Chapter I. How a Retired Provision Merchant Felt the Impulse of Spring

Huntingtower

by John Buchan

Mr. Dickson McCunn completed the polishing of his smooth cheeks
with the towel, glanced appreciatively at their reflection in the
looking-glass, and then permitted his eyes to stray out of the
window. In the little garden lilacs were budding, and there was a
gold line of daffodils beside the tiny greenhouse. Beyond the sooty
wall a birch flaunted its new tassels, and the jackdaws were
circling about the steeple of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk. A
blackbird whistled from a thorn-bush, and Mr. McCunn was inspired to
follow its example. He began a tolerable version of "Roy's Wife of
Aldivalloch."

He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was
his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden
fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before
he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least
one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by
sticking-plaster. Calculation revealed to him the fact that in his
fifty-five years, having begun to shave at eighteen, he had wasted
three thousand three hundred and seventy hours--or one hundred and
forty days--or between four and five months--by his neglect of this
admirable invention. Now he felt that he had stolen a march on
Time. He had fallen heir, thus late, to a fortune in unpurchasable
leisure.

He began to dress himself in the sombre clothes in which he
had been accustomed for thirty-five years and more to go down to the
shop in Mearns Street. And then a thought came to him which made
him discard the grey-striped trousers, sit down on the edge of his
bed, and muse.

Since Saturday the shop was a thing of the past. On Saturday
at half-past eleven, to the accompaniment of a glass of dubious
sherry, he had completed the arrangements by which the provision
shop in Mearns Street, which had borne so long the legend of D.
McCunn, together with the branches in Crossmyloof and the Shaws,
became the property of a company, yclept the United Supply Stores,
Limited. He had received in payment cash, debentures and preference
shares, and his lawyers and his own acumen had acclaimed the
bargain. But all the week-end he had been a little sad. It was the
end of so old a song, and he knew no other tune to sing. He was
comfortably off, healthy, free from any particular cares in life,
but free too from any particular duties. "Will I be going to turn
into a useless old man?" he asked himself.

But he had woke up this Monday to the sound of the blackbird,
and the world, which had seemed rather empty twelve hours before,
was now brisk and alluring. His prowess in quick shaving assured
him of his youth. "I'm no' that dead old," he observed, as he sat
on the edge of he bed, to his reflection in the big
looking-glass.

It was not an old face. The sandy hair was a little thin on
the top and a little grey at the temples, the figure was perhaps a
little too full for youthful elegance, and an athlete would have
censured the neck as too fleshy for perfect health. But the cheeks
were rosy, the skin clear, and the pale eyes singularly childlike.
They were a little weak, those eyes, and had some difficulty in
looking for long at the same object, so that Mr. McCunn did not stare
people in the face, and had, in consequence, at one time in his
career acquired a perfectly undeserved reputation for cunning. He
shaved clean, and looked uncommonly like a wise, plump schoolboy. As
he gazed at his simulacrum he stopped whistling "Roy's Wife" and let
his countenance harden into a noble sternness. Then he laughed, and
observed in the language of his youth that there was "life in the
auld dowg yet." In that moment the soul of Mr. McCunn conceived the
Great Plan.

The first sign of it was that he swept all his business
garments unceremoniously on to the floor. The next that he rootled
at the bottom of a deep drawer and extracted a most disreputable
tweed suit. It had once been what I believe is called a Lovat
mixture, but was now a nondescript sub-fusc, with bright patches of
colour like moss on whinstone. He regarded it lovingly, for it had
been for twenty years his holiday wear, emerging annually for a
hallowed month to be stained with salt and bleached with sun. He
put it on, and stood shrouded in an odour of camphor. A pair of
thick nailed boots and a flannel shirt and collar completed the
equipment of the sportsman. He had another long look at himself in
the glass, and then descended whistling to breakfast. This time the
tune was "Macgregors' Gathering," and the sound of it stirred the
grimy lips of a man outside who was delivering coals--himself a
Macgregor--to follow suit. Mr McCunn was a very fountain of music
that morning.

