by John Buchan
So his sensitiveness became a disease, and he guarded his seclusion with a vestal jealousy. He had accumulated a personal staff of highly paid watch-dogs, whose business was not only the direction of the gigantic Craw Press but the guardianship of the shrine consecrated to its master. There was his principal secretary, Freddy Barbon, the son of a bankrupt Irish peer, who combined the duties of grand vizier and major-domo. There was his general manager, Archibald Bamff, who had been with him since the early days of the Centre-Forward. There was Sigismund Allins, an elegant young man who went much into society and acted, unknown to the world, as his chief’s main intelligence-officer. There was Bannister, half valet, half butler, and Miss Elena Cazenove, a spinster of forty-five and the most efficient of stenographers. With the exception of Bamff, this entourage attended his steps — but never together, lest people should talk. Like the police in a Royal procession, they preceded or followed his actual movements and made straight the path for him. Among them he ruled as a mild tyrant, arbitrary but not unkindly. If the world of men had to be kept at a distance lest it should upset his poise and wound his vanity, he had created a little world which could be, so to speak, his own personality writ large.
It is the foible of a Scot that he can never cut the bonds which bind him to his own country. Thomas had happy recollections of his childhood on the bleak shores of Fife, and a large stock of national piety. He knew in his inmost heart that he would rather win the approval of Kilmaclavers and Partankirk than the plaudits of Europe. This affection had taken practical form. He had decided that his principal hermitage must be north of the Tweed. Fife and the East coast were too much of a home country for his purpose, the Highlands were too remote from London, so he settled upon the south-west corner, the district known as the Canonry, as at once secluded and accessible. He had no wish to cumber himself with land, for Thomas desired material possessions as little as he desired titles; so he leased from Lord Rhynns (whose wife’s health and declining fortune compelled him to spend most of the year abroad) the ancient demesne of Castle Gay. The place, it will be remembered, lies in the loveliest part of the glen of the Callowa, in the parish of Knockraw, adjoining the village of Starr, and some five miles from the town of Portaway, which is on the main line to London. A high wall surrounds a wild park of a thousand acres, in the heart of which stands a grey stone castle, for whose keep Bruces and Comyns and Macdowalls contended seven centuries ago. In its cincture of blue mountains it has the air of a place at once fortified and forgotten, and here Thomas found that secure retirement so needful for one who had taken upon himself the direction of the major problems of the globe. The road up the glen led nowhere, the fishing was his own and no tourist disturbed the shining reaches of the Callowa, the hamlet of Starr had less than fifty inhabitants, and the folk of the Canonry are not the type to pry into the affairs of eminence in retreat. To the countryside he was only the Castle tenant—”yin Craw, a newspaper body frae England.” They did not read his weekly pronouncements, preferring older and stronger fare.
But at the date of this tale a thorn had fixed itself in Thomas’s pillow. Politics had broken in upon his moorland peace. There was a by-election in the Canonry, an important by-election, for it was regarded as a test of the popularity of the Government’s new agricultural policy. The Canonry in its seaward fringe is highly farmed, and its uplands are famous pasture; its people, traditionally Liberal, have always been looked upon as possessing the toughest core of northern common sense. How would such a region regard a scheme which was a violent departure from the historic attitude of Britain towards the British farmer? The matter was hotly canvassed, and, since a General Election was not far distant, this contest became the cynosure of political eyes. Every paper sent a special correspondent, and the candidates found their halting utterances lavishly reported. The Canonry woke up one morning to find itself “news.”
Thomas did not like it. He resented this publicity at his doorstep. His own press was instructed to deal with the subject in obscure paragraphs, but he could not control his rivals. He was in terror lest he should be somehow brought into the limelight — a bogus interview, perhaps — such things had happened — there were endless chances of impairing his carefully constructed dignity. He decided that it would be wiser if he left the place till after the declaration of the poll. The necessity gave him acute annoyance, for he loved the soft bright October weather at Castle Gay better than any other season of the year. The thought of his suite at Aix — taken in the name of Mr Frederick Barbon — offered him no consolation.
