The Free Fishers

In Which a Young Man is Afraid of His Youth


Mr Anthony Lammas, whose long legs had been covering ground at the
rate of five miles an hour, slackened his pace, for he felt the
need of ordering a mind which for some hours had been dancing
widdershins. For one thing the night had darkened, since the moon
had set, and the coast track which he followed craved wary walking.
But it was the clear dark of a northern April, when, though the
details are blurred, the large masses of the landscape are
apprehended. He was still aware of little headlands descending to
a shadowy gulf which was the Firth. Far out the brazier on the May
was burning with a steady glow, like some low-swung planet shaming
with its ardour the cold stars. He sniffed the sharp clean scent
of the whins above the salt; he could almost detect the brightness
of their flowering. They should have been thyme, he thought, thyme
and arbutus and tamarisk clothing the capes of the Sicilian sea,
for this was a night of Theocritus. . . .

Theocritus! What had he to do with Theocritus? It was highly
necessary to come to terms with this mood into which he had fallen.

For Mr Lammas, a licensed minister of the Kirk and a professor in
the University of St Andrews, had just come from keeping strange
company. Three years ago, through the good offices of his patron
and friend, Lord Snowdoun, he had been appointed to the Chair of
Logic and Rhetoric, with emoluments which, with diet money and
kain-hens, reached the sum of £309 a year, a fortune for a
provident bachelor. His father, merchant and boat-builder in the
town of Dysart, had left him also a small patrimony, so that he was
in no way cumbered with material cares. His boyhood had been
crowded with vagrant ambitions. At the burgh school he had
hankered after the sea; later, the guns in France had drawn him to
a soldier's life, and he had got as far as Burntisland before a
scandalised parent reclaimed him. Then scholarship had laid its
spell on him. He had stridden to the top of his Arts classes in St
Andrews, and at Edinburgh had been well thought of as a theologian.
His purpose then was the lettered life, and he had hopes of the
college living of Tweedsmuir, far off in the southern moorlands,
where he might cultivate the Muses and win some such repute as that
of Mr Beattie at Aberdeen.

But Lord Snowdoun had shown him the way to better things, for to be
a professor at twenty-five was to have a vantage-ground for loftier
ascents. In the Logic part of his duties he had little interest,
contenting himself with an exposition of Mr Reid's Inquiry and some
perfunctory lectures on Descartes, but in the Rhetoric classes,
which began after Candlemas, his soul expanded, and he had made
himself a name for eloquence. Also he had discovered an aptitude
for affairs, and was already entrusted with the heavy end of
college business. A year ago he had been appointed Questor, a post
which carried the management of the small academic revenues. He
stood well with his colleagues, well with the students, and behind
him was Lord Snowdoun, that potent manager of Scotland. Some day
he would be Principal, when he would rival the fame of old
Tullidelph, and meantime as a writer he would win repute far beyond
the narrow shores of Fife. Had he not in his bureau a manuscript
treatise on the relations of art and morals which, when he re-read
it, astounded him by its acumen and wit, and a manuscript poem on
the doings of Cardinal Beatoun which he could not honestly deem
inferior to the belauded verse of Mr Walter Scott!