Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  He wrote to his wife’s aunt, Lady (Katharine) Lyttelton: ‘He had the sunniest and most contented disposition I have ever known. He spent all his life working hard in a Glasgow slum parish, and he died of his wounds got there, for when he retired 1 ½ years ago he was a broken man. But I never remember seeing him cast down for one moment. His presence was a perpetual benediction. What a thing a strong faith is, which drives out every small care and selfishness!’ In the same letter he told her that a week later Susie had given birth in the house in Bryanston Street to a son, John Norman Stuart. ‘He is like me, but (at present) still more like the late lamented Leopold, King of the Belgians.’20 It was for JB a very strange fortnight of condolence and congratulation, people reacting most favourably to the birth of a son and heir.

  In the spring of 1912 a collection of his short stories and poems was published under the title The Moon Endureth. The book was dedicated ‘To the Happy Memory of My Father’ and followed by the strangely Catholic invocation: Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, Et lux perpetua luceat ei. It contained also his best poetry to date: ‘Avignon, 1759’, a desperately sad lament by an exiled Jacobite, who has lost family and home; ‘Atta’s Song’, which accompanies ‘The Lemnian’; ‘Wood Magic’, which harks back to the panic JB felt in Bavaria and complements ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’; ‘Plain Folk’, which follows ‘The Riding of Ninemileburn’; and the powerful ‘The Wise Years’ about a hermit who experiences perfect peace, even though he is waiting to be burned as a heretic, because God has told him that ‘He findeth God who finds the earth He made’.

  The stories show his growing maturity as a writer. ‘Space’ introduces the barrister, Edward Leithen, in a role he was often to assume, that of listener and lawyerly confidant, and it combines JB’s interest in Alpine mountaineering with that of the theories of the French philosopher/mathematicians, Henri Bergson and Henri Poincaré. ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ is a powerful supernatural tale about a sympathetically portrayed Jewish settler in South Africa, dabbling in pagan magic to his detriment. There are deeply affecting stories about ordinary people, such as ‘Streams of Water in the South’ about a Border shepherd close to death, while ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’ describes, unblinkingly, Scottish royalty gone to seed.

  Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (‘Q’) wrote that ‘The Company’ was a story ‘which any man in my generation might be proud to sign’,21 while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle admired both ‘The Lemnian’ and ‘The Company’. ‘I don’t think the 18th century was ever better caught…’22 he said about the latter. Later that year, JB was the subject of a profile in The Bookman, when the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson on him was noted but the writer remarked that JB was beginning to develop his own style: ‘He has breathed a new life into the moribund art of the novel; he has made the short story what a cameo might be when it is cut by the hand of a master, and he has even contrived to make the light essay and occasional article an entertaining and scholarly production.’23

  Even short stories gave JB the opportunity to indulge one of his favourite devices when writing historical fiction, that of building up, layer by layer, a false but compelling provenance for his stories, relying on his capacious memory as well as his antiquarian bent to invent credible but completely fictional scenarios. ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’ is a clear example and got him into trouble with at least one irate reader, who felt he had been duped.

  The story, which was published initially in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1909, concerns the visit of four members of the Philadelphia Assembly – including ‘a lawyer of New York’ – to a small town in Italy where an aged and drunken Bonnie Prince Charlie is staying with his daughter, who looks after him. The Americans are monarchists and are on a mission to invite the Chevalier to be their King, but go sorrowfully away when they realise it’s all far too late.

  According to a note at the beginning, the tale supposedly came from letters amongst the unpublished papers of the Manorwater family, sent by Charles Hervey-Townshend (‘afterwards our Ambassador at the Hague’) to his aunt, the Countess of Manorwater, from Italy in the 1780s. The use of the name of a prominent Whig family, the Townshends, caused a New York railroad magnate and banker called Stuyvesant Fish to write a long letter to JB. In it, he asked to see the letters from Hervey-Townshend, since he thought that his grandfather, ‘a lawyer of New York’ in the 1770s, might be the man mentioned in the story, although the family had no records of him going to Europe. (He plainly wanted to absolve his ancestor of any monarchist leanings.) Fish had researched the histories of politicians called Galloway and Sylvester (the other names that JB used), the details of which he sent to the author. At the end of the letter is a note of Susie’s, written many years later: ‘Mr Fish was extremely displeased with JB when he wrote to him to say that the Company of the Marjolaine was pure fiction.’24

  Sadly, neither JB’s letter of apology nor Fish’s reply to it have survived, but it is not hard to imagine the latter, since no Wall Street banker would ever like to be taken for a mug. The exquisite embarrassment of this episode did not stop JB from continuing to provide elaborate false provenances for his historical fiction, the novel Midwinter being a particularly notable example.

