CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
1 The Sergeant-major’s Return
2 The Wake
3 A Question of Marriage
4 Also a Question of Marriage
5 A Run Round Great Todday
6 The Two Travellers
7 The Crock of Gold
8 The Drought
9 The Cabinet Minister
10 Whisky Galore
11 The Sergeant-major Back Again
12 The Rèiteach
13 Mrs Campbell’s Defeat
14 Captain Waggett’s Adventure
15 Nobost Lodge
16 Alarms and Excursions
17 Mrs Odd
18 The Wedding
Author’s Note
Glossary
Copyright
It’s 1943 and the war has brought rationing to the Hebridean islands of Great and Little Todday. When food is in short supply, it is bad enough, but when the whisky runs out, it looks like the end of the world.
Morale is at rock bottom. George Campbell needs a wee dram to give him the courage to stand up to his mother and marry Catriona. The priest, the doctor and, of course, the landlord at the inn are all having a very thin time of it. There’s no conversation, no jolity, no fun – until a shipwreck off the coast brings a piece of extraordinary good fortune ...
Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool in 1883. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Magdalen College, Oxford. During the First World War he became a Captain in the Royal Marines, becoming Director of the Aegean Intelligence Service. He wrote more than ninety books – novels, history and biography, essays and criticism, children’s stories and verse, and was also an outstanding broadcaster. He founded and edited until 1961 the magazine the Gramophone, and was President of the Siamese Cat Club. He lived for many years on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, but later settled in Edinburgh. Compton Mackenzie died in 1972.
FROM the bridge of the Island Queen, which three times a week made the voyage between Obaig and the outer islands of the Hebrides, Captain Donald MacKechnie gazed across a smooth expanse of grey sea to where the rugged outline of Great Todday stood out dark against a mass of deepening cloud in which a dull red gash showed that the sun was setting behind it. Captain MacKechnie muttered an order in Gaelic to the steersman, and the mailboat changed her course to round the south-west point of the island that was her next port of call. Presently the low green land and white beaches of Little Todday appeared west of the larger island and the mailboat made a sweep to enter the Coolish, the strait of water two miles wide which separated the two Toddays from each other.
It was a Saturday afternoon toward the end of February in the year 1943, and this was the first time for a week that the mailboat had been able to call at Snorvig, the little harbour in Great Todday which served the two islands.
‘And there’s some tirty weather coming,’ Captain MacKechnie piped in that high-pitched voice of his, with a baleful glance from his bright eyes at the heavy sky louring over the Atlantic Ocean beyond Little Todday.
At this moment the trim soldierly figure of Sergeant-major Alfred Ernest Odd appeared in the doorway of the bridge-house.
‘Room in here for a little one?’ he asked, with a grin of welcome.
‘Well, well,’ the skipper exclaimed in astonishment, ‘if it isn’t Sarchant Odd! Man, where have you been all these months? And where have you been since we left Obaig this morning?’
‘I was having a jolly good lay down. What a journey! Stood up in the corridor all the way from Devonshire the day before yesterday. Stood up in the corridor all the way from Euston up to Glasgow the night before last. Stood up in the corridor for the first half of the journey to Fort Augustus where I had to see Colonel Lindsay-Wolseley. He very kindly got me to Obaig in time for the boat and which meant leaving Tummie at three o’clock this morning in the Colonel’s car, and as soon as ever I got on board the dear old Island Queen I got the steward to find me a bunk and I slept right through the day.’
‘You’ve had a long churney right enough, Sarchant. Teffonshire? That’s a place I neffer was in. It’s a crate place for cream, I believe.’
‘It may have been a great place for cream before this war, but we didn’t see much cream where I’ve been since I got back from Africa,’ said the Sergeant-major. ‘No, give me good old Scotland before Devonshire any day of the week – except perhaps Sunday,’ he added quickly.
‘Ah, but the Sabbath’s not what it was,’ Captain MacKechnie insisted firmly. ‘When I was a poy, man, it wass a tay. My word, what a tay, too, what a tay! I remember my mother once sat down on the cat, because you’ll understand the plinds were pulled down in our house every Sabbath and she didn’t chust see where she was sitting. The cat let out a great sgiamh and I let out a huge laugh, and did my father take the skin off me next day? Man, I was sitting down on proken glass for a week afterwards.1 My father was Kilwhillie’s head stalker.’
‘What, Captain Hugh Cameron of Kilwhillie?’
‘Not the present laird. His father. A fine figure of a man with a monster of a peard praking below his nose like a wave on the Skerryvore. Well, well, well, it’s nice to see you again, Sarchant. You’ve been away from us a long while now.’
‘Nearly eighteen months,’ said the Sergeant-major in disgusted tones. ‘But that’s the way in the army. As soon as anybody’s got a job that suits him and he suits it, shift him. I was getting along to rights as P.S.I. with Colonel Lindsay-Wolseley’s…’
‘What’s P.S.I. at all?’ the skipper interjected. ‘Man, the alphabet’s gone mad like the rest of the world since this war.’
‘Permanent Sergeant Instructor with Colonel Lindsay-Wolseley’s Home Guard battalion. Yes, I’ve been away eighteen months too long. However, the Colonel’s got me back at last, and he very kindly gave me the week-end to come over and have a look at my young lady in Little Todday. I was reckoning to get married last autumn year, and then biff! Transferred to a special job in Devonshire, and that tore it. The old man kicked up at the idea of her going so far away, and Peggy thought she couldn’t leave her dad, and so that was that for the moment.’
