in the present. A lately published book on Ireland has been welcomed by
critics, and I suppose by readers, because in it is no mention of
evictions and crowbar brigades and horrors of which newspapers make good
capital. I have never been in Ireland, and it may be that you can travel
there and forget the people. But in the Hebrides the human silence and
the desolate homes and the almost unbroken moorland would let us, as
foreigners, think of nothing else. Since our return we have read Scott
and Mr. Hamerton and Miss Gordon Cumming and the Duke of Argyll, and
many others who have helped to make or mar the romance and history of
the Highlands. But the true story of the Highlands as they are I think
we learned for ourselves when we looked, as we did at Ulva, from the
laird's mansion to the crofter's hovel. It is the story of the tyranny
of the few, the slavery of the many, which can be learned still more
fully from the reports of the Royal Commission, published by the English
Government.
When we returned to the inn we had no thought but to get away at once,
how, we hardly knew. The landlady suggested three plans. We could wait
until the morrow, when the Gomestra men, as she, a native, called them,
and not Gometra men, as Mr. Black has it, would row us out to meet the
steamboat coming from Iona. How "Macleod of Dare" like this would have
been! We could be ferried over the Sound, and walk back by Loch-Na-Keal,
the way we had come, then around its southern shores, and so across to
Loch Scridain, at the head of which was an inn. Or we could sail across
Loch-Na-Keal, and thus cut off many miles of the distance that lay
between us and our next resting-place. We must, however, decide at once;
there were two gentlemen below who would take us in their boat, but if
we did not want them, they must go back to cut the laird's hay. Were we
willing to wait until evening, they would take us for half price. The
rain now fell on the loch, but we made our bargain with the gentlemen on
the spot.
The landlady gave our sailing quite the air of an adventure. We need not
be alarmed, she said, as indeed we had not thought of being; the only
danger was to the gentlemen coming home. We found them at the landing,
ballasting the boat with stones and getting on their oil-skins. We
suggested that they should take us all the way to Bunessan, but they
would not hear of it. Only the older of the two, an old gray-haired man,
could speak English; they would not venture out to sea in such weather,
he told us.
As we sailed past the white house we asked him if he had ever heard of
Dr. Johnson. He shook his head and then turned to the other man, and the
two began to talk in Gaelic. "Toctor Shonson, Toctor Shonson," we heard
them say to each other. But they both kept shaking their heads, and
finally the old man again said they had never heard of him.
When the wind swept the rain from the hills of Ulva, we could see that
on the western side of the island the strange basaltic formation like
that of Staffa begins. Near the low green shores of Inch-Kenneth a yacht
lay at anchor. It belonged to one of the lairds of Mull, the boatman
said. The people, who have barely enough to live on themselves, can
still afford to support a yacht for their landlord. How this can be is
the real problem of the Hebrides. To solve it is to explain the crofter
question without the aid of a Royal Commission.
On the Gribun shore the landing-place was a long row of stones, slippery
with wet sea-weed. The old man gave me his arm and led me in safety to
the foot of the meadows beyond. He was the gentleman the landlady had
called him. A Frenchman could not have been more polite. Nor was there
in his politeness the servility, which in England makes one look to
honest rudeness with relief. Caste distinctions may be bitterly felt in
the homes of the Western Islanders, but in their manner is something of
the equality which French republicans love. They can be courteous
without cringing. Englishmen call this familiarity. But then the
Englishman who understands true politeness is the exception.
It was, if anything, wetter on land than it had been on the water. To
reach the road we waded through a broad meadow knee-high in dripping
grass. The mist kept rising and falling, and one minute we could see the
islands--Ulva and Gometra and Inch-Kenneth and even Staffa--and the next
only grayness. In the narrow pass over the headland between Loch-Na-Keal
and Loch Scridain the clouds rolled slowly down the mountains on either
side, lower and lower, until presently we were walking through them. And
as we went, as was proper in the land of Macleod of Dare, a strange
thing happened; for scarcely had the clouds closed about us than a great
gust of wind swept through the pass and whirled them away for a moment.