  The Buchans were in agreement about suffragism and, in the years before the First World War, JB gave a number of public talks on the subject. In May 1912 he delivered the keynote speech at a Conservative women suffragists’ dinner in London and, in October the following year, his speeches to this kind of meeting were published as a pamphlet for the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association (of which Susie was a member). The pamphlet was entitled Women’s Suffrage: A Logical Outcome of the Conservative Faith, and in it he outlined his reasons for believing that women should have the vote, a view hardly universal amongst his acquaintance.

  He wrote that the franchise depended on citizenship, and he defined that as the bearing of certain civic burdens, so the gender of the citizen was immaterial. To deny the franchise to half the country’s citizenship was ‘an impossible position for a reasonable Conservative to maintain; for if the vote be denied to an educated and capable woman, who is a real asset to the State and takes a share in its burdens, not because she is not a citizen, but because, unfortunately, she is not a man, you are on the edge of a very dangerous doctrine’.25 He went on to mock that hoary old chestnut, ‘the thin end of the wedge’. He believed this to be the most foolish argument, for the British Constitution ‘is stuck full like a pin cushion of thin ends of wedges, and so is every other successful human fabric, political, or social, or commercial’.26

  In 1912, JB secured the end of a lease on a handsome Robert Adam house at 76 Portland Place in Marylebone. It was, according to Susie, ‘a Georgian house with mahogany doors and a graceful staircase with shallow steps which wound its ways towards the nursery floor…’27 It must have been large for it had two drawing rooms and a library.

  In 1913, Anna’s Olivia in India was published, under the pseudonym O.[livia] Douglas (since Anna refused to ride on her brother’s coat tails), by the ultra-respectable firm of Hodder and Stoughton. It had first received the blue-pencil treatment from JB. One review averred that it was impossible to overpraise such a delightful book.

  Anna depended heavily on JB (and Susie) for encouragement and advice, even when she was a well-established author of novels about Scottish provincial life, with a large, and growing, fan base. For example, Hodder sent the bound typescript of a later novel, Penny Plain, to Mrs Buchan as a gift, and Anna was amused by the blue pencil marks from JB, crossing out the indiscriminate ‘quotes’ to which she was addicted and commenting that passages were ‘incorrigibly noble’.28

  What is plain from the beginning of Anna’s long and successful literary career is that her eldest brother had not the slightest intention of encouraging her to write in the way that he did. And the same was true of his wife when she took to writing both history and fiction. Many years of reading a wide variety of fiction – good and bad �
� for Nelson’s had made him a most tolerant critic, while love for his sister and wife precluded him from bullying them. He must have had to bite his tongue at times, knowing how influenced they both were by his most airily expressed opinion.

  In 1912 his health began to give increasing cause for concern. He complained periodically of painful stomach trouble, or what he called ‘seediness’, which was obviously more than indigestion. The travelling, hurried meals before speaking engagements, and the stress of projecting his thoughts and personality to a sometimes hostile audience, seem to have been contributory factors. For a long time, no one knew quite what the trouble was; in fact it was probably not until 1914 that he received a clear diagnosis that he had developed a duodenal ulcer.

  That summer, Willie came home to Peebles for a much longed-for leave, projected to last more than a year. But he had scarcely arrived in Scotland before he began to complain of back pain, which his doctor initially thought was rheumatism. In August, JB and Susie took a house at a place called Broadmeadows near Selkirk, so that JB could tour that part of the constituency. The family shot and fished as they had done in 1909 but there was plainly something not right with Willie and, in October, he developed pleurisy and was admitted to a Glasgow nursing home. Blood tests were taken and sent to Sir Almroth Wright in London. He pronounced that Willie was suffering from blood poisoning, due to a streptococcal infection picked up in India, and he sent a ‘vaccination’ to Scotland. JB, fretting impotently in London, wrote daily both to Willie and Mrs Buchan. ‘Will you see that the news is sent to me every day for I am miserably anxious? … Our kind beloved old William! But he will get all right, bonny body, and laugh at this job.’29 He hurried up to Glasgow every weekend to visit his brother as the miserable, exhausting weeks went by.

  The family maintained a vigil at his bedside, but it eventually became evident that there was no hope of recovery. On the afternoon of 11 November the doctors decided to operate, and Willie died under the anaesthetic. ‘Mother is bearing up wonderfully,’ JB wrote to Susie, but ‘what are we to do without the dear, canny [gentle], brave laddie!’30

  According to the lights of the day, Willie had been an exemplary imperial servant. He was undoubtedly a deft and dedicated admin-istrator, with a feeling for India and its peoples, who might have gone far if death had not claimed him at the age of thirty-two. He was much mourