Rising man, they say, and I don’t wonder. I bet that fellow is at the top before he dies.”
“Is he keen on shooting?” I asked, for it was the usual question.
Not much, George thought. You could never expect a man like that to be good in the same way as fools like himself; they had better things to think about. After all, what were grouse and salmon but vanities, and the killing of them futility? said Mr. Winterham, by way of blaspheming his idols.
“I was writing to my sister, Lady Clanroyden, you know,” he went on, “and I mentioned that a chap of the name of Layden was coming. And here she writes to me to-day and can speak about nothing but the man. She says that the Cravens have taken him up, and that he is going to marry the rich Miss Clavering, and that the Prime Minister said to somebody that he would be dashed if this chap wasn’t the best they had. Where the deuce did I leave Mabel’s letter?” And George went indoors upon the quest.
Shortly after Layden came out, and soon we all sat watching the dusk gather over miles of spongy moor and vague tangled birchwoods. It is hard for one who is clearly the sole representative of light amid barbarism to escape from a certain seeming of pedantry and a walk aloof and apart. I watched the man carefully, for he fascinated me, and if I had admired his nimble wits at dinner, the more now did I admire his tact. By some cunning art he drove out all trace of superiority from his air; he was the ordinary good fellow, dull, weary like the rest, vastly relishing tobacco, and staring with vacant eyes to the evening.
The last day of my visit to the Forest I have some occasion to remember. It was marked by a display of weather, which I, who am something of a connoisseur in the thing, have never seen approached in this land or elsewhere. The morning had been hazy and damp, with mist over the hill-tops and the air lifeless. But about mid-day a wind came out of the southwest which sent the vapour flying, and left the tops bald and distant. We had been shooting over the Cauldshaw Head, and about five in the afternoon landed on a spur of the Little Muneraw above the tarn which they call the Loch o’ the Threshes. Thence one sees a great prospect of wild country, with birchwoods like smoke and sudden rifts which are the glens of streams. On this afternoon the air was cool and fine, the sky a level grey, the water like ink beneath dull-gleaming crags. But the bare details were but a hundredth part of the scene; for over all hung an air of silence, deep, calm, impenetrable,—the quiet distilled of the endless moors, the grey heavens, the primeval desert. It was the incarnate mystery of Life, for in that utter loneliness lay the tale of ages since the world’s birth, the song of being and death as uttered by wild living things since the rocks had form. The sight had the glamour of a witch’s chant; it cried aloud for recognition, driving from the heart all other loves and fervours, and touching the savage elemental springs of desire.
We sat in scattered places on the hillside, all gazing our fill of the wild prospect, even the keepers, to whom it was a matter of daily repetition. None spoke, for none had the gift of words; only in each mind was the same dumb and unattainable longing. Then Layden began to talk, and we listened. In another it would have been mere impertinence, for another would have prated and fallen into easy rhetoric; but this man had the art of speech, and his words were few and chosen. In a second he was done, but all had heard and were satisfied; for he had told the old tale of the tent by the running water and the twin candle- stars in heaven, of morning and evening under the sky and the whole lust of the gipsy life. Every man there had seen a thousand fold more of the very thing he spoke of, had gone to the heart of savagery, pioneering in the Himalayas, shooting in the Rockies, or bearing the heat of tropical sport. And yet this slim townsman, who could not shoot straight, to whom Scots hills were a revelation of the immense, and who was in his proper element on a London pavement,—this man could read the sentiment so that every hearer’s heart went out to answer.
As we went home I saw by his white face that he was overtired, and he questioned me irritably about the forwarding of letters. So there and then I prayed Heaven for the gift of speech, which makes a careless spectator the interpreter of voiceless passion.
II
Three years later I found myself in England, a bronzed barbarian fresh from wild life in north Finland, and glad of a change to the pleasant domesticity of home. It was early spring, and I drifted to my cousin’s house of Heston, after the aimless fashion of the wanderer returned. Heston is a pleasant place to stay in at all times, but pleasantest in spring, for it stands on the last ridge of a Devon moor, whence rolls a wide land of wood and meadow to a faint blue line of sea. The hedgerows were already bursting into leaf, and brimming waters slipped through fresh green grasses. All things were fragrant of homeland and the peace of centuries.
At Heston I met my excellent friend Wratislaw, a crabbed, cynical, hard- working, and sore-battered man, whose excursions in high politics had not soothed his temper. His whole life was a perpetual effort to make himself understood, and as he had started with somewhat difficult theories his recognition had been slow. But it was sure; men respected him sincerely if from afar; in his own line he was pre-eminent, and gradually he was drawing to himself the work in a great office of State where difficulty was equally mated with honour.
“Well, you old madman,” he cried, “where have you been lost all these months? We heard marvellous stories about you, and there was talk of a search-party. So you chose to kill the fatted calf here of all places. I should have gone elsewhere; it will be too much of a show this week.”
“Who are coming?” I groaned resignedly.
“Lawerdale for one,” he answered. I nodded; Lawerdale was a very great man in whom I had no manner of interest. “Then there are Rogerson, and Lady Afflint and Charlie Erskine.”
“Is that the lot?”
“Wait a moment. Oh, by Jove, I forgot; there’s Layden coming, the great Layden.”
“I once met a Layden; I wonder if it’s the same man.”
“Probably,—cousin of Urquhart’s.”
“But he wasn’t commonly called ‘great’ then.”
“You forget, you barbarian, that you’ve been in the wilderness for years. Reputations have come and gone in that time. Why, Layden is a name to conjure with among most people,—Layden, the brilliant young thinker, orator, and writer, the teacher of the future!” And Wratislaw laughed in his most sardonic fashion.
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“Oh, well enough in a way. He was a year below me at Oxford,—used to talk in the Union a lot, and beat me hollow for President. He was a harebrained creature then, full of ideals and aboriginal conceit; a sort of shaggy Rousseau, who preached a new heaven and a new earth, and was worshipped by a pack of schoolboys. He did well in his way, got his First and some ‘Varsity prizes, but the St. Chad’s people wouldn’t have him at any price for their fellowship. He told me it was but another sign of the gulf between the real and the ideal. I thought then that he was a frothy ass, but he has learned manners since, and tact. I suppose there is no doubt about his uncommon cleverness.”
“Do you like him?”
Wratislaw laughed. “I don’t know. You see, he and I belong to different shops, and we haven’t a sentiment in common. He would call me dull; I might be tempted to call him windy. It is all a matter of taste.” And he shrugged his broad shoulders and went in to dress.
At dinner I watched the distinguished visitor with interest. That he was very much of a celebrity was obvious at once. He it was to whom the unaccountable pauses in talk were left, and something in his carefully modulated voice, his neatness, his air of entire
