Brothers & Sisters - John & Anna Buchan Edition (Collection of Their Greatest Works). Buchan John
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of Liddesdale, his father, was a hale old man who might reasonably be expected to live for another ten years and so prevent his son’s career being compromised by a premature removal to the House of Lords. He had a safe seat for a London division, was a member of the Cabinet, and had a high reputation for the matter-of-fact oratory which has replaced the pre-war grandiloquence. People trusted him, because, in spite of his hidalgo-ish appearance, he was believed to have that combination of candour and intelligence which England desires in her public men. Also he was popular, for his record in the war and the rumour of a youth spent in adventurous travel touched the imagination of the ordinary citizen. At the moment he was being talked of for a great Imperial post which was soon to become vacant, and there was gossip, in the alternative, of a Ministerial readjustment which would make him the pivot of a controversial Government. It was a remarkable position for a man to have won in his early forties, who had entered public life with every disadvantage of birth.
“I suppose he’s happy,” said Leithen. “But I’ve always held that there was a chance of Charles kicking over the traces. I doubt if his ambition is an organic part of him and not stuck on with pins. There’s a fundamental daftness in all Merklands. I remember him at school.”
The two men finished their meal and retired to the smoking-room, where they drank their coffee abstractedly. Each was thinking about the other, and wondering what light the other’s case could shed on his own. The speculation gave each a faint glimmer of comfort.
Presently the voice of Sir Archibald Roylance was heard, and that ebullient young man flung himself down on a sofa beside Leithen, while Lord Lamancha selected a cigar. Sir Archie settled his game leg to his satisfaction, and filled an ancient pipe.
“Heavy weather,” he announced. “I’ve been tryin’ to cheer up old Charles and it’s been like castin’ a fly against a thirty-mile gale. I can’t make out what’s come over him. Here’s a deservin’ lad like me struggling at the foot of the ladder and not cast down, and there’s Charles high up on the top rungs as glum as an owl and declarin’ that the whole thing’s foolishness. Shockin’ spectacle for youth.”
Lamancha, who had found an arm-chair beside Palliser-Yeates, looked at the others and smiled wryly.
“Is that true, Charles?” Leithen asked. “Are you also feeling hipped? Because John and I have just been confessing to each other that we’re more fed up with everything in this gay world than we’ve ever been before in our useful lives.”
Lamancha nodded. “I don’t know what has come over me. I couldn’t face the House to-night, so I telephoned to Archie to come and cheer me. I suppose I’m stale, but it’s a new kind of staleness, for I’m perfectly fit in body, and I can’t honestly say I feel weary in mind. It’s simply that the light has gone out of the landscape. Nothing has any savour.”
The three men had been a school together, they had been contemporaries at the University, and close friends ever since. They had no secrets from each other. Leithen, into whose face and voice had come a remote hint of interest, gave a sketch of his own mood, and the diagnosis of the eminent consultant. Archie Roylance stared blankly from one to the other, as if some new thing had broken in upon his simple philosophy of life.
“You fellows beat me,” he cried. “Here you are, every one of you a swell of sorts, with every thing to make you cheerful, and you’re grousin’ like a labour battalion! You should be jolly well ashamed of yourselves. It’s fairly temptin’ Providence. What you want is some hard exercise. Go and sweat ten hours a day on a steep hill, and you’ll get rid of these notions.”
“My dear Archie,” said Leithen. “your prescription is too crude. I used to be fond enough of sport, but I wouldn’t stir a foot to catch a sixty-pound salmon or kill a fourteen pointer. I don’t want to. I see no fun in it. I’m blasé. It’s too easy.”
“Well, I’m dashed! You’re the worst spoiled chap I ever heard of, and a nice example to democracy.” Archie spoke as if his gods had been blasphemed.
“Democracy, anyhow, is a good example to us. I know now why workmen strike sometimes and can’t give any reason. We’re on strike—against our privileges.”
Archie was not listening. “Too easy, you say?” he repeated. “I call that pretty fair conceit. I’ve seen you miss birds often enough, old fellow.”
“Nevertheless, it seems to me too easy. Everything has become too easy, both work and play.”
“You can screw up the difficulty, you know. Try shootin’ with a twenty bore, or fishin’ for salmon with a nine-foot rod and a dry-fly cast.”
“I don’t want to kill anything,” said Palliser-Yeates. “I don’t see the fun of it.”
Archie was truly shocked. Then a light of reminiscence came into his eye. “You remind me of poor old Jim Tarras,” he said thoughtfully.
There were no inquiries about Jim Tarras, so Archie volunteered further news.
“You remember Jim? He had a little place somewhere in Moray, and spent most of his time shootin’ in East Africa. Poor chap, he went back there with Smuts in the war and perished of blackwater. Well, when his father died and he came home to settle down, he found it an uncommon dull job. So, to enliven it, he invented a new kind of sport. He knew all there was to be known about Shikar, and from trampin’ about the Highlands he had a pretty accurate knowledge of the country-side. So he used to write to the owner of a deer forest and present his compliments, and beg to inform him that between certain dates he proposed to kill one of his stags. When he had killed it he undertook to deliver it to the owner, for he wasn’t a thief.”
“I call that poaching on the grand scale,” observed Palliser-Yeates.
“Wasn’t it? Most of the fellows he wrote to accepted his challenge and told him to come and do his damnedest. Little Avington, I remember, turned on every man and boy about the place for three nights to watch the forest. Jim usually worked at night, you see. One or two curmudgeons talked of the police and prosecutin’ him, but public opinion was against them—too dashed unsportin’.”
“Did he always get his stag?” Leithen asked.
“In-var-iably, and got it off the ground and delivered it to the owner, for that was the rule of the game. Sometimes he had a precious near squeak, and Avington, who was going off his head at the time, tried to pot him—shot a gillie in the leg too. But Jim always won out. I should think he was the best Shikari God ever made.”
“Is that true, Archie?” Lamancha’s voice had a magisterial tone.
“True—as—true. I know all about it, far Wattie Lithgow, who was Jim’s man, is with me now. He and his wife keep house for me at Crask. Jim never took but the one man with him, and that was Wattie, and he made him just about as cunning an old dodger as himself.”
Leithen yawned. “What sort of a place is Crask?” he inquired.
“Tiny little place. No fishin’ except some hill lochs and only rough shootin’. I take it for the birds. Most marvellous nestin’ ground in Britain barrin’ some of the Outer Islands. I don’t know why it should be, but it is. Something to do with the Gulf Stream, maybe. Anyhow, I’ve got the greenshank breedin’ regularly and the red-throated diver, and half a dozen rare duck. It’s a marvellous stoppin’ place in spring too, for birds goin’ north.”
“Are you much there?”
“Generally in April, and always from the middle of August till the middle of October. You see, it’s about the only place I know where you can do exactly as you like. The house is stuck away up on a long slope of moor, and you see the road for a mile from the windows, so you’ve plenty of time to take to the hills if anybody comes to worry you. I roost there with old Sime, my butler, and the two Lithgows, and put up a pal now and then who likes the life. It’s the jolliest bit of the year for me.”
“Have you any neighbours?”
“Heaps, but they don’t trouble me much. Crask’s the earthenware