Castle Gay - MVK World

the depths of the ha-ha there was shadow, and Jaikie took the victim of
Dougal's haste for someone on the Castle staff.
"What are you doing here?" The man's air was at once apologetic and
defiant. There was that in his tone which implied that he might in turn
be asked his business, that he had no prescriptive right to be sitting
smoking in that ha-ha at midnight.
So Jaikie answered: "Just the same as you. Taking the air and admiring
the view."
The little man was recovering himself.
"You gave me quite a start when you jumped on the top of me. I
thought it was one of the gamekeepers after a poacher." He began to fill
his pipe. "More by token, who are you?"
"Oh, we're a couple of undergraduates seeing the world. We wanted a
look at the Castle, and there's not much you can see from the highroad,
so we got in at the bridge and came up the stream… . We're strangers
here. There's an inn at Starr, isn't there? What sort of a place is it?"
"Nothing to write home about," was the answer. "You'd better go on to
Portaway… . So you're undergraduates? I thought that maybe you were
of my own profession, and I was going to be a bit jealous. I'm on the staff
of the Live Wire."
Dougal's hand surreptitiously found Jaikie's wrist and held it tight.
"I suppose you're up here to cover the by-election," he observed, in a
voice which he strove to keep flat and uninterested.
"By-election be hanged! That was my original job, but I'm on to far bigger
business. Do you know who lives in that house?"
Two heads were mendaciously shaken.
"The great Craw! Thomas Carlyle Craw! The man that owns all the uplift
papers. If you've never heard of Craw, Oxford's more of a mausoleum
than I thought."
"We're Cambridge," said Jaikie, "and of course we've heard of Craw.
What about him?"
"Simply that he's the mystery man of journalism. You hear of him but
you never see him. He's a kind of Delphic oracle that never shows his
face. The Wire doesn't care a hoot for by-elections, but it cares a whole lot
about Craw. He's our big rival, and we love him as much as a cat loves
water. He's a go-getter, is Craw. There's a deep commercial purpose behind
all his sanctimonious bilge, and he knows how to rake in the
shekels. His circulation figures are steadily beating ours by at least ten
per cent. He has made himself the idol of his public, and, till we pull off
the prophet's mantle and knock out some of the sawdust, he has us
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