"C'est enfin que dans leurs prunelles
Rit et pleure-fastidieux--
L'amour des choses eternelles
Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!"
--PAUL VERLAINE.
We were sitting around the camp fire, some thirty miles north of a
place called Taqui, when Lawson announced his intention of finding a
home. He had spoken little the last day or two, and I had guessed that
he had struck a vein of private reflection. I thought it might be a
new mine or irrigation scheme, and I was surprised to find that it was
a country house.
"I don't think I shall go back to England," he said, kicking a
sputtering log into place. "I don't see why I should. For business
purposes I am far more useful to the firm in South Africa than in
Throgmorton Street. I have no relation left except a third cousin, and
I have never cared a rush for living in town. That beastly house of
mine in Hill Street will fetch what I gave for it,--Isaacson cabled
about it the other day, offering for furniture and all. I don't want
to go into Parliament, and I hate shooting little birds and tame deer.
I am one of those fellows who are born Colonial at heart, and I don't
see why I shouldn't arrange my life as I please. Besides, for ten
years I have been falling in love with this country, and now I am up to
the neck."
He flung himself back in the camp-chair till the canvas creaked, and
looked at me below his eyelids. I remember glancing at the lines of
him, and thinking what a fine make of a man he was. In his untanned
field-boots, breeches, and grey shirt, he looked the born wilderness
hunter, though less than two months before he had been driving down to
the City every morning in the sombre regimentals of his class. Being a
fair man, he was gloriously tanned, and there was a clear line at his
shirt-collar to mark the limits of his sunburn. I had first known him
years ago, when he was a broker's clerk working on half-commission.
Then he had gone to South Africa, and soon I heard he was a partner in
a mining house which was doing wonders with some gold areas in the
North. The next step was his return to London as the new
millionaire,--young, good-looking, wholesome in mind and body, and much
sought after by the mothers of marriageable girls. We played polo
together, and hunted a little in the season, but there were signs that
he did not propose to become the conventional English gentleman. He
refused to buy a place in the country, though half the Homes of England
were at his disposal. He was a very busy man, he declared, and had not
time to be a squire. Besides, every few months he used to rush out to
South Africa. I saw that he was restless, for he was always badgering
me to go big-game hunting with him in some remote part of the earth.
There was that in his eyes, too, which marked him out from the ordinary
blond type of our countrymen. They were large and brown and
mysterious, and the light of another race was in their odd depths.
To hint such a thing would have meant a breach of friendship, for
Lawson was very proud of his birth. When he first made his fortune he
had gone to the Heralds to discover his family, and these obliging
gentlemen had provided a pedigree. It appeared that he was a scion of
the house of Lowson or Lowieson, an ancient and rather disreputable
clan on the Scottish side of the Border. He took a shooting in
Teviotdale on the strength of it, and used to commit lengthy Border
ballads to memory. But I had known his father, a financial journalist
who never quite succeeded, and I had heard of a grandfather who sold
antiques in a back street at Brighton. The latter, I think, had not
changed his name, and still frequented the synagogue. The father was a
progressive Christian, and the mother had been a blonde Saxon from the
Midlands. In my mind there was no doubt, as I caught Lawson's
heavy-lidded eyes fixed on me. My friend was of a more ancient race
than the Lowsons of the Border.
"Where are you thinking of looking for your house?" I asked. "In Natal
or in the Cape Peninsula? You might get the Fishers' place if you paid
a price."
"The Fishers' place be hanged!" he said crossly. "I don't want any
stuccoed, over-grown Dutch farm. I might as well be at Roehampton as
in the Cape."
He got up and walked to the far side of the fire, where a lane ran down
through the thornscrub to a gully of the hills. The moon was silvering
the bush of the plains, forty miles off and three thousand feet below
us.
"I am going to live somewhere hereabouts," he answered at last. I
whistled. "Then you've got to put your hand in your pocket, old man.
You'll have to make everything, including a map of the countryside."
