From London Far

by Michael Innes

  Moreover, no amount of cursing could mitigate the drastic effect upon the bank balance of the Misses Macleod. It was this that gave Mr Properjohn his chance.

  Mr Properjohn, although a person of no particular nationality, might be classed as a Sasunnach – and it seemed very likely that he was himself a limited company as well. Moreover, he was – or had been on the occasion of his first appearance – a tourist, staying at a mainland hotel some ten miles away with an orthodox paraphernalia of brand new guns and rods (on the chance of making the acquaintance of the gentry) and golf clubs (on a calculation that he probably would not). Or so the inhabitants read him – and not the kindlier for his appearing in a kilt, something of a solecism even where kilts are worn, and very definitely so where they are not.

  To be a tourist was to fall, in the estimation of the Misses Macleod and of their housekeeper, into a middling category difficult to deal with. Travellers – whom the ladies thought of vaguely as country gentlemen sequacious of Antiquities and the Picturesque, traversing the country in a chariot or a chaise – travellers were to be received at any time and shown over the castle by Mrs Cameron. Etiquette required that the Misses Macleod should be declared not in residence, and to maintain this fiction they would lurk for half an hour on end in a servant’s bedroom or a privy. Should some mischance, however, actually bring about an encounter with a Traveller it was necessary that courtesies should be interchanged, and a glass of whisky and an oatcake offered and discussed. Travellers were thus definitely of the eighteenth century.

  Trippers belonged equally definitely to the twentieth. They used paddle steamers and chars-à-bancs. They moved in droves. The Misses Macleod had no doubts about Trippers. They were a menacing tide in no circumstances to be let break against the rocks of Moila.

  Tourists came in between. Their aura was of Birmingham and the later Victorian age. It was known that people had been marrying their sons and even daughters to the children of Tourists for quite a long time. The advent of a Tourist was thus regularly the occasion of anxious debate. And it was in this category that Mr Properjohn was provisionally placed when Hamish Macleod rowed him across to Moila in his boat.

  Mr Properjohn, as has been mentioned, was wearing a kilt – and this attracted the eye of Miss Dorcas Macleod, one of whose favourite bedside books was the Vestiarium Scoticum of Sobieski Stuart. It was late afternoon and Miss Dorcas had been walking on the keep, whither it was her custom to repair at this hour in order to feed a small flock of pigeons who there led a somewhat harried existence amid the ocean fowl. The season was autumnal and the mists were chill. Miss Dorcas was dressed in a balaclava helmet and British warm abandoned by her brother, the former hereditary Captain, some twenty-five years before. Her figure was thus not particularly suggestive of the Celtic Twilight; pacing the crumbling battlements, she looked rather more like Marcellus or Bernardo about to meet the Ghost in a modern-dress production of the tragedy of Hamlet. And when Mr Properjohn came into view approaching the causey she halted as abruptly as if about to demand that he should stand and unfold himself.

  The curiosity of Miss Dorcas was scientific rather than personal, for the fact was that the tartan sported by Mr Properjohn was unknown to her. Momentarily, indeed, she took that mingling of greens crossed by a narrow yellow line to betoken the approach of a Campbell of Breadalbane; and then – the darker green taking on a bluish tinge in the level light of early evening – she conjectured that the visitor might even be a Gordon. But then there was scarlet too, and what looked uncommonly like lines of ultramarine. Miss Dorcas was puzzled and disturbed. She set down the pannikin of breadcrumbs which she had brought for the pigeons and leant precariously over the keep for better observation. Meanwhile, Mr Properjohn (whose tartan had, in fact, been invented some six months previously by a tailor within reasonable hail of Savile Row) approached the castle and walked confidently across the drawbridge. He looked as if he were about to buy the place. And, as it happened, it was approximately this that was in his mind.

  It would have been customary upon such an occasion for Miss Dorcas to make her way hurriedly to the castle’s flagstaff and there lower the little standard which indicated that the hereditary Captain and herself were at home. The ladies would then have retired to their bedchambers – or to the kitchen if the day was chilly – and thus permit Mrs Cameron or the man Tammas to show the visitor round. But Miss Dorcas was so interested in the new tartan – the wearer of which, as she could now see, further sported an outsize dirk, or skeandhu, in his stocking – that she hurried down the long winding-stair of the keep, strode across the base-court and herself threw open the wicket in the great door of the castle. No sooner had she done this than she was overwhelmed with a sense of the temerity and impropriety of her conduct.

