Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  There is much truth in that, for, although JB was very interested in most processes of the business of Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, and had an excellent relationship with the workforce, he seems to have had something of a blind spot about the firm’s finances, and often recommended books to George Brown on gut instinct rather than an informed, costed assessment as to whether they would make Nelson’s money or not. Brown, and even more the long-suffering production manager, George Graham, had sometimes to rein in his enthusiasms.

  The last weeks before the marriage were made extremely fraught because Mrs Buchan was so unwell. Thin, weak and downcast as she was, JB began to think that there was no chance that she would make the wedding and that it might even have to be postponed. He told Susie that ‘I am very distressed about her, and Anna, for once, seems at her wits’ end. The truth is that she has no desire to get better, and won’t be persuaded to do anything.’78 As a result of these anxieties, even JB’s generally equable nerves became strained. A fortnight before they were married, he wrote to Susie: ‘Darling mine, I was a hideous cross old bear with a sore head last night and you were a kind little angel, and I don’t deserve to have such an angel, and I am very sorry, and I won’t do it again and that’s all.’79

  Despite worrying about his own mother, he had space to be anxious about Susie’s. Just before they married, he wrote to his fiancée: ‘The person I can’t get out of my thoughts is our poor Gerald. You see my gain is the measure of her loss, and as the one is so enormous the other must be very bad. I am very sorry for her. She is a great angel.’80

  In the end, all the Buchans were well enough to attend the wedding and the sun shone brightly on the afternoon of Monday, 15 July 1907, as the bride arrived at St George’s, Hanover Square. (How JB, who loved Thackeray, must have smiled at the thought of being married in the church of Vanity Fair.) Susie had been conveyed – rather queasily – the half mile from Upper Grosvenor Street in the Duke of Westminster’s* carriage, which had been lent for the occasion. She was met by her uncle, Lord Ebury, at the door and they walked up the aisle to the strains of the Allegro in C from the Serenade for Chamber Orchestra, composed by her father, and played by his friend, Dr Walford Davies, the organist of the Temple Church.

  The square eighteenth-century church, with its wide nave, box pews, gallery, and chancel floor of black and white marble, was filled with what the newspapers called ‘a fashionable crowd’, although it also included the Grosvenor Square road sweeper, a long-time friend of the bride’s. St George’s had seen many society, and indeed Grosvenor, weddings, but this occasion was a little different. Instead of the customary sober, white and green mixture of lilies and trailing smilax vine, the flowers on the screen erected across the chancel steps were colourful sweet peas, red rambler roses and mauve wisteria. These struck one commentator as being ‘rather suggestive of a maypole’.

  The bride, who was described as ‘extremely comely’, wore an ivory-white stiff satin gown, with a fichu bodice and kimono sleeves of silver-embroidered chiffon, made for her by the voguish dressmaker, Madame Kate Reilly of Dover Street. Her veil was of ultra-fine Brussels lace and trailed to her feet. She carried a sheaf of white lilies. The young page, who carried her long train, was Ivor Guest, the son of a cousin, and the very image of little Lord Fauntleroy in his pink and silver brocade court suit, with lace ruffles and paste shoe buckles. Susie was accompanied by seven bridesmaids, including her sister, Marnie, and JB’s sister, Anna. They wore plain long skirts and fichu bodices of pale pink ninon de soie, embroidered with silver ‘passementerie’, over white glacé silk. On their heads they wore wreaths of pink roses, and they carried little baskets of sweet peas. These dresses were intended to show off the slenderness of their waists and were modest in the extreme.

  Mrs Grosvenor gave away her daughter, while Hugh Wyndham,* a friend from South Africa days, was best man. Dr Cosmo Lang officiated. He had been born in a Church of Scotland manse, but was now the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, resplendent in purple. JB would not permit an address on the grounds that you never knew what a Bishop might say. Hugh Wyndham reported that Mrs Buchan glowered at Lang. If she did so, it was perfectly understandable, since not only would she have considered him a traitor, but she was bitterly hurt that her husband had not been invited to take part in the ceremony. Certainly such a snub looks, at this distance, to be a piece of reprehensible Anglican bad manners, but the Reverend John Buchan, though disappointed, was resigned. He knew his church history too well.

