There was a snapping fire in the chimney. I was cold through and I was
glad to stand close beside it on the stone hearth. My greatcoat had kept
out the rain, but it had not kept out the chill of the West Highland
night. I shivered before the fire, my hands held out to the flame.
It was a long, low room. There was an ancient guncase on one side,
but the racks were empty except for a service pistol hanging by its
trigger-guard from the hook. There were some shelves of books on the
other side. But the conspicuous thing in the room was an image of Buddha
in a glass box on the mantelpiece.
It was about four inches high, cast in silver and, I thought, of immense
age.
I had to wait for my uncle to come in. But I had enough to think about.
Every event connected with this visit seemed to touch on some mystery.
There was his strange letter to me in reply to my note that I was in
England and coming up to Scotland. Surely no man ever wrote a queerer
letter to a nephew coming on a visit to him.
It dwelt on the length of the journey and the remoteness of the place. I
was to be discouraged in every sentence. I was to carry his affectionate
regards to the family in America and say that he was in health.
It stood out plainly that I was not wanted.
This was strange in itself, but it was not the strangest thing about
this letter. The strangest thing was a word written in a shaky cramped
hand on the back of the sheet: the letters huddled together: “Come!”
I would have believed my uncle justified in his note. It was a long
journey. I had great difficulty to find anyone to take me out from the
railway station. There were idle men enough, but they shook their heads
when I named the house. Finally, for a double wage, I got an old gillie
with a cart to bring me as far on the way as the highroad ran. But he
would not turn into the unkept road that led over the moor to the house.
I could neither bribe nor persuade him. There was no alternative but to
set out through the mist with my bag on my shoulder.
Night was coming on. The moor was a vast wilderness of gorse. The house
loomed at the foot of it and beyond the loch that made a sort of estuary
for the open sea. Nor was this the only thing. I got the impression as I
tramped along that I was not alone on the moor. I don't know out of what
evidences the impression was built up. I felt that someone was in the
gorse beyond the road.
The house was closed up like a sleeping eye when I got before it. It was
a big, old, rambling stone house with a tangle of vines half torn away
by the winds: I hammered on the door and finally an aged man-servant
holding a candle high above his head let me in.
This was the manner of my coming to Saint Conan's Landing.
I had some supper of cold meat brought in by this aged servant. He was a
shrunken derelict of a human figure. He was disturbed at my arrival
and ill at ease. But I thought there was relief and welcome in his
expression. The master would be in directly; he would light a fire in
the drawing-room and prepare a bedchamber for me.
One would hardly find outside of England such faithful creatures
clinging to the fortunes of descending men. He was at the end of life
and in some fearful perplexity, but one felt there was something stanch
and sound in him.
I had no doubt that there, under my eye, was the hand that had added the
cramped word to my uncle's letter.
I stood now before the fire in the long, low room. The flames and a tall
candle at either end of the mantelpiece lit it up. I was looking at the
Buddha in the glass box. I could not imagine a thing more out of note.
Surely of all corners of the world this wild moor of the West Highlands
was the least suited to an Oriental cult. The elements seemed under no
control of Nature. The land was windswept, and the sea came crying into
the loch.
I suppose it was the mood of my queer experiences that set me at this
speculation.
One would expect to find some evidences of India in my uncle's house.
He had been a long time in Asia, on the fringes of the English service.
Toward the end he had been the Resident at the court of an obscure Rajah
in one of the Northwest Provinces. It was on the edge of the Empire
where it touches the little-known Mongolian states south of the Gobi.
The Home Office was only intermittently in touch with him. But
something, never explained, finally drew its attention and he was put
out of India. No one knew anything about it; “permitted to retire,” was
the text of the brief official notice.
And he had retired to the most remote place he could find in the British
islands. There was no other house on that corner of the coast. The man
was as alone as he would have been in the Gobi.
If he had planned to be alone one would have believed he had succeeded
in that intention. And yet from the moment I got down from the gillie's
cart I seemed drawn under a persisting surveillance. I felt now that
some one was looking at me. I turned quickly. There was a door at the
end of the room opening onto a bit of garden facing the sea. A man
stood, now, just inside this door, his hand on the latch. His head and
shoulders were stooped as though he had been there some moments, as
though he had let himself noiselessly in, and remained there watching me
before the fire.
But if so, he was prepared against my turning. He snapped the latch and
came down the room to where I stood.
