Jaikie lifted his head in astonishment. This was a Craw whom he had not met before—a man of purpose, with his hackles up. He was proposing to take that bold course which Jaikie himself had urged at the Back House of the Garroch, to loose the entangling knot by cutting it. But, strangely enough, Jaikie was now averse to that proposal, for he had come to suspect that business was afoot which made it desirable that Mr Craw should keep at a distance from Castle Gay.
"That's a pretty good score for you," he said.
"What do you mean? It's an outrage. It must be at once repudiated."
"The Wire has been hoaxed. You've got them in your hand. They'll have to eat humble pie. But I'm blessed if I know how it happened. Tibbets is no fool, and he would not have printed the stuff unless he believed it to be genuine. Who has been pulling his leg? It can't have been Dougal—he must have known that it was too dangerous."
"I shall find out at Castle Gay."
"There's no need to go there—at least there's no hurry. Telegraph to the View telling them to announce that the interview in the Wire is bogus. I'll take it round to the office before it closes."
Mr Craw was in the mood for action. He at once drafted a telegram, signing it with the code-word which he employed in emergencies and which would secure the instant attention of his editor. Jaikie took it and departed. "Remember to order a car," Mr Craw called after him, but got no reply.
But when he reached the Post Office Jaikie did not send the telegram as originally drafted. It was borne in on him that this bogus interview was a disguised blessing. If it went uncontradicted it would keep Tibbets quiet; it had changed that menacing creature from an enemy to an ally. So on his own responsibility he altered the telegram to "Do not repudiate Wire interview for the moment," and signed it with Mr Craw's codeword. That would prevent any premature disavowal from Castle Gay.
Jaikie despatched the wire and walked slowly back. His mind was busy with a problem which each hour seemed to develop new ramifications.
There was first the question of Sigismund Allins. Jaikie was firmly resolved that Allins was a rogue, and his chief evidence was his own instinct. There was something fishy about the man's behaviour—his premature and secret return from holiday, his presence at the Hydropathic under another name, his association with the strange foreigners. But above all he remembered Allins's face and manner of speech, which had inspired him with profound mistrust. A hard and a varied life had made Jaikie a good impressionist judge of character. He remembered few occasions when he had been wrong.
That morning he had reached a conclusion. Mr Allins—for a consideration—had brought the Evallonians to Knockraw, and had arranged for the announcement of Mr Craw's journey abroad. He was a gambler, and probably hard up. Mr Craw's disappearance, if he was aware of it, must have upset his calculations, but that, after all, was the Evallonians' concern: Allins's task had probably only been to get them into Craw's vicinity. There might be a contingent payment due to him if the Evallonians succeeded in their mission, and in that case it was to his interest to further their efforts. But he could scarcely do that at Castle Gay, for his connivance might leak out. No. It was quite clear that Allins had every reason to be absent during their visit.
Why, then, had he returned? To advise the Evallonians and earn his contingent payment at a safe distance? That was intelligible enough, though dangerous. There must be people in Portaway who knew him by sight, and a rumour of his arrival might reach Castle Gay. He had not disguised himself, except by posing as a foreigner, and he was walking about brazenly in the streets… . The more Jaikie thought about it, the less reason he could find for Allins's return. It was a risk which no discreet blackguard would take, and he believed Allins to be discreet. No, there must be some overmastering motive which he could not guess at.
His mind turned to the foreigners at the Hydropathic. Were they Evallonians, a reserve summoned to wait in the background? Jaikie regretted that his ignorance of foreign tongues had prevented his identifying their speech. He could think of no reason for their presence. The business was very secret and did not require numbers. The three plenipotentiaries at Knockraw were abundantly adequate… . They had behaved oddly, too. Allins and another had visited the station and witnessed the arrival of a visitor for Knockraw. They had not spoken to him or to the Knockraw chauffeur, and the visitor had left in a mighty hurry, as if anxious to be unobserved. But the sight of him had put Allins and his friend into a state of considerable excitement. He remembered their eager talk at the Hydropathic door.
His reflections came to a sudden halt, for an idea had struck him, an idea so startling that for the moment he could not compass it. He needed more information. The last part of his return journey was almost a canter.
He found Mr Craw still fuming over the Wire.
"I didn't send your telegram," he said. "As long as the interview goes unrepudiated it will keep Tibbets quiet, so I think we'd better let it alone for a day or two."
Mr Craw disregarded this act of indiscipline.
"Have you ordered a car?" he asked crossly.
Jaikie pulled a chair up to the small fire, which had been lit by his order, and regarded his companion seriously.
