The Disentanglers

On a knowe which commanded the castle, in a manner that would have pained Sir Dugald Dalgetty, Mr. Macrae had erected, not a ‘sconce,’ but an observatory, with a telescope that ‘licked the Lick thing,’ as he said. Indeed it was his foible ‘to see the Americans and go one better,’ and he spoke without tolerance of the late boss American millionaire, the celebrated J. P. van Huytens, recently deceased.

Duke Humphrey greater wealth computes,And sticks, they say, at nothing,

sings the poet. Mr. Macrae computed greater wealth than Mr. van Huytens, though avoiding ostentation; he did not

Wear a pair of golden boots,And silver underclothing.

The late J. P. van Huytens he regarded with moral scorn. This rival millionaire had made his wealth by the process (apparently peaceful and horticultural) of ‘watering stocks,’ and by the seemingly misplaced generosity of overcapitalising enterprises, and ‘grabbing side shows.’ The nature of these and other financial misdemeanours Merton did not understand. But he learned from Mr. Macrae that thereby J. P. van Huytens had scooped in the widow, the orphan, the clergyman, and the colonel. The two men had met in the most exclusive circles of American society; with the young van Huytenses the daughter of the millionaire had even been on friendly terms, but Mr. Macrae retired to Europe, and put a stop to all that. To do so, indeed, was one of his motives for returning to the home of his ancestors, the remote and inaccessible Castle Skrae. The Sportsman’s Guide to Scotland says, as to Loch Skrae: ‘Railway to Lairg, then walk or hire forty-five miles.’ The young van Huytenses were not invited to walk or hire.

Van Huytens had been ostentatious, Mr. Macrae was the reverse. His costume was of the simplest, his favourite drink (of which he took little) was what humorists call ‘the light wine of the country,’ drowned in Apollinaris water. His establishment was refined, but not gaudy or luxurious, and the chief sign of wealth at Skrae was the great observatory with the laboratory, and the surmounting ‘pole with box on top,’ as Merton described the apparatus for the new kind of telegraphy. In the basement of the observatory was lodged the hugest balloon known to history, and a skilled expert was busied with novel experiments in aerial navigation. Happily he could swim, and his repeated descents into Loch Skrae did not daunt his soaring genius.

Above the basement of the observatory were rooms for bachelors, a smoking-room, a billiard-room, and a scientific library. The wireless telegraphy machine (looking like two boxes, one on the top of the other, to the eye of ignorance) was installed in the smoking-room, and a wire to Mr. Macrae’s own rooms informed him, by ringing a bell (it also rang in the smoking-room), when the machine began to spread itself out in tape conveying the latest news. The machine communicated with another in the establishment of its vendors, Messrs. Gianesi, Giambresi & Co., in Oxford Street. Thus the millionaire, though residing nearly fifty miles from the nearest station at Lairg, was as well and promptly informed as if he dwelt in Fleet Street, and he could issue, without a moment’s procrastination, his commands to sell and buy, and to do such other things as pertain to the nature of millionaires. When we add that a steam yacht of great size and comfort, doing an incredible number of knots an hour on the turbine system, lay at anchor in the sea loch, we have indicated the main peculiarities of Mr. Macrae’s rural establishment. Wealth, though Merton thought so poorly of it, had supplied these potentialities of enjoyment; but, alas! disease had ‘decimated’ the grouse on the moors (of course to decimate now means almost to extirpate), and the crofters had increased the pleasures of stalking by making the stags excessively shy, thus adding to the arduous enjoyment of the true sportsman.

To Castle Skrae, being such as we have described, Lady Bude and Merton returned from their sentimental prowl. They found Miss Macrae, in a very short skirt of the Macrae tartan, trying to teach Mr. Blake to play ping-pong in the great hall.

We must describe the young lady, though her charms outdo the powers of the vehicle of prose. She was tall, slim, and graceful, light of foot as a deer on the corrie. Her hair was black, save when the sun shone on it and revealed strands of golden brown; it was simply arrayed, and knotted on the whitest and shapeliest neck in Christendom. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes large and lucid,

The greyest of things blue,The bluest of things grey.

Her complexion was of a clear pallor, like the white rose beloved by her ancestors; her features were all but classic, with the charm of romance; but what made her unique was her mouth. It was faintly upturned at the corners, as in archaic Greek art; she had, in the slightest and most gracious degree, what Logan, describing her once, called ‘the Æginetan grin.’ This gave her an air peculiarly gay and winsome, brilliant, joyous, and alert. In brief, to use Chaucer’s phrase,

She was as wincy as a wanton colt,Sweet as a flower, and upright as a bolt.

