by John Buchan
“Harosheth of your grannie!”
The minister’s voice had stopped, and, in the profound hush that followed, the four words fell with a startling clearness. The blasphemy of them was not decreased by the tone, which was of measureless contempt. The scared eyes of the people saw Mark Riddel, for whom soldiers were now beating the countryside, standing easy and arrogant before the pulpit, and those near him drew away their stools in panic. He had not the look of a hunted man, and though his presence had always won him respect in Woodilee he seemed now to have expanded into some one most formidable and unfamiliar. He wore the same clothes as he had worn in field and market, but he held himself very differently from the friendly crony who had sat in Lucky Weir’s. At his side, too, swung a long sword.
Mr. Proudfoot looked boldly down on him.
“Who are you that dares to cast scorn upon the Word?” he asked in a firm voice.
“Not on the Word,” was the answer, “but on the auld wives that pervert it. “He nodded over his shoulder. “They ken me fine in the parish. I was baptized after the Apostle, and for my surname ye can choose Kerr or Riddel as it pleases you.”
The Moderator sat with a flaming face. “It is Mark Kerr the malignant. I summon all law-abiding and Christian men to lay hands on him and convey him to a place of bondage.”
But no one stirred. The dark face with the laugh at the lips, the fierce contemptuous eyes, the figure compact and light with a strength which the toil-bent shoulders of Woodilee could never equal, the repute for magical skill — these were things terrible enough without the long sword.
Mr. Muirhead rose. “Then I and my brother will get us forth of this place. Come, Mr. Ebenezer,” and he gathered the skirts of his gown.
“Nay, friends,” said Mark, “ye’ll bide where ye are. And the folk will keep their seats, till I give them leave to skail [disperse].” He swung the key of the kirk door in his hand as he spoke. “Sit ye doun, Mr. Muirhead. Sit ye doun, worthy Mr. Proudfoot. You billies have the chance ilka Sabbath o’ sayin’ your say and no man can controvert you. This day for a change ye will have to hearken.”
In justice to the two ministers let it be said that it was not the sword that kept them in their places. Neither lacked courage. But this man who stood confronting them, the very sight of whom seemed to paralyse the folk of Woodilee, this shameless malignant had a compelling something in his air. He spoke as one having authority; though he used the broad country speech, he had that in his voice which, whether it spring from camp or court or college, means command. Very sensitive to this note in their disciplined Kirk, the two ministers listened.
What fell from Mark’s lips was discussed secretly for many a day in the countryside. Publicly it was rarely mentioned, for a more awful blasphemy, it seemed, was never spoken in the house of God. He told two pillars of the Kirk and a congregation of the devout that they had all failed utterly to interpret God’s Word; that they were Pharisees faithful to an ill-understood letter and heedless of the spirit; that they were fools bemused with Jewish rites which they did not comprehend and Jewish names which they could not properly pronounce. “It’s nothing but a bairn’s ploy,” he cried, “but it’s a cruel ploy, for it has spilt muckle good blood in Scotland. If ye take the blood-thirstiness, and the hewing in pieces, and thrawnness of the auld Jews, and ettle to shape yourselves on their pattern, what for do ye no gang further? Wherefore d’ye no set up an altar and burn a wedder on’t? What kind o’ kirk is this, when ye suld have a temple with gopher and shittim wood and shew-bread and an ark o’ the covenant and branched candlesticks, and busk your minister in an ephod instead of a black gown? Ye canna pick and choose in the Word. If one thing is to be zealously copied, wherefore not all? . . . Ye fatted calves! . . . Ye muckle weans, that play at being ancient Israelites!”
This was too much for Mr. Proudfoot.
“Silence, blasphemer,” he cried. “In the name of Him that snappeth the spear asunder I will outface you.” He stumbled down the pulpit stairs, and would no doubt have flung himself on Mark had not old Nance Kello who sat at the foot impeded him and given Mirehope time to catch his coat-skirts. He stopped, breathing heavily, about three yards from Mark, and, as he stood, it was not the sword that a second time deterred him. He felt dimly that this outlaw had come to wear a fearful authority. It was not the tacksman of Crossbasket that spoke, but the captain of Mackay’s — not the farmer of Jed Water, but the kinsman of Roxburghe and the brigadier of Montrose.
