Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  At the sound of my feet the door was thrown open, and a string of collies rushed out to devour me. At their tail came the master of the place, a man bent and thin, with a beard ragged and torn with all weathers, and a great scarred face roughly brown with the hill air and the reek of peat.

  ‘Can I stay—’ I began, but my words were drowned in his loud tone of welcome.

  ‘How in the warld did ye get here, man? Come in, come in; ye’ll be fair perished.’

  He caught me by the arm and dragged me into the single room which formed his dwelling. Half-a-dozen hens, escaping from the hutch which was their abode, sat modestly in corners, and from a neighbouring shed came the lowing of a cow. The place was so filled with blue fine smoke that my eyes were dazed, and it was not till I sat in a chair by a glowing fire of peats that I could discern the outlines of the roof. The rafters were black and finely polished as old oak, and the floor was flagged with the grey stones of the moor. A stretch of sacking did duty for a rug, and there the tangle of dogs stretched itself to sleep. The furnishing was of the rudest, for it was brought on horseback over barren hills, and such a portage needs the stoutest of timber. But who can tell of the infinite complexity of the odour which filled the air, the pungency of peat, varied with a whiff of the snell night without and the comfortable fragrance of food?

  Meat he set before me, scones and oaten-cakes, and tea brewed as strong as spirits. He had not seen loaf-bread, he told me, since the spring, when a shepherd from the Back o’ the Caldron came over about some sheep, and had a loaf-end for his dinner. Then, when I was something recovered, I sat again in the fireside chair, and over pipes of the strongest black we held high converse.

  ‘Wife!’ he said, when I asked him if he dwelt alone; ‘na, na, nae woman-body for me. I bide mysel’, and bake my bakings, and shoo my breeks when they need it. A wife wad be a puir convanience in this pairt o’ the warld. I come in at nicht, and I dae as I like, and I gang oot in the mornings, and there’s naebody to care for. I can milk the coo mysel’, and feed the hens, and there’s little else that a man need dae.’ I asked him if he came often to the lowlands.

  ‘Is’t like,’ said he, ‘when there’s twenty mile o’ thick heather and shairp rock atween you and a level road? I naether gang there, nor do the folk there fash me here. I havena been at the kirk for ten ‘ear, no since my faither dee’d; and though the minister o’ Gledsmuir, honest man, tries to win here every spring, it’s no’ often he gets the length. Twice in the ‘ear I gang far awa’ wi’ sheep, when! Spain the lambs in the month o’ August, and draw the crocks in the back-end. I’m expectin’ every day to get word to tak’ off the yowes.’

  ‘And how do you get word?’ I asked.

  ‘Weel, the post comes up the road to the foot o’ the Gled. Syne some o’ the fairmers up the water tak’ up a letter and leave it at the foot o’ the Cauldshaw Burn. A fisher, like yersel’, maybe, brings it up the glen and draps it at the herd’s cottage o’ the Front Muneraw, whaur it lies till the herd, Simon Mruddock, tak’s it wi’ him on his roonds. Noo, twice every week he passes the tap o’ the Aller, and I’ve gotten a cairn there, whaur he hides it in an auld tin box among the stanes. Twice a week I gang up that way mysel’, and find onything that’s lyin’. Oh, I’m no’ ill off for letters; I get them in about a week, if there’s no’ a snawstorm.’

  The man leant forward to put a fresh coal to his pipe, and I marked his eyes, begrimed with peat smoke, but keen as a hawk’s, and the ragged, ill-patched homespun of his dress. I thought of the good folk in the lowlands and the cities who hugged their fancies of simple Arcadian shepherds, who, in decent cottage, surrounded by a smiling family, read God’s Word of a Saturday night. In the rugged man before me I found some hint of the truth.

  ‘And how do you spend your days?’ I asked. ‘Did you never think of trying a more kindly countryside?’

  He looked at me long and quizzically.

  ‘Yince,’ he said, ‘I served a maister, a bit flesher-body doun at Gledfoot. He was aye biddin’ me dae odd jobs about the toun, and I couldna thole it, for I’m a herd, and my wark’s wi’ sheep. Noo I serve the Yerl o’ Callowa, and there’s no’ a body dare say a word to me; but I manage things according to my ain guid juidgement, wi’oot ony ‘by your leave’. And whiles I’ve the best o’ company, for yince or twice the Yerl has bided here a’ nicht, when he was forewandered shooting amang thae muirs.’

