by John Buchan
Dickson lost no time in fulfilling his mission.
“Those poor folk at Knockraw,” he said. “They’ve made an awful mess of it, but a man like you can see for yourself that they meant no harm. The Count’s a friend of Mr Barbon’s and a great sportsman, and it seems they haven’t any grouse in their own country — I’m not just sure what it is, but it’s somewhere near Austria — so they were determined to take a Scotch moor. The mistake was in bringing a lot of wild heathen servants, when they could have got plenty of decent folk here to do their business. The Count was lamenting on the telephone, thinking you’d set the police and the Procurator-fiscal on him or make a rumpus in the newspapers. But I knew you were not that kind of man, and I told him so.” Dickson beamed pleasantly on his companion.
But Tibbets scarcely appeared to be listening. “Oh, that business!” he said. “Of course, it was all a mistake, and I’ll never say another word about it.”
“That’s fine!” said Dickson heartily. “I knew you would take it like a sensible fellow. I needn’t tell you I’ve a great admiration for you journalists, and I daresay I often read you in the papers!”
“You read the Wire?” asked the startled Tibbets. Mr Craw was generally supposed to look at no papers but his own.
“Not regularly. But I often pick it up. I like a turn at the Wire. You’ve grand pictures, and a brisk way of putting things. I always say there’s not a livelier paper in this land than the Wire. It keeps a body from languor.”
A small note-book and a pencil had emerged from Tibbets’s pocket. Dickson observed them unperturbed. The man was a journalist and must be always taking notes.
“Your praise of the Wire will give enormous satisfaction,” said Tibbets, and there was almost a quaver in his voice. He neglected the cup of tea which had been poured out for him, and sat gazing at his companion as a hopeful legatee might gaze at a lawyer engaged in reading a will.
“You only arrived to-day, sir?” he asked.
“Just an hour ago. I’ve been in Carrick. A fine country, Carrick, none better, but the fishing in my water there is just about over. The Callowa here goes on for another fortnight. You’re not an angler, Mr Tibbets? A pity that, for I might have got Mr Barbon to arrange a day on the Callowa for you.”
Tibbets wrote. Mr Craw as a fisherman was a new conception, for he was commonly believed to be apathetic about field sports.
“Would you care to say anything about the Canonry election, sir?” he asked deferentially.
Dickson laughed and poured himself out a third cup of tea. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I know nothing about it. I’m a poor hand at politics. I suppose I’m what you call a Tory, but I often get very thrawn with the Tories. I don’t trust the Socialists, but whiles I think they’ve a good deal to say for themselves. The fact is, I’m just a plain Scotsman and a plain business man. I’m terrible fond of my native country, but in these days it’s no much a man like me can do for her. I’m as one born out of due season, Mr Tibbets. I would have been more use when the job was to hunt the English back over the Cheviots or fight the French. I like straight issues.”
“You believe in a business Government, sir?” Tibbets asked, for this was the Wire’s special slogan.
“I believe in the business spirit — giving plain answers to plain questions and finding what’s the right job to do and taking off your coat to it. We’re all smothered nowadays with fine talk. There’s hardly a man in public life with a proper edge to his mind. They keep blazing away about ideals and principles, when all they’re seeking is just to win seats at the next election, and meantime folk stand hoasting at the street-corners with no chance of a job. This country, Mr Tibbets, is suffering from nobility of language and ignobility of practice. There’s far too much damned uplift abroad, and far too little common sense. In the old days, when folk stuck closer to the Bible, there was the fear of hell-fire to remind them that faith without works was dead.”
Dickson said much more, for it was one of his favourite topics. He expanded on the modern lack of reverence for the things that mattered and the abject veneration for trash. He declared that the public mind had been over-lubricated, that discipline and logic were out of fashion, and that the prophets as a fraternity had taken to prophesying smooth things. He just checked himself in time, remembering where he was, for he almost instanced Mr Craw as a chief sinner.
