by John Buchan
It was the sign which he had awaited, and a solemn gladness filled his heart. He had not been wrong in his hope, and his purpose was now certain of fulfilment. Creevey saw that his face was smiling, and wondered.
“You must go on alone for a bit.” Adam’s arm pulled him to a standstill. “We are almost over the bad patch. After this the road is easy. The snow has stopped, and you will see where the track runs. Soon you will be among the trees.”
“What do you mean? . . . Are you going to stay and fight? . . . I’ll be damned if I leave you.” Creevey was nearly at the end of his tether, but the weakness of his body was not reflected in his angry eyes.
“There will be no fighting. But I see a chance of blocking the road. On with you, for it is our only hope — a certain hope.”
There was that in Adam’s voice which could not be gainsaid.
“You will follow me? Promise that, or I won’t stir. I must have you with me — always. . . .”
“I will follow you. I will be with you always.” Creevey heard the words, but he did not see the look on the other’s face.
Adam circumvented the boulder and reached a point on the cliff above it, where its shallow roots clung to the mountain. His vantage ground gave him a view of Creevey stumbling downward towards the easier slopes where the first pines began. Very small he looked as his figure grew dim in the brume.
Then Adam put forth his strength. He found a stance where, with his feet against living rock, he thought he could prise the boulder from its hold. . . . It quivered and moved, but at first it seemed as if it were too deep-rooted to fall. Desperation gave him the little extra force which was needed, and suddenly the foreground heaved, slipped, and with a sickening hollow sigh dropped into nothingness. Thunder awoke in the narrow glen, and the solid flank of the mountain seemed to shudder. The air was thick with dust and snow, and Adam, perched above the abyss, was for a moment blinded. Presently it cleared, and he saw that the side of the ravine had been planed smooth, smooth as the glassy rock-wall of the torrent. Only a bird could reach the Val Saluzzana. . . .
Creevey was safe. He would be alarmed at the earthquake, and might totter back to look for his friend, but sooner or later he would reach the valley. It did not matter how long he took, for he was now beyond the reach of his enemies. . . . Presently he would be restored to a world which had sore need of him. Loeffler would have a potent ally. The rock-fall was a curtain which cut him off from his foes and inaugurated a new epoch in his life. He would be the same man, hungry, masterful, audacious, infinitely resourceful, still striding with long quick steps, but his face would be turned to another goal. The gods did not stop half-way when they wrought miracles.
Adam looked into the chasm which was filled with a fine dust like spindrift. That way lay the long road he had travelled since boyhood. Did his eyes deceive him, or was there some brightening of the mist, as if somewhere behind it there were the fires of sunset? Pleasant things were there — all his youth with its hopes, and all the tense striving of the last years — the grim things forgotten and only the sunshine hours remaining. His friends, too, and Jacqueline above all. He felt a warm uprush of affection, but it was an affection without longing or regret. He had seen life and beauty and honour, and these things did not die; they would endure to warm the world he was leaving.
He turned his face up the ravine whence he had come, and there the air had the bitter clearness of an interval between snow-showers. His range of vision was small, but every detail stood out hard and bleak. It was like the world he had seen from the Greenland ice-cap, a world barren of life, the ante-chamber of death. It was motionless as the grave, for the wind had fallen. But there was movement in his ears. He could hear the rasp of nailed boots on stone, and what sounded like human speech. The pack was closing in on him.
* * * * *
Then suddenly he saw beyond it. His eyes were no longer looking at clammy rock and lowering clouds, or the icy shoulder of the Pomagognon lifting through a gap of cliff. . . . They were on blue water running out to where the afternoon sun made a great dazzle of gold. He knew that he had found the sea which had eluded him in all his dreams. He was in a bay of white sand, and in front, crested with light foam, were the skerries where the grey seals lived. The scents of thyme and heather and salt were blent in a divine elemental freshness. Nigel had come back to him — he saw him skipping by the edge of the tide — he saw him running towards him — he felt his hand in his — he looked into eyes bright with trust and love. From those eyes he seemed to draw youth and peace and immortality.
* * * * *
A voice which was not Nigel’s broke into his dream, but it did not mar his peace. There only remained the trivial business of dying.
