Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  ‘Then meet me at the Gled’s Cleuch Head at the sun’s setting,’ said the bird, and it flew away.

  Now it seemed to the man that in a twinkling it was sunset, and he found himself at the Gled’s Cleuch Head with the bird flapping in the heather before him. The place was a long rift in the hill, made green with juniper and hazel, where it was said True Thomas came to drink the water.

  ‘Turn ye to the west,’ said the whaup, ‘and let the sun fall on your face, then turn ye five times round about and say after me the Rune of the Heather and the Dew.’ And before he knew, the man did as he was told, and found himself speaking strange words, while his head hummed and danced as if in a fever.

  ‘Now lay ye down and put your ear to the earth,’ said the bird, and the man did so. Instantly a cloud came over his brain, and he did not feel the ground on which he lay or the keen hill-air which blew about him. He felt himself falling deep into an abysm of space, then suddenly caught up and set among the stars of heaven. Then slowly from the stillness there welled forth music, drop by drop like the clear falling of rain, and the man shuddered, for he knew that he heard the beginning of the Moor-Song.

  High rose the air, and trembled among the tallest pines and the summits of great hills. And in it were the sting of rain and the blatter of hail, the soft crush of snow and the rattle of thunder among crags. Then it quieted to the low sultry croon which told of blazing mid-day when the streams are parched and the bent crackles like dry tinder. Anon it was evening, and the melody dwelled among the high soft notes which mean the coming of dark and the green light of sunset. Then the whole changed to a great paean which rang like an organ through the earth. There were trumpet notes in it and flute notes and the plaint of pipes. ‘Come forth,’ it cried; ‘the sky is wide and it is a far cry to the world’s end. The fire crackles fine o’ nights below the firs, the smell of roasting meat and wood smoke is dear to the heart of man. Fine, too, is the sting of salt and the risp of the north-wind in the sheets. Come forth, one and all, to the great lands oversea, and the strange tongues and the fremit peoples. Learn before you die to follow the Piper’s Son, and though your old bones bleach among grey rocks, what matter, if you have had your bellyful of life and come to the land of Heart’s Desire?’ And the tune fell low and witching, bringing tears to the eyes and joy to the heart; and the man knew (though no one told him) that this was the first part of the Moor-Song, the ‘Song of the Open Road’, the ‘Lilt of the Adventurer’, which shall be now and ever and to the end of days.

  Then the melody changed to a fiercer and sadder note. He saw his forefathers, gaunt men and terrible, run stark among woody hills. He heard the talk of the bronze-clad invader, and the jar and clangour as flint met steel. Then rose the last coronach of his own people, hiding in wild glens, starving in corries, or going hopelessly to the death. He heard the cry of Border foray, the shouts of the poor Scots as they harried Cumberland, and he himself rode in the midst of them. Then the tune fell more mournful and slow, and Flodden lay before him. He saw the flower of Scots gentry around their king, gashed to the breast bone, still fronting the lines of the south, though the paleness of death sat on each forehead. ‘The flowers of the Forest are gone,’ cried the lilt, and through the long years he heard the cry of the lost, the desperate, fighting for kings over the water and princes in the heather. ‘Who cares?’ cried the air. ‘Man must die, and how can he die better than in the stress of fight with his heart high and alien blood on his sword? Heigh-ho! One against twenty, a child against a host, this is the romance of life.’ And the man’s heart swelled, for he knew (though no one told him) that this was the ‘Song of Lost Battles’, which only the great can sing before they die.

  But the tune was changing, and at the change the man shivered, for the air ran up to the high notes and then down to the deeps with an eldrich cry, like a hawk’s scream at night, or a witch’s song in the gloaming. It told of those who seek and never find, the quest that knows no fulfilment. ‘There is a road,’ it cries, ‘which leads to the Moon and the Great Waters. No changehouse cheers it, and it has no end; but it is a fine road, a braw road — who will follow it?’ And the man knew (though no one told him) that this was the ‘Ballad of Grey Weather’, which makes him who hears it sick all the days of his life for something which he cannot name. It is the song which the birds sing on the moor in the autumn nights, and the old crow on the tree-top hears and flaps his wing. It is the lilt which old men and women hear in the darkening of their days, and sigh for the unforgettable; and love-sick girls get catches of it and play pranks with their lovers. It is a song so old that Adam heard it in the Garden before Eve came to comfort him, so young that from it still flows the whole joy and sorrow of earth.

