by John Buchan
It lay before him white and ghaistly, with mist blowing in wafts across it and a slow swaying of the tides. It was the better part of a mile wide, but save for some fathoms in the middle, where the Sker current ran, it was no deeper even at flood than a horse’s fetlocks. It looks eerie at bright midday, when the sun is shining and whaups are crying among the seaweeds; but think what it was on that awesome night, with the Powers of Darkness brooding over it like a cloud! The rider’s heart quailed for a moment in natural fear. He stepped his beast a few feet in, still staring afore him like a daft man. And then something in the sound or the feel of the waters made him look down, and he perceived that the ebb had begun and the tide was flowing out to sea.
He kenned that all was lost, and the knowledge drove him to stark despair. His sins came in his face like birds of night, and his heart shrunk like a pea. He knew himself for a lost soul, and all that he loved in the world was out in the tides. There, at any rate, he could go, too, and give back that gift of life he had so blackly misused. He cried small and saft like a bairn, and drove the grey out into the water. And aye as he spurred it the foam should have been flying as high as his head, but in that uncanny hour there was no foam; only the waves running sleek like oil. It was not long ere he had come to the Sker channel, where the red moss waters were roaring to the sea, — an ill place to ford in midsummer heat, and certain death, as folk reputed it, at the smallest spate. The grey was swimming; but it seemed the Lord had other purposes for him than death, for neither man nor horse could droun. He tried to leave the saddle, but he could not; he flung the bridle from him, but the grey held on as if some strong hand were guiding. He cried out upon the Devil to help his own; he renounced his Maker and his God: but whatever his punishment, he was not to be drouned. And then he was silent, for something was coming down the tide.
It came down as quiet as a sleeping bairn, straight for him as he sat with his horse breasting the waters; and as it came the moon crept out of a cloud, and he saw a glint of yellow hair. And then his madness died away, and he was himself again, a weary and stricken man. He hung down over the tide and caught the body in his arms, and then let the grey make for the shallows. He cared no more for the Devil and all his myrmidons, for he kenned brawly he was damned. It seemed to him that his soul had gone from him, and he was as toom as a hazel shell. His breath rattled in his throat, the tears were dried up in his head, his body had lost its strength, and yet he clung to the drouned maid as to a hope of salvation. And then he noted something at which he marvelled dumbly. Her hair was drookit back from her clay-cold brow, her eyes were shut, but in her face there was the peace of a child; it seemed even that her lips were smiling. Here, certes, was no lost soul, but one who had gone joyfully to meet her Lord. It may be in that dark hour at the burn-foot, before the spate caught her, she had been given grace to resist her adversary and fling herself upon God’s mercy. And it would seem that it had been granted; for when he came to the Skerbumfoot, there in the corner sat the weird wife Alison, dead as a stone.
For days Heriotside wandered the country, or sat in his own house with vacant eye and trembling hands. Conviction of sin held him like a vice: he saw the lassie’s death laid at his door; her face haunted him by day and night, and the word of the Lord dirled in his ears, telling of wrath and punishment. The greatness of his anguish wore him to a shadow, and at last he was stretched on his bed and like to perish. In his extremity worthy Dr Chrystal went to him unasked, and strove to comfort him. Long, long the good man wrestled, but it seemed as if his ministrations were to be of no avail. The fever left his body, and he rose to stotter about the doors; but he was still in his torments, and the mercy-seat was far from him. At last in the back end of the year came Mungo Muirhead to Caulds to the autumn communion, and nothing would serve him but he must try his hand at the storm-tossed soul. He spoke with power and unction, and a blessing came with his words: the black cloud lifted and showed a glimpse of grace, and in a little the man had some assurance of salvation. He became a pillar of Christ’s kirk, prompt to check abominations, notably the sin of witchcraft; foremost in good works, but with it all a humble man who walked contritely till his death. When I came first to Caulds I sought to prevail upon him to accept the eldership, but he aye put me by, and when I heard his tale I saw that he had done wisely. I mind him well as he sat in his chair or daundered through Caulds, a kind word for every one and sage counsel in time of distress, but withal a severe man to himself and a crucifier of the body. It seems that this severity weakened his frame, for three years syne come Martinmas he was taken ill with a fever of the bowels, and after a week’s sickness he went to his account, where I trust he is accepted.
