Mr. Standfast

J >> John Buchan >> Mr. Standfast

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I had a scrub with a piece of yellow soap at an adjacent pool in
the burn and then entered a kitchen blue with peat-reek. We had a
meal of boiled fish, oatcakes and skim-milk cheese, with cups of
strong tea to wash it down. The old folk had the manners of
princes. They pressed food on me, and asked me no questions, till
for very decency's sake I had to put up a story and give some
account of myself.

I found they had a son in the Argylls and a young boy in the
Navy. But they seemed disinclined to talk of them or of the war. By
a mere accident I hit on the old man's absorbing interest. He was
passionate about the land. He had taken part in long-forgotten
agitations, and had suffered eviction in some ancient landlords'
quarrel farther north. Presently he was pouring out to me all the
woes of the crofter - woes that seemed so antediluvian and forgotten
that I listened as one would listen to an old song. 'You who come
from a new country will not haf heard of these things,' he kept
telling me, but by that peat fire I made up for my defective education.
He told me of evictions in the year. One somewhere in Sutherland,
and of harsh doings in the Outer Isles. It was far more than a
political grievance. It was the lament of the conservative for vanished
days and manners. 'Over in Skye wass the fine land for black cattle,
and every man had his bit herd on the hillside. But the lairds said it
wass better for sheep, and then they said it wass not good for sheep,
so they put it under deer, and now there is no black cattle anywhere
in Skye.' I tell you it was like sad music on the bagpipes hearing that
old fellow. The war and all things modern meant nothing to him; he
lived among the tragedies of his youth and his prime.

I'm a Tory myself and a bit of a land-reformer, so we agreed well
enough. So well, that I got what I wanted without asking for it. I
told him I was going to Skye, and he offered to take me over in his
boat in the morning. 'It will be no trouble. Indeed no. I will be
going that way myself to the fishing.'

I told him that after the war, every acre of British soil would
have to be used for the men that had earned the right to it. But that
did not comfort him. He was not thinking about the land itself, but
about the men who had been driven from it fifty years before. His
desire was not for reform, but for restitution, and that was past the
power of any Government. I went to bed in the loft in a sad,
reflective mood, considering how in speeding our newfangled
plough we must break down a multitude of molehills and how
desirable and unreplaceable was the life of the moles.

In brisk, shining weather, with a wind from the south-east, we
put off next morning. In front was a brown line of low hills, and
behind them, a little to the north, that black toothcomb of mountain range
which I had seen the day before from the Arisaig ridge.

'That is the Coolin,' said the fisherman. 'It is a bad place where
even the deer cannot go. But all the rest of Skye wass the fine land
for black cattle.'

As we neared the coast, he pointed out many places. 'Look there,
Sir, in that glen. I haf seen six cot houses smoking there, and now
there is not any left. There were three men of my own name had
crofts on the machars beyond the point, and if you go there you will
only find the marks of their bit gardens. You will know the place
by the gean trees.'
When he put me ashore in a sandy bay between green ridges of
bracken, he was still harping upon the past. I got him to take a
pound - for the boat and not for the night's hospitality, for he
would have beaten me with an oar if I had suggested that. The last
I saw of him, as I turned round at the top of the hill, he had still his
sail down, and was gazing at the lands which had once been full of
human dwellings and now were desolate.

I kept for a while along the ridge, with the Sound of Sleat on my
right, and beyond it the high hills of Knoydart and Kintail. I was
watching for the _Tobermory, but saw no sign of her. A steamer put
out from Mallaig, and there were several drifters crawling up the
channel and once I saw the white ensign and a destroyer bustled
northward, leaving a cloud of black smoke in her wake. Then, after
consulting the map, I struck across country, still keeping the higher
ground, but, except at odd minutes, being out of sight of the sea. I
concluded that my business was to get to the latitude of Ranna
without wasting time.

