The next Macrae – Donald – was different again from Norman. He was a gloomy man who always wore dark clothes and spent most of his time reading his grandfather’s plans in a small room of his house. He also hired workers but kept them at it. The trouble was that he could never find the exact kind of stone that he wanted for the house, and all the stone that he did find locally was, according to him, soft and inferior. He spent much money on importing stone and because it was so expensive he became poorer and poorer but succeeded at last in adding another wall in which a long narrow lugubrious window was set. Sometimes he would sit with his elongated head and body at this window gazing across the village or brooding or reading a theological book. He would tell the villagers that they must prepare for their deaths and that they were merely like the lilies of the field. It did not escape their notice however that he got as much money from them as he could. He said that the house he was building was like a temple which would last forever and that it would glorify them all, poor as they were. Did they not wish to see some solid building erected among their poor thatched houses? They would gaze down at the ground, their caps in their hands, but say nothing since they couldn’t understand a word he was saying. What with his theological books and his stones he spent practically all his money and the family’s money and he died at fifty years old, a religious recluse who would suddenly emerge from his house and shout at the workmen that they weren’t worthy of their hire. Then he would mutter to himself and go back into his gloomy room where he would read till the early hours of the morning. No one had a good word to say for him for he would say things like, ‘You have no sense of excellence’ to their faces. At one time he even started a school in competition with the one already there, but after a while no one would attend it for he would never allow any of the pupils out during school hours in contrast to the teacher in the other school who used to take the children out to pick flowers and berries.
The Macrae I knew – the son of this one – was a large jovial fat man who dressed in a brown canvas blouse. Day after day he would set off with his wheelbarrow and bring back a huge boulder which he would lever on to the ground in order to add another part of the wall to the house, which by now had three walls and a stone floor and three windows. The trouble with Iain Macrae was that he liked children and when they danced round making fun of his house which would never in their opinion be finished, he would look at them with a merry smile and tell them stories. When he was doing this, his expression would become wonderfully tender and he would gaze into the distance over their heads as if he were seeing a most beautiful serene sight. He would completely abandon any work on his house and begin, ‘Last night I was walking across the moor looking for a boulder when I saw an owl sitting on a stone reading a book.’ The children would gather round him open-mouthed and cease to play pranks. He was really a very lazy fat man who seemed to move heavily like a large solid cloud. When he was asked why he didn’t abandon the house altogether he would say, ‘One must have something to do. Even if it’s no good.’ And he would smile a sad clownish smile. He was liked in the village as he would do anything for anyone at any time and would wholly neglect his own affairs in order to help. When he was on his death-bed he was making jokes about his coffin and saying that they must get him a large one. At one time he would say that it should be made of stone, but at other times he preferred wood since it changed so much, whereas stone never changed, and this was its weakness. In fact he didn’t care about the quality of the stone he trundled along in his wheelbarrow and sometimes he would forget which stone he ought to have been using at a particular time. ‘We all have something to do,’ he would say, ‘and this was what was left to me. I couldn’t live in this house,’ he would add, ‘if it was finished. I would admire it from a distance.’ And so another wall and another window would be slowly added in the interval of telling stories to the children. But the people grew used to seeing this unfinished structure and praised God that their own houses were wind and rain proof and tightly made. He also died as a result of wheeling a stone along. He fell on his face while torrents of blood poured out of his mouth, and stained the ground. He wasn’t long on his death-bed where he grew very thin and meagre so that no one would ever have thought that he had weighed fifteen stone and could tell interesting stories to children, who as a mark of respect gathered a bunch of flowers and laid them on