The Kings of Orion
Blackwood’s Magazine, 1906
An ape and a lion lie side by side in the heart of a man.
Persian Proverb
SPRING-FISHING IN the North is a cold game for a man whose blood has become thin in gentler climates. All afternoon I had failed to stir a fish, and the wan streams of the Laver, swirling between bare grey banks, were as icy to the eye as the sharp gusts of hail from the north-east were to the fingers. I cast mechanically till I grew weary, and then with an empty creel and a villainous temper set myself to trudge the two miles of bent to the inn. Some distant ridges of hill stood out snow-clad against the dun sky, and half in anger, half in a dismal satisfaction, I told myself that fishing to-morrow would be as barren as to-day.
At the inn door a tall man was stamping his feet and watching a servant lifting rod-cases from a dog-cart. Hooded and wrapped though he was, my friend Thirlstone was an unmistakable figure in any landscape. The long, haggard, brown face, with the skin drawn tightly over the cheek-bones, the keen blue eyes finely wrinkled round the corners with staring at many suns, the scar which gave his mouth a humorous droop to the right, made up a whole which was not easily forgotten. I had last seen him on the quay at Funchal bargaining with some rascally boatman to take him after mythical wild goats in the Desertas. Before that we had met at an embassy ball in Vienna, and still earlier at a hill station in Persia to which I had been sent posthaste by an anxious and embarrassed Government. Also I had been at school with him, in those faraway days when we rode nine stone and dreamed of cricket averages. He was a soldier of note, who had taken part in two little wars and one big one; had himself conducted a political mission through a hard country with some success, and was habitually chosen by his superiors to keep his eyes open as a foreign attaché in our neighbours’ wars. But his fame as a hunter had gone abroad into places where even the name of the British army is unknown. He was the hungriest shikari I have ever seen, and I have seen many. If you are wise you will go forthwith to some library and procure a little book entitled Three Hunting Expeditions, by A.W.T. It is a modest work, and the style is that of a leading article, but all the lore and passion of the Red Gods are in its pages.
The sitting-room at the inn is a place of comfort, and while Thirlstone warmed his long back at the fire I sank contentedly into one of the well-rubbed leather arm-chairs. The company of a friend made the weather and the scarcity of salmon less the intolerable grievance they had seemed an hour ago than a joke to be laughed at. The landlord came in with whisky, and banked up the peats till they glowed beneath a pall of blue smoke.
‘I hope to goodness we are alone,’ said Thirlstone, and he turned to the retreating landlord and asked the question.
‘There’s naebody bidin’ the nicht forbye yoursels,’ he said, ‘but the morn there’s a gentleman comin’. I got a letter frae him the day. Maister Wiston, they ca’ him. Maybe ye ken him?’
I started at the name, which I knew very well. Thirlstone, who knew it better, stopped warming himself and walked to the window, where he stood pulling his moustache and staring at the snow. When the man had left the room, he turned to me with the face of one whose mind is made up on a course but uncertain of the best method.
‘Do you know this sort of weather looks infernally unpromising? I�
��ve half a mind to chuck it and go back to town.’
I gave him no encouragement, finding amusement in his difficulties.
‘Oh, it’s not so bad,’ I said, ‘and it won’t last. To-morrow we may have the day of our lives.’
He was silent for a little, staring at the fire. ‘Anyhow,’ he said at last, ‘we were fools to be so far up the valley. Why shouldn’t we go down to the Forest Lodge? They’ll take us in, and we should be deucedly comfortable, and the water’s better.’
‘There’s not a pool on the river to touch the stretch here,’ I said. ‘I know, for I’ve fished every inch of it.’
He had no reply to this, so he lit a pipe and held his peace for a time. Then, with some embarrassment but the air of having made a discovery, he announced that his conscience was troubling him about his work, and he thought he ought to get back to it at once. ‘There are several things I have forgotten to see to, and they’re rather important. I feel a beast behaving like this, but you won’t mind, will you?’
