Brothers & Sisters - John & Anna Buchan Edition (Collection of Their Greatest Works). Buchan John

fires there, and hot water, and old soft leather armchairs, and an aroma of good food and good tobacco, and giant trout in glass cases, and pictures of Captain Barclay of Urie walking to London and Mr. Ramsay of Barnton winning a horse-race, and the three-volume edition of the Waverley Novels with many volumes missing, and indeed all those things which an inn should have. Also there used to be—there may still be—sound vintage claret in the cellars. The Black Bull expects its guests to arrive in every stage of dishevelment, and Dickson was received by a cordial landlord, who offered dry garments as a matter of course. The pack proved to have resisted the elements, and a suit of clothes and slippers were provided by the house. Dickson, after a glass of toddy, wallowed in a hot bath, which washed all the stiffness out of him. He had a fire in his bedroom, beside which he wrote the opening passages of that diary he had vowed to keep, descanting lyrically upon the joys of ill weather. At seven o’clock, warm and satisfied in soul, and with his body clad in raiment several sizes too large for it, he descended to dinner.

      At one end of the long table in the dining-room sat a group of anglers. They looked jovial fellows, and Dickson would fain have joined them; but, having been fishing all day in the Lock o’ the Threshes, they were talking their own talk, and he feared that his admiration for Izaak Walton did not qualify him to butt into the erudite discussions of fishermen. The landlord seemed to think likewise, for he drew back a chair for him at the other end, where sat a young man absorbed in a book. Dickson gave him good evening, and got an abstracted reply. The young man supped the Black Bull’s excellent broth with one hand, and with the other turned the pages of his volume. A glance convinced Dickson that the work was French, a literature which did not interest him. He knew little of the tongue and suspected it of impropriety.

      Another guest entered and took the chair opposite the bookish young man. He was also young—not more than thirty-three—and to Dickson’s eye was the kind of person he would have liked to resemble. He was tall and free from any superfluous flesh; his face was lean, fine-drawn, and deeply sunburnt, so that the hair above showed oddly pale; the hands were brown and beautifully shaped, but the forearm revealed by the loose cuffs of his shirt was as brawny as a blacksmith’s. He had rather pale blue eyes, which seemed to have looked much at the sun, and a small moustache the colour of ripe hay. His voice was low and pleasant, and he pronounced his words precisely, like a foreigner.

      He was very ready to talk, but in defiance of Dr. Johnson’s warning, his talk was all questions. He wanted to know everything about the neighbourhood—who lived in what houses, what were the distances between the towns, what harbours would admit what class of vessel. Smiling agreeably, he put Dickson through a catechism to which he knew none of the answers. The landlord was called in, and proved more helpful. But on one matter he was fairly at a loss. The catechist asked about a house called Darkwater, and was met with a shake of the head. “I know no sic-like name in this countryside, sir,” and the catechist looked disappointed.

      The literary young man said nothing, but ate trout abstractedly, one eye on his book. The fish had been caught by the anglers in the Loch o’ the Threshes, and phrases describing their capture floated from the other end of the table. The young man had a second helping, and then refused the excellent hill mutton that followed, contenting himself with cheese. Not so Dickson and the catechist. They ate everything that was set before them, topping up with a glass of port. Then the latter, who had been talking illuminatingly about Spain, rose, bowed, and left the table, leaving Dickson, who liked to linger over his meals, to the society of the ichthyophagous student.

      He nodded towards the book. “Interesting?” he asked.

      The young man shook his head and displayed the name on the cover. “Anatole France. I used to be crazy about him, but now he seems rather a back number.” Then he glanced towards the just-vacated chair. “Australian,” he said.

      “How d’you know?”

      “Can’t mistake them. There’s nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe to-day. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but most looked like Phoebus Apollo.”

      Dickson gazed with a new respect at his neighbour, for he had not associated him with battle-fields. During the war he had been a fervent patriot, but, though he had never heard a shot himself, so many of his friends’ sons and nephews, not to mention cousins of his own, had seen service, that he had come to regard the experience as commonplace. Lions in Africa and bandits in Mexico seemed to him novel and romantic things, but not trenches and airplanes which were the whole world’s property. But he could scarcely fit his neighbour into even his haziest picture of war. The young man was tall and a little round-shouldered; he had short-sighted, rather prominent brown eyes, untidy black hair and dark eyebrows which came near to meeting. He wore a knickerbocker suit of bluish-grey tweed, a pale blue shirt, a pale blue collar, and a dark blue tie—a symphony of colour which seemed too elaborately considered to be quite natural. Dickson had set him down as an artist or a newspaper correspondent, objects to him of lively interest. But now the classification must be reconsidered.

      “So you were in the war,” he said encouragingly.

      “Four blasted years,” was the savage reply. “And I never want to hear the name of the beastly thing again.”

      “You said he was an Australian,” said Dickson, casting back. “But I thought Australians had a queer accent, like the English.”

      “They’ve all kind of accents, but you can never mistake their voice. It’s got the sun in it. Canadians have got grinding ice in theirs, and Virginians have got butter. So have the Irish. In Britain there are no voices, only speaking-tubes. It isn’t safe to judge men by their accent only. You yourself I take to be Scotch, but for all I know you may be a senator from Chicago or a Boer General.”

      “I’m from Glasgow. My name’s Dickson McCunn.” He had a faint hope that the announcement might affect the other as it had affected the bagman at Kilchrist.

      “Golly, what a name!” exclaimed the young man rudely.

      Dickson was nettled. “It’s very old Highland,” he said. “It means the son of a dog.”

      “Which—Christian name or surname?” Then the young man appeared to think he had gone too far, for he smiled pleasantly. “And a very good name too. Mine is prosaic by comparison. They call me John Heritage.”

      “That,” said Dickson, mollified, “is like a name out of a book. With that name by rights you should be a poet.”

      Gloom settled on the young man’s countenance. “It’s a dashed sight too poetic. It’s like Edwin Arnold and Alfred Austin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Great poets have vulgar monosyllables for names, like Keats. The new Shakespeare when he comes along will probably be called Grubb or Jubber, if he isn’t Jones. With a name like yours I might have a chance. You should be the poet.”

      “I’m very fond of reading,” said Dickson modestly.

      A slow smile crumpled Mr. Heritage’s face. “There’s a fire in the smoking-room,” he observed as he rose. “We’d better bag the armchairs before these fishing louts take them.” Dickson followed obediently. This was the kind of chance acquaintance for whom he had hoped, and he was prepared to make the most of him.

      The fire burned bright in the little dusky smoking-room, lighted by one oil-lamp. Mr. Heritage flung himself into a chair, stretched his long legs, and lit a pipe.

      “You like reading?” he asked. “What sort? Any use for poetry?”

      “Plenty,” said Dickson. “I’ve aye been fond of learning it up and repeating it to myself when I had nothing to do. In church and waiting on trains, like. It used to be Tennyson, but now it’s more Browning. I can say a lot of Browning.”

      The other screwed his face into an expression of disgust. “I know the stuff. ‘Damask cheeks and dewy sister eyelids.’ Or else the Ercles vein—’God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.’ No good, Mr. McCunn. All back numbers. Poetry’s not a thing of pretty round phrases or noisy invocations. It’s life itself, with the tang of the raw world in it—not a