by John Buchan
The Duke of Angus was very old, highly respected, and almost wholly witless. He had never been very clever — Disraeli, it was said, had refused him the Thistle on the ground that he would eat it — and of late years his mind had retired into a happy vacuity. As a chairman he was mercifully brief. He told a Scots story, at which he shook with laughter, but the point of which he unfortunately left out; he repeated very loudly the names of the speakers — Sir Archie started at the sound of his own like a scared fawn; in a tone which was almost a bellow he uttered the words “Lord Lamancha,” and then he sat down.
Lamancha had the reputation which is always accorded to a man whose name is often in the newspapers. Most of the audience had never seen him in the flesh, and human nature is grateful for satisfied curiosity. Presently he had them docile under the spell of his charming voice. He never attempted oratory in the grand style, but he possessed all the lesser accomplishments. He had nothing new to say, but he said the old things with a pleasant sincerity and that simplicity which is the result only of a long-practised art. It was the kind of speech of which he had made hundreds and would make hundreds more; there was nothing in it to lay hold of, but it produced an impression of being at once weighty and spontaneous, flattering to the audience and a proof of the speaker’s easy mastery of his trade. There was a compliment to the Duke, a warm tribute to Sir Archie, a bantering profession of shyness on the part of a Borderer speaking north of the Forth. Then, by an easy transition, he passed to Highland problems — land, emigration, the ex-service men — and thence to the prime economic needs of Britain since 1918, the relation of these needs to world demands, the necessity of meeting them by using the full assets of an Empire which had been a unit in war and should be a unit in peace. There was little to inspire, but little to question; platitudes were so artfully linked together as to give the impression of a rounded and stable creed. Here was one who spoke seriously, responsibly, and yet with optimism; there was character here, said the ordinary man, and yet obviously a mind as well. Even the stern critics on the back benches had no fault to find with a statement from which they could only dissent with respect. None recognised that it was the manner that bewitched them. Lamancha, who on occasion could be profound, was now only improvising. The matter was a mosaic of bits of old speeches and answers to deputations, which he put together cynically with his left hand. But the manner was superb — the perfect production of a fine voice, the cunning emphasis, the sudden halts, the rounded cadences, the calculated hesitations. He sat down after forty minutes amid a tempest of that applause which is the tribute to professional skill and has nothing to do with conviction.
Sir Archie had listened with awe. Knowing now from bitter experience the thorny path of oratory, he was dumbfounded by this spectacle of a perfection of which he had never dreamed. What a fiasco would his halting utterance be in such company! He glanced at the notes in his hand, but could not read them; he strove to remember his opening sentences, and discovered them elusive. Then suddenly he heard his name spoken, and found himself on his feet.
He was scarcely aware of the applause with which he was greeted. All he knew was that every word of his speech had fled from his memory and would never return. The faces below him were a horrid white blur at which he knew he was foolishly grinning... In his pocket was an oration carefully written out. If he were to pluck it forth, and try to read it, he knew that he could not make sense of a word, for his eyes had lost the power of sight... Profound inertia seized him; he must do something, but there was a dreadful temptation to do nothing, just to go on grinning, like a man in a nightmare who finds himself in the track of an express train.
Nevertheless, such automata are we, he was speaking. He did not know what he was saying, but as a matter of fact he was repeating the words with which the chairman had introduced him. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are fortunate in the privilege of having heard so stirring and statesmanlike an address as that which His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions has just delivered. Now we are to hear what our gallant and enterprising friend, the prospective candidate for Wester Ross, has to say to us about the problems which confront the nation.”
He repeated this exordium like a parrot. The audience scented a mild joke, and laughed... Then in a twittering falsetto he repeated it again — this time in silence. There was a vague sense that something had gone wrong. He was about to repeat it a third time, and then the crash would have come, and he would have retired gibbering from the field.
The situation was saved by Wattie Lithgow. Seated at the back of the hall, Wattie saw that his master was in deadly peril, and took the only way to save him. He had a voice of immense compass, and he used it to the full.
“Speak up, man,” he roared. “I canna hear a word ye’re sayin’.”