‘It was pretty annoying for you, I believe.’
‘Annoying? It was enough to drive a man off his rocker. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Last April instead of getting married as I hoped, biff, again! And it’s West Africa, with not enough embarkation leave to risk coming up to the Islands. Then I got back in January only to find myself down in Devonshire again. Did I create? Well, to cut a long rotten story short, I’m back at last, and I’m going to get married as soon as ever it can be managed.’
‘You waited a fair time, Sarchant, before you thought about getting married at all,’ Captain MacKechnie pointed out, with a shrewd smile. ‘Very wise, too.’
‘Very wise once upon a time,’ the Sergeant-major agreed. ‘But I was forty-five last month. And I can’t afford to wait much longer. Here, I mustn’t talk to the man at the wheel.’ He had noticed that the skipper’s eyes were turning away from the topic of marriage toward the Snorvig pier thronged as usual with the inhabitants of the two Toddays, though it was already on the edge of dusk. ‘Joseph Macroon will probably come over himself for the mail as the weather’s so calm.’
‘Ay, it’s calm enough now, but there’s plenty tirty weather away out there in the west. It’ll plow as hard as effer by morning.’
‘So long for the present, Captain. I dare say I’ll be seeing you up at the hotel before we cross over to Kiltod.’
‘I don’t believe I’ll be going up to the hotel this evening at all,’ the skipper replied, his usually bright eyes clouded and curiously remote.
‘But Joseph will expect to have a crack with you, especially as you have had to miss two runs this week.’
‘Ay, it’s a pity right enough, but I want to be ketting along up to Nobost. Well, well, I’m clad to see you pack, Sarchant, in what used to be the land of the free before this plutty war.’
Sergeant-major Odd left the bridge and went below to the promenade deck, where he walked up and down the port side looking across to the dimunitive harbour of Kiltod and the small cluster of houses beyond, in one of which the girl he had hoped to marry so many months ago was waiting for him. Oh, well, he was back again now. Not like some of those poor chaps in Africar and Burmar and Indiar and what not who hadn’t managed to get married all those months ago and didn’t know when they would now.
‘Good evening, Sergeant-major.’
He swung round to see the stocky form of the Snorvig bank agent.
‘Hullo, Mr Thomson, you’re looking well. I am glad to see you,’ he declared, shaking Andrew Thomson’s hand so fervidly that the bank agent’s dark complexion grew darker with embarrassment. He was a man to whom words came with difficulty, and he had been walking behind Sergeant-major Odd twice up and down the length of the deck before he had managed to summon up the necessary resolution to break into speech with a greeting.
‘You’ve been away quite a long while, Sergeant-major,’ said the bank agent; but the Sergeant-major knew Andrew Thomson’s manner and did not suppose that the scowl which accompanied this observation was meant to convey that it was a pity he had ever come back.
‘Yes, but I’m glad to say Colonel Wolseley has got me back again at last.’
‘Imphm? Is that so?’
‘And how’s G Company getting on? I suppose you’re all as smart as guardsmen by now.’
The bank agent made a determined effort to smile at this pleasantry and in consequence his scowl became absolutely ferocious.
‘Not quite yet,’ he gulped. ‘As a matter of fact, Captain Waggett has been having a lot of difficulty lately in getting the men together for drill. There were only two at the last parade – that is, there were only Captain Waggett and myself.’
The Sergeant-major clicked his tongue.
‘Still, as long as they keep up their shooting …’ he began.
‘They’re not,’ said the bank agent, who was also G Company’s sergeant-major. ‘The turn-out for shooting practice has been very poor all this month.’
‘I expect they’ll be more keen as the spring comes along.’
‘It’s not the weather,’ Andrew Thomson observed gloomily. ‘There’s another reason.’ And then to prevent his companion’s asking what that was he added hastily, ‘I took Mrs Thomson over to Edinburgh on Friday. She’s to stay with Mrs Pringle – that’s her mother – imphm …’ speech evaporated in a dusky blush.
‘And you thought you’d have a little run around on your own, eh? Ah, well, I shall be married myself this spring if all goes according, so I mustn’t talk.’
‘I intended to return on Tuesday, Sergeant-major,’ Andrew Thomson assured him gravely, ‘but the weather held the mailboat up on Tuesday and again on Thursday.’
‘A good thing I didn’t arrange to come over earlier in the week,’ said the Sergeant-major. ‘I’d have gone bats hanging around at Obaig. Hullo, we’re just getting in. I’ll see you up at the hotel before I cross over to Kiltod.’
‘I’ll have to attend to the correspondence, Sergeant-major. There’ll be three days’ mail, and the head office will be wondering what’s happened. I’m afraid you’ll find it kind of dull up at the hotel just now.’
‘I won’t find it dull. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends and having a jolly good Jock and Doris, as you call it, to celebrate getting back to the two tightest little islands in the world.’
The bank agent smiled sardonically.
‘They’re not very tight just now, Sergeant-major,’ he said, and went off quickly to find his bag.
Sergeant-major Odd puzzled for a moment over this remark, and then with a sudden thought that perhaps his beloved Peggy might have come over from Little Todday to welcome him on the pier he hurried off round to starboard. The pier was crowded with familiar figures, among them Peggy’s father in his knitted red cap; but Peggy herself was not there.
‘You’re a proper mug, Fred,’ he murmured to himself. ‘As if the poor girl would want to see you for the first time after nearly eighteen months with everybody staring at her!’