  While the Register was being signed, the congregation sang ‘O Perfect Love’, a hymn specifically written for weddings; this was followed by Mendelssohn’s anthem, ‘Lift thine eyes to the mountains, whence cometh help’, which we can safely assume was the bridegroom’s choice.

  The public prints had a field day. There were descriptions, not all very accurate, in many national and provincial newspapers and periodicals. Queen even carried a fashion plate to show Miss Grosvenor’s wedding dress and ‘going-away’ outfit, as well as the bridesmaids’ dresses.

  Although the outfits of some of the most aristocratic guests were described (Mrs Ivor Guest must have looked wonderful in corn-coloured painted chiffon), little was said in the English newspapers about any of the Buchans, except the groom. He was ‘clever and popular’, ‘the well-known novelist and literary critic’, and ‘in his way, a very remarkable man’.

  There were no photographs taken of the couple after the ceremony, since Susie’s mother did not want the guests to be made to hang around – photography in 1907 being still a laborious business. This was later a source of regret to the family, although presumably not to Master Ivor Guest, the elaborately dressed page boy, who grew up to be a dignified politician called the 2nd Viscount Wimborne.

  The reception was held at Upper Grosvenor Street, and the papers were keen to stress that the dowager Duchess of Westminster had favoured it with her presence. If any of the grand guests, such as the Countess of Kerry or Adeliza, Countess of Clancarty (names reminiscent of Vanity Fair), later remembered this wedding as different from any other that they had attended at the fag end of the Season, it might well have been because of the fond farewell they witnessed between Susie and her parrot, Aglavaine. This parrot ‘had a commanding upper beak and a mass of wrinkled grey skin round a pair of bright dark eyes. In spite of his formidable appearance, he was a gentle and affectionate bird who had no objection to being kissed.’81 He was wrapped in a towel so as not to spoil the bride’s pale blue crepe de chine ‘going away’ dress, but fought noisily to get out and clamber onto his mistress.

  Willie Buchan, far away in India, wrote in fine fraternal style to his sister: ‘I saw portraits of the misguided couple in several of the papers … I perceive you were dressed in ninon-de-soie. Never heard of it. But John said you looked beautiful. Surely that wasn’t possible … What a gay gallivantin’ family you are! And my elderly respectable father kissing his daughter-in-law and jaunting over to Paris! He’ll be losing his job one of these days…’82 Since Free Church people were absolutely not given to social kissing, this gesture, by the man who had taken so little part in the fractious debates over JB’s marriage, mutely but eloquently signalled the acceptance of Susie into the Buchan family – to the whole world, but most particularly to his wife, Helen.

  The first week of the honeymoon was spent at Tylney Hall in Hampshire, a house owned by Sir Lionel Phillips, the Rand magnate. It was luxurious to a point: pink, scented water flowed from the bath taps. From Hampshire the couple travelled to Achensee* in the Tirol, staying on the north side of the lake at the Hotel Scholastika, which backed up against steep mountains covered in fir trees. They went for walks in the woods and rowed on the lake and JB did some work on a novel, possibly Prester John, although he told her mother that Susie was ‘a dire distraction’.83

  They moved on to Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Dolomites, where JB intended to introduce his wife to the joys of mountaineering, as he had succeeded in doing with his sister Ann
a. An alarmed Willie, who had all too vivid memories of his brother’s rock-climbing exploits, wrote to Anna that he trusted JB hadn’t succeeded in making Susie a widow or an angel in the Dolomites.

  JB did not kill either himself or Susie but he tested her good nature and courage sorely. He persuaded her to climb Monte Cristallo, the mountain that looms up to a height of 10,000 feet north-east of Cortina, and offers glaciers, screes and some stiff rock climbing. Baedeker’s guide to the Eastern Alps84 considered it only suitable for ‘adepts’. They slept the night before the climb in a little hotel at the top of the Tre Croci* pass, rose at 3 a.m. (‘oh so horrid’),85 dressed by candlelight, and started out long before dawn. Susie would have been walking in a long skirt and uncomfortable, stiff, hobnailed boots. ‘We went over 2 snow slopes and then up in to the rocks – somehow or other I was pushed up by John and Pierre Blanc [their guide]. We breakfasted on the top about 9.30 having taken all that time from about 4.30 am to get there.’86 What she didn’t tell her mother was that she developed an acute attack of vertigo on the way up, when Blanc advised her at one point to put her foot ‘into the void’.