Mr. Proudfoot turned to his colleague and saw that the Moderator’s eye was puzzled and uncertain. He bethought him of his chief ally in the parish. “Where is Chasehope?” he cried. “Where is Ephraim Caird?”
The answer came from an unlooked-for quarter. Daft Gibbie sat crouched in a corner of the kirk, and those near him had marked his unwonted silence. He did not gabble as usual, but sat with his great head in his hands, murmuring softly and rolling his wild eyes. But at the mention of Chasehope he suddenly found voice.
“He’s up in the hills,” he cried. “I seen him at skreigh o’ day at the buchts o’ the Drygrain, and he was rivin’ a yowe and cryin’ that it was a hound o’ hell and that it suldna devour him. He was a’ lappered wi’ bluid, and when he seen me he ran on me, and his een were red and he slavered like a mad tyke, and his face was thrawed oot o’ the shape o’ man. Eh, sirs, puir Gibbie was near his end, for I couldna stir a foot, but afore he wan to me there cam’ anither sound, and as sure as death it was like a hound’s yawp. At that he gangs off like the wund, and the next I seen o’ him he was skelpin’ through the flowe moss, cryin’ like ane in torment, and I stottered hame to get Amos Ritchie to tak’ his flintlock and stop yon awfu’ skellochs. I’ll never sleep till I ken that the lost soul o’ him is free o’ the body.”
“Another has told my tale.” Mark spoke in a voice out of which all scorn had gone, a voice penetratingly quiet and solemn. “I, too, have seen him that once was Ephraim Caird, and I shudder at the swiftness of the judgment. There is no man or woman in Woodilee that does not ken that he was the leader of the coven that practised the devil’s arts in the Wood, but he had a name for godliness, and he had the measure of the blind fools that call themselves ministers of God. — Sit still, sir! I would be loth to draw on an unarmed man, but my sword ere this has punished vermin. . . . He has sworn falsely against the innocent, and yestreen at Kirk Aller he prevailed. But in the night the Lord sent forth His vengeance — ask me not how, for I do not know — and this day he is running demented on the hills, pursued by the dogs of his own terrors. Go and look for him. You will find him in a bog-hole or a pool in the burn. Bury his body decently, but bury it face downward, so that you speed him on his road.”
There was such a silence that the rasp of a stool on the earthen floor struck the hearers like a thunderclap. One voice — it was Amos Ritchie’s — came out of the back of the kirk.
“Where is the minister?” it asked.
“He is gone where you will never see him more,” said Mark. “A prophet came among you and you knew him not. For the sake of that witless thing that is now going four-foot among the braes you have condemned the innocent blood. He spent his strength for you and you rejected him, he yearned for you and you repelled him, he would have laid down his life for you and you scorned him. He is now beyond the reach of your ingratitude.”
“Unless he be dead,” said Mr. Proudfoot, “he is not beyond the reach of the law, and if he be dead he has fallen into the hands of a living and offended God.”
“Man, man,” said Mark gently, “you and your like have most lamentably confounded God and Devil.”
“And you yourself,” cried the Moderator, struggling valiantly to assert himself against an atmosphere which he felt inimical, “are within a span of the gallows.”
“We are all and at all times within a span of death. . . . To you, reverend sirs, I have no more to say. You will gang your own ways, and some day others will play the tyrant over you and give you your ain kail through
the reek. In that day of humiliation you will repent of what you did in your pride. . . . To those who have been partakers of the iniquity of the Wood I wish no less than the fate that has overtaken their master. . . . To the poor folk of Woodilee I leave their minister’s blessing, and may they have whiles a kindly thought of one that loved them.”
He turned at the door. “You will bide here till you are released. The ministers can while away the time excommunicatin’ me. Guid day to you a’.”
Amos Ritchie and Reiverslaw slipped out after him, and the key was turned in the lock. Amos wept bitterly, and Reiverslaw’s dark face was working with suppressed tears.
“You have to live on in this parish,” Mark said. “I need not involve you in my own peril. Let the bodies out in half an hour. No one saw you enter, so you will get no discredit by this day’s work. Say you found the key by the roadside.”