"I know," he said; "that's where the fun comes in. Hang it all, why
shouldn't I indulge my fancy? I'm uncommonly well off, and I haven't
chick or child to leave it to. Supposing I'm a hundred miles from
rail-head, what about it? I'll make a motor-road and fix up a
telephone. I'll grow most of my supplies, and start a colony to
provide labour. When you come and stay with me, you'll get the best
food and drink on earth, and sport that will make your mouth water.
I'll put Lochleven trout in these streams,--at 6,000 feet you can do
anything. We'll have a pack of hounds, too, and we can drive pig in
the woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at our
feet. I tell you I'll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamed
of. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns and
rose-gardens." Lawson flung himself into his chair again and smiled
dreamily at the fire.
"But why here, of all places?" I persisted. I was not feeling very
well and did not care for the country.
"I can't quite explain. I think it's the sort of land I have always
been looking for. I always fancied a house on a green plateau in a
decent climate looking down on the tropics. I like heat and colour,
you know, but I like hills too, and greenery, and the things that bring
back Scotland. Give me a cross between Teviotdale and the Orinoco,
and, by Gad! I think I've got it here."
I watched my friend curiously, as with bright eyes and eager voice he
talked of his new fad. The two races were very clear in him--the one
desiring gorgeousness, the other athirst for the soothing spaces of the
North. He began to plan out the house. He would get Adamson to design
it, and it was to grow out of the landscape like a stone on the
hillside. There would be wide verandahs and cool halls, but great
fireplaces against winter time. It would all be very simple and
fresh--"clean as morning" was his odd phrase; but then another idea
supervened, and he talked of bringing the Tintorets from Hill Street.
"I want it to be a civilised house, you know. No silly luxury, but the
best pictures and china and books. I'll have all the furniture made
after the old plain English models out of native woods. I don't want
second-hand sticks in a new country. Yes, by Jove, the Tintorets are a
great idea, and all those Ming pots I bought. I had meant to sell
them, but I'll have them out here."
He talked for a good hour of what he would do, and his dream grew
richer as he talked, till by the time we went to bed he had sketched
something more like a palace than a country-house. Lawson was by no
means a luxurious man. At present he was well content with a Wolseley
valise, and shaved cheerfully out of a tin mug. It struck me as odd
that a man so simple in his habits should have so sumptuous a taste in
bric-a-brac. I told myself, as I turned in, that the Saxon mother from
the Midlands had done little to dilute the strong wine of the East.
It drizzled next morning when we inspanned, and I mounted my horse in a
bad temper. I had some fever on me, I think, and I hated this lush yet
frigid tableland, where all the winds on earth lay in wait for one's
marrow. Lawson was, as usual, in great spirits. We were not hunting,
but shifting our hunting-ground, so all morning we travelled fast to
the north along the rim of the uplands.
At midday it cleared, and the afternoon was a pageant of pure colour.
The wind sank to a low breeze; the sun lit the infinite green spaces,
and kindled the wet forest to a jewelled coronal. Lawson gaspingly
admired it all, as he cantered bareheaded up a bracken-clad slope.
"God's country," he said twenty times. "I've found it." Take a piece
of Sussex downland; put a stream in every hollow and a patch of wood;
and at the edge, where the cliffs at home would fall to the sea, put a
cloak of forest muffling the scarp and dropping thousands of feet to
the blue plains. Take the diamond air of the Gornergrat, and the riot
of colour which you get by a West Highland lochside in late September.
Put flowers everywhere, the things we grow in hothouses, geraniums like
sun-shades and arums like trumpets. That will give you a notion of the
countryside we were in. I began to see that after all it was out of
the common.
And just before sunset we came over a ridge and found something better.
It was a shallow glen, half a mile wide, down which ran a blue-grey
stream in lings like the Spean, till at the edge of the plateau it
leaped into the dim forest in a snowy cascade. The opposite side ran
up in gentle slopes to a rocky knell, from which the eye had a noble
prospect of the plains. All down the glen were little copses, half
moons of green edging some silvery shore of the burn, or delicate
clusters of tall trees nodding on the hill brow. The place so
satisfied the eye that for the sheer wonder of its perfection we
stopped and stared in silence for many minutes.