Then the wind fell, and again we were swallowed up in grayness, and
could scarcely see. Just as we were within sight of Loch Scridain, down
poured torrents of rain. A little farther on and we were half-way up to
our knees in a bridgeless stream that came rushing down the mountains
across the road.
[Illustration: HEADLAND OF GRIBUN, FROM ULVA.]
We passed two wind-and-rain-beaten villages and occasional lonely
cottages, and the ruins of others. Mr. Hamerton says that nothing is
more lovely to an artist than a Highland cottage after a rain; but the
trouble is, you seldom see it after the rain, for in the Hebrides the
rain it raineth every day and always. We came, too, to one big dreary
house and a drearier kirk. The rest of the way there was but the wet
wilderness, with the wet road following the curves of the loch, and even
striking a mile or so inland to cross with the bridge a river which
falls into it at its head. The inn was on the opposite shore; a
short-cut lay across the water; there were boats moored to the northern
bank where we walked, but not a ferryman to be found. A woman in a clean
white cap, who stood in a cottage door-way, did not even know if there
was a ferry.
Towards evening the rain stopped; the light of the setting sun shone on
the hills before us as it seldom does except in pictures of the
Hebrides; but on a walking tour when the chance for pleasure comes,
one's capacity for enjoyment has gone. At the end of a day's tramp one
can see little beauty, save that of a good dinner and a soft bed, both
of which are the exception in the Hebrides.
The inn at
KINLOCH
was a two-storied cottage, with kitchen full of women and tap-room full
of geese and hens below stairs, dining and sleeping rooms above. The
bed-rooms were all occupied--by the family, I suppose, since we were
given our choice; but after choosing, everything had to be moved out
before we could move in. However, we made a shift to change our shoes
and stockings, and in the dining-room we crouched over a big fire, while
the steam rose in clouds from our soaked tweeds. The landlady came up at
once with whiskey and glasses.
"And will you accept a glass from me?" she asked.
This was the Highland hospitality of which one reads, and it was more to
our taste than the whiskey.
For supper of course we had ham and eggs, but it took no less than two
hours for the landlady to cook them and to set the table. She was the
sister of the landlady at Ulva, she told us. "And it's a good house my
sister keeps whatever," she said; and then she wanted to know, "Had the
wee laddie, Donald, ferried us over? And we had come from Salen, and
were we going to Bunessan? It will be twelve miles to Bunessan
whatever. And then to Iona?" It will be a great kirk we should see
there, she had heard; but she had never been to Iona. She spoke
excellent English, with the soft, drawling accent we thought so pleasant
to hear, and we wished she could cook as well as she talked.
While we waited, J----, out of sympathy, fed a lean hound on
meat-lozenges. He looked so starved that we could but hope each would
prove for him the substantial meal it is said to be on the label of the
box, and which we had not yet found it.
After supper it was two hours more before the bedroom was ready, and I
think we had rarely been so tired. We sat nodding over the fire, sick
with sleep. When we could stand it no longer, we made a raid upon the
room while the landlady, who spent most of her time on the stairs, was
on her hundredth pilgrimage below, and locked ourselves in. After that,
she kept coming back with towels and one thing and another until we were
in bed and asleep.
We had ordered more ham and eggs for eight o'clock in the morning, and
asked to be awakened at seven. We might have spared ourselves the
trouble--no one called us. It was half-past nine before breakfast was on
the table, and it would not have been served then had not J---- gone
into the kitchen to see it cooked. The only difference between our
morning and evening meal was in the bill, where, according to island
reckoning, tea and ham and eggs called supper, are worth sixpence more
than eggs and ham and tea called breakfast.
At the last moment up came the landlady, again with whiskey and glasses.
"And will you accept a glass from me?"
But indeed we could not. To begin a twelve miles' walk with whiskey was
out of the question. We afterwards learned that this was but good form
on her part. The true Highlander always expects to drink a wee drappie
with the coming and the parting guest. It would have been true
politeness for us to accept. However, we did not know it at the time,
and the whiskey was bad. She seemed hurt by our refusal. I thought her a
shade less cordial when we came to say goodby.
