Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes Page A

and said perhaps I could tell them what was in Guthrie’s mind: was Will right in thinking he had opened up Erchany for fear of the Americans?
    ‘I think it fell unlikely that the American cousins are fretting any more about Guthrie, or he about them.’ And at that I knocked out my pipe and prepared to dander home.
    Reader, there’s ever a judgement waits on arrogance. I had got to the door of the private when it opened that briskly I had to jump back from it and in came a strange quean in motoring clothes. ‘Am I interrupting?’ she asked, and seemed fell certain she wasn’t, marching straight to the bar and speaking crisp-like but friendly to Mistress Roberts. ‘The postmistress can’t be found and I’ve just no time to look for her. Would you very much mind telephoning this? I’ll have a sherry.’ And out of her pocket the quean pulled a paper and a bit silver.
    I don’t doubt we all gowked at the girl as if she had been a two-headed calf. But she never minded us but just stood, a slip of a young creature and yet with something extra-purposeful to her, drinking her sherry while the Roberts wife went through and telephoned her telegram to Dunwinnie. Syne she turned round and had a look at us, brief and concentrated, as if we were something with a couple of asterisks against us on a Cook’s tour. Then when Mistress Roberts came ben she took her change, said a word of thanks and was out of the Arms in a winking. Half a minute later came the sound of her car making off up the road as if it didn’t think to stop this side of Inverness.
    There was silence for a bit. We were all thinking it unco that just as we had been talking of America and Newfoundland in should step an American lassie – for that she was that no one who had ever been to the Dunwinnie picture palace could doubt. Mistress Roberts stood polishing glasses behind the bar, and there was a gleam in her eye that didn’t come just from the effort of scouring the mortal sin of beer from them. She had the news now and she knew it.
    Presently Rob had a try at her. ‘It would be a telegram, Mistress Roberts, the quean was sending?’
    ‘It was that,’ said Mistress Roberts, and gave the rest of her whistle to breathing hard on a pint pot.
    ‘To book her a room for the night up the road, maybe?’
    ‘Maybe aye and maybe no, and it’s nobody’s business but her own,’ said the Roberts wife, virtuous-like. She hadn’t yet forgiven Rob for the way he’d treated Carfrae’s Non-Injurious. But it was plain she was fair bursting all the same; for two–three minutes she polished her glasses as if she were trying to take the black from the face of the Devil. Then ‘Faith,’ she said, ‘I was right stammagasted!’
    This time Carfrae tried, and we knew he was much liker to get round her. ‘There was something unco in the message, mistress?’
    ‘Maybe aye and maybe no again. If you must know it was to someone in London and it just said Hope to have important news soon .’
    Will Saunders got up and joined me by the door. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘that there’s much occasion for what Carfrae calls evil idle talk in that.’
    ‘Maybe no and maybe aye. But I’ll tell you this. Mr Bell there ought to be real interested in the signature.’ And at that she banged down the last of her glasses and turned to give a bit stir to her teapot.
    ‘The signature?’ I said, puzzled.
    ‘Just that, Mr Bell. The lassie’s signature was Guthrie.’

 
     
8
    And now there’s only what the author lad in Edinburgh will call the Testimony of Miss Strachan and I’ll be coming to Christine – Christine who you may think will be the heroine of his book. You’ll remember Miss Strachan is the schoolmistress, her that wrote a paper on Visual Education. Maybe it was no bad subject for her; she’s a peering body by nature, hungry in other people’s affairs, and joins a sharp eye to a long nose. And no doubt it was the inquisitiveness of her that took her the