by John Buchan
Then he borrowed an old dishcloth and a piece of soap, and retired with Woolworth to the pump. When Mr Craw joined them the terrier, shivering violently, and with a face of woe, had been thoroughly scrubbed, and now was having his thick fleece combed with a gap-toothed instrument which Jaikie had discovered in the stable. Followed a drastic dressing down with a broken brush, while Jaikie made the same hissing sounds that had accompanied his towelling of Mr Craw the previous evening. Jaikie had said no word of plans at breakfast. He seemed to be waiting for his companion to make the first comment on a shattering miscarriage.
“I cannot go to London in these clothes,” said Mr Craw, looking down at the well-worn grey breeks.
Jaikie’s eyes left Woolworth and regarded him critically. He was certainly a different figure from the spruce gentleman who, twenty-four hours ago, had left the Back House of the Garroch. He was not aggressively disreputable, but the combination of trousers, blue jacket, and dirty collar made him look like a jobbing carpenter, or a motor mechanic from some provincial garage. The discordant element in the picture was his face, which belied his garb, for it was the face of a man accustomed to deference, mildly arrogant, complacent for all the trouble in his eyes. Such a face never belonged to a mechanic. Jaikie, puzzled to find a name for the apparition, decided that Mr Craw had become like the kind of man who spoke on Sunday in Hyde Park, a politician from the pavement. He remembered a Communist orator in Glasgow who had had something of the same air.
“I can’t get to Castle Gay without a bicycle, and be back in time,” was all he said.
“That means postponing still further my journey to London,” said Mr Craw. The curious thing was that he did not say it dolefully. Something had changed in him this morning. His tone was resigned, almost philosophic. A sound sleep after a day of hard exercise had given him a novel sense of physical well-being. He had just eaten, with a hearty appetite, a very plain breakfast, at which his chef would have shuddered. The tonic air of the upland morning put vigour into his blood. He was accustomed to start his day with a hot bath, and emerge from warm rooms with his senses a little dulled. This morning he had had no bath of any kind, yet he felt cleaner than usual, and his eyes and nostrils and ears seemed to be uncommonly awake. He had good long-distance sight, so he discarded his spectacles, which for the moment were useless, and observed with interest the links of the two flooded streams with some stray cocks of moorland hay bobbing on their current. . . . There were golden plover whistling on the hill behind the inn; he heard them with a certain delight in the fitness of their wild call to that desert. . . . He sniffed the odour of wet heather and flood water and peat reek — and something else, homely and pleasant, which recalled very distant memories. That was, of course, the smell of cows; he had forgotten that cows smelt so agreeably.
“Have you anything to propose?” he asked in a tone which was quite amiable.
Jaikie looked up sharply, and saw that in his companion’s face which he had not seen before, and scarcely expected.
“I doubt there’s nothing for it but to make our way round the butt-end of the hills towards Portaway. That will bring us near Castle Gay, and I’ll find a chance to see Dougal and Barbon and get some money. . . . It’s at least twenty-seven miles to Portaway, but we needn’t get there to-night. I know most of the herds, and we can easily find a place to stop at when we get tired. It’s a grand day for the hills.”
“Very well,” said Mr Craw, and his tone was rather of contentment than of resignation.
They paid their modest bill, and put a luncheon of scones and cheese in their packs, one of which Mr Craw insisted on shouldering. He reiterated his promise to pay for the bicycle, and Mrs Johnston, assured of his good will if not of his means, shook his hand. The voice of the convalescent husband cut short their leave-takings, and their last recollection of the place was a confused noise within, caused by that husband, with many appeals to his Maker, beginning a cautious descent of the stairs.
Almost at once they left the Gledmouth highway and turned up a green loaning, an old drove-road which zigzagged along the face of a heather hill. Woolworth at first trotted docilely at Jaikie’s heels, but soon, lured by various luscious scents, he took to investigating the environs. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the firmament was the palest blue, infinitely clear, with a quality of light which made the lowlands to the south and east seem like some background in an Italian primitive. There was little sound but the scrunch of their boots on the patches of scree, and a great crying of birds, but from very far away came an echo of bells, ringing to kirk in some distant clachan. Except for an occasional summons to Woolworth Jaikie spoke no word, for he was not much given to speech. Mr Craw, too, was silent. He was thinking his own thoughts.