  Mr Properjohn was passing somewhat apprehensively beneath the portcullis. At the same time he was calculating (as it happened) just what this might fetch if sold to a gentleman then engaged in rapidly assembling a medieval castle in the neighbourhood of Pasadena, Cal. Thus Miss Dorcas’ confusion was for a moment matched by the visitor’s abstraction and apprehension, and they looked at each other without speaking. Mr Properjohn wore a sporran of white horsehair and shining silver – including what appeared to be the representation of a camelopard rampant. At the sight of this garment, appropriate only to a parade ground or a ballroom, Miss Dorcas’ heart further misgave her. And then Mr Properjohn raised his hat.

  Mr Properjohn raised his hat, which is a motion so socially distinct from taking it off that Miss Dorcas at once apprehended the worst. Moreover, the hat being, as it happened, a glengarry bonnet, and Mr Properjohn fumbling with it while held suspended above his head, it returned to its resting place back to front, with the result that two broad black ribbons hung down on each side of Mr Properjohn’s nose. Miss Dorcas found this so very funny that she laughed unrestrainedly – so loudly, indeed, as to raise clouds of screaming gulls from the precipitous slopes of the causey. All this, together with the intermittent reverberation of breakers upon the rocks below and the farmyard noises which were never absent from the base-court, appeared to put the visitor to considerable confusion. It was with a view to relieving this, as well as atoning for her discourtesy, that Miss Dorcas mildly said: ‘Good afternoon. I think that perhaps you are a Traveller?’

  Now this (as the reader knows) was to falsify her own judgement in the matter and convey something of a compliment. Miss Dorcas was therefore much at a loss when Mr Properjohn – still from behind the two black ribbons – at once replied in the negative and with a good deal of offended pride. The fact was, of course, that by this form of words he supposed himself to be taxed with peddling refrigerators or vacuum-cleaners; and it is conceivable that he felt his acumen as well as his dignity to be assailed by Miss Dorcas’ conjecture. For assuredly the vacuum-cleaner that could hope to cope with Castle Moila still lay in the womb of time, while a refrigerator would have been altogether misplaced there.

  ‘My goot man,’ said Mr Properjohn (being led altogether astray by the balaclava, the British warm, and the Hebridean ruggedness of Miss Dorcas’ features), ‘my goot man, I am the director of six, seven big large companies – some the largest biggest companies of industrial chemistry operating presently. So please permit you take my cart to your mistress. Sogleich.’ And Mr Properjohn produced a square of pasteboard on which Miss Dorcas found inscribed:

  AMOS WILLOUGHBY PROPERJOHN,

  MANAGING DIRECTOR

  Macrocosmic Chemicals, Ltd, Inc., and Prop.

  Miss Dorcas studied this, and found at least the end of it as incomprehensible as the bank found her sister’s curses. And while Miss Dorcas studied Mr Properjohn’s card Mr Properjohn studied the gulls – watching their multitudinous gyrations with such benevolent and indeed proprietary approval that he might have been taken, standing in this wild place in his Celtic habiliments, to represent that Angus of the Birds so beautifully celebrated by the late
W B Yeats. And, unlike the Enoch Arden of an earlier poet, he appeared to find the myriad scream of these ocean fowl definitely to his taste. Almost, it might have been the chink of guineas on a counter that was sounding in his ear. As it happened, this was very much what it did, in fact, represent.

  ‘I am afraid’, said Miss Dorcas, ‘that it is now some years since my sister has received.’

  ‘Say!’ What Mr Properjohn put into this interjection was a large and cordial interest – nor did he appear at all abashed by the revelation that it was a Miss Macleod who addressed him. ‘But that’s definite what I come about. Now onworts I promise your sister she receive regular as clockwork – sempre!’

  Miss Dorcas was a good deal startled by this impertinence. ‘Sir,’ she began, ‘I fear that some strange misapprehension–’

  ‘In fak, quarterly,’ continued Mr Properjohn. ‘And you leave it to me I work it so it don’t pay no taxes neither.’

