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.
"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.
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.
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.
IONA.
It is the fashion among writers of guide and other books about Iona to call it a desolate, lonely little isle. That it is little I admit; but you must go to the other side of the Sound for the loneliness and desolation. In proportion to its size, it seemed to us the most cultivated island of the Hebrides. I have heard it argued that for the Duke of Argyll not to forfeit his ownership was a true charity to his tenants, as if Iona was still the desert St. Columba found it. But I think its rental would be found a fair return for the charity of a landlord. As for the favorite myth that Iona is far out in the Hebridean Sea, I hardly know how it could have arisen, since the island is within easy reach of the main land and of Mull. There is no history of its old monastery that does not tell how the pilgrim coming to it from the Ross of Mull had but to call a summons from the granite rocks, and the monks would hear the cry and make ready to meet him in their boats. If this be true, however, his voice must have been phenomenal. The modern pilgrim could no more do this than he could wield the long sword or pull the crossbow of men of old. In our time a steamer comes to Iona every day from Oban, and twice a week another stops on its way to and from Glasgow and the Outer Hebrides. If Iona lay so near American shores it would long since have become a Bar Harbor or a Campo Bello. Even where it is it has its crowds of visitors. The writer who on one page tells you of its loneliness, on the next mourns its daily desecration when tourists eat sandwiches among the ruins.
TOMB OF MACLEOD.
These ruins, like everything else in Iona, belong to the Duke of Argyll. They are kept locked except when the keeper of the keys opens them to sight-seers. It may interest his Grace to know that we trespassed, climbing over the low stone walls into the cathedral enclosure. While we were there we were alone, save for black sheep, the modern successors of the monks. It is a fact that as we stood with our feet upon Macleod of Macleod's tomb, one of the black sheep—probably the very same which frightened Gertrude White in the moonlight—baaed at us. But the sun was shining, and we did not screech; we merely said shoo to it, and remarked upon its impudence.
If our piety, with Dr. Johnson's, did not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona, at least our way of seeing them was not unlike Boswell's. Perhaps this is why we think he showed more commonsense in Iona than elsewhere on his journey. He did not trouble to investigate minutely, he says, "but only to receive the general impression of solemn antiquity, and the particular ideas of such objects as should of themselves strike my attention." But indeed, unless you have a lifetime to spend in Iona, unless you are an architect or an archæologist, there is little need to care where the exact site of infirmary or refectory or library may be, or to whom this shrine was set up, that tombstone laid, or in what year walls were built, windows opened. It is enough to see how beautiful the monks could make the holy place they loved, here on this rough northern coast, as in among the vineyards and olives of the south, as in English fenland and wooded valley.
But if Boswell's impression was one of disappointment, ours was one of wonder to find the ruins so much more perfect than we had expected, and so beautiful, not only with the beauty of impressiveness as a whole, but with a grace and refinement of detail one does not look for in the far north. Much early Italian work is not more graceful than the carving on the capitals, the tracery in the windows, the door-way leading into the sacristy, the arches that spring from the cloister walls to their outer arcade in the monastery and church founded by St. Columba. If, as has been said, no ivy covers the walls, when we were there yellow flowers had pushed their way between the stones, while windows and rounded arches made a frame-work for the unbroken blue of sea and sky and pale distant hills. For so long as we were in the cathedral, the sun shone as if, instead of Hebridean seas, the Mediterranean lay beyond. True, this did not last half a morning; it rained before night; but the very breaks in the sunshine, and the way the clouds came and went, made the day more beautiful.
It is strange to see this wonderful work of other days in an island where, owing to their present masters, men can now scarce support existence. Centuries of progress or deterioration—which is it?—lie between the cathedral, lovely even in ruin, and the new ugly kirk close by. And yet when men had time to make their world beautiful the harvest was as rich. There was enough to eat and to spare for the stranger when the Celtic knots and twists were first carved on the cross standing by the cathedral door and looking seaward, and on the tombs lying within the chancel. But, and more's the pity, the same cannot be said to-day, when tombs are crumbling, and pale green lichens cover the carving of the cross. You feel this contrast between past and present still more in the graveyard by St. Oran's chapel, into which also we made our way over a stone wall. The long grass has been cleared from the gray slabs, where lie the mitred bishops and the men in armor, or where the intricacy of the Celtic designs makes space for a ship with its sails spread. They are "only gravestones flat on the earth," as Boswell says, and now neatly placed in senseless rows for the benefit of the tourist. But who would exchange them for the well-polished granite obelisks of the modern stone-cutter which rise at their side?
The old road leads from the cathedral, past McLean's weather-worn cross—which is so thin you wonder that it still withstands the strong winds from the sea—to the nuns' convent, whose ruins and tombs show it to have been only less fine than the monastery. Here the gate was thrown open. A small steam-yacht, which we could see lying at anchor in the Sound below, had just let loose a dozen yachtsmen upon the loneliness of Iona, and they were being personally conducted through the nunnery.
We trespassed no more, except in fields on the western side of the island, whither we walked by the very road, for all I know, along which St. Columba was carried in the hour before death, that he might once more see the monks working on the land he had reclaimed, and there give them his last blessing. But if we trespassed, no one objected. The men whom we met greeted us in Gaelic, which, when they saw we did not understand, they translated into a pleasant good-day or directions about our path.
