Earraid
Earraid
by Robert Louis Stevenson
There
is an isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges
me. I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later
on, threw upon its shores, and condemned to several days of
rain and shellfish on its tumbled boulders, the hero of another.
The ink is not yet faded; the sound of the sentences is still
in my mind's ear; and I am under a spell to write of that
island again.
I
saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger,
Sam Bough and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet
upon our baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern summer eve.
And behold! there was now a pier of stone, there were rows
of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a street of cottages,
an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden bothies for
the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together
experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in
the hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer
lay at her moorings. All day long there hung about the place
the music of chinking tools; and even in the dead of night,
the watchman carried his lantern to and fro in the dark settlement
and could light the pipe of any midnight muser. It was, above
all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, when the sound
of the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet. All about
the green compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday's
best, walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler,
thoughtfully smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the
stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of the gulls. And
it was strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they
were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a
table, and the congregation perched about in the double tier
of sleeping bunks; and to hear the singing of the psalms,
"the chapters," the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon,
and the old, eloquent lighthouse prayer.
In
fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was
observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound
of preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun
had risen from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out
of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic
rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a brace
of wallowing stone-lighters. The open ocean widened upon either
board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the
horizon, before she came to her unhomely destination, and
lay-to at last where the rock clapped its black head above
the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its spider legs,
and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their arms,
and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An
ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage
of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might
play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock
or the Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely
bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every
crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug. No
other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea
itself, that here ran like a mill-race, and growled about
the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the calmest
weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. Times were
different upon Dhu-Heartach when it blew, and the night fell
dark, and the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were
quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in their
iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the sprays.
Fear sat with them in their sea-beleaguered dwelling; and
the colour changed in anxious faces when some greater billow
struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under
the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr. Goodwillie,
whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of undecipherable
rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy
amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that
I saw Dhu-Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier
summer afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid,
ploughing an enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved
of their deck cargo, riding in her wake more quietly; and
the steersman upon each, as she rose on the long swell, standing
tall and dark against the shining west.
But
it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse
settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the top
of the first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all
shut out, the face of things unchanged by any of man's doings.
Here was no living presence, save for the limpets on the rocks,
for some old, gray, rain-beaten ram that I might rouse out
of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and
the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was found
so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's
priests. The earthy savour of the bog-plants, the rude disorder
of the boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the
air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among
the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of
dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle, all that I saw
and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt with scarce
a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past ages.
And
all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and
sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon
were roaring for days together on French battlefields; and
I would sit in my isle (I call it mine, after the use of lovers)
and think upon the war, and the loudness of these far-away
battles, and the pain of the men's wounds, and the weariness
of their marching. And I would think too of that other war
which is as old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man:
the unsparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; the
toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread, precarious honour,
the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards. It was a long
look forward; the future summoned me as with trumpet calls,
it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and beseeching;
and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish
bather on the beach.
There
was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were
much together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying
to sail a boat and spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools
of the roost. But the most part of the time we spoke of the
great uncharted desert of our futures; wondering together
what should there befall us; hearing with surprise the sound
of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As far,
and as hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave,
so far it seems now to look backward upon these emotions;
so hard to recall justly that loath submission, as of the
sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our necks under the
yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the other day;
I cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon my
part, I was wondering to see us both so much at home, and
so composed and sedentary in the world; and how much we had
gained, and how much we had lost, to attain to that composure;
and which had been upon the whole our best estate: when we
sat there prating sensibly like men of some experience, or
when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a western
islet.
