The Sea for Breakfast (15 page)

‘Well,' went on Erchy, ‘when the pilgrims left here they went on to Dodo's place and they must have got a good hold of Dodo for I'm hearin' now that he and that woman slipped off quietly to Glasgow and he's married her.'

‘Married her? After all these years?' we all echoed incredulously.

‘Aye, that's what I'm hearin' and I believe it's the truth.'

There was a moment of silence as everyone digested the news and then Morag said, philosophically: ‘Well, if he has, it's the first time I've ever known that man finish a job once he'd begun it.'

Because of the attention of the pilgrims it must not be supposed that the inhabitants of Bruach were any more godly or ungodly than any other community either in the Islands or elsewhere. It was certainly not to Bruach that a certain missionary was referring when he complained from the pulpit: ‘The birds and the beasts and the roots of the the earth have their season, but the women of this place are always in season.' The village had never aspired to a church social—there was nowhere to hold such a function; the practice of concubinage was, as Erchy had pointed out, rare enough to be discounted entirely; admittedly the pipe-smokers unregenerately smoked their pipes with as much pleasure when the pilgrims had departed as they had before they arrived. Nevertheless every pilgrim visiting Bruach could be sure of a full and ostensibly receptive congregation, for the innate courtesy of the Bruachites compelled them to attend the meetings. The pilgrims they reasoned, like the henwife, had taken the trouble to come to the village in order to help them. They might be no more interested in the destiny of their souls than they were in the destiny of their poultry but they flocked to the services with dispassionate regularity and listened with evident piety. After the service the women would murmur sanctimoniously to one another, ‘My, but wasn't he a good preacher,' or, ‘What a splendid sermon that was,' for they are easily carried away by the tritest of dramatic performances; but once away from the church one could discern that little glint of hope behind the eyes that one of them would venture some comically outrageous aside and so allow them to untense themselves with a little burst of laughter. After long residence among them I do not believe that Gaels are essentially religious. They have been constrained by Calvinism, but their readiness to shed the constraint when circumstances appear to offer an excuse is, for me, sufficient proof that they have not absorbed it. They can be insufferably pious; they can also be sickeningly blasphemous. I recall once pausing on the threshold of a house I was about to enter while a devout old man read with slow reverence the nightly passage from the Bible to his wife. The lamplit ritual of the scene was most impressive until the old man, coming to the end of the reading, shut the Bible with a snap and, slinging it across the table towards his wife, commanded her to ‘Put that bloody thing away now.' I remember too an irrepressible old bachelor living alone, who would no more have considered taking a bite of food without first asking the blessing on it man of paying his rates without first receiving the final demand note; after a stormy night which had stripped part of his roof so that the ensuing rain squalls sent dismal trickles down into his kitchen, he was sitting before a bowl of breakfast porridge, asking for the customary blessing. As he came to the end of his prayer a steady jet of water descended from the roof directly into his bowl. Unhurriedly he said the ‘Amen' and then without noticeable pause or alteration of tone he went on, ‘But beggin' your pardon, Lord, I'd thank you not to go pissin' in my porridge.'

So, with negligible effect on the community, the various religious representatives, all indifferently referred to as ‘pilgrims', came and went. Once Bruach had been startled to find a black-robed priest in its midst; a kindly, jovial man who was every day to be seen striding the rough moors or climbing the hills, his black robes fluttering around him. ‘Puttin' all the hens off their layin', that's all he does,' Morag grumbled to me.

Since I had come to live in Bruach a second church had been built so that it was no longer necessary for the two sects to hold joint services
^*
. The new church was about half a mile farther along the road than the old one and was similarly constructed of plain corrugated iron. It was to this new church that Morag, Behag, Kate and myself set out one Wednesday in October to hear the last of a series of services conducted by two earnest young men who were making an evangelistic tour of the Hebrides which, they hoped, would arrest if not recall the great number of people who had back-slidden since their previous visit. The opening of their campaign in Bruach had been accompanied by the onslaught of a fierce gale which had raged almost without respite throughout the first four or five days, buffeting the walk of the church and driving rain and leaden hail against the root with machine-gun force. During the last day or two, however, the storm had moderated, first into busy squalls with flurries of hailstones that stung one's cheeks like hot sparks, then into frisky breezes that brought tinsel-like rain, and finally this evening into a dramatic calm that was intensified by the steady sibilance of the sea outside the bay. Above the décor of hill peaks the stars flicked on haphazardly and the immature moon peeped out from a stage-wing of cloud, like a too-impetuous performer.