  But I was scarce listening, so busy was I in trying to picture an existence which meant incessant wanderings all day among the wilds, and firelit evenings, with no company but dogs. I asked him if he ever read.

  ‘I ha’e a Bible,’ he said doubtfully, ‘and I whiles tak’ a spell at it to see if I remember by schulin’. But I’m no keen on books o’ ony kind.’

  ‘Then what in the name of goodness do you do?’ said I.

  Then his tongue was unloosed, and he told me the burden of his days; how he loved all weather, fighting a storm for the fight’s sake, and glorying in the conquest; how he would trap blue hares and shoot wild-fowl — for had he not the Earl’s leave? — and now and then kill a deer strayed among the snow. He was full of old tales of the place, learned from a thousand old sources, of queer things that happened in these eternal deserts, and queer sights which he and others than himself had seen at dawning and sunset. Some day I will put them all down in a book, but then I will inscribe it to children and label it fantasy, for no one would believe them if told with the circumstance of truth. But, above all, he gloried in the tale of the changes of sky and earth, and the multitudinous lore of the hills. I heard of storms when the thunder echoed in the Caldron like the bleating of great sheep, and the man sat still at home in terror. He told with solemn eyes of the coming of snow, of masterful floods in the Aller, when the dead sheep came down and butted, as he said, with their foreheads against his house-wall. His voice grew high, and his figure, seen in the red glare of the peats, was like some creature of a tale.

  But in time the fire sank, the dogs slumbered, our pipes went out, and he showed me my bed. It was in the garret, which you entered by a trap from the shed below. The one window had been shattered by some storm and boarded up with planks, through whose crevices I could see the driving mist and the bog lying dead under cover of night. I slept on rough blankets of homespun, and ere I lay down, in looking round the place, I came upon a book stuck fast between the rafters and the wall. It was the Bible used to brush up the shepherd’s learning, and for the sake of his chances hereafter I dragged it forth and blew the dust from it.

  In the morning the mist had gone, and a blue sky shone out, over which sudden gusts swept like boats on a loch. The damp earth still reeked of rain; and as I stood at the door and watched the Aller, now one line of billows, strive impetuous through the bog-land, and the hills gleam in the dawning like wet jewels, I no more wondered at the shepherd’s choice. He came down from a morning’s round, his voice bellowing across the uplands, and hailed me from afar. ‘The hills are no vera dry,’ he said, ‘but they micht be passed; and if I was sure I wadna bide, he wad set me on my way.’ So in a little I followed his great strides through the moss and up the hill-shoulder, till in two hours I was breathing hard on the Dreichil summit, and looking down on awful craigs, which dropped sheerly to a tarn. Here he stopped, and, looking far over the chaos of ridges, gave me my directions.

  ‘Ye see yon muckle soo-backit hill — yon’s the Yirnie Cleuch, and if ye keep alang the taps ye’ll come to it in an ‘oor’s time. Gang doun the far shouther o’t, and ye’ll see a burn which flows into a loch; gang on to the loch-foot, and ye’ll see a great deep hole in the hillside, what they ca’ the Nick o’ the Hurlstanes; gang through it, and ye’ll strike the Criven Burn, which flows into the Callowa; gang doun that water till it joins the Gled, and syne ye’re no’ abune ten mile from whaur ye’re bidin’. So guid-day to ye.’

  And with these lucid words he left me and took his swinging path across the hill.

  The Moor Song, or Th
e Rime of True Thomas

  THE TALE OF THE RESPECTABLE WHAUP AND THE GREAT GODLY MAN

  Macmillan’s Magazine, 1897

  THIS is a story that I heard from the King of the Numidians, who with his tattered retinue encamps behind the peat-ricks. If you ask me where and when it happened I fear that I am scarce ready with an answer. But I will vouch my honour for its truth; and if any one seek further proof, let him go east the town and west the town and over the fields of Nomansland to the Long Muir, and if he find not the King there among the peat-ricks, and get not a courteous answer to his question, then times have changed in that part of the country, and he must continue the quest to His Majesty’s castle in Spain.