Tibby, the aged maid, had his newspaper and letters waiting by
his plate, and a dish of ham and eggs frizzling near the fire. He
fell to ravenously but still musingly, and he had reached the stage
of scones and jam before he glanced at his correspondence. There
was a letter from his wife now holidaying at the Neuk Hydropathic.
She reported that her health was improving, and that she had met
various people who had known somebody else whom she had once known
herself. Mr. McCunn read the dutiful pages and smiled. "Mamma's
enjoying herself fine," he observed to the teapot. He knew that for
his wife the earthly paradise was a hydropathic, where she put on
her afternoon dress and every jewel she possessed when she rose in
the morning, ate large meals of which the novelty atoned for the
nastiness, and collected an immense casual acquaintance, with whom
she discussed ailments, ministers, sudden deaths, and the intricate
genealogies of her class. For his part he rancorously hated
hydropathics, having once spent a black week under the roof of one
in his wife's company. He detested the food, the Turkish baths (he
had a passionate aversion to baring his body before strangers), the
inability to find anything to do and the compulsion to endless small
talk. A thought flitted over his mind which he was too loyal to
formulate. Once he and his wife had had similar likings, but they
had taken different roads since their child died. Janet! He saw
again--he was never quite free from the sight--the solemn little
white-frocked girl who had died long ago in the Spring.

It may have been the thought of the Neuk Hydropathic, or more
likely the thin clean scent of the daffodils with which Tibby had
decked the table, but long ere breakfast was finished the Great Plan
had ceased to be an airy vision and become a sober well-masoned
structure. Mr. McCunn--I may confess it at the start--was an
incurable romantic.

He had had a humdrum life since the day when he had first
entered his uncle's shop with the hope of some day succeeding that
honest grocer; and his feet had never strayed a yard from his sober
rut. But his mind, like the Dying Gladiator's, had been far away.
As a boy he had voyaged among books, and they had given him a world
where he could shape his career according to his whimsical fancy.
Not that Mr. McCunn was what is known as a great reader. He read
slowly and fastidiously, and sought in literature for one thing
alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first guide, but he read the
novels not for their insight into human character or for their
historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith
to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same with Dickens. A
lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of hoofs on a
frosty road, went to his head like wine. He was a Jacobite not
because he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always
before his eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new
landed from France among the western heather.

On this select basis he had built up his small library--Defoe,
Hakluyt, Hazlitt and the essayists, Boswell, some indifferent
romances, and a shelf of spirited poetry. His tastes became known,
and he acquired a reputation for a scholarly habit. He was
president of the Literary Society of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and
read to its members a variety of papers full of a gusto which rarely
became critical. He had been three times chairman at Burns
Anniversary dinners, and had delivered orations in eulogy of the
national Bard; not because he greatly admired him--he thought him
rather vulgar--but because he took Burns as an emblem of the
un-Burns-like literature which he loved. Mr. McCunn was no scholar
and was sublimely unconscious of background. He grew his flowers in
his small garden-plot oblivious of their origin so long as they gave
him the colour and scent he sought. Scent, I say, for he
appreciated more than the mere picturesque. He had a passion for
words and cadences, and would be haunted for weeks by a cunning
phrase, savouring it as a connoisseur savours a vintage. Wherefore
long ago, when he could ill afford it, he had purchased the
Edinburgh Stevenson. They were the only large books on his shelves,
for he had a liking for small volumes--things he could stuff into
his pocket in that sudden journey which he loved to contemplate.

Only he had never taken it. The shop had tied him up for
eleven months in the year, and the twelfth had always found him
settled decorously with his wife in some seaside villa. He had not
fretted, for he was content with dreams. He was always a little
tired, too, when the holidays came, and his wife told him he was
growing old. He consoled himself with tags from the more philosophic
of his authors, but he scarcely needed consolation. For he had
large stores of modest contentment.

But now something had happened. A spring morning and a safety
razor had convinced him that he was still young. Since yesterday he
was a man of a large leisure. Providence had done for him what he
would never have done for himself. The rut in which he had
travelled so long had given place to open country. He repeated to
himself one of the quotations with which he had been wont to stir
the literary young men at the Guthrie Memorial Kirk:

"What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram
in a day, what his youth took a year to hold: When we mind labour,
then only, we're too old-- What age had Methusalem when he begat
Saul? He would go journeying--who but he?--pleasantly."

