As I’ve told you, I can’t grow up. There’s a couple of lines by some poet that describes me accurately: ‘He is crazed by the spell of far Arabia, It has stolen his mind away.” Far Arabia—that’s my trouble. But the Ulysses business won’t do for an ageing child of forty. Besides, what about the mariners? Where are the ’free hearts, free foreheads?“ We used to have a rather nice little Round Table, Dick, but it is all broken up now and the wood turned into cigar-boxes for wedding present; Peter is dead, and you and Archie are married, and Leithe and Lamancha are happy parts of the machine.”

“There’s still Blenkiron.”

“He doesn’t count. He was a wandering star, that joined us and revolved cheerfully with us for a little, and then shot back to where it belonged…You can’t alter it by talking, my dear chap. I’m the old buccaneer marooned on a rock, watching his ancient companions passing in ocean liners.”

We had reached the top of the hill above Laverlaw and were looking down into the green cup filled with the afternoon sunlight, in which the house seemed as natural a thing is a stone from the hillside. I observed that it was a very pleasant rock to be marooned on. Sandy stared at the scene, and for a moment did not reply.

“I wish I had been born an Englishman,” he said at last. “Then I could have lived for that place, and been quite content to grow old in it. But that has never been our way. Our homes were only a jumping-off ground. We loved them gainfully and were always home-sick for them, but we were very little in them. That is the blight on us—we never had my sense of a continuing city, and our families survived only by accident. It’s a miracle that I’m the sixteenth Clanroyden…It’s not likely that there will be a seventeenth.”

 

 

 

   III

 

 

   Left Laverlaw rather anxious about Sandy, and during our time at Machray I thought a good deal about my friend. He was in an odd, jumpy, unpredictable state of mind, and didn’t see what was to be the outcome of it. At Machray I had a piece of news which showed his restlessness. Martendale, the newspaper man, came to stay, and was talking about boats, for his chief hobby is yacht-racing.

“What’s Arbuthnot up to now?” he asked. “I saw him it Cowes—at least I’m pretty sure it was he. In an odd get-up, even for him.”

I said that I had been staying with Sandy in August and that he had never mentioned Cowes, so I thought he must be mistaken. But Martendale was positive. He had been on the Squadron lawn, looking down on the crowd passing below, and he had seen Sandy, and caught his eye. He knew him slightly, but apparently Sandy had not wanted to be recognised and had simply stared at him. Martendale noticed him later, lunching out of a paper bag with the other trippers on the front. He was dressed like a yacht’s hand, rather a shabby yacht’s hand, and Martendale said that he thought he had a glimpse of him later with some of the crew of the big Argentine steam yacht, the Santa Barbara, which had been at Cowes that year. “The dago does not make an ornamental sailor,” said Martendale, “and if it was Arbuthnot, and I am pretty certain it was, he managed to assimilate himself very well to his background. I only picked him out of the bunch by his clean-cut face. Do you happen to know if he speaks Spanish? They were all jabbering that lingo.”

“Probably,” I said. “He’s one of the best linguists alive. But, all the same, I think you were mistaken. I saw him a fortnight later, and, I can tell you, he isn’t in the humour for escapades.”

In November, when I ran up to London from Fosse for a few days, I got further news of Sandy which really disquieted me.