The Runagates Club by John Buchan

Author:John Buchan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Handheld Press
Published: 2017-10-10T14:24:45+00:00

VI. The Loathly Opposite:

Oliver Pugh’s story

How loathly opposite I stood

To his unnatural purpose.

— King Lear

Burminster had been to a Guildhall dinner the night before, which had been attended by many—to him—unfamiliar celebrities. He had seen for the first time in the flesh people whom he had long known by reputation, and he declared that in every case the picture he had formed of them had been cruelly shattered. An eminent poet, he said, had looked like a starting-price bookmaker, and a financier of world-wide fame had been exactly like the music-master at his preparatory school. Wherefore Burminster made the profound deduction that things were never what they seemed.

‘That’s only because you have a feeble imagination,’ said Sandy Arbuthnot. ‘If you had really understood Timson’s poetry you would have realised that it went with close-cropped red hair and a fat body, and you should have known that Macintyre (this was the financier) had the music-and-metaphysics type of mind. That’s why he puzzles the City so. If you understand a man’s work well enough you can guess pretty accurately what he’ll look like. I don’t mean the colour of his eyes and his hair, but the general atmosphere of him.’

It was Sandy’s agreeable habit to fling an occasional paradox at the table with the view of starting an argument. This time he stirred up Pugh, who had come to the War Office from the Indian Staff Corps. Pugh had been a great figure in Secret Service work in the East, but he did not look the part, for he had the air of a polo-playing cavalry subaltern. The skin was stretched as tight over his cheek-bones as over the knuckles of a clenched fist, and was so dark that it had the appearance of beaten bronze. He had black hair, rather beady black eyes, and the hooky nose which in the Celt often goes with that colouring. He was himself a very good refutation of Sandy’s theory.

‘I don’t agree,’ Pugh said. ‘At least not as a general principle. One piece of humanity whose work I studied with the microscope for two aching years upset all my notions when I came to meet it.’

Then he told us this story.

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