The wind was still blowing a gale, but it drove the clouds beyond the
bald mountains towards Ben-More, and brought no showers with it.
Everything had grown bright with the morning but the cottages, and they,
perhaps because of the contrast with the blue loveliness of water and
sky and hills, seemed darker and more desolate than in the rain. Here
and there along the loch a few were gathered in melancholy groups,
pathless and chimneyless, smoke pouring from door-ways and through holes
in the walls, mud at the very thresholds. For every cottage standing
there was another in ruins. On the top of a low hill, over which we made
a short-cut, was a deserted village, conveniently out of sight of the
road. No traveller, unless he chanced upon it as we did, would know of
it. It was not high enough or far enough from other cottages for the
shielings upon which the Duke of Argyll thinks so much false sentiment
has been wasted. We found a few black-faced sheep in possession of the
ruins, and before them, I fear, have been driven not merely cattle from
summer pastures, but men from their only homes. There were several
school-houses between Kinloch and Bunessan, and we half hoped that these
were in a measure responsible for roofless walls and desolate hearths.
But the truth is, the Duke of Argyll and other landlords of Mull find it
less trouble to collect rents from a few large tenants than from many
small ones, and to suit their convenience the people have had to go. It
is their land; why should they not do with it as they think best?
Almost all this Ross of Mull, on which we now were, belongs to the Duke
of Argyll, the defender of Scotland as it was and as it is; and I think
in all the Hebrides there is no place more desolate. We saw perhaps more
signs of bitter poverty in Skye and in Barra. But in these islands the
evicted have settled again upon the crofts of their friends or
relations. Often it is because the many are thus forced to live upon
land that can scarce support the few that all are so poor. But the
Islander loves his home as he once loved his chief, and now hates his
landlord, and he must be in extremity indeed before he will go from it.
Knowing this, you feel the greatness of the misery in the Ross of Mull,
from which the people have flown as if from a plague-stricken land. The
greater part of it is silent and barren as the desert. We walked for
miles, seeing no living things save a mere handful of sheep grazing on
the hills, and the white sea-gulls perched on the low sea-weed covered
rocks of Loch Scridain. And beyond the barren waste of land was the sea
without a sail upon its waters, and the lonely islands, which we knew
were no less desolate. The cruel climate of this far northern country
has had little to do with the people's flight. Neither, indeed, has
natural barrenness. The soil in the Highlands is not naturally barren,
the Duke of Argyll himself has said. The few large farms by the way were
good proof of what might be, even in the rocky Ross of Mull.
It seemed odd in the midst of the wilderness to meet two peddlers loaded
with gay gilt frames. They thought it a "blowy" day, and so did a man
who passed soon after in a dog-cart. But the women in clean white caps
whom we met on the road could answer our questions only in streams of
Gaelic.
We saw no one else but men and women getting in the harvest, or bending
beneath great burdens of sea-weed as they toiled up the hill from the
shores of the loch. There was a lonely graveyard by the way; but nowhere
does death seem so great a blessing as we thought it must be here.
It was a long twelve miles, and the knapsacks were growing heavier with
each day. But we were walking for our lunch; there were no inns on our
road. For one reason or another, to me it was our hardest day's work. I
think I must have starved had not J---- slung my knapsack on his already
heavily laden shoulders. At the last,
BUNESSAN
came as a surprise. We were looking sadly at the endless line of road
over the moors in front of us, when we turned a corner, and there was
the little white town, with a pleasant inn, close to the waters of Loch
Slach.
We had to wait--we were growing used to waiting--for our lunch; but at
last when it came it seemed a banquet. We were not asked to eat either
ham or eggs. Altogether, we were so well pleased that we brought the
day's walk to an end. But it seemed that the maid who came to the door
was less pleased with us. Our knapsacks, too large for comfort, were
too small for respectability. Our clothes were weather-worn. The
landlord bade her show us to a bedroom; but before we had finished our
lunch she had locked every door in the house, carefully leaving the keys
on the outer side, and, in her zeal, locking one man in. This, however,
we did not learn until later, when English people staying in the inn
told us what suspicious characters we were. They said she was stupid,
which we had already found out for ourselves.
