Land of Heart's Desire

by Catherine Airlie

  She did so now, taking up a block and her box of oils to paint in the best light of the day. Walking briskly up on to the moor, she decided that her subject would be the old, disused mill and the group of ruined cottages which surrounded it.

  Many of the little, two-roomed houses were without a roof and most of them would have been condemned as unsuitable living quarters, but they held for her a pathos which she could not ignore.

  Once, not so long ago, they had been the scene of a thriving tweed industry. Young women and old had sung and gossiped as they had spun the wool from the backs of the native sheep, ready to be dyed and woven when the time came. The old island waulking songs rang in her ears because they were still being sung when she was a child, and their haunting beauty and dark, intrinsic sadness had sunk deep into her heart.

  She had felt compelled to come to the mill, to capture it all with brush and colour, but was it really the death of the mill and the old clachan surrounding it that she wanted to preserve on canvas for all time?

  The question troubled her as she sat down on a grey outcrop of rock and began to sketch. The mill itself was still intact, although signs of decay were everywhere around. Nature had sought to cover it with lichen and flowers, but she could not hide the stark tragedy of those roofless homes silhouetted bleakly against the blue of the September sky. Beyond them, the heather still stained the hillside in places, but it, too, was dying. Christine could not find the purple she wanted—the true colour, because it was like spilt blood in places. The life’s blood of an island ebbing slowly away.

  Tears filled her eyes and she let her brush fall idly against her palette. Was it really any use hoping that she could do what Dame Sarah had failed to do?

  “You need someone behind you, Chris. Some man.” It was as if the words Hamish had used had been echoed close behind her, yet she knew that she could not trust Croma’s future to him without reserve.

  She bent to her work, and a glowing tract of heather and vividly-tinted bracken stained the canvas before she looked up again at the sound of a step on the rock surface behind her.

  Finlay Sutherland had climbed on to the moor through the wood. He had come from the direction of the harbour and he stood looking down at the picture on its impromptu stone easel, assessing it shrewdly before he spoke.

  “You’ve got something there,” he said slowly. “The death of an island.”

  It was what she did not want to hear and she would not have believed that he could have understood so readily. She put the painting aside and closed her box of colours.

  “It’s an old story,” she said. “True of so many islands in our little group. There used to be more people on Croma alone than there are now on Croma and Heimra and Tolsta all put together.”

  He stood thoughtfully, looking beyond her to the scene of desolation which she had conveyed so skilfully to the hidden canvas.

  “We’ve got to face up to it,” he said, cramming tobacco into an ancient pipe. “The people are the vital link. If they had had work to do they would never have left their homes.”

  “The older people wouldn’t, but young people are different. The old people did stay, but now they are dying off, and the younger ones didn’t come back after the war.” She nodded towards the head of the glen. “Up there under Buchaille Erradale there’s a village not quite the size of this where one can count the male population on one hand. The rest of the inhabitants are old women, widows mostly, who are living there because there is nowhere else for them to go. They have a pension, but they would rather have work.”

  “Supposing,” he said, puffing reflectively at the newly-lit pipe, “they were given work to do?”

  She looked up sharply.

  “Supposing these people in the clachan at the head of the glen had the kind of work they know how to do?”

  “They only know how to knit and spin and make cloth—”

  “That’s it!” he said. “Croma tweed. The kind of cloth I see everywhere I go in well-worn suits and costumes which have lasted these people for years!”

  “Mr. Sutherland,” she said patiently, “the idea is impossible. If you are thinking of the mill, the place is uninhabitable, for one thing, and we’re not producing enough wool in Erradale even to make a start. What we do produce is sold for the best profit on the mainland. It’s an elementary economic problem, you see. We can’t afford to make our own cloth any more—not for an uncertain and highly competitive market.”

  He looked as if he had not heard.

  “It would take several weeks to put this place right,” he considered, “but, in the meantime, the people further up the glen could work at their own firesides. That was the way of it at one time, wasn’t it?”

  “It still is on some of the larger islands,” she admitted, “where they are weir organized.”

  “Then,” he decided, “we must organize Croma.”

  She stiffened, even although something strong and exciting had begun to tingle along her veins.

  “If you can tell me how that is to be done without an adequate supply of raw wool,” she began, “I might be able to see eye to eye with you, Mr. Sutherland.”

  “I bought your wool,” he reminded her, seating himself on the rock directly facing her and drawing thoughtfully on the obnoxious-looking pipe. “Erradale’s clippings and the stuff I have on the south side of the island would be enough to start with.”

  She drew in a swift breath.

  “You make it all sound so very easy, Mr. Sutherland,” she said.

  “It won’t be. I know that as well as you do,” he told her, the red brows coming together in a deep frown. “But I am willing to take a chance, if you are.”

  “In what way?”

  “You open the mill and persuade the people to work for you. I’ll provide the wool—and the money to pay them till we get our first returns.”

  She stiffened instinctively.

  “Are you suggesting a—partnership?” she asked.

  He laughed easily.

  “In a way I suppose I am,” he agreed. “You always balk at an idea, don’t you, whenever money comes into it—my money?”