  Once upon a time, says the tale, there was a Great Godly Man, a shepherd to trade, who lived in a cottage among heather. If you looked east in the morning, you saw miles of moor running wide to the flames of sunrise, and if you turned your eyes west in the evening, you saw a great confusion of dim peaks with the dying eye of the sun set in a crevice. If you looked north, too, in the afternoon, when the life of the day is near its end and the world grows wise, you might have seen a country of low hills and haughlands with many waters running sweet among meadows. But if you looked south in the dusty forenoon or at hot mid-day, you saw the far-off glimmer of a white road, the roofs of the ugly little clachan of Kilmaclavers, and the rigging of the fine new kirk of Threepdaidle.

  It was a Sabbath afternoon in the hot weather, and the man had been to kirk all the morning. He had heard a grand sermon from the minister (or it may have been the priest, for I am not sure of the date and the King told the story quickly) — a fine discourse with fifteen heads and three parentheses. He held all the parentheses and fourteen of the heads in his memory, but he had forgotten the fifteenth; so for the purpose of recollecting it, and also for the sake of a walk, he went forth in the afternoon into the open heather. The air was mild and cheering, and with an even step he strolled over the turf and into the deeps of the moor.

  The whaups were crying everywhere, making the air hum like the twanging of a bow. Poo-eelie, Poo-eelie, they cried, Kirlew, Kirlew, Whaup, Wha-up. Sometimes they came low, all but brushing him, till they drove settled thoughts from his head. Often had he been on the moors, but never had he seen such a stramash among the feathered clan. The wailing iteration vexed him, and he shoo’d the birds away with his arms. But they seemed to mock him and whistle in his very face, and at the flaff of their wings his heart grew sore. He waved his great stick; he picked up bits of loose moor-rock and flung them wildly; but the godless crew paid never a grain of heed. The morning’s sermon was still in his head, and the grave words of the minister still rattled in his ear, but he could get no comfort for this intolerable piping. At last his patience failed him and he swore unchristian words. ‘Deil rax the birds’ thrapples,’ he cried.

  At this all the noise was hushed and in a twinkling the moor was empty. Only one bird was left, standing on tall legs before him with its head bowed upon its breast, and its beak touching the heather.

  Then the man repented his words and stared at the thing in the moss. ‘What bird are ye?’ he asked thrawnly.

  ‘I am a Respectable Whaup,’ said the bird, ‘and I kenna why ye have broken in on our family gathering. Once in a hundred years we foregather for decent conversation, and here we are interrupted by a muckle, sweerin’ man.’

  Now the shepherd was a fellow of great sagacity, yet he never thought it a queer thing that he should be having talk in the midmoss with a bird. Truth, he had no mind on the matter.

  ‘What for were ye making siccan a din, then?’ he asked. ‘D’ ye no ken ye were disturbing the afternoon of the holy Sabbath?’

  The bird lifted its eyes and regarded him solemnly. ‘The Sabbath is a day of rest and gladness,’ it said, ‘and is it no reasonable that we should enjoy the like?’

  The shepherd shook his head, for the presumption staggered him. ‘Ye little ken what ye speak of,’ he said. ‘The Sabbath is for them that have the chance of salvation, and it has been decreed that Salvation is for Adam’s race and no for the beasts that perish.’

  The whaup gave a whistle of scorn. ‘I have heard all that long ago. In my great-grandmother’s time, which ‘ill be a thousand years and mair syne, there came a people from the south with bright brass things on their heads and breasts and terrible swords at their thighs. And with them were some lang-gowned men who kenned the stars and would come out o’ nights to talk to the deer and the corbies in their ain tongue. And one, I mind, foregathered with my greatgrandmother and told her that the souls o’ men flitted in the end to braw meadows where the gods bide or gaed down to the black pit which they ca’ Hell. But the souls o’ birds, he said, die wi’ their bodies and that’s the end o’ them. Likewise in my mother’s time, when there was a great abbey down yonder by the Threepdaidle Burn which they called the House of Kilmaclavers, the auld monks would walk out in the evening to pick herbs for their distillings, and some were wise and kenned the ways of bird and beast. They would crack often o’nights with my ain family, and tell them that Christ had saved the souls o’ men, but that birds and beasts were perishable as the dew o’ heaven. And now ye have a black-gowned man in Threepdaidle who threeps on the same owercome. Ye may a’ ken something o’ your ain kitchen-midden, but certes! ye ken little o’ the warld beyond it.’

  Now this angered the man, and he rebuked the bird. ‘These are great mysteries,’ he said, ‘which are no to be mentioned in the ears of an unsanctified creature. What can a thing like you wi’ a lang neb and twae legs like stilts ken about the next warld?’