Bunessan is the show-place of the Ross of Mull; steamers occasionally
land at a pier on the loch, two miles distant. Tourists come to the inn
for the fishing. If they go no farther into the island, they probably
carry away with them impressions of well-to-do people and benevolent
landlords--the impressions, probably, the Duke of Argyll wishes to
produce. After Kilpatrick and the other wretched groups of cottages we
had passed in the morning, it did indeed seem happy and prosperous. It
may be that we should have been less struck with it and its inn had it
not been for the things we had already seen and experienced. Certainly,
at dinner, dishes which we thought luxuries were found fault with by the
rest of the company. But then they had their own opinion of Bunessan.
They had taken it on trust, after hearing it praised; but no sooner had
they come than they wished themselves away again. One suggested that
friends should be induced to stay for a summer and educate the place,
which might thus be made bearable for them in the future; but the others
would not hear of it--one trial was quite enough. We were all very
confidential about our plans, and took pleasure in mutually discouraging
each other. J---- and I were foolish, they said, to go to Iona, where
the cathedral was so insignificant that from the steamer they mistook it
for the parish church. We, on our side, declared it worse than folly for
them to go from Bunessan to Tobermory, the dreariest spot in all the
dreariness of Mull. In the end we agreed that our coming to the island
was a mistake, and that no one but Mr. Black could have a good word to
say for it. Somehow, we made it seem--and it was a comfort to find some
one else to abuse--as if he had brought us here under false pretences.
But, indeed, whoever thinks to find Mull as it is described in "Macleod
of Dare" cannot but be disappointed. Castle Dare must have been not very
far from Bunessan, on the Ross of Mull. It was to this very inn Lady
Macleod wished to send Gertrude White and her father; and when you have
seen the home of the Macleods for yourself, you would have, like Mr.
Black, no mercy for Sir Keith, but you would spare his sweetheart.
The fact is, Mr. Black's descriptions are misleading, though I must
admit that even as we found fault with him, one of his strange things
happened; for, far out beyond the loch and its purple hills we saw
Staffa, and the sea below and the sky above it, turned to gold as the
sun sank into the Atlantic. But then, as a rule, the things that happen
in Mull are less strange than disagreeable. For one evening's
loveliness, you must put up with hours of cold and damp discomfort. Of
course, if you own a castle or a yacht, you can improve your point of
view.
In the morning after this beautiful sunset, the wind blew the rain
through the window in gusts over our toilet-table. Again no one called
us. The morning hours of the Hebrides are even later than those of
London, which we had hitherto supposed the latest in the working world.
When we went down-stairs there were cups and saucers and plates on the
breakfast-table, but nothing else; when we asked for our bill the maid
said we should have it in a wee bittee, which we knew to mean long
hours, and J----, as at Kinloch, took matters into his own hands.
For the first time we felt our superiority as we shouldered our
knapsacks. Because of the early rain and wind, the other people in the
inn had given up the boat to Tobermory. Already, breakfast over, the
rain stopped and clouds grew light. We were on our way to Iona while
they still made plans to follow us with their babies and bundles.
[Illustration: "ONE OF HIS STRANGE THINGS HAPPENED."]
The road lay for six miles over the moors. There were two or three large
houses with cultivated fields, a few black dreary cottages, and the
ruins of others. But this end of the Ross of Mull was mostly, as when
David Balfour walked across it, bog and brier and big stones. The coast
was all rock, great piles of red granite jutting out in uneven masses
into the sound that separates Iona from the Ross. When we reached it the
ferryman had just come and gone. It was the 11th of August, and men with
guns, in readiness for the morrow, were getting into a dog-cart, its
horses' heads turned towards Bunessan. Two fishermen, in a boat filled
with lobster nets, rowed to the tiny landing. We asked them to take us
across, but with a word they refused. There was nothing to do but to sit
on the rocks and wait, in fear lest the party from Bunessan, with their
children and endless boxes and bundles--thirteen, one man told us he
had--should overtake us and give us and our knapsacks no chance in the
inns of Iona.