Tibbets scribbled busily, gulped down his cup of now lukewarm tea, and rose to go. He had got an interview which was the chief professional triumph of his career. The Knockraw car was still at his disposal. He could be in Portaway in time to write out his story and send it by the mail which reached London at 4.30 a.m. and so catch the later editions of his paper. Meantime he would telephone to his chief and prepare him for the thunderbolt.
He bowed over Dickson’s hand. “I am honoured to have met you, sir. I can only hope that it is a privilege which may be repeated.”
Dickson sought out Dougal and Barbon in the smoking-room. “Yon’s a pleasant-spoken fellow,” he said. “I made it all right about Knockraw, and sent him away as crouse as a piper. We had a fine crack, and he wrote down what I said in a wee book. I suppose I’ve been interviewed, and that’s the first time in my life.”
A sudden suspicion awoke in Dougal’s eye.
“What kind of thing did you give him?” he asked.
Dickson sketched the main lines of his conversation, and Dougal’s questions became more peremptory till he had extracted all of Tibbets’s interrogatories and Dickson’s answers. Then he lay back in his chair and laughed.
“He left in a hurry, you say. No wonder. He has a story that will keep the Wire busy for a fortnight. . . . No, no, you’re not to blame. It’s my fault that I never guessed what might happen. Tibbets is a proud man to-night. He took you for Craw, and he’s got in his pocket the first interview that Craw ever gave to mortal man. . . . We’re in the soup this time, right enough, for you’ve made the body blaspheme every idol he worships.”
CHAPTER XII. PORTAWAY — THE GREEN TREE
The eight miles to Portaway were taken by the travellers at a leisurely pace, so that it was noon before they came in sight of the Canonry’s capital. There had been some frost in the night, and, when they started, rime had lain on the stiffened ruts of the road and the wayside grasses. Presently the sun burned it up, and the shorn meadows and berry-laden hedges drowsed under a sky like June. The way, after they had left the Knockraw moors, was mostly through lowlands — fat farms with full stackyards, and woods loud with the salutes of pheasants. Now and then at a high place they stopped to look back to the blue huddle of the great uplands.
“Castle Gay lies yonder.” Jaikie directed his companion’s eyes. “Yon’s the Castle Hill.”
Mr Craw viewed the prospect with interest. His home had hitherto been for him a place without environment, like a walled suburban paradise where a city man seeks his repose. He had enjoyed its park and gardens, but he had had no thought of their setting. Now he was realising that it was only a little piece of a vast and delectable countryside. He had come down from bleak hills into meadows, and by contrast the meadows seemed a blessed arcady. . . . His mind was filled with pleasant and fruitful thoughts. The essence of living lay in its contrasts. The garden redoubled its charm if it marched with heather; the wilderness could be a delight if it came as a relief from a world too fatted and supine. . . . Did not the secret of happiness lie in the true consciousness of environment? Castle Gay was nothing if the thought of it was confined to its park walls. The mind must cultivate a wide orbit, an exact orientation, for the relief from trouble lay in the realisation of that trouble’s narrow limits. Optimism, a manly optimism, depended only upon the radius of the encircling soul. He had a recollection of Browning: “Somewhere in the distance Heaven is blue above Mountains where sleep the unsunn’d tarns.” . . . On this theme he saw some eloquent articles ahead of him.
He was also feeling very well. Autumn scents had never come to his nostrils
with such aromatic sharpness. The gold and sulphur and russet of the woods had never seemed so marvellous a pageant. He understood that his walks had hitherto, for so many years, been taken with muffled senses — the consequence of hot rooms, too frequent meals, too heavy a sequence of little indoor duties. To-day he was feeling the joys of a discoverer. Or was it re-discovery? By the time they had come to the beginnings of Portaway he was growing hungry, and in the narrow street of the Eastgate, as it dropped to the Callowa bridge, they passed a baker’s shop. He stared at the window and sniffed the odour from the doorway with an acuteness of recollection which was almost painful. In the window was a heap of newly-baked biscuits, the kind called “butter biscuits,” which are still made in old-fashioned shops in old-fashioned Scots towns. He remembered them in his childhood — how he would flatten his nose of a Saturday against a baker’s window in Partankirk, when he had spent his weekly penny, and his soul hungered for these biscuits’ delicate crumbly richness. . . . He must find a way to return to this shop, and for auld lang syne taste a butter biscuit again.
