The Hills is Lonely (24 page)

In spite of the policeman's obvious reluctance, Duncan grasped his arm compellingly and amid jeers and encouragements the two disappeared. Dancing was resumed, and when, about half an hour later, the policeman returned alone, he was heard confiding to enquirers that he'd got so fed up with Duncan hangin' round his neck and insistin' on bein' jailed that he'd pushed him in through a little narrow window at the back of the hall, told him it was a prison cell and cleared off as quickly as he could. It transpired that the ‘little narrow window' belonged to the ladies' lavatory!

At three o' clock in the morning the dancers were still in fine fettle and old men and young men, dowagers and damsels, were capering about the soapy room with the exuberance of two-year-olds, the fervour of their dancing banishing the missionary and his prophecies of Hell-fire to the regions of their inspiration. The men had discarded their jackets, collars and ties and were dancing in shirt sleeves, their expressions a mixture of ecstasy and bliss. At the commencement of each dance they approached the girls with condescending masculinity, using the same phrase, the same peremptory voice and intonation when requesting them to dance as they used when they wished to move an obstinate cow. It sounded suspiciously like the English farmer's ‘Get up there, Daisy!' The roadmen were much in evidence, inches of their sunburnt bull-necks emerging above constricting neck-bands, their shirts soaked with perspiration. Boisterously they skipped and vaulted about the uneven floor, wielding their partners as they had wielded their picks and shovels, though I should say that the latter had received the more consideration. Their dancing was an ungainly combination of capers, lunges and caprioles and was attended by an incessant chorus of male and female shrieks; the former rapturous, the latter agonised. It struck me that none of the roadmen had changed his boots. Lachy, hot and dishevelled, pranced vengefully across the floor brandishing his two partners as though he was practising for ‘tossing the caber' rather than leading them through the intricacies of a ‘Dashing White Sergeant'. Johnny was being propelled hither and thither by Elspeth the schoolteacher; his legs looked as though they were moving mechanically; his eyes were tight shut. It was quite possible that he was fast asleep! Watching the dancers I recalled a phrase of the ‘warning' notice —‘lassies now's your chance to shine'. The lassies were certainly shining and if they had not mopped their pretty faces profusely (borrowing one another's handkerchiefs for the purpose) they would have shone a good deal more; the perspiration showed as dark patches which reached from the armpits almost to the waistlines of their flimsy blouses. The wooden walls of the room were running with condensation; the air was blue with tobacco smoke, and cigarette butts and empty packets were being trodden and kicked around the floor by the feet of the dancers. At the end of each dance the men dropped their partners as though they were hot—perhaps the simile is not inappropriate—and hurried outside.

At one time during the evening I ventured outside myself for a breath of fresh air and was surprised to hear the sound of a spade being plunged into earth.

‘There's Miss Peckwitt.' The remark came out of the darkness and a moment later Lachy's voice was asking me if he'd ‘get a shine of a torch'. Obediently I went towards the voice and found a group of men gazing with puzzled intensity at a newly turned patch of earth. Lachy bent down, unearthed a bottle, and held it in the beam of the torch.

‘That's no ours, Lachy,' said Johnny who was also one of the group.

‘What brand was ours then?' asked Lachy.

‘It was no that one anyway,' insisted someone; ‘haste and put that back.'

‘Then were the hell is ours?' asked Lachy irritably as he replaced the bottle and covered it over. ‘I'm damty sure it was somewhere here we put it.'

He set to work again in a slightly different spot and this time his digging brought to light a bottle which they were all satisfied was their own.

‘I have another one I buried earlier over by the dyke there,' said Johnny. He turned to me: ‘Miss Peckwitt will be thinkin' it's awful strange to be buryin' the drinks,' he said ruefully, ‘but you canna' dance with bottles in your pockets and you canna' trust folks here when it comes to whisky.' He addressed Lachy again. ‘Come and we'll get my bottle while we have the light,' he said eagerly.

‘Not on your life,' replied Lachy. ‘Leave that one where it is for now. We'll drink this one first—it won't take long.'

