Letters from England/Loch Tay
Loch Tay
IF I were a poet like Karel Toman or Otakar Fischer,[1] I would to-day write a short but beautiful poem. It would be about the Scottish lakes, the Scottish wind would be wafted through it, and the daily Scottish rain would bedew it; it would contain something about blue waves, gorse, bracken and wistful pathways; in it I should not mention that these wistful pathways are entirely begirt with a fence (perhaps to prevent enchantresses from going to dance there). I must say in crude prose how beautiful it is here; a blue and violet-coloured lake between bare hills—the lake is called Loch Tay and each valley is called Glen, each mountain Ben and each man Mac, a blue and peaceful lake, a sparkling waft of wind, shaggy black or reddish oxen on the meadows, pitch-black mountain tor rents and hills of ballad-like bareness, overgrown with grass and furze—
how am I to depict this for you? It would, after all, be best to write it in verse; but I cannot think of a rhyme to the word “tempest.”
It was this name tempest which yesterday carried me off to the castle of Finlarig. I gave the old castle watchman a dreadful fright, for he was just cleansing a former place of execution and perhaps he took me for a ghost. When he had calmed down he gave an account of the aforesaid place of execution in an odd dialect but with great gusto; it contains a hole through which the amputated heads fell into an underground spot; as for me, I consider it possible that this orifice and the underground chamber served bloodless and natural purposes. An American who was present smiled sceptically at all this as if it were humbug; but the Americans have no proper angle from which to view the mysteries of the Old World. The dear old watchman was remarkably proud of his castle; he pointed out all sorts of trees, old horse-shoes and stones, and explained at inordinate length, apparently in Gaelic, about Queen Mary Stuart, Marquis Ballochbuich and Scottish history. There is also a chamber with statues there; one represents Queen Mary,
one a certain knight named Campbell and one the queen’s jester. The latter I have drawn for you. There is another statue which is very peculiar, and concerning it the old custodian, evidently following the ancient ballads, stated that it represents a shrew; and because she was beyond endurance, the sheriff decided that all those affected should give her a public drubbing, and this is what the statue in question is supposed to represent. I differ from the opinion of the local authority, in so far as the statue seems to me far older than sheriff, shrew and Castle Finlarig; I think it represents something very ancient, perhaps the torments of the damned in hell. Anyhow, I made a careful drawing of it.
I succeeded in drawing a Scottish couple, a man with his wife. For the most part the Scots are sturdy, with florid faces and powerful necks; they have many children and attractive, ancient clan-names. The skirts of kilts are worn only in the army or when they are playing the bag-pipes. The checkwork plaids are called tartans, and are really a kind of escutcheon; each clan has a tartan of different colours, and this assuredly was once an adequate reason why mutual massacres took place between clans whose checkwork patterns varied.
The Scottish Sunday is even worse than the English one, and the Scottish religious services evoke the conception of infinity. The pastors wear prickly moustaches, and are neither so rosy nor so bland as the Anglican clergy. Throughout Scotland on Sunday the trains stop running, the railway stations are closed and nothing whatever is done; I am surprised that the very clocks do not stop. Only the wind crinkles the livid and steely lakes between the bare domes of the hills; it was on such a lake that I went sailing until my boat landed on a sandbank, so I laid aside my pen and went wandering along the wistful pathways between the wire fences.
And there was displayed to me another Scotland beneath grey skies; bare and straggling glens with ruined stone huts, stone walls ranging along the hill-sides, for miles and miles scarcely a single stone cottage, and even that seemingly uninhabited, here and there fields of oats with a finger-high crop—all the rest only bracken and stones and tough grass like moss; sometimes a sheep without a shepherd will bleat as it crawls over the slope; sometimes a bird will utter a cry of lament; below, among gnarled oaks roars the black river Dochart foaming into a tinge of yellow. A strange, hard, almost prehistoric land. Clouds trail across the hill-tops, a rainy veil shadows the mournful and empty region, which has not yet yielded itself to the hand of man, and below over the black stones roars the black river Dochart.
- ↑ Two distinguished contemporary Czech poets.