Jaikie’s mind on that morning walk had been differently engaged. He was trying to find a clue through the fog of suspicions which the sight of Sigismund Allins had roused in him. Allins was a confidential secretary of Mr Craw. He was also a gambler, and a man who bragged of his power with the Craw Press. Allins was, therefore, in all likelihood a dweller in the vicinity of Queer Street. If he had money troubles — and what more likely? — he would try to use his purchase with Craw to help him through. But how? Jaikie had a notion that Mr Craw would not be very tolerant towards Allins’s kind of troubles.
Allins had gone off on holiday before the present crisis began, and was not expected back for another fortnight. He had obviously nothing to do with the persecution of Craw by the journalists — there was no profit for him that way. But what about the Evallonians? They had known enough of Craw’s ways and had had sufficient power to get his papers to print the announcement of his going abroad. Barbon had assumed that they had an efficient intelligence service. Was it not more likely that they had bought Allins? Why should Allins not be — for a consideration — on their side?
But in that case why had he returned prematurely from his holiday? The wise course, having got his fee, was to stay away till the Evallonians had done their business, in order that he might be free from any charge of complicity. But he had returned secretly by a roundabout road. He could have gone direct to Portaway, for the train which had deposited him at Gledmouth stopped also at that station. He wanted to be in the neighbourhood, unsuspected, to watch developments. It was a bold course and a dangerous. There must be some compelling motive behind it.
Jaikie questioned Mr Craw about Allins, and got vague answers, for his companion’s thoughts were on higher things. Allins had been recommended to him by some business friends; his people were well known in the city; he had been private secretary to Lord Wassell; he was a valuable man, because he went a great deal into society, unlike Barbon, and could always find out what people were talking about. He had been with him two years. Yes, most useful and diplomatic and an excellent linguist. He had often accompanied him abroad, where he seemed to know everybody. Did Barbon like him? Certainly. They were a happy family, with no jealousies, for each had his appointed business. Well off? Apparently. He had a substantial salary, but must spend a good deal beyond it. Undoubtedly he had private means. No, Allins had nothing to do with the management of the papers. He was not seriously interested in politics or literature. His study was mankind. Womenkind, too, perhaps. It was necessary for one like himself, who had heavy intellectual preoccupations, to provide himself with eyes and ears. “Allins is what you call a man of the world,” said Mr Craw. “Not the highest type of man, perhaps, but for me indispensable.”
“I don’t think he has gone to Castle Gay,” said Jaikie. “I’m certain he is in Portaway. It is very important that he should not see you.”
Mr Craw asked why.
“Because the game would be up if you were recognised in Portaway, and it would be too dangerous for you to be seen speaking to one of your own secretaries. As you are just now, it wouldn’t be easy for anyone to spot you — principally because no one is expecting you, and there isn’t the right atmosphere for recognition. But if you and Allins were seen together, that might give the clue.”
Mr Craw accepted the reasoning. “But I must have money — and clothes,” he added.
“I’m going to send a line to Dougal as soon as we get to Portaway.”
“And I must post the article I wrote last night.”
“There’s something else,” said Jaikie. “You’ll have to be in Portaway for at least twenty-four hours, and your rig won’t quite do. It’s all right except the jacket, which gives you away. We must get you a ready-made jacket to match Johnston’s breeks.”