It certainly did not take them long and within a short time they were again borrowing my torch. How many bottles of whisky had been buried in the grounds of the hall that night I had no idea, but whenever I went in search of fresh air there was always one group or another busy digging.

‘How is it that there happens to be a spade at the hall?' I asked Johnny. ‘Surely the committee don't provide that, do they?'

‘Of course they don't,' he rejoined. ‘We picked it up from the burial ground on our way here.' And misunderstanding my look of surprise he went on: ‘It's all right, we're goin' to put it back on our way home.'

‘The trouble with these girls is that they canna' dance,' grumbled Lachy as we sat watching the progress of an aptly named reel. His wandering eye fixed briefly on a full-blooded young siren who had draped herself sinuously over a couple of chairs and was raking the ‘stag lines' with hungry eyes. ‘That's the only one here who knows how to dance properly,' he finished. I recognised the girl as the missionary's daughter.

I pointed to an extremely pretty girl with a glorious mop of blonde curls. ‘Who is she?' I asked.

‘Ach, she doesn't rightly belong here at all,' said Lachy, and after a few minutes cogitation whispered: ‘Not properly she doesn't—one half of her comes from Glasgow.'

The next dance was one which was utterly unfamiliar to me and though I studied the steps of the revellers I could see no two couples who followed the same pattern. ‘Tripping the light fantastic' might have been a fair description of some of the steps executed by the more lissom of the damsels, but ‘fantastic' was the only adjective applicable to those of the rest of the dancers.

‘Come and dance,' invited Lachy.

‘I'm sorry, I'm quite unable to do this one,' I apologised.

‘Neither can anybody else,' said Lachy; ‘but who's worryin' so long as we enjoy ourselves.'

It was difficult to refuse Lachy because he was always much too ready to feel that he was being snubbed, so I suffered myself to be bobbed and bounced through something that might have been a jig but was more akin to a judo lesson.

‘I like the way you townsfolk seem to be able to dance on your toes,' panted my partner admiringly.

‘You're dancing on them too,' I replied with a ghostly chuckle that was half irony and half agony.

‘Me? Dancin' on my toes?'

‘No,' I retorted brutally, ‘on mine.'

‘I thought I must be,' said Lachy simply, and with no trace of remorse; ‘I could tell by the way your face keeps changin'.'

‘What did you think of the evening's beauty?' I enquired as we sank exhausted into our seats.

‘She'd make a damty fine heifer,' he said dispassionately.

‘She wasn't your choice, then?'

‘No indeed. It was the one with pink hair I voted for.'

I had long since discovered that colour shades in Bruach bore no resemblance whatever to those recognised by the rest of the world. A red and white cow, for instance, is known as a ‘grey beast'; a black one will be described as ‘blue'; but pink hair was worth investigation. I asked Lachy to point out the freak. For a few minutes he scanned the weaving dancers and then he pointed to a young girl with pale, sandy-coloured hair who was at that moment engaged in executing a frolicsome schottische. She caught our glance, waved cheerily and continued dancing with zest. I was surprised to see her there for it was only recently that I had heard she had secured a good post as a lady's maid in Edinburgh. I mentioned this to Lachy.

‘Oh, but she had to give it up and come home,' he replied. ‘Did you not hear? She's been on the club for a few weeks now.'

‘Is there something wrong with her?' I asked dubiously, my eyes following the girl's fast-moving, nimble figure.

‘Indeed there is!' said Lachy. ‘Did you not know she has terrible rheumatics in her feets? My, I hear it's that bad sometimes she can hardly put her legs under her.'

The lassie had ‘her legs under her' tonight all right, and it looked to me from the way she was skipping about the floor that she might have the legs of a few other people under her before very much longer. My own shins were already bruised after encountering her as a neighbour in a ‘Strip the Willow'.

‘How did you like the second prize-winner?' I demanded of Lachy.

‘Oh, she wasn't bad.' he said. ‘Her hair was all right. That's real Highland hair.'

‘That's real hennaed,' contradicted Morag who had just seated herself on the empty form beside us. ‘I'm tellin' you. Miss Peckwitt, that second prize-winner is the girl Lachy has a fancy for marryin'.'