A minute or two later he was hurrying down the gangplank to greet his future father-in-law.
The movements of the postmaster and leading merchant of Kiltod seemed less quick than he remembered them, and his grey moustache usually so trim was slightly ragged. If Sergeant-major Odd had not been so acutely conscious of the twenty years’ difference between his own age and that of his prospective wife he would have said that Joseph Macroon had grown appreciably older during these last eighteen months. There was, too, in the way he shook hands with him a kind of absent-mindedness as if he was hardly aware of the Sergeant-major’s presence. And as he wished him ‘fàilte do’ ndùthaich’ (welcome to the country), he was not looking at the returned wanderer but at Roderick MacRurie, the owner of the hotel, who was working his great bulk up the gang-plank in search of the purser.2
‘How’s Roderick?’ the Sergeant-major asked.
‘Ach, he’s not well at all at all, Sarchant. He’s had a terrible time, poor soul.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. And how’s … how’s everything on Little Todday?’
‘Terrible. Just as bad there as here. Terrible.’
‘Nothing wrong with Peggy?’
‘What would be wrong with Peggy or Kate Anne?’ their father demanded contemptuously. ‘Smoking away, the pair of them, like two peats. It’s a pity the Government doesn’t run out of cigarettes.’
Joseph took a battered clay pipe out of his pocket, lit it with a noise like a rotary pump, drew two deep gurgling puffs at the closely packed twist, removed the pipe from his mouth, spat gloomily between his legs, and replaced the pipe in his pocket.
Several of Sergeant-major Odd’s old acquaintances had been greeting him, and one of them, a man with a nose and a chin like a lobster’s claw, said something to Joseph in Gaelic.
‘I don’t know, Airchie, but there’s nothing to be seen of Captain MacKechnie, and if they’d brought it he’d have come ashore by now.’
‘Ay, I believe he would,’ agreed Archie MacRurie, generally known as the Biffer, a fisherman of prowess about fifty years old. ‘Ay, he’d have been ashore by now right enough if it had been on board.’
‘Look at Roderick now,’ Joseph exclaimed. ‘You can see it isn’t there by the way the man’s shoulders have died on him. Ah, duine bochd, it’s me that’s sorry for the poor soul.3 Ah well, Sarchant, we’ll be getting down to the Morning Star,’ he said, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat.
‘You’d better come up to the hotel and have a dram with me first while you’re waiting for the mails to be sorted,’ the Sergeant-major suggested.
His two companions looked at him quickly to see if he was laughing at them. Then, perceiving that the invitation had been given in earnest, their manners forbade them to tell him how futile it was lest he should suppose they had suspected him of a deliberate meanness in giving it. Joseph Macroon sighed deeply.
‘What is the use of waiting for the mail? Just a lot of letters for nothing,’ he declared. ‘We’ll be getting them Monday morning.’
Sergeant-major Odd was only too happy not to wait for the sorting of the mail. He had expected to be kept at least another hour or more away from the sight of his Peggy. As Joseph Macroon and he moved across the pier to the steps at the foot of which the Morning Star was moored, Roderick MacRurie came down the gang-plank.
‘Any news, Roderick?’ the postmaster of Little Todday asked.
‘Not a single bottle. A Chruitheir, this is a terrible war, Iosaiph, right enough.4 Do you remember that Sunday night the day the war started? Nobody in the islands could mind such a storm of rain. Water? I never saw so much water come down Ben Sticla. My best cow was drowned like a kitten that night. It wass a sign, Iosaiph, it wass a sign right enough of what wass coming to us. Water! Chust nothing but water! My brother Simon said we would have to pay for it by going to war on the Sabbath. I didn’t take any notice at the time because an elder has to talk like that, you’ll understand. But he was right.’
‘But what exactly has happened? How does water come into it?’ the Sergeant-major asked.
‘Because there hasn’t been a trop of whisky in the two islands for twelve days,’ Roderick MacRurie replied. ‘And I was handing it out for a month before that like my own blood, we were that short.’
‘And we’ll have Lent on us in a fortnight next Wednesday,’ said Joseph Macroon, who as a Catholic of Little Todday was not prepared to allow the Protestants of Great Todday a monopoly of religious emotion. ‘Fancy the Government running out of whisky just before Lent. What a Government!’
‘Do you think Winston Churchill knows they’ve run out of whisky?’ Roderick asked.
‘I don’t believe he will,’ Joseph replied.
‘It’s a pity he wouldn’t be saying something about it on the wireless,’ Roderick observed sagely, for he was a profound admirer of the Prime Minister’s oratory. ‘You never know what these Governments will be doing next. Before we know where we are there’ll be no peer either. We’re running terribly low.’
The passage of time since last he had visited Little Todday was brought home to the Sergeant-major by his first sight of Joseph’s youngest son, Kenny, who was now a lanky stripling of sixteen in charge of his father’s motorboat and always threatening when he was denied anything he wanted for the engine to be off to sea. This evening the Morning Star was on her best behaviour and chugged across the Coolish without stopping once. The water was as smooth as a tarnished silver plate and there was still a glimmer of twilight when they reached the tiny harbour on the top of the tide.
‘Captain Waggett hasn’t managed the perfect black-out at the end of a perfect day yet?’ the Sergeant-major observed with a grin when he saw the light from Joseph Macroon’s shop streaming across the road leading up from the harbour.
‘Ach, they haven’t drawn the curtains. Plenty time,’ said the Chief Warden of Kiltod. ‘Plenty time,’ he murmured to himself remotely.