He was a big stoop-shouldered Englishman with a pale, pasty face
beginning to sag at the jowls. There was a queer immobility about the
features as though the man were always in some fear. His eyes were a
pale tallow color and seemed too small for their immense sockets. One
could see that the man had been a gentleman. I write it in the past,
because at the moment I felt it as in the past. I felt that something
had dispossessed him.
“This will be Robin,” he said. “My dear fellow, it was fine of you to
travel all this way to see me.”
He had a nervous cold hand with hardly any pressure in the grasp of it.
His thin black hair was brushed across the top of his bald head, and the
distended, apprehensive expression on his face did not change.
He made me sit down by the fire and asked me about the family
in America. But there was, I thought, no real interest in this
interrogation until he came to a reflective comment.
“I should like to go to America,” he said; “there must be great wastes
of country where one would be out of the world.”
The sincerity of this expression stood out in the trivial talk. It
indicated something that disturbed the man. He was as isolated as he
could get in England, but that was not enough.
He sat for a moment silent, the fingers of his nervous hand moving on
his knee. When he glanced up, with a sudden jerk of his head, he
caught me looking at the little image of Buddha in its glass box on the
mantelpiece.
Was this longing for solitude the influence of this mysterious religion?
Remote, lonely isolation was a cult of Buddha. The devotees of that cult
sought the waste places of the earth for their meditations. To be out
of the world, in its physical contact, was a prime postulate in the
practice of this creed.
“Ah, Robin,” he cried, as though he were in a jovial mood and careless
of the subject, “do you have a hobby?”
I answered that I had not felt the need of one. The inquiry was a
surprise and I could think of nothing better to reply with.
“Then, my boy,” he went on, “what will you do when you are old? One must
have something to occupy the mind.”
He got up and turned the glass box a little on the mantelpiece.
“This is a very rare image,” he said; “one does not find this image
anywhere in India. It came from Tibet. The expression and the pose of
the figure differ from the conventional Buddha. You might not see that,
but to any one familiar with this religion these differences are
marked. This is a monastery image, and you will see that it is cast, not
graven.”
He beckoned me to come closer, and I rose and stood beside him. He went
on as with a lecture:
“The reason given by the natives why this image is not found in Southern
Asia is that it cannot be cast anywhere but in the Tibetan monasteries.
A certain ritual at the time of casting is necessary to produce a
perfect figure. This ritual is a secret of the Khan monasteries.
Castings of this form of image made without the ritual are always
defective; so I was told in India.”
He moved the glass box a little closer to the edge of the mantelpiece.
“Naturally,” he went on, “I considered this story, to be a mere piece of
religious pretension. It amused me to make some experiments, and to
my surprise the castings were always defective. I brought the image to
England.”
He shrugged his shoulders as with a careless gesture.
“In my idle time here I tried it again. And incredibly the result was
always the same; some portion of the figure showed a flaw. My interest
in the thing was permanently aroused. I continued to experiment.”
He laughed in a queer high cackle.
“And presently I found myself desperately astride a hobby. I got all the
Babbitt metal that I could buy up in England and put in the days and
not a few of the nights in trying to cast a perfect figure of this
confounded Buddha. But I have never been able to do it.”
He opened a drawer of the gun-case and brought over to the fire half a
dozen castings of the Buddha in various sizes.
Not one among the number was perfect. Some portion of the figure was in
every case wanting. A hand would be missing, a portion of a shoulder, a
bit of the squat body or there would be a flaw where the running metal
had not filled the mold.
“I'm hanged,” he cried, “if the beggars are not right about it. The
thing can't be done! I've tried it in all sorts of dimensions. You will
see some of the big figures in the garden. I've used a ton of metal and
every sort of mold.”
Then he flung his hand out toward the bookcase.
“I've studied the art of molding in soft metal. I have all the books
on it, and I've turned the boathouse into a sort of shop. I've spent a
hundred pounds--and I can't do it!”
He paused, his big face relaxed.
“The country thinks I'm mad, working with such outlandish deviltry. But,
curse the thing, I have set out to do it and I am not going to throw it
up.”
And suddenly with an unexpected heat he damned the Buddha, shaking his
clenched hand before the box.
“Your pardon, Robin,” he cried, the moment after. “But the thing's
ridiculous, you know. The ritual story would be sheer rubbish. The
beggars could not affect a metal casting with a form of words.”
