The Hills is Lonely

by Lillian Beckwith

  Much interest was focused on Murdoch, a white-haired old bachelor, who was riding a horse purchased at the sale.

  ‘Why did you buy a new horse?’ asked Donald. ‘Was your other one not good enough?’

  ‘No,’ replied Murdoch, ‘she wasn’t very good at the ploughin’ this year.’

  Morag was quick to defend the old horse. ‘Well, she was gettin’ old,’ she scolded Murdoch, ‘and you must expect horses to disintegrate with age.’

  No one seemed to think this characteristic of old horses in the least peculiar, and I waited in vain for Donald to offer his suggestion of a rope.

  ‘Your own horse is gettin’ old at that,’ Murdoch told Donald.

  ‘Indeed she is not,’ retorted Donald indignantly. ‘My horse put in three bags of potatoes for me only last week.’

  ‘Did you see yon cow Ian Tearlaich had bought?’ asked someone in reference to the bag of bones we had lately passed.

  ‘So we did,’ replied Morag, ‘just one big bellyache that beast is and nothin’ more.’

  The train of men and beasts strung itself out along the road; cows bellowed and from time to time calves tried vainly to elude their new owners.

  ‘We’ll just stay and wait here for the bus,’ suggested Morag, and as we had already covered a good distance I willingly agreed.

  At that moment one of the drovers treated us to a conspiratorial wink.

  ‘Why is Angus givin’ us the wingéd eye?’ whispered my companion.

  Angus pointed gleefully at Murdoch, who sat with unshakable confidence astride his surprisingly quiet horse. The old man’s back was comfortably rounded, his hands were deep in his pockets and his outsize feet swung loosely on either side. Angus went alongside and put his hand on the saddle.

  ‘Sure, Murdoch, it’s yourself that’s havin’ the nice ride home now, is it not?’ he teased.

  ‘So I am,’ agreed Murdoch cordially. ‘She’s a nice quiet horse indeed for an old man like myself.’

  ‘And you with the biggest flat feet in the place to take you home too,’ went on Angus.

  Murdoch laughed self-consciously.

  Before I realised what was happening Angus had stealthily lifted the saddle, placed his lighted cigarette under and dodged quickly away. Instantly the horse reared, pawed the air desperately for a few seconds and then, to the delight of the wildly cheering drovers, galloped madly along the road with Murdoch clinging to its mane like grim death and swearing comprehensively. The startled cattle scattered to right and left.

  ‘You fool!’ I flung at Angus as I took off in the wake of the runaway, feeling certain that the old man would come to some harm. I ran quickly but not having had the same incentive my performance was much less impressive than that of the horse.

  Rounding a bend I was in time to see Murdoch being flung, or flinging himself, from the back of his mount on to the grassy verge of the road and some minutes later, closely followed by the gamekeeper, I came upon his prostrate body. Murdoch lay quite still and though I could see no blood I was quite sure that he was injured in some way. Gingerly I began to examine him. By this time the rest of the men had left their cattle to look after themselves and had arrived on the scene. They stood watching in a subdued silence while Morag, who had come panting in their rear, prodded exploratively at the prone figure.

  ‘He’s no dead but I believe he’s unconscience,’ she pronounced.

  ‘D’you hear that now?’ The gamekeeper turned on Angus with simulated rage.

  ‘Ach, you couldna’ kill that one without shootin’ him first,’ rejoined Angus lightly; ‘and supposin’ you shot him dead you’d still have to go and knock him down afterwards, his feet are that flat.’

  A gust of relieved laughter swept the onlookers.

  ‘It was a crazy thing to do,’ I cut in tartly. My rebuke brought a completely unrepentant smile to Angus’s ruddy face.

  The gamekeeper tried again: ‘It was a fool thing to do,’ he stressed reproachfully; ‘and you’re lucky he’s only been knocked unconscious. He could easily have been hurt badly.’

  After that inane observation I gave up trying to bestir in them any feelings of remorse.

  Someone bethought himself to go and catch the horse, which by now had rid itself of the cigarette and was grazing quietly, utterly indifferent to the fate of its owner.