The Sergeant-major felt that he was indeed back in the islands when he heard those two words, and that of course gave him the keenest pleasure. All the same in view of what he hoped to settle about his own future during this precious week-end, he was chary of accepting the dictum too easily.
‘Time flies, you know,’ he reminded his host. Then in the lighted door of the post-office he saw tall and slim as ever his Peggy, and a moment later he was holding her hands and looking into her deep-blue slanting eyes.
THE gathering in the bar of the Snorvig Hotel on that February evening was so exceptionally gloomy an occasion for Great or Little Todday and the host Roderick MacRurie was so unlike his usual expansive self that it is only fair to give a picture of the islands in happier times and by the kind permission of Mr Hector Hamish Mackay, the well-known topographer of the Hebrides, to quote what he says about the two islands in his book, Faerie Lands Forlorn:
And so after sailing for the whole of a fine summer’s day along the magical coasts of Tìr nan Ôg the gallant Osprey reached Snorvig, the picturesque little port of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) where we dropped anchor and soon afterwards went ashore to enjoy the hospitality of the Snorvig Hotel and the tales of ‘mine host’, Roderick MacRurie, the ‘uncrowned king’ of the island.1 After a lordly spread, of which a magnificent lobster was the pièce de résistance, we sat outside on a terrace of shingle to pore spellbound over a scene of natural beauty which is nowhere surpassed in all the wondrous West.
Down below we could hear the voices of children playing among the various merchandise lying all over the quay and pier until Iain Dubh, the piermaster, should find time to put it away in the store – sweet Gaelic voices that seemed to reach us like the ‘horns of elfland faintly blowing’.
Mr MacRurie, with a grave shake of his impressive head, assured us that the Snorvig children were getting out of hand. Only last week two of them had ridden into the sea a motor-bicycle just arrived from the mainland for the schoolmaster at Bobanish on the other side of the island.
Soon, however, all discussion of modern youth was hushed by the splendour of the sunset beyond Little Todday (Todaidh Beag) which was turning the mighty Atlantic to a sheet of molten gold. Kiltod, the diminutive port of Little Todday, lies opposite Snorvig from which it is separated by a strait of water two miles wide. Little Todday is not so very much inferior in superficial area to its sister island and probably earned its qualifying adjective by the comparative lowness and flatness of the vivid green machair land framed by long white sandy beaches, which contrasts with the more rugged aspect of Great Todday. Here the soil is peaty and the shores are rockbound, while three of its hills, of which Ben Sticla (1400 feet) is the most conspicuous, rise above a thousand feet. The contrast in appearance between the two islands is so remarkable that we are not surprised to learn the inhabitants of both have preserved for hundreds of years an equally remarkable independence of one another, and differ considerably not merely in character but even in religion, Great Todday being Protestant and Little Todday Catholic.
Both of the islands were formerly under the protection of St Tod who is said to have sailed there from Donegal on a log, his monkish habit providing the sail, his arm uplifted in benediction the mast. He built a church at Kiltod the foundations of which beside a holy well are still discernible close to the port. My grief! Nowadays even on Little Todday the old tales of the saint are passing from the memory, and the store of legend has been sadly depleted.
In our time the two islands display no more than a friendly rivalry, but in the old period of clan feuds the MacRuries of Great Todday were always raiding the cattle of their neighbours, and the Macroons of Little Todday were not less adept at making inroads upon the MacRurie sheep. Authorities disagree about the comparative antiquity of the two clans. The Macroons claim to be descended from a seal-woman who loved an exiled son of Clan Donald and bore him seven sons every one of whom brought himself back a mortal bride from the mainland. The MacRuries on the other hand claim to be descended from an exiled Maclean called Ruairidh Ruadh, reputed to have stood seven feet six inches without his brogues.2 This Ruairidh Ruadh was a noted pirate who stole at least one wife from almost every island in the west. The fact that there is no legend of his having stolen a Macroon wife is held by those who support the claim of the MacRuries to greater antiquity to prove that the Macroons had not yet appeared upon the scene.
We shall not venture an opinion on this vexed question. The air is too soft and balmy upon this June evening for genealogical controversy. Let us lean back in our deck-chairs and watch the great sun go dipping down into the sea behind Little Todday. Is that St Brendan’s floating isle we see upon the Western horizon? Forsooth, on such a night it were easy to conjure up that elusive morsel of geography. And now behind us the full moon clears the craggy summit of Ben Sticla and swims south past Ben Pucka to shed a honey-coloured radiance over the calm water of the Coolish, as the strait between the two Toddays is called. Why, oh why, the lover of Eden’s language asks, must the fair Gaelic word Caolas be debased by map-makers to Coolish, so much more suggestive of municipal baths than of these ‘perilous seas’? Alas, such sacrilege is all too sadly prevalent throughout Scotland. We turn our gaze once more to rest spellbound upon the beauty of earth and sea and sky and to let our imagination carry us back out of the materialistic present into the haunted past.
We see again Ruairidh Ruadh’s dark galley creep out from Snorvig and sweep with measured strokes northward up the Coolish on rapine bent. We see again the seal-beaked galley of the Macroons off Tràigh nam Marbh – the Strand of the Dead – and we hear the voices of the rowers lamenting their own dead Chief as they bear his body to the burial-place of the Macroons on the little neighbouring isle of Poppay.3 Alas, for these degenerate days, although Poppay is still a breeding ground for the grey Atlantic seals, the Macroons no longer use it as a burial-ground.