She was the girl who was teaching the poet the elements of ping-pong. The poet usually missed the ball, for he was averse to and unapt for anything requiring quickness of eye and dexterity of hand. On a seat lay open a volume of the Poetry of the Celtic Renascence, which Blake had been reading to Miss Macrae till she used the vulgar phrase ‘footle,’ and invited him to be educated in ping-pong. Of these circumstances she cheerfully informed the new-comers, adding that Lord Bude had returned happy, having photographed a wild cat in its lair.

‘Did he shoot it?’ asked Blake.

‘No. He’s a sportsman!’ said Miss Macrae.

‘That is why I supposed he must have shot the cat,’ answered Blake.

‘What is Gaelic for a wild cat, Blake?’ asked Merton unkindly.

Like other modern Celtic poets Mr. Blake was entirely ignorant of the melodious language of his ancestors, though it had often been stated in the literary papers that he was ‘going to begin’ to take lessons.

‘Sans purr,’ answered Blake; ‘the Celtic wild cat has not the servile accomplishment of purring. The words, a little altered, are the motto of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders. This is the country of the wild cat.’

‘I thought the “wild cat” was a peculiarly American financial animal,’ said Merton.

Miss Macrae laughed, and, the gong sounding (by electricity, the wire being connected with the Greenwich Observatory), she ran lightly up the central staircase. Lady Bude had hurried to rejoin her lord; Merton and Blake sauntered out to their rooms in the observatory, Blake with an air of fatigue and languor.

‘Learning ping-pong easily?’ asked Merton.

‘I have more hopes of teaching Miss Macrae the essential and intimate elements of Celtic poetry,’ said Blake. ‘One box of books I brought with me, another arrived to-day. I am about to begin on my Celtic drama of “Con of the Hundred Battles.”’

‘Have you the works of the ancient Sennachie, Macfootle?’ asked Merton. He was jealous, and his usual urbanity was sorely tried by the Irish bard. In short, he was rude; stupid, too.

However, Blake had his revenge after dinner, on the roof of the observatory, where the ladies gathered round him in the faint silver light, looking over the sleeping sea. ‘Far away to the west,’ he said, ‘lies the Celtic paradise, the Isle of Apples!’

‘American apples are excellent,’ said Merton, but the beauty of the scene and natural courtesy caused Miss Macrae to whisper ‘Hush!’

The poet went on, ‘May I speak to you the words of the emissary from the lovely land?’

‘The mysterious female?’ said Merton brutally. ‘Dr. Hyde calls her “a mysterious female.” It is in his Literary History of Ireland.’

‘Pray let us hear the poem, Mr. Merton,’ said Miss Macrae, attuned to the charm of the hour and the scene.

‘She came to Bran’s Court,’ said Blake, ‘from the Isle of Apples, and no man knew whence she came, and she chanted to them.’

‘Twenty-eight quatrains, no less, a hundred and twelve lines,’ said the insufferable Merton. ‘Could you give us them in Gaelic?’

The bard went on, not noticing the interruption, ‘I shall translate

‘There is a distant isleAround which sea horses glisten,A fair course against the white swelling surge,Four feet uphold it.’‘Feet of white bronze under it.’

‘White bronze, what’s that, eh?’ asked the practical Mr. Macrae.

‘Glittering through beautiful ages!Lovely land through the world’s age,On which the white blossoms drop.’

‘Beautiful!’ said Miss Macrae.

‘There are twenty-six more quatrains,’ said Merton.

The bard went on,

‘A beautiful game, most delightfulThey play – ’

‘Ping-pong?’ murmured Merton.

‘Hush!’ said Lady Bude.

Miss Macrae turned to the poet.

‘They play, sitting at the luxurious wine,Men and gentle women under a bush,Without sin, without crime.’

‘They are playing still,’ Blake added. ‘Unbeheld, undisturbed! I verily believe there is no Gael even now who would not in his heart of hearts let drift by him the Elysiums of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, to grasp at the Moy Mell, the Apple Isle, of the unknown Irish pagan! And then to play sitting at the luxurious wine,

‘Men and gentle women under a bush!’

‘It really cannot have been ping-pong that they played at, sitting. Bridge, more likely,’ said Merton. ‘And “good wine needs no bush!”’

The bard moved away, accompanied by his young hostess, who resented Merton’s cynicism

‘Tell me more of that lovely poem, Mr. Blake,’ she said.