  The bus opportunely arrived at that moment and Murdoch was deposited on the top of a snoring pile of inebriates who were in turn bedded on a mattress of bulging mailbags. His condition was the cause of much levity and even when, still unconscious, he was being carried home by four of the more sober of the Bruachites it seemed to have occurred to no one but myself that the man might have sustained serious injury. As it was quite possible that the four carriers would tire of their burden before they reached Murdoch’s house and that the invalid, like the old woman with the pig, would ‘never get home that night’, I insisted on accompanying them. Morag came too and we were present to see Murdoch taken off to bed by indifferent relatives who seemed in no way surprised to see their kinsman being brought home insensible. I gathered that it was the rule rather than the exception for Murdoch to be in this condition after a sale, and my proposal that a doctor be sent for was received with icy disdain.

  After taking a welcome cup of tea, Morag and I set off home. The night was patchily dark and there was again a threat of rain in the scudding clouds through which a fugitive moon peeped anxiously. I remembered I had a torch and had just retrieved it from the bottom of my handbag when a savage scream rent the stillness of the night, and out from one of the cottages a white shape staggered. My companion and I stopped still and in the beam of the torch saw a middle-aged woman clad only in a nightgown. The woman’s eyes were sunken and staring, her grey unkempt hair fell in wisps over her dirt-streaked face. Her hands tore convulsively at her breast and her mouth moved soundlessly.

  ‘It’s Barbac,’ whispered Morag, but I had already recognised the figure, despite the fact that when I had first met her she had been a plump and pleasant little woman, with only a slight inclination to neurosis. A long illness coupled with careless nursing had affected her brain, and now here she was, a wasted gibbering lunatic. Her plight was shocking but at this moment the sight of her made me shudder.

  ‘Go back to your bed, Barbac,’ Morag entreated softly, ‘go back to your bed.’

  A man appeared and, taking the unresisting woman by the arm, led her back to the cottage with silent resignation. The incident had shaken Morag nearly as much as myself, and it was not until we were on our own doorstep that she spoke again.

  ‘Indeed it’s a pity when people go like that,’ she said sadly.

  I agreed wholeheartedly.

  ‘Sure,’ she went on, ‘I would sooner lose my hearin’ or my sight than I would lose my sanitation. I believe to lose one’s sanitation would be the end of everythin’.’

  The following day I called at Murdoch’s house to ask how he fared, for I was still the only one who was in the least worried by his mishap. I was assured that he was ‘fine except for a sore head’, and this was apparently of such frequent occurrence that I realised my enquiry was not tactful. On the contrary, my concern was regarded as a reflection on Murdoch’s capacity to hold his drink.

  Later I called at Lachy’s home to collect some wool for Morag. Lachy was there, his jaw much swollen. He also complained of a ‘sore head’—a ‘sale head’, interpreted his mother pithily. It was not long before we heard the voice of Alistair the shepherd and Lachy was quick to invite his recent opponent to come in for a strupak. Both Alistair’s eyes were black and he had a cut on his nose.

  ‘Lachy, my boy, they tell me we was fightin’ like bulls yesterday,’ said the shepherd contritely.

  ‘We was?’ asked Lachy, tenderly feeling his jaw.

  ‘Aye, it’s true they’re sayin’.’

  Lachy inspected his knuckles critically.

  ‘Ach, if we was fightin’ it was no us fightin’,’ expounded the shephe
rd.

  ‘No?’ queried Lachy.

  ‘No, ’twas the drink inside us that was fightin’,’ said the shepherd importantly.

  Their heads nodded in unison as each studied the other’s wounds, and then Lachy let out a self-satisfied chuckle.

  ‘Well, Alistair, my boy, I’d say from the look of you that my whisky was stronger than your whisky.’ He gave me an audacious wink. ‘D’you not think so?’ he asked me.

  I declined to give an opinion and after politely refusing the invitation of Lachy’s mother to stay and ‘take a drink of milk from the cattles’, left them to their raillery. At several of the houses I passed on my way home a solitary shirt hung limply on the clothes line. Each shirt was devoid of cuffs and neckband!