But, hark! What is that melodious moaning we hear in the west? It is the singing of the seals on Poppay and Pillay, the twin small isles that guard the extremities of Little Todday, their fantastic shapes standing out dark against the blood-stained western sky. Would that the present scribe possessed the musical genius of Mrs Kennedy Fraser that he might set down in due notation that melodious moaning!
And now in the entrance of the hotel we notice our host beckoning to us. With one last lingering look at the unearthly beauty of this Hebridean twilight we turn to answer the summons. In our host’s snuggery the glasses reflect with opalescent gleams the flicker of a welcome fire of peats, and as we raise the uisge beatha to our lips with a devout ‘slàinte mhath, slàinte mhór’ we feel that we are indeed privileged visitors to Tìr nan Ôg, and rejoicing in our own renewed youth we give thanks to the beneficent fortune which has brought us once more to the two lovely Toddays, there to dream away a few enchanted days on the edge of the world.4, 5
Tempora mutantur. This evening an almost silent group of elderly or old or very old men sat on the wooden benches round the bar and eyed the glasses of beer on the tables in front of them without relish. Beer does not taste like itself unless it is chasing a dram of neat whisky down the gullet, preferably two drams. To add to the prevailing depression, on account of a shortage of paraffin only two of the six lamps hanging from the ceiling were alight.
‘Did you hear any word of Donald in the post, Airchie?’ the Biffer was asked by Angus MacCormac, a big crofter with an immense grey moustache who had driven in with the lorry from Garryboo, in the extreme north of the island. Donald was the eldest of Archie MacRurie’s four sons now serving their country in the Mercantile Marine.
‘Not a word, not a word,’ he sighed.
‘Och, he’ll be a prisoner of war,’ put in Sammy MacCodrum, another Garryboo crofter, a small man with sparse hair and a nose on him even larger and beakier than the Biffer’s own.
‘Ay, maybe he will and maybe not,’ said the father gloomily. ‘His mother’s made up her mind the lad’s drowned.’
‘Where wass his ship sunk?’ Sammy asked.
‘By what we can reckon it must have been off the Irish coast.’
‘Look at that now,’ Sammy commented. ‘So near and yet so far, as they say.’
‘That’s the worst of it,’ said the father. ‘If he’d been torpedoed away out it might have been long enough before we heard if he was safe, but being so near we ought to have heard by now if he’s a prisoner of war.’
Heads all round were shaken dejectedly. There was indeed nothing in the atmosphere of the bar that evening to encourage an easy optimism.
It was at this moment that Captain Alec MacPhee, the patriarch of Snorvig, now in his ninetieth year, rose from his seat and taking his glass to the bar-counter asked his host to fill it up again.
‘I’m sorry, Captain MacPhee, but unless the peer comes by Monday’s poat the peer will be where the whisky is, and that’s nowhere at all,’ said the big hotel-keeper.
The ancient mariner, who was sailing the Seven Seas before the Franco-Prussian war, emitted such a tremendous gasp of amazement that his great white beard shivered like a grove of aspens.
‘A Thighearna bheannaichte,’ he exhaled, ‘what are you telling me, Roderick?’
‘I’m telling you you’ve had two pints of peer already this evening, Captain MacPhee, and no man can have more.’6
The ancient mariner turned on his heels and walked out of the bar without another word. Outside, they heard the shingle of the terrace crunched by his resolute footsteps. There was neither moon nor star to light him on his way home; but an inward blaze of indignation illuminated the road down the hill to his house, which stood back from the main road round the island in a small garden, of which the principal feature was an enormous clam-shell from the Great Barrier Reef, mounted on a small cairn. His own snug sitting-room was a museum of his long adventurous life. The walls were covered with paintings and faded photographs of the ships in which he had sailed, with assegais and clubs and blowpipes, with bits of china and bits of armour, while over the mantelpiece hung a glass case in which two green pigeons from Fernando Po eyed perpetually an emerald bird of paradise from New Guinea.
Into this room the Captain strode upon that dark February evening and struck the Burmese gong with which he was wont to summon his great-grandniece Flora, a pretty, amiable flibbertigibbet of a girl, who at this date was looking after him until she could get to Glasgow and become a tram-conductress.
An hour later Dr Maclaren came into the bar, where by now the frequenters were all sitting in front of empty glasses.
‘Did the Captain seem all right when he left here?’ Dr Maclaren asked sharply.
He was told what had happened.
‘Well, the shock has killed him,’ the Doctor announced. ‘And I’m not surprised. For the last fifteen years to my knowledge he drank his three drams of whisky and three pints of beer every night of his life and on such a tonic he might have lived to a hundred. He’s had not a drop of whisky for twelve days, and before that only one dram a night for nearly a month. And now tonight he wasn’t able to get his third pint of beer. Well, it’s killed him.’
Dr Maclaren’s usually jovial florid face was lined with bad temper. He was a man who liked his dram, and he was beginning to feel the effects of no whisky on himself.
‘I’ve sent Flora along to her mother,’ he went on. ‘I suppose some of you will be sitting up with the body tonight.’
‘Ay, we’ll see about the caithris right enough,’ one of the men in the bar assured him. ‘Don’t you worry yourself for that, Doctor.’7
When the women had laid out the body in the bedroom on the other side of the passage, some seven or eight male representatives of Great Todday gathered in the Captain’s sitting-room to watch the night away and keep the dead man company.
