Authors: Iain Crichton Smith
I was born and brought up in the village but in spite of that I sometimes find it, as I have said, claustrophobic and I like to get away from it and fishing is the pretext I use. When people see
you sitting down dangling a rod in the water they think you are quite respectable and sensible whereas if you sat there and simply thought and brooded they would think you eccentric. It’s
amazing the difference a long piece of wood makes to your reputation among your fellow-men. After all if I never catch anything they merely think I am a poor fisherman and this is more acceptable
than to think me silly.
So I sit there by the loch with the rod dangling from my hand and I watch the sun go down and I smell the fragrance of the plants and flowers and I watch the circles the fish make in the water
as they plop about the loch. Sometimes if there are midges I am rather uncomfortable but one can’t have everything and quite a lot of the time there are no midges. And I really do like to see
the sun setting, as the mountains ahead of me become blue and then purple and then quite dark. The sunsets are quite spectacular and probably I am the only person in the village who ever notices
them.
So I was sitting by the lochside when I saw the hermit at a good distance away sitting by himself. I knew it was the hermit since there was no loch where he was and no other person from the
village would sit by himself on the moor staring at nothing as the hermit was doing. He was exactly like a statue – perhaps like Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ – and as Dougie had
said he looked quite happy. I nearly went over to talk to him but for some reason I didn’t do so. If it had been anyone from the village I would have felt obliged to do so but as I
didn’t know the hermit I felt it would be all right if I stayed where I was. Sometimes I watched him and sometimes I didn’t. But I noticed that he held the same pose all the time, that
statue-like pose of which I have just spoken. I myself tend to be a little restless after a while. Sometimes I will get up from the lochside and walk about, and sometimes I will take out a
cigarette and light it (especially if there are midges), but I don’t have the ability to stay perfectly still for a long period as he obviously had. I envied him for that. And I wondered
about him. Perhaps he was some kind of monk or religious person. Perhaps he had made a vow of silence which he was strictly adhering to. But at the same time I didn’t think that that was the
case.
At any rate I sat there looking at him and sometimes at the loch which bubbled with the rings made by the fish, and I felt about him a queer sense of destiny. It was as if he had always been
sitting where he was sitting now, as if he was rooted to the moor like one of the Standing Stones behind him whose purpose no one knew and which had been there forever. (There are in fact Standing
Stones on the moor though no one knows what they signify or where they came from. In the summer time you see tourists standing among them with cameras but it was too late in the evening to see any
there now.) I thought of what Dougie had said, that the hermit was not in the habit of buying whisky, and I considered this a perceptive observation. After all, lonely people do drink a lot and the
fact that he didn’t drink showed that he was exceptional in his own way. It might also of course show that he didn’t have much money. Perhaps he was not a monk at all, but a new kind of
man who was able to live happily on his own without speaking to anyone at all. Like a god, or an animal.
All the time that I had been looking at him he hadn’t moved. And behind him the sun was setting, large and red. Soon the stars would come out and the pale moon. I wondered how long he
would stay there. The night certainly was mild enough and he could probably stay out there all night if he wished to. And as he obviously didn’t care for other people’s opinions he
might very well do that. I on the other hand wasn’t like that. Before I could leave the village and sit out by myself I had to have a fishing rod even though I didn’t fish. And people
in the village knew very well that I didn’t fish, or at least that I never brought any fish home with me. Still, the charade between me and the villagers had to be played out, a charade that
he was clearly too inferior or superior to care about. In any case there were no new events happening in the village apart from his arrival there and therefore I thought about him a lot. It was
almost as if I knew him already though I hadn’t spoken to him. It was as if he were a figment of my imagination that had taken shape in front of me. I even felt emotions about him, a mixture
of love and hate. I felt these even though I had only seen him once. Which was very odd as I had always thought myself above such petty feelings.
Sometimes I thought that I would take a book out with me and read it in the clear evening light, but that too would have made me appear odd. Fishing didn’t matter but reading books did, so
I had never done that. The hermit wasn’t reading a book but I knew that if he had thought about it and were a book reader he would have taken his book out with him and not cared what people
thought of him. He wasn’t a prisoner of convention. I on the other hand had been a headmaster here and I could only do what I thought they expected of me. So I could dangle a rod uselessly in
the water – which I thought absurd – and I couldn’t read a book among that fragrance, which was what would have suited me better. After a while – the hermit still sitting
throughout without moving – I rose, took my rod, and made my way home across the moor which was red with heather.
When I arrived back at the house Murdo Murray was as usual sitting on a big stone beside the house he was building. He has been building this house for five years and all that he has finished is
one wall. Day after day he goes out with his barrow to the moor and gathers big solid stones which he lays down beside the partially finished house. As usual too he was wearing his yellow canvas
jersey.
‘Did you catch anything?’ he asked and smiled fatly.
‘No,’ I said, ‘nothing.’
He smiled again. Sometimes I dislike intensely his big red fat face and despise him for his idleness. How could a man start on a project like building a house and take such a long time to do it
and not even care what people thought of him or what they were saying about him? Did he have no idea what excellence and efficiency were? But no, he lived in a dream of idleness and large stones,
that was his whole life. Most of the time he sat on a stone and watched the world go by. He would say, ‘One day there will be a bathroom here and a bedroom there,’ and he would point
lazily at spaces above the ground around him. Then he would sigh, ‘My wife and daughters are always after me, but I can’t do more than it is possible for me to do, isn’t that
right?’
After a while he would repeat, ‘No man can do more than it is possible for him to do.’
As a matter of fact, we often wondered what he would do with himself if he ever finished the house. It looked as if he didn’t want to finish it. The children of the village would often
gather round him, and help him, and he would tell them stories as he sat on a big stone, large and fat. No, he would never finish the house, that was clear, and for some reason that bothered me. I
hated to see these big useless stones lying about, as if they were the remnants of some gigantic purpose of the past.
