From London Far (14 page)

‘Dorcas,’ said Miss Isabella, ‘is this person a
banker
?’ And the hereditary Captain’s gaze, which was penetrating and indeed a trifle wild, travelled past her visitor in what was distinguishably the direction of the oubliette.

‘By no means, Tibbie.’ Miss Dorcas, though a woman formidable enough in herself, spoke in some nervous agitation. ‘Mr Properjohn – whom I wish to present to you – is a man of business. But not by any means a banker. Nor do I think that he is connected with the paddle steamers. It would appear that he has proposals to make to you which are in some way connected with Inchfarr. And by drawing out his cheque-book he merely means to imply that the arrangement would result in the immediate payment of a sum of money.’

Miss Isabella, whose eyes had been narrowed on Mr Properjohn’s tartan and gargantuan
skeandhu
, widened them abruptly at this. ‘Stay!’ she said commandingly to Mr Properjohn. ‘We admit parley.’ And, turning round, she led the way into the recesses of her castle.

Mr Properjohn took one last look at the gulls – for, having some artistry in his temperament, he had almost persuaded himself that they were indeed the end of his manoeuvres – and followed. His step was lighter and his kilt swung gallantly as he moved – gallantly enough to have done credit to the Black Watch or the Gay Gordons. For he had won the day and knew it.

Or perhaps it should be said that Mr Properjohn had won the evening. For the sun was now low in the western heaven; the precipitous rocks of Inchfarr, gleaming white at other hours of the day, were a dark silhouette against its broadening mass; presently the reddening disk would spill itself into a line of fire on the horizon and disappear. The castle was a place of sprawling shadows and fantastically eroded forms shot through by fugitive gleams of light like some vast prone skeleton in which fireflies danced. And Mr Properjohn, as if he were indeed a Traveller eager for the Picturesque, took the plainest delight in this romantically accented gloaming, this Gothic twilight. His enthusiasm, if not always intelligent, was unflagging – and the more interesting for being absent-mindedly expressed in several languages. ‘Peeutiful!’ he exclaimed when viewing what remained of the vaulting of the banqueting hall.
‘Wunderschön
!’ And
‘Wunderbar
!’ and
‘Ausgezeichnet
!’ he murmured as he was led up the interminable staircase buried in the wall of the keep; and when conducted to the dizzying
Aussichtspunkt
of the uppermost bartisan he declared that the sheer drop to the moat below was
effrayant
in the extreme. The Misses Macleod, who, like all good Scots, lived far closer to Europe than Englishmen contrive to do, were considerably taken with this pronounced if puzzling cosmopolitanism. They scarcely noticed that without a further word of business having been spoken they had themselves unprecedentedly conducted a stranger on the grand tour of Castle Moila – a tour the final stages of which had to be accomplished behind a flaming torch born aloft by the flabbergasted Tammas.
‘Uomo da bosco e da riviera
,’ said Mr Properjohn in appraising Tammas himself.
‘Bel cecino
!’ And on finding that Tammas was stone-deaf, very short-sighted, something crippled, and much astray in his wits, Mr Properjohn’s enthusiasm rose to such a pitch that he gave him half a crown. This, although extremely surprising to everybody, was perhaps less curious than his pronounced approbation of the well-nigh grotesquely inconvenient living arrangements to which the Misses Macleod had been obliged to submit themselves in their island home.

It will be recalled that Castle Moila consists of two main courts, each occupying a limb or claw of the bifurcate peninsula upon which the building stands, these being linked together by the massive keep at that point where the castle faces the causey to the body of the island. The general form is thus that of a vast semicircle or half-girdle of stone, the inner face of which follows and crowns the great arc of cliff and scree which surround the deep and retired anchorage below. But on all this seaward side of the castle the ravages of past military science, as also of ever present and eating Time, have been extreme, so that here are nothing but broken walls and roofless chambers, spiral staircases ending in air, and masses of masonry mysteriously impending over empty space, with darnel and thistle and sea-holly growing from clefts in the immemorial stone. Only on the extreme outer perimeter of the far-spreading pile is there a series of high and narrow chambers in which habitation is possible.