Amos turned on him with a distraught eye.
“Where is Mr. David? What have ye done with him? . . . We ken nocht o’ you — ye come and gang like bog-fire — there’s some says ye’re the Deil himsel’. If ye’ve wiled a saunt doun the road to Hell—”
“Be comforted,” said Mark, laying a hand on Amos’s arm. “I think I have helped to open for him the gates of Paradise.”
EPILOGUE
The Reverend John Dennistoun, in his once-famous work, Satan’s Artifices against the Elect (written in the year 1719, but not published till 1821, when the manuscript came into the hands of Sir Walter Scott), has a chapter on the disturbances in Woodilee. In his pages can be found the tradition which established itself during the next fifty years. He has heard of the doings in Melanudrigill, but he lays no blame for them on the parish. The power of the Kirk has been sufficient to sanctify Chasehope; in Mr. Dennistoun’s pages he appears as an elder of noted piety, who was the chief mark for the enmity of the Adversary, and who was, as that Adversary’s last resort, driven crazy by hellish assaults on his person till his life ended in a fall from the rocks in the Garple Linn. There is no mention of Reiverslaw, and Amos Ritchie is treated with respect, for Amos carried his grandfather’s matchlock to Rullion Green, played a notable part in the Killing Time, was an ally of the Black Macmichael, and has a paragraph to himself in Naphtali. Mr. Dennistoun represents the trouble as a deliberate campaign of the Devil against a parish famed for its godliness, and David as an unwitting instrument. The minister of Woodilee he portrays as a young man of good heart but of small experience, unstable, puffed up in his own conceit. He records that there was a faction in the place that took his side, and that his misfortunes, justly deserved as they were, were not unlamented. He mentions as a foolish fable the belief of some that he had been carried off by the Fairies; he notes, too, without approval, the counter-legend that he had been removed bodily by the Devil.
On one matter Mr. Dennistoun has no doubts. Mark Kerr is the villain of his pages: the lieutenant of Satan, or, as many believed, Satan himself; one at any rate who was sold irrevocably to evil. Of the real Mark Kerr’s antecedents he is aware, but he is inclined to the belief that the figure that appeared in Woodilee was not Montrose’s captain but another in his semblance. He makes a sinister tale of Mark’s doings — his uncanny power over the minds of the people, his necromancy in the case of the witch-pricker, his devilries during the pest (these are explained as mere purposeless cruelties), his crowning blasphemy in the kirk, when he outfaced two godly ministers and spoke words of which the very memory made honest folk tremble. He is inclined to attribute to him also the warlockries of the Wood. When he disappeared on that April day he returned to the place whence he had come.
On this point Mr. Dennistoun reflected faithfully the tradition in Woodilee. Old folks for generations, with sighs and a shaking of the head, would tell of the departure of him who had so sorely troubled the Elect. The tale no doubt grew in the telling, and the children would creep close to their mother’s knee, and the goodman would stir the peats into a glow, when grandfather with awe in his voice recounted the stages in that journey of the lost. . . . Sandy Nicoll saw him in the gloaming moving with leaps which were beyond a mortal’s power across Charlie’s Moss. Later, at the little lonely ale-house of Kilwauk, he was observed by a drover to cross the peat-road, and the drover — his name was Grieve — swore to his dying day that beside the traveller moved a coal-black shadow. There was a moon that night, and Robbie Hogg, herd in Glenwhappen, saw the fearful twosome — man and shadow, man and devil — flitting across the braes of Caerdrochit. At one in the morning a packman, late on the road, saw the figure on the Edinburgh highway, and, though he had been drinking and was therefore a doubtful witness, remembered that he could not be clear whether it was one man or two, and had been sobered by the portent. . . .
At this point, when all that remained was an awful imagining, it was the custom of a household where the tale was told to sing with dry throats the twenty-third Psalm.
Three hours after the fuddled packman was left rubbing his eyes, two men entered the back room of a little hostelry in Leith within a stone’s throw of the harbour. The dust of moorburn and the April roads was on them, and one of the two was limping and very weary.
The only occupant of the room was a man in a great seaman’s coat who was eating a hasty meal. He rose to his feet with an exclamation.
