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

man the outdoor world was revealing itself as something strange and wild and yet with an odd kindness at the heart of it. Dimly there was a revelation at work, not only of Nature but of his own soul.

      Jaikie’s voice woke him out of his dreams. He had halted, and was pointing to a bird high up in the sky.

      “There’s a buzzard,” he cried. “Listen. You’re a great writer, Mr Craw, but I think that most writers go wrong about birds. How would you describe that sound?”

      “Mewing,” was the answer.

      “Right. People talk about a buzzard screaming, but it mews like a sick cat … I’ve heard a kestrel scream, but not a buzzard. Listen to that, too. That’s a raven.”

      A bird was coasting along the hill-side, with its mate higher up on a bank of shingle.

      “They say a raven croaks. It’s sharper than that. It’s a bark… Words are good things, if you get them right.”

      Mr Craw was interested. Words were his stock in trade, out of which he had won fortune. Was there not capital to be made out of these novel experiences? He saw himself writing with a new realism. He never read criticisms, but he was aware that he had his critics. Here was a chance to confound them.

      “I thought that you might want to write,” Jaikie went on, “so I brought something in my pack. Barbon said you had a special kind of envelope in which you sent your articles, and that these envelopes were opened first in the mail at your office. I got a batch of them from him, and some paper and pencils. He said you always wrote with a pencil.”

      Mr Craw was touched. He had not expected such consideration from this taciturn young man. He was also flattered. This youth realised that his was an acquisitive and forward-looking mind, which could turn a harsh experience into a message of comfort for the world. His brain began to work happily at the delightful task of composition. He thought of vivid phrases about weather, homely idioms heard in the inn, word-pictures of landscapes, tough shreds of philosophy, and all coloured with a fine, manly, out-of-doors emotion. There was a new manner waiting for him. When they sat down to lunch by a well-head very near the top of the Callowa watershed, he felt the cheerfulness of one on the brink of successful creation.

      Munching his scones and cheese, he became talkative.

      “You are a young man,” he said. “I can remember when I also was twenty. It was a happy time, full of dreams. It has been my good fortune to carry those dreams with me throughout my life. Yes, I think I was not yet twenty when I acquired my philosophy. The revelation came to me after reading Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Characteristics.’ Do you know the essay?”

      Jaikie shook his head. He was an omnivorous reader, but he had found Carlyle heavy going.

      “Ah, well! That great man is too little read to-day, but his turn will come again. I learned from him not to put too high a value upon the mere intellect. He taught me that the healthy life is the unconscious life, and that it is in man’s dim illogical instincts that truth often lies. We are suffering to-day, Mr Galt, from a surfeit of clever logicians. But it is the biologist rather than the logician or the mathematician to whom we should look for guidance. The infinite power and value of the unreasoned has always been one of my master principles.”

      “I know,” said Jaikie. He remembered various articles above Mr Craw’s signature which had appealed to what he called “the abiding instincts of the people,” and he had wondered at the time how any man could be so dogmatic about the imponderable.

      “From that principle,” the other went on, “I deduce my optimism. If we live by reason only we must often take a dark view of the world and lose hope. But the irrational instinct is always hopeful, for it is the instinct to live. You must have observed the astonishing cheerfulness of the plain man, when the intellectual despairs. It was so in the War. Optimism is not a pre-condition of thought, but it is a pre-condition of life. Thus mankind, which has the will to continue, ‘never turns its back, but marches breast-forward.’” He filled his chest and delivered the full quotation from Browning.

      Jaikie, to whom Browning had always seemed like a slightly intoxicated parson, shifted uncomfortably.

      “I hope you do not affect pessimism,” said Mr Craw. “I believe it is often a foolish pose of youth. Dishonest, too.”

      “I don’t know,” was the answer. “No. I’m not a pessimist. But I haven’t been through bad enough times to justify me in being an optimist. You want to have been pretty hardly tried before you have any right to say that the world is good.”

      “I do not follow.”

      “I mean that to declare oneself an optimist, without having been down into the pit and come out on the other side, looks rather like bragging.”

      “I differ profoundly. Personal experience is not the decisive factor. You have the testimony of the ages to support your faith.”

      “Did you ever read Candide?” Jaikie asked.

      “No,” said Mr Craw. “Why?”

      But Jaikie felt that it would take too long to explain, so he did not answer.

      The drove-road meandered up and down glens and across hill-shoulders till it found itself descending to the valley of one of the Callowa’s principal tributaries, in which ran a road from Gledmouth to Portaway. The travellers late in the afternoon came to the edge of that road, which on their left might be seen winding down from the low moorish tableland by which it had circumvented the barrier of the high mountains. On their right, a quarter of a mile away, it forked, one branch continuing down the stream to Portaway, twelve miles distant, while the other kept west around a wooded spur of hill.

      Mr Craw squatted luxuriously on a dry bank of heather. He had not a notion where he had got to, but spiritually he was at ease, for he felt once again master of himself. He had stopped forecasting the immediate future, and had his eye on the articles which he was going to write, the fresh accent he would bring to his messages. He sat in a bush like a broody hen, the now shapeless Homburg hat squashed over his head, the image of a ruminating tramp.

      Jaikie had gone down to the road fifty yards away, where a stream fell in pools. He was thirsty, since, unlike his companion, he had not drunk copiously of wayside fountains. As he knelt to drink, the noise of an approaching car made him raise his head, and he watched an ancient Ford pass him and take the fork on the left, which was the road to Portaway. It was clearly a hired car, presumably from Gledmouth. In it sat the kind of driver one would expect, a youth with a cap on one side of his brow and an untidy mackintosh. The other occupant was a young man wearing a light grey overcoat and a bowler hat, a young man with a high-coloured face, and a small yellow moustache. It was a lonely place and an unfrequented road, but to his surprise he knew the traveller.

      He watched the car swing down the valley towards Portaway, and was busy piecing together certain recollections, when he was recalled to attention by the shouts of Mr Craw from the hill-side. Mr Craw was in a state of excitement. He ran the fifty yards towards Jaikie with surprising agility.

      “Did you see that?” he puffed. “The man in the car. It’s my secretary, Sigismund Allins. I tried to stop him, but I was too late. He was on holiday in Spain, and was not expected back for another fortnight. I can only assume that Barbon has recalled him by wire. What a pity we missed him, for he could have provided us with the money we need. At any rate he could have arranged for sending it and my clothes from Castle Gay without troubling you to go there… I am relieved to think Allins is back. He is a very resourceful man in an emergency.”

      “You are sure it was he?”

      “Absolutely certain. I had a good look at him as the car passed, but I found my voice too late. I may be trusted to recognise the inmates of my own household.”

      Jaikie too had recognised the man, though he did not know his name. His memory went back to an evening in Cambridge a year before, when he had dined in what for him was strange company—the Grey Goose Club, a fraternity of rich young men who affected the Turf. It had been the day before the Cambridgeshire, and the