So soon as I changed my course I had the Coolin for company.
Mountains have always been a craze of mine, and the blackness and
mystery of those grim peaks went to my head. I forgot all about
Fosse Manor and the Cotswolds. I forgot, too, what had been my
chief feeling since I left Glasgow, a sense of the absurdity of my
mission. It had all seemed too far-fetched and whimsical. I was
running apparently no great personal risk, and I had always the
unpleasing fear that Blenkiron might have been too clever and that
the whole thing might be a mare's nest. But that dark mountain
mass changed my outlook. I began to have a queer instinct that that
was the place, that something might be concealed there, something
pretty damnable. I remember I sat on a top for half an hour raking
the hills with my glasses. I made out ugly precipices, and glens
which lost themselves in primeval blackness. When the sun caught
them - for it was a gleamy day - it brought out no colours,
only degrees of shade. No mountains I had ever seen - not the
Drakensberg or the red kopjes of Damaraland or the cold, white
peaks around Erzerum - ever looked so unearthly and uncanny.

Oddly enough, too, the sight of them set me thinking about
Ivery. There seemed no link between a smooth, sedentary being,
dwelling in villas and lecture-rooms, and that shaggy tangle of
precipices. But I felt there was, for I had begun to realize the
bigness of my opponent. Blenkiron had said that he spun his web
wide. That was intelligible enough among the half-baked youth of
Biggleswick, and the pacifist societies, or even the toughs on the
Clyde. I could fit him in all right to that picture. But that he should
be playing his game among those mysterious black crags seemed
to make him bigger and more desperate, altogether a different kind
of proposition. I didn't exactly dislike the idea, for my objection to
my past weeks had been that I was out of my proper job, and this
was more my line of country. I always felt that I was a better bandit
than a detective. But a sort of awe mingled with my satisfaction. I
began to feel about Ivery as I had felt about the three devils of the
Black Stone who had hunted me before the war, and as I never felt
about any other Hun. The men we fought at the Front and the men
I had run across in the Greenmantle business, even old Stumm
himself, had been human miscreants. They were formidable enough,
but you could gauge and calculate their capacities. But this Ivery
was like a poison gas that hung in the air and got into unexpected
crannies and that you couldn't fight in an upstanding way. Till
then, in spite of Blenkiron's solemnity, I had regarded him simply
as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and omnipresent
enemy, intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house. Up on
that sunny hillside, with the sea winds round me and the whaups
calling, I got a chill in my spine when I thought of him.

I am ashamed to confess it, but I was also horribly hungry.
There was something about the war that made me ravenous, and
the less chance of food the worse I felt. If I had been in London
with twenty restaurants open to me, I should as likely as not have
gone off my feed. That was the cussedness of my stomach. I had
still a little chocolate left, and I ate the fisherman's buttered scones
for luncheon, but long before the evening my thoughts were dwelling
on my empty interior.

I put up that night in a shepherd's cottage miles from anywhere.
The man was called Macmorran, and he had come from Galloway
when sheep were booming. He was a very good imitation of a
savage, a little fellow with red hair and red eyes, who might have
been a Pict. He lived with a daughter who had once been in service
in Glasgow, a fat young woman with a face entirely covered with
freckles and a pout of habitual discontent. No wonder, for that
cottage was a pretty mean place. It was so thick with peat-reek that
throat and eyes were always smarting. It was badly built, and must
have leaked like a sieve in a storm. The father was a surly fellow,
whose conversation was one long growl at the world, the high
prices, the difficulty of moving his sheep, the meanness of his
master, and the godforsaken character of Skye. 'Here's me no seen
baker's bread for a month, and no company but a wheen ignorant
Hielanders that yatter Gawlic. I wish I was back in the Glenkens.
And I'd gang the morn if I could get paid what I'm awed.'

However, he gave me supper - a braxy ham and oatcake, and I
bought the remnants off him for use next day. I did not trust his
blankets, so I slept the night by the fire in the ruins of an arm-
chair, and woke at dawn with a foul taste in my mouth. A dip in the burn
refreshed me, and after a bowl of porridge I took the road again.
For I was anxious to get to some hill-top that looked over to Ranna.

Before midday I was close under the eastern side of the Coolin,
on a road which was more a rockery than a path. Presently I saw a
big house ahead of me that looked like an inn, so I gave it a miss
and struck the highway that led to it a little farther north. Then I
bore off to the east, and was just beginning to climb a hill which I
judged stood between me and the sea, when I heard wheels on the
road and looked back.

It was a farmer's gig carrying one man. I was about half a mile
off, and something in the cut of his jib seemed familiar. I got my
glasses on him and made out a short, stout figure clad in a mackintosh,
with a woollen comforter round its throat. As I watched, it
made a movement as if to rub its nose on its sleeve. That was the
pet trick of one man I knew. Inconspicuously I slipped through the
long heather so as to reach the road ahead of the gig. When I rose
like a wraith from the wayside the horse started, but not the driver.