There were shouts of “Order,” and the stewards glared angrily at Wattie, but the trick had been done. Sir Archie’s eyes opened, and he saw the audience no longer like turnips in a field, but as living and probably friendly human beings. Above all, he saw Wattie’s gnarled face and anxious eyes. Suddenly his brain cleared, and, had he desired it, he could have reeled off the speech in his pocket as glibly as he had repeated it in the solitude of Crask. But he felt that that was no longer possible. The situation required a different kind of speech, and he believed he could make it. He would speak direct to Wattie, as he had often lectured him in the Crask smoking-room.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said — and his voice had become full and confident—”your ‘gallant and enterprising friend’ is not much of a hand in public speaking. I have still my job to learn, and with your help I hope soon to learn it. What I have to say to you this afternoon is the outcome of my first amateurish study of public questions. You may take it that my views are honest and my own. I am not a gramophone.”
In this last sentence he lied, for what he said was for the most part not his own; it was the sermon which Janet Raden had preached him the day before in the clear air of the Carnmore tops. Mixed up with it were fragments of old discourses of his own to Wattie, and reflections which had come to him in the last ten years of a variegated life. The manner was staccato, the style was slangy and inelegant, but it was not a lesson learned and recited, but words spoken direct to those into whose eyes he was looking. He had found touch with his audience, and he held their attention in a vice.
It was a strange, inconsequent speech, but it had a curious appeal in it — the appeal of youth and candour and courage. It was philosophy rather than politics, and ragged but arresting philosophy. He began by confessing that the war had left the world in a muddle, a muddle which affected his own mind. The only cure was to be honest with oneself, and to refuse to accept specious nonsense and conventional jargon. He told the story from Andersen of the Emperor’s New Suit. “Our opponents call us Tories,” he said; “they can call us anything they jolly well please. I am proud to be called a Tory. I understand that the name was first given by Titus Oates to those who disbelieved in his Popish Plot. What we want to-day is Toryism — the courage to give the lie to impudent rogues.”
That was a memory of Leithen’s table talk. The rest was all from Janet Raden. He preached the doctrine of Challenge; of no privilege without responsibility, of only one right of man — the right to do his duty; of all power and property held on sufferance. These were the thoughts which had been growing in his head since yesterday afternoon. He spoke of the changing face of the land — the Highlands ceasing to be the home of men and becoming the mere raw material of picture post-cards, the old gentry elbowed out and retiring with a few trinkets and pictures and the war medals of their dead to suburban lodgings. It all came of not meeting the challenge... What was Bolshevism but a challenge, perhaps a much-needed challenge, to make certain of the faith that was in a man? He had no patience with the timorous and whining rich. No law could protect them unless they made themselves worth protecting. As a Tory, he believed that the old buildings were still sound, but they must be swept and garnished, that the ancient weapon
s were the best, but they must be kept bright and shining and ready for use. So soon as a cause feared inquiry and the light of day that cause was doomed. The ostrich, hiding its head in the sand, left its rump a fatal temptation to the boot of the passer-by.
Sir Archie was not always clear, he was often ungrammatical, and he nobly mixed his metaphors, but he held his audience tight. He did more, when at the close of his speech he put his case in the form of an apologue — the apologue of John Macnab. The mention of the name brought laughter and loud cheering. John Macnab, he said, was abroad in the world to-day, like a catfish among a shoal of herrings. He had his defects, no doubt, but he was badly wanted, for he was at bottom a sportsman and his challenge had to be met. Even if the game went against them the challenged did not wholly lose, for they were stirred out of apathy into life.
No queerer speech was ever made by a candidate on his first public appearance. It had no kind of success with the Baillie, nor, it may be presumed, with Lord Claybody; indeed, I doubt if any of the distinguished folk on the platform quite approved of it, except Lamancha. But there was no question of its appeal to the audience, and the applause which had followed Lamancha’s peroration was as nothing to that amid which Sir Archie resumed his seat.