Roderick MacRurie sat in the Captain’s own armchair, and his presence was a tribute to the sorrow he felt for that failure of his hospitality which had shocked the old mariner out of this world into the next. In the armchair on the other side of the hearth, where a well-laid fire of peats was glowing, sat the Biffer. Round the table were Angus MacCormac, Sammy MacCodrum, Alec Mackinnon, the headmaster of Snorvig School, and two or three more. They were joined presently by Norman Macleod, the attractive young schoolmaster of Watasett, a village at the head of Loch Sleeport near the south-west point of the island.
‘I tried to persuade George Campbell to stay with us for a while,’ he told the company. ‘But he went back in the lorry to Garryboo. He and my sister Catriona fixed things this afternoon and they’ll be married at the beginning of the summer holidays.’
‘Ah, well, Catriona will make him a good wife,’ Roderick MacRurie declared amid general agreement. ‘There isn’t a better cook in Todaidh Mòr.’ He paused. ‘Does Mistress Campbell know Chorge is to be marrying himself so soon?’
‘George is going to tell his mother tonight,’ said Norman. ‘Och, I’m glad for Catriona’s sake, for I’ll be away in the R.A.F. any time now. I’ve had my papers.’
‘Did you have a good dram to drink their health?’ Angus MacCormac asked.
‘Where would I have a dram in this drought of whisky?’ retorted Norman Macleod, with an indignant toss of his long wavy hair.
Sammy MacCodrum shook his head.
‘Chorge will neffer be having the courage to tell Mistress Campbell he’s going to be married on her. Neffer!’ he declared. ‘Not unless he’d trunk a tram the size of Loch Sleeport itself, and then I believe it would turn to water inside of his stamac when he saw his mother gazing at him.’
Further discussion of the Garryboo schoolmaster’s chances of escaping from bachelorhood was interrupted by the entrance of Mrs Farquhar Maclean, the Captain’s great-niece and the mother of Flora, with tea, scones, and oatcakes to sustain the watchers. She was a plump bustling woman of about forty whose husband was away at sea.
‘Ah, Morag, eudail, the Captain went terrible quick,’ Big Roderick sighed.8
‘Och, it was better that way,’ said Mrs Maclean. ‘He lived a terrible long time before he went at all, and I’m sure himself would have wanted to go quick. The bodach was always so quick about everything.9 Our Flora got as thin as bone the way she would be jumping when he always put his head round the door so quick.’ She surveyed the table. ‘There’s plenty more tea and scones in the kitchen, and you’ll just be helping yourselves when I go back home.’
‘Tapadh leat, tapadh leat, a Mhorag,’ said Big Roderick.10 ‘Oidhche mhath.’ The others murmured their thanks and good nights, and when Mrs Maclean had left them to their vigil they started to pour themselves out cups of tea.
‘Ah well, well,’ Roderick muttered with a deep sigh, ‘it’s not for us to crumple at what the Lord provides for us.’
‘I believe the Captain would have grumbled if he was sitting up here with us this night,’ said the Biffer. ‘Och, I’ve often seen him drink a cup of tea right enough, but he would never be looking at it so lovingly before he drank it the way he would be looking at a dram.’
‘That’s right,’ Angus MacCormac agreed. ‘It was a pleasure to see the way he would be looking at a dram before he put it to his mouth. You’d almost be thinking you were going to drink it yourself.’
‘Ay,’ the Biffer agreed in turn, ‘there was a relish in the man’s eyes which made you warm toward another dram yourself. A Chruithear, many’s the time I’ve called for one myself just because the Captain had enjoyed his own so much. When do you think you’ll be seeing whisky again, Roderick?’
‘How would I know, Archie?’ the hotel-keeper replied sombrely. ‘Wasn’t the Minister’s wife asking me that very question this afternoon?’
‘The Minister’s wife?’ exclaimed Alec Mackinnon, his thin body bending over the table like a tall black note of interrogation.
Norman Macleod threw back his head and laughed loudly.
‘Ist, ist, Mr Macleod,’ the hotel-keeper rebuked, ‘don’t be laughing, please.11 Mistress Morrison was wanting some whisky for the Minister’s cold. My brother Simon went up to the Manse to see him this evening, and he says the poor soul has no more voice in him than a bit of dead grass in the wind.’
‘What kind of a stuffed pird is that at all?’ the high-pitched voice of Sammy MacCodrum broke in suddenly to ask. He had been staring for some time at the emerald bird of paradise between the two green pigeons over the mantelpiece. ‘I never saw a pird with a tail on him like that.’
‘That’s a bird of paradise, Sammy,’ the Snorvig headmaster informed him.
‘A pird of baratice,’ Sammy echoed in amazement. ‘How was the Captain after shooting a pird of baratice and him on earth? You’re making a fun and a choke of me, Mr Mackinnon, and this is no time to be making funs and chokes of people whateffer.’
‘No, no, Mr Mackinnon’s not joking, Sammy,’ Norman Macleod assured him earnestly. ‘Captain MacPhee shot it in a balloon.’
‘Don’t you believe him, Sammy,’ said Alec Mackinnon. ‘The Captain brought it back with him from New Guinea. And those two green pigeons came from West Africa.’
‘Ah, well, well, well, fancy a man who’s travelled about all over the world like the Captain having to stand before his Creator chust for the want of a pint of peer.’
Sammy MacCodrum shook his head in a bewilderment of ironic and melancholy reflection.