  Then it ceased, and all of a sudden the man was rubbing his eyes on the hillside, and watching the falling dusk. ‘I have heard the Moor-Song,’ he said to himself, and he walked home in a daze. The whaups were crying, but none came near him, though he looked hard for the bird that had spoken with him. It may be that it was there and he did not know it, or it may be that the whole thing was only a dream; but of this I cannot say.

  The next morning the man rose and went to the manse.

  ‘I am glad to see you, Simon,’ said the minister, ‘for it will soon be the Communion Season, and it is your duty to go round with the tokens.’

  ‘True,’ said the man, ‘but it was another thing I came to talk about,’ and he told him the whole tale.

  ‘There are but two ways of it, Simon,’ said the minister. ‘Either ye are the victim of witchcraft, or ye are a self-deluded man. If the former (whilk I am loth to believe), then it behoves ye to watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation. If the latter, then ye maun put a strict watch over a vagrom fancy, and ye’ll be quit o’ siccan whigmaleeries.’

  Now Simon was not listening, but staring out of the window. ‘There was another thing I had it in my mind to say,’ said he. ‘I have come to lift my lines, for I am thinking of leaving the place.’

  ‘And where would ye go?’ asked the minister, aghast.

  ‘I was thinking of going to Carlisle and trying my luck as a dealer, or maybe pushing on with droves to the South.’

  ‘But that’s a cauld country where there are no faithfu’ ministrations,’ said the minister.

  ‘Maybe so, but I am not caring very muckle about ministrations,’ said the man, and the other looked after him in horror.

  When he left the manse he went to a Wise Woman, who lived on the left side of the Kirk-yard above Threepdaidle burn-foot. She was very old, and sat by the ingle day and night, waiting upon death. To her he told the same tale.

  She listened gravely, nodding with her head. ‘Ach,’ she said, ‘I have heard a like story before. And where will you be going?’

  ‘I am going south to Carlisle to try the dealing and droving,’ said the man, ‘for I have some skill of sheep.’

  ‘And will ye bide there?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe aye, and maybe no,’ he said. ‘I had half a mind to push on to the big toun or even to the abroad. A man must try his fortune.’

  ‘That’s the way of men,’ said the old wife. ‘I, too, have heard the Moor-Song, and many women, who now sit decently spinning in Kilmaclavers, have heard it. But a woman may hear it and lay it up in her soul and bide at hame, while a man, if he get but a glisk of it in his fool’s heart, must needs up and awa’ to the warld’s end on some daft-like ploy. But gang your ways and fare ye weel. My cousin Francie heard it, and he went north wi’ a white cockade in his bonnet and a sword at his side, singing ‘Charlie’s come hame’. And Tam Crichtoun o’ the Bourhopehead got a sough o’ it one simmer’s morning, and the last we heard o’ Tam he was killed among the Frenchmen fechting like a fair deil. Once I heard a tinkler play a sprig of it on the pipes, and a’ the lads were wud to follow him. Gang your ways, for I am near the end o’ mine.’ And the old wife shook with her coughing.

  So the man put up his belongings in a pack on his back and went wh
istling down the Great South Road.

  Whether or not this tale have a moral it is not for me to say. The King (who told it me) said that it had, and quoted a scrap of Latin, for he had been at Oxford in his youth before he fell heir to his kingdom. One may hear tunes from the Moor-Song, said he, in the thick of a storm on the scarp of a rough hill, in the low June weather, or in the sunset silence of a winter’s night. But let none, he added, pray to have the full music, for it will make him who hears it a footsore traveller in the ways o’ the world and a masterless man till death.