But first he must visit Glasgow to arrange with his builders for some reforms in the water supply, which, with the assent of Lord Rhynns, he proposed to have installed in his absence. Therefore, on the evening of the Kangaroo match already described, his discreet and potent figure might have been seen on the platform of Kirkmichael as he returned from the western metropolis. It was his habit to be met there by a car, so as to avoid the tedium of changing trains and the publicity of Portaway station.
Now, as it chanced, there was another election in process. The students of the western capital were engaged in choosing their Lord Rector. On this occasion there was a straight contest; no freak candidates, nationalist, sectarian, or intellectual, obscured the issue. The Conservative nominee was a prominent member of the Cabinet, the Liberal the leader of the Old Guard of that faith. Enthusiasm waxed high, and violence was not absent — the violence without bitterness which is the happy mark of Scottish rectorial contests. Already there had been many fantastic doings. The Conservative headquarters were decorated by night with Liberal red paint, prints which set the law of libel at nought were sold in the streets, songs of a surprising ribaldry were composed to the discredit of the opposing candidates. No undergraduate protagonist had a single physical, mental, or moral oddity which went unadvertised. One distinguished triumph the Liberals had won. A lanky Conservative leader had been kidnapped, dressed in a child’s shorts, blouse, socks, and beribboned sailor hat, and attached by padlocked chains to the college railings, where, like a culprit in the stocks, for a solid hour he had made sport for the populace. Such an indignity could not go unavenged, and the Conservatives were out for blood.
The foremost of the Liberal leaders was a man, older than the majority of students, who, having forsaken the law, was now pursuing a belated medical course. It is sufficient to say that his name was Linklater, for he does not come into this story. The important thing about him for us is his appearance. He looked older than his thirty-two years, and was of a comfortable figure, almost wholly bald, with a round face, tightly compressed lips, high cheek-bones and large tortoise-shell spectacles. It was his habit to wear a soft black hat of the kind which is fashionable among statesmen, anarchists, and young careerists. In all these respects he was the image of Thomas Carlyle Craw. His parental abode was Kirkmichael, where his father was a Baptist minister.
On the evening in question Thomas strode to the door of the Kirkmichael booking-office, and to his surprise found that his car was not there. It was a drizzling evening, the same weather which that day had graced the Kangaroo match. The weather had been fine when he left Castle Gay in the morning, but he had brought a light raincoat with which he now invested his comfortable person. There were no porters about, and in the dingy station yard there was no vehicle except an antique Ford.
His eye was on the entrance to the yard, where he expected to see any moment the headlights of his car in the wet dusk, when he suddenly found his arms seized. At the same moment a scarf was thrown over his head which stopped all utterance. . . . About what happened next he was never quite clear, but he felt himself swung by strong arms into the ancient Ford. Through the folds of the scarf he heard its protesting start. He tried to scream, he tried to struggle, but voice and movement were forbidden him. . . .
He became a prey to the most devastating fear. Who were his assailants? Bolshevists, anarchists, Evallonian Republicans, the minions of a rival press? Or was it the American group
which had offered him two days ago by cable ten millions for his properties? . . . Whither was he bound? A motor launch on the coast, some den in a city slum? . . .
After an hour’s self-torture he found the scarf switched from his head. He was in a car with five large young men in waterproofs, each with a muffler covering the lower part of his face. The rain had ceased, and they seemed to be climbing high up on to the starlit moors. He had a whiff of wet bracken and heather.
He found his voice, and with what resolution he could muster he demanded to know the reason of the outrage and the goal of his journey.
“It’s all right, Linklater,” said one of them. “You’ll know soon enough.”
They called him Linklater! The whole thing was a blunder. His incognito was preserved. The habit of a lifetime held, and he protested no more.
