Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  He had need of all his good spirits, for he emerged into an unrelenting drizzle. The environs of Kilchrist are at the best unlovely, and in the wet they were as melancholy as a graveyard. But the encounter with the bagman had worked wonders with Dickson, and he strode lustily into the weather, his waterproof collar buttoned round his chin. The road climbed to a bare moor, where lagoons had formed in the ruts, and the mist showed on each side only a yard or two of soaking heather. Soon he was wet; presently every part of him — boots, body, and pack — was one vast sponge. The waterproof was not water-proof, and the rain penetrated to his most intimate garments. Little he cared. He felt lighter, younger, than on the idyllic previous day. He enjoyed the buffets of the storm, and one wet mile succeeded another to the accompaniment of Dickson’s shouts and laughter. There was no one abroad that afternoon, so he could talk aloud to himself and repeat his favourite poems. About five in the evening there presented himself at the Black Bull Inn at Kirkmichael a soaked, disreputable, but most cheerful traveller.

  Now the Black Bull at Kirkmichael is one of the few very good inns left in the world. It is an old place and an hospitable, for it has been for generations a haunt of anglers, who above all other men understand comfort. There are always bright fires there, and hot water, and old soft leather armchairs, and an aroma of good food and good tobacco, and giant trout in glass cases, and pictures of Captain Barclay of Urie walking to London and Mr. Ramsay of Barnton winning a horse-race, and the three-volume edition of the Waverley Novels with many volumes missing, and indeed all those things which an inn should have. Also there used to be — there may still be — sound vintage claret in the cellars. The Black Bull expects its guests to arrive in every stage of dishevelment, and Dickson was received by a cordial landlord, who offered dry garments as a matter of course. The pack proved to have resisted the elements, and a suit of clothes and slippers were provided by the house. Dickson, after a glass of toddy, wallowed in a hot bath, which washed all the stiffness out of him. He had a fire in his bedroom, beside which he wrote the opening passages of that diary he had vowed to keep, descanting lyrically upon the joys of ill weather. At seven o’clock, warm and satisfied in soul, and with his body clad in raiment several sizes too large for it, he descended to dinner.

  At one end of the long table in the dining-room sat a group of anglers. They looked jovial fellows, and Dickson would fain have joined them; but, having been fishing all day in the Lock o’ the Threshes, they were talking their own talk, and he feared that his admiration for Izaak Walton did not qualify him to butt into the erudite discussions of fishermen. The landlord seemed to think likewise, for he drew back a chair for him at the other end, where sat a young man absorbed in a book. Dickson gave him good evening, and got an abstracted reply. The young man supped the Black Bull’s excellent broth with one hand, and with the other turned the pages of his volume. A glance convinced Dickson that the work was French, a literature which did not interest him. He knew little of the tongue and suspected it of impropriety.

  Another guest entered and took the chair opposite the bookish young man. He was also young — not more than thirty-three — and to Dickson’s eye was the kind of person he would have liked to resemble. He was tall and free from any superfluous flesh; his face was lean, fine-drawn, and deeply sunburnt, so that the hair above showed oddly pale; the hands were brown and beautifully shaped, but the forearm revealed by the loose cuffs of his shirt was as brawny as a blacksmith’s. He had rather pale blue eyes, which seemed to have looked much at the sun, and a small moustache the colour of ripe hay. His voice was low and pleasant, and he pronounced his words precisely, like a foreigner.

  He was very ready to talk, but in defiance of Dr. Johnson’s warning, his talk was all questions. He wanted to know everything about the neighbourhood — who lived in what houses, what were the distances between the towns, what harbours would admit what class of vessel. Smiling agreeably, he put Dickson through a catechism to which he knew none of the answers. The landlord was called in, and proved more helpful. But on one matter he was fairly at a loss. The catechist asked about a house called Darkwater, and was met with a shake of the head. “I know no sic-like name in this countryside, sir,” and the catechist looked disappointed.