THE END
THE FREE FISHERS
This 1934 adventure novel is a stirring tale of treason and romance, set in the bleak Yorkshire hamlet of Hungrygrain during the Napoleonic Wars. The novel concerns Anthony Lammas, minister of the Kirk and Professor of Logic at St Andrews University, who leaves his home town for London on business and within two days he finds himself deeply entangled in a web of mystery and intrigue. Lammas is no ordinary professor, having had a boyhood allegiance to a brotherhood of deep-sea fishermen, which will connect the professor with his dashing ex-pupil, Lord Belses, and a beautiful, yet dangerous woman.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. In Which a Young Man is Afraid of His Youth
CHAPTER II. In Which Lord Mannour Discourses
CHAPTER III. Tells of a Night Journey
CHAPTER IV. In which a Young Lover is Slighted
CHAPTER V. King’s Business
CHAPTER VI. In Which a Town-Clerk is Ill received
CHAPTER VII. In Which a Baronet is Discomposed
CHAPTER VIII. In Which the Hunter Meets the Hunted
CHAPTER IX. Tells of a Dark Wood and a Dark Lady
CHAPTER X. Tells of Sunshine and the High Bent
CHAPTER XI. Tells of Arrivals and Departures
CHAPTER XII. Tells How a Chase Began
CHAPTER XIII. Of Sundry Doings on the South Road
CHAPTER XIV. Tells of a Veiled Champion
CHAPTER XV. How a Philosopher Laid Aside His Philosophy
CHAPTER XVI. Tells of a Sceptic’s Conversion
CHAPTER XVII. Tells of a Green Lamp and a Cobwebbed Room
CHAPTER XVIII. How Sundry Gentlemen Put Their Trust in Horses
CHAPTER XIX. Of the Meeting of Lovers and the Home-going of Youth
TO
JOHN KEY HUTCHISON
IN MEMORY OF OUR BOYHOOD ON THE COAST OF FIFE
CHAPTER I. In Which a Young Man is Afraid of His Youth
Mr Anthony Lammas, whose long legs had been covering ground at the rate of five miles an hour, slackened his pace, for he felt the need of ordering a mind which for some hours had been dancing widdershins. For one thing the night had darkened, since the moon had set, and the coast track which he followed craved wary walking. But it was the clear dark of a northern April, when, though the details are blurred, the large masses of the landscape are apprehended. He was still aware of little headlands descending to a shadowy gulf which was the Firth. Far out the brazier on the May was burning with a steady glow, like some low-swung planet shaming with its ardour the cold stars. He sniffed the sharp clean scent of the whins above the salt; he could almost detect the brightness of their flowering. They should have been thyme, he thought, thyme and arbutus and tamarisk clothing the capes of the Sicilian sea, for this was a night of Theocritus. . . .
Theocritus! What had he to do with Theocritus? It was highly necessary to come to terms with this mood into which he had fallen.
For Mr Lammas, a licensed minister of the Kirk and a professor in the University of St Andrews, had just come from keeping strange company. Three years ago, through the good offices of his patron and friend, Lord Snowdoun, he had been appointed to the Chair of Logic and Rhetoric, with emoluments which, with diet money
and kain-hens, reached the sum of £309 a year, a fortune for a provident bachelor. His father, merchant and boat-builder in the town of Dysart, had left him also a small patrimony, so that he was in no way cumbered with material cares. His boyhood had been crowded with vagrant ambitions. At the burgh school he had hankered after the sea; later, the guns in France had drawn him to a soldier’s life, and he had got as far as Burntisland before a scandalised parent reclaimed him. Then scholarship had laid its spell on him. He had stridden to the top of his Arts classes in St Andrews, and at Edinburgh had been well thought of as a theologian. His purpose then was the lettered life, and he had hopes of the college living of Tweedsmuir, far off in the southern moorlands, where he might cultivate the Muses and win some such repute as that of Mr Beattie at Aberdeen.