‘My dear Thirlstone,’ I said, ‘what is the good of hedging? Why can’t you say you won’t meet Wiston?’
His face cleared. ‘Well, that’s the fact — I won’t. It would be too infernally unpleasant. You see, I was once by way of being his friend, and he was in my regiment. I couldn’t do it.’
The landlord came in at the moment with a basket of peats. ‘How long is Capt — Mr Wiston staying here?’ I asked.
‘He’s no bidin’ ony time. He’s just comin’ here in the middle o’ the day for his denner, and then drivin’ up the water to Altbreac. He has the fishin’ there.’
Thirlstone’s face showed profound relief. ‘Thank God!’ I heard him mutter under his breath, and when the landlord had gone he fell to talking of salmon with enthusiasm. ‘We must make a big day of it tomorrow, dark to dark, you know. Thank Heaven, our beat’s downstream, too.’ And thereafter he made frequent excursions to the door, and bulletins on the weather were issued regularly.
Dinner over, we drew our chairs to the hearth, and fell to talk and the slow consumption of tobacco. When two men from the ends of the earth meet by a winter fire, their thoughts are certain to drift overseas. We spoke of the racing tides off Vancouver, and the lonely pine-clad ridges running up to the snow peaks of the Selkirks, to which we had both travelled once upon a time in search of sport. Thirlstone on his own account had gone wandering to Alaska, and brought back some bear skins and a frost-bitten toe as trophies, and from his tales had consorted with the finest band of rogues which survived unhanged on this planet. Then some casual word took our thoughts to the south, and our memories dallied with Africa. Thirlstone had hunted in Somaliland and done mighty slaughter; while I had spent some never-to-be-forgotten weeks long ago in the hinterland of Zanzibar, in the days before railways and game preserves. I had gone through life with a keen eye for the discovery of earthly paradises, to which I intend to retire when my work is over, and the fairest I thought I had found above the Rift valley, where you have a hundred miles of blue horizon and the weather of Scotland. Thirlstone, not having been there, naturally differed, and urged the claim of a certain glen in Kashmir, where you may hunt two varieties of bear and three of buck in thickets of rhododendron, and see the mightiest mountain-wall on earth from your tent door. The mention of the Indian frontier brought us back to our professions, and for a little we talked ‘shop’, with the unblushing confidence of those who know each other’s work and approve it. As a very young soldier Thirlstone had gone shooting in the Pamirs, and had blundered into a Russian party of exploration which contained Kuropatkin. He had in consequence grossly outstayed his leave, having been detained for a fortnight by an arbitrary hospitality; but he had learned many things, and the experience had given him strong views on frontier questions. Half an hour was devoted to a masterly survey of the East, until a word pulled us up.
‘I went there in’99,’ Thirlstone was saying,—’the time Wiston and I were sent—’ and then he stopped, and his eager face clouded. Wiston’s name cast a shadow over our reminiscences.
‘What did he actually do?’ I asked after a short silence.
‘Pretty bad! He seemed a commonplace, good sort of fellow, popular, fairly competent, a little bad-tempered perhaps. And then suddenly he did something so extremely blackguardly that everything was at an end. It’s no good repeating details, and I hate to think about it. We know little about our neighbours, and I’m not sure that we know much about ourselves. There may be appalling depths of iniquity in every one of us, only most people are fortunate enough to go through the world without meeting anything to wake the devil in them. I don’t believe Wiston was bad in the ordinary sense. Only there was something else in him — somebody else, if you like — and in a moment it came uppermost, and he was a branded man. Ugh! it’s a gruesome thought.’
Thirlstone had let his pipe go out, and was staring moodily into the fire.
‘How do you explain things like that?’ he asked. ‘I have an idea of my own about them. We talk glibly of ourselves and our personality and our conscience, as if every man’s nature were a smooth, round, white thing, like a chuckie-stone. But I believe there are two men — perhaps more — in every one of us. There’s our ordinary self, generally rather humdrum; and then there’s a bit of something else, good, bad, but never indifferent, — and it is that something else which may make a man a saint or a great villain.’