For the Misses Macleod, therefore, life in the castle was rather like life in the corridors of a railway train frozen into immobility while rounding a sharp curve and then pounded and pashed into debris in all its parts save the interminable concatination of corridors themselves. And as all the inhabited parts of Castle Moila faced towards Moila itself and the mainland, and none of them towards Inchfarr and the open sea, it was evident that the anchorage was no more under the observation of human eye than when the previous hereditary Captain had departed with his governess cart and Moila had been abandoned to the seagulls. It was after Mr Properjohn had satisfied himself of this, and had surveyed, from a hazardous perch on the crumbling Western Ward, the pitchy darkness of the deep-water inlet below, that he returned to his business proposals. By this time it had become plain that whisky and oatcakes must be provided, and it was while discussing these in Miss Macleod’s solar – an apartment furnished in the Victorian taste, but always referred to under this finely medieval name – that Mr Properjohn explained about the Flying Foxes.

Mr Properjohn had successfully employed Flying Foxes – more technically known as a telpher span – in numerous parts of the world. If the Misses Macleod had ever visited the mining districts of Western Australia – The Misses Macleod disclaimed being travelled after this fashion, but admitted to a voyage in the Adriatic in the course of which they were tolerably confident that they had disembarked and spent some nights at Spalato, which was no doubt the same place that Mr Properjohn referred to as Split. Miss Isabella seemed to remember that their hostelry had been called the
Grand Hôtel de l’Univers;
Miss Dorcas did verily believe that Mr Properjohn’s Flying Foxes had there been within the field of observation from her bedroom window. Miss Isabella had no recollection of the Foxes, but her conviction as to the name of the hotel strengthened, and she was prepared to allow Miss Dorcas the Foxes if Miss Dorcas allowed her this. Mr Properjohn produced paper and pencil and showed the old ladies (for so we may now without ungallantry describe them) how Flying Foxes work. And although Miss Isabella’s mind wandered away every now and then to the Forty-Five or farther, and Miss Dorcas’ to plumbing (for Miss Dorcas had all her life longed for
drains
; the idea of them fascinated her; and on five hundred a year wonders might be possible) – although the old ladies, we say, listened only amid these distractions, Mr Properjohn yet contrived to make of it all a most friendly and informative evening. The Flying Foxes would approach virtually noiselessly from the mainland; they would sweep high over the castle above an ample provision of safety-nets; three pylons, or at the most four, would carry them on to Inchfarr. There they would be loaded with the guano – of which the deposits were so tremendous as to justify this machinery – and return as they had come. When they reached the mainland once more their jaws would open, the guano would fall into waiting lorries, and Macrocosmic Chemicals, Ltd., Inc., and Prop., would be inestimably furthered in the beneficent activities for which it lived. Moreover, there would be that cheque.

Flesh and blood – even that of a Highland aristocracy – is weak and frail. Less than a couple of hours before, the Misses Macleod had regarded as the most intolerable assault upon their just privacy the sporadic appearance of a paddle steamer on waters nearly a league removed from their home. Now they were seriously envisaging the installation of an endless chain of gigantic buckets each one of which should whisk through the skies above them the accumulated droppings of whole generations of birds. The hereditary Captain and her sister, like Lord Tennyson in his prophetic poem, would see their heavens filled with commerce. And they had only Mr Properjohn’s word for it that there would not rain a ghastly dew – to wit, ammonium oxalate and urate – upon such roofs as Castle Moila could still show.

The money appealed to Miss Dorcas. What appealed to Miss Isabella is obscure. Perhaps she saw in this tremendous contrivance a potential engine of war such as might have been invented by Leonardo da Vinci – an instrument for pouring a derisive ammunition upon the hostile forces of the mainland. Or perhaps she saw in it an equally ingenious means of provisioning her island were it blockaded by an enemy fleet.

