by John Buchan
Red Davie, in his gentle earnest voice and his precise scholarly accents, was delivering a reasoned denunciation of civilised society. He was the chairman, but he was obviously not the principal speaker. Jaikie asked in a whisper of a man behind him who was expected, and was told Alec Stubber, a name to conjure with. “But his train’s late and he’ll no be here for twenty minutes. They’ll be gey sick o’ Antrobus or then.”
Jaikie looked down on the upturned faces. He saw Allins standing at the back of the hall near the door, with his eyes fixed on the platform and a half-smile on his face. Was that smile one of recognition or bewilderment? Happily Mr Craw was well hidden by the chairman. . . . He saw row upon row of faces, shaven and bearded, young and old, but mostly middle-aged. These were the Communists of the Canonry, and very respectable folk they looked. The Scottish Communist is a much misunderstood person. When he is a true Caledonian, and not a Pole or an Irishman, he is simply the lineal descendant of the old Radical. The Scottish Radical was a man who held a set of inviolable principles on which he was entirely unable to compromise. It did not matter what the principles were; the point was that they were like the laws of Sinai, which could not be added to or subtracted from. When the Liberal party began to compromise, he joined Labour; when Labour began to compromise, by a natural transition he became a Communist. Temperamentally he has not changed. He is simply the stuff which in the seventeenth century made the unyielding Covenanter, and in the eighteenth the inflexible Jacobite. He is honesty incarnate, but his mind lacks flexibility.
It was an audience which respected Red Davie, but could not make much of him, and Red Davie felt it himself. The crowd had come to hear Alec Stubber, and was growing a little restless. The chairman looked repeatedly at his watch, and his remarks became more and more staccato. . . . Allins had moved so that he now had a full view of Mr Craw, and his eyes never left him.
Then Jaikie had an inspiration. He whispered fiercely to his neighbour: “Allins is watching you. There’s only one way to put him off the scent. You’ve got to speak. . . . Denounce the Labour party, as you’ve often done in the papers. Point out that their principles lead logically to Communism. . . . And, for God’s sake, speak as broad as you can. You must. It’s the only way.”
Mr Craw would certainly have refused, but he was given no time. Jaikie plucked the chairman’s elbow. “My friend here,” he whispered, “could carry on for a little. He’d be glad of the chance. He’s from Aberdeen, and a great worker in the cause.”
Red Davie caught at the straw. “Before Comrade Stubber arrives,” he said, “and that must be in a very few minutes, you will have the privilege of hearing a few words from Comrade Carroll, who brings to us the fraternal greetings of our Aberdeen comrades. No man in recent years has worked more assiduously for the triumph of the proletariat in that unpromising quarter of Scotland. I call on Comrade Carroll.”
He turned round, beamed on Mr Craw, and sat down.
It was perhaps the most difficult moment of that great man’s life. Crisis had come upon him red-handed. He knew himself for one of the worst speakers in the world, and he — he who had always had a bodyguard to shield him from rough things — who was the most famous living defender of the status quo — was called upon to urge its abolition, to address as an anarchist a convention of anarchs. His heart fluttered like a bird, he had a dreadful void in the pit of his stomach, his legs seemed to be made of cotton-wool.
Yet Mr Craw got to his feet. Mr Craw opened his mouth and sounds came forth. The audience listened.
More — Mr Craw said the right things. His first sentences were confused and stuttering, and then he picked up some kind of argument. He had often in the View proved with unassailable logic that the principles of Socialism were only halfhearted Communism. He proved it now, but with a difference. For by some strange inspiration he remembered in what company he was, and, whereas in the View he had made it his complaint against Labour that it was on the logical road to an abyss called Communism, his charge now was that Labour had not the courage of its principles to advance the further stage to the Communist paradise. . . . It was not a good speech, for it was delivered in a strange abstracted voice, as if the speaker were drawing up thoughts from a very deep well. But it was not ill received. Indeed, some of its apophthegms were mildly applauded.