‘“The Kings of Orion have come to earth,”’I quoted.
Something in the words struck Thirlstone, and he asked me what was the yarn I spoke of.
‘It’s an old legend,’ I explained. ‘When the kings were driven out of Orion, they were sent to this planet and given each his habitation in some mortal soul. There were differences of character in that royal family, and so the alter ego which dwells alongside of us may be virtuous or very much the reverse. But the point is that he is always greater than ourselves, for he has been a king. It’s a foolish story, but very widely believed. There is something of the sort in Celtic folk-lore, and there’s a reference to it in Ausonius. Also the bandits in the Bakhtiari have a version of it in a very excellent ballad.’
‘Kings of Orion,’ said Thirlstone musingly. ‘I like that idea. Good or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belief in it in our daily practice. Every man is always making fancies about himself; but it is never his workaday self, but something else. The bank clerk who pictures himself as a financial Napoleon knows that his own thin little soul is incapable of it; but he knows, too, that it is possible enough for that other bigger thing which is not his soul, but yet in some odd way is bound up with it. I fancy myself a field-marshal in a European war; but I know perfectly well that if the job were offered me, I should realise my incompetence and decline. I expect you rather picture yourself now and then as a sort of Julius Caesar and empire-maker, and yet, with all respect, my dear chap, I think it would be rather too much for you.’
‘There was once a man,’ I said, ‘an early Victorian Whig, whose chief ambitions were to reform the criminal law and abolish slavery. Well, this dull, estimable man in his leisure moments was Emperor of Byzantium. He fought great wars and built palaces, and then, when the time for fancy was past, went into the House of Commons and railed against militarism and Tory extravagance. That particular king from Orion had a rather odd sort of earthly tenement.’
Thirlstone was all interest. ‘A philosophic Whig and the throne of Byzantium. A pretty rum mixture! And yet — yet,’ and his eyes became abstracted. ‘Did you ever know Tommy Lacelles?’
‘The man who once governed Deira? Retired now, and lives somewhere in Kent? Yes, I’ve met him once or twice. But why?’
‘Because,’ said Thirlstone solemnly, ‘unless I’m greatly mistaken, Tommy was another such case, though no man ever guessed it except myself. I don’t mind telling you the story, now that he is retired and vegetating in his ancestral pastures. Besides, the facts are all to his credit, and the explanation is our own business..
.
‘His wife was my cousin, and when she died Tommy was left a very withered, disconsolate man, with no particular object in life. We all thought he would give up the service, for he was hideously well off; and then one fine day, to our amazement, he was offered Deira, and accepted it. I was short of a job at the time, for my battalion was at home, and there was nothing going on anywhere, so I thought I should like to see what the East Coast of Africa was like, and wrote to Tommy about it. He jumped at me, cabled offering me what he called his Military Secretaryship, and I got seconded, and set off. I had never known him very well, but what I had seen I had liked; and I suppose he was glad to have one of Maggie’s family with him, for he was still very low about her loss. I was in pretty good spirits, for it meant new experiences, and I had hopes of big game.
‘You’ve never been to Deira? Well, there’s no good trying to describe it, for it’s the only place in the world like itself. God made it and left it to its own devices. The town is pretty enough, with its palms and green headland, and little scrubby islands in the river’s mouth. It has the usual half-Arab, half-Portugee look — white green-shuttered houses, flat roofs, sallow little men in duck, and every type of nigger from the Somali to the Shangaan. There are some good buildings, and Government House was the mansion of some old Portugee seigneur, and was built when people in Africa were not in such a hurry as to-day. Inland there’s a rolling forest country, beginning with decent trees and ending in mimosa-thorn, when the land begins to rise to the stony hills of the interior; and that poisonous yellow river rolls through it all, with a denser native population along its banks than you will find anywhere else north of the Zambesi. For about two months in the year the climate is Paradise, and for the rest you live in a Turkish bath, with every known kind of fever hanging about. We cleaned out the town and improved the sanitation, so there were few epidemics, but there was enough ordinary malaria to sicken a crocodile.