At the back of the hall a wild-eyed man sitting rear Wattie Lithgow had been vociferous in his plaudits. “He ca’s himsel’ a Tory. By God, it’s the red flag that he’ll be wavin’ soon.”
“If you say that again,” said Wattie fiercely, “I’ll smash your heid.”
“Keep your hair on,” was the reply. “I’m for the young ane, whatever he ca’s himsel’.”
Archie sat down with his brain in a whirl, for he had tasted the most delicious of joys — the sense of having moved a multitude. He had never felt happier in his life — or, let it be added, more truly amazed. A fiery trail was over, and brilliantly over. He had spoken straightforwardly to his fellow mortals with ease and acceptance. The faces below him were no longer featureless, but human and friendly and interesting. He did not listen closely to Colonel Wavertree’s remarks, which seemed to be mostly about taxation, or to the Ex-Premier of New Caledonia, who was heavily rhetorical and passionately imperial. Modest as he was, he had a pleased consciousness that, though he might have talked a good deal of rot, he had gripped his hearers as not even Lamancha had gripped them. He searched through the hall for faces to recognise. Wattie he saw, savagely content; the Colonel, too, who looked flushed and happy, and Junius, and Agatha. But there was no sign of Janet, and his failure to find her threw a dash of cold water on his triumph.
The next step was to compass an inconspicuous departure. Lamancha would be escorted in state to the four-forty-five train, and he must join it at Frew. While “God save the King” was being sung, Sir Archie escaped by a side-door, followed by an excited agent. “Man, ye went down tremendous,” Brodie gasped. “Ye changed your mind — ye told me ye were goin’ to deal wi’ foreign policy. Anyway, ye’ve started fine, and there’ll be no gettin’ inside the hall the next time ye speak in Muirtown.”
Archie shook him off, picked up a taxi-cab at the station, and drove to Frew. There, after lurking in the waiting-room, he duly entered a third-class carriage in the rear of the south-going train. At six o’clock he emerged on to the platform at Bridge of Gair, and waited till the train had gone before he followed Lamancha to the hotel. He found his friend thinking only of Haripol. “I had a difficult job to get rid of Claybody, and had to tell a lot of lies. Said I was going to stay with Lanerick and that my man had gone on there with my luggage. We’d better be off, for we’ve a big day before us to-morrow.”
But, as the Hispana started up the road to the pass, Lamancha smiled affectionately on the driver and patted his shoulder. “I’ve often called you an idiot, Archie, but I’m bound to say to-day you were an inspired idiot. You may win this seat or not — it doesn’t matter — but sooner or later you’re going to make a howling success in that silly game.”
Beyond the pass the skies darkened for rain, and it was in a deluge that the car, a little after eight o’clock, crossed the Bridge of Larrig. Archie had intended to go round by one of the peat-roads, but the wild weather had driven everyone to shelter, and it seemed safe to take the straight road up the hill. Shapp, who had just arrived in the Ford, took charge of the car, and Archie and Lamancha sprinted through the drizzle to the back-door.
To their surprise it was locked, and when, in reply to their hammering, Mrs Lithgow appeared, it was only after repeated questions through the scullery- window that she was convinced of their identity and permitted them to enter.
“We’ve been fair fashed wi’ folk,” was her laconic comment, as she retired hastily to the kitchen after locking the door behind them.
In the smoking-room they found the lamps lit, the windows shuttered, Crossby busy with the newspapers, Palliser-Yeates playing patience, and Leithen as usual deep in the works of Sir Walter Scott. “Well,” was the unanimous question, “how did it go off?”
“Not so bad,” said Archie. “Charles was in great form. But what on earth has scared Mrs Lithgow?”
Leithen laid down his book. “We’ve had the devil of a time. Our base has been attacked. It looks as if we may have a rearguard action to add to our troubles. We’re practically besieged. Two hours ago I was all for burning our ciphers and retiring.”
“Besieged? By whom?”
“By the correspondents. Ever since the early afternoon. I fancy their editors have been prodding them with telegrams. Anyhow, they’ve forgotten all about Harald Blacktooth and are hot on the scent of John Macnab.”
“But what brought them here?”