  How firmly he took the bull by the horns! There was no finesse about this man, no veneer whatsoever. He got right down to rock bottom in a minimum of words. A “go-getter”, she supposed the term was.

  “I’m not sure that such an idea would work—”

  “You know it would work,” he said, brushing her protest aside with the utmost ruthlessness. “You could make it work. I couldn’t do it on my own. It will take me a dozen years or so to be ‘accepted’ by your islanders, and then it would be too late! But you’re one of them. It’s your rightful heritage. They’d cast themselves into the sea for you quite willingly, I dare say—if you asked them. That’s all I want you to do.”

  She turned to face him in the September sunshine, the little specks of yellow light very prominent in her eyes as they met his.

  “What do you expect to get out of all this, Mr. Sutherland?” she asked with the frankness she considered necessary to the occasion.

  “A great deal of satisfaction,” he told her without hesitation, “and a reasonable return for my money—later on.”

  “I see.” Her lips were firmly compressed, but there was a spark of hope for Croma in her heart. Her eager thoughts had fastened so swiftly on his suggestions for the glen that they could only have been part of her own desire, which she had been forced to recognize as wishful thinking until now. “I shall do my best,” she added involuntarily, “but we are sure to meet with snags.”

  “You’ll overcome them, I’ve no doubt,” he told her, getting up to knock the contents of his pipe out against the rock. “If not, send them along to me at Ardtornish.”

  She picked up the half-finished canvas and he retrieved her paint-box and palette from the heather.

  “Mr. Sutherland,” she asked, “why did you come?”

  “To Croma?” His red brows shot up. “Because I was in love with a g
irl who preferred someone else—or thought she did,” he answered dryly. “Maybe that wasn’t all my reason, though,” he added thoughtfully. “I felt that I might belong here one day, but I thought I explained that to you before.”

  “I didn’t mean Croma,” she said hastily, the hot colour dyeing her cheeks at his confession. “I meant—what brought you to Erradale this afternoon?”

  “Oh!” He grinned down at her. “I wanted to see you about a right of way.”

  Her flush deepened, because she knew that he was reminding her of their encounter on the other side of the ford—quite deliberately, it seemed.

  “How can I help you?” she asked stiffly.

  “By allowing me to work from your side of the causeway. By letting men and material I shall need come in at Port-na-Keal instead of being unloaded by tender at Scoraig. I shall want to store some of it there during the winter months, when the work will necessarily be slowed down by weather conditions,” he explained. “Ideally, the job should have been tackled in the early part of the summer, but there may be just time before the winter gales set in to get the back of it broken. At least, we can reinforce the causeway and start the work on the sea wall—”

  “Just a minute, Mr. Sutherland,” she objected. “All this is going to cost a great deal of money, and I have none—none to spare, that is, for—unnecessary renovations.”

  “Renovations!” he snorted. “The thing’s essential—an absolute necessity if there is to be any real return to life in this place. You’ve got to get into your head that this is one island, not two! I haven’t been here very long,” he added dryly, “but it isn’t difficult to figure out that your precious little port up here isn’t all it might be in a northeasterly gale. When the wind’s in that ‘air’, Scoraig is the natural landing-place, and I mean to build a pier at Scoraig. It’s then that the causeway may prove useful to Erradale, if for no better reason than that you can come home to Croma any time you like.”

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized, regretting her abrupt dismissal of his plans, “but money is my bogey. I have none to spare. At least, not at present.” Suddenly her head was held very high. “Whatever you plan to do with the causeway or the ford, I must pay my fair share.” His strange eyes gleamed suddenly in the mellow light as he looked at her, but she could not tell what lay in their unfathomable green depths.

  “Mr. Sutherland—”

  “Finlay to you,” he corrected with a smile. “I guess there’s a premium on friendship around here that I could very well do without!”

  Suddenly and without warning, he bent forward and took her round the waist, holding her prisoner and looking down into her eyes with a world of purpose in his own.

  “From the moment I came here you’ve done your best to make me feel ill at ease,” he reminded her hardly, “but I’m not taking defeat all that easily.”

  Swiftly, arrogantly almost, he bent his head and kissed her full on the lips, a kiss that lasted a paralysing second, a kiss that drew something straight from her heart. It silenced her, draining her of all resistance, holding time and place and events arrested as if nothing else mattered in all the world but the fact that their lips had met and held. But even in that moment of realization she was denying it.

  “How dare you do a thing like that!” she spat at him. “How can you come and talk about Croma if this is all you want?” She smoothed back her dishevelled hair, her hand shaking. “It’s outrageous—despicable!” Suddenly her voice shook and her eyes were clouded by angry tears. “It’s the last thing I could have imagined—even from you!”

  He smiled gently, letting her go.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll say I’m sorry! What I want to know is—are you going to use the mill?”

  “I don’t know.” She tried to steady her voice and failed. “I think it might be—easier to do—one thing at a time.” He bowed before her judgment.

  “I’ll forge ahead with my end of the causeway,” he suggested, “and leave the tweed to you.”

  That wasn’t exactly what she had meant, but it was of little use to argue with him. He would have his own way in the end.

  “I don’t think there’s any right of way involved at the Port,” she told him. “You have every right to use it to bring in your material.”