‘It wassn’t the want of a pint of peer that killed the Captain, a Shomhairle,’ said the hotel-keeper.12 ‘Ach, yess, it was a shock right enough when I had to tell him he could not be having his third pint, but if his constitution had not been weakened so powerfully for want of whisky chust at the time of year when a man needs it most, himself would be sitting where I’m sitting now in his own armchair. A dhuine dhuine, we are all miserable worrums in the eyes of the Lord.13 He chust stamps on us when He has a mind to. Did anybody bring the Book? Maybe Mr Mackinnon would read us the death of Moses in sight of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey.’
‘But the poor old Captain never had a glimpse of the Promised Land,’ Norman Macleod pointed out. ‘There wasn’t a drop of whisky in sight.’
‘Angus, will you see if the Captain has his Bible there,’ said Roderick, with a reproachful glance at the flippant young schoolmaster.
Angus MacCormac searched the Captain’s bookshelf. ‘The China Pi-lot, the West Africa Pi-lot, the Pacific Pi-lot,’ he read out. ‘Och, there’s nothing but Pi-lots.’
Roderick clicked his tongue. ‘The poor Captain! There’s only one Pilot for the voyage he’s making now. Maybe it’s beside his bed.’
‘And it’s not for us to be taking it from him if it is,’ the Biffer declared firmly. ‘He was a good man, and he was a very patriotic man. I remember fine when we had no weapons for the Home Guard and we all thought the Germans would be on top of us at any minute, and the Captain brought those assegais hanging up there down to the police-station, ay, and he handed his own shot-gun over to Constable Macrae at the same time.’
‘Sarchant Odd wasn’t too pleased at all this evening when he heard we hadn’t been keeping our shooting up to the mark,’ said Angus MacCormac.
‘It would be the Panker who wass telling him that. He didn’t see Mr Wackett on the pier,’ Sammy MacCodrum put in.
‘I’ll bet Waggett hasn’t run out of his whisky,’ Norman Macleod chuckled.
‘You oughtn’t to say a thing like that, Mr Macleod,’ the Snorvig schoolmaster urged, ‘unless you have positive proof.’
Paul Waggett was the retired stockbroker who had bought Snorvig House and rented the shooting of the two islands from the Department of Agriculture. He commanded the Home Guard Company recruited from the Toddays and in the opinion of the islanders never allowed himself to run out of creature comforts.
And indeed Norman Macleod was right. When the watchers down in the Captain’s house were preparing for their long vigil with the support of tea, up at Snorvig House Paul Waggett was pouring himself out a carefully measured dram, which he handed to his wife.
‘If you’ll add sugar and hot water, old lady, I’ll drink it when I’m in bed. I rather think I caught a germ at the Manse this afternoon. Mr Morrison really ought to keep that cold of his to himself.’
‘I know, dear, I think it’s so selfish the way people scatter colds all over the place. I do hope you’ve caught it in time.’
‘You mean “not caught” it, Dolly,’ said her husband with that superior smile which sent his sharp nose up in the air.
‘Yes, of course, dear, how silly of me!’
‘I think if I drink a double ration of hot grog I may fend it off. That’s the beauty of only drinking whisky on rare occasions. One gets the benefit of it when one does drink it.’
Mrs Waggett who had been hearing this observation reiterated over nearly twenty-five years of connubiality tried to look as if she had heard it now for the first time.
‘You’re worried because there are no lemons,’ said her husband kindly. ‘Don’t worry, old lady. À la guerre comme à la guerre, as the French used to say in the last war.’ He stressed the word ‘last’ severely. The French collapse in 1940 was a favourite theme of his for a display of prosy superficiality.
And his wife who knew it hurried off to boil the kettle.
‘You go on, dear, and get quickly into bed. I’ll bring your whisky up to you.’
When a few minutes later she arrived in the bedroom with a steaming glass of heavily-sugared whisky, Paul Waggett was lying back in pillowed luxury.
‘Now sip this, Paul, while I’m getting ready for bed, and then I’ll take the glass away. You won’t want it left beside you.’
When Mrs Waggett returned in a dressing-gown her husband was leaning back with an expression of profound satisfaction.
‘I think that ought to defeat my cold,’ he announced with evident admiration of his own cunning. ‘Mrs Morrison was complaining this afternoon that she couldn’t get any whisky for the Minister.’
‘We still have another bottle,’ Mrs Waggett reminded him.
‘I know, but if every time people run out of whisky we are going to be called upon to supply it we shall be in the same position as them. They must learn not to be improvident. Improvidence is the besetting sin of the Islands. If they had all the whisky in Scotland, do you think they would be able to keep it? No, no, they’d drink it as fast as they could. Just as fast as they could,’ he repeated dreamily.
‘But poor Mrs Morrison never expected not to be able to get whisky from Roderick MacRurie when it was wanted for medical reasons,’ Mrs Waggett ventured to point out. ‘The Minister never keeps it in the house.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean by improvidence,’ her husband insisted. ‘Look at Captain MacPhee. Maclaren tells me that it was being suddenly cut off from whisky which killed him. Of course, Maclaren always exaggerates. Yet no doubt the old man was inconvenienced. Now, you’d think somebody like him who has had the command of ships would have taken care not to run out of whisky if it was so important to his comfort. But no, he was just as improvident as that silly niece of his who was supposed to be looking after him. It’s in the blood. And it’s even getting hold of a man like Sergeant-major Odd. I’d no idea he was coming over this evening. I must say I’m rather surprised he didn’t come up to Snorvig House before he crossed over to Little Todday.’
‘Oh, well, Paul, I expect he was anxious to see Peggy Macroon. He’s been away a long time.’