  The literary young man said nothing, but ate trout abstractedly, one eye on his book. The fish had been caught by the anglers in the Loch o’ the Threshes, and phrases describing their capture floated from the other end of the table. The young man had a second helping, and then refused the excellent hill mutton that followed, contenting himself with cheese. Not so Dickson and the catechist. They ate everything that was set before them, topping up with a glass of port. Then the latter, who had been talking illuminatingly about Spain, rose, bowed, and left the table, leaving Dickson, who liked to linger over his meals, to the society of the ichthyophagous student.

  He nodded towards the book. “Interesting?” he asked.

  The young man shook his head and displayed the name on the cover. “Anatole France. I used to be crazy about him, but now he seems rather a back number.” Then he glanced towards the just-vacated chair. “Australian,” he said.

  “How d’you know?”

  “Can’t mistake them. There’s nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe to-day. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but most looked like Phoebus Apollo.”

  Dickson gazed with a new respect at his neighbour, for he had not associated him with battle-fields. During the war he had been a fervent patriot, but, though he had never heard a shot himself, so many of his friends’ sons and nephews, not to mention cousins of his own, had seen service, that he had come to regard the experience as commonplace. Lions in Africa and bandits in Mexico seemed to him novel and romantic things, but not trenches and airplanes which were the whole world’s property. But he could scarcely fit his neighbour into even his haziest picture of war. The young man was tall and a little round-shouldered; he had short-sighted, rather prominent brown eyes, untidy black hair and dark eyebrows which came near to meeting. He wore a knickerbocker suit of bluish-grey tweed, a pale blue shirt, a pale blue collar, and a dark blue tie — a symphony of colour which seemed too elaborately considered to be quite natural. Dickson had set him down as an artist or a newspaper correspondent, objects to him of lively interest. But now the classification must be reconsidered.

  “So you were in the war,” he said encouragingly.

  “Four blasted years,” was the savage reply. “And I never want to hear the name of the beastly thing again.”

  “You said he was an Australian,” said Dickson, casting back. “But I thought Australians had a queer accent, like the English.”

  “They’ve all kind of accents, but you can never mistake their voice. It’s got the sun in it. Canadians have got grinding ice in theirs, and Virginians have got butter. So have the Irish. In Britain there are no voices, only speaking-tubes. It isn’t safe to judge men by their accent only. You yourself I take to be Scotch, but for all I know you may be a senator from Chicago or a Boer General.”

  “I’m from Glasgow. My name’s Dickson McCunn.” He had a faint hope that the announcement might affect the other as it had affected the bagman at Kilchrist.

  “Golly, what a name!” exclaimed the young man rudely.

  Dickson was nettled. “It’s very old Highland,” he said. “It means the son of a dog.”

  “Which — Christian name or surname?” Then the young man appeared to think he had gone too far, for he smiled pleasantly. “And a very good name too. Mine is prosaic by comparison. They call me John Heritage.”

  “That,” said Dickson, mollified, “is like a name out of a book. With that name by rights you should be a poet.”

  Gloom settled on the young man’s countenance. “It’s a dashed sight too poetic. It’s like Edwin Arnold and Alfred Austin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Great poets have vulgar monosyllables for names, like Keats. The new Shakespeare w
hen he comes along will probably be called Grubb or Jubber, if he isn’t Jones. With a name like yours I might have a chance. You should be the poet.”

  “I’m very fond of reading,” said Dickson modestly.

  A slow smile crumpled Mr. Heritage’s face. “There’s a fire in the smoking-room,” he observed as he rose. “We’d better bag the armchairs before these fishing louts take them.” Dickson followed obediently. This was the kind of chance acquaintance for whom he had hoped, and he was prepared to make the most of him.

  The fire burned bright in the little dusky smoking-room, lighted by one oil-lamp. Mr. Heritage flung himself into a chair, stretched his long legs, and lit a pipe.

  “You like reading?” he asked. “What sort? Any use for poetry?”