  ‘Do I understand you to suggest that my sister, Miss Isabella, is to receive money?’ Miss Dorcas, whose quick grasp of a contingency so unlikely as this did her wits much credit, looked with entirely fresh interest at the exotic Mr Properjohn. ‘And that your call upon her is in the capacity of a man of business?’

  ‘Sure! Véritablement! Money from home!’ Mr Properjohn exuded confidence and cheer. ‘And there is no inconveniences – no inconveniences in the worlt. Even we are able to be of a liddle direk service – and you permit my saying service is the motto of our organization – and do ourselves a piece of goot the same time. And that is what service is, no?’

  ‘It is a species’, said Miss Dorcas drily, ‘of which the rumour has reached us, I confess.’

  ‘Then that’s capital.’ Mr Properjohn had added a large obtuseness to his aura. ‘A little direk service in the way of giving the castle – your wonderful old castle – a goot clean up.’

  ‘A clean up!’

  ‘Exak so. And if you should care to replace this contrivance’ – and Mr Properjohn gestured upwards at the portcullis – ‘by a puttikler handsome front door, or even some the finest wrought iron gates including high-class heraldic device–’

  ‘The portcullis was there’, said Miss Dorcas, ‘in the age of Prince Charles Edward, who passed under it in the year 1745. It was then perhaps six hundred years old. So I fancy it may last our time.’

  ‘Six hundut years!’ Mr Properjohn, who saw that he had been altogether below the mark in what he had supposed this feudal contraption might fetch in Pasadena, sighed with brief regret. ‘But what we can do round abouts the castle is small matters. It’s like maybe you got an odder island and we make a deal on that?’

  ‘You mean Inchfarr?’ It occurred to Miss Dorcas for the first time that this fancy-dress Sasunnach might be astray in his wits. Quite possibly he was bewitched – and conceivable by Great-aunt Patuffa of the dower house. It was not at all improbable, when she came to think of it, that Great-aunt Patuffa had deliberately despatched him as a plague on Moila. The gold he offered would be fairy gold – and it would prove so. ‘Inchfarr?’ repeated Miss Dorcas warily.

  ‘Inchfarr. Jawohl.’ Mr Properjohn was emphatic. ‘I understand your sister owns it?’

  ‘Miss Isabella, the hereditary Captain, holds not in chief, but from the Marquis of Raasay.’ Miss Dorcas spoke at once with dignity and caution. ‘The feu is therefore subject to the payment of chiefery, as also of teinds to the Synod of Argyll. Subject to these, I have little doubt that His Majesty would be pleased to regard our holding as inalienable. Always supposing, that is to say, that we remained well affected to his Throne and Person.’

  ‘Par exemple!’ said Mr Properjohn – the more confidently in that this novel angle on the real-estate business both bewildered and impressed him.

  ‘As there is little doubt that we should do. The present Pretender is a gracious and charming Prince, with whom my sister and I were privileged to dine in Rome some twenty years ago. But it is now several generations since we have had any doubts on the expediency of the Hanoverian Settlement.’

  ‘Natchly,’ said Mr Properjohn. ‘I can say I met few several kinks myself and they looks like maybe lorts of creation you go in to them first. But start talking business and they acts like they were you or me.’ Mr Properjohn paused on this reminiscence and his glance rose once more to the wheeling gulls. ‘Peeutiful birts!’ he cried with enthusiasm. ‘Always at it even on the wink. Always industrials like the bees.’

  II

  The fabrication of a mystery being far from the purpose of the present narrative, it will already be abundantly clear to the reader that Mr Properjohn (of Macrocosmic Chemicals, Ltd, Inc., and Prop.) was – ostensibly, at least – after guano, that valuable manure formed by the immemorial droppings of birds (or bats). Hence his pleasing enthusiasm for the industriousness of the feathered myriads of Moila and Inchfarr. And no doubt, had the bats of Castle Moila been numbered by hundreds of thousands (instead of merely by hundreds), he would have been equally lyrical about them. As it was, he now followed Miss Dorcas across the base-court with his gaze so elevated to the skies that he first stumbled over a recumbent sow and seconds later almost precipitated himself down the castle’s oubliette. Had not Miss Dorcas – who was by no means disposed to let even fairy gold vanish into a dungeon – grasped him by the tail of his kilt he would undoubtedly have gone the way of Sir Mungo Macalpine (who had entered into an unfortunate dispute with a hereditary Captain in the later fourteenth century) and of Black Malcolm, a minstrel who had failed to commend himself to the ear (it was said) of a hereditary Captain’s lady some fifty years later, and whose plaintive strains could still be heard issuing from the bowels of the castle on any tolerably calm night when the moon was full.