Moreover, it was delivered in the right accent. Jaikie’s injunction to “speak broad” was unconsciously followed. For Mr Craw had not lifted up his voice in public for more than thirty years, not since those student days at Edinburgh, when he had been destined for the ministry and had striven to acquire the arts of oratory. Some chord of memory awoke. He spoke broadly, because in public he had never spoken in any other way. Gone were the refinements of his later days, the clipped vowels, the slurred consonants. The voice which was speaking at Jaikie’s ear had the aboriginal plaint of the Kingdom of Fife.
Jaikie, amazed, relieved, delighted, watched Allins, and saw the smile fade from his face. This being who stammered a crude communism in the vernacular was not the man he had suspected. He shrugged his shoulders and jostled his way out of the hall.
As he left, another arrived. Jaikie saw a short square man in a bowler hat and a mackintosh enter and push his way up the middle passage.
An exclamation from the chairman, and the applause of the meeting, told him that the great Stubber had appeared at last. Mr Craw, in deference to a tug from Jaikie, sat down, attended by an ovation which was not meant for his efforts.
The two sat out that meeting to its end, and heard many remarkable things from Comrade Stubber, but Jaikie hurried Mr Craw away before he could be questioned as to the progress of Communism in Aberdeen. He raced him back to the Green Tree, and procured from Mrs Fairweather a tumbler of hot whisky and water, which he forced him to drink. Then he paid his tribute.
“Mr Craw,” he said, “you did one of the bravest things to-night that I ever heard of. It was our only chance, but there’s not one man in a million could have taken it. You’re a great man. I offer you my humble congratulations.”
Mr Craw blushed like a boy. “It was rather a dreadful experience,” he said, “but it seems to have cured my cold.”
CHAPTER XV. DISAPPEARANCE OF MR CRAW
Next morning Jaikie arose at six, and, having begged of an early-rising maid a piece of oatcake and two lumps of sugar (a confection to which he was partial), set out on foot for Knockraw. He proposed to make part of his route across country, for he had an idea that the roads in that vicinity, even thus early in the morning, might be under observation. Mr Craw descended at half-past eight to find a pencilled message from Jaikie saying that he would be absent till luncheon and begging him to keep indoors. Mr Craw scarcely regarded it. He had slept like a top, he ate a hearty breakfast, and all the time he kept talking to himself. For he was being keyed up to a great resolution.
A change had come over him in these last days, and he was slowly becoming conscious of its magnitude. At the Back House of the Garroch he had been perplexed and scared, and had felt himself the undeserving sport of Fortune. His one idea had been to hide himself from Fortune’s notice till such time as she changed her mind. His temper had been that of the peevish hare.
But the interview in the Wire had kindled his wrath — a new experience for one who for so long had been sheltered from small annoyances. And with that kindling had come unrest, a feeling that he himself must act, else all that he had built might crumble away. He felt a sinking of the foundations under him which made passivity mere folly. Even his personality seemed threatened. Till that accursed interview was disowned, the carefully constructed figure which he had hitherto presented to the world was distorted and awry. . . . And at the very moment when he had it in his power to magnify it! Never, he told himself, had his mind been more fruitful than during the recent days. That article in yesterday’s View was the best he had written for years.
Following upon this restlessness had come a sudden self-confidence. Last night he had attempted an
incredibly difficult thing and brought it off. He marvelled at his own courage. Jaikie (whom at the moment he heartily detested) had admitted that he had been very brave. . . . Not the only occasion, either. He had endured discomfort uncomplainingly — he had assisted to eject a great hulking bully from a public house. He realised that if anyone had prophesied the least of these doings a week ago he would have laughed incredulously. . . . There were unexpected deeps in him. He was a greater man than he had dreamt, and the time had come to show it. Fragments of Jaikie’s talk at the Back House of the Garroch returned to his mind as if they had been his own inspiration. “You can carry things with a high hand.” . . . “Sit down in your own house and be master there.” . . . “If they turn nasty, tell them to go to the devil.” That was precisely what he must do — send his various enemies with a stout heart to the devil.