But Lord Snowdoun had shown him the way to better things, for to be a professor at twenty-five was to have a vantage-ground for loftier ascents. In the Logic part of his duties he had little interest, contenting himself with an exposition of Mr Reid’s Inquiry and some perfunctory lectures on Descartes, but in the Rhetoric classes, which began after Candlemas, his soul expanded, and he had made himself a name for eloquence. Also he had discovered an aptitude for affairs, and was already entrusted with the heavy end of college business. A year ago he had been appointed Questor, a post which carried the management of the small academic revenues. He stood well with his colleagues, well with the students, and behind him was Lord Snowdoun, that potent manager of Scotland. Some day he would be Principal, when he would rival the fame of old Tullidelph, and meantime as a writer he would win repute far beyond the narrow shores of Fife. Had he not in his bureau a manuscript treatise on the relations of art and morals which, when he re-read it, astounded him by its acumen and wit, and a manuscript poem on the doings of Cardinal Beatoun which he could not honestly deem inferior to the belauded verse of Mr Walter Scott!
So far the path of ambition, in which for a man of twenty-eight he had made notable progress. Neat in person, a little precise in manner, his mouth primmed to a becoming gravity, his hair brushed back from his forehead to reveal a lofty brow, Mr Lammas was the very pattern of a dignitary in the making. . . . And yet an hour ago he had been drinking toddy with shaggy seafarers, and joining lustily in the chorus of “Cocky Bendy,” and the tune to which his long legs had been marching was “Dunbarton’s Drums.” He was still whistling it:
“Dunbarton’s drums are bonnie O —
I’ll leave a’ my friends and my daddie O —
I’ll bide nae mair at hame, but I’ll follow wi’ the drum,
And whenever it beats I’ll be ready O.”
This was a pretty business for a minister of the Kirk, the Questor of St Andrews, and a professor of divine philosophy.
There was a long story behind it. As a boy his playground had been the little rock-girt port of Dysart, and as the son of honest David Lammas, who could build a smack with any man between Berwick and Aberdeen, he had been made free of the harbour life. His intimates had been men who took their herring busses far north into the cold Shetland seas, whalers who sailed yearly for the Färoes and Iceland and still stranger waters, skippers of Dutch luggers and Norway brigs who leavened their lawful merchantry with commodities not approved by law. He learned their speech and the tricks of their calling, and listened greedily to their tales through many a summer twilight. Sometimes he went to the fishing himself in the shore-cobles, but his dream was to sail beyond the May to the isles of the basking sharks and the pilot-whales and the cliffs snowy with sea-fowl. Only the awe of his father kept him from embarking one fine morning in a Middleburg lugger with tulips in its cabin, and a caged singing-bird whose pipe to his ear was the trumpet of all romance.
There was a brotherhood among the sea-folk as close and secret as a masonic order. Its name was the Free Fishers of Forth, but its name was not often spoken. To be a member was to have behind one, so long as one obeyed its rules, a posse of stalwart allies. It had been founded long ago — no man knew when, though there were many legends. Often it had fallen foul of the law, as in the Jacobite troubles, when it had ferried more than one much-sought gentlemen between France and Scotland. Its ostensible purpose was the protection of fisher rights, and a kind of co-operative insurance against the perils of the sea, but these rights were generously interpreted, and there had been times when free-trade was its main concern, and the east-coast gaugers led a weary life. But the war with France had drawn it to greater things. Now and then the ship of a Free Fisher may have conveyed an escaping French prisoner to his own country, but it is certain that they brought home many a British refugee who had struggled down to the Breton shore. Also the fraternity did famous secret services. They had their own private ways of gleaning news, and were often high in repute with an anxious Government. Letters would arrive by devious ways for this or that member, and a meeting would follow in some nook of the coast with cloaked men who did not easily grasp the Fife speech. More than once the Chief Fisher, old Sandy Kyles, had consulted in Edinburgh behind guarded doors with the Lord Advocate himself.
To the boy the Free Fishers had been the supreme authority of his world, far more potent than the King in London. He cherished every hint of their doings that came to him, but he fell in docilely with the ritual and asked no questions. As he grew older he learned more, and his notion of the brotherhood was clarified; some day he would be a member of it like his father before him. But when he chose the path of scholarship he had to revise his ambitions, since the society was confined strictly to those whose business lay with the sea. Yet the harbour-side was still his favourite haunt, and he went on adding to his seafaring friendships.
“I’ll tell you what,” he told his chief ally, Tam Dorrit. “If I cannot be a member, I’ll be your chaplain. When I’m a minister you’ll appoint me. King George has his chaplain, and Lord Snowdoun, and all the great folk, and what for no the Free Fishers?”