‘I am jangled and out of tune,’ said Blake wildly. ‘The Sassenach is my torture! Let me take your hand, it is cool as the hands of the foam-footed maidens of – of – what’s the name of the place?’

‘Was it Clonmell?’ asked Miss Macrae, letting him take her hand.

He pressed it against his burning brow.

‘Though you laugh at me,’ said Blake, ‘sometimes you are kind! I am upset – I hardly know myself. What is yonder shape skirting the lawn? Is it the Daoine Sidh?’

‘Why do you call her “the downy she”? She is no more artful than other people. She is my maid, Elspeth Mackay,’ answered Miss Macrae, puzzled. They were alone, separated from the others by the breadth of the roof.

‘I said the Daoine Sidh,’ replied the poet, spelling the words. ‘It means the People of Peace.’

‘Quakers?’

‘No, the fairies,’ groaned the misunderstood bard. ‘Do you know nothing of your ancestral tongue? Do you call yourself a Gael?’

‘Of course I call myself a girl,’ answered Miss Macrae. ‘Do you want me to call myself a young lady?’

The poet sighed. ‘I thought you understood me,’ he said. ‘Ah, how to escape, how to reach the undiscovered West!’

‘But Columbus discovered it,’ said Miss Macrae.

‘The undiscovered West of the Celtic heart’s desire,’ explained the bard; ‘the West below the waters! Thither could we twain sail in the magic boat of Bran! Ah see, the sky opens like a flower!’

Indeed, there was a sudden glow of summer lightning.

‘That looks more like rain,’ said Merton, who was standing with the Budes at an opposite corner of the roof.

‘I say, Merton,’ asked Bude, ‘how can you be so uncivil to that man? He took it very well.’

‘A rotter,’ said Merton. ‘He has just got that stuff by heart, the verse and a lot of the prose, out of a book that I brought down myself, and left in the smoking-room. I can show you the place if you like.’

‘Do, Mr. Merton. But how foolish you are! do be civil to the man,’ whispered Lady Bude, who shared his disbelief in Blake; and at that moment the tinkle of an electric bell in the smoking-room below reached the expectant ears of Mr. Macrae.

‘Come down, all of you,’ he said. ‘The wireless telegraphy is at work.’

He waited till they were all in the smoking-room, and feverishly examined the tape.

‘Escape of De Wet,’ he read. ‘Disasters to the Imperial Yeomanry. Strike of Cigarette Makers. Great Fire at Hackney.’

‘There!’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘We might have gone to bed in London, and not known all that till we got the morning papers to-morrow. And here we are fifty miles from a railway station or a telegraph office – no, we’re nearer Inchnadampf.’

‘Would that I were in the Isle of Apples, Mell Moy, far, far from civilisation!’ said Blake.

“There shall be no grief there or sorrow,” so sings the minstrel of The Wooing of Etain.

“Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of new milk and ale shalt thou have with me then, fair lady,” Merton read out from the book he had been speaking of to the Budes.

‘Jolly place, the Celtic Paradise! Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of ale and new milk. Quel luxe!’

‘Is that the kind of entertainment you were offering me, Mr. Blake?’ asked Miss Macrae gaily. ‘Mr. Blake,’ she went on, ‘has been inviting me to fly to the undiscovered West beneath the waters, in the magic boat of Bran.’

‘Did Bran invent the submarine?’ asked Mr. Macrae, and then the company saw what they had never seen before, the bard blushing. He seemed so discomposed that Miss Macrae took compassion on him.

‘Never mind my father, Mr. Blake,’ she said, ‘he is a very good Highlander, and believes in Eachain of the Hairy Arm as much as the crofters do. Have you heard of Eachain, Mr. Blake? He is a spectre in full Highland costume, attached to our clan. When we came here first, to look round, we had only horses hired from Edinburgh, and a Lowlander – mark you, a Lowlander– to drive. He was in the stable one afternoon – the old stable, we have pulled it down – when suddenly the horses began to kick and rear. He looked round to the open door, and there stood a huge Highlander in our tartans, with musket, pistols, claymore, dirk, skian, and all, and soft brogues of untanned leather on his feet. The coachman, in a panic, made a blind rush at the figure, but behold, there was nobody, and a boy outside had seen no man. The horses were trembling and foaming. Now it was a Lowlander from Teviotdale that saw the man, and the crofters were delighted. They said the figure was the chief that fell at Culloden, come to welcome us back. So you must not despair of us, Mr. Blake, and you, that have “the sight,” may see Eachain yourself, who knows?’