He was thinking about Death, an odd subject for a shining morning. At the back of his mind he had a great fear of death, against which the consolations were void of that robust philosophy which he preached in public. His fear took a curious shape. He had made for himself a rich environment of money and houses and servants and prestige. So long as he lived he was on a pinnacle above the crowd, secure from all common ills. But when he died he would be no more than a tramp in a ditch. He would be carried out naked from his cosy shelter to lie in the cold earth, and his soul — he believed in the soul — would go shivering into the infinite spaces. Mr Craw had often rebuked himself for thinking in such materialist terms of the ultimate mystery, but whatever his reason might say his fancy kept painting the same picture. Stripped cold and bare! The terror of it haunted him, and sometimes he would lie awake at night and grapple with it. . . . He felt that men who led a hard life, the poor man with famine at his threshold, the sailor on the sea, the soldier in the trench, must think of death with more complacency. They had less to lose, there was less to strip from them before the chilly journeying. . . . Sometimes he had wished that he could be like them. If he could only endure discomfort and want for a little — only feel that the gap was narrower between his cosseted life and the cold clay and the outer winds! . . . Now he had a feeling that he was bridging the gap. He was exposed to weather like any tinker, he was enduring fatigue and cold and occasional hunger, and he was almost enjoying it. To this indoor man the outdoor world was revealing itself as something strange and wild and yet with an odd kindness at the heart of it. Dimly there was a revelation at work, not only of Nature but of his own soul.
Jaikie’s voice woke him out of his dreams. He had halted, and was pointing to a bird high up in the sky.
“There’s a buzzard,” he cried. “Listen. You’re a great writer, Mr Craw, but I think that most writers go wrong about birds. How would you describe that sound?”
“Mewing,” was the answer.
“Right. People talk about a buzzard screaming, but it mews like a sick cat. . . . I’ve heard a kestrel scream, but not a buzzard. Listen to that, too. That’s a raven.”
A bird was coasting along the hill-side, with its mate higher up on a bank of shingle.
“They say a raven croaks. It’s sharper than that. It’s a bark. . . . Words are good things, if you get them right.”
Mr Craw was interested. Words were his stock in trade, out of which he had won fortune. Was there not capital to be made out of these novel experiences? He saw himself writing with a new realism. He never read criticisms, but he was aware that he had his critics. Here was a chance to confound them.
“I thought that you might want to write,” Jaikie went on, “so I brought something in my pack. Barbon said you had a special kind of envelope in which you sent your articles, and that these envelopes were opened first in the mail at your office. I got a batch of them from him, and some paper and pencils. He said you always wrote with a pencil.”
Mr Craw was touched. He had not expected such consideration from this taciturn young man. He was also flattered. This youth realised that his was an acquisitive and forward-looking mind, which could turn a harsh experience into a message of comfort for the world. His brain began to w
ork happily at the delightful task of composition. He thought of vivid phrases about weather, homely idioms heard in the inn, word-pictures of landscapes, tough shreds of philosophy, and all coloured with a fine, manly, out-of-doors emotion. There was a new manner waiting for him. When they sat down to lunch by a well-head very near the top of the Callowa watershed, he felt the cheerfulness of one on the brink of successful creation.
Munching his scones and cheese, he became talkative.
“You are a young man,” he said. “I can remember when I also was twenty. It was a happy time, full of dreams. It has been my good fortune to carry those dreams with me throughout my life. Yes, I think I was not yet twenty when I acquired my philosophy. The revelation came to me after reading Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Characteristics.’ Do you know the essay?”
Jaikie shook his head. He was an omnivorous reader, but he had found Carlyle heavy going.
