Well, one day the mouse’s manager in the office was very angry with her because of a mistake she had made in her books, and he told her that she must come back and work late at five o’clock at night. When the mouse left the office she began to cry.
Look, she said to herself, at the life I lead. I try to do my best and look what happens to me. Tonight I was going to wash my clothes and now I have to go back to the office though I don’t want to do that. Some of the other mice in the office laugh at me and some of them steal my food.
And so she looked out at the swan that was swimming so calmly in the water.
‘I’m just as good as you,’ she said to the swan. ‘I do more work than you. You never did any work in your life. What use are you to the country? You never do anything but admire yourself in the water. Well, it’s high time I got some rest as well. I need it more than you do. Anyway in my own way I’m just as beautiful as you. And there were kings and queens in my family as well, I’m sure, in the past, though now I’m working in an office.’
She was so upset that she couldn’t eat her food and later a crow came down from the sky and ate it.
Anyway the mouse jumped into the river thinking that she would swim just as well as the swan was doing.
But she slowly began to sink because she wasn’t used to swimming and she was drowned in the river and the swan continued to swim round and round, dipping her throat now and again in the water, and then raising it and looking around her with her long neck and her blunt red beak.
Murdo sent the following to the local newspaper, but it was never printed.
Is Calvin Still Alive?
Many people think that Hitler is still alive and that he is living in South America with money that he stole from the Jews.
But there is a rumour going about this island that Calvin is still alive. He is supposed to have been seen in a small house a little out of town on the road to Holm.
He is a small hunchbacked man with spectacles, who speaks to no one, or if he does speak he speaks in very sloppy not to say ungrammatical Gaelic.
He has a face like iron and he is said to sit at a table night and day studying a Bible almost as big as himself.
He can’t stand a candle in the same house.
If he sees anyone drinking or smoking he rushes out of the house and shouts insults at him and dances up and down on the road, shaking his fist.
He also has a strong aversion to cars.
If he sees a woman approaching he shuts the door at once and sits at the window shaking his fist at her and mouthing inaudible words. If she looks at him he shuts his eyes and keeps them shut till she has gone past. After that he washes his face.
He wears black gloves on his hands. He hardly ever leaves the house in the summer but in the winter he goes on long walks.
Now a number of people in the village wonder if you can find a picture of Calvin so that they can establish his identity. It may be that this is a man who is impersonating Calvin for some reason of his own.
If anyone were to say that it would certainly be odd to find Calvin still alive, I would answer that stranger things have happened down the centuries.
What about for instance the man in the Bible who rose to heaven in a chariot?
And what about Nebuchadnezzar who lived on grass for many years?
It is also odd that this man won’t go to any of our churches but that now and again on a Sunday he will be seen hanging about one of them though he won’t actually go in.
I await your answer with much interest. I enclose a stamp.
Yours etc.,
Murdo Macrae
One day Murdo visited the local library and he said to the thin bespectacled woman who was standing at the counter:
‘I want the novel War and Peace written by Hugh Macleod.’
‘Hugh Macleod?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but if you don’t happen to have War and Peace I’ll take any other book by the same author, such as The Brothers Karamazov.’
‘I thought,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I mean are you sure that …’
‘I’m quite sure that the book is by Hugh Macleod,’ said Murdo, ‘and I often wonder why there aren’t more of his books in the libraries.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think we have War and Peace but surely it was written by Tolstoy.’
‘What’s it about?’ said Murdo. ‘Is it about a family growing up in Harris at the time of Napoleon?’
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that the story is set in Russia,’ looking at him keenly through her glasses.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Murdo under his breath and then aloud,
‘Oh well I don’t think we can be talking about the same Hugh Macleod. This man was never in Russia as far as I know. Is it a long book, about a thousand pages?’
‘I think that’s right,’ said the woman, who was beginning to look rather wary.
‘Uh huh,’ said Murdo. ‘This is a long book as well. It’s about Napoleon in Harris in the eighteenth century. Hugh Macleod was an extraordinary man, you know. He had a long beard and he used to make his own shoes. A strange man. I don’t really know much about his life except that he became a bit religious in his old age. But it doesn’t matter. If you haven’t got War and Peace maybe you could give me his other book The Brothers Karamazov. It’s about three brothers and their struggle for a croft.’
‘I don’t think,’ said the woman, ‘that we have that one.’
‘Well, isn’t that damnable,’ said Murdo. ‘Here you have an author as distinguished as any that has ever come out of the Highlands and you don’t have his books. And I can’t get them in any other library. I think it’s shameful. But I bet you if he was a Russian you would have all his books. I’m pretty sure that you’ll have Tramping through Siberia by Gogol. Anyway it doesn’t matter.
‘But I was forgetting another reason for my call,’ and he took a can out of his pocket. ‘I’m collecting money for authors who can’t write. A penny or two will do.’
