by John Buchan
Colonel Raden appraised the lean, athletic figure. ‘You’ve been our mystery man, Sir Archibald. I’m almost sorry to meet you, for we lose our chief topic of discussion. You’re fond of stalking, they tell me. When are you coming to kill a stag at Glenraden?’
‘When will you ask me?’ Sir Archie laughed. ‘I’m still fairly good on the hill, but just now I’m sittin’ indoors all day tuggin’ at my hair and tryin’ to compose a speech.’
Colonel Raden’s face asked for explanations.
‘Day after tomorrow in Muirtown. Big Unionist meetin’, and I’ve got to start the ball. It’s jolly hard to know what to talk about, for I’ve a pretty high average of ignorance about everything. But I’ve decided to have a shot at foreign policy. You see, Charles –’ Sir Archie stopped in a fright. He had been within an ace of giving the show away.
‘Of course. Ton my soul I had forgotten that you were our candidate. It’s an uphill fight I’m afraid. The people in these parts, sir, are the most obstinate reactionaries on the face of the globe; but they’ve been voting Liberal ever since the days of John Knox.’
Mr Bandicott regarded Sir Archie with interest.
‘So you’re standing for Parliament,’ he said. ‘Few things impress me more in Great Britain than the way young men take up public life as if it were the natural coping-stone to their education. We have no such tradition, and we feel the absence of it. Junius would as soon think of running for Congress as of keeping a faro-saloon. Now I wonder, Sir Archibald, what induced you to take this step?’
But Sir Archie was gone, for he had seen the beckoning eyes of Janet Raden. That young woman, ever since she had heard that the Laird of Crask was coming to dinner, had looked forward to this occasion as her culminating triumph. He had been her confidant about the desperate John Macnab, and from her he must learn the tale of her victory. Her pleasure was increased by the consciousness that she was looking her best, for she knew that her black gown was a good French model and well set off her delicate colouring. She looked with eyes of friendship on him as he limped across the room, and noted his lean distinction. No other country, she thought, produced this kind of slim, graceful, yet weathered and hard-bitten youth.
‘Do you know Mr Claybody?’
Mr Claybody said he was delighted to meet his neighbour again. ‘It’s years,’ he said, ‘since we met at Ronham. I spend my life in the train now, and never get more than a few days at a time at Haripol. But I’ve managed to secure a month this year to entertain my friends. I was looking forward in any case to seeing you at Muirtown on the 4th. I’ve been helping to organise the show, and I consider it a great score to have got Lamancha. This place had never been properly worked, and with a little efficient organisation we ought to put you in right enough. There’s no doubt Scotland is changing, and you’ll have the tide to help you.’
Mr Claybody was a very splendid person. He looked rather like a large edition of the great Napoleon, for he had the same full fleshy face, and his head was set on a thickish neck. His blond hair was beautifully sleek and his clothes were of a perfection uncommon in September north of the Forth. Not that Mr Claybody was either fat or dandified; he was only what the ballad calls ‘fair of flesh’, and he employed a good tailor and an assiduous valet. His exact age was thirty-two, and he did not look older, once the observer had got over his curiously sophisticated eyes.
But Sir Archie was giving scant attention to Mr Claybody.
‘Have you heard?’ Janet broke out. ‘John Macnab came, saw, and didn’t conquer.’
‘I’ve heard nothing else in the last two days.’
‘And I was right! He is a gentleman.’
‘No? Tell me all about the fellow.’ Sir Archie’s interest was perhaps less in the subject than in the animation which it woke in Janet’s eyes.
But the announcement that dinner was served cut short the tale, though not before Sir Archie had noticed a sudden set of Mr Claybody’s jaw and a contraction of his eyebrows. ‘Wonder if he means to stick to his lawyer’s letter,’ he communed with himself. ‘In that case it’s quod for Charles.’