  6 Patients and Patience

  The paralysing effect of an influenza epidemic which swept the village was the means of my obtaining a far deeper insight into the customs and living conditions of the inhabitants than I could possibly have obtained in ordinary circumstances. The epidemic temporarily incapacitated the nurse and deluged the doctor with work; so daily Morag and I, who were lucky enough to escape infection, sallied forth to make beds, to wash dishes, and in some cases, where the illness had struck most severely, to do a good deal of the house and croft work besides. It was fortunate that I had by this time learned to milk, but. though most of the women exclaimed favourably at the degree of skill I had acquired, most of the cows expressed grave doubts as to my ability; doubts which often resulted in the milk-pail being a much different shape at the end of the milking than at the beginning!

  During this period of ministration to the sick I discovered that Morag’s mother had been regarded as the ‘medicine woman’ of the village, and, as the daughter was expected to have acquired much of the mother’s skill or ‘magic’, my landlady’s remedies were often much in demand. It soon became evident to me that her advice and instructions were adhered to far more conscientiously than were those of the doctor. The latter, who was by no means unaware of the attitude of the crofters towards his profession, accepted the position with amused tolerance and between the amateur and the professional there existed a friendly rivalry which neither the one nor the other would allow to be affected by the continuous badinage of their patients. Naturally, we saw a good deal of the doctor at this time: constantly encountering him in and out of sick rooms: and though in me he expected to find an ally, I was already too conscious of the efficacy of Morag’s prescriptions in contrast to his own to prove a particularly staunch one. Indeed I was inclined to suspect that he himself had more faith in the simple traditional remedies than in his own involved treatments, especially so when I overheard him asking my landlady what she recommended for rheumatism.

  ‘Thicker soles on your boots, boy,’ she advised him, with a disapproving glance at his dressy town shoes.

  ‘I cannot get strong shoes on my feet they’re so swollen,’ countered the doctor.

  ‘The swellin’ would come down if you rubbed your feets with eel fat a time or two,’ said Morag, and though the doctor pretended scepticism he insisted on driving us home, where, after allowing himself to be persuaded to take a ‘wee strupak’, he offhandedly reintroduced the subject of rheumatism. Morag, taking the hint, searched in the cupboard and then brought out a small bottle of yellowish-brown oily stuff which she handed to the doctor. There was a contemptuous smile on his lips as he accepted it, but nevertheless the alacrity with which he pocketed the bottle convinced me that a good deal of his manner was assumed purely for my benefit.

  Though in the opinion of the crofters the doctor’s medical skill was negligible, his presence in the sick room was as welcome as it was at the ceilidh. He drank their tea, capped their jokes and criticised their cattle—he was generally considered to be a better vet than doctor—and probably his camaraderie contributed as much to the recovery of his patients as anything he might give them from a bottle. Personally I found the doctor refreshing, for, whatever his faults may have been, he had at least retained a character. He was clever and he knew it: he liked whisky and he drank it—in quantity; he ate his food with more gusto than grace and the evidence of it could be seen all down the front of his waistcoat. His sense of humour was puckish, and his contempt for the English, despite the fact that he had married an Englishwoman, permeated much of his conversation; before I had been acquainted with him for half an hour, he had embarked on a story of his student days in which he claimed to have got the better of a supercilious Englishman.

  It was during the university vacation, he told me, and the doctor was roaming the hills herding his father’s cattle, when two tourists, a man and a woman, approached him. The doctor was barefooted and bareheaded and was clad, as he himself put it, ‘in a well-ventilated pair of breeks and a shirt with more front than back in it’.

  ‘Hello, young fellow!’ said the Englishman condescendingly.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ answered the doctor politely.

  ‘And do you live around here?’ asked the man archly.

  ‘I do,’ replied the doctor.

  ‘And do you go to school?’

  ‘Sometimes I go,’ the doctor admitted.

  ‘I see you have a book under your arm. Can you read?’

  ‘A little,’ said the doctor hesitantly, though the book happened to be an advanced medical textbook.

  ‘Ah!’ The man turned and conferred in low tones with his companion and then addressed the doctor once more. ‘And can you count?’ he asked.