'So ye're there,' said Amos's voice. 'I've news for ye. The _Tobermory
will be in Ranna by now. She passed Broadford two hours
syne. When I saw her I yoked this beast and came up on the chance
of foregathering with ye.'

'How on earth did you know I would be here?' I asked in some surprise.

'Oh, I saw the way your mind was workin' from your telegram.
And says I to mysel' - that man Brand, says I, is not the chiel to be
easy stoppit. But I was feared ye might be a day late, so I came up
the road to hold the fort. Man, I'm glad to see ye. Ye're younger
and soopler than me, and yon Gresson's a stirrin' lad.'

'There's one thing you've got to do for me,' I said. 'I can't go
into inns and shops, but I can't do without food. I see from the
map there's a town about six miles on. Go there and buy me
anything that's tinned - biscuits and tongue and sardines, and a
couple of bottles of whisky if you can get them. This may be a long
job, so buy plenty.'

'Whaur'll I put them?' was his only question.

We fixed on a cache, a hundred yards from the highway in a
place where two ridges of hill enclosed the view so that only a
short bit of road was visible.

'I'll get back to the Kyle,' he told me, 'and a'body there kens
Andra Amos, if ye should find a way of sendin' a message or comin'
yourself. Oh, and I've got a word to ye from a lady that we ken of.
She says, the sooner ye're back in Vawnity Fair the better she'll be
pleased, always provided ye've got over the Hill Difficulty.'

A smile screwed up his old face and he waved his whip in
farewell. I interpreted Mary's message as an incitement to speed,
but I could not make the pace. That was Gresson's business. I think I
was a little nettled, till I cheered myself by another interpretation.
She might be anxious for my safety, she might want to see me
again, anyhow the mere sending of the message showed I was not
forgotten. I was in a pleasant muse as I breasted the hill, keeping
discreetly in the cover of the many gullies. At the top I looked
down on Ranna and the sea.

There lay the _Tobermory busy unloading. It would be some time,
no doubt, before Gresson could leave. There was no row-boat in
the channel yet, and I might have to wait hours. I settled myself
snugly between two rocks, where I could not be seen, and where I
had a clear view of the sea and shore. But presently I found that I
wanted some long heather to make a couch, and I emerged to get
some. I had not raised my head for a second when I flopped down
again. For I had a neighbour on the hill-top.

He was about two hundred yards off, just reaching the crest,
and, unlike me, walking quite openly. His eyes were on Ranna, so
he did not notice me, but from my cover I scanned every line of
him. He looked an ordinary countryman, wearing badly cut, baggy
knickerbockers of the kind that gillies affect. He had a face like a
Portuguese Jew, but I had seen that type before among people with
Highland names; they might be Jews or not, but they could speak
Gaelic. Presently he disappeared. He had followed my example and
selected a hiding-place.

It was a clear, hot day, but very pleasant in that airy place. Good
scents came up from the sea, the heather was warm and fragrant,
bees droned about, and stray seagulls swept the ridge with their
wings. I took a look now and then towards my neighbour, but he
was deep in his hidey-hole. Most of the time I kept my glasses on
Ranna, and watched the doings of the _Tobermory. She was tied up at
the jetty, but seemed in no hurry to unload. I watched the captain
disembark and walk up to a house on the hillside. Then some idlers
sauntered down towards her and stood talking and smoking close
to her side. The captain returned and left again. A man with papers
in his hand appeared, and a woman with what looked like a telegram.
The mate went ashore in his best clothes. Then at last, after
midday, Gresson appeared. He joined the captain at the piermaster's
office, and presently emerged on the other side of the jetty where
some small boats were beached. A man from the _Tobermory came in
answer to his call, a boat was launched, and began to make its way
into the channel. Gresson sat in the stern, placidly eating his luncheon.

I watched every detail of that crossing with some satisfaction
that my forecast was turning out right. About half-way across,
Gresson took the oars, but soon surrendered them to the _Tobermory
man, and lit a pipe. He got out a pair of binoculars and raked my
hillside. I tried to see if my neighbour was making any signal, but
all was quiet. Presently the boat was hid from me by the bulge of
the hill, and I caught the sound of her scraping on the beach.