  “Plenty,” said Dickson. “I’ve aye been fond of learning it up and repeating it to myself when I had nothing to do. In church and waiting on trains, like. It used to be Tennyson, but now it’s more Browning. I can say a lot of Browning.”

  The other screwed his face into an expression of disgust. “I know the stuff. ‘Damask cheeks and dewy sister eyelids.’ Or else the Ercles vein—’God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.’ No good, Mr. McCunn. All back numbers. Poetry’s not a thing of pretty round phrases or noisy invocations. It’s life itself, with the tang of the raw world in it — not a sweetmeat for middle-class women in parlours.”

  “Are you a poet, Mr. Heritage?”

  “No, Dogson, I’m a paper-maker.”

  This was a new view to Mr. McCunn. “I just once knew a paper-maker,” he observed reflectively, “They called him Tosh. He drank a bit.”

  “Well, I don’t drink,” said the other. “I’m a paper-maker, but that’s for my bread and butter. Some day for my own sake I may be a poet.”

  “Have you published anything?”

  The eager admiration in Dickson’s tone gratified Mr. Heritage. He drew from his pocket a slim book. “My first fruits,” he said, rather shyly.

  Dickson received it with reverence. It was a small volume in grey paper boards with a white label on the back, and it was lettered: Whorls - John Heritage’s Book. He turned the pages and read a little. “It’s a nice wee book,” he observed at length.

  “Good God, if you call it nice, I must have failed pretty badly,” was the irritated answer.

  Dickson read more deeply and was puzzled. It seemed worse than the worst of Browning to understand. He found one poem about a garden entitled “Revue.”

  “Crimson and resonant clangs the dawn,”

  said the poet. Then he went on to describe noonday:

  “Sunflowers, tall Grenadiers, ogle the roses’ short-skirted ballet.

  The fumes of dark sweet wine hidden in frail petals

  Madden the drunkard bees... “

  This seemed to him an odd way to look at things, and he boggled over a phrase about an “epicene lily.” Then came evening: “The painted gauze of the stars flutters in a fold of twilight crape,” sang Mr. Heritage; and again, “The moon’s pale leprosy sloughs the fields.”

  Dickson turned to other verses which apparently enshrined the writer’s memory of the trenches. They were largely compounded of oaths, and rather horrible, lingering lovingly over sights and smells which every one is aware of, but most people contrive to forget. He did not like them. Finally he skimmed a poem about a lady who turned into a bird. The evolution was described with intimate anatomical details which scared the honest reader.

  He kept his eyes on the book, for he did not know what to say. The trick seemed to be to describe nature in metaphors mostly drawn from music-halls and haberdashers’ shops, and, when at a loss, to fall to cursing. He thought it frankly very bad, and he laboured to find words which would combine politeness and honesty.

  “Well?” said the poet.

  “There’s a lot of fine things here, but — but the lines don’t just seem to scan very well.”

  Mr. Heritage laughed. “Now I can place you exactly. You like the meek rhyme and the conventional epithet. Well, I don’t. The world has passed beyond that prettiness. You want the moon described as a Huntress or a gold disc or a flower — I say it’s oftener like a beer barrel or a cheese. You want a wealth of jolly words and real things ruled out as unfit for poetry. I say there’s nothing unfit for poetry. Nothing, Dogson! Poetry’s everywhere, and the real thing is commoner among drabs and pot-houses and rubbish-heaps than in your Sunday parlours. The poet’s business is to distil it out of rottenness, and show that it is all one spirit, the thing that keeps the stars in their place. I wanted to call my book Drains, for drains are sheer poetry carrying off the excess and discards of human life to make the fields green and the corn ripen. But the publishers kicked. So I called it Whorls, to express my view of the exquisite involution of all things. Poetry is the fourth dimension of the soul. Well, let’s hear about your taste in prose.”

  Mr. McCunn was much bewildered, and a little inclined to be cross. He disliked being called Dogson, which seemed to him an abuse of his etymological confidences. But his habit of politeness held.

  He explained rather haltingly his preferences in prose.