The dining-room at Strathlarrig was a remnant of the old house which had been enveloped in the immense sheath of the new. It had eighteenth-century panelling unchanged since the days when Jacobite chiefs in lace and tartan had passed their claret glasses over the water, and the pictures were all of forbidding progenitors. But the ancient narrow windows had been widened, and Sir Archie, from where he sat, had a prospect of half a mile of the river, including Lady Maisie’s Pool, bathed in the clear amber of twilight. He was on his host’s left hand, opposite the Professor, with Agatha Raden next to him: then came Junius: while Janet was between Johnson Claybody and the guest of the occasion.
Mr Claybody still brooded over John Macnab.
‘I call the whole thing infernal impertinence,’ he said in his loud, assured voice. ‘I confess I have ceased to admire undergraduate “rags”. He threatens to visit us, and my father intends to put the matter into the hands of the police.’
‘That would be very kind,’ said Janet sweetly. ‘You see, John Macnab won’t have the slightest trouble in beating the police.’
‘It’s the principle of the thing, Miss Raden. Here is an impudent attack on private property, and if we treat it as a joke it will only encourage other scoundrels. If the man is a gentleman, as you say he is, it makes it more scandalous.’
‘Come, come, Mr Claybody, you’re taking it too seriously.’ Colonel Raden could be emphatic enough on the rights of property, but no Highlander can ever grow excited about trespass. ‘The fellow has made a sporting offer and is willing to risk a pretty handsome stake. I rather admire what you call his impudence. I might have done the same thing as a young man, if I had had the wits to think of it.’
Mr Claybody was quick to recognise an unsympathetic audience. ‘Oh, I don’t mean that we’re actually going to make a fuss. We’ll give him a warm reception if he comes – that’s all. But I don’t like the spirit. It’s too dangerous in these unsettled times. Once let the masses get into their heads that landed property is a thing to play tricks with, and you take the pin out of the whole system. You must agree with me, Roylance?’
Sir Archie, remembering his part, answered with guile. ‘Rather! Rotten game for a gentleman, I think. All the same, the chap seems rather a sportsman, so I’m in favour of letting the law alone and dealing with him ourselves. I expect he won’t have much of a look in on Haripol.’
‘I can promise you he won’t,’ said Mr Claybody shortly.
Professor Babwater observed that it would be difficult for a descendant of Harald Blacktooth to be too hard on one who followed in Harald’s steps. ‘The Celt,’ he said, ‘has always sought his adventures in a fairy world. The Northman was a realist, and looked to tangible things like land and cattle. Therefore he was a conqueror and a discoverer on the terrestial globe, while the Celt explored the mysteries of the spirit. Those who, like you, sir’ – he bowed to Colonel Raden – ‘have both strains in their ancestry, should have successes in both worlds.’
‘They don’t mix well,’ said the Colonel sadly. ‘There was my grandfather, who believed in Macpherson’s Ossian and ruined the family fortunes in hunting for Gaelic manuscripts on the continent of Europe. And his father was in India with Clive, and thought about nothing except blackmailing native chiefs till he made the place too hot to hold him. Look at my daughters, too. Agatha is mad about poetry and such-like, and Janet is a bandit. She’d have made a dashed good soldier, though.’
‘Thank you, papa,’ said the lady. She might have objected to the description had she not seen that Sir Archie accepted it with admiring assent.
‘I suppose,’ said old Mr Bandicott reflectively, ‘that the war was bound to leave a good deal of unsettlement. Junius missed it through being too young – never got out of a training camp – but I have noticed that those who fought in France find it difficult to discover a groove. They are energetic enough, but they won’t
“stay put”, as we say. Perhaps this Macnab is one of the unrooted. In your country, where everybody was soldiering, the case must be far more common.’
Mr Claybody announced that he was sick of hearing the war blamed for the average man’s deficiencies. ‘Every waster,’ he said, ‘makes an excuse of being shell-shocked. I’m very clear that the war twisted nothing in a man that wasn’t twisted before.’
Sir Archie demurred. ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty bad cases of fellows who used to be as sane as a judge, and came home all shot to bits in their mind.’
‘There are exceptions, of course. I’m speaking of the general rule. I turn away unemployables every day – good soldiers, maybe, but unemployable – and I doubt if they were ever anything else.’