  A Reputation

  Macmillan’s Magazine, 1898

  I

  IT WAS AT a little lonely shooting-box in the Forest of Rhynns that I first met Layden, sometime in the process of a wet August. The place belonged to his cousin Urquhart, a strange man well on in years who divided his time between recondite sport and mild antiquities. We were a small party of men held together by a shifty acquaintance of those who meet somewhere and somehow each autumn. By day we shot conscientiously over mossy hills or fished in the many turbid waters; while of an evening there would be much tobacco and sporting-talk interspersed with the sleepy, indifferent joking of wearied men. We all knew the life well from long experience, and for the sake of a certain freshness and excitement were content to put up with monotonous fare and the companionship of bleak moorlands. It was a season of brown faces and rude health, when a man’s clothes smelt of peat, and he recked not of letters accumulating in the nearest post-town.

  To such sombre days Layden came like a phoenix among moorfowl. I had arrived late, and my first sight of him was at dinner, where the usual listless talk was spurred almost to brilliance by his presence. He kept all the table laughing at his comical stories and quaint notes on men and things, shrewd, witty, and well-timed. But this welcome vivacity was not all, for he cunningly assumed the air of a wise man unbending, and his most random saying had the piquant hint of a great capacity. Nor was his talk without a certain body, for when by any chance one of his hearers touched upon some matter of technical knowledge, he was ready at the word for a well-informed discussion. The meal ended, as it rarely did, in a full flow of conversation, and men rose with the feeling of having returned for the moment to some measure of culture.

  The others came out one by one to the lawn above the river, while he went off with his host on some private business. George Winterham sat down beside me and blew solemn wreaths of smoke toward the sky. I asked him who was the man, and it is a sign of the impression made that George gave me his name without a request for further specification.

  ‘That’s a deuced clever chap,’ he said with emphasis, stroking a wearied leg.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know, - cousin of Urquhart’s. Rising man, they say, and I don’t wonder. I bet that fellow is at the top before he dies.’

  ‘Is he keen on shooting?’ I asked, for it was the usual question.

  Not much, George thought. You could never expect a man like that to be good in the same way as fools like himself; they had better things to think about. After all, what were grouse and salmon but vanities, and the killing of them futility? said Mr. Winterham, by way of blaspheming his idols.

  ‘I was writing to my sister, Lady Clanroyden, you know,’ he went on, ‘and I mentioned that a chap of the name of Layden was coming. And here she writes to me to-day and can speak about nothing but the man. She says that the Cravens have taken him up, and that he is going to marry the rich Miss Clavering, and that the Prime Minister said to somebody that he would be dashed if this chap wasn’t the best they had. Where the deuce did I leave Mabel’s letter?’ And George went indoors upon the quest.

  Shortly after Layden came out, and soon we all sat watching the dusk gather over miles of spongy moor and vague tangled birch-woods. It is hard for one who is clearly the sole representative of light amid barbarism to escape from a certain seeming of pedantry and a walk aloof and apart. I watched the man carefully, for he fascinated me, and if I had admired his nimble wits at dinner, the more now did I admire his tact. By some cunning art he drove out all trace of superiority from his air; he was the ordinary good fellow, dull, weary like the rest, vastly relishing tobacco, and staring with vacant eyes to the evening.

  The last day of my visit to the Forest I have some occasion to remember. It was marked by a display of weather, which I, who am something of a connoisseur in the thing, have never seen approached in this land or elsewhere. The morning had been hazy and damp, with mist over the hill-tops and the air lifeless. But about mid-day a wind came out of the south-west which sent the vapour flying, and left the tops bald and distant. We had been shooting over the Cauldshaw Head, and about five in the afternoon landed on a spur of the Little Muneraw above the tarn which they call the Loch o’ the Threshes. Thence one sees a great prospect of wild country, with birchwoods like smoke and sudden rifts which are the glens of streams. On this afternoon the air was cool and fine, the sky a level grey, the water like ink beneath dull-gleaming crags. But the bare details were but a hundredth part of the scene; for over all hung an air of silence, deep, calm, impenetrable, - the quiet distilled of the endless moors, the grey heavens, the primeval desert. It was the incarnate mystery of Life, for in that utter loneliness lay the tale of ages since the world’s birth, the song of being and death as uttered by wild living things since the rocks had form. The sight had the glamour of a witch’s chant; it cried aloud for recognition, driving from the heart all other loves and fervours, and touching the savage elemental springs of desire.

