The frightened animal, terror in its blank agate eyes, redoubled its efforts when it saw her. “I might be a wolf at least,” she said to herself. A rank smell of hot damp wool rose to her nostrils as, avoiding the madly kicking hind-legs, she seized the sheep by its horns. It was a very large heavy sheep, but Kate was strong. Though she felt that she would probably sprain her wrists or break the beast’s neck, she managed after several desperate heaves to set it upright on its inadequate legs.
“There!” she panted, scarlet with exertion and triumph.
The sheep rewarded her by promptly collapsing on to its back again in the same hollow.
“Ten thousand million devils!” cried Kate, justly annoyed by this display of ingratitude. “It would serve you right,” she said severely to the struggling ewe, “if I left you here to die. However—”
Followed another brief period of violent activity, at the end of which the ewe had once more been hoisted to its feet and stood leaning against Kate, whose hands now clutched the dirty greasy fleece of its back.
“Well, I’m tired of grappling you,” she said. “Can you walk now?”
The sheep, as if galvanized, leapt away from her, ran round in a tottering semi-circle, and fell over in its original helpless position.
“Of course, you know,” Kate said sadly. “I don’t believe you’re really trying.”
Plainly the creature was too feeble by this time to stay upright, and too stupid with fright to lie quietly and rest.
“Yet I can’t just abandon you, silly old nanny,” said Kate. “Oh, damn! I shall have to go and tell your shepherd all about you—if I can find him, which I doubt.”
All round her was spread the lonely moor, mile upon mile of dim purple distance, and not another human being in sight. A dip in the hills about a mile to the west, where a few trees showed, seemed the only possible place for a small farm or a shepherd’s cottage. Kate tied her handkerchief to a heather bush as a landmark, nodded encouragingly to the sheep, now lying hopelessly still, and set out on her mission.
When, flushed and dirty, with a large hole torn in one stocking by a vicious spike of burnt heather, she came to a halt and looked down into the dimple of ground which she had hoped might hide a house, she broke into helpless laughter. There was a shrunken burn running through the hollow, there were trees, there was even a little road which crossed the water by a tiny stone bridge; but the only house was a ruined shell, roofless, the garden a wilderness of nettles. . . . It seemed most unlikely that anyone would ever come along the little road, but Kate, having scrambled down the hillside, sat on the bridge and decided that she had earned a rest and a cigarette before she went any farther. The burn was very low and clear, the water ran like dark amber over its bed of smooth stones. Kate, looking down, could see the small trout so plainly that every red spot on their shining sides was visible. It must be pleasant to be a trout on a day as hot as this, to lie at ease under cool water with head upstream and tail gently moving to keep one’s balance. She lingered alter the cigarette had been smoked to a stub, idly picking tiny pieces of moss from between the coping-stones of the bridge, the afternoon sun warm on her back. Lulled by the soft murmur of the water, she did not hear the car until it drew up.
When a man’s voice said: “Lost something?” she was so startled that she jumped.
Indignantly she said: “What a fright you gave me, creeping up like that! I nearly fell into the burn.”
And then she saw that the ancient tourer was driven by Robin Anstruther. Beside him sat a lean brown man wreathed in collies, most obviously a hill shepherd.
“Creeping?” Anstruther raised his eyebrows. “In this old tin-can, over a road like this? We came up making a noise like a fire-engine. But what on earth are you doing here?”
Kate had recovered. “I’m looking for help for a—a friend,” she said.
“What? Another girl, d’you mean?”
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call her a girl,” said Kate, considering the matter. “She’s too matronly for that. A very womanly woman, I met her quite by chance.”
His puzzled frown was too much for her gravity and she began to laugh. “It’s a sheep. An elderly ewe. I found it lying on its back, and now you can rescue it.”
Both men craned their necks as if they expected to see the sheep recumbent below the bridge.
“Not there. More than a mile away,” Kate explained. “I was on my way to look for someone who could make it stand up.”
This remark, perfectly sensible to her, seemed to amuse Robin Anstruther. He uttered his short laugh, which echoed loudly in the quiet place, and even the silent man beside him smothered a smile.
