The Watcher by the Threshold. Buchan John

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      ‘Oh, I am a man of affairs, busy from year’s end to year’s end. For eleven months I am chained, but for once in a while I am free. And you—?’

      ‘Oh I,’ and the tramp laughed. ‘Ulysses, you know. A wanderer is man from his birth. I see we have not so much in common.’

      ‘No,’ said the other, ‘I am afraid we have not. You see I believe really at the bottom of my heart in getting on in life, and doing one’s duty, and that sort of thing. I see that you have no such prejudices.’

      ‘Not a bit of it,’ and the tramp whistled lackadaisically. ‘It’s all a question of nature. Some men – well, some, you know, are born to be good citizens. Others lack the domestic virtues. How does the thing go?

      Non illum tectis ullæ, non mœnibus urbes

      Accepere, neque ipse manus feritate dedisset,

      Pastorum et solis exegit montibus ævum.

      ‘Brunck emends the passage, but the words are good as they are. In them you have my character and watchword.’

      ‘It is the character of many,’ said the other. ‘We can all hear the Piper if we listen, but some of us stop our ears against him. For myself, this hill air makes me daft, and the smell of heather and burning wood, and the sound of water and the wind. I can sympathise with you. And now I am going back to toil, and it will be very hard for days, till the routine lays its spell over me once more.’

      ‘And for what good?’ asked the wayfarer. ‘I apologise for asking you the foolish question, but it is the inevitable one in my philosophy.’

      ‘Oh,’ said the other, ‘I can scarcely tell. For the sake of feeling that one is fighting in the ranks of life and not skulking from the battle line; that one is doing the work for which God has given him talents; to know that one is mixing with men, and playing his part well in the human tragi-comedy. These reasons and many others.’

      ‘Hum,’ said the tramp. ‘Again I must say, “temper of mind”. You will excuse me if I say that they do not commend themselves to me. I cannot see the necessity for making the world a battle-field. It is a pilgrimage, if you like, where it is a man’s duty and best wisdom to choose the easiest course. All the pleasure in life can be got apart from the turmoil of the market-place – love and kindness, the taste of bread to a hungry man and water to a thirsty, the delight of rest when tired, and the pleasure of motion when fresh and alert, and, above all, the thousand things of nature.’

      ‘You chose the life? You were not born to it?’

      ‘Born to it?’ and the wayfarer laughed again. ‘No, I was very little born to it. I shall not trouble you with my story, it is too old-fashioned to amuse you. I had good prospects, as people say, but, as I have said, I lacked the civil virtues. I was too restless to stay long anywhere and too rich to have any need, and the upshot of it all is – this!’ And he fingered lovingly the multiform rents in his coat.

      Below them, as they talked, ran the sandy hill-road, with its white gravel glistening in the westering sunlight. Far down lay a cottage, which was as clear as if it had been not a score of yards away. Thither a man was walking, a shepherd in his Sabbath clothes, who had been to the country town and was returning laden with many parcels. Distant as it was, the whole scene lay plain before the two. A child, a little girl, ran from the cottage at her father’s approach, and clung lovingly to his knee. Then with childish strength she clutched a package, and in another second the pair had entered the house. By some simultaneous impulse both men had directed their eyes to the place and had seen the whole of the little comedy.

      And lo! to the other’s amazement the tramp’s eyes glistened as he looked.

      ‘You do not believe in the domestic virtues?’ said the one very slowly.

      ‘Not I,’ said the tramp. ‘I have told you that I don’t. The essence of social life, civil and domestic, is bearing one another’s burdens and sharing one another’s pleasures. I am an individualist with all my heart. I grant you things would come to a pretty pass if all were of my way of thinking; but there – it is a matter of temperament, and such temperaments are scarce.’

      ‘Is it not,’ said his interrogator, ‘the old question whether man or nature is the more productive study? You cannot maintain that these hills afford the same view-ground of character as the city and the bustle of life. I speak solely as a spectator. I do not even ask you to go down and mix with the crowd and taste its life.’ And there seemed no incongruity in talking thus to the man of the wayside and many tatters.

      ‘No, no,’ said the other. ‘God forbid that I should talk so callously of the sorrows and toils of my fellows. I do not seek to scrutinise the character of others. All my concern is with myself. It is not a man’s duty to seek out his kind and strive with them and live among them. All that he must do is to play his part well as he may chance upon them. It is not richness and fulness of life that I want. I am not ambitious. Ease, ataraxia, you know, is enough for me.’

      ‘But the rewards?’ said the one, questioningly.

      ‘Ah, the rewards! You cannot know them.’ And the man’s voice took a new tone. His eyes lit up, and, looking over the darkening valley, he spoke to his comrade many things, and sang in his ear ever so sweetly the ‘Song of the Open Road’. He told of the changes of the season – the rigours of winter, the early flush of spring, the mellow joys of summer, and autumn with her pomp and decay. He told of clear starlit nights, when the hill breezes blow over the moors and the birds wake the sleeper; of windy mornings, when the mist trails from the hills and dun clouds scud across the sky; of long hot days in the heather among the odours of thyme and bog-myrtle and the lark’s clear song. Then he changed his tune, and spoke of the old romance of the wayside, that romance which gipsies and wanderers feel, of motion amid rest, of ease in the hurry of the seasons, of progress over the hills and far away, into that land unknown which dawns upon the sight with each new morrow. And he spoke, too, of the human element in it all which is so dear to the man versed in its mysteries, of heroism amid the sordid, the pathetic in the coarse, the kindly in the most repulsive. And as he spoke he grew eloquent with it all, and his hearer marvelled at such words, till he looked away from the rags to the keen, eager face, and then he marvelled no more.

      But by this time the darkness had all but come, and the speaker cut himself short, laughing at his own rhetoric.

      ‘Losh, it’s comin’ on for nicht,’ he said, speaking broadly, as if to point a contrast, ‘and time slips by when ye get on the crack. I’ll hae to be movin’ if I’m to win to Jock Rorison’s the nicht. I aye bide wi’ Jock, when I’m hereaways, if I dinna sleep ootbye. Will ye be gaun doun the road?’

      ‘Yes, I go by that way too. I’ll be glad to accompany you;’ and the two went down the winding path together. Overhead the stars, faint with haze, winked and glittered; and below in the valley a light or two shone out from the blue darkness. The soft, fragrant night airs rustled over the heather, and borne on them came the faint twitter of sleepy birds. To one of the pair all seemed so new, so strange, that it was like an excerpt from the caliph’s journal. The wondrous natural loveliness around seemed to be a fitting environment for the strange being at his side; and he reflected somewhat ruefully as he walked that what folk call the romance of life springs in the main from people of hot heads and ill-balanced judgments, who seek to put their imperfect, immature little philosophies into action.

      They stopped at the first wayside cottage, and the tramp knocked. The door was opened by a grave-faced woman, for in these uplands the sharp air seems to form the human СКАЧАТЬ