‘Authors who can’t write?’ said the woman looking suspiciously at the can as if it might explode in her face.
‘That’s right,’ said Murdo. ‘Poor people who sit at their desks every morning and find that they can’t put a word to paper. Have you ever spared a thought for them? Those people who can write don’t of course need help. But think,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘of those people who sit at their desks day after day while the sun rises and the sun sets and when they look at their paper they find that there isn’t a word written on it. Do you not feel compassion for them? Aren’t your bowels moved with pity? Doesn’t it surprise you that in our modern society not enough is done for such people?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘to tell the truth …’
‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say,’ said Murdo. ‘Why should you give money for non-existent books? And that point of view is natural enough. There is a great deal in it. But has it ever occurred to you that the books that have never been written may be as good as, nay even better than, the ones that have? That there is in some heaven or other books as spotless as the angels themselves without a stain of ink on them? For myself, I can believe this quite easily as I put a lot of credence in the soul as I am sure you do also. Think,’ he said, ‘if this room were full of non-existent unwritten books how much easier your job would be.’
He saw her hand creeping steadily towards the phone that lay on her desk and said hurriedly,
‘Perhaps that day will come though it hasn’t come yet.’
He took the can in his hand and half-ran half-walked out of the library down the corridor with the white marble busts of Romans on each side of him.
Still half running he passed a woman laden with books and said, ‘I’m sorry. Bubonic plague. Please excuse me. I’ll be all right in a few minutes. Brucellosis,’ and half crouching he ran down the brae among the bare trees and the snow.
Ahead of him he saw the white mountain and he shook his fist at it shouting
‘Neil Munro. Neil Munro.’
After a while he took a black hat out of his bag and he went home limping, now and again removing his hat when he saw a child walking past him on the street.
‘The potato,’ said Murdo to his wife one night, ‘what is like the potato? What would we do without the potato especially in the islands? The potato is sometimes wet and sometimes dry. It is even said that the dry potato is “laughing” at you. Now that is a very odd thing, a laughing potato. But it could happen. And there are many people whose faces are like potatoes. If we had no potatoes we would have to eat the herring with our tea and that wouldn’t be very tasty. In the spring we plant the potatoes and we pick them in the autumn. Now in spite of that no poet has made a poem for the humble potato. It didn’t occur to William Ross or Alexander Macdonald—great poets though they were—to do so, and I am sure that they must have eaten a lot of potatoes in their poetic careers.
‘There is a very big difference, when you think of it, between the potato and the herring. The herring moves, it travels from place to place in the ocean, and they say that there aren’t many fish in the sea faster than the herring. But the potato lies in the dark till someone digs it up with a graip. We should therefore ask ourselves, Which is the happier of the two, the potato or the herring? That is a big philosophical question and it astonishes me that it hasn’t been studied in greater depth. It is a very profound question. For the potato lies there in the dark, and it doesn’t hear or see anything. But in spite of that we have no evidence that it is less happy than the herring. No indeed. And as well as that we have no evidence that the herring is either happy or unhappy. The herring journeys through the ocean meeting many other kinds of fish on its way, such as seals and mackerel.
‘But the potato stays in the one place in the dark in its brown skin, without, we imagine, desire or hope. For what could a potato hope for? Or what could it desire? Now at a certain time, the potato and the herring come together on the one plate, say on a summer day or on an autumn day. It greatly puzzles me how they come together in that fashion. Was it predestined that that particular herring and that particular potato should meet—the herring that was roving the sea in its grey dress and the potato that was lying in the earth in its brown dress. That is a very deep question. And the herring cannot do without the potato, nor for that matter can the potato do without the herring. For they need each other.
‘They are as closely related as the soul and the body. But is the herring the body or the soul?
‘That is another profound question.
‘And also you can roast a potato and you can roast a herring but I don’t think they are as good when they are roasted. I myself think that the herring is better when it is salted and I may say the same about the potato.
‘But no one has ever conjectured about the feelings of the potato or the feelings of the herring. The herring leaves its house and travels all over the world and it sees strange sights in the sea, but the potato sees nothing, it is lying in the darkness while the days and the weeks and the years pass. The potato doesn’t move from the place in which it was planted.
‘I must make a poem about this sometime,’ said Murdo to his wife. ‘I am very surprised that up till now no one has made a poem about it.’
And he stopped speaking and his wife looked at him and then got up and made some tea.
One night Murdo woke from sleep, his wife beside him in the bed, and he was sweating and trembling.
‘Put on the light at once,’ he shouted. His wife jumped out of bed and did as he had told her to do.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’ Murdo’s face was as white as the sheet on the bed. He was sitting up in bed as if he was listening to some odd sound that only he was hearing: in the calmness they could hear the gurgling of the water from the stream that ran past their house among the undergrowth.