It sounds a trivial resolve, but it quickened Mr. McCunn to
the depths of his being. A holiday, and alone! On foot, of course,
for he must travel light. He would buckle on a pack after the
approved fashion. He had the very thing in a drawer upstairs, which
he had bought some years ago at a sale. That and a waterproof and a
stick, and his outfit was complete. A book, too, and, as he lit his
first pipe, he considered what it should be. Poetry, clearly, for
it was the Spring, and besides poetry could be got in pleasantly
small bulk. He stood before his bookshelves trying to select a
volume, rejecting one after another as inapposite. Browning--Keats,
Shelley--they seemed more suited for the hearth than for the
roadside. He did not want anything Scots, for he was of opinion
that Spring came more richly in England and that English people had
a better notion of it. He was tempted by the Oxford Anthology, but
was deterred by its thickness, for he did not possess the thin-paper
edition. Finally he selected Izaak Walton. He had never fished in
his life, but The Compleat Angler seemed to fit his mood. It was old
and curious and learned and fragrant with the youth of things. He
remembered its falling cadences, its country songs and wise
meditations. Decidedly it was the right scrip for his pilgrimage.

Characteristically he thought last of where he was to go.
Every bit of the world beyond his front door had its charms to the
seeing eye. There seemed nothing common or unclean that fresh
morning. Even a walk among coal-pits had its attractions....But
since he had the right to choose, he lingered over it like an
epicure. Not the Highlands, for Spring came late among their sour
mosses. Some place where there were fields and woods and inns,
somewhere, too, within call of the sea. It must not be too remote,
for he had no time to waste on train journeys; nor too near, for he
wanted a countryside untainted. Presently he thought of Carrick. A
good green land, as he remembered it, with purposeful white roads
and public-houses sacred to the memory of Burns; near the hills but
yet lowland, and with a bright sea chafing on its shores. He
decided on Carrick, found a map, and planned his journey.

Then he routed out his knapsack, packed it with a modest
change of raiment, and sent out Tibby to buy chocolate and tobacco
and to cash a cheque at the Strathclyde Bank. Till Tibby returned
he occupied himself with delicious dreams....He saw himself daily
growing browner and leaner, swinging along broad highways or
wandering in bypaths. He pictured his seasons of ease, when he
unslung his pack and smoked in some clump of lilacs by a
burnside--he remembered a phrase of Stevenson's somewhat like that.
He would meet and talk with all sorts of folk; an exhilarating
prospect, for Mr. McCunn loved his kind. There would be the evening
hour before he reached his inn, when, pleasantly tired, he would top
some ridge and see the welcoming lights of a little town. There
would be the lamp-lit after-supper time when he would read and
reflect, and the start in the gay morning, when tobacco tastes
sweetest and even fifty-five seems young. It would be holiday of
the purest, for no business now tugged at his coat-tails. He was
beginning a new life, he told himself, when he could cultivate the
seedling interests which had withered beneath the far-reaching shade
of the shop. Was ever a man more fortunate or more free?

Tibby was told that he was going off for a week or two. No
letters need be forwarded, for he would be constantly moving, but
Mrs. McCunn at the Neuk Hydropathic would be kept informed of his
whereabouts. Presently he stood on his doorstep, a stocky figure in
ancient tweeds, with a bulging pack slung on his arm, and a stout
hazel stick in his hand. A passer-by would have remarked an elderly
shopkeeper bent apparently on a day in the country, a common little
man on a prosaic errand. But the passer-by would have been wrong,
for he could not see into the heart. The plump citizen was the
eternal pilgrim; he was Jason, Ulysses, Eric the Red, Albuquerque,
Cortez--starting out to discover new worlds.

Before he left Mr. McCunn had given Tibby a letter to post.
That morning he had received an epistle from a benevolent
acquaintance, one Mackintosh, regarding a group of urchins who
called themselves the "Gorbals Die-Hards." Behind the premises in
Mearns Street lay a tract of slums, full of mischievous boys, with
whom his staff waged truceless war. But lately there had started
among them a kind of unauthorized and unofficial Boy Scouts, who,
without uniform or badge or any kind of paraphernalia, followed the
banner of Sir Robert Baden-Powell and subjected themselves to a rude
discipline. They were far too poor to join an orthodox troop, but
they faithfully copied what they believed to be the practices of
more fortunate boys. Mr. McCunn had witnessed their pathetic
parades, and had even passed the time of day with their leader, a
red-haired savage called Dougal. The philanthropic Mackintosh had
taken an interest in the gang and now desired subscriptions to send
them to camp in the country.

Mr. McCunn, in his new exhilaration, felt that he could not
deny to others what he proposed for himself. His last act before
leaving was to send Mackintosh ten pounds.