  ‘Er, yes.’ faltered the doctor.

  ‘Very good!’ exclaimed the man. ‘How much can you count?’

  The doctor looked puzzled.

  ‘Tell me, my boy, how many people there are here just at this moment. You, myself and my wife. How many is that?’

  ‘One hundred,’ answered the doctor after a struggle. The man and his wife laughed derisively. ‘Come, come, my boy. How do you make that out?’ they remonstrated.

  ‘Well.’ explained the doctor, turning to go, ‘there’s myself, that’s one.’

  ‘Yes?’ the couple waited in amused expectancy.

  ‘And there’s yourself and your wife—you’re the two nothings. Good day to you both.’

  Never before or since, it seemed, had the hill been so strangely quiet as it was in the following moments. Whether or not the story was true I cannot say, but I do know that the doctor possessed an enviable gift for disconcerting people whom he regarded as being impudent, and I am forced to admit that my countrymen seem to regard themselves as having the right to interrogate the Islanders much as a policeman might interrogate a suspicious character.

  Of all the intractable patients that we helped to nurse during the epidemic, Murdoch was by far the most difficult. He was by turns haughty, mischievous, crafty and ingenuous. One day he would decide he was at death’s door and would be amenable to every suggestion; the next he would not only be out of bed, but visiting a neighbour’s house to read the newspaper. When he had exhausted the news he would crawl back to his own home and would again make rapid strides towards death’s door, where, moaning piteously, he would remain until the time for delivery of the next newspaper. Why Murdoch would never go to the length of buying his own paper I do not know, but then many of the crofters’ little economies are entirely incomprehensible to the outsider.

  Murdoch’s two elderly sisters had also been taken ill with the influenza at the same time as himself, but they were all three fairly well on the road to recovery when I called one day to milk their cow and to make their tea. As soon as I pushed open the kitchen door I could hear voices coming from Murdoch’s room, one of which belonged to the doctor. After a word to the sisters I set about preparing the tea-trays and was engaged on this task when the door leading from Murdoch’s room was opened and the doctor, winking furiously, beckoned me to accompany him. His expression prepared me for some sort of joke and as I followed him through to the bedroom I wondered what it could be.

  ‘Well, Murdoch,’ said the doctor, ‘I’
ll be away now as Miss Beckwith’s come to make your tea.’

  Murdoch lay back on his pillows and greeted me with a benign smile.

  ‘Just you see and keep on taking your medicine,’ the doctor told him.

  ‘Aye, that I will, Doctor, I feel the better of that medicine indeed,’ replied Murdoch earnestly.

  ‘Did you take it in the morning?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘Aye, I did,’ said the old man.

  ‘And after your tea?’

  ‘To be sure I did.’

  ‘And did you take it last night after supper?’

  ‘Certainly I did,’ nodded Murdoch solemnly.

  ‘Murdoch!’ accused the doctor suddenly, ‘you’re a b——liar!’

  Murdoch sat bolt upright and fixed the doctor with a pair of startled eyes.

  ‘Doctor,’ he declared with touching dignity, ‘wouldn’t I swear before God I did as you said. I’m tellin’ you I took it three times yesterday and twice this day already, and there’s no more than half the bottle left now. I swear it indeed.’

  Murdoch lifted up his hand as though taking the oath and I was sure that even the doctor would be convinced that the old man was telling the truth.

  ‘Murdoch,’ repeated the doctor sternly, ‘I’m telling you you’re a liar.’ He produced a bag of peppermints, offered it to me and then popped one into his own mouth. Murdoch scrutinised the doctor’s face.

  ‘Am I indeed a liar?’ he asked, an unrepentant smile beginning to touch his lips and eyes.

  The doctor extracted a bottle of medicine from his bulging jacket pocket and set it on the table beside the bed. ‘There now,’ he announced triumphantly, ‘though I brought your medicine along with me on Tuesday. I forgot to leave it for you, and when I got back home I found it still in my pocket. You old rascal, you didn’t even miss the stuff so I know fine you’re a liar.’ He folded his arms across his chest and stood smiling down impishly at his patient’s discomfiture which was brief indeed.