Something in his tone annoyed Janet.
‘You saw a lot of service, didn’t you?’ she asked meekly.
‘No – worse luck! They made me stick at home and slave fourteen hours a day controlling cotton. It would have been a holiday for me to get into the trenches. But what I say is, a sane man usually remained sane. Look at Sir Archibald. We all know what a hectic time he had, and he hasn’t turned a hair.’
‘I’d like you to give me that in writing,’ Sir Archie grinned. ‘I’ve known people who thought I was rather cracked.’
‘Anyhow, it made no difference to your nerves,’ said Colonel Raden.
‘I hope not. I expect that was because I enjoyed the beastly thing. Perhaps I’m naturally a bit of a bandit – like Miss Janet.’
‘Perhaps you’re John Macnab,’ said that lady.
‘Well, you’ve seen him and can judge.’
‘No. I’ll be a witness for the defence if you’re ever accused. But you mustn’t be offended at the idea. I suppose poor John Macnab is now crawling round Strathlarrig trying to find a gap between the gillies to cast a fly.’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ Junius laughed. ‘And there’s twenty special correspondents in the neighbourhood cursing his name. If they get hold of him, they’ll be savager than old Angus.’
Mr Bandicott, after calling his guests’ attention to the merits of a hock which he had just acquired – it was a Johannisberg with the blue label – declared that in his belief the war would do good to English life, when the first ferment had died away.
‘As a profound admirer of British institutions,’ he said, ‘I have sometimes thought that they needed a little shaking up and loosening. In America our classes are fluid. The rich man of today began life in a shack, and the next generation may return to it. It is the same with our professions. The man who starts in the law may pass to railway management, and end as the proprietor of a department store. Our belief is that it doesn’t matter how often you change your trade before you’re fifty. But an Englishman, once he settles in a profession, is fixed in it till the Day of Judgment, and in a few years he gets the mark of it so deep that he’d be a fish out of water in anything else. You can’t imagine one of your big barristers doing anything else. No fresh fields and pastures new for them. It would be a crime against Magna Carta to break loose and try company-promoting or cornering the meat trade for a little change.’
Professor Babwater observed that in England they sometimes – in his view to the country’s detriment – became politicians.
‘That’s the narrowest groove of all,’ said Mr Bandicott with conviction. ‘In this country, once you start in on politics you’re fixed in a class and members of a hierarchy, and you’ve got to go on, however unfitted you may be for the job, because it’s sort of high treason to weaken. In America a man tries politics as he tries other things, and if he finds the air of Washington uncongenial he quits, or tries newspapers, or Wall Street, or oil.’
‘Or the penitentiary,’ said Junius.
‘And why not?’ asked his father. ‘I deplore criminal tendencies in any public man, but the possibility of such a downfall keeps the life human. It is very different in England. The respectability of your politicians is so awful that, when one of them backslides, every man of you combines to hush it up. There would be a revolution if the people got to suspect. Can you imagine a Cabinet Minister in the police court on a common vulgar charge?’
Professor Babwater said he could well imagine it – it was where most of them should be; but Colonel Raden agreed that the decencies had somehow to be preserved, even at the cost of a certain amount of humbug. ‘But, excuse me,’ he added, ‘if I fail to see what good an occasional sentence of six months hard would do to public life.’
‘I don’t want it to happen,’ said his host, who was inspired by his own Johannisberg, ‘but I’d like to think it could happen. The permanent possibility of it would supple the minds of your legislators. It would do this old country a power of good if now and then a Cabinet Minister took to brawling and went to jail.’
It was a topic which naturally interested Sir Archie, but the theories of Mr Bandicott passed by him unheeded. For his seat at the table gave him a view of the darkening glen, and he was aware that on that stage a stirring drama was being enacted. His host could see nothing, for it was behind him; the Professor would have had to screw his head round; to Sir Archie alone was vouchsafed a clear prospect. Janet saw that he was gazing abstractedly out of the window, but she did not realise that his eyes were strained and every nerve in him excitedly alive . . .
