And then, when he was waiting for the car that must get him through the snow to the junction, I learnt a bit more of what was in his mind. He had a young friend, he said, a feckless chiel, who had written daft tales, mysteries, about folk the like of whom he’d never met, and of events quite beyond nature. Mr Wedderburn was concerned to call him back to what he thought reality. And as the Guthrie business had been real enough – though half beyond nature itself – and the folk such folk as this writer-lad might have some understanding of, Mr Wedderburn thought it would be fine if we could let the chiel have all the materials, in a series of narratives, to work over as he cared; either just editing, or writing over the whole. And certain it would be he would so contrive it – what would be felt necessary – that our names and the like were changed, and Kinkeig and all in it get no more notoriety than they had already had.
Well, it seemed a benevolent scheme, and a chance of fetching a little good out of much ill. To make a long story short, I gave Mr Wedderburn my promise. In the following pages I begin a record of the events that brought about the death of Ranald Guthrie. I shall start – as the poet Horace advises – in medias res and then hark back to earlier matters. If Mr Wedderburn’s young friend in Edinburgh distrusts Horace he can e’en change about.
2
When the speak came down Glen Erchany that Ranald Guthrie had taken his own ungodly life there was little grieving in Kinkeig. A coarse man he was known to be for all his years and gentry, who had lived nigh solitary like a crow as long as most could remember: a recluse, the last minister called him. And there was a story how the minister, years back, had made way up the glen to call on Guthrie and beg a subscription to a work of charity. Some said Guthrie, thinking the minister had come to chide him over the aye-empty great pew in the kirk, fired off a rusty gun at him. And some said he had but let loose the dogs – and some said the rats, for the Erchany rats were more famous in that land than all the rats of Hamlin town. And whether gun or dogs or rats all Kinkeig laughed, for the minister – him that was before Dr Jervie – was ill liked. But if folk disliked the minister they fair hated Ranald Guthrie. And that was unco at a first thinking, for while the minister was ever about folk’s houses, crying out ‘Is any of you indoors?’ and next moment stepping over the door-sill with his havering and expecting a dram for-bye, Guthrie was far enough away and himself plagued none. But folk hated his very name, he was that near-going.
Guthrie was the nearest-going man in all the lands about, and there were some that were near-going enough. Rob Yule, who farmed the fine parks down the Drochet and had more silver than most, would walk behind the cart that brought his meal home from the mill, crying to the lad to go warily; and he had a bit grocer’s shovel and when a handful of meal coupt from the cart he’d be down with his shovel and scraping it up from the glaur. And Fairbairn – him at Glenlippet whose wife was crippled with rheumatism, and such a church-worker that she made him keep a motor so she could be sure always to get to the Dorcas and such – Fairbairn took out the motor licence by the quarter – her being by ten years the older, and him being ever in hope. But neither Rob Yule nor Fairbairn could hold a candle in meanness to Ranald Guthrie – Guthrie who was as well set-up among the gentry as Rob was among the tenant-folk, and who had been a great scholar too, men said, in his day. Of all the dwellers in the glens about it was only of Ranald Guthrie you could honestly say he was as mean as an Englishman. Most in Kinkeig had suffered through him, for he owned the lands far round and his factor, the creature Hardcastle, took kindly to the pinching and screwing he was employed in. When the word got round Kinkeig that Guthrie had done himself a fatal mischief there were many that were right glad and a few that were sorry. The many were glad, hoping surely for a better laird. But the few with a spark of imagination were sorry, for to them the pity came that Guthrie had not thought to take the coarse creature Hardcastle with him, to do his pinching and screwing for him when he was set-up – as syne he’d be sure to be – among the propertied souls in hell. But Hardcastle’s neck was as sound as the day his mother first scraiched at the ill sight of him; and there was that look in his eye – Laurie the policeman said – you could tell he expected to come fair comfortable and well-feathered out of the tragedy. When folk heard there had been a strangeness in Guthrie’s end and that the sheriff himself was coming to Kinkeig to get the truth of it there were tongues enough to prophesy that Hardcastle would soon be gaoled; and when the strangeness grew with the daft gossip of what had befallen the corpse, so that the hanging of young Neil Lindsay was on the lips of every gawpus and bap-faced old body in the parish, there were plenty that would still have Hardcastle involved as well. Old Speirs the stationy, him they called the Thoughtful Citizen because he was ever blethering out of the English newspapers, went about saying that for certain Hardcastle was an accessory before the fact and would be held on suspicion as sure as sure. Full of criminal law was old Speirs ever since he started stocking Edgar Wallace for Dr Jervie’s loons, and would air his views every night at the Arms, with a pack of bothie billies listening to his stite as if it were the wisdom of Solomon. But there – I’m losing my thread again.