‘It is not,' repudiated Lachy. ‘I'm after marryin' nobody but an Englishwoman like Miss Peckwitt here. They're good workers the English.'

At five o'clock, the floor was noticeably clearer and even the younger dancers were beginning to show signs of fatigue. There being no more prizes to present, Morag and I decided we could unobtrusively withdraw from the festivities. We were tired, I more so than my landlady for she had done little but sit and ceilidh during the whole evening. Rescuing my coat from the packed cloakroom, I flung it over my shoulders, and was following Morag to the door when suddenly a wild-eyed figure burst into the room.

‘The hotel's on fire!' he bellowed. ‘Help! Help!'

The response from even the most jaded dancers among us was immediate, and in less than a minute the hall was emptied of dancers, onlookers, officials and musicians and we were all racing as fast as we could in the direction of the hotel. The smell of burning soon met our nostrils, and, callous as it may seem, it was a welcome change from the pungent odour of soap flakes and sweat I had been breathing all evening. As we rounded the corner we came upon the hotel, where one of the garret windows sprouted fierce tufts of flame and billowing clouds of smoke.

The policeman, hatless and jacketless, was already attempting to form the revellers into a bucket chain, assuring everyone meantime that he had despatched someone to ‘'phone for the Brigade'. His task was well nigh hopeless, for the Bruachites and their neighbours were nothing if not fierce individualists and they retained their individualism even in the face of fire. He might just as easily have tried to organise a chain of live eels as organise a chain of Gaels. His exhortations, entreaties and threats were in vain; the crowd obeyed their own inclinations entirely, clinging tenaciously to the belief that personal effort would always be superior to communal effort. The few who were not bewitched by the conflagration seized pails and ran to the loch, but the blazing lights of the hotel were so dazzling after the darkness that people and pails were constantly colliding and at least as much water was spilled on the ground as eventually reached the flames.

‘Them lights near takes the eyes out of you,' coughed Morag as she came over to join the knot of women whom I had more or less coerced into forming a straggled and inefficient chain. But even with the eyes near out of her she was worth at least three of the other women. Her presence shamed them into action; her tongue stirred action to alacrity, and soon buckets and jugs were passing to and from the loch. Several men stood by, their admiration divided between the burning building and the bucket chain.

‘What can I do? What can I do?' The distracted hotel housekeeper ran out from the kitchen and stood wailing, and wringing her hands, in the midst of the confusion.

‘Get me half a dozen darning needles to stick into some of these louts!' shrilled a voice which I was faintly surprised to recognise as my own. From the way the spellbound watchers were electrified into activity it might have been supposed that the darning needles had been produced forthwith.

‘Get into the chain will you!' the sorely tried policeman shouted as he descried an old man, the occupant of a thatched cottage dangerously near to the burning building, returning from the direction of the loch.

‘I will not then,' retorted the old man defiantly. ‘'Tis my own chamber I got and 'tis my own waiter that's in it, and 'tis my own bit of flame I'll be after quenchin'.'

The reply typified the attitude of the crowd and, with a despondent shrug of his shoulders, the policeman watched the lone fire-fighter trotting purposefully in the direction of the cottage, his utensil held in front of him as though he was a competitor in an egg-and-spoon race.

Tired as everyone must have been, we worked like Trojans that night but, though every utensil a hotel could provide was commandeered for fire-fighting, our efforts had only a negligible effect on the flames. If the helpers had directed their energies as efficiently as they wagged their tongues we might have accomplished more, but the Gael's inability to co-operate is congenital and his loquacity is, if anything, increased by peril or panic.

Over an hour later there was a cry of relief as a small, grey van slid elegantly towards the hotel and braked to a decorous halt. Then began a scene which could only have been described as high comedy.

‘He Breeah!' The driver, who was in fireman's uniform, greeted us all with true Hebridean politeness, unfailing though sometimes exasperating. He and his two mates alighted from the van, and, bestowing confident smiles on the bunch of sodden fire-fighters, seemed undecided whether to come and shake hands with each of us in turn.