‘A dream I had,’ said Murdo. ‘It was a dream I dreamed. In the dream I saw a witch and she was coming after me and she had a cup of blood in her hand as if it was a cup of tea. And her face … There’s something wrong with this house.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the house,’ she said, and when he looked at her he began to tremble as if she herself might indeed be the witch.
‘Her face was sharp and long,’ he said, ‘and she had a cup of blood in her hand and I was making the sign of the cross. The devil was in that dream, there was real evil in that dream. I never dreamed a dream like that before.’ And his face was dead white, his teeth were chattering, and he was looking around him wildly.
He thought that the room was full of evil, of devils, that his wife’s face was like the face of a witch among the evil.
‘I never thought that evil existed till now,’ he said. ‘Leave the light on. Don’t put it off.’
He was afraid to leave his bed or to walk about the house and he felt that there was some evil moving about the outside of the house in the darkness. He thought that there were devils clawing at the walls, trying to get in through the windows, perhaps even breaking the glass or tapping on it.
‘Her face,’ he said, ‘was so sharp and so long, and her back was crooked and she had black wings.’
‘You’re all right now, aren’t you?’ said his wife and her blue eyes were gazing at him with what he thought was compassion. But he couldn’t be sure. He thought again, What if she is a witch? What if I am a devil myself? What world have we come from, what evil world? What dark woods?
Sitting upright in bed it was as if he was a ghost rising from the grave.
‘You’re all right, you’re all right,’ said Janet again.
‘Who lived in this house before us?’ he asked. ‘It was an old woman, wasn’t it?’
‘Not at all,’ said Janet. ‘You remember very well who lived here. It was a young family. Surely you remember.’
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘you’re right enough.’
Masks, he said to himself. Masks on all the faces, as happens on Hallowe’en. Masks that don’t move. Stiff cardboard masks. A wolf’s face, a bear’s face.
And he felt as if the house were shaking in a storm of evil and the evil hitting it like a strong wind and light pouring out of the house.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Janet. ‘I’m sorry I wakened you.’
‘Do you want some tea?’ she asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But leave the light on for a while.’ He listened to the sound of the river flowing through the darkness. Directly underneath the window there was grass where he had buried the black dog when it had been killed on a summer’s day by a motor car.
The bones rotting.
‘I’m all right now,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. You can put the light off.’
And she rose and did that and he sat awake for a long time listening to his wife’s breathing and he heard above her tranquil breathing the sound of the river flowing past.
At last he fell asleep and this time he had no frightening dreams.
But just before he fell asleep he had a vision of the house as a lighted shell moving through the darkness, and animals around it with red beaks and claws and red teeth, leaping and jumping venomously at the windows and walls to get at him.
‘What’s wrong with that man of yours if he can be called a man at all?’ said Janet’s father to her one day. He was sitting in an easy chair, his face red with the light of the fire, like a cockerel about to crow.
‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘I used to be at the fishing no matter what kind of weather it was.’
‘You’ve told me,’ said Janet. She was more familiar with her father’s world than she was with Murdo’s. She didn’t understand what attraction the white mountain, of which he was continually speaking, had for him.
She herself was of the opinion that the mountain though beautiful was very cold. She much preferred the spring to winter or autumn. She liked to hang billowing clothes on a line in breezy spring and to watch the birds flying about the moorland.
; ‘You don’t even have any children,’ her father said to her. They were alone together for her mother was at the midweek evening service in the church hall. Her father never went to church.
He was always wandering about in the open air with a hammer or a piece of wood or standing at the door studying the weather.
‘It’s easy enough to work in an office,’ he said. ‘Anyone can do that. Why did he leave his work?’ In the days before Murdo left the office he used to write letters for his father-in-law about matters connected with the croft, which he couldn’t understand but which he could transform into reasonably official English.
‘Is he going to stay in that house forever?’ said her father again. ‘What does he do all day?’
In a way Janet was on her father’s side for she couldn’t really understand Murdo any more than he did. When she married him she had thought she understood him and that he was normal enough but now she wasn’t so sure. He did such odd not to say abnormal things. Her father was not at all odd, he was the quintessence of normality: he was like stone on a moor. Murdo would sometimes come home from the office and he would say, ‘I don’t understand why I am in that office at all. Why do people work anyway? A sort of fog comes over my eyes when I look at Maxwell and the rest of them. They actually believe that what they are doing is important to the human race. They actually believe that by gathering in money and counting, and by adding figures in columns, they are contributing to the salvation of the world. It’s really quite incredible. I mean, the absurdity of what they do has never occurred to them at all. They haven’t even thought about it. They are so glad and so pleased that they can actually do the work they’re doing, and they make a great mystery of it, as if it were of some immense secret importance. They don’t realise at all the futility of what they’re doing, and sometimes it takes me all my time to keep from bursting out laughing. If they all dropped dead with pens in their hands it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the world. They would be replaced by other people equally absorbed in the same absurd work.’
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