Gresson was not a hill-walker like my neighbour. It took him the
best part of an hour to get to the top, and he reached it at a point
not two yards from my hiding-place. I could hear by his labouring
breath that he was very blown. He walked straight over the crest
till he was out of sight of Ranna, and flung himself on the ground.
He was now about fifty yards from me, and I made shift to lessen
the distance. There was a grassy trench skirting the north side of
the hill, deep and thickly overgrown with heather. I wound my
way along it till I was about twelve yards from him, where I stuck,
owing to the trench dying away. When I peered out of the cover I
saw that the other man had joined him and that the idiots were
engaged in embracing each other.

I dared not move an inch nearer, and as they talked in a low
voice I could hear nothing of what they said. Nothing except one
phrase, which the strange man repeated twice, very emphatically.
'Tomorrow night,' he said, and I noticed that his voice had not the
Highland inflection which I looked for. Gresson nodded and glanced
at his watch, and then the two began to move downhill towards the
road I had travelled that morning.

I followed as best I could, using a shallow dry watercourse of
which sheep had made a track, and which kept me well below the
level of the moor. It took me down the hill, but some distance from
the line the pair were taking, and I had to reconnoitre frequently
to watch their movements. They were still a quarter of a mile or so
from the road, when they stopped and stared, and I stared with
them. On that lonely highway travellers were about as rare as
roadmenders, and what caught their eye was a farmer's gig driven
by a thick-set elderly man with a woollen comforter round his neck.

I had a bad moment, for I reckoned that if Gresson recognized
Amos he might take fright. Perhaps the driver of the gig thought
the same, for he appeared to be very drunk. He waved his whip, he
jiggoted the reins, and he made an effort to sing. He looked towards
the figures on the hillside, and cried out something. The gig
narrowly missed the ditch, and then to my relief the horse bolted.
Swaying like a ship in a gale, the whole outfit lurched out of sight
round the corner of hill where lay my cache. If Amos could stop
the beast and deliver the goods there, he had put up a masterly bit
of buffoonery.

The two men laughed at the performance, and then they parted.
Gresson retraced his steps up the hill. The other man - I called him
in my mind the Portuguese Jew - started off at a great pace due
west, across the road, and over a big patch of bog towards the
northern butt of the Coolin. He had some errand, which Gresson
knew about, and he was in a hurry to perform it. It was clearly my
job to get after him.

I had a rotten afternoon. The fellow covered the moorland miles
like a deer, and under the hot August sun I toiled on his trail. I had
to keep well behind, and as much as possible in cover, in case he
looked back; and that meant that when he had passed over a ridge I
had to double not to let him get too far ahead, and when we were
in an open place I had to make wide circuits to keep hidden. We
struck a road which crossed a low pass and skirted the flank of the
mountains, and this we followed till we were on the western side
and within sight of the sea. It was gorgeous weather, and out on the
blue water I saw cool sails moving and little breezes ruffling the
calm, while I was glowing like a furnace. Happily I was in fair
training, and I needed it. The Portuguese Jew must have done a
steady six miles an hour over abominable country.

About five o'clock we came to a point where I dared not follow.
The road ran flat by the edge of the sea, so that several miles of it
were visible. Moreover, the man had begun to look round every
few minutes. He was getting near something and wanted to be sure
that no one was in his neighbourhood. I left the road accordingly,
and took to the hillside, which to my undoing was one long
cascade of screes and tumbled rocks. I saw him drop over a rise
which seemed to mark the rim of a little bay into which descended
one of the big corries of the mountains. It must have been a good
half-hour later before I, at my greater altitude and with far worse
going, reached the same rim. I looked into the glen and my man
had disappeared.

He could not have crossed it, for the place was wider than I had
thought. A ring of black precipices came down to within half a
mile of the shore, and between them was a big stream - long,
shallow pools at the sea end and a chain of waterfalls above. He had
gone to earth like a badger somewhere, and I dared not move in
case he might be watching me from behind a boulder.

But even as I hesitated he appeared again, fording the stream, his
face set on the road we had come. Whatever his errand was he had
finished it, and was posting back to his master. For a moment I
thought I should follow him, but another instinct prevailed. He
had not come to this wild place for the scenery. Somewhere down
in the glen there was something or somebody that held the key of
the mystery. It was my business to stay there till I had unlocked it.
Besides, in two hours it would be dark, and I had had enough
walking for one day.