"I don't think you should go back to Castle Gay to-night," he said. "You'll only fall into the thick of that Evallonian mess. Perhaps Barbon and Dougal have got it settled, and it would be a pity to spoil their game. By eleven o'clock to-morrow morning we'll know the position, and I think that you should wait at least till them. There's no need to hurry. You've got the Wire in a cleft stick."
Mr Craw's ire was slightly ebbing.
"I shall not rest," he answered, "till I have run the author to ground and exposed the whole shameful affair. It is the most scandalous breach of the comity of journalism that I have ever heard of."
"I agree. But it won't do you any harm. It will only make the Wire look foolish. You don't mean to give them any chance to get back on you through the Evallonian business. Up to now you've won all along the line, for they've had to confess their mistake in their mystery stunt about your disappearance, and soon they'll have to climb down about the interview. Don't spoil your success by being in a hurry."
As I have said, Mr Craw's first fine rapture of wrath was cooling. He saw the good sense of Jaikie's argument. Truth to tell, he had no desire to face the Evallonians, and he was beginning to see that fortune had indeed delivered his rivals into his hands. He did not answer, but he crumpled the Wire and tossed it to Jaikie's side of the fireplace. It was a token of his reluctant submission.
"I want to ask you something," Jaikie continued. "It's about Evallonia."
"I prefer not to discuss that hateful subject."
"I quite understand. But this is really rather important. It's about the Evallonian Republic. What sort of fellows run it?"
"Men utterly out of tune with the national spirit. Adventurers who owe their place to the injudicious patronage of the Great Powers!"
"But what kind of adventurers? Are they the ordinary sort of middle-class republicans that you have, for example, in Germany?"
"By no means. Very much the contrary. My information is that the present Evallonian Government is honeycombed with Communism. I have evidence that certain of its members have the most sinister relations with Moscow. No doubt they speak fair to foreign Powers, but there is reason to believe that they are only waiting to consolidate their position before setting up an imitation of the Soviet régime. One of their number, Mastrovin, is an avowed Communist, who might turn out a second Bela Kun. That is one of the reasons why Royalism is so living a force in the country. The people realise that it is their only protection against an ultimate anarchy."
"I see." Jaikie tapped his teeth with the nail of his right forefinger, a sure proof that he had got something to think about.
"Have you met any of those fellows? Mastrovin, for example?"
"I am glad to say that I have not."
"You know some of the Royalists?"
"Not personally. I have always in a matter like this avoided personal contacts. They warp the judgment."
"Who is their leader? I mean, who would sit on the throne if a Royalist revolution succeeded?"
"Prince John, of course."
"What's he like?"
"I never met him. My reports describe him as an exemplary young man, with great personal charm and a high sense of public duty."
"How old?"
"Quite young. Twenty-six or twenty-seven. I have seen his portraits, and they reminded me of our own Prince Charles Edward. He is very fair, for his mother was a Scandinavian Princess."
"I see." Jaikie asked no more questions, for he had got as much information as for the moment he could digest. He picked up the despised Wire, straightened it out, and read the famous interview, which before he had only skimmed.
He read it with a solemn face, for he was aware that Mr Craw's eye was upon him, but he wanted badly to laugh. The thing was magnificent in its way, the idiomatic revelation of a mind at once jovial and cynical. Tibbets could not have invented it all. Where on earth had he got his material?
One passage especially caught his notice.
"I asked him, a little timidly, if he did not think it rash to run counter to the spirit of the age.
"In reply Mr Craw relapsed smilingly into the homely idiom of the countryside. 'The Spirit of the Age!' he cried. 'That's a thing I wouldn't give a docken for.'"
Jaikie was a little startled. He knew someone who was in the habit of refusing to give dockens for things he despised. But that someone had never heard of Tibbets or Castle Gay, and was far away in his modest home of Blaweary.
That day the two travellers escaped from the tyranny of ham and eggs. They ate an excellent plain dinner, cooked especially for them by Mrs Fairweather. Then came the question of how to spend the rest of the evening. Mr Craw was obviously unsettled, and apparently had no desire to cover foolscap in his bedroom, while the mystery afoot in Portaway made Jaikie anxious to make further explorations in the town. The polling was only a few days off, and there was that ferment in the air which accompanies an election. Jaikie proposed a brief inquisition into the politics of the place, and Mr Craw consented.