“Mark!” he cried. “In the name of God, man . . .”
“When does the sloop sail?”
“In the next hour with the tide.”
“The Lord be thanked! . . . You’ll have this gentleman and me as fellow-passengers, Patie . . .”
“Wheesht, man. They ken me in this place as Jens Gunnersen, a skipper out of Denmark. . . . I’m for Bergen.”
“Bergen be it. All roads are the same for us that lead forth of this waesome land. A bite and sup would be welcome, Patie, and two ship’s cloaks to cover our landward clothes. . . . I’m for the wars again, old friend, and I’ve gotten a braw recruit, but the tale can bide till we’re on shipboard.”
But three hours later the telling had not begun. Two men with wistful eyes leaned over the stern bulwarks, and watched the hills of Lothian dwindle in the bleak April dawn.
THE END
THE MAGIC WALKING-STICK
First published in the annual Sails of Gold in 1927, this is the only children’s book that Buchan wrote. Set during the First World War, the novel concerns Bill, a teenage boy, who buys a walking stick from a beggar, which is later revealed as a magical device, allowing him to visit many places and undergo exciting adventures.
The annual in which the novel first appeared
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. THE COMING OF THE STAFF.
CHAPTER II. THE ADVENTURE OF ALEMOOR.
CHAPTER III. THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLOMON ISLANDS.
CHAPTER IV. THE ADVENTURE OF GLENMORE.
CHAPTER V. THE ADVENTURE OF CATSBANE.
CHAPTER VI. “BEAUTY” AND “BANDS”
CHAPTER VII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE CHRISTMAS PARTY — I.
CHAPTER VIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE CHRISTMAS PARTY — II.
CHAPTER IX. THE ADVENTURE OF UNCLE BOB — I.
CHAPTER X. THE ADVENTURE OF UNCLE BOB — II
CHAPTER XI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE IVORY VALLEY — I.
CHAPTER XII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE IVORY VALLEY — II.
CHAPTER XIII. BILL HEARS OF PRINCE ANATOLE.
CHAPTER XIV. THE FIRST ADVENTURE OF MAMIZAN.
CHAPTER XV. THE ADVENTURE OF THE ROYAL LARDER.
CHAPTER XVI. THE SECOND ADVENTURE OF MAMIZAN.
CHAPTER XVII. THE KIDNAPPING OF THE KIDNAPPER.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE ADVENTURE OF GRACHOVO.
CHAPTER XIX. THE RESTORATION OF PRINCE ANATOLE.
CHAPTER XX. THE CROWNING ADVENTURE — I.
CHAPTER XXI. THE CROWNING ADVENTURE — II.
CHAPTER XXII. THE GOING OF THE STAFF.
The 1932 edition
TO CAROLA, MARGARET, AND JEREMY
“MAGIC,” gasped the dull of
mind.
When the harnessed earth and skies
Drew the nomads of their kind
To uncharted emperies —
Whispers round the globe were sped,
Construed was the planets’ song.
But the little boy playing in the orchard said.
Conning his tale in the orchard said,
“ I knew it all along.”
Power deduced from powerless dust.
Nurture from the infertile grave;
Much the years may hold in trust,
Space a thrall and Time a slave.
Hark the boasting of the wise:
‘‘First are we of those that know!”
But the little boy playing by the roadside cries,
Trundling his hoop by the roadside cries,
“I said it long ago.”
CHAPTER I. THE COMING OF THE STAFF.
WHEN Bill came back for long-leave that autumn half, he had before him a complicated programme of entertainment. Thomas, the keeper, whom he revered more than anyone else in the world, was to take him in the afternoon to try for a duck in the big marsh called Alemoor. In the evening Hallowe’en was to be celebrated in the nursery with his small brother Peter, and he was to be permitted to come down to dinner, and to sit up afterwards until ten o’clock. Next day, which was Sunday, would be devoted to wandering about with Peter, hearing from him all the appetising home news, and pouring into his greedy ears the gossip of the foreign world of school. On Monday morning, after a walk with the dogs, he was to motor to London, lunch with Aunt Alice, and then, after a noble tea, return to school in time for lock-up.
