Kept

I
will happily declare that there is no sight so harmonious to the eye or suggestive to the spirit as Highland scenery. A man who sits on the Metropolitan Railway to Marylebone may be comforted by what he sees, but I do not think he will be inspired. A ziggurat raised by some bold industrialist for the purposes of his manufacture is an edifying spectacle, no doubt, but a mountain is moral. Philosophy quails before it, science grows mutely respectful and literature is both exalted and cast down. The traveller who desires a sense of his own insignificance will discover it here on some descending slope, down in the shadow of some mighty summit, there beneath some rill that has run since the dawn of time. God walks in the mountains, but it is the mountains that will drive Him out, with their granite secrets and the truth that lies concealed in their stone, and mankind be reduced to an antlike insubstantiality beside them. Or so we are told.

It was late in the afternoon of an April day in the year of Our Lord 186–, on a steam engine moving slowly forward—impossibly slowly—along the Highland line through Inverness-shire, a line so lately instituted that everything about it had an air of novelty. The uniforms of the officials shone as if they had only that morning arrived in bandboxes from the seamstress, the engine appeared to have been polished overnight, and even the passengers—subdued Highland folk, for the most part, with their baggage piled at their feet—seemed to have donned their best clothes for the occasion. All this Dunbar observed from his seat in the corner of the third-class carriage, and though grateful for the mechanised wonder that drew him nearer his destination, he thought that he did not like it. Outside the window the sky was darkening, so that the distant peaks and the valley through which they ran turned red and purple, and for a moment he bent his eye on what lay beyond him rather than things nearer at hand. A herd
of Highland cattle grazing the sloping moor; a woman and her child waiting patiently at a wayside crossing; a flock of birds—he knew about birds, for in a certain sense they were his profession—wheeling away to the north: all these Dunbar saw and brought together in his mind to feed his sense of dissatisfaction.

“Of course,” he said at length, “it’s not as if they’re civilised folk in these parts.”

The words brought Dewar, who lay sprawled next to him on the double seat of the compartment, one arm thrown over the square teak box they had brought from Edinburgh that morning, out of his half slumber.

“Ain’t they, though?”

“Surely not! Why it’s not more than a century since Cumberland smoked them out and made them pay. My grandfather’s father fought at Culloden. Saw a man stick a babby with a bayonet. Said it would stay with him till his dying day.”

Dewar drew himself up from his slouch and began to dust down his shirt-front with a spotted handkerchief that he took from the pocket of his coat.

“Why would a man stick a babby with a bayonet? It seems an uncommon devilish thing to do.”

A fellow passenger, moving along the train’s corridor, had that traveller peered in through the compartment window, would have seen an odd assortment of persons and their gear. Dunbar, a tall, gaunt man of perhaps fifty years of age, wore a green sporting jacket and a pair of corduroy trousers, which combination made him look not unlike a gamekeeper. Dewar, shorter and rather younger, was the more ill-favoured of the two, fat and somewhat unhealthy-looking, his costume completed by a shabby frock coat of which the braid was beginning to part company with the lapels. Rolled up in bundles on luggage racks, or strewn about on the floor, lay a variety of miscellaneous items, each of which posed some question as to the object of their journey: a pair of heavy walking boots, two cork life jackets, a woollen scarf and a coiled length of rope. Dewar’s gaze, which had fallen for a moment or two on the square teak box, widened to take in this further cargo.

“We seem to have brought a deal of stuff with us. How are we to carry it all, I should like to know?”

Something in the set of Dunbar’s eye perhaps disclosed that he did not regard his associate with complete confidence. “I can see you’re new to this game, my boy. Green you are indeed. Why, when we get to the other end there’ll be a gig to meet us. Take us right to where we want to go as well, I shouldn’t wonder.”

There was an unspoken question in this statement which the younger man either did not appreciate or chose not to answer. But his companion persisted.

“What line of trade was you in before Bob Grace pushed you my way?”

“Grocer.”

Something in this spoke of ruinous mischance, of hope denied, tragedy even. Another man would have given up the pursuit, but Dunbar continued easily.

“General or green stuff?”

“General.”

“Any reason for giving it up?”

Dewar stared before him at the cork life jackets draped over the opposing seat. “Wife took bad and I had to nurse her. It’s hard on a fellow when that happens.”