A tall figure leading a cow on a rope loomed up before us as we approached the church.

‘Surely you're no bringin' the cow to the service, Ruari?' shouted Morag.

‘Service?' bawled deaf Ruari.

‘Aye, at the church tonight,' replied Morag patiently.

‘What are they after havin' the bull at the church for?' demanded Ruari. ‘No wonder I canna' find him. Here's me been leadin' this beast round since twelve o'clock this mornin' and no a sign did I see of him yet. I was thinkin' he must have gone over a cliff. At the church indeed!' His tirade rumbled into disgusted expectoration.

Morag took hold of his ear and explained firmly. ‘It's they privileges. They're holdin' a service again tonight. There's no bull at the church.'

‘Here, here, but the bull was down in the Glen yesterday. I saw him myself. He can no be far away,' volunteered Kate.

‘He could be far enough,' muttered Ruari, sitting down by the road and wiping his hand over his face. ‘I'm tired out lookin' for him.'

‘Then come and sit in the church and listen to the privileges,' suggested Morag. ‘It's no use sittin' there on the wet grass where you'll get your death of cold.'

‘It's too late to take her to the bull tonight,' said Kate. ‘D' ye think she'll hold till mornin'?'

‘She might,' admitted Ruari half-heartedly.

‘Ach then, see and tie her to the post just and come to the service,' instructed Morag, taking the rope from the unresisting Ruari and tying it round a telegraph pole.

Obediently Ruari followed us into the church whither we were pursued by reproachful bawls from the cow. We were late, so we had to sit in the front row, the church having filled from the back. The pilgrims, with resolutely happy faces, were ready to start.

Several times during the week I had encountered the pilgrims on my daily walks and always it was difficult to reconcile the pleasant-spoken, normally intelligent young men with whom I conversed with the two who from the pulpit stridently harangued the congregation each evening. Tonight they seemed to be even more emotionally tense than hitherto. Taking their text from the Acts of the Apostles they warned us, contradicted by frustrated bawls from Ruari's cow, not to emulate Felix and ‘await our more convenient season'. They illustrated the text by relating to us the story of a young man who had elected to postpone his decision on conversion until after he had attended a social function in the church hall. At this function the young man had caught a cold which had rapidly progressed to pneumonia and when at last he lay dying he had charged the evangelists to ensure that when his coffin was carried past the church hall they should stop and give the people this message: ‘I am in everlasting damnation and all because of a social and dance in the church hall.' The pilgrim, the muscles of his face and throat working, paused for a full threatening minute to allow the congregation to reflect upon the tragedy. Ruari's cow did not pause for an instant, but bellowed despairingly. No one appeared to be much affected by either performance. ‘Ah, my friends,' continued the pilgrim, battling manfully against an obvious desire to weep; ‘that young man waited his more convenient season and it was too late.' At this juncture he was so overcome by emotion that he had to sit down hurriedly in the pulpit and cover his face with a handkerchief while his partner took over the rest of the service. We sang a hymn and after being adjured once again to get rid of any ‘Drusillas in our midst' we paid our fee at the door and filed out.

‘Well done!' was Morag's first remark and I, thinking she was commenting on the sermon, was about to agree spinelessly, when I saw her eyes were on the moonlit road in front of us.

Kate's guess that the bull could not be far away had apparently not been very wide of the mark and the bellowed invitations of the cow had brought him to her. ‘She wasn't goin' to wait her more convenient season,' whispered Kate wickedly.

I was not at all surprised to hear the following morning that after the service the bus, packed with members of the congregation, had left Bruach for a dance in the next village. In the wee small hours, long after the exultant pilgrims had retired to their beds, they were blissfully unaware that the noise of engines that penetrated their celestial dreams announced the return of last night's congregation, or a significant part of it, exhausted after a fervid dancing session and not a little the worse for whisky. It was still later that Angus and Hector arrived home. They had taken their rifles with them in the bus and dropped off on the return journey so as to go poaching venison at first light.