“Ah, well! That great man is too little read to-day, but his turn will come again. I learned from him not to put too high a value upon the mere intellect. He taught me that the healthy life is the unconscious life, and that it is in man’s dim illogical instincts that truth often lies. We are suffering to-day, Mr Galt, from a surfeit of clever logicians. But it is the biologist rather than the logician or the mathematician to whom we should look for guidance. The infinite power and value of the unreasoned has always been one of my master principles.”
“I know,” said Jaikie. He remembered various articles above Mr Craw’s signature which had appealed to what he called “the abiding instincts of the people,” and he had wondered at the time how any man could be so dogmatic about the imponderable.
“From that principle,” the other went on, “I deduce my optimism. If we live by reason only we must often take a dark view of the world and lose hope. But the irrational instinct is always hopeful, for it is the instinct to live. You must have observed the astonishing cheerfulness of the plain man, when the intellectual despairs. It was so in the War. Optimism is not a pre-condition of thought, but it is a pre-condition of life. Thus mankind, which has the will to continue, ‘never turns its back, but marches breast-forward.’” He filled his chest and delivered the full quotation from Browning.
Jaikie, to whom Browning had always seemed like a slightly intoxicated parson, shifted uncomfortably.
“I hope you do not affect pessimism,” said Mr Craw. “I believe it is often a foolish pose of youth. Dishonest, too.”
“I don’t know,” was the answer. “No. I’m not a pessimist. But I haven’t been through bad enough times to justify me in being an optimist. You want to have been pretty hardly tried before you have any right to say that the world is good.”
“I do not follow.”
“I mean that to declare oneself an optimist, without having been down into the pit and come out on the other side, looks rather like bragging.”
“I differ profoundly. Personal experience is not the decisive factor. You have the testimony of the ages to support your faith.”
“Did you ever read Candide?” Jaikie asked.
“No,” said Mr Craw. “Why?”
But Jaikie felt that it would take too long to explain, so he did not answer.
The drove-road meandered up and down glens and across hill-shoulders till it found itself descending to the valley of one of the Callowa’s principal tributaries, in which ran a road from Gledmouth to Portaway. The travellers late in the afternoon came to the edge of that road, which on their left might be seen winding down from the low moorish tableland by which it had circumvented the barrier of the high mountains. On their right, a quarter of a mile away, it forked, one branch continuing down the stream to Portaway, twelve miles distant, while the other kept west around a wooded spur of hill.
Mr Craw squatted luxuriously on a dry bank of heather. He had not a notion where he had got to, but spiritually he was at ease, for he felt once again master of himself. He had stopped forecasting the immediate future, and had his eye on the articles which he was going to write, the fresh accent he would bring to his messages. He sat in a bush like a broody hen, the now shapeless Homburg hat squashed over his head, the image of a ruminating tramp.
Jaikie had gone down to the road fifty yards away, where a stream fell in pools. He was thirsty, since, unlike his companion, he had not drunk copiously of wayside fountains. As he knelt to drink, the noise of an approaching car made him raise his head, and he watched an ancient Ford pass him and take the fork on the left, which was the road to Portaway. It was clearly a hired car, presumably from Gledmouth. In it sat the kind of driver one would expect, a youth with a cap on one side of his brow and an untidy mackintosh. The other occupant was a young man wearing a light grey overcoat and a bowler hat, a young man with a high-coloured face, and a small yellow moustache. It was a lonely place and an unfrequented road, but to his surprise he knew the traveller.
He watched the car swing down the valley towards Portaway, and was busy piecing together certain recollections, when he was recalled to attention by the shouts of Mr Craw from the hill-side. Mr Craw was in a state of excitement. He ran the fifty yards towards Jaikie with surprising agility.
“Did you see that?” he puffed. “The man in the car. It’s my secretary, Sigismund Allins. I tried to stop him, but I was too late. He was on holiday in Spain, and was not expected back for another fortnight. I can only assume that Barbon has recalled him by wire. What a pity we missed him, for he could have provided us with the money we need. At any rate he could have arranged for sending it and my clothes from Castle Gay without troubling you to go there. . . . I am relieved to think Allins is back. He is a very resourceful man in an emergency.”