This happy turn of the conversation exactly suited Blake. He began to be very amusing about magic, and brownies, and ‘the downy she,’ as Miss Macrae called the People of Peace. The ladies presently declared that they were afraid to go to bed; so they went, Miss Macrae indicating her displeasure to Merton by the coldness of her demeanour.

The men, who were rather dashed by the pleasant intelligence which the telegraph had communicated, sat up smoking for a while, and then retired in a subdued state of mind.

Next morning, which was Sunday, Merton appeared rather late at breakfast, late and pallid. After a snatch of disturbed slumber, he had wakened, or seemed to waken, fretting a good deal over the rusticity of his bearing towards Blake, and over his hopeless affair of the heart. He had vexed his lady. ‘If he is good enough for his hosts, he ought to be good enough for their guests,’ thought Merton. ‘What a brute, what a fool I am; I ought to go. I will go! I ought not to take coffee after dinner, I know I ought not, and I smoke too much,’ he added, and finally he went to breathe the air on the roof.

The night was deadly soft and still, a slight mist hid the furthest verges of the sea’s horizon. Behind it, the summer lightning seemed like portals that opened and shut in the heavens, revealing a glory without form, and closing again.

‘I don’t wonder that these Irish poets dreamed of Isles of Paradise out there:

‘Lands undiscoverable in the unheard-of West,Round which the strong stream of a sacred seaRuns without wind for ever.’

thought Merton. ‘Chicago is the realisation of their dream. Hullo, there are the lights of a big steamer, and a very low one behind it! Queer craft!’

Merton watched the lights that crossed the sea, when either the haze deepened or the fainter light on the smaller vessel vanished, and the larger ship steamed on in a southerly direction. ‘Magic boat of Bran!’ thought Merton. He turned and entered the staircase to go back to his room. There was a lift, of course, but, equally of course, there was nobody to manage it. Merton, who had a lighted bedroom-candle in his hand, descended the spiral staircase; at a turning he thought he saw, ‘with the tail of his eye,’ a plaid, draping a tall figure of a Highlander, disappear round the corner. Nobody in the castle wore the kilt except the piper, and he had not rooms in the observatory. Merton ran down as fast as he could, but he did not catch another view of the plaid and its wearer, or hear any footsteps. He went to the bottom of the staircase, opened the outer door, and looked forth. Nobody! The electric light from the open door of his own room blazed across the landing on his return. All was perfectly still, and Merton remembered that he had not heard the footsteps of the appearance. ‘Was it Eachain?’ he asked himself. ‘Do I sleep, do I dream?’

He went back to bed and slumbered uneasily. He seemed to be awake in his room, in broad light, and to hear a slow drip, drip, on the floor. He looked up; the roof was stained with a great dark splash of a crimson hue. He got out of bed, and touched the wet spot on the floor under the blotch on the ceiling.

His fingers were reddened with blood! He woke at the horror of it: found himself in bed in the dark, pressed an electric knob, and looked at the ceiling. It was dry and white. ‘I certainly have been smoking too much lately,’ thought Merton, and, switching off the light, he slumbered again, so soundly that he did not hear the piper playing round the house, or the man who brought his clothes and hot water, or the gong for breakfast.

When he did wake, he was surprised at the lateness of the hour, and dressed as rapidly as possible. ‘I wonder if I was dreaming when I thought that I went out on the roof, and saw mountains and marvels,’ said Merton to himself. ‘A queer thing, the human mind,’ he reflected sagely. It occurred to him to enter the smoking-room on his way downstairs. He routed two maids who perhaps had slept too late, and were hurriedly making the room tidy. The sun was beating in at the window, and Merton noticed some tiny glittering points of white metallic light on the carpet near the new telegraphic apparatus. ‘I don’t believe these lazy Highland Maries have swept the room properly since the electric machine was put up,’ Merton thought. He hastily seized, and took to his chamber, his book on old Irish literature, which was too clearly part of Blake’s Celtic inspiration. Merton wanted no more quatrains, but he did mean to try to be civil. He then joined the party at breakfast; he admitted that he had slept ill, but, when asked by Blake, disclaimed having seen Eachain of the Hairy Arm, and did not bore or bewilder the company with his dreams.

Miss Macrae, in sabbatical raiment, was fresher than a rose and gay as a lark. Merton tried not to look at her; he failed in this endeavour.