3
It was a hard winter. Armistice morn saw the clouds gathering leaden behind Ben Cailie, the snowy summit standing brilliant still against them in a bleak early sun. Then the lift darkened and at eleven, while the minister was holding his service by the memorial, the first flakes felclass="underline" you could tell at once it was going to lie, the way it lay on the minister’s robes. Some thought he would interrupt the service, but he went on unheeding; and a few folk put up umbrellas and the rest gathered shawls about them – widow-bodies mostly, their thoughts twenty years back and more – and sang the hundred and twenty-first psalm.
Unto the hills around do I lift up
My longing eyes…
Sweet and strange it was, no hills could be seen, neither Ben Cailie nor the braes about, the words like a queer parable of faith in things invisible. And then the flakes came thicker, not dancing but in a steady fall, and took the psalm from folk’s lips and muted it, so that the singing might have come from far away. There is ever something piercing the mind in an open-air service in Scotland, so piercing they are but seldom held: we had our stomach-full of that in the days of the Solemn League and Covenant.
The eleventh of November, I say, was the beginning of a bitter season. For the snow that began that day in flakes so broad folk said it would be gone the morning’s morn lay for a fortnight in a still, cold air: you could see the boughs quivering at the tips with the weight on them. And that snow went out with a quick thaw and a great storm, a hurricane fit to bring down in ruin another Tay Bridge, that went howling up the glen to rip great sheets of lead from the crazy battlements of Castle Erchany. And hard on that, with the stubble lands still steaming, came a black frost.
The snow was falling again in mid-December and the bairns were right pleased with the white Christmas they were like to have. But as it fell fine and unceasing day by day the canny in Kinkeig began to look to their provisions and outlying crofters made sore haste to get an extra load of corn to the mill. The Thoughtful Citizen said the winter would be a record, sure, and a grand season for the curlers. And that was fine comfort for those who were thinking of their bit kye. There’s this to be said for making your stock of Edgar Wallace and Annie S. Swan: they need no cake and no mucking.
By the time that snow stopped we knew there had to come but another fall and a bit drift to snow the place up entirely, for though the county has snow-ploughs enough these days it would be long before they’d think to let drive at a remote place like Kinkeig. So we sat down in next to idleness, the old men with a bit park maybe sharpening a coulter against the spring and the farmer billies toasting their big bellies before a gey fire and nodding their heads over a catalogue of tractors from the coarse American creature Henry Ford. And the silence the snow brings thickened about us: fient a sound in all the glens except the peewits, that went crying their own strangeness still to the strange and blanketed earth, with whiles a bit stir in a corn yard as some wife went out to meat the hens. There’s ever a sense of expecting in a white Christmas season, and has been belike since A.D. One. And sure there were plenty to say afterwards that they had felt an Expectation; they hadn’t known of What, it was just a Feeling, awful, they never minded the like. And one old wife said that when the minister was preaching on the Herald Angels and she was trying, decent-like, to conjure up a bit picture of them in her mind like what they put on Christmas cards, she had a vision of the daftie Tammas, coming louping through the snow from Erchany and yammering murder; it would be just a week before he did that same certain enough, but she hadn’t let on at the time, thinking it a fell unchristian fancy. Mistress McLaren the smith’s wife, that was; she must be said to have a talent for what the stationy calls publicity.