“Harder still when she dies. Very hard. Here, have a fill of this and you’ll feel better.”

They smoked Dunbar’s tobacco companionably for a while, nodding at the people who wandered along the corridor and resting their feet on their bundles. It was now perhaps half past four in the afternoon, and the light was growing grey. Outside the land continued to rise, and there were shadows creeping down among the granite escarpments of the hills. The day was drawing in. Dunbar was not an imaginative man—a rock to him was a rock that might have to be scaled, a mountain stream the hazard of wet feet—but nonetheless something of the bleakness of the prospect communicated itself to him and he clasped his hands together against a cold that he could not yet feel but knew would come.

“D–—t! This ain’t Piccadilly Circus, by George! Did you ever see such a place?”

Dewar, less impressionable even than his mentor, stared vaguely beyond the window. “They say Highland air’s very bracing. I believe that’s the case. Will it snow, do you reckon?”

“I shouldn’t wonder. I took an eagle’s nest in a blizzard once, twenty miles south of here at Loch Garten, and had three fingers bitten by the frost. No trains in those days. Nor a path for a pony either. Why, the fellow I was with, he and I had to haul our boat over the hills to reach the river.”

The words seemed to waken in Dewar a curiosity that had previously been lacking in him. Rubbing his small eyes with the flat of one hand and knocking his pipe out on the iron casing of the carriage window with the other, he cleared his throat once or twice, looked as if he were about to speak and then thought better of it.

“You look as if you wanted to say something,” Dunbar chided him. “Why don’t you let it out?”

“You’re a professional man. You’ll only laugh at me like as not. But never mind, I will say it. Why would a man pay good money for you to bring him eggs?”

Dunbar beat his hand sharply on his knees. “Why, there are any number of queer trades. There are fellows in London who collect up slop pails and sell what’s in them for fertiliser. You’ll have seen them about their business. I knew a man that traded in dolls’ eyes—blue, brown and green, only the green ones was a farthing a dozen dearer. Why shouldn’t a man take ospreys’ eggs, or eagles’, if he’s a mind?”

“He can’t eat them.”

“I daresay he can’t. But he can look at them. Haven’t you got anything that you sits and looks at?”

Dewar thought. “My wife had a fancy for china dogs once. As much as a shilling she’d pay for a china dog at Hoxton market. But there isn’t no china dogs now.”

“There you are. China dogs. Waterloo medals—look at the market there is for them. Why, I was at the sea once, Devon way, and there was a dozen folk out under the cliff looking for those rarey stones that
are made so much of. Fossils, they call them. But what we’re after, there’s few enough of them to be had now. Take these ospreys, that the people here call eagle fishers. They don’t come to Loch an Eilein crag no more. It’s six years since I’ve taken from Loch Morlich. There may be nests at Loch Arkaig, I don’t know. But think of it! These might be the last of them in all England. That’s worth a ten-pound note if ever a thing was.”

“And what if there aren’t no more?” Dewar wondered.

“What about if there aren’t? I had a gentleman come to me the other day—a clergyman he was, many of them’s from the clergy—enquiring of auks’ eggs. Now there hasn’t been an auk seen in these parts for a century. On St. Kilda’s perhaps, or Shetland, but not here. There are some that would have given him guillemot with a touch of dye, but I’m not one of that kind, which is perhaps a weakness in me.”

He lapsed into silence, perhaps imagining that he had said too much. Dewar thought regretfully of the china dogs that had once processed over the mantelpiece in Hoxton and now, like certain other things, were gone from his life.

“We shall be there soon, I suppose,” he ventured.

“Yes, we shall be there soon. You had better help me pick up these things.”

Together, swaying a little against the rhythm of the engine, they began to reduce the mass of luggage to some kind of order. This task accomplished, Dunbar selected a thick greatcoat from the topmost sack and placed it over his shoulders. Beyond the window he saw that twilight was falling. A furious tawny sun hung low over the furthermost crags so that their sharply descending slopes seemed livid in its shadow. Skeins of birds flew north above their heads, following the train’s course for a moment and then veering away into invisibility. Dewar looked up.

“What kind of birds is they?”

“Black-backed gulls. Curlew. Nothing there for us.” He resumed his position at the window. “Put on your coat, man. There’ll be an end to trains before too long.”