II. Lost

The day was Sunday, and Merton, who had a holy horror of news, rejoiced to think that the telegraphic machine would probably not tinkle its bell for twenty-four hours. This was not the ideal of the millionaire. Things happen, intelligence arrives from the limits of our vast and desirable empire, even on the Day of Rest. But the electric bell was silent. Mr. Macrae, from patriotic motives, employed a Highland engineer and mechanician, so there was nothing to be got out of him in the way of work on the sabbath day. The millionaire himself did not quite understand how to work the thing. He went to the smoking-room where it dwelt and looked wistfully at it, but was afraid to try to call up his correspondents in London. As for the usual manipulator, Donald McDonald, he had started early for the distant Free Kirk. An ‘Unionist’ minister intended to try to preach himself in, and the majority of the congregation, being of the old Free Kirk rock, and averse to union with the United Presbyterians, intended to try to keep him out. They ‘had a lad with the gift who would do the preaching fine,’ and as there was no police-station within forty miles it seemed fairly long odds on the Free Kirk recalcitrants. However, there was a resolute minority of crofters on the side of the minister, and every chance of an ecclesiastical battle royal. Accompanied by the stalker, two keepers, and all the gardeners, armed with staves, the engineer had early set out for the scene of brotherly amity, and Mr. Macrae had reluctantly to admit that he was cut off from his communications.

Merton, who was with him in the smoking-room, mentally absolved the Highland housemaids. If they had not swept up the tiny glittering metallic points on the carpet before, they had done so now. Only two or three caught his eye.

Mr. Macrae, avid of news, accommodated himself in an arm-chair with newspapers of two or three days old, from which he had already sucked the heart by aid of his infernal machine. The Budes and Blake, with Miss Macrae (an Anglican), had set off to walk to the Catholic chapel, some four miles away, for crofting opinion was resolute against driving on the Lord’s Day. Merton, self-denying and resolved, did not accompany his lady; he read a novel, wrote letters, and felt desolate. All was peace, all breathed of the Sabbath calm.

‘Very odd there’s no call from the machine,’ said Mr. Macrae anxiously.

‘It is Sunday,’ said Merton.

‘Still, they might send us something.’

‘They scarcely favoured us last Sunday,’ said Merton.

‘No, and now I think of it, not at all on the Sunday before,’ said Mr. Macrae. ‘I dare say it is all right.’

‘Would a thunder-storm further south derange it?’ asked Merton, adding, ‘There was a lot of summer lightning last night.’

‘That might be it; these things have their tempers. But they are a great comfort. I can’t think how we ever did without them,’ said Mr. Macrae, as if these things were common in every cottage. ‘Wonderful thing, science!’ he added, in an original way, and Merton, who privately detested science, admitted that it was so.

‘Shall we go to see the horses?’ suggested Mr. Macrae, and they did go and stare, as is usual on Sunday in the country, at the hind-quarters of these noble animals. Merton strove to be as much interested as possible in Mr. Macrae’s stories of his fleet American trotters. But his heart was otherwhere. ‘They will soon be an extinct species,’ said Mr. Macrae. ‘The motor has come to stay.’

Merton was not feeling very well, he was afraid of a cigarette, Mr. Macrae’s conversation was not brilliant, and Merton still felt as if he were under the wrath, so well deserved, of his hostess. She did not usually go to the Catholic chapel; to be sure, in the conditions prevailing at the Free Kirk place of worship, she had no alternative if she would not abstain wholly from religious privileges. But Merton felt sure that she had really gone to comfort and console the injured feelings of Blake. Probably she would have had a little court of lordlings, Merton reflected (not that Mr. Macrae had any taste for them), but everybody knew that, what with the weather, and the crofters, and the grouse disease, the sport at Castle Skrae was remarkably bad. So the party was tiny, though a number of people were expected later, and Merton and the heiress had been on what, as he ruefully reflected, were very kind terms – rather more than kind, he had hoped, or feared, now and then. Merton saw that he had annoyed her, and thrown her, metaphorically speaking, into the arms of the Irish minstrel. All the better, perhaps, he thought, ruefully. The poet was handsome enough to be one that ‘limners loved to paint, and ladies to look upon.’ He generally took chaff well, and could give it, as well as take it, and there were hours when his sentiment and witchery had a chance with most women. ‘But Lady Bude says there is nothing in it, and women usually know,’ he reflected. Well, he must leave the girl, and save his self-respect.

When nothing more in the way of pottering could be done at the stables, when its proprietor had exhausted the pleasure of staring at the balloon in its hall, and had fed the fowls, he walked with Merton down the avenue, above the shrunken burn that whispered among its ferns and alders, to meet the returning church-goers. The Budes came first, together; they were still, they were always, honeymooning. Mr. Macrae turned back with Lady Bude; Merton walked with Bude, Blake and Miss Macrae were not yet in sight. He thought of walking on to meet them – but no, it must not be.