For suddenly into his field of vision had darted a man. He was on the far side of the Larrig, running hard, and behind him, at a distance of some forty yards, followed another. At first he thought it was Leithen, but even in the dusk it was plain that it was a shorter man – younger, too, he looked, and of a notable activity. He was gaining on his pursuers, when the chase went out of sight . . . Then Sir Archie heard a far-away whistling, and would have given much to fling open the window and look out . . .
Five minutes passed and again the runner appeared – this time dripping wet and on the near side. Clearly not Leithen, for he wore a white sweater, which was a garment unknown to the Crask wardrobe. He must have been headed off up-stream, and had doubled back. That way lay danger, and Sir Archie longed to warn him, for his route would bring him close to the peopled appendages of Strathlarrig House . . . Even as he stared he saw what must mean the end, for two figures appeared for one second on the extreme left of his range of vision, and in front of the fugitive. He was running into their arms!
Sir Archie seized his glass of the blue-labelled Johannisberg, swallowed the wine the wrong way, and promptly choked.
When the Hispana crossed the Bridge of Larrig His Majesty’s late Attorney-General was modestly concealed in a bush of broom on the Crask side, from which he could watch the sullen stretches of the Lang Whang. He was carefully dressed for the part in a pair of Wattie Lithgow’s old trousers much too short for him, a waistcoat and jacket which belonged to Sime the butler and which had been made about the year 1890, and a vulgar flannel shirt borrowed from Shapp. He was innocent of a collar, he had not shaved for two days, and as he had forgotten to have his hair cut before leaving London his locks were of a disreputable length. Last, he had a shocking old hat of Sir Archie’s from which the lining had long since gone. His hands were sunburned and grubby, and he had removed his signet-ring. A light ten-foot greenheart rod lay beside him, already put up, and to the tapered line was fixed a tapered cast ending in a strange little cocked fly. As he waited he was busy oiling fly and line.
His glass showed him an empty haugh, save for the figure of Jimsie at the far end close to the Wood of Larrigmore. The sun-warmed waters of the river drowsed in the long dead stretches, curled at rare intervals by the faintest western breeze. The banks were crisp green turf, scarcely broken by a boulder, but five yards from them the moss began – a wilderness of hags and tussocks. Somewhere in its depths he knew that Benjie lay coiled like an adder, waiting on events.
Leithen’s plan, like all great strategy, was simple. Everything depended on having Jimsie out of sight of the Lang Whang for half an hour. Given that, he b
elieved he might kill a salmon. He had marked out a pool where in the evening fish were usually stirring, one of those irrational haunts which no piscatorial psychologist has ever explained. If he could fish fine and far, he might cover it from a spot below a high bank where only the top of his rod would be visible to watchers at a distance. Unfortunately, that spot was on the other side of the stream. With such tackle, landing a salmon would be a critical business, but there was one chance in ten that it might be accomplished; Benjie would be at hand to conceal the fish, and he himself would disappear silently into the Crask thickets. But every step bristled with horrid dangers. Jimsie might be faithful to his post – in which case it was hopeless; he might find the salmon dour, or a fish might break him in the landing, or Jimsie might return to find him brazenly tethered to forbidden game. It was no good thinking about it. On one thing he was decided: if he were caught, he would not try to escape. That would mean retreat in the direction of Crask, and an exploration of the Crask coverts would assuredly reveal what must at all costs be concealed. No. He would go quietly into captivity, and trust to his base appearance to be let off with a drubbing.
As he waited, watching the pools turn from gold to bronze, as the sun sank behind the Glenraden peaks, he suffered the inevitable reaction. The absurdities seemed huge as mountains, the difficulties innumerable as the waves of the sea. There remained less than an hour in which there would be sufficient light to fish – Jimsie was immovable (he had just lit his pipe and was sitting in meditation on a big stone) – every moment the Larrig waters were cooling with the chill of evening. Leithen consulted his watch, and found it half-past eight. He had lost his wrist-watch, and had brought his hunter, attached to a thin gold chain. That was foolish, so he slipped the chain from his buttonhole and drew it through the arm-hole of his waistcoat.