  We sat in scattered places on the hillside, all gazing our fill of the wild prospect, even the keepers, to whom it was a matter of daily repetition. None spoke, for none had the gift of words; only in each mind was the same dumb and unattainable longing. Then Layden began to talk, and we listened. In another it would have been mere impertinence, for another would have prated and fallen into easy rhetoric; but this man had the art of speech, and his words were few and chosen. In a second he was done, but all had heard and were satisfied; for he had told the old tale of the tent by the running water and the twin candle-stars in heaven, of morning and evening under the sky and the whole lust of the gipsy life. Every man there had seen a thousand fold more of the very thing he spoke of, had gone to the heart of savagery, pioneering in the Himalayas, shooting in the Rockies, or bearing the heat of tropical sport. And yet this slim townsman, who could not shoot straight, to whom Scots hills were a revelation of the immense, and who was in his proper element on a London pavement, — this man could read the sentiment so that every hearer’s heart went out to answer.

  As we went home I saw by his white face that he was overtired, and he questioned me irritably about the forwarding of letters. So there and then I prayed Heaven for the gift of speech, which makes a careless spectator the interpreter of voiceless passion.

  II

  Three years later I found myself in England, a bronzed barbarian fresh from wild life in north Finland, and glad of a change to the pleasant domesticity of home. It was early spring, and I drifted to my cousin’s house of Heston, after the aimless fashion of the wanderer returned. Heston is a pleasant place to stay in at all times, but pleasantest in spring, for it stands on the last ridge of a Devon moor, whence rolls a wide land of wood and meadow to a faint blue line of sea. The hedgerows were already bursting into leaf, and brimming waters slipped through fresh green grasses. All things were fragrant of homeland and the peace of centuries.

  At Heston I met my excellent friend Wratislaw, a crabbed, cynical, hard-working, and sore-battered man, whose excursions in high politics had not soothed his temper. His whole life was a perpetual effort to make himself understood, and as he had started with somewhat difficult theories his recognition had been slow. But it was sure; men respected him sincerely if from afar; in his own line he was pre-eminent, and gradually he was drawing to himself the work in a great office of State where difficulty was equally mated with honour.

  Well, you old mad
man,’ he cried, ‘where have you been lost all these months? We heard marvellous stories about you, and there was talk of a search-party. So you chose to kill the fatted calf here of all places. I should have gone elsewhere; it will be too much of a show this week.’

  ‘Who are coming?’ I groaned resignedly.

  ‘Lawerdale for one,’ he answered. I nodded; Lawerdale was a very great man in whom I had no manner of interest. ‘Then there are Rogerson, and Lady Afflint and Charlie Erskine.’

  ‘Is that the lot?’

  ‘Wait a moment. Oh, by Jove, I forgot; there’s Layden coming, the great Layden.’

  ‘I once met a Layden; I wonder if it’s the same man.

  ‘Probably, - cousin of Urquhart’s.’

  ‘But he was n’t commonly called “great” then.’

  ‘You forget, you barbarian, that you’ve been in the wilderness for years. Reputations have come and gone in that time. Why, Layden is a name to conjure with among most people, - Layden, the brilliant young thinker, orator, and writer, the teacher of the future!’ And Wratislaw laughed in his most sardonic fashion.

  ‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, well enough in a way. He was a year below me at Oxford, — used to talk in the Union a lot, and beat me hollow for President. He was a harebrained creature then, full of ideals and aboriginal conceit; a sort of shaggy Rousseau, who preached a new heaven and a new earth, and was worshipped by a pack of schoolboys. He did well in his way, got his First and some’Varsity prizes, but the St. Chad’s people would n’t have him at any price for their fellowship. He told me it was but another sign of the gulf between the real and the ideal. I thought then that he was a frothy ass, but he has learned manners since, and tact. I suppose there is no doubt about his uncommon cleverness.’

  ‘Do you like him?’

  Wratislaw laughed. ‘I don’t know. You see, he and I belong to different shops, and we have n’t a sentiment in common. He would call me dull; I might be tempted to call him windy. It is all a matter of taste.’ And he shrugged his broad shoulders and went in to dress.