LITMIR.BIZ

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      Sandy laughed. “Better go to the States. That’s the power-house where you press the button.”

      This gave me the chance to talk about Blenkiron, and I told them what I had heard from Ellery Willis. Archie, who had only seen Blenkiron in the last year of the War, was rather excited; Sandy, who knew him intimately, was apathetic.

      “He’ll turn up all right. Trust John S. You can’t mislay a battered warrior like that. You’d better tell Willis that he is doing a very poor service to Blenkiron by starting a hue-and-cry. The old man won’t like it a bit.”

      “But, I assure you, Willis is very much in earnest. He wanted me to start out right away on a secret expedition, and to quiet him I promised to speak to you.”

      “Well, you’ve spoken,” said Sandy, “and you can tell him I think it moonshine. Blenkiron will come back to his friends when his job is done, whatever it may be… Unless Archie likes to take the thing on?”

      He seemed to want to drop the subject, but Janet broke in: “I always understood that Mr Blenkiron had no relations except the nephew who was killed in the War. But I met a girl last month who was a niece or a cousin of his. She told me she had been staying in the Borders and had been taken to see you at Laverlaw.”

      Sandy looked up, and I could have sworn that a shade of anxiety passed over his face.

      “Her name was Dasent,” Janet went on. “I can’t remember her Christian name.”

      “Probably Irene—pronounced Ireen,” said Sandy. “I remember her. She came over with the Manorwaters. She seemed to have got a little mixed about Scotland, for she wanted to know why I wasn’t wearing a kilt, and I told her because I was neither a Highlander nor a Cockney stock-broker.” He spoke sharply, as if the visit had left an unpleasant memory.

      “I should like to meet a niece of Blenkiron’s,” I said “Tell me more about her.”

      In reply Sandy made a few comments on American young women which were not flattering. I could see what had happened—Sandy at a loose end and a little choked by his new life, and a brisk and ignorant lady who wanted to enthuse about it. They had met “head on,” as Americans say.

      “You didn’t like her?” I asked.

      “I didn’t think enough about her to dislike her. Ask Janet.”

      “I only saw her for about an hour,” said that lady. “She came to stay with Junius and Agatha at Strathlarrig just when I was leaving. I think I rather liked her. She was from South Carolina, and had a nice, soft, slurring voice. So far as I remember she talked very little. She looked delicious, too-tallish and slim and rather dark, with deep eyes that said all sorts of wonderful things. You must be as blind as a bat, Sandy, if you didn’t see that.”

      “I am. I don’t boast of it—indeed I’m rather ashamed of it—but I’m horribly unsusceptible. Once—long ago—when I was at Oxford, I was staying in the West Highlands, and in the evening we sat in a room which looked over the sea into the sunset, and a girl sang old songs. I don’t remember whether she was pretty or not—I don’t remember her name—but I remember that her singing made me want to fall in love… Since I grew up I’ve had no time.”

      Janet was shocked. “But, Sandy dear, you must marry.”

      He shook his head. “Never! I should make a rotten husband. Besides, Dick and Archie have carried off the only two women I love.”

      After that he seemed to cheer up. I remember that he took to telling stories of poisons—I suppose the mention of South America set him off on that. He showed us a box with three tiny pellets in it, things which looked like discoloured pearls, and which he said were the most mysterious narcotics in the world, and one of the deadliest poisons. They reminded me of pills I once got from an old Portugee prospector, which I carried about with me for years but never touched, pills to be used if you were lost in the bush, for one was said to put you into a forty-hours sleep and two gave a painless death. Sandy would explain nothing further about them, and locked them away.

      What with one thing and another we had rather a jolly evening. But next morning, when the Roylances had gone, I had the same impression of some subtle change. This new Sandy was not the one I had known. We went for a long tramp on the hills, with sandwiches in our pockets, for neither of us seemed inclined to shoulder a gun. It was a crisp morning with a slight frost, and before midday it had become one of those blazing August days when there is not a breath of wind and the heather smells as hot as tamarisks.

      We climbed the Lammer Law and did about twenty miles of a circuit along the hill-tops. It was excellent training for Machray, and I would have enjoyed myself had it not been for Sandy.

      He talked a great deal and it was all in one strain, and—for a marvel—all about himself. The gist of it was that he was as one born out of due season, and mighty discontented with his lot.

      “I can’t grow old decently,” he said. “Here am I—over forty—and I haven’t matured one bit since I left Oxford. I don’t want to do the things befitting my age and position. I suppose I ought to be ambitious—make speeches in the House of Lords—become an expert on some rotten subject—take the chair at public dinners—row my weight in the silly old boat—and end by governing some distant Dominion.”

      “Why not?” I asked.

      “Because I don’t want to. I’d rather eat cold mutton in a cabman’s shelter, as Lamancha once observed about political banquets. Good Lord, Dick, I can’t begin to tell you how I loathe the little squirrel’s cage of the careerists. All that solemn twaddle about trifles! Oh, I daresay it’s got to be done by somebody, but not by me. If I touched politics I’d join the Labour Party, not because I think then less futile than the others, but because as yet they haven’t got such a larder of loaves and fishes.”

      “I want a job,” he declared a little later. “I was meant by Providence to be in a service, and to do work under discipline—not for what it brought me, but because it has to be done. I’m a bad case of the inferiority complex. When I see one of my shepherds at work, or the hands coming out of a factory, I’m ashamed of myself. The all have their niche, and it is something that matters, whereas I am a cumberer of the ground. If I want to work I’ve got to make the job for myself, and the one motive is personal vanity. I tell you, I’m in very real danger of losing my self-respect.”

      It was no good arguing with Sandy in this mood, though there were a great many common-sense things I wanted the say. The danger with anyone so high-strung and imaginative as he is that every now and then come periods of self disgust and despondency.

      “You’re like Ulysses,” I told him. “The fellow in Tennyson’s poem, you know. Well, there’s a widish world before you, and a pretty unsettled one. Ships sail every day to some part of it.”

      He shook his head.

      “That’s the rub. As I’ve told you, I can’t grow up. There’s a couple of lines by some poet that describes me accurately: ‘He is crazed by the spell of far Arabia, It has stolen his mind away.’ Far Arabia—that’s my trouble. But the Ulysses business won’t do for an ageing child of forty. Besides, what about the mariners? Where are the ‘free hearts, free foreheads?’ We used to have a rather nice little Round Table, Dick, but it is all broken up now and the wood turned into cigar-boxes for wedding present; Peter is dead, and you and Archie are married, and Leithe and Lamancha are happy parts of the machine.”

      “There’s still Blenkiron.”

      “He doesn’t count. He was a wandering star, that joined us and revolved cheerfully with us for a little, and then shot back to where it belonged… You can’t alter it by talking, my dear chap. I’m the old buccaneer marooned on a rock, watching his ancient companions passing in ocean liners.”

      We had reached the top of the hill above Laverlaw and were looking down into the green cup filled with the afternoon sunlight, in which the house seemed as natural a thing is a stone from the hillside. I observed that it was

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