There were many other places we should have seen. But since the whole island was a proof of St. Columba's wisdom in settling on it, nothing was to be gained by a visit to the particular spot where he landed or where he set up a cairn. And as for the Spouting Cave, we took the guide-book's word for it; for as Dr. Johnson would say, we were never much elevated by the expectation of any cave. Instead of sight-seeing, we stayed on the western shore, looking out beyond the low white and grass-grown sand-dunes and the bowlder-made beach to the sea, with its many rocky isles, the fear of seamen, black upon the waters. It is just such a coast as Mr. Stevenson has described in his "Merry Men." And, indeed, since I have written this I have read in his "Memoirs of an Islet" that it is this very coast, though more to the south of Iona, where the Christ-anna and the Covenant went down to the bottom, there to rot with the Espirito Santo and her share of the treasures of the Invincible Armada. When Columba sailed from Ireland to Hebridean seas the Merry Men had long since begun their bonny dance, for they are as old as the rocks against which they dash, and these rocks are older than man. When you know the dangers of this coast you have no little respect for the saint who dared them. St. Columba and his disciples, who set up cross and bell on lonely St. Kilda and the far Färöe Islands, were the Stanleys and Burtons of their time.
People who have never heard of crofters and their troubles can tell you all about St. Columba and his miracles. In Iona he interested us chiefly because all that is left of his and his followers' work gives the lie to modern landlords. Land in the Hebrides, they say, is only fit for deer and grouse. St. Columba showed that it could be made fit for man as well.
The landlady of St. Columba's Inn is true to the traditions of the island. She is as unwilling to turn the stranger from her door as were the abbots of St. Columba's monastery. In her own way she performs miracles and finds room for every one who comes. At first we thought that her miracles were worked at our expense. During our absence the party from Bunessan had arrived. Although their boxes were on the rocks of the Ross of Mull, awaiting the ferry-man's convenience, by their very numbers they had gained the advantage we feared, and had quietly stepped into the room in the manse, of which we had neglected to take possession. We were now quartered in the school-house. However, to judge from our comfort there, we lost nothing by the change.
It was at the late supper that we enjoyed the "dairy produce" of which Miss Gordon Cumming writes with rapture. It was a simple meal, such as one might have shared with St. Columba himself. The breakfasts and dinners, I should add, were less saintly, and therefore more substantial. As for the rest of the island, the fare is regulated by poverty and the Duke. We make a great to-do at home over the prohibition question, but in the Highlands they manage these matters more easily. Ducal option, we were told, reigns throughout the island. And yet the people of Iona are not grateful for thus being spared the trouble of deciding for themselves upon a subject whereon so few men agree. It has been whispered that drunkenness is not unknown in the Blessed Isle, and that natives have been seen by strangers—oh, the scandal of it!—reeling under the very shadow of the cathedral.
A white-haired clergyman, with pleasant old-fashioned manners and Gladstone collar, presided at supper. He introduced us at once to his family. "My son"—and he waved his hand towards a youth we had seen crossing the fields with his color-box—"my son is an artist; he is studying in the Royal Academy. He has already sold a picture for forty pounds. Not a bad beginning, is it? And my daughter," and he lowered his voice deferentially, "will soon be in the hands of the critics. She has just made some wonderfully clever illustrations for an old poem that hit her fancy!"
It was pleasant to see his fatherly pride. For his sake we could have wished her in an easier position.
Evidently, when you have exhausted saintly gossip in Iona you are at the end of your resources. The clergyman and two or three others with him were as eager to hear where we had been and where we were going and what we had seen, as if they had had nothing to talk about for a fortnight. We had decided to take the Dunara Castle from Glasgow, and in it to steam to Coll and Tiree and the Long Island. We had heard of the steamer, as you hear of everything in the Hebrides, by chance. And now the old man was all for having us change our minds. Here we were, safe in Iona, he said; why should we brave the dangers of the wild coast? Another man thought we had better not go to Harris; he had arrived there one Saturday evening, intending to remain two weeks; but the midges would give him no peace, and he had left with the steamer on Monday morning. The only comfort he could give was that they would feed us well on the Dunara Castle. It is strange that in Scotland, no matter what your plans may be, your fellow-tourists are sure to fall foul of them.
It was after this the clergyman brought out of his pocket a handful of the new coins, which we had not then seen.
"It's an ugly face," said J——, thinking only of the coin, though it would have been no libel had he referred to her gracious Majesty herself.
But the clergyman was down upon him at once. "I cannot let any one speak disrespectfully of my queen in my presence," he cried; "I love her too dearly to hear a word against her."
And he told us how, that afternoon, he had climbed to the top of the highest hill in Iona; and standing where Columba had stood so many hundreds of years ago, and remembering that this was the Jubilee year of his beloved sovereign, he dropped a new shilling into the cairn which marks the spot where the monks first made their home.
And yet I have a friend who, in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, has tried to prove that sentiment is fast decaying.
Later, when this same sentimentalist told us of the poverty, hunger, and misery in Iona, we thought that the shilling might have been dropped to better purpose.
It was on a gray morning that an old Hamish rowed us and two other passengers and a load of freight to the