‘Yes, that’s why it’s so strange he didn’t come up here as soon as he got off the boat. I noticed before he left us to go to that job in Devonshire that this West Highland casualness was getting hold of him.’
‘I wonder if he and Peggy Macroon will be getting married soon,’ Mrs Waggett said.
‘I’m afraid I’m more anxious to know if he will be able to smarten up my men. They’re getting terribly slack.’
‘It is disheartening for you, Paul, after all the trouble you’ve taken with them.’
‘When duty calls we don’t consider our personal feelings, Dolly. Where’s the book I was reading? I hope you haven’t taken it downstairs.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Death in the Jampot. It’s a Crime Club volume.’
‘Oh dear, I believe I did take it downstairs. Silly of me. I thought you’d finished it,’ said Mrs Waggett.
Her husband shook his head.
‘Don’t you start going native, old lady.’
She removed the empty glass and went off in search of the book. It was quickly found.
‘Is it a good story?’ she asked solicitously as she presented it to him.
‘Not quite enough action for me, but it’s not too bad.’
Mrs Waggett doffed her dressing-gown, got into bed and composed herself for sleep. Her husband read a few pages of Death in the Jampot; but the agreeable fumes of the hot grog made him too drowsy to spot even the most obvious clue, and he was not long in following Mrs Waggett’s example.
THE Sergeant-major found Joseph Macroon in a mood of pessimism about the prospect of marriage. When the two daughters of the household had retired to bed with a paternal reminder that the barrel of paraffin was almost empty, that they must not be late for early Mass, and that the saying of their prayers did not require a lamp, the postmaster took his guest into the little room at the back of the shop and expressed an opinion that there was enough coal on the fire to last as long as they would be wanting to sit up.
‘I was hoping we might settle the date when me and Peggy get safely married, Mr Macroon,’ the Sergeant-major suggested after he had seated himself in one of the armchairs on either side of the hearth.
‘Ah, yes, well, we’ll be talking about that when summer’s over,’ Joseph replied, his eyes wandering round the room, his tone vague. ‘Och, that’ll be quite time enough,’ he added on a firmer note.
‘I don’t agree with you there, Mr Macroon.’
‘We’ll see better then the way the war is going. These Chaps are terrible. I believe they’re worse than the Chermans,’ said Joseph.
‘Oh, they’re regular bastards. No mistake about that. All the same, I don’t see what they’ve got to do with me and Peggy getting married.’
‘No, no,’ Joseph murmured ambiguously. ‘Will you have a bottle of ginger-ale, Sarchant?’
‘No, thanks, I don’t think I’ll have anything.’
‘You won’t get anything,’ Joseph assured him. ‘Do you know when I last had a dram? Twelve days ago, and Lent begins the week after next.’
‘Don’t you ever drink whisky in Lent?’
‘Och, I drink whisky any time of the year. I don’t drink so much of it that I must give it up in Lent.’
‘Then what difference will Lent make?’ the Sergeant-major asked in perplexity.
‘Man, we always allow ourselves a few extra drams before Lent begins. You’re not a Catholic. You don’t understand what a solemn sort of a time Lent is. And it’s very long.’
‘We have Lent in the Church of England,’ said the Sergeant-major.
Joseph Macroon looked doubtful.
‘At least, I’m pretty sure I remember having to give up sugar in Lent when I was a nipper.’
‘Look at that now,’ Joseph exclaimed in astonishment. ‘Well, well, well, I never thought that the English ever denied themselves anything. Isn’t that strange, now? Ay, ay, you live and learn. That’s very true. When do you think this terrible war will be over, Sarchant?’
‘Oh, it may go on for another three years with the Jerries, and I daresay you could add another year or more to finish off the Japs. That’s why I’m anxious not to waste any more time in getting married. You see, if the war does stop sooner than we expect my job at Fort Augustus will stop too. That’ll mean me going to live down in Nottingham to look after my mother’s shop. And I want you to have as long as possible to get used to the idear of Peggy living so far away. Fort Augustus is much nearer her old home than what Nottingham will be. And by the time she and me have been living for a couple of years at Fort Augustus you’ll hardly notice it if she goes a bit further off. Colonel Lindsay-Wolseley’s very kindly offered me a furnished cottage at Tummie for ten bob a week. It’s a gift. He’s a fine gentleman.’
‘Och, he’s a fine gentleman right enough,’ Joseph agreed. ‘We’ve never had a disagreeable word at the Council meetings. And I believe he’ll support us when the question of the new school for Kiltod comes up again at the March meeting.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ the Sergeant-major declared fervidly.
‘The present school is not fit for children at all. It is not fit for chickens. “How many water-closets have you?” one of these wise men from the East as Ben Nevis calls them was asking me at the last meeting? General Mackenzie of Mam. “How many water-closets, General? The whole island is a water-closet,” I said. The General was a bit taken aback when I told him that. Och, I believe we’ll get our school right enough.’
But Joseph’s optimism was all too brief. A moment later he was sighing. ‘And yet I don’t know so much at all. They want all the rates for themselves in Inverness. They’re terribly greedy for themselves on the other side of the county. So many Mackenzies there, and the air just gives them an appetite.’
‘But what about me and Peggy getting married?’ Sergeant-major Odd pressed. ‘Don’t you think just before Easter would be a good time?’
‘Just before Easter? What are you saying, man?’ Joseph exclaimed in horror. ‘You have some very peculiar thoughts, Sarchant.’
‘Well, just after Easter? Anyway, before April’s out?’