Mr. Standfast
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 realise 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