A country town after dark has a more vivid life than a great city, because that life is more concentrated. There is no business quarter to become a sepulchre after business hours, since the domestic and the commercial are intermingled. A shopkeeper puts up his shutters, has his supper upstairs, and presently descends to join a group on the pavement or in a neighbouring bar parlour. The children do not seem to retire early to bed, but continue their games around the lamp-posts. There are still country carts by the kerbs, stray sheep and cattle are still moving countrywards from the market, and long-striding shepherds butt their way through the crowd. There is a pleasant smell of cooking about, and a hum of compact and contented life. Add the excitement of an election, and you have that busy burghal hive which is the basis of all human society—a snug little commune intent on its own affairs, a world which for the moment owes allegiance to no other.
It was a fine evening, setting to a mild frost, when Jaikie and Mr Craw descended the Eastgate to the cobbled market place where stood the Town Hall. There it appeared from gigantic blue posters that the Conservative candidate, one Sir John Cowden, was holding forth, assisted by a minor member of the Government. The respectable burghers now entering the door did not promise much amusement, so the two turned up the Callowa into the oldest part of the old town, which in other days had been a nest of Radical weavers. Here their ears were greeted by the bray of a loud-speaker to which the wives by their house-doors were listening, and, having traced it to its lair, they found a beaky young man announcing the great Liberal Rally to be held that night in the new Drill Hall and to be addressed by the candidate, Mr Orlando Greenstone, assisted by no less a personage than his leader, the celebrated Mr Foss Jones.
"Let's go there," said Jaikie. "I have never seen Foss Jones. Have you?"
"No," was the answer, "but he tried several times to make me a peer."
They had to retrace their steps, cross the Callowa bridge, and enter a region of villas, gardens, and ugly new kirks. There could be no doubt about the attraction of Mr Foss Jones. The road was thronged with others on the same errand as theirs, and when they reached the Drill Hall they found that it was already crowded to its extreme capacity. An excited gentleman, wearing a yellow rosette, was advising the excluded to go to the hall of a neighbouring church. There an overflow meeting would be held, to which Mr Foss Jones's speech would be relayed, and the great man himself would visit it and say a word.
Jaikie found at his elbow the mechanic from the Hydropathic called Wilkie.
"I'm no gaun to sit like a deaf man listenin' to an ear trumpet," he was announcing. "Hullo, Mr Galt! Weel met! I was sayin' that it's a puir way to spend your time sittin' in a cauld kirk to the rumblin' o' a tin trumpet. What about a drink? Or if it's poalitics ye're seekin', let's hear what the Socialists has to say. Their man the nicht is in the Masons' Hall. They say he's no much o' a speaker, but he'll hae a lively crowd aboot him. What d'ye say? … Fine, man. We'll a' gang thegither… . Pleased to meet ye, Mr Carlyle… . Ony relation o' Jock Carlyle, the horse-doctor?"
"Not that I am aware of," said Mr Craw sourly. He was annoyed at the liberty taken by Jaikie with his surname, though he realised the reason for it.
To reach the Masons' Hall they had to recross the Callowa and penetrate a mesh of narrow streets east of the market square. The Labour party in Portaway made up for their lack of front-bench oratory by their enthusiasm for their local leaders. Jaikie found himself wedged into a back seat in a hall, which was meant perhaps to hold five hundred and at the moment contained not less than eight. On the platform, seen through a mist of tobacco smoke, sat a number of men in their Sunday clothes and wearing red favours, with a large, square, solemn man, one of the foremen at the Quarries, in the chair. On his right was the Labour candidate, a pleasant-faced youth with curly fair hair, who by the path of an enthusiasm for boys' clubs in the slums had drifted from Conservative pastures into the Socialist fold. He was at present engaged in listening with an appreciative grin to the oratorical efforts of various members of his platform, for that evening's meeting seemed to have been arranged on the anthology principle—a number of short speeches, testifying from different angles to the faith.
"We'll now hear Comrade Erchie Robison," the chairman announced. Comrade Robison rose nervously to his feet, to be received with shouts of "Come awa, Erchie! Oot wi't, man. Rub their noses in't." But there was no violence in Comrade Erchie, who gave them a dull ten minutes, composed mainly of figures which he read from a penny exercise book. He was followed by Comrade Jimmy Macleish, who was likewise received with favour by the audience and exhorted to "pu' up his breeks and gie them hell." But Jimmy, too, was a wet blanket, confining himself to a dirge-like enunciation of Tory misdeeds in various foreign places, the pronunciation of which gave him pain. "Whaur did ye say that happened?" said a voice. "Tchemshooershoo," said Jimmy. "Man, there couldna be sic a place. Ye've got a cauld in your heid, Jimmy," was the verdict. The only exception to this dismal decorum was a woman, who had a real gift of scolding rhetoric. Her theme was "huz puir folk," and she announced that she came from a "Glesca stair-heid." She was vigorous and abusive, but she had a voice like a saw, and five minutes of her were a torment to the ear.