“The sheep and I,” she pointed out coldly, “didn’t find it very funny.”
“Hah!” he said. “Where is this beast? Couldn’t you have had a shot at setting it up yourself?”
“I did have a shot. Several shots,” said Kate, still more coldly. “I should have thought that one look at me could have told you that I haven’t been strolling idly about doing nothing. I don’t get into this state of dirt for pleasure. And the sheep refuses to stay on its feet. It just falls down again, and as I got tired of supporting about half a ton of solid sheep, I thought I might get someone else to try.”
“You can’t have expected to find anyone in the burn,” he said unabashed, and added with a chuckle, “unless you were looking for the kelpie?”
“I was tired and hot, so I stopped for a rest,” began Kate on her dignity. Then, forgetting it immediately: “Is there really a kelpie?”
“Supposed to be. Well, come on and we’ll go along the road with the car as far as we can. Duncan, you and the dogs will have to get in behind.”
The shepherd got out in a wave of collies. “Doun, Tweed, doun, Glen, doun, Mirk!” he commanded as the dogs leapt about Kate. He proceeded to urge them into the back of the car, where he followed them.
“What’s brought you so far afield? I thought you’d be at Soonhope looking after your painter,” said Robin Anstruther, when they were bumping over the rough road.
“I gave myself a whole holiday. Mrs. Pow can deal with the painter far more efficiently than I can. He’s really her painter now, not mine.”
“Poor devil. With Mrs. Pow at his heels I pity him,” he said. “Well, I was coming down this evening to Haystoun to see if you’d like to go to Baro Fair with me tonight, but you’ll be too tired now.”
“No, I won’t, really I won’t. I’d love to go—after we’ve rescued the sheep.” Kate assured him hastily.
The car toiled on amid clouds of steam from the radiator. Grouse flew over them with a whir of swift wings, to alight at a safe distance in the heather and cry: “Go-back! Go-back!”
“I really think we’d better, you know,” said Kate.
“Better what?”
“Go back, as the grouse advise. They are quite right. The car’s boiling like a kettle.”
“Pity we didn’t bring any tea,” he said placidly. “We might have had a cup, and you’re so fond of tea, too. It’s all right. Here we are at the top. Now where’s your sheep?”
It was the shepherd whose keen eyes picked out the white speck which was Kate’s handkerchief, and they set off towards it.
“Can you see the sheep?” she asked anxiously.
“I believe you’re getting quite fond of this sheep of yours,” observed Robin Anstruther.
Duncan said to him: “She’ll be there a’right. Thae auld yowes are aye rowin’ aboot. They’re no’ wise at a’.”
The handkerchief was quite clearly to be seen when Kate stopped short with an angry cry. “Just look at that, will you?”
A solitary sheep had moved from behind a peat-hag and now began nonchalantly to crop the grass.
“Well!” said Kate, as Robin burst into a shout of laughter.
“Your sheep seems to have made a good recovery,” he suggested, and the shepherd’s polite decorum deserted him and his face became one broad delighted grin.
>
“Well!” said Kate again. “Isn’t that exactly like a sheep? Not content with being a perfect fool itself, the ungrateful beast must needs make a fool of me into the bargain!”
2
Baro village lies high above Haystoun on the lower slopes of the hills, so cunningly enfolded by deep woods that from a little distance no stranger would suspect its presence. It can be approached from all sides by a network of small roads, but no main highway comes any nearer than the valley, where the buses roll heavily past on their way to England along the Post Road. Round Baro the farms have not yet been broken up into small-holdings whose over-driven tenants struggle to scrape a livelihood from an inadequate two acres of soil. Times are not very good, but the old order still prevails there, a survival of days when master and men were one large family working together with the same aim, that the land to which they were thirled might yield to its greatest advantage. It is true that Lord Soutra’s great house, from which the village takes its name, stands empty for many months in every year, and his moors and coverts are shot by a syndicate of wealthy Englishmen who can afford to pay well for their sport. But a Heriot at least still owns the ‘Big Hoose’ and that counts for a great deal when so many estates have changed hands. The huge closed gates preside over the village, staring from the end of a grass avenue of lime-trees, now an extension of the Green, at the broken cross mounted on a seven-stepped pedestal which marks the centre of Baro.