The two male pilgrims were soon followed by two middle-aged lady pilgrims who, no doubt feeling that the Bruachites were in need of constant rather than intermittent ministration, moved into the empty house adjoining the burial ground and prepared for a lengthy stay. One was a spinster, tiny, shiny, plump and gushing, with small blue eyes which glistened with tears whenever she was emotionally aroused, as perhaps by an observation on the weather or by the receipt of a compliment on a pretty dress. The other was a widow who had been married briefly to a jockey. She was dark and morose, with curiously mottled cheeks which looked as though they might have been used for stubbing out cigarettes, and her long, thin face constantly wore such an outraged expression that it reminded me of an emphatic exclamation mark. Also she had a pronounced stammer and in no time at all the village had dubbed them ‘Flutter and Stutter'. They did not, I think, belong to any particular denomination and from Stutter's faintly servile attitude one got the impression that her religion was a very neutral affair, whipped into fervour only when necessary to appease her more ecstatic companion and so ensure a continuance of her favours. Flutter's religion was, I am convinced, mainly glandular.

When she was not occupied with religious meetings or in visiting, Flutter knitted prolifically and was distressed because she could find no market for her work. Stutter's quaint hobby was the making of finger-stalls from odd scraps of material; checked ginghams, pyjama cloth, tartan, all were neatly sewn and finished with white tape. I ordered one of Flutter's jerseys, which made her so happy the tears spilled over. I could have cried too when I got the jersey home and found it would have amply made a loose cover for my armchair. Fortunately, Stutter did not try to sell her finger-stalls but she generously left me a bundle of them whenever she visited me. After she had gone I used to examine my fingers critically, counting them to make sure I really had only ten, and then I would count again the rising stock of finger-stalls in my first-aid tin which at its peak totalled a hundred and six.

Because they were female ‘privileges' and because they preached happiness instead of hell-fire, the men did not feel it incumbent on them to attend the weekly meetings which the two pilgrims held in their cottage, but the women, with their more pliable conscience and glad of any diversion, turned up regularly to sing hymns and be read to by Flutter. Sometimes the readings were from the Bible but just as often they were stories from missionary magazines or, on particularly exciting evenings, from
The Man-Eaters of Kumaan
or even
King Solomons Mines
. For the reading Miss Flutter invariably took up her position directly in front of a mirror above the fireplace into which she glanced frequently for reassurance. When it was time for prayers, regardless of the work-a-day attire of her congregation, she would take her hat from the dresser and carefully arrange it on her head before announcing ‘We will now try to put up a little prayer,' much m the same way as a poacher might confide that he was going to ‘try to put up a little grouse'. I must admit there were times when the ‘Go-back, go-back' cry of the disturbed grouse would have seemed an appropriate response. These meetings were repeated on Sundays for the children of those parents prepared to endure the jeremiad tongues and lashing sarcasm of their Calvinistic elders to whom Sunday school was frivolous to the point of profanity. At the Sunday meetings and to a semblance of the tune of ‘Hear the Pennies Dropping' extracted from a tortured violin by Miss Stutter, the children were invited to drop their pennies into a ‘Present from Blackpool' teapot. In return they received a gaily coloured tract card; when the pilgrims ran out of tract cards they substituted cigarette cards. The children thought little of Flutter's reading; they thought even less of Stutter's violin fit's as wicked as the bagpipes on a Sunday but it's no half as good a noise,' one little boy confided to me); some of them reckoned a coloured card a very poor return for their penny, yet, because it was somewhere to go to escape the smothering Sabbath piety of their own homes, the children attended with a regularity that both flattered and astonished the pilgrims. So much so that they decided to give a party as a reward, some of the money they had collected being used to provide the refreshments. Now although many of the crofters had been broad-minded enough to join in the services at the cottage the association of parties with religion was to them completely unacceptable and though it was only obliquely expressed the pilgrims would not have needed undue powers of perception to. have become aware of the general disapproval of their project but, happily insulated by their own egotism, they sailed along with the arrangements. Miss Flutter resolutely learned poetry to recite. Miss Stutter practised her violin, while both made the rounds of the village extracting so many faithful promises of attendance that I wondered what the outcome of it all would be.