I have tried to set down here precisely what my uncle said. It was
the last talk I ever had with the man in this world, and it profoundly
impressed me. He was in fear, and his jovial manner was a ghastly
pretence. I left him sitting by the fire drinking neat whisky from a
tumbler.
The old man-servant took me up to my room. It was a big room in a wing
of the house looking out on the garden and the sea. I saw that it had
been cleaned and made ready against my coming; clearly the old man
expected me.
He put the candle on the table and laid back the covers of the bed. And
suddenly I determined to have the matter out with him.
“Andrew,” I said, “why did you add that significant word to my uncle's
letter?”
He turned sharply with a little whimpering cry.
“The master, sir!” he said, and then he stopped as though uncertain
in what manner to go on. He made a hopeless sort of gesture with his
extended hands.
“I thought your coming might interrupt the thing.... You are of his
family and would be silent.”
“What threatens my uncle?” I cried, “What is the thing?”
He hesitated, his eyes moving about the floor.
“Oh, sir,” he said, “the master is in some wicked and dangerous
business. You heard his talk, sir; that would not be the talk of a man
at peace.... He has strange visitors, sir, and the place is watched. I
cannot tell you any more than that, except that something is going to
happen and I am shaken with the fear of it.”
I looked out through the musty curtains before I went to bed. But
the whole world was dark, packed down in the thick mist. Once, in the
direction of the open sea, I thought I saw the flicker of a light.
I was tired and I slept profoundly, but somewhere in the sleep I saw my
uncle and a priest of Tibet gibbering over a ladle of molten silver.
It was nearly midday when I awoke. The whole world had changed as under
some enchantment; there was brilliant sun and afresh stimulating air
with the salt breath of the sea in it. Old Andrew gave me some breakfast
and a message.
His manner like everything else seemed to have undergone some
transformation. He was silent and, I thought, evasive. He repeated the
message without comment, as though he had committed it to memory from an
unfamiliar language:
“The master directed me to say that he must make a journey to Oban. It
is urgent business and will not be laid over.”
“When does my uncle return,” I said.
The old man shifted his weight from one foot to the other; he looked
out through the open window onto the strip of meadow extending into the
loch. Finally he replied:
“The master did not name the hour of his return.”
I did not press the interrogation. I felt that there was something here
that the old man was keeping back; but I had an impression of equal
force that he ought to be allowed the run of his discretion with it.
Besides, the brilliant morning had swept out my sinister impressions.
I got my cap and stick from the rack by the door and went out. The house
was within a hundred paces of the loch, in a place of wild beauty on
a bit of moor, yellow with gorse, extending from the great barren
mountains behind it right down into the water. Immense banners of mist
lay along the tops of these mountain peaks, and streams of water like
skeins of silk marked the deep gorges in dazzling whiteness.
The loch was a crooked finger of the sea hooked into the land. It was
clear as glass in the bright morning. The open sea was directly beyond
the crook of the finger, barred out by a nest of needlepointed rocks. On
this morning, with the sea motionless, they stood up like the teeth of a
harrow, but in heavy weather I imagined that the waves covered them. To
the eye they were not the height of a man above the level water; they
glistened in the brilliant sun like a sheaf of black pikes.
This was Saint Conan's Landing, and it occurred to me that if the holy
man came in rough weather from the Irish coast he required, in truth,
all the perspicacity of a saint to get his boat in without having it
impaled on these devil's needles.
There was no garden to speak of about the house. It was grown up like
the moor. Two or three images of Buddhas stood about in it; one of them
was quite large--three feet in height I should say at a guess. They
were on rough stone pedestals. I examined them carefully. They were all
defective; the large one had an immense flaw in the shoulder. The gorse
nearly covered them; the unkept hedge let the moor in and there were no
longer any paths, except one running to the boathouse.
I did not follow the path. But I looked down at the boathouse with some
interest. This was the building that my uncle had turned into a sort of
foundry for his weird experiments. There was a big lock on the door and
a coal-blacked chimney standing above the roof.
It was afternoon. The whole coast about me was like an undiscovered
country. I hardly knew in what direction to set out on my exploration.
I stood in the path digging my stick into the gravel and undecided.
Finally I determined to cross the bit of moor to the high ground
overlooking the loch. It was the sloping base of one of the great peaks
and purple with heather. It looked the best point for a full sweep of
the sea and the coast.