Lord Alistair's Rebellion

by Allen Upward

The lustre of the rain was over the grey lochs and green Hebrides.

The broad sound that stretched between the Island of Oig and the mainland was crinkled in furrows, on whose torn edges the foam-spit flickered like driving snowflakes. Whenever the indigo folds of the rolling rain parted for a minute the white beaches of Kesteven gleamed out like a picked bone. Away to the southward, where the fishing-boats were slowly reaching round the Mull of Oig, their taut sails glistened like new-washed tiles in the sunshine; then, as they twisted about and came up into the wind, the light emptied out of their sails like water being spilt, and each boat in turn became a murky phantom gliding forward along leaden grooves.

When the rain-wreaths closed round again, the mainland was blotted out with its hills and pine-forests, and the fishing-boats were no longer anything but blurred hints of things behind a screen. The mist wrapped the Island of Oig round with a great stillness, as though it had been removed a thousand miles off into the midst of the sea.

When at last the heavy cloud phalanxes broke and drifted overhead, and the lochs and isles lay in clear day, something new had crossed into the magic ring of the horizon.

Down in the south-east, in the far-off corner of the landscape, where the pale rose-purple of the hills melted into the dark slate-purple of the waves, a low black smudge had come like a flake of soot on a glorious stained-glass window. Seen at first as a mere speck on the picture, it swiftly spread and grew till it became a great dingy smear trailing across the heavens. And there was something about this new presence in the landscape which made it seem strange and hostile to the rest. It was as though a harsh, unexpected note had been struck in the middle of a symphony. All the other things there—the clouds and the sunlight, the hills and the sea—seemed to have grown used to one another during the ages, and to keep up a stately accord together; but this smoke giant forced himself in amongst them, like an upstart that had not learnt their ways—an ugly gnome of the underworld breaking into the haunts of the fairies and the nixies.

Beneath the inky banner a small black steamer lifted its hull above the wave-line and came on obstinately, beating defiance with its paddles to the mother elements. The fishing-boats that for thousands of years had put in and out from the little haven of Oig had never done aught but coax the elemental forces in order to turn them to service. For them the winds and the tides had been instruments on which they searched, as it were, for the right chords. But this masterful intruder snapped the strings in careless discord; compared with the others, it seemed to be a burglar breaking the locks of Nature with a crowbar instead of opening them with a key.

Fussing and fretting as it came, the steamboat struck right through the fleet of fishing-boats, and hurried on. It churned its way noisily into the harbour, driving small rowing-boats to right and left like frightened birds, and took up its berth against the pier with the air of an invading column taking up its quarters in a surrendered town. At the same time everything seemed to wake up to meet it: the old men who leant all day against the harbour wall started out of their dreams to handle the ropes flung to them from the steamer’s deck; the harbour master and the factor of the company hastened along the quay, and all the folk of the little town issued from their houses and swarmed down to the water’s edge. The whole Island of Oig roused itself from its six days’ peace, and began to bustle for its life.

Having taken fast hold of the pier with its rope tentacles, the masterful black monster rapped out a wooden gangway, down which there walked quickly a passenger who looked as much estranged from the surroundings as the floating machine which had transported him from the mainland.

The strangeness was not so much in his black clothes as in his gait and bearing. He walked jerkily, with short, quick steps, casting glances to right and left through his spectacles, as though he were moving through a crowd, on the lookout for hindrances. His feet struck the ground in the helpless, violent fashion of one who wore boots and used his feet merely as the ferrules of his legs on the pavement, instead of as claws to grasp the ground with. The muscles of his neck had suffered a similar atrophy; a long course of high collars and top-heavy hats had drilled his head into a fixed pose, and it moved on the socket of the neck stiffly and jerkily within certain narrow limits. That his eyes had also become cramped by gazing at books instead of fields and clouds was shown plainly enough, for this man of the town wore glasses. He had only to open his mouth to speak, and you saw that his very teeth were no longer Nature’s handiwork.

The townsman’s speech was as outlandish in the Island of Oig as were his dress and gait. He stopped half-way down the pier, before a group of boys, who had left their play to come and see the steamer, and put a question in English.