“You are sure it was he?”
“Absolutely certain. I had a good look at him as the car passed, but I found my voice too late. I may be trusted to recognise the inmates of my own household.”
Jaikie too had recognised the man, though he did not know his name. His memory went back to an evening in Cambridge a year before, when he had dined in what for him was strange company — the Grey Goose Club, a fraternity of rich young men who affected the Turf. It had been the day before the Cambridgeshire, and the talk had been chiefly of Newmarket. Among the guests had been a brisk gentleman who was not an undergraduate and who had been pointed out to him as a heroic and successful plunger. “He’s got the View in his pocket,” his host had told him, “and that, of course, means that he gets the best tips.” He remembered that he had not liked the guest, whose talk sounded to him boastful and indecent. He had set him down as a faux bonhomme, noting the cold shiftiness of his light eyes. What was it that Alison had said of Mr Allins? “If you met him you would say that he wasn’t quite a gentleman.” He certainly would go thus far.
The last stage of the day’s walk in the purple October dusk was for Mr Craw a pleasant experience. He was agreeably tired. He was very hungry and had Jaikie’s promise of a not too distant meal, and his mind — this was always a factor in his comfort — was working busily. The sight of his secretary had assured him that his proper world could be readily recaptured when he wished, but he was content to dwell a little longer in the new world to which he had been so violently introduced. About six o’clock they reached the shepherd’s house of the Black Swire, some eight miles from Portaway, the eastern hirsel on the Knockraw estate. There Jaikie was given an effusive welcome by his old friends, the shepherd and his wife, and, since the house was new and commodious, they had a bedroom far superior to Mrs Catterick’s or that of the Watermeeting inn. Mr Craw faced without blenching a gigantic supper of the inevitable ham and eggs, and drank three cups of tea. At the meal he condescended affably, and discoursed with the shepherd, who was a stout Radical, on the prospects of the Canonry election. Jaikie had introduced him as a friend from London, and it pleased him to cultivate his anonymity, when by a word he might have set the shepherd staring.
The host and hostess went early to bed, after the fashion of countryfolk, and the two travellers were left
alone by the fire. Mr Craw felt wakeful, so he had out the foolscap from Jaikie’s pack, and composed an article which, when it appeared two days later, gave pleasure to several million readers. Its subject was the value of the simple human instincts, too often overlaid by the civilised, the essential wisdom of the plain man. Just as a prophet must sojourn occasionally in the wilderness, so it was right for culture now and then to rub shoulders with simplicity, as Antæus drew his strength from contact with his mother, the Earth.
Jaikie sat by the peats, Woolworth’s head against his knee, and brooded. What he had seen that evening had altered his whole outlook. . . . Allins was not bound for Castle Gay. He had not mentioned it to his companion, but the road to Castle Gay was the right fork, and the car had taken the left. It was less than eight miles to Castle Gay by the straight road at the point where they had seen the car, but it was seventeen by Portaway. . . . Why should Allins go to Portaway when he was supposed to be on holiday? He did not believe for one moment that he had been recalled by Barbon, who had spoken of him coldly. He was Mr Craw’s protégé, not Barbon’s. . . . He must have come from Gledmouth, probably arriving there by the 6.30 train from the south. Why had he chosen that route to Portaway? It was longer than by the coast, and a most indifferent road. But it was lonely, and his only reason must have been that he wanted to be unobserved. . . . Jaikie had a very clear picture of Allins that night at the Grey Goose Club. Was that the sort of fox to be safely domesticated by an innocent like Craw?
The innocent in question was busy at his article, sometimes sucking the end of his pencil, sometimes scribbling with a happy smirk, sometimes staring into the fire. Jaikie, as his eyes dwelt on him, had a sudden conviction about two things. One was that he liked him. The other was that this business was far more complicated than even Dougal realised. It was more than protecting the privacy of a newspaper proprietor and saving his face. There were darker things to be looked for than rival pressmen and persistent Evallonians.