  ‘Talking of rights of way,” he said as they went down across the heather, “I walked up along the cliff just now. Have you seen the state of the path up there? It may be no business of mine, but it occurred to me that you are as badly in need of a fence and a notice-board up there as I was at Scoraig.”

  She lifted her head proudly.

  “I have already seen to that, Mr. Sutherland,” she informed him. “The notices are being prepared.”

  “O.K!” he said. “I wasn’t trying to tell you your job, but it’s all one cliff and a common danger.”

  When he had gone she walked slowly towards the shore. The tide was out and the whole silver stretch of the sound lay wet and shimmering under a westering sun. At the far side of the bay she could see old Callum gathering driftwood for his fire, and high above her, in the corrie between the two cliffs, the sun’s reflection danced and glittered on his cottage windows. It was a scene to be painted some other time, she decided, sitting down to wait for the old man. The lonely croft, the silent cliff, the distant, deep blue sea stretching without a break to the far horizon’s rim where the sun drew clouds down with it to leave the heavens bare for the waiting stars! There were so many pictures on Croma waiting for her to put them on canvas, so much of fulfilment so near at hand!

  Idly she searched the fine scattering of shells at her feet. The shells of the west were the most beautiful she had ever seen, delicately and wonderfully shaped and varying through all the colours of the spectrum. When she was a child she had matched them for shape and colour, spending hours down here on the beach in search of them and carrying pailfuls of them back to the house.

  There had been an even more exciting form of search when she had climbed the cliff at her twin brother’s heels and Dick had gouged the little, semi-precious stones out of the crevices where they lay embedded in the rock. When the tide had fallen and the sun shone the stones glittered as brightly as diamonds and emeralds and topaz, but there did not seem to be so many of them about now.

  She smiled a little. Perhaps there had never really been a lot; perhaps it was only that distant impression from childhood which made it seem that the whole cliff had been studded with them!

  Running her fingers through the fine white sand, she watched it trickle back on to the beach until one small object remained in her cupped palm. It was an irregular, violet-coloured stone about the size of a sixpence which, when polished, would gleam as beautifully as any true amethyst.

  With all the ardour of childhood she began her search, and by the time Callum had hobbled across the bay with his bundle of driftwood over his back she had found several more in varying colours.

  “Look, Callum!” she cried, holding them out. “The treasure that is Croma!”

  “Indeed! Indeed!” he said, peering shortsightedly. “The stones are still to be found by those that have a mind to look for them. It is the way with all beauty. Some search, some never see it, and some have a feeling for it that is an instinct. They carry it with them always, and they are the lucky ones.”

  “You used to work with the stones,” Christine said. “Making brooches and bracelets for the mainland shops. My grandmother told me how beautiful they were and how well they sold.”

  “Yes, indeed, that is so,” he agreed with gentle pride. “They were greatly appreciated by the ladies, but the war did away with our market and it was never renewed. I don’t work so easily now by the light of a lamp. I’m getting old and done—almost blind.”

  “Callum,” she said impulsively, “you can’t have lost the art.” She held out the stones she had gathered. “Do these for me.”

  As he took the stones between his gnarled old hands his whole face seemed to glow, fired by an
inner warmth as the craftsman in him came to life again.

  “I will do that,” he said. “They will be to polish and set, and I may be a while longer in the doing of it, but I will make it a job you will be proud to wear. Yes,” he repeated, “to be sure!”

  After that Christine saw him many times searching the shore and the cliffs in bright sunshine for the stones he wanted, for only when the light caught them would he be able to see their hiding places among the rocks. She did not attempt to help him further, knowing that she had given him back the precious right to work and that he wanted to complete his task alone.

  Finlay Sutherland’s remark that American women would “go crazy” over such jewellery kept recurring to her, but how was she to get Callum’s work to America in order to sell it? Besides, there wasn’t enough of it to make it a commercial proposition. Apart from the brooch Callum had given her on her birthday and several pieces she had found in her grandmother’s jewel-box, there was little left to show of his handicraft. Samples? But Callum was old and almost blind...

  Restlessly she considered the problem of the wool. She wanted Croma to come into its own again, watched to launch Erradale tweed on to the market once more, but she was painfully aware of her own limitations. Without the necessary initial capital she could not hope to re-open the mill, and without a reasonably large-scale output was it any use besieging the market for orders?

  Then, with typical enthusiasm, she had cast her doubt aside and plunged headlong into the sort of plans she could make.

  Before the first fussy little black Clyde “puffer” had delivered the first load of equipment for Finlay Sutherland’s new causeway and heaped it on the quayside at Port-na-Keal, she had visited the clachan at the head of Glen Erradale and enrolled seven of her tenants to spin in their own houses during the winter months.

  Much to her own surprise, a great deal of Erradale tweed came to light during her visits, hoarded bales which had been put aside in cottage presses against a time of urgent need. They were there, she knew, for her to take if she wanted them, because hope had been rekindled in the eyes of those forgotten women and their hands were turned to work again. She could not promise them that the mill would be re-opened immediately, but she said that she would be able to sell the tweed they produced in their own homes.