‘It’s a fine evening,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and there are no midges. Why don’t you go out fishing yourself?’ I added.
‘Me?’ he said and laughed. ‘I’ve got enough to do without going fishing.’ And he probably believed that too, I thought. He probably believed that he was a very busy
man with not a minute to himself, living in the middle of a world of demanding stones.
‘If you want any help at any time,’ I would say to him, but he would answer, ‘No, I’ll do fine as I am. If I don’t finish the house someone will finish it.’
And he lived on in that belief. He shifted his big buttocks about on the stone and said, ‘I used to go fishing in a boat as you know but I never fished in the lochs. And that was a long time
ago. Myself and Donald Macleod. We used to go in the boat but I never fished the lochs.’
I felt a tired peace creeping over me and I didn’t want to speak. Sometimes it’s impossible to summon up enough energy to talk to people, and I had been growing more and more like
that recently. I was growing impatient of those long silences when two people would sit beside each other and think their own thought and then finally like a fish surfacing someone would speak, as
he was doing now, words without meaning or coherence. Why was it necessary to speak at all?
He was clearly finished for the day, sitting there surrounded by his stones. Perhaps he didn’t want to go into the house in case his wife would nag him for not making quicker progress. Or
perhaps he was sitting there inert as a mirror on which pictures print themselves. In the late light I thought of him as a man sitting in a cemetery with rough unengraved headstones around him.
Perhaps that was what our world was like, a world of rough unengraved headstones, lacking the finished marble quality of the world of the Greeks.
Big rough stones on a moor.
I left him there and went back to my own house.
When I entered I felt as I usually did the emptiness and the order. The TV set, the radio and the bookcases were in their places. The mirrors and ornaments and furniture had their own quiet
world which I sometimes had the eerie feeling excluded me altogether. When my wife was alive the furniture seemed less remote than it seemed to be now. Even the pictures on the walls had withdrawn
into a world of their own. I often had the crazy feeling that while I was out my furniture was conducting a private life of its own which froze immediately I went in the door and that sometimes I
would half catch tables and chairs returning hastily to their usual places in the room. It was all very odd, very disquieting.
I went to the cupboard and poured myself a whisky and then I sat down in my chair after switching on the fire and picking up a book from the bookcase. It was a copy of Browning’s poems.
Since I retired I had far more time to read books unconnected with my job but I didn’t read as much as I thought I would have done and what I did read was mostly poetry. I would find myself
falling asleep in the middle of the day and at other times I would pace about the house restlessly as if I were in a cage which I myself had built.
In the chair opposite me my wife used to sit and she would tell me stories which I hardly ever listened to. ‘Kirsty’s daughter’s gone away to London again. They say that
she’s walking the streets, did you know?’ And I would raise my head and nod without speaking. And she would go on to something else. But most of the time I wouldn’t say anything.
It didn’t occur to me that my wife’s remarks required an answer and for a lot of the time I couldn’t think of anything to say anyway. Her voice was like a background of flowing
water, a natural phenomenon which I had grown accustomed to. Now there was no voice at all in the house except that of the radio or the TV and the only order was that which I imposed on it.
I sipped my whisky slowly and read my Browning. I drank much more now since my wife had died. Not that I actually loved her, at least I didn’t think I did. It had never been a large
glowing affair, much more a quieter, more continuous fire. We were companions but we weren’t lovers. But in those days I didn’t drink as much as I do now. I think loneliness and drink
must go together, as Dougie said. Browning however is another matter. His poetry has a cheerful tone and apparently he was in love with his wife, or at least so we must believe after that dramatic
elopement. I wondered what people would say of me when one day I died in this house as was inevitable. They might perhaps say, ‘Well, he was a good headmaster. He was interested in the
children,’ and then dig a hole and leave me there. On a cold rainy day perhaps. And then they would go back to their homes. But they wouldn’t say that I had done much for the village. I
hadn’t, of course. I had always been a stranger in the village. Just as much as the hermit was. Though I had been born and brought up in it. My thoughts had never been the villagers’
thoughts, they aspired to be higher and more permanent than the business of the seasons.
It was strange how quiet I felt the house was, as if I missed that monotonous conversation, as if even yet I could see someone sitting in that chair opposite me. But of course there was no one.
Mary was rotting away somewhere else, in the damp ground. In spite of Browning. In spite of the illusion of warmth which the whisky momentarily gave me.
3
The following day I met Kirsty who was on her way to Murdo’s house with a cup in her hand. An evil Christian woman. She never misses a sermon or Communion, going about in
her dark clothes, with her thin bitter face and the nose from which there is a continual drip like the drip from a tap which needs a washer and which makes an irritating sound in the sink night and
day. She has a daughter who appears periodically from London and then goes away again after a stormy period at home. It is said that she works in the streets in Soho but this may be malice since
anyone as bitterly Christian as Kirsty is must be brought down to the level of common humanity and given at least one cross to bear in this fallen world.
It wasn’t long before she spoke about the hermit.
‘It shouldn’t be allowed,’ she said.
‘What shouldn’t?’ I asked.
‘That man living in that hut. Why, he might be a murderer or a thief or a gangster. The police might be after him. I wonder if anyone’s thought of that.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t think he is any of these things,’ I said. ‘I’m told he looks very gentle.’
‘So do lots of murderers,’ she said sharply.
I didn’t want to be talking to her. I was listening to the music of the sea which one can hear clearly on a fine summer’s day, as this one was. Sometimes when I hear it I don’t
want to be talking to people at all. What would we do without this ancient unalterable music which lies below our daily concerns and which at the deepest moments of our lives we hear eternally
present, with its salty echo?