He particularly wanted to send Allins there. Allins was the second thing that broke his temper. That a man whom he had petted and favoured and trusted should go back on him was more than he could endure. He now believed whole-heartedly in Jaikie’s suspicions. Mr Craw had a strong sense of decency, and Allins’s behaviour had outraged it to its core. He had an unregenerate longing to buffet his former secretary about the face.
His mind was made up. He would leave Portaway forthwith and hurl himself into the strife. . . . The day of panic was over and that of action had dawned. . . . But where exactly should he join the battle front? . . . Knockraw was out of the question. . . . Castle Gay? That was his ultimate destination, but should it be the first? Jaikie had said truly that Barbon and Dougal might have got things well in train, and, if so, it would be a pity to spoil their plans. Besides, Castle Gay would be the objective of his new enemies, that other brand of Evallonian at which Jaikie had hinted. Better to avoid Castle Gay till he had learned the exact lie of the land. . . . The place for him was the Mains. Mrs Brisbane-Brown, whom he had always respected, lived there; she knew all about his difficulties; so did her niece, who was one of Jaikie’s allies. The high-nosed gentility of the Mains seemed in itself a protection. He felt that none of the troubles of a vulgar modern world could penetrate its antique defences.
So with some dregs of timidity still in his heart, but on the whole with a brisk resolution, he left the inn. The wet south-west wind, now grown to half a gale, was blowing up the street. Mr Craw turned up the collar of his thin raincoat, and, having discarded long ago his malacca cane, bought a hazel stick for a shilling in a tobacconist’s shop. This purchase revealed the fact that the total wealth now borne in his purse was five shillings and threepence. He was not certain of his road, but he knew that if he kept up the right bank of the Callowa he would reach in time the village of Starr. So he crossed the bridge, and by way of villas and gas-works came into open country.
Knockraw is seven miles from Portaway as the crow flies, and after the first two miles Jaikie took the route of the crow. It led him by the skirts of great woods on to a high moorish ridge, which had one supreme advantage in that it commanded at a distance large tracts of the highway. But that highway was deserted, except for a solitary Ford van. Jaikie had reached the edge of the Knockraw policies, and the hour was a quarter to eight, before he saw what he expected.
This was a car drawn up in the shelter of a fir wood — an aged car with a disreputable hood, which no doubt belonged to some humble Portaway garage. What was it doing there so early in the morning? It stood in a narrow side-road in which there could be little traffic, but it stood also at a view-point. . . . Jaikie skirted the little park till he reached the slope of Knockraw Hill, and came down on the back of the house much as the luckless Tibbets had done on the previous Saturday night. He observed another strange thing. There was a wood-cutter’s road up the hill among the stumps of larches felled in the War, the kind of road where the ruts are deep and the middle green grass. It was not a place where a sane man would take a car except for urgent reasons. Yet Jaikie saw a car moving up that road, not a decayed shandrydan like the other, but a new and powerful car. It stopped at a point which commanded the front door and the main entrance to the house. It could watch unperceived, for it was not in view from below, it was far from any of the roads to the grouse moor, and there were no woodmen at work.
Jaikie made an inconspicuous entrance, dropping into the sunk area behind the kitchen, and entering by the back door. To an Evallonian footman, who in his morning garb looked like an Irish setter, he explained that he was there by appointment; and Jaspar, the butler, who came up at that moment apparently expected him. He was led up a stone stair, divested of a sopping waterproof, and ushered into the low-ceilinged, white-panelled dining-room.
In that raw morning hour it was a very cheerful place. Alison sat on the arm of a chair by the fire, with her wet riding-boots stretched out to the blaze. Opposite her stood a young man in knickerbockers, a tall young man, clean-shaven, with a small head, a large nose, and smooth fair hair. Prince Odalchini was making coffee at the table, and the Professor was studying a barograph. Casimir, who was attired remarkably in very loud tweeds and white gaiters, came forward to greet him.