  Mr. Heritage listened with wrinkled brows.

  “You’re even deeper in the mud than I thought,” he remarked. “You live in a world of painted laths and shadows. All this passion for the picturesque! Trash, my dear man, like a schoolgirl’s novelette heroes. You make up romances about gipsies and sailors, and the blackguards they call pioneers, but you know nothing about them. If you did, you would find they had none of the gilt and gloss you imagine. But the great things they have got in common with all humanity you ignore. It’s like — it’s like sentimentalising about a pancake because it looked like a buttercup, and all the while not knowing that it was good to eat.”

  At that moment the Australian entered the room to get a light for his pipe. He wore a motor-cyclist’s overalls and appeared to be about to take the road. He bade them good night, and it seemed to Dickson that his face, seen in the glow of the fire, was drawn and anxious, unlike that of the agreeable companion at dinner.

  “There,” said Mr. Heritage, nodding after the departing figure. “I dare say you have been telling yourself stories about that chap — life in the bush, stockriding and the rest of it. But probably he’s a bank-clerk from Melbourne. Your romanticism is one vast self-delusion, and it blinds your eye to the real thing. We have got to clear it out, and with it all the damnable humbug of the Kelt.”

  Mr. McCunn, who spelt the word with a soft “C,” was puzzled. “I thought a kelt was a kind of a no-weel fish,” he interposed.

  But the other, in the flood-tide of his argument, ignored the interruption. “That’s the value of the war,” he went on. “It has burst up all the old conventions, and we’ve got to finish the destruction before we can build. It is the same with literature and religion, and society and politics. At them with the axe, say I. I have no use for priests and pedants. I’ve no use for upper classes and middle classes. There’s only one class that matters, the plain man, the workers, who live close to life.”

  “The place for you,” said Dickson dryly, “is in Russia among the Bolsheviks.”

  Mr. Heritage approved. “They are doing a great work in their own fashion. We needn’t imitate all their methods — they’re a trifle crude and have too many Jews among them — but they’ve got hold of the right end of the stick. They seek truth and reality.”

  Mr. McCunn was slowly being roused.

  “What brings you wandering hereaways?” he asked.

  “Exercise,” was the answer. “I’ve been kept pretty closely tied up all winter. And I want leisure and quiet to think over things.”

  “Well, there’s one subject you might turn your attention to. You’ll have been educated like a gentleman?”

  “Nine wasted years — five at Harrow, four at Cambridge.”

  “See here, then. You’re daft about the working-class and have no use for any other. But what in the name of
goodness do you know about working-men? I come out of them myself, and have lived next door to them all my days. Take them one way and another, they’re a decent sort, good and bad like the rest of us. But there’s a wheen daft folk that would set them up as models — close to truth and reality, says you. It’s sheer ignorance, for you’re about as well acquaint with the working-man as with King Solomon. You say I make up fine stories about tinklers and sailor-men because I know nothing about them. That’s maybe true. But you’re at the same job yourself. You ideelise the working man, you and your kind, because you’re ignorant. You say that he’s seeking for truth, when he’s only looking for a drink and a rise in wages. You tell me he’s near reality, but I tell you that his notion of reality is often just a short working day and looking on at a footba’-match on Saturday. And when you run down what you call the middle-classes that do three-quarters of the world’s work and keep the machine going and the working-man in a job, then I tell you you’re talking havers. Havers!”

  Mr. McCunn, having delivered his defence of the bourgeoisie, rose abruptly and went to bed. He felt jarred and irritated. His innocent little private domain had been badly trampled by this stray bull of a poet. But as he lay in bed, before blowing out his candle, he had recourse to Walton, and found a passage on which, as on a pillow, he went peacefully to sleep:

  “As I left this place, and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me; ‘twas a handsome milkmaid, that had not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many men too often do; but she cast away all care, and sang like a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; it was the smooth song that was made by Kit Marlow now at least fifty years ago. And the milkmaid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days. They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good; I think much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age.”