‘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;
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.
In fact Wilde had been arrested by the time Buchan started writing for the paper. This story was published in April 1896 and was later included in Grey Weather (1899). A drover, driving his sheep between Edinburgh and Glasgow, takes refuge at a remote farmhouse where he enters into a Faustian pact with his landlord, who mysteriously has the same name.
The Devil he sang, the Devil he played
High and fast and free.
And this was ever the song he made,
As it was told to me.
Oh, I am the king of the air and the ground,
And lord of the seasons’ roll,
And I will give you a hundred pound,
If you will give me your soul!
from The Ballad of Grey Weather
The cattle market of Inverforth is, as all men know north of the Tweed, the greatest market of the kind in the land. For days in the late Autumn there is the lowing of oxen and the bleating of sheep among its high wooden pens, and in the rickety sale-rings the loud clamour of auctioneers and the talk of farmers. In the open yard where are the drovers and the butchers, a race always ungodly and law-despising, there is such a Babel of cries and curses as might wake the Seven Sleepers. From twenty different adjacent eating-houses comes the clatter of knives, where the country folk eat their dinner of beef and potatoes, with beer for sauce, and the collies grovel on the ground for stray morsels. Hither come a hundred types of men from the Highland cateran with scarce a word of English, and the shentleman-farmer of Inverness and Ross, to lowland graziers and city tradesmen, not to speak of blackguards of many nationalities and more professions.
It was there I first met Duncan Stewart of Clacham-harstan, in the Moor of Rannoch, and there I heard this story. He was an old man when I knew him, grizzled and wind-beaten; a prosperous man, too, with many herds like Jacob and much pasture. He had come down from the North with kyloes, and as he waited on the Englishmen with whom he had trysted, he sat with me through the long day and beguiled the time with many stories. He had been a drover in his youth, and had travelled on foot the length and breadth of Scotland; and his memory went back hale and vigorous to times which are now all but historical. This tale I heard among many others as we sat on a pen amid the smell of beasts and the jabber of Gaelic:
‘When I was just turned of twenty-five I was a wild young lad as ever was heard of. I had taken to the droving for the love of a wild life, and a wild life I led. My father’s heart would be broken long syne with my doings, and well for my mother that she was in her grave since I was six years old. I paid no heed to the ministrations of godly Mr Macdougall of the Isles, who bade me turn from the error of my ways, but went on my own evil course, making siller, for I was a braw lad at the work and a trusted, and knowing the inside of every public from the pier of Cromarty to the streets of York. I was a wild drinker caring in my cups for neither God nor man, a great hand with the cards, and fond of the lasses past all telling. It makes me shameful to this day to think on my evil life when I was twenty-five.
‘Well, it chanced that in the back of the month of September I found myself in the city of Edinburgh with a flock of fifty sheep which I had bought as a venture from a drunken bonnet-laird and was thinking of selling somewhere wast the country. They were braw beasts, Leicester every one of them, well-fed and dirt-cheap at the price I gave. So it was with a light heart that I drove them out of the town by the Merchiston Road along by the face of the Pentlands. Two or three friends came with me, all like myself for folly, but maybe a little bit poorer. Indeed, I cared little for them, and they valued me only for the whisky which I gave them to drink my health in at the parting. They left me on the near side of Colinton, and I went on my way alone.
‘Now, if you’ll be remembering the road, you will mind that at the place called Kirk Newton, just afore the road begins to twine over the Big Muir and almost at the head of the Water o’ Leith, there
