Below them, as they talked, ran the sandy hill-road, with its white gravel glistening in the westering sunlight. Far down lay a cottage, which was as clear as if it had been not a score of yards away. Thither a man was walking, a shepherd in his Sabbath clothes, who had been to the country town and was returning laden with many parcels. Distant as it was, the whole scene lay plain before the two. A child, a little girl, ran from the cottage at her father’s approach, and clung lovingly to his knee. Then with childish strength she clutched a package, and in another second the pair had entered the house. By some simultaneous impulse both men had directed their eyes to the place and had seen the whole of the little comedy.
And lo! to the other’s amazement the tramp’s eyes glistened as he looked.
‘You do not believe in the domestic virtues?’ said the one very slowly.
‘Not I,’ said the tramp. ‘I have told you that I don’t. The essence of social life, civil and domestic, is bearing one another’s burdens and sharing one another’s pleasures. I am an individualist with all my heart. I grant you things would come to a pretty pass if all were of my way of thinking; but there – it is a matter of temperament, and such temperaments are scarce.’
‘Is it not,’ said his interrogator, ‘the old question whether man or nature is the more productive study? You cannot maintain that these hills afford the same view-ground of character as the city and the bustle of life. I speak solely as a spectator. I do not even ask you to go down and mix with the crowd and taste its life.’ And there seemed no incongruity in talking thus to the man of the wayside and many tatters.
‘No, no,’ said the other. ‘God forbid that I should talk so callously of the sorrows and toils of my fellows. I do not seek to scrutinise the character of others. All my concern is with myself. It is not a man’s duty to seek out his kind and strive with them and live among them. All that he must do is to play his part well as he may chance upon them. It is not richness and fulness of life that I want. I am not ambitious. Ease, ataraxia, you know, is enough for me.’
‘But the rewards?’ said the one, questioningly.
‘Ah, the rewards! You cannot know them.’ And the man’s voice took a new tone. His eyes lit up, and, looking over the darkening valley, he spoke to his comrade many things, and sang in his ear ever so sweetly the ‘Song of the Open Road’. He told of the changes of the season – the rigours of winter, the early flush of spring, the mellow joys of summer, and autumn with her pomp and decay. He told of clear starlit nights, when the hill breezes blow over the moors and the birds wake the sleeper; of windy mornings, when the mist trails from the hills and dun clouds scud across the sky; of long hot days in the heather among the odours of thyme and bog-myrtle and the lark’s clear song. Then he changed his tune, and spoke of the old romance of the wayside, that romance which gipsies and wanderers feel, of motion amid rest, of ease in the hurry of the seasons, of progress over the hills and far away, into that land unknown which dawns upon the sight with each new morrow. And he spoke, too, of the human element in it all which is so dear to the man versed in its mysteries, of heroism amid the sordid, the pathetic in the coarse, the kindly in the most repulsive. And as he spoke he grew eloquent with it all, and his hearer marvelled at such words, till he looked away from the rags to the keen, eager face, and then he marvelled no more.
But by this time the darkness had all but come, and the speaker cut himself short, laughing at his own rhetoric.
‘Losh, it’s comin’ on for nicht,’ he said, speaking broadly, as if to point a contrast, ‘and time slips by when ye get on the crack. I’ll hae to be movin’ if I’m to win to Jock Rorison’s the nicht. I aye bide wi’ Jock, when I’m hereaways, if I dinna sleep ootbye. Will ye be gaun doun the road?’
‘Yes, I go by that way too. I’ll be glad to accompany you;’ and the two went down the winding path together. Overhead the stars, faint with haze, winked and glittered; and below in the valley a light or two shone out from the blue darkness. The soft, fragrant night airs rustled over the heather, and borne on them came the faint twitter of sleepy birds. To one of the pair all seemed so new, so strange, that it was like an excerpt from the caliph’s journal. The wondrous natural loveliness around seemed to be a fitting environment for the strange being at his side; and he reflected somewhat ruefully as he walked that what folk call the romance of life springs in the main from people of hot heads and ill-balanced judgments, who seek to put their imperfect, immature little philosophies into action.
They stopped at the first wayside cottage, and the tramp knocked. The door was opened by a grave-faced woman, for in these uplands the sharp air seems to form the human countenance into a passive mould. But at the sight of the man her eyes brightened and she half-offered admittance.
‘I’m no comin’ in the now,’ he explained. ‘I juist ca’ed as I passed to tell ye that as I cam’ bye the schule at Callowa’, the maister gave me a wheen buiks to tak’ to your laddie.’
‘Thank ye, and it’s rale guid o’ ye to bring them. He’s awfu’ keen o’ the readin’, and gettin’ on uncommon weel. It’s a wunnerfu’ thing eddication; how it mak’s a thing different to some folk. But of course you, that never kenned what it was, canna understand it in the same way.’
‘No,’ said the tramp humbly, ‘we canna, but it’s a wunnerfu’ thing. Na, I’ll no come in. Gude nicht,’ and again they took the road.
By the time they crossed the water the darkness had fairly come, and a bright horn rose behind the pines. Somewhere in thicket a bird sang – no nightingale – and the two men stopped to listen. Beyond lay the little hamlet of a dozen houses, a rambling, tangled clachan, looking grey and ghostlike in the night.
At one door he knocked and a man came, an old man bent with age and toil, who greeted them kindly.
‘I juist cam’ frae your son,’ the visitor explained. ‘I gave him a ca’ in as I was passin’. He’s verra weel, and he bade me tell ye that he’s comin’ ower the morn’s week to see ye. I was to tell ye, tae, that he’s sold his hoggs at twenty-seven, and that he’s bocht Crichope yins this ’ear.’
Again he halted, and this time it was at a very little dwelling somewhat beyond the others, standing alone in its garden of gooseberry and marigold. This time the man who waited at the gate saw a pretty, slim lass stand in the doorway, who blushed at the message which was brought her. For her lover lived many a mile over the hills and saw her but every second Sabbath, so their primitive love-letters were sent by word of mouth. And sometimes there came a present from the market town, and there went back something knitted by the girl’s own fair fingers; and so the harmless comedy was played, as it is played and will be played all the world over.
Once more the two went on their way, the one silent, the other humming a light country catch. The mind of the one was occupied with many problems, among them that hard one of the adjustment of a man to his neighbours, and the place of ambition in the scale of the virtues. Somehow or other his pride of intellect, of strength, seemed to be deserting him, and in its place there came a better feeling, humble and kindly, a sense that the world is full of more things than any man has ever writ in black and white.
But now it was the cross-road where their paths were severed. They had known each other a bare hour, and now they were the fastest friends. At parting the one shook the other’s hand. ‘You are a very pretty kind of individualist,’ he said.
Buchan contributed three stories to The Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley’s magazine of the Aesthetic movement that during its thirteen issues published such writers as George Gissing and W.B. Yeats. John Betjeman in his ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ sums up the surprise with which this association is often greeted:
So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book
And Buchan has got in it now;