Doing as he was bidden—his own coat was a threadbare affair from which the buttons hung by solitary threads—Dewar sensed that
the train had begun to reduce its speed. A great black hedge shot up suddenly to the left of them, so near that he could have reached out from the window and plucked at the trees. In the distance there was a glimmer of water. Then, in what seemed only an instant of time, the darkness receded and the tawny light illumined their surroundings once more. They were travelling—rolling, gently descending—at ever-decreasing speed and with a great shudder of brakes through a country of flat fields and broken stones, at whose outer edge a spur of dark forest could be seen approaching from higher ground to the north.

“This is the place,” Dunbar announced. “I recollect it.” He saw Dewar’s face, somehow mournful in the gloaming as he bent to retrieve his kit. “Come now. There are worse trades for a man to follow.”

“It’s not work that I’m used to,” Dewar volunteered. For a moment Dunbar thought that he could see him in his grocery, obsequious behind the counter, hands dusty with flour, meal sticking in his sparse hair. Near stationary now, the train shook convulsively once or twice and then came to a halt. “But I hope I shall give satisfaction.”

Dunbar did not answer but seized the first of their bags and began to heave it to the door. It was no more than a halt—a long, low platform with a granite slab for a seat, a single lantern, a pair of stone outhouses at the further end and a solitary attendant gaping at them from behind a muffler. Beyond the clump of buildings a narrow road descended through the fields. Here a pony and trap waited in the gathering dusk. Dunbar saw it and sniffed.

“I don’t doubt Mackay to be the most punctual man in Strathspey. Here, see if the place runs to a handcart.”

His voice was lost in the noise of the engine’s wheels as they began once more to revolve. A cloud of steam, blown back on the wind, enveloped them both in dense white vapour. The station attendant said something in a broad Scots accent that Dewar could not interpret. There was no handcart. He began miserably to arrange the baggage in a kind of pyramid upon the granite seat, while Dunbar went to greet a tall figure, with a mastiff dog at his heels, who now loomed into view at the further end of the platform.

“Mackay,” Dunbar said on their return. He seemed strangely
exhilarated, poking at a strip of his shirt collar levered up by the wind. “Invaluable factotum to the gentry. The laird’s right-hand man, forbye. Whose own great-grandfather brought the Prince over from Skye in a rowboat, or so they say. Is that not right, Mackay?”

“I’ll thank you to hold your tongue, Dunbar,” said the laird’s right-hand man. Dewar could not tell if he was amused or made angry by this familiarity. “That’s a deal of clutter ye’ve brought with ye.”

“But you’ll carry it for us, Mackay. Is that not right?”

“There’s snow coming, I have no doubt. I can take you to the boathouse. And maybe return in the morning. But no further, mind.”

“Suit yourself, old party.” Again Dewar caught the lilt in his companion’s voice. “Suit yourself.”

Silently, they began to load their belongings onto the cart. It was quite noiseless now, except for the rumble of the train as it descended into the valley beyond them, altogether dark save for the sparks flying up along the track which danced for a moment in the air above the engine stack and then fell back into nothingness. Dunbar stopped loading to watch its progress, murmured something unintelligible under his breath and then resumed his labours. Presently, illumined by the pale light of Mackay’s lantern, the cart bore them away down the hill, past thickets of pine trees, a mass of undergrowth in which something unseen moved briefly for a second and then was gone out of the lantern’s range.

“There’s no wolves, are there, in these parts?” Dewar wondered cravenly.

Dunbar laughed. “No, no wolves. Not for a hundred years and more. That was a fox, most like. Or a marten. But no wolves.”

It was by now quite dark, and with an absence of moon that, Dunbar calculated, boded ill for the night’s activity. Something of the place’s immensity communicated itself to him—a silence that, he acknowledged, proceeded from the entire absence of man—and he fell quiet, recalling similar excursions: walking twenty miles from Grantown once in the middle of a snowstorm; a journey into the upper reaches of Norway, where in the few hours of daylight the sun seemed to hang on the rim of the horizon like the yolk of an egg. At the same time his eye began to accustom itself to the terrain and its distinctive
character: the cracked stone on the path that glittered in the lantern light; dense banks of fir heralding the innermost parts of the glen; what his memory told him was the smell of water borne back over the treetops. The mastiff dog, huddled up at his master’s feet, caught some second scent and moved its muzzle restlessly. They were nearing their destination.