were given regarding painting inside and out and the fixing up of the engine so that I could take her over in a sea-going condition before the beginning of June. I asked her name, for it was not painted on her, and was told it was Thistle. There was a smile at this for I had been somewhat concerned with Scottish affairs for years, and Eoin thought it a good omen! The owner had only had the boat about a year, and had not got her original particulars, but so far as he knew the engine was not more than twelve to fifteen years old. Old enough in my view, but not hopelessly old for a poppet-valve Kelvin. So the new ownership was toasted, and sometime after midday Eoin and I started back for Inverness.
We stopped at Portree to send off a telegram, advising the purchase of the Thistle and our return about six o’clock, for we were expecting some guests at that hour.
Neither of us is ever likely to forget that run, for lack of sleep and many toasts can induce a state of being in which the flesh grows tenuous and the mind floats like thistledown in a white wind. The fevers and greeds of living are understood and all one’s enemies forgiven; not at all to be confused with the mood of never climbing up the climbing wave; for it is so full of brightness that it sees even optimism as half-blind struggle.
We saw a man on a knoll winnowing grain in a gentle wind. This age-old picture so affected us that Eoin without a word drew up the car to light a cigarette.
From the rhythmic motion of the riddle, we watched the good grain fall to the earth and the chaff blow on the wind. The man on the knoll stood against the sky.
In the northland, the generation before mine used to winnow thus in their little barns, the winds blowing in at the small window and out at the door. As they used to do it in the country of the Loire away back in that sixteenth century when Joachim du Bellay wrote, D’un Vanneur de Blé aux Vents. ‘It is a song’, says Pater, ‘which the winnowers are supposed to sing as they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to lie lightly on the grain.’ The song that begins:
A vows troupe légère
Qui d’aile passagère
Par le monde volez . . .
and ends:
Cependant qui j’abanne
A mon blé qui je vanne
A la chaleur du jour.
‘One seems to hear the measured motion of the fans, with a child’s pleasure on coming across the incident for the first time, in one of those great barns of Du Bellay’s own country, La Beauce, the granary of France.’
Older than the barns of La Beauce, this figure on the hill—in a land, too, that had songs for all its labours. Yet the virtue of the picture lay in its gathering together in human kinship all men who have winnowed grain across all the fields of time.
As we went on, the Black Cuillin rose up white before us in an impressiveness, a massive symmetry, that on this sunny afternoon would have been incredible, did I not know that the imagination in its utmost reach for fantasy could hardly achieve so towering a spectacle. Some perfect angle of approach, some trick of light on the snowfields, some grouping of lines and planes and perspectives towards aspiring pinnacles, achieved for a moment this unearthly effect. There was silence for a long time, then Eoin said quietly:
‘When sleep takes you, where does it take you first? Is it in the eyes?’
It was a matter that had to be weighed thoughtfully. ‘No,’ I decided; ‘it takes me in the head.’
‘Do you know where it takes me?’
‘Where?’
‘In the hands. My arms and hands go jerky and queer. You see the turn there in front.’ It was a fairly sharp turn to the left. ‘My hands will want to turn to the right.’ If his hands had their way, the only craft that would thereafter interest us would be old Charon’s ferry-boat. We waited calmly to see what would happen at the turn. The car was a 30 h.p. V-8 Ford, and when the sole of the foot fell with the lightest negligence on the throttle, the whole mechanism charged like a Spanish bull. After flawlessly negotiating a few more bends, we drew up and got out. Eoin stretched himself on a hillock—just to ease his legs for one minute, he said.
His snoring was the most magnificent I have ever heard. It induced reverberations of laughter in the coping of a small stone bridge. The bog quaked. I could hardly read my watch-face for snorts of mirth that issued from some obscure but happy benevolence within.
At Kyleakin—Haco’s Kyle—we had to wait an hour and a quarter for the ferry boat, which seemed bent on demonstrating the scientific curve of timelessness with the two off piers as axes of co-ordinates. And very convincing it was, for our wits were sharpened by the knowledge that we were now to be at least one hour late, and we followed the graph with close attention and occasional exclamatory remarks of admiration. A car had shut off its engine behind us. From it, in a lull, came an explosive voice: ‘What the damthing wants to keep jiggering about like that for, God knows!’ But we had not the energy to form a committee.
Often in following weeks was I to curse this absence of time in the West, a state or condition for which there is no human warrant. It irritates supremely the active man who wants something done. I swore that one day I should have my revenge.
The cod at Kyle of Lochalsh were forgotten. And all Eoin’s friends passed by. The long trek across country was accomplished in marvellous time. For we took turn about at the wheel, the one who was relieved climbing into the back seat and curling up in a half-sleep where the body was softly tossed by trains rushing backward, by the screws of heaving steamers, by a certain small motor cruiser, twenty-seven feet over all, refusing to give way to beam seas. And we triumphed, for when I bade good-bye to Eoin at the gate, our guests had not yet arrived.
‘You’ve bought her?’
‘Yes,’ I said, acknowledging her smiling welcome on the doorstep, ‘and you are hereby engaged as the whole crew.’