Be this as it may, Miss Isabella closed with Mr Properjohn and asked him to stay the night. As Hamish Macleod and his boat had long since departed, the only alternative to this would have been a vigil under a clump of whins or in one of the more outlying ruins. Miss Isabella’s invitation was thus a matter more of humanity than of hospitality. And as Miss Dorcas busied herself to find a bedchamber without broken windows, sheets without holes, and – most difficult of all – a sleeping-garment without the most obvious feminine suggestions, it is to be feared that her thoughts were less on the comfort these would bring to a benighted stranger than on boilers, towel-rails, drying-cupboards, hot and cold taps, baths, and water-closets. On these latter in particular Miss Dorcas had made extensive observations during her travels to Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, and other capitals. Like all who have given thought to this matter, she had been amazed by the multiplicity of forms which are to be found subsumed under the one governing idea of this convenience, and still more by the astounding variety of names which convention decrees should be imprinted on them. Her favourite she had found – curiously enough – no farther off than Fort Augustus. It was called the MacIsaacs. And as Prometheus had brought fire to men, so would Mr Properjohn bring a MacIsaacs to Castle Moila. So much was Miss Dorcas possessed by this sanitary reverie that she went to bed herself without once reflecting that Mr Properjohn’s proposal – like the guano it concerned – was rather a fishy affair.

The reader, who perceives at once that the Misses Macleod were being
gulled
, will hardly forgive her for this obtuseness. But let him remember the opinion of the poet Butler:

What makes all doctrines plain and clear?

About two hundred pounds a year.

It is not otherwise with business propositions. And in the Highlands of Scotland five hundred pounds goes a very long way.

Some years passed. Miss Isabella received one hundred and twenty-five pounds quarterly. Workmen came from Glasgow and installed a MacIsaacs in the Postern Tower, a boiler-house in the Counterscarp, and a bathroom somewhat inconveniently located within the walls of the Outer Enceinte. The Flying Foxes worked regularly by day and intermittently by night as well. They had been put up in record time (Mr Properjohn’s visit to Castle Moila had been in the early months of 1939) and by such an army of labourers that the Misses Macleod had feared a permanent neighbourhood of many employees of the Macrocosmic Chemical Company. This foreboding, however, turned out to be unfounded. On Inchfarr itself two ancient persons – presumably devoid of olfactory sensations – were installed in a tin hut from which, week in and week out, they showed no disposition to depart; and their efforts apparently sufficed to fill the maw of the Foxes as they arrived. At the mainland end of the line, where the Foxes voided themselves into large covered motor-lorries, an engineer and his assistant composed the only staff which appeared to be regularly required. And these two also lived a solitary life of their own, rarely emerging from a tall, blind building of corrugated iron which served both as their living quarters, an engine-house and a shelter within which this final stage in the despatch of the guano accomplished itself.

Thus life in the castle, bating small changes of routine dictated by the necessity of using the new amenities provided, went on very much as before. Miss Dorcas’ mind had turned from drains to trenches, shelters, and tunnels, and she spent much time planning molings and burrowings through the living rock upon which Castle Moila stood – this with the very rational object of bidding defiance to Marshal Goering’s
Luftwaffe
when it should choose to appear in force over the island and demand its capitulation.

Miss Isabella thought little of the
Luftwaffe
, and not very much even of the Forty-five, her mind having taken a definite turn from modern times and being much occupied with the daily exigencies of life in the fifteenth century. Miss Isabella, in fact, had got news of gunpowder, and she saw with considerable intellectual clarity how this disagreeable innovation was likely to affect the castle-owning class.

At other times Miss Isabella was sane enough and sat amid the grass and poppies and flag-irises of the inner ward, looking up at the passing Foxes with a faintly sceptical eye. And the ladies were still waited upon by Tammas – who slit the throats of the calves more slowly than ever – and by Mrs Cameron – who had now completed a sampler depicting Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego bound in their coats, their hose, their hats, and their other garments, and cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace. This devotional composition Mrs Cameron had caused to be glazed and hung opposite the kitchen range, thus achieving a pleasantly realistic flicker of flame across its surface on dull afternoons.

So much for the retinue of the Misses Macleod, which was augmented only by a lad called Shamus, red-haired, innocent of the English tongue, of an age indeterminate between eleven and eighteen, and of skill to control the petrol engine without which, as it had appeared, modern conveniences could not be installed in the castle. Shamus ate and slept in the Barbican, tended his engine, and three or four times a week went off in a rowing boat after girls. If a boat were denied him he would swim, which was very dangerous, and when returning would lay hands on any boat that offered. The nearest girls, as it happened, were Mr Properjohn’s maids, and this amatory link alone united Castle Moila with its benefactor.