  From the company of this melodious shade, then, Miss Dorcas just snatched Mr Properjohn, and led him firmly through the remaining offices to the superior parts of the castle. The man Tammas – who, with the slow motion effect common to all Island activities, was slitting the throat of a calf – paused in astonishment at the spectacle, so that he looked rather like Abraham when in doubts about Isaac, his knife poised in air. And Mrs Cameron – with even more of deliberation, she was wringing the neck of a rooster – stood so transfixed before the apparition of Miss Dorcas in familiar conversation with an outlandishly attired stranger that she bore much the appearance of Lot’s wife at the fatal moment of taking a backward glance at Sodom – a Biblical occasion, as it happened, vividly commemorated in sampler work above Mrs Cameron’s bed.

  Mr Properjohn removed his eye from the welkin sufficiently long to take a passing glance at these retainers. ‘I suppose’, he said, ‘that you keep a great many servants in a such place like this? Butlers and valets and five, six, ten hired girls?’

  ‘We are waited upon by Mrs Cameron and Tammas. The needs of my sister and myself are extremely simple.’ Miss Dorcas’ reply was absent and betrayed no consciousness of offence. She was trying to think of anything – apart from the portcullis – for which this fantastically ill-informed person could possibly propose to part with a quarterly cheque. Could it be the Raeburn? There was no chance whatever of her sister’s being persuaded to sacrifice that. Could it be Uncle Alastair’s Landseers? Miss Dorcas was dimly aware that Landseers were not quite what they had once been. Might Mr Properjohn, despite his commercial connection, be himself an artist and merely desirous of hiring a studio with superior marine views? But artists, Miss Dorcas was quite sure, do not wear the wrong sort of sporran and seldom talk about hired girls. There flitted through her mind the possibility that this unaccountable stranger was a fugitive from justice – had he not said something about avoiding income tax? – and proposed to pay handsomely for asylum. Castle Moila had harboured plenty of such people in its time – commonly gratis, but occasionally for cash down. And a commercial man was, of course, peculiarly likely to be in such trouble. Yet there was something a little too obtru
sive about Mr Properjohn for this explanation to fit – unless, indeed, he regarded his garish costume as a sort of protective colouring which should virtually compose him into the landscape of the Highlands of Scotland… Miss Dorcas had got so far in her speculations – to little purpose, it must be confessed – when she became aware of her sister regarding her with a very minimum of approval from the steps of the banqueting hall.

  Mr Properjohn, having been at fault with his first Miss Macleod, was determined to make no mistake with this elder lady. Sweeping off his glengarry bonnet with a new and altogether more generous gesture, he contrived a blended bow and genuflection which might have satisfied the most stringent sense of feudal decorum. ‘Goot afternoon,’ he said agreeably to Miss Isabella. ‘May I venture to express the hope that your Excellency finds herself in her accustomed peeutiful health?’

  This was a species of address which Mr Properjohn had known to answer capitally in various corners of Europe – and particularly when he was conducting business in the Balkan countries (whether with kings or others) through the medium of an interpreter. As both the approach to Moila along the Glasgow and Mallaig line, and also the condition of the peasantry so far as he had been able to observe it, strongly reminded him of the wildness and poverty of those other outposts of Europe, it had struck him that this was the likely line to take.

  ‘Bless me!’ said Miss Isabella. ‘Dorcas, what in the world is this?’

  ‘An offer of for certain five hundut pounts a year.’ Mr Properjohn interrupted deftly with what his Balkan experience told him was the next important point. ‘And no inconvenience – no inconvenience whatever. We undertake we take special care that the machinery is puttikler noiseless and thoroughly safe–’