‘The communion table,’ said our guide, and her quiet voice went over its austerity like a reconciling hand.

I hardly heard half of what she said, and have forgotten that, for facts did not seem so important as the feeling of unity that embraced the whole. And when I thought the guide said that the builder was a Campbell, who had devoted his life to the work, I began to understand. For here, written out in stone and ornament, was the clear story of one man’s soul.

And the story, too—I wondered—of the whole Campbell soul in its centuries of dealings with the Church, in its desires and its repressions, its acquisitiveness and its aspirations, its catholicity and its narrowness, its ambitions and its compromise, its effort at a Protestant Church universal achieving —this individual story in stone.

I was so impressed that I forgot to hurry back and after a final sprint just caught the train, which stopped at Cruachan Falls.

XVIII

Farewell to Deirdre’s garden

We had seen the little white passenger boat go throb-throb up the loch and down each day until it had become a friendly sight.

‘Wouldn’t it be a great thing’, I suggested to the Crew, ‘to be on a boat where another man had to look after the engine?’

So she led the way, and, from the ruinous wooden jetty at Bonawe, climbed a wobbly ladder with calm ease. The engine was a semi-diesel Gardener, and the polish on the brass was unbelievable and the engineer very friendly. When the skipper rang his telegraph, the engineer dodged down his head, turned a couple of levers, and things happened with the awful certainty of fate. Then up came his head again and the broken sentence was completed.

If ever (I thought) we have a marine engine like that, we shall start it and stop it, go ahead and go astern, glide up to little wooden jetties and reverse to a standstill alongside, quietly, without any fuss, yet with the accuracy of music. How is it that no poet has ever written an ode to an old Kelvin, or one breath-taking sonnet to a new? Free-verse moderns have, of course, attempted praise of mechanism and speed, but they are a trifle dashing, inclined a bit to worship their own emotionally vague mood induced by speed; their cylinders, vast and shining, tend to be confused with pistons, moved by the same mysterious violence as moves themselves. There is a lack of definition, arising out of a lack, one fancies, not only of exact knowledge but of physical handling. At the best, their mechanism is their servant and they would ride it as God rides the whirlwind. Or it suggests workers and social injustice and is thus not a thing in itself but a text for something quite other; something admirable and splendid and to be desired; but not an engine.

So the poem still awaits the eye that sees the mountain in the engine; the ore of the mountain in the cylinders and pistons; the oil-fields of continents distilled in the tanks; the magnetism of the whole earth itself leaping in fire across the plug points; while the engineer, with half-unconscious ear, apprehends the final harmony so justly that let there be introduced a ‘new noise’ beyond the power of poet’s ear to distinguish, and down dodges the head and at a touch the sphere-music is re-established.