So at a small draper’s, almost next door to the baker’s shop, a jacket of rough tweed was purchased — what is known to the trade as a “sports” line, suitable for the honest man who plays bowls or golf after his day’s work. Mr Craw was apparently stock-size for this class of jacket, for one was found which fitted him remarkably well. Also two soft collars were purchased for him. Jaikie looked with satisfaction on his handiwork. The raincoat and the hat were now battered by weather out of their former glossiness. Clad in well-worn grey trousers and a jacket of cheap tweed, Mr Craw was the image of the small tradesman on holiday. Having no reading to do, he had discarded his spectacles, and the sun and wind had given him a healthy colouring. Moreover, he had relapsed a little from his careful speech to the early idiom of Kilmaclavers. He would be a clever man, thought Jaikie, who could identify this homeliness with the awful dignity of him who had sat in Mrs Catterick’s best room.
The town of Portaway lies on both banks of the Callowa, which there leaves its mountain vale and begins its seven miles of winding through salty pastures to the Solway. The old town is mostly on the left shore; on the right has grown up a suburb of villas and gardens, with one flaring Hydropathic, and a large new Station Hotel, which is the resort of golfers and anglers. The capital of the Canonry is half country market town, half industrial centre, for in the hills to the south-east lie the famous quarries, which employ a large and transient population. Hence the political activities of the constituency centre in the place. The countryside is Tory or Liberal; among the quarrymen is a big Socialist majority, which its mislikers call Communist. As Jaikie and Mr Craw descended the Eastgate the posters of all three candidates flaunted in shop windows and on hoardings, and a scarlet rash on a building announced the Labour committee rooms.
In a back street stood the ancient hostelry of the Green Tree, once the fashionable county inn where in autumn the Canonry Club had its dinners, but now the resort only of farmers and the humbler bagman. Jaikie had often slept there on his tramps, and had struck up a friendship with Mrs Fairweather, its buxom proprietress. To his surprise he found that the election had not congested it, for the politicians preferred the more modern hotels across the bridge. He found rooms without trouble, in one of which was a writing-table, for the itch of composition was upon Mr Craw. They lunched satisfactorily in an empty coffee-room, and there at a corner table he proceeded to compose a letter. He wrote not to Dougal but to Alison. Dougal might be suspect, and unable to leave the Castle, while Alison was free as the winds. He asked for money and a parcel of Mr Craw’s clothing, but he asked especially for an interview at the Green Tree, fixing for it the hour of 11 a.m. the next day. There were various questions he desired to ask which could only be answered by someone familiar with the Castle ménage. It thrilled him to be writing to the girl. He began, “Dear Miss Westwater,” and then changed it to “Dear Miss Alison.” There had been something friendly and confidential about her eyes which justified the change. His handwriting was vile, and he regarded the address on the envelope with disfavour. It looked like “The Horrible Alison Westwater.” He tried to amend it, but only made it worse.
Mr Cr
aw proposed to remain indoors and write. This intention was so clear that Jaikie thought it unnecessary to bind him down with instructions. So, depositing the deeply offended Woolworth in his bedroom, Jaikie left the inn and posted his letter to Alison and arranged for the despatch of Mr Craw’s precious article by the afternoon train. Then he crossed the Callowa bridge to the new part of the town. He proposed to make a few private inquiries.
He thought it unlikely that Allins would be at the Station Hotel. It was too public a place, and he might be recognised. But he had stayed there once himself, and, according to his fashion, had been on good terms with the head-porter, so, to make assurance sure, he made it his first port of call. It was as he expected. There was no Sigismund Allins in the register, and no one remotely resembling him staying in the house. The most likely place was the Hydropathic, which had famous electric baths and was visited by an odd assortment of humanity. Thither Jaikie next directed his steps.
The entrance was imposing. He passed a garage full of cars, and the gigantic porch seemed to be crowded with guests drinking their after-luncheon coffee. He had a vision of a hall heaped with golf clubs and expensive baggage. The porter was a vast functionary in blue and gold, with a severe eye. Jaikie rather nervously entered the hall, conscious that his clothes were not in keeping with its grandeur, and asked a stately lady in the bureau if a Mr Allins was living in the house. The lady cast a casual eye at a large volume and told him “No.”
