John MacNab (15 page)

‘Yes. I think they have, because they're fighters and we're only survivals. They will disappear, too, unless they learn their lesson ... You see, for a thousand years we have been going on here, and other people like us, but we only endured because we were alive. We have the usual conventional motto on our coat of arms –
Pro Deo et Rege –
a Heralds' College invention. But our Gaelic motto was very different – it was “Sons of Dogs, come and I will give you flesh.” As long as we lived up to that we flourished, but as soon as we settled down and went to sleep and became
rentiers
we were bound to decay ... My cousins at Glenaicill were just the same. Their motto was “What I have I hold”, and while they remembered it they were great people. But when they stopped holding they went out like a candle, and the last of them is now living in St Malo and a Lancashire cotton-spinner owns the place . . . When we had to fight hard for our possessions all the time, and give flesh to the sons of dogs who were our clan, we were strong men and women. There was a Raden with Robert Bruce – he fell with Douglas in the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre – and a Raden died beside the King at Flodden – and Radens were in everything that happened in the old days in Scotland and France. But civilisation killed them – they couldn't adapt themselves to it. Somehow the fire went out of the blood, and they became vegetables. Their only claim was the right of property, which is no right at all.'

‘That's what the Bolsheviks say,' said the puzzled Sir Archie.

‘Then I'm a Bolshevik. Nobody in the world today has a right to anything which he can't justify. That's not politics, it's the way nature works. Whatever you've got – rank or power or fame or money – you've got to justify it, and keep on justifying it, or go under. No law on earth can buttress up a thing which nature means to decay.'

‘D'you know that sounds to me pretty steep doctrine?'

‘No, it isn't. It isn't doctrine, and it isn't politics, it's common sense. I don't mean that we want some silly government redistributing everybody's property. I mean that people should realise that whatever they've got they hold under a perpetual challenge, and they are bound to meet that challenge. Then we'll have living creatures instead of mummies.'

Sir Archie stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘I daresay there's a lot in that. But what would Colonel Raden say to it?'

‘He would say I was a bandit. And yet he would probably agree with me in the end. Agatha wouldn't, of course. She adores decay – sad old memories and lost causes and all the rest of it. She's a sentimentalist, and she'll marry Junius and go to America, where everybody is sentimental, and be the sweetest thing in the Western hemisphere, and live happy ever after. I'm quite different. I believe I'm kind, but I'm certainly hard-hearted. I suppose it's Harald Blacktooth coming out.'

Janet had got off her perch, and was standing a yard from Sir Archie, her hat in her hand and the light wind ruffling her hair. The young man, who had no skill in analysing his feelings, felt obscurely that she fitted most exquisitely into the picture of rock and wood and water, that she was, in very truth, a part of his clean elemental world of the hill-tops.

‘What about yourself?' she asked. ‘In the words of Mr Bandicott, are you going to make good?'

She asked the question with such an air of frank comradeship that Sir Archie was in no way embarrassed. Indeed he was immensely delighted.

‘I hope so,' he said. ‘But I don't know ... I'm a bit of a slacker. There doesn't seem much worth doing since the war.'

‘What nonsense! You find a thousand things worth doing, but they're not enough – and they're not big enough. Do you mean to say you want to hang up your hat at your age and go to sleep? You need to be challenged.'

‘I expect I do,' he murmured.

‘Well,
I
challenge you. You're fit and you're young, and you did extraordinarily well in the war, and you've hosts of friends, and – and – you're well off, aren't you?'

‘Pretty fair. You see, I had a long minority, and – oh yes, I've far more money than I want.'

‘There you are. I challenge you. You're bound to justify what you've got. I won't have you idling away your life till you end as the kind of lean brown old gentleman in a bowler hat that one sees at Newmarket. It's a very nice type, but it's not good enough for you, and I won't have it. You must not be a dilettante pottering about with birds and a little sport and a little politics.'

Sir Archie had been preached at occasionally in his life, but never quite in this way. He was preposterously pleased and also a little solemnised.

‘I'm quite serious about politics.'