CHAPTER III. THE BACK HOUSE OF THE GARROCH
The road to the springs of the Garroch water, a stream which never descends to the lowlands but runs its whole course in the heart of mossy hills, is for the motorist a matter of wide and devious circuits. It approaches its goal circumspectly, with an air of cautious reconnaissance. But the foot-traveller has an easier access. He can take the cart-road which runs through the heather of the Clachlands glen and across the intervening hills by the Nick of the Threshes. Beyond that he will look into the amphitheatre of the Garroch, with the loch of that name dark under the shadow of the Caldron, and the stream twining in silver links through the moss, and the white ribbon of highway, on which wheeled vehicles may move, ending in the yard of a moorland cottage.
The Blaweary car had carried Jaikie and Dougal swiftly over the first fifteen miles of their journey. At about three o’clock of the October afternoon they had reached the last green cup where the Clachlands has its source, and were leisurely climbing the hill towards the Nick. Both had ancient knapsacks on their shoulders, but it was their only point of resemblance. Dougal was clad in a new suit of rough tweed knickerbockers which did not fit him well; he had become very hot and carried his jacket on his arm, and he had no hat. Jaikie was in old flannels, for he abominated heavy raiment, and, being always more or less in training, his slender figure looked pleasantly cool and trim. Sometimes they sauntered, sometimes they strode, and now and then they halted, when Dougal had something to say. For Dougal was in the first stage of holiday, when to his closest friend he had to unburden himself of six months’ store of conversation. It was as inevitable as the heat and discomfort which must attend the first day’s walk, before his body rid itself of its sedentary heaviness. Jaikie spoke little; his fate in life was to be a listener.
It is unfair to eavesdrop on the babble of youth when its flow has been long pent up. Dougal’s ran like Ariel over land and sea, with excursions into the upper air. He had recovered his only confidant, and did not mean to spare him. Sometimes he touched upon his daily task — its languors and difficulties, the harassments of the trivial, the profound stupidity of the middle-aged. He defended hotly his politics, and drew so many fine distinctions between his creed and those of all other men, that it appeared that his party was in the loyal, compact, and portable form of his single self. Then ensued torrential confessions of faith and audacious ambition. He was not splashing — he was swimming with a clean stroke to a clear goal. With his pen and voice he was making his power felt, and in time the world would listen to him. His message? There followed a statement of ideals which was nobly eclectic. Dougal was at once nationalist and internationalist, humanitarian and man of iron, realist and poet.
They were now in the Nick of the Threshes, where, in a pad of green lawn between two heathery steeps, a well bubbled among mosses. The thirsty idealist flung himself on the ground and drank deep. He rose with his forelock dripping.
“I sometimes think you are slipping away from me, Jaikie,” he said. “You’ve changed a lot in the last two years. . . . You live in a different kind of world from me, and every year you’re getting less and less of a Scotsman. . . . And I’ve a notion, when I pour out my news to you and haver about myself, that you’re criticising me all the time in your own mind. Am I not right? You’re terribly polite, and you never say much, but I can feel you’re laughing at me. Kindly, maybe, but laughing all the same. You’re saying to yourself, ‘Dougal gets dafter every day. He’s no better than a savage.’”
Jaikie regarded the flushed and bedewed countenance of his friend, and the smile that broadened over his small face was not critical.
“I often think you daft, Dougal. But then I like daftness.”
“Anyway, you’ve none of it yourself. You’re the wisest man I ever met. That’s where you and I differ. I’m always burning or freezing, and you keep a nice, average, normal temperature. I take desperate likes and dislikes. You’ve something good to say about the worst scallywag, and, if you haven’t, you hold your tongue. I’m all for flinging my cap over the moon, while you keep yours snug on your head. No. No” — he quelled an anticipated protest. “It’s the same in your football. It was like that yesterday afternoon. You never run your head against a stone wall. You wait till you see your chance, and then you’re on to it like forked lightning, but you’re determined not to waste one atom of your strength.”
“That’s surely Scotch enough,” said Jaikie laughing. “I’m economical.”
“No, it’s not Scotch. We’re not an economical race. I don’t know what half-wit invented that libel. We spend ourselves — we’ve always spent ourselves — on unprofitable causes. What’s the phrase — perfervidum ingenium? There’s not much of the perfervid about you, Jaikie.”