Wind and rain blew in our faces. The fishermen made off in their little
boat, hugging the rocky shore. Above us, on the granite, were two
cottages, no less naked and cold. Across the Sound we looked to a little
white town low on the wind-swept water, and to a towered cathedral dark
against the gray-green rocks. A steamer had just brought Cook's daily
pilgrims to St. Columba's shrine.
[Illustration]
ON THE ISLANDS.
All things come to those who wait, even the ferry-men of the Hebrides;
but the steamer had carried the pilgrims far from St. Columba's Island
towards Staffa before the little ferry-boat sailed with the wind, round
the rocks, into the tiny bay by the landing. One passenger was put out,
and a woman ran down from the black cottages for a bundle done up in a
handkerchief, from which, as she took it, fell out broken pieces of
bread and meat. Unconsciously, these people are always reminding you of
their poverty.
There was no sailing in the teeth of the wind. The ferry-man and a small
boy with him rowed, keeping under the shelter of the rocks as far as
possible. At first both were silent. But we were fast learning that this
silence is not the stupidity or surliness which the stranger in the
islands is apt to think it. It comes rather of the sadness which has
been the Western Islander's inheritance for generations, and of his
shyness in speaking the foreign Scotch--that is, if he can speak it at
all--for which he is so often laughed at. Once you break through the
silence, and show the people that you do not look upon them as children
or as slaves, they are friendly enough.
All this part of the Ross of Mull, as far as we could see, belonged to
the Duke of Argyll, our ferry-man said. There had been trouble here as
in Tiree, and the Commission was coming in a week. He had only his house
and his boat. Five shillings and sixpence a year he paid; it was not
much, but it was about the land there was trouble, and he had no land.
We might have agreed with him and thought his rent no great thing, had
we not seen his bare cottage, stranded on the bare rocks, probably built
by himself or by his father before him. As it was, it seemed to us, if
there was any question of payment, it should have been the other way.
Our stay in Iona was the one perfect part of our journey. In the first
place, we were free to wander where and how we chose without thought of
long miles to be walked before nightfall, and, better still, without our
knapsacks, which we left in the inn. It was no small surprise to learn
that we had our choice of three hotels. After careful study of "Macleod
of Dare," we rather expected to be stranded on an almost uninhabited
island. We can now recommend Mr. Black, on his next visit, to try the
very excellent house at which we stayed. This was St. Columba's Inn. We
went to it, not so much to do honor to the saint as because it was the
biggest in the place, the nearest to the cathedral, and commanded the
finest view.
[Illustration: IN THE TRANSEPT OF THE CATHEDRAL, IONA.]
Southward, it looked to the broken walls of the nunnery rising high
above house roofs and chimneys, and farther to a sweep of water, and
farther still to the Ross of Mull, the low black rock of Erraid, the
isle Mr. Stevenson has made famous, at its far end. In the distance,
shadowy islands lay over the gray sea. To the north was the cathedral
and the ruined monastery.
The inn was quite full, but the landlady promised us a room in the
manse, a short way down the road.
Iona is the show-place by which we fancied the Duke of Argyll must hope
to answer the question, once in a great while asked, about misery,
terrorism, extortion, rent, in the Hebrides. Strangers come to the
islands only to fish or to shoot. It is the exception when, as at Iona,
there are sights to be seen. They have time to give only a glance to the
Islander and his home. In Iona this home seems decent enough; if you
stop to ask the Islander what he thinks, however, I doubt if it will be
praise alone you will hear of his model landlord. Above the stony beach,
where boats lie among the rocks, is the village street, lined with white
cottages; and beyond, fields of tall grain and good pasture slope upward
to the foot of the low green hills, whose highest peak rises to the
north of the village, a background for the cathedral. Many of the
cottages are new, others are whitewashed into comparative cheerfulness.
The crops on the lower ground, the sheep and cattle on the hills, are
pleasanter to see in an island where men live than endless wastes of
heather. In Iona the civilization of the monks of the Dark Ages has
survived even the modern sportsman.
[Illustration: IONA.]