  JB was decidedly more upbeat about the expedition in his letter to ‘Gerald’: ‘We took it very easily, and we had splendid guides, one of whom Susie used largely as a pack mule. She had some vertigo going up, but Pierre and I performed wonders of [indecipherable] so that we were always on each side of her. But at the top she recovered, and came down quite easily … She must have far more physical strength than any of us imagined. Of her pluck there could never be any question. I am very glad she has done a little climbing, and she is glad herself … Cortina has been a great success.’87 (In 1937, however, he told Janet Adam Smith, a keen mountaineer, that ‘if I had not had the two best guides in Europe we should not have got down’.)88 Despite his brave words to Mrs Grosvenor, JB had learned the first stern lesson of marriage, which is to give up that which really does not suit your spouse. He hardly mountaineered seriously again.

  In mid-August the couple boarded a train to Venice, where they stayed on the Grand Canal at a fifteenth-century Gothic palazzo, the Hotel Europa. It was directly opposite the Dogana di Mare and the church of Santa Maria della Salute and was full of cultural ghosts, since Verdi, Turner and Proust had all stayed there. The Buchans visited St Mark’s, which they found ‘rich and glowing’, as well as the Accademia, were serenaded in a gondola, visited Torcello and Burano in an orange-sailed felucca, and even took a small steamer to the fishing village on the sandbar in the Venetian Lagoon where the Lido had been established in the 1850s and which was in the process of becoming an upmarket resort.* Here they were given bathing clothes – Susie’s was ‘a sort of Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers all in one, and striped pink … We obtained also two bright-yellow straw hats shaped rather like cornucopias and tied under one’s chin with damp white strings and then walked some way down to the sea. Anything more killing than we both looked would be hard to imagine. We reluctantly gave up the hats and plunged into the sea which was Prussian blue and hot and gogglie [delightful] to the last degree … It was the most delicious experience I have ever had.’89 In late August they returned home by train after what Susie called a ‘heavenly’ honeymoon. She cried when they arrived at Paris. They had been away a leisurely six weeks.

  In Memory Hold-the-Door, JB wrote briefly about his engagement and marriage:

  I had no longer any craving for a solitary life at some extremity of the Empire, for England was once more for me an enchanted land, and London a magical city … I had been suffering from loneliness, since my family were four hundred miles away. Now I acquired a vast new relationship – Grosvenors, Wellesleys, Stuart-Wortleys, Lytteltons, Talbots – and above all I found the perfect comrade. I have been happy in many things, but all my other good fortune has been as dust in the balance compared with the blessing of an incomparable wife.90

  *JB was also elected to the prestigious Alpine Club in 1906.

  *Haldane was a great Liberal swell, a barrister, philosopher and politician who, as Secretary of State for War, instigated important army reforms before the First World War.

  *She was an unsuccessful Liberal candidate in the 1918 general election.

  *As Lord Robert Grosvenor M.P., he had served in a number of Whig administrations and had supported factory working hours’ reform. Late in life, when Lord Ebury, he opposed William Ewart Gladstone on Irish Home Rule.

  *Not that old. Crabbet Park was only built in 1873, but in the Queen Anne style, which is what foxed him.

  **A biography of William Morris, probably one of the two volumes of J. W. Mackail’s The Life of William Morris, published in 1899 and 1901, respectively.

  *Included in the collection Grey Weather, John Lane, London, 1898.

  *She helped found both the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women, and the Women’s Farm and Garden Association. The latter continues to this day. She was appointed CBE in 1920.

  *‘How many fistfuls of dust make a double handful of mud?’ If this is a Scottish saying, I can find no Scot who has ever heard of it. It may have been already redundant by the early twentieth century. JB to Susie Grosvenor, 3 April 1906, NLS, Acc. 11627/1.

  *Haldane’s Gifford Lectures, originally delivered extempore, then put between hard covers.