“Method of elimination, I suppose. Your journalist is a sharp fellow. They argued that John Macnab must have a base near by, and, as it wasn’t Strathlarrig or Glenraden, it was most likely here. Also they caught sight of Crossby taking the air, and gave chase. Crossby flung them off — happily they can’t have recognised him — but they had him treed in the stable loft for three hours.”
“Did they see you?”
“No. Some got into the hall and some glued their faces to this window, but John was under the table and I was making myself very small at the back of the sofa... Mrs Lithgow handled them like Napoleon. Said the Laird was away and wouldn’t be back till midnight, but he’d see them at ten o’clock to-morrow. She had to promise that, for they are determined ruffians. They’d probably still be hanging about the place if it hadn’t been for this blessed rain.”
“That’s not all,” said Palliser-Yeates. “We had a visit from a lunatic. We didn’t see him, for Mrs Lithgow lured him indoors and has him shut up in the wine-cellar.”
“Good God! What kind of lunatic?” Sir Archie exclaimed.
“Don’t know. Mrs Lithgow was not communicative. She said something about smallpox. Maybe he’s a fellow-sufferer looking for Archie’s company. Anyhow, he’s in the wine-cellar for Wattie to deal with.”
Sir Archie rose and marched from the room, and did not return till the party were seated at a late supper. His hair was harassed, and his eyes were wild.
“It wasn’t the wine-cellar,” he groaned, “it was the coal-hole. He’s upstairs now having a bath and changing into a suit of my clothes. Pretty short in the temper, too, and no wonder. For Heaven’s sake, you fellows, stroke him down when he appears. We’ve got to bank on his being a good chap and tell him everything. It’s deuced hard luck. Here am I just making a promising start in my public career, and you’ve gone and locked up the local Medical Officer of Health who came to inquire into a reputed case of smallpox.”
CHAPTER 10. IN WHICH CRIME IS ADDED TO CRIME
By the mercy of Providence Doctor Kello fulfilled Archie’s definition of a “good chap.” He was a sandy-haired young man from Dundee, who had been in the Air Force, and on his native dialect had grafted the intricate slang of that service. Archie had found him half-choked with coal-dust and wrath, and abject apologies had scarcely mollified him. But a hot bath
and his host’s insistence that he should spend the night at Crask — Dr Kello knew very well that at the inn he would get no more than a sofa — had worked a miracle, and he appeared at the supper-table prepared to forgive and forget. He was a little awed by the company in which he found himself, and nervously murmured, “Pleased to meet ye” in response to the various introductions. A good meal and Archie’s Veuve Clicquot put him into humour with himself and at ease with his surroundings. He exchanged war reminiscences, and told stories of his professional life—”Ye wouldn’t believe, I tell ye, what queer folk the Highlanders are” and when later in the evening Archie, speaking as to a brother airman, made a clean breast of the John Macnab affair, he received the confession with obstreperous hilarity. “It’s the best stunt I ever heard tell of,” he roared, slapping his knee. “Ye may depend on me to back ye up, too. Is it the journalists that’s worrying ye? You leave the merchants to me. I’ll shut their mouths for them. Ten o’clock to-morrow, is it? Well, I’ll be there with a face as long as my arm, and I’ll guarantee to send them down the hill like a kirk emptying.”
All night it rained in bucketfuls, and the Friday morning broke with the same pitiless deluge. Lamancha came down to breakfast in a suit of clothes which would have been refused by a self-respecting tramp, but which, as a matter of fact, had been his stalking outfit for a dozen years. The Merklands were not a dressy family. He studied the barograph, where the needle was moving ominously downward, and considered the dissolving skies and the mist which rose like a wall beyond the terrace.
“It’s no good,” he told his host. “You might as well try to stalk Haripol in a snow blizzard. To-day must be washed out, and that leaves us only to- morrow. We’ll have to roost indoors, and we’re terribly at the mercy of that hive of correspondents.”
The hive came at ten, a waterproofed army defying the weather in the cause of duty. But in front of the door they were met by Dr Kello, with a portentous face.