“There are two pubs in this place,” said Robin Anstruther as the car—the smart car, not the elderly tourer—came round a sharp corner by the old church. “One is rather pretentious, calls itself the Baro House Hotel, you know. Sun lounge, cocktails, food mostly out of tins. The other’s just a pub where people stay who come for the fishing and shooting. Which d’you think you’d fancy?”
“Just the pub, please,” said Kate promptly. It was obvious where his own preference lay, and in any case anglers and shooters usually chose a place which did them well in a plain fashion.
“Good, the Soutra Arms it is, then,” he said in a voice of relief and turned the car away from the larger building behind the cross into a narrow road running alongside the lime avenue. “Here we are.”
They had stopped before an old whitewashed house with a faded coat-of-arms hanging on a sign above the door. Across the road, on the Green and under the trees, the Fair was in full swing, noisy, colourful in the last of the sunlight failing between the leaves.
Baro Fair had once been famous throughout the south-east of Scotland, when the Haystoun High School boys ‘got the play’ to attend it. Farmers flocked there to buy and sell beasts, their wives, who did their shopping annually, came with them to inspect the wares of the weavers and shoemakers from Seton. Bickers and tubs had to be bought of the coopers, baskets of the wild swarthy gipsies. Nor was the Fair wholly given over to serious business. There were fortune-tellers, frowned on by the minister, but patronized behind his back by his parishioners, there were sellers of gingerbread, ribbons and trinkets and quack medicines, there were merry-go-rounds and wrestling matches and dancing.
Though stripped of its old use as an essential part of country life, and degraded to a cheap form of summer amusement, the Fair was still held every year. Games and dancing competitions took the place of the cattle sale, a circus had halted its wagons and pitched its dirty tents in a convenient field along the Haystoun road. The Green was set about with booths and stalls, where young ploughmen and hinds tried their strength or displayed their skill and accuracy of eye with darts, air-guns or quoits, hoping to win a gaudy prize for the giggling girls who accompanied them. In a dark corner a fortune-teller with an exotic eastern name, a gipsy costume of more than oriental splendour and a pronounced Glasgow accent lurked outside her dingy pavilion to lure passers-by within. The din was tremendous, and above the noise of showmen trumpeting their attractions, the laughter and loud talk of the crowd, blared the band of the British Legion from Haystoun rendering Braw, Braw Lads with every brass instrument it owned.
“Is the noise too much for you?” asked Robin Anstruther close to Kate’s ear.
“No, no! I love it. Please may we go on the Green and see the fun?” Her eyes were shining, her cheeks pink with excitement. Robin, who had brought her partly because she amused him, a little out of half-lazy kindness, and more out of half-idle curiosity to see how she would take it, was, for some reason which he did not try to explain to himself, pleased with her.
“We’ll have dinner first. I hope there’s something to eat, and someone in to cook it,” he said, and taking her by the elbow, gently urged her into the narrow hall of the Soutra Arms.
It was dark, quiet, and empty save for a pleasant smell of cooking, but while Kate was wondering where everyone was, a door flew open and a large woman in pink print, whose moon-face bore witness to her activities, advanced upon them, a basting-spoon in her hand.
“Eh, ye idle, guid-for-naethin’ wee hempie!” she shouted. “If ye dinna set aboot yer wark this meenit ye’ll can pack yer bag an’ awa’!” Then, evidently realizing that the object of her wrath was not among those present: “Maircy on us! It’s gentry!” she exclaimed on a lower note. “I’m that pit aboot, sirr, ye’ll need tae excuse me. Here’s the denner a’ ready, an’ no’ a soul tae serve it, an’ the three gentlemen in the settin’-room roarin’ on their meat!”
“Well, Isa, we’re roaring for ours,” said Robin Anstruther. “Where’s everyone? On the Green, I’ll be bound.”
“Oh, it’s yersel’, Maister Anst’er!” said the cook, adding bitterly, “ay, they’re on the Green screichin’ an’ cairryin’ on, an’ me fair dementit.”