  **It is no surprise that the Cuillins feature in Mr Standfast.

  *Rounton Grange was owned by Sir Hugh Bell, the steel founder (and father of Gertrude Bell). Caroline Grosvenor was a long-time friend of the family but JB also knew them.

  *A common expression in those days, which Susie would not have considered patronising.

  *Nelson’s brought out an edition in 1917.

  *J. W. Hills was the widowed husband of Virginia Woolf’s half-sister, Stella Duckworth.

  *The Westminsters no doubt remembered JB as one of their hosts in the house in Parktown outside Johannesburg in 1902.

  *Later the 4th Lord Leconfield.

  *Franklin Scudder mentions the Achensee in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

  *The name he gives to the inn in ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’.

  *Five years later, Thomas Mann set Death in Venice there.

  5

  London and Edinburgh, 1907–1914

  Two days after the wedding, Willie Buchan wrote to his mother: ‘Well, John’s marriage is a thing of the past. Don’t you think now that the best thing for a wise and intelligent and sensible old body like yourself to do is to accept it and to pluck up your spirits and your health again? … Surely you must have discovered by now that John’s having a wife makes no difference to his affection for his mother.’1

  It was by no means certain that she was prepared to discover that just yet but, fortunately, she was distracted by the imminent departure of Anna to stay with Willie in India. The brother and sister were deeply attached to each other, and this trip was long planned, and vigorously promoted by JB, who paid for it, to prevent Anna from feeling too lonely after the wedding. (It must have been very galling to have his mother complain that his marriage would mean he would rescind the offer.)

  Willie was based partly in west Bengal and partly in the neighbouring state of Bihar. He began as Assistant Magistrate and Collector in Chapra, meting out justice in familial disputes and minor criminal cases. Later he oversaw the building of agricultural colleges. In 1907 he was for a time an Under-Secretary to the Governor of Bengal. The work was hard and the hours very long, with many protracted and arduous journeys into the countryside, on a bicycle or pony.

  Willie managed to show Anna rather more of India than was common for young British women to see. He even took her ‘up country’, and they camped in tents or in government-owned ‘dak bungalows’. The diary she kept and the letters she sent home were to become the basis for her first, very autobiographical, novel, Olivia in India, the foundation stone of her literary fame. She arrived home in early April 1908. ‘It’s a great mistake for a family to be too affectionate; partings are too upsetting,’ wrote Wil
lie to his mother after she had left. ‘It was a wretched business saying goodbye.’2

  In January 1908, Willie had been appointed Registrar of Agricultural Banks in West Bengal. This scheme, set up four years earlier, aimed to deliver debt-ridden village farmers (‘ryots’) out of the hands of rapacious money-lenders, the idea being to provide a network of cooperative banks even in extremely remote areas. This work required even more travelling in country districts than before, and risked his health. By 1910 there were 650 cooperative credit societies in Bengal. (What began in 1904 continues to this day, in the work of the West Bengal Department of Cooperation.)

  JB and Susie spent a month after their honeymoon at St Leonards in Edinburgh, with weekends at Ardtornish, a house on the edge of the Morvern peninsula, which could only be reached by boat, as the guests of Gerard Craig Sellar, as well as at Achnacloich on Loch Etive with Tommy and Margaret Nelson. On their return to London in October they took up residence at 40 Hyde Park Square, only a stiff walk through Hyde Park from Upper Grosvenor Street, although not nearly such a smart address. Theirs was a tall, slightly gaunt house with a steep staircase, a disadvantage for Susie since she was now pregnant. The house was inconvenient to look after, but pleasant enough, and it had a conservatory built out from the stairs where Susie made her first essays in gardening.

  In June 1908 she gave birth to a girl, Alice Caroline Helen, at home. With those names the younger Buchans satisfied not only their own inclination, but saw to it that neither mother would feel left out. It was the arrival of Alice that finally broke down the barrier erected by Mrs Buchan against Susie, since the latter was only too willing for her mother-in-law to revel in the joy and pride of a first grandchild. Indeed, in September, she was even prepared to send the baby, and the nursemaid of course, to spend a weekend with the family in Peebles, while she and JB holidayed at Achnacloich.