‘I wonder,' said Janet, smiling. ‘I don't mean scraping into Parliament, but real politics – putting the broken pieces together, you know. Papa and the rest of our class want to treat politics like another kind of property in which they have a vested interest. But it won't do – not in the world we live in today. If you're going to do any good you must feel the challenge and be ready to meet it. And then you must become yourself a challenger. You must be like John Macnab.'

Sir Archie stared.

‘I don't mean that I want you to make poaching wagers like John. You can't live in a place and play those tricks with your neighbours. But I want you to follow what Mr Bandicott would call the “John Macnab proposition”. It's so good for everybody concerned. Papa has never had so much fun out of his forest as in the days he was repelling invasion, and even Mr Junius found a new interest in the Larrig ... I'm all for property, if you can defend it; but there are too many fatted calves in the world.'

Sir Archie suddenly broke into loud laughter.

‘Most people tell me I'm too mad to do much good in anything. But you say I'm not mad enough. Well, I'm all for challengin' the fatted calves, but I don't fancy that's the road that leads to the Cabinet. More like the jail, with a red flag firmly clenched in my manly hand.'

The girl laughed too. ‘Papa says that the man who doesn't give a damn for anybody can do anything he likes in the world. Most people give many damns for all kinds of foolish things. Mr Claybody, for example – his smart friends, like Lord Lamancha and the Attorney-General – what is his name? – Leithen? – and his silly little position, and his father's new peerage. But you're not like that. I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for the few right things and not caring a straw about the rest.'

Had anyone hinted to Sir Archie that a young woman on a Scots mountain could lecture him gravely on his future and still remain a ravishing and adorable thing he would have dismissed the suggestion with incredulity. At the back of his head he had that fear of women as something mysterious and unintelligible which belongs to a motherless and sisterless childhood, and a youth spent almost wholly in the company of men. He had immense compassion for a sex which seemed to him to have a hard patch to hoe in the world, and this pitifulness had always kept him from any conduct which might harm a woman. His numerous fancies had been light and transient like thistledown, and his heart had been wholly unscathed. Fear that he might stumble into marriage had made him as shy as a woodcock – a fear not without grounds, for a friend had once proposed to write a book called
Lives of the Hunted,
with a chapter on Archie. Wherefore, his hour having come, he had cascaded into love with desperate completeness, and with the freshness of a mind unstaled by disillusion ... All he knew was that a miraculous being had suddenly flooded his world with a new radiance, and was now opening doors and inviting him to dazzling prospects. He felt at once marvellously confident, and supremely humble. Never had mistress a more docile pupil.

They wandered back to the house, and Janet gave him tea in a room full of faded chintzes and Chinese-Chippendale mirrors. Then, when the sun was declining behind the Carnmore peaks, Sir Archie at last took his leave. His head was in a happy confusion, but two ideas rose above the surge – he would seize the earliest chance of asking Janet to marry him, and by all his gods he must not make a fool of himself at Muirtown. She had challenged him, and he had accepted the challenge; he must make it good before he could become in turn a challenger. It may be doubtful if Sir Archie had any very clear notions on the matter, but he was aware that he had received an inspiration, and that somehow or other everything was now to be different. . .First for that confounded speech. He strove to recollect the sentences which had followed each other so trippingly during his morning's walk. But he could not concentrate his mind. Peace treaties and German reparations and the recognition of Russia flitted from him like a rapid film, to be replaced by a ‘close-up' of a girl's face. Besides, he wanted to sing, and when song flows to the lips consecutive thought is washed out of the brain.

In this happy and exalted mood, dedicate to great enterprises of love and service, Sir Archie entered the Crask smoking-room, to be brought heavily to earth by the sordid business of John Macnab.

Leithen was there, reading a volume of Sir Walter Scott with an air of divine detachment. Lamancha, very warm and dishevelled, was endeavouring to quench his thirst with a large whisky-and-soda; Palliser-Yeates, also the worse for wear, lay in an attitude of extreme fatigue on a sofa; Crossby, who had sought sanctuary at Crask, was busy with the newspapers which had just arrived, while Wattie Iithgow stood leaning on his crook staring into vacancy, like a clown from some stage Arcadia.