  ‘Weel, weel,’ said the whaup, ‘we’ll let the matter be. Everything to its ain trade, and I will not dispute with ye on metapheesics. But if ye ken something about the next warld, ye ken terrible little about this.’

  Now this angered the man still more, for he was a shepherd reputed to have great skill in sheep and esteemed the nicest judge of hogg and wether in all the countryside. ‘What ken ye about that?’ he asked. ‘Ye may gang east to Yetholm and west to Kells, and no find a better herd.’

  ‘If sheep were a’,’ said the bird, ‘ye micht be right; but what o’ the wide warld and the folk in it? Ye are Simon Etterick o’ the Lowe Moss. Do ye ken aucht o’ your forebears?’

  ‘My father was a God-fearing man at the Kennel-head, and my grandfather and great-grandfather afore him. One o’ our name, folk say, was shot at a dyke-back by the Black Westeraw.’

  ‘If that’s a’,’ said the bird, ‘ye ken little. Have ye never heard o’ the little man, the fourth back from yoursel’, who killed the Miller o’ Bewcastle at the Lammas Fair? That was in my ain time, and from my mother I have heard o’ the Covenanter, who got a bullet in his wame hunkering behind the divot-dyke and praying to his Maker. There were others o’ your name rode in the Hermitage forays and burned Naworth and Warkworth and Castle Gay. I have heard o’ an Etterick, Sim o’ the Redcleuch, who cut the throat o’ Jock Johnson in his ain house by the Annan side. And my grandmother had tales o’ auld Ettericks who rade wi’ Douglas and the Bruce and the ancient Kings o’ Scots; and she used to tell o’ others in her mother’s time, terrible shock-headed men, hunting the deer and rinnin’ on the high moors, and bidin’ in the broken stane biggings on the hill-taps.’

  The shepherd stared, and he, too, saw the picture. He smelled the air of battle and lust and foray, and forgot the Sabbath.

  ‘And you yoursel’,’ said the bird, ‘are sair fallen off from the auld stock. Now ye sit and spell in books, and talk about what ye little understand, when your fathers were roaming the warld. But little cause have I to speak, for I too am a downcome. My bill is two inches shorter than my mother’s, and my grandmother was taller on her feet. The warld is getting weaklier things to dwell in it, ever since I mind mysel’.’

  Ye have the gift o’ speech, bird,’ said the man, ‘and I would hear mair.’ You will perceive that he had no mind of the Sabbath day or the fifteenth head of the forenoon�
��s discourse.

  ‘What things have I to tell ye when ye dinna ken the very hornbook o’ knowledge? Besides, I am no clatter-vengeance to tell stories in the middle o’ the muir, where there are ears open high and low. There’s others than me wi’ mair experience and a better skill at the telling. Our clan was well acquaint wi’ the reivers and lifters o’ the muirs, and could crack fine o’ wars and the taking of cattle. But the blue hawk that lives in the corrie o’ the Dreichil can speak o’ kelpies and the dwarfs that bide in the hill. The heron, the lang solemn fellow, kens o’ the greenwood fairies and the wood elfins, and the wild geese that squatter on the tap o’ the Muneraw will croak to ye of the merrymaidens and the girls o’ the pool. The wren — he that hops in the grass below the birks — has the story of the ‘Lost Ladies of the Land’, which is ower auld and sad for any but the wisest to hear; and there is a wee bird bide in the heather — hill-lintie men call him — who sings the ‘Lay of the West Wind’, and the ‘Glee of the Rowan Berries’. But what am I talking of? What are these things to you, if ye have not first heard the Moor-Song, which is the beginning and end o’ all things?’

  ‘I have heard no songs,’ said the man, ‘save the sacred psalms o’

  God’s Kirk.’

  ‘Bonny sangs,’ said the bird. ‘Once I flew by the hinder end o’ the Kirk and I keekit in. A wheen auld wives wi’ mutches and a wheen solemn men wi’ hoasts! Be sure the Moor-Song is no like yon.’

  ‘Can ye sing it, bird?’ said the man, ‘for I am keen to hear it.’

  ‘Me sing,’ cried the bird, ‘me that has a voice like a craw! Na, na, I canna sing it, but maybe I can tak ye where ye may hear it. When I was young an auld bog-blitter did the same to me, and sae began my education. But are ye willing and brawly willing? — for if ye get but a sough of it ye will never mair have an ear for other music.’

  ‘I am willing and brawly willing,’ said the man.