Then the candidate rose. He was elegant, he was wholesome, and he was young; he had not made the mistake of dressing down to his part; in that audience of grim faces, worn with toil and weather, he looked as out of place as a flamingo among crows. His speech, which he delivered with the fluency born of frequent repetition, was an emotional appeal for the under-dog. He deprecated bitterness, he repudiated any intent of violence; such arguments as he gave were a plea rather for a change of heart than a change of the social fabric. He was earnest, he was eloquent, he was transparently honest, and there was something in his youthful candour which attracted his hearers, for his periods were punctuated with loud applause. But from the man on Jaikie's right they evoked only heartbroken groans.
Jaikie looked at this neighbour and recognised him. He was a middle-aged man, with a good deal of hair and beard plentifully streaked with grey. His features were regular and delicate, and his whole air was of breeding and cultivation—all but his eyes, which were like live coals under his shaggy brows. His name was David Antrobus, a name once famous in Latin scholarship, till the War suddenly switched his attention violently on to public affairs. He had been a militant pacifist, and had twice gone to gaol for preaching treason. In 1920 he had visited Russia and had returned a devout votary of Lenin, whose mission it was to put alcohol into the skim milk of British Socialism. In Glasgow he was known as Red Davie, and Jaikie had met him there in Dougal's company, when he had been acutely interested to hear a creed of naked nihilism expounded in accents of the most scholarly precision. He had met him in Cambridge, too, the preceding term. Mr Antrobus had been invited to lecture to a group of young iconoclasts, and Jaikie, in company with certain Rugby notables, had attended. There had been a considerable row, and Jaikie, misliking the manner of Mr Antrobus's opponents, had, along with his friends, entered joyfully into the strife, and had helped to conduct the speaker safely to his hotel and next morning to the station.
The man returned Jaikie's glance, and there was recognition in his eyes. "Mr Galt, isn't it?" he asked. "I am very glad to see you again. Have you come to spy out the nakedness of the land?"
"I came to be amused," was the answer. "I have no politics."
"Amused!" said Mr Antrobus. "That is the right word. This man calls himself a Socialist candidate, but his stuff is the merest bleating of the scared bourgeois sheep. Evils, for which the only remedy is blood and steel and the extreme rigour of thought, he would cure with a penny bun."
"Are you here to help him?"
"I am here to break him," was the grim answer. "My business is to hunt down that type of humbug and keep it out of Parliament. Answer me. Would it not terrify you to think that such a thing as that was fighting beside you in the day of battle? His place is among our enemies, to be food for our powder."
Mr Antrobus would have said more, but his attention was distracted by the neighbour on his other side, who asked him a question. He bent his head deferentially to listen, and over the back of it Jaikie saw the strong profile and the heavy jaw of the man whom a few hours before he had observed with Allins at the Hydropathic door.
There was a short colloquy between the two, and then Mr Antrobus inclined again towards Jaikie. The man was courtesy incarnate, and he seemed to think that the debt he owed Jaikie for his escape at Cambridge must be paid by a full confession of faith. He enlarged on the folly of British Socialism, the ineptitude and dishonesty of official Labour. "Toryism," he said, "is our enemy—a formidable enemy. We respect it and some day will slay it. Liberalism is an antique which we contemptuously kick out of the road. But Labour is treason, treason to our own cause, and its leaders will have the reward of traitors."
Jaikie put his mouth close to his ear: "Who is the man on your right?" he asked. "I fancy I have seen him before."
"Abroad?"
"Abroad," Jaikie mendaciously agreed.
"It must have been abroad, for this is his first visit to Britain. It would not do to advertise his name, for he is travelling incognito. But to you I can tell it, for I can trust you. He is a very great man, one of the greatest living. Some day soon all the world will ring with his deeds. To me he is an old friend, whom I visit several times each year for counsel and inspiration. He is the great Anton Mastrovin. You have heard of him?"
"Yes. And I must have seen him—perhaps in Vienna. One does not easily forget that face."
"It is the face of a maker of revolutions," said Mr Antrobus reverentially.
But at that moment the great man rose, having no doubt had enough, and Mr Antrobus docilely followed him. Jaikie sat tight through the rest of the candidate's speech, and did not squeeze out till the proposing of the resolutions began. But it may be assumed that he did not pay very strict attention to the candidate's ingenious attempt to identify the latest Labour programme with the Sermon on the Mount. He had something more urgent to think about.