A bell, pressed by an impatient finger in some room upstairs, trilled angrily through the house, and as if in answer to its summons a girl in a black dress and tiny apron, her coquettish cap over one ear, was blown into the hall from outside on a gale of high-pitched mirth.
The cook, swelling with fury, and looking like Boadicea urging her chariots against the legions of Rome, confronted her, while Kate and Robin fell back respectfully into an open doorway.
“Jessie!” thundered the cook with an awful wave of her basting-spoon. Kate trembled for the culprit, but she did not appear either abashed or intimidated.
“Eh, Isa!” she gasped, struggling with her laughter. “Noo dinna be vexed wi’ me. I won twa prizes in the shootin’-gallery, an’ baith for you—see, a poke o’ sweeties an’ a bonny wee peen-cushion wi’ a dolly’s heid on’t!”
She held out the bribes and the cook in mollified accents said: “Weel, that was rale guid o’ ye, Jessie. My, it’s an awfu’ bonny wee cushion. . . . But come awa’ noo, hen, an’ set the table for the denners. Here’s Maister Anst’er brocht a leddy, an’ the shooters up the stair are gettin’ wild wantin’ their meat. C’wa’.”
In sweet accord they moved off towards the back of the hotel. Robin looked at Kate and smiled. “Mastery of matter over mind, don’t you think?”
“Bribery and corruption,” Kate said firmly.
“It seems to work all right. Look here, let’s go into the dining-room and take a table by the window. Then you’ll be able to watch the goings-on outside while I get you some sherry. Are you at the stage of ‘roarin’ on your meat yet?”
“Not quite. In any case, being a perfect lady, I shouldn’t roar. But,” said Kate rather wistfully, “I only had sandwiches for lunch, and we got back to Mrs. Anstruther’s too late for tea. I could bear to be fed within the next hour.”
“I’ll try some more bribery on Isa, and see if we can’t be dealt with before those wild shooters upstairs,” he promised, and went off in search of sherry.
Watching the Green from where Kate sat at a table for two in the window was like looking at a stage from the front or a box. The noise was dulled, the moving figures and glaring lights that mocked the sunset slightly blurred by the glass between, and this gave a further effect of unreality to the changing scene. The hand was still playing its stock piece, and even the o
ver-loud brass could not entirely spoil the lovely air. A small girl, wearing a travesty of Highland costume, her bonnet flaunting three feathers, her kilt disclosing a glimpse of frilled white drawers, her velvet doublet half-hidden by dangling medals, passed with a hard-faced woman who held her by the hand. ‘One of the prize-winning dancers at the Games,’ thought Kate, and smiled, remembering how angry it always made Greystiel Heron to see these over-dressed brats performing men’s dances. ‘Poor little wretch, she doesn’t seem to be enjoying her triumph much.’ The woman jerked her along, the child’s tired sallow face was smeared with crying. . . . For the moment Kate was glad not to be out among the crowd. She was content to look on, a spectator of rough pleasure in which she had no part. And suddenly it struck her like a blow that she had spent far too much time looking on at life instead of living it. To sit here with the glass between her and the crowd outside was typical of her whole existence.
“It’s all wrong!” she exclaimed aloud.
“What’s all wrong?” Robin Anstruther, unheard by her, had come in from the bar carrying two glasses of sherry.
Kate looked at him seriously. “Nothing, really,” she said. Instinctively she knew that she would never be able to make him understand, for he was the sort of person who would live as he chose, and yet expect women to want always to be sheltered.
He sat down opposite her, and smiled his slow ironic smile. “So you won’t tell me?”
Kate laughed. “No, I won’t. You’d never understand.”
“Perhaps not. Women are unaccountable creatures,” he said philosophically. “Aren’t you going to drink your sherry?”
She picked up her glass and looked at him over it. The wine was almost the same colour as her eyes. “Unaccountable, quotha! Not so, sir. Men are the mysterious sex. We poor women are probably the simplest creatures in this complex world.”
“Hah! Well, I’ll take your word for it. Cheer-oh.” He lifted his own glass and drank.
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