‘Where on earth have you been all day, Archie?' Lamancha asked sternly.

‘I walked over to Glenraden and stayed to luncheon. They're all hot on your side there – Bandicott too. There's a general feelin' that young Claybody wants takin' down a peg.'

‘Much good that will do us. John and Wattle and I have been crawling all day round the Haripol marches. It's pretty clear what they'll do – you think so, Wattie?'

‘Alan Macnicol is not altogether a fule. Aye, I ken fine what they'll dae.'

‘Clear the beasts off the ground?' Archie suggested.

‘No,' said Lamancha. ‘Move them into the Sanctuary, and the Sanctuary is in the very heart of the forest – between Sgurr Mor and Sgurr Dearg at the head of the Reascuill. It won't take many men to watch it. And the mischief is that Haripol is the one forest where it can be done quite simply. It's so infernally rough that if the deer were all over it I would back myself to get a shot with a fair chance of removing the beast, but if every stag is inside an inner corral it will be the devil's own business to get within a thousand yards of them – let alone shift the carcass.'

‘If the wind keeps in the west,' said Wattie, ‘it is a manifest impossibeelity. If it was in the north there would be a verra wee sma' chance. All other airts are hopeless. We maun just possess our souls in patience, and see what the day brings forth . . . I'll awa and mak arrangements for the morn.'

Lamancha nodded after the retreating figure.

‘He is determined to go to Muirtown tomorrow. Says you promised that he should be present when you made your first bow in public, and that he has arranged with Shapp to drive him in the Ford ... But about Haripol. This idea of Wattle's – and I expect it's right – makes the job look pretty desperate. I had worked out a very sound scheme to set my Lord Claybody guessing – similar to John's Glenraden plan but more ingenious; but what's the use of bluff if every beast is snug in an upper corrie with a cordon of Claybody's men round it? Wattie says that Haripol is fairly crawling with gillies.'

Crossby raised his head from his journalistic researches. ‘The papers have got my story all right, I see. The first one, I mean – the “Return of Harald Blacktooth”. They've featured it well, too, and I expect the evening papers are now going large on it. But it's nothing to what the second will be to-morrow morning. I'm prepared to bet that our Scottish Tutankhamen drops out of the running, and that the Press of this land thinks of nothing for a week except the salmon Sir Edward got last night. It's the silly season, remember!'

Lamancha's jaw dropped. ‘Crossby, I don't want to dash your natural satisfaction, but I'm afraid you've put me finally in the cart. If the public wakes up and takes an interest in Haripol, I may as well chuck in my hand.'

‘I wasn't such an ass as to mention Haripol,' said the correspondent.

‘No, but of course it will get out. Some of your journalistic colleagues will hear of it at Strathlarrig, and, finding that the interest has departed from Harald Blacktooth, will make a bee-line for Haripol. Your success, which I don't grudge you, will be my ruin. In any case the Claybodys will be put on their mettle, for, if they are beaten by John Macnab, they know they'll be a public laughing-stock . . . What sort of fellow is young Clay-body, Archie?'

‘Bit shaggy about the heels. Great admirer of yours. Ask Ned – he said he knew Ned very well.'

Leithen raised his eyes from
Redgauntlet.
‘Never heard of the fellow in my life.'

‘Oh yes, you have. He said he had briefed you in a big case.'

‘Well, you can't expect me to know all my clients any more than John knows the customers of his little bank.' Leithen relapsed into Sir Walter.

‘I'm going to have a bath.' Lamancha rose and cautiously relaxed his weary limbs. ‘I seem to be in for the most imbecile escapade in history with about one chance in a billion. That's Wattle's estimate, and he knows what a billion is, which I don't.

‘What about dropping it?' Archie suggested; for, though he was sworn to the ‘John Macnab proposition', he was growing very nervous about this particular manifestation. ‘Young Clay-body is an ugly customer, and we don't want the thing to end in bad blood. Besides, you're cured already – you told me so yesterday.'