Jaikie pointed to the scene which was now spread before them, for they had emerged from the Nick of the Threshes and were beginning the long descent to the Garroch. The October afternoon was warm and windless, and not a wisp of cloud broke the level blue of the sky. Such weather in July would have meant that the distances were dim, but on this autumn day, which had begun with frost, there was a crystalline sharpness of outline in the remotest hills. The mountains huddled around the amphitheatre, the round bald forehead of the Yirnie, the twin peaks of the Caldron which hid a tarn in their corrie, the steel-grey fortress of the Calmarton, the vast menacing bulk of the Muneraw. On the far horizon the blue of the sky seemed to fade into white, and a hill shoulder which rose in one of the gaps had an air of infinite distance. The bog in the valley was a mosaic of colours like an Eastern carpet, and the Garroch water twined through it like some fantastic pictured stream in a missal. A glimpse could be had of Loch Garroch, dark as ink in the shadow of the Caldron. There were many sounds, the tinkle of falling burns far below, a faint calling of sheep, an occasional note of a bird. Yet the place had an overmastering silence, a quiet distilled of the blue heavens and the primeval desert. In that loneliness lay the tale of ages since the world’s birth, the song of life and death as uttered by wild living things since the rocks first had form.
The two did not speak for a little. They had seen that which touched in both some deep elemental spring of desire.
Down on the level of the moss, where the green track wound among the haggs, Dougal found his tongue.
“I would like your advice, Jaikie,” he said, “about a point of conduct. It’s not precisely a moral question, but it’s a matter of good taste. I’m drawing a big salary from the Craw firm, and I believe I give good value for it. But all the time I’m despising my job, and despising the paper I help to make up, and despising myself. Thank God, I’ve nothing to do with policy, but I ask myself if I’m justified in taking money from a thing that turns my stomach.”
“But you’re no more responsible for the paper than the head of the case-room that sets the type. You’re a technical expert.”
“That’s the answer I’ve been giving myself, but I’m not sure that it’s sound. It’s quite true that my leaving Craw’s would make no difference—they’d get as good a man next day at a lower wage—maybe at the same wage, for I will say that for them, they’re not skinflints. But it’s a bad thing to work at something you can’t respect. I’m condescending on my job, and that’s ruin for a man’s soul.”
“I see very little harm in the Craw papers,” said Jaikie. “They’re silly, but they’re decent enough.”
“Decent!” Dougal cried. “That’s just what they are not. They’re the most indecent publications on God’s earth. They’re not vicious, if that’s what you mean. They would be more decent if they had a touch of blackguardism. They pander to everything that’s shoddy and slushy and third-rate in human nature. Their politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking. Their endless stunts, their competitions and insurances and country-holiday schemes—that’s the ordinary dodge to get up their circulation, so as to raise their advertisement prices. I don’t mind that, for it’s just common business. It’s their uplift, their infernal uplift, that makes my spine cold. Oh, Lord! There’s not a vulgar instinct, not a half-baked silliness, in the whole nation that they don’t dig out and print in leaded type. And above all, there’s the man Craw!”
“Did you ever meet him?” Jaikie asked.
“Never. Who has? They tell me he has a house somewhere in the Canonry, when he gets tired of his apartments in foreign hotels. But I study Craw. I’m a specialist in Craw. I’ve four big press-cutting books at home full of Craw. Here’s some of the latest.”
Dougal dived into a pocket and produced a batch of newspaper cuttings.
“They’re mostly about Evallonia. I don’t worry about that. If Craw wants to be a kingmaker he must fight it out with his Evallonians… But listen to some of the other titles. ‘Mr Craw’s Advice to Youth!’ ‘Mr Craw on the Modern Drama.’—He must have sat in the darkness at the back of a box, for he’d never show up in the stalls.—’Mr Craw on Modern Marriage.’—A fine lot he knows about it!—’Mr Craw warns the Trade Unions.’—The devil he does!—’Mr Craw on the Greatness of England.’ ‘Mr Craw’s Open Letter to the President of the U.S.A.’ Will nobody give the body a flea in his ear?… I could write a book about Craw. He’s perpetually denouncing, but always with a hopeful smirk. I’ve discovered his formula. ‘This is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.’ He wants to be half tonic and half sedative, but for me he’s just a plain emetic.”
Dougal waved the cuttings like a flag.
“The man is impregnable, for he never reads any paper but his own, and he has himself guarded like a gun-factory. But I’ve a notion that some day I’ll get him face to face. Some day I’ll have the chance of telling him just what I think of him, and what every honest man—”
Jaikie by a dexterous twitch got possession of the cuttings, crumpled them into a ball, dropped it in a patch of peat, and ground it down with his heel.
“What’s that you’ve done?” Dougal cried angrily. “You’ve spoiled my Craw collection.”
“Better that than spoiling our holiday. Look here, Dougal, my lad. For a week you’ve got to put Craw and all his works out of your head. We are back in an older and pleasanter world, and I won’t have it wrecked by your filthy journalism… “
For the better part of five minutes there was a rough-and-tumble on the green moor-road, from which Jaikie ultimately escaped and fled. When peace was made the two found themselves at a gate in a dry-stone dyke.
“Thank God,” said Dougal. “Here is the Back House at last. I want my tea.”
Their track led them into a little yard behind the cottage, and they made their way to the front, where the slender highway which ascended the valley of the Garroch came to an end in a space of hill gravel before the door. The house was something more than a cottage, for fifty years ago it had been the residence of a prosperous sheep-farmer, before the fashion of “led” farms had spread over the upland glens. It was of two storeys and had a little wing at right angles, the corner between being filled with a huge bush of white roses. The roof was slated, the granite walls had been newly whitewashed, and were painted with the last glories of the tropæolum. A grove of scarlet-berried rowans flanked one end, beyond which lay the walled garden of potatoes and gooseberry bushes, varied with golden-rod and late-flowering phloxes. At the other end were the thatched outhouses and the walls of a sheepfold, where the apparatus for boiling tar rose like a miniature gallows above the dipping-trough. The place slept in a sunny peace. There was a hum of bees from the garden, a slow contented clucking of hens, the echo of a plashing stream descending the steeps of the Caldron, but the undertones made by these sounds were engulfed in the dominant silence. The scent of the moorlands, compounded of miles of stone and heather and winds sharp and pure as the sea, made a masterful background from which it was possible to pick out homelier odours—peat-reek, sheep, the smell of cooking food. To ear, eye, and nostril the place sent a message of intimate and delicate comfort.
The noise of their feet on the gravel brought someone in haste to the door. It was a woman of between forty and fifty, built like a heroine of the Sagas, deep-bosomed, massive, straight as a grenadier. Her broad comely face was brown like a berry, and the dark eyes and hair told of gipsy blood in her ancestry. Her arms were bare, for she had been making butter, and her skirts were kilted, revealing a bright-coloured petticoat, so that she had the air of a Highland warrior.
But in place of the boisterous welcome which Jaikie had expected, her greeting was laughter. She stood in the doorway and shook. Then she held up a hand to enjoin silence, and marched