The notion, offered half in jest, simmered in the heads of the brotherhood, for they liked the lad and did not want to lose him, if fate should send him to some landward parish. So it came about that when Mr Lammas had passed his trials and won his licence to preach, a special sederunt of the Free Fishers took place, and he was duly appointed their chaplain, with whatever rights, perquisites and privileges might inhere in that dignity. In due course he was installed at a supper, where the guests, a little awed by the shadow of the Kirk, comported themselves with a novel sobriety. Then for a year or two he saw nothing of them. He was engaged by Lord Snowdoun as the governor of his heir, the young Lord Belses, and passed his time between the great house of Snowdoun under the Ochils, the lesser seat of Catlaw in Tweeddale, and his lordship’s town lodgings in Edinburgh. Ambition had laid its spell on him, high-jinks were a thing of the past, and he was traversing that stage of ruthless wordly-wisdom which follows on the passing of a man’s first youth. It was a far cry from the echoing chambers and orderly terraces of Snowdoun or the deep heather of Catlaw to the windy beaches of Fife.
But with his return to St Andrews he found himself compelled to pick up the threads of his youth. The stage of premature middle-age had passed, and left him with a solid ambition, indeed, but with a more catholic outlook on the world. He had to deal with young men, and his youth was his chief asset; he had strong aspirations after literary success — in youthful spheres, too, like poetry and fantastic essays. He dared not bolt the door against a past which he saw daily in happier colours. The Free Fishers had not forgotten him. They had solemnly congratulated their chaplain on his new dignity, and they invited him to their quarterly gatherings at this or that port of the Firth. The message was never by letter; it would come by devious means, a whispered word in the street or at the harbour-side or on the links from some shaggy emissary who did not wait to be questioned.
At first Mr Lammas had been shy of the business. Could a preceptor of youth indulge in what was painfully akin to those extravagances of youth against which the Senatus warred? He had obeyed the fir
st summons with a nervous heart, and afterwards the enterprise was always undertaken in the deepest secrecy. No chaise or saddle-horse for him; his legs carried him in the evening to the rendezvous, however distant, and brought him back in the same fashion. From the side of the Free Fishers, however, he knew that he need fear nothing, for they were silent as the tomb. So into the routine of his life came these hiatuses of romance with a twofold consequence. They kept his hand in for his dealings with his pupils. He became “Nanty” to the whole undergraduate world, from the bejant to the magistrand. His classes were popular and orderly, and many consulted him on private concerns which they would not have broached to any other professor. Also, as if to salve his conscience, he began to cultivate a special gravity in his deportment. Among his colleagues he spoke little, but what he said was cogent; he acquired a name for whinstone common sense; he was a little feared and widely trusted. Soon his gravity became a second nature, and his long upper lip was a danger-signal to folly. Yet all the while he was nursing his private fire of romance in the manuscripts accumulating in his study drawers, and once in a while those fires were permitted to flicker in public. After a dull day of Senatus meetings, when he would reprehend the plunderings by his colleagues of the College library, or frame new rules for the compulsory Sunday service in St Leonard’s Kirk and the daily Prayer-hall at St Mary’s, or bicker with Dr Wotherspoon, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, over the delimitations of his subject, he would find himself among his boyhood’s friends, bandying queer by-names and joining in most unacademic choruses.
This night the supper had been at Pittenweem. All day Mr Lammas had been engaged on high affairs. There was trouble over the University revenue from the Priory lands, which was a discretionary grant from the Exchequer; Government had shown itself unwilling to renew it on the old terms, and it had been decided that Mr Lammas should proceed forthwith to London, lay the matter before Lord Snowdoun, and bespeak his lordship’s interest. It was a notable compliment to the young man, and a heavy responsibility. Also he had received a letter from Lord Mannour, who as Mr Peter Kinloch had been the University’s standing counsel, begging him to wait upon him without delay in Edinburgh. Mr Lammas, cumbered with such cares and about to set out on a difficult journey, had been in no mood for the Free Fishers, and had almost let the occasion slip. But some perverse loyalty had set his feet on the shore-road, and for some hours he had been absorbed, not unhappily, into a fantastic world.
