John Macnab (Illustrated)

I - In which Three Gentlemen Confess Their Ennui-2

“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 tonight, 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 at 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 everything 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 countryside. 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 by 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-i-ably, 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, for 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 pot among the brazen vessels—mighty hard to get to and nothing to see when you get there. So the brazen vessels keep to themselves.”

Lamancha went to a shelf of books above a writing-table and returned with an atlas. “Who are your brazen vessels?” he asked.

“Well, my brassiest is old Claybody at Haripol—that’s four miles off across the hill.”

“Bit of a swine, isn’t he?” said Leithen.

“Oh, no. He’s rather a good old bird himself. Don’t care so much for his family. Then there’s Glenraden t’other side of the Larrig”—he indicated a point on the map which Lamancha was studying—“with a real old Highland grandee living in it—Alastair Raden—commanded the Scots Guards, I believe, in the year One. Family as old as the Flood and very poor, but just manage to hang on. He’s the last Raden that will live there, but that doesn’t matter so much as he has no son—only a brace of daughters. Then, of course, there’s the show place, Strathlarrig—horrible great house as large as a factory, but wonderful fine salmon-fishin’. Some Americans have got it this year—Boston or Philadelphia, I don’t remember which—very rich and said to be rather high-brow. There’s a son, I believe.”

Lamancha closed the atlas.

“Do you know any of these people, Archie?” he asked.

“Only the Claybodys—very slightly. I stayed with them in Suffolk for a cover shoot two years ago. The Radens have been to call on me, but I was out. The Bandicotts—that’s the Americans—are new this year.”

“Is the sport good?”

“The very best. Haripol is about the steepest and most sportin’ forest in the Highlands, and Glenraden is nearly as good. There’s no forest at Strathlarrig, but, as I’ve told you, amazin’ good salmon fishin’. For a west coast river, I should put the Larrig only second to the Laxford.”

Lamancha consulted the atlas again and appeared to ponder. Then he lifted his head, and his long face, which had a certain heaviness and sullenness in repose, was now lit by a smile which made it handsomer and younger.

“Could you have me at Crask this autumn?” he asked. “My wife has to go to Aix for a cure and I have no plans after the House rises.”

“I should jolly well think so,” cried Archie. “There’s heaps of room in the old house, and I promise you I’ll make you comfortable. Look here, you fellows! Why shouldn’t all three of you come? I can get in a couple of extra maids from Inverlarrig.”

“Excellent idea,” said Lamancha. “But you mustn’t bother about the maids. I’ll bring my own man, and we’ll have a male establishment, except for Mrs. Lithgow. . . . By the way, I suppose you can count on Mrs Lithgow?”

“How do you mean, ‘count’?” asked Archie, rather puzzled. Then a difficulty struck him. “But wouldn’t you be bored? I can’t show you much in the way of sport, and you’re not naturalists like me. It’s a quiet life, you know.”

“I shouldn’t be bored,” said Lamancha. “I should take steps to prevent it.”

Leithen and Palliser-Yeates seemed to divine his intention, for they simultaneously exclaimed.—“It isn’t fair to excite Archie, Charles,” the latter said. “You know that you’ll never do it.”

“I intend to have a try. Hang it, John, it’s the specific we were talking about—devilish difficult, devilish unpleasant, and calculated to make a man long for a dull life. Of course you two fellows will join me.”

“What on earth are you talkin’ about?” said the mystified Archie. “Join what?”

“We’re proposing to quarter ourselves on you, my lad, and take a leaf out of Jim Tarras’s book.”

Sir Archie first stared, then he laughed nervously, then he called upon his gods, then he laughed freely and long. “Do you really mean it? What an almighty rag! . . . But hold on a moment. It will be rather awkward for me to take a hand. You see I’ve just been adopted as prospective candidate for that part of the country.”

“So much the better. If you’re found out—which you won’t be—you’ll get the poaching vote solid, and a good deal more. Most men at heart are poachers.”

Archie shook a doubting head. “I don’t know about that. They’re an awfully respectable lot up there, and all those dashed stalkers and keepers and gillies are a sort of trade-union. The scallywags are a hopeless minority. If I get sent to quod——”

“You won’t get sent to quod. At the worst it will be a fine, and you can pay that. What’s the extreme penalty for this kind of offence, Ned?”

“I don’t know,” Leithen answered. “I’m not an authority on Scots law. But Archie’s perfectly right. We can’t go making a public exhibition of ourselves like this. We’re too old to be listening to the chimes at midnight.”

“Now, look here.” Lamancha had shaken off his glumness and was as tense and eager as a schoolboy. “Didn’t your doctor advise you to steal a horse? Well, this is a long sight easier than horse-stealing. It’s admitted that we three want a tonic. On second thoughts Archie had better stand out—he hasn’t our ailment, and a healthy man doesn’t need medicine. But we three need it, and this idea is an inspiration. Of course we take risks, but they’re sound sporting risks. After all, I’ve a reputation of a kind, and I put as much into the pool as anyone.”

His hearers regarded him with stony faces, but this in no way checked his ardour.

“It’s a perfectly first-class chance. A lonely house where you can see visitors a mile off, and an unsociable dog like Archie for a host. We write the letters and receive the answers at a London address. We arrive at Crask by stealth, and stay there unbeknown to the country-side, for Archie can count on his people and my man is a sepulchre. Also we’ve got Lithgow, who played the same game with Jim Tarras. We have a job which will want every bit of our nerve and ingenuity with a reasonable spice of danger—for, of course, if we fail we should cut queer figures. The thing is simply ordained by Heaven for our benefit. Of course you’ll come.”

“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Leithen.

“No more will I,” said Palliser-Yeates.

“Then I’ll go alone,” said Lamancha cheerfully. “I’m out for a cure, if you’re not. You’ve a month to make up your mind, and meanwhile a share in the syndicate remains open to you.”

Sir Archie looked as if he wished he had never mentioned the fatal name of Jim Tarras. “I say, you know, Charles,” he began hesitatingly, but was cut short.

“Are you going back on your invitation?” asked Lamancha sternly. “Very well, then, I’ve accepted it, and what’s more I’m going to draft a specimen letter that will go to your Highland grandee, and Claybody and the American.”

He rose with a bound and fetched a pencil and a sheet of notepaper from the nearest writing-table. “Here goes—Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I propose to kill a stag—or a salmon as the case may be—on your ground between midnight on —— and midnight ——. We can leave the dates open for the present. The animal, of course, remains your property and will be duly delivered to you. It is a condition that it must be removed wholly outside your bounds. In the event of the undersigned failing to achieve his purpose he will pay as forfeit one hundred pounds, and if successful fifty pounds to any charity you may appoint. I have the honour to be, your obedient humble servant.”

“What do you say to that?” he asked. “Formal, a little official, but perfectly civil, and the writer proposes to pay his way like a gentleman. Bound to make a good impression.”

“You’ve forgotten the signature,” Leithen observed dryly.

“It must be signed with a nom de guerre.” He thought for a moment. “I’ve got it. At once business-like and mysterious.” At the bottom of the draft he scrawled the name “John Macnab.”