I made my way to the stream side and had a long drink. The
corrie behind me was lit up with the westering sun, and the bald cliffs
were flushed with pink and gold. On each side of the stream was
turf like a lawn, perhaps a hundred yards wide, and then a tangle of
long heather and boulders right up to the edge of the great rocks. I
had never seen a more delectable evening, but I could not enjoy its
peace because of my anxiety about the Portuguese Jew. He had not
been there more than half an hour, just about long enough for a
man to travel to the first ridge across the burn and back. Yet he
had found time to do his business. He might have left a letter in
some prearranged place - in which case I would stay there till the
man it was meant for turned up. Or he might have met someone,
though I didn't think that possible. As I scanned the acres of rough
moor and then looked at the sea lapping delicately on the grey sand
I had the feeling that a knotty problem was before me. It was too
dark to try to track his steps. That must be left for the morning,
and I prayed that there would be no rain in the night.

I ate for supper most of the braxy ham and oatcake I had
brought from Macmorran's cottage. It took some self-denial, for I
was ferociously hungry, to save a little for breakfast next morning.
Then I pulled heather and bracken and made myself a bed in the
shelter of a rock which stood on a knoll above the stream. My bed-
chamber was well hidden, but at the same time, if anything should
appear in the early dawn, it gave me a prospect. With my waterproof
I was perfectly warm, and, after smoking two pipes, I fell asleep.

My night's rest was broken. First it was a fox which came and
barked at my ear and woke me to a pitch-black night, with scarcely
a star showing. The next time it was nothing but a wandering hill-
wind, but as I sat up and listened I thought I saw a spark of light
near the edge of the sea. It was only for a second, but it disquieted
me. I got out and climbed on the top of the rock, but all was still
save for the gentle lap of the tide and the croak of some night bird
among the crags. The third time I was suddenly quite wide awake,
and without any reason, for I had not been dreaming. Now I have
slept hundreds of times alone beside my horse on the veld, and I
never knew any cause for such awakenings but the one, and that
was the presence near me of some human being. A man who is
accustomed to solitude gets this extra sense which announces like
an alarm-clock the approach of one of his kind.

But I could hear nothing. There was a scraping and rustling on
the moor, but that was only the wind and the little wild things of
the hills. A fox, perhaps, or a blue hare. I convinced my reason, but
not my senses, and for long I lay awake with my ears at full cock
and every nerve tense. Then I fell asleep, and woke to the first flush
of dawn.

The sun was behind the Coolin and the hills were black as ink,
but far out in the western seas was a broad band of gold. I got up
and went down to the shore. The mouth of the stream was shallow,
but as I moved south I came to a place where two small capes
enclosed an inlet. It must have been a fault in the volcanic rock, for
its depth was portentous. I stripped and dived far into its cold
abysses, but I did not reach the bottom. I came to the surface rather
breathless, and struck out to sea, where I floated on my back and
looked at the great rampart of crag. I saw that the place where I
had spent the night was only a little oasis of green at the base of
one of the grimmest corries the imagination could picture. It was as
desert as Damaraland. I noticed, too, how sharply the cliffs rose
from the level. There were chimneys and gullies by which a man
might have made his way to the summit, but no one of them could
have been scaled except by a mountaineer.

I was feeling better now, with all the frowsiness washed out of
me, and I dried myself by racing up and down the heather. Then I
noticed something. There were marks of human feet at the top of
the deep-water inlet - not mine, for they were on the other side.
The short sea-turf was bruised and trampled in several places, and
there were broken stems of bracken. I thought that some fisherman
had probably landed there to stretch his legs.

But that set me thinking of the Portuguese Jew. After breakfasting
on my last morsels of food - a knuckle of braxy and a bit of
oatcake - I set about tracking him from the place where he had first
entered the glen. To get my bearings, I went back over the road I
had come myself, and after a good deal of trouble I found his
spoor. It was pretty clear as far as the stream, for he had been
walking - or rather running - over ground with many patches of
gravel on it. After that it was difficult, and I lost it entirely in the
rough heather below the crags. All that I could make out for
certain was that he had crossed the stream, and that his business,
whatever it was, had been with the few acres of tumbled wilderness
below the precipices.

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