“No?” said the other, politely interrogatory.
“No. You’ve all the pluck in creation, but it’s the considering kind. You remember how Alan Breck defined his own courage—’Just great penetration and knowledge of affairs.’ That’s yours. . . . Not that you haven’t got the other kind too. David Balfour’s kind—’auld, cauld, dour, deidly courage.’”
“I’ve no courage,” said Jaikie. “I’m nearly always in a funk.”
“Aye, that’s how you would put it. You’ve picked up the English trick of understatement — what they call meiosis in the grammar books. I doubt you and me are very unlike. You’ll not catch me understating. I want to shout both my vices and my virtues on the house-tops. . . . If I dislike a man I want to hit him on the head, while you’d be wondering if the fault wasn’t in yourself. . . . If I want a thing changed I must drive at it like a young bull. If I think there’s dirty work going on I’m for starting a revolution. . . . You don’t seem to care very much about anything, and you’re too fond of playing the devil’s advocate. There was a time . . .”
“I don’t think I’ve changed,” said Jaikie. “I’m a slow fellow, and I’m so desperately interested in things that I feel my way cautiously. You see, I like so much that I haven’t a great deal of time for hating. I’m not a crusader like you, Dougal.”
“I’m a poor sort of crusader,” said Dougal ruefully. “I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away. But still I’ve a good hearty stock of dislikes and they keep me from boredom. That’s the difference between us. I’m for breaking a man’s head, and I probably end by shaking hands. You begin by shaking hands. . . . All the same, God help the man or woman or creed or party that you make up your slow mind to dislike. . . . I’m going to make a stir in the world, but I know that I’ll never be formidable. I’m not so sure about you.”
“I don’t want to be formidable.”
“And that’s maybe just the reason why you will be — some day. But I’m serious, Jaikie. It’s a sad business if two ancient friends like you and me are starting to walk on different sides of the road. Our tracks are beginning to diverge, and, though we’re still side by side, in ten years we may be miles apart. . . . You’re not the good Scotsman you used to be. Here am I driving myself mad with the sight of my native land running down the brae — the cities filling up with Irish, the countr
yside losing its folk, our law and our letters and our language as decrepit as an old wife. Damn it, man, in another half-century there will be nothing left, and we’ll be a mere disconsidered province of England. . . . But you never bother your head about it. Indeed, I think you’ve gone over to the English. What was it I heard you saying to Mr McCunn last night? — that the English had the most political genius of any people because they had the most humour?”
“Well, it’s true,” Jaikie answered. “But every day I spend out of Scotland I like it better. When I’ve nothing else to do I run over in my mind the places I love best — mostly in the Canonry — and when I get a sniff of wood smoke it makes me sick with longing for peat-reek. Do you think I could forget that?”
Jaikie pointed to the scene which was now spread before them, for they had emerged from the Nick of the Threshes and were beginning the long descent to the Garroch. The October afternoon was warm and windless, and not a wisp of cloud broke the level blue of the sky. Such weather in July would have meant that the distances were dim, but on this autumn day, which had begun with frost, there was a crystalline sharpness of outline in the remotest hills. The mountains huddled around the amphitheatre, the round bald forehead of the Yirnie, the twin peaks of the Caldron which hid a tarn in their corrie, the steel-grey fortress of the Calmarton, the vast menacing bulk of the Muneraw. On the far horizon the blue of the sky seemed to fade into white, and a hill shoulder which rose in one of the gaps had an air of infinite distance. The bog in the valley was a mosaic of colours like an Eastern carpet, and the Garroch water twined through it like some fantastic pictured stream in a missal. A glimpse could be had of Loch Garroch, dark as ink in the shadow of the Caldron. There were many sounds, the tinkle of falling burns far below, a faint calling of sheep, an occasional note of a bird. Yet the place had an overmastering silence, a quiet distilled of the blue heavens and the primeval desert. In that loneliness lay the tale of ages since the world’s birth, the song of life and death as uttered by wild living things since the rocks first had form.