Alison jumped to her feet. “This is Mr Galt, sir, that I told you about,” she informed the young man. Jaikie was presented to him, and made the kind of bow which he thought might be suitable for royalty. He shook hands with the others, and then his eyes strayed involuntarily to Alison. The fire had flushed her cheeks, and he had the dismal feeling that it would be starkly impossible for anything under the age of ninety to avoid falling in love with her.
They sat down to breakfast, Alison on Prince John’s right hand, while Jaikie sat between Casimir and the Professor. Jaikie was very hungry, and his anxieties did not prevent him making an excellent meal, which Casimir thoughtfully did not interrupt with questions. One only he asked: “I understand that Mr Craw is with you? You have just left him?”
Jaikie was a little startled. Alison must have given this fact away. A moment’s reflection assured him that it did not matter. With the Knockraw party the time had come to put all their cards on the table.
“I left him in bed,” he said. “He had a difficult time last night. We fell in with Allins, and he thought he recognised Mr Craw. We took refuge in a Communist meeting, and Allins followed us. I knew the chairman, and there was nothing for it but to get him to ask Mr Craw to speak. And speak he did. You never heard anything like it. He belted the Labour party for not being logical and taking the next step to Communism, and he did it in the accents of a Fife baillie. That was enough to make Allins realise that he was on the wrong scent.”
“How splendid!” Alison cried. “I never thought . . .”
“No more did he. His nearest friends wouldn’t recognise him now. He scarcely recognises himself.”
Jaikie spoke only once again during the meal.
“Do you know that this place is watched, sir?” he asked Casimir.
“Watched?” three voices exclaimed as one.
“I came on foot across country,” said Jaikie, “for I expected something of the kind. There’s an old Portaway car in the by-road at the southwest corner of the park, and there’s a brand-new car on the wood-road up on the hill. Good stands both, for you’d never notice them, and if you asked questions they’d be ready with a plausible answer. We’re up against some cleverish people. Has Miss Westwater told you anything?”
“Only that Mr Sigismund Allins is a rascal,” said Casimir. “And that is grave news, for he knows too much.”
Jaikie looked at the four men, the kindly fanatical eyes of Prince Odalchini, the Professor’s heavy honesty, Casimir’s alert, clever face, Prince John’s youthful elegance, and decided that these at any rate were honest people. Foolish, perhaps, but high-minded. He was a good judge of the other thing, having in his short life met much of it.
The table was pushed back, the company made a circle round the fire, and Jaikie was given a cigarette out of Prince John’s case. The others preferred cigars.
“We are ready to listen
, Mr Galt,” said Casimir.
Jaikie began with a question. “It was Allins who arranged your visit here?”
Casimir nodded. “He has been in touch with us for some time. We regarded him as Mr Craw’s plenipotentiary. He assured us that very little was needed to secure Mr Craw’s active support.”
“You paid him for his help?”
“We did not call it payment. There was a gift — no great amount — simply to cover expenses and atone for a relinquished holiday.”
“Well, the first thing I have to tell you is that somebody else has paid him more — to put a spoke in your wheel.”
“The present Government in Evallonia!”
“I suppose so. I will tell you all I know, and you can draw your own conclusions.”
Jaikie related the facts of which we are already aware, beginning with his first sight of Allins in the car from Gledmouth on the Sunday evening. When he came to the party of foreigners at the Hydropathic he could only describe them according to the account of the head-porter, for he had not yet seen them. But, such as it was, his description roused the liveliest interest in his audience.
“A tall man with a red, pointed beard!” Casimir cried. “That can only be Dedekind.”
“Or Jovian?” Prince Odalchini interjected.
“No. I know for certain that Jovian is sick and has gone to Marienbad. It must be Dedekind. They have used him before for their dirty work. . . . And the other — the squat one — that is beyond doubt the Jew Rosenbaum. I thought he was in America. The round-faced, spectacled man I do not know — he might be any one of a dozen. But the youngish man like a horse-breaker — he is assuredly Ricci. Your Royal Highness will remember him — he married the rich American wife. The fifth I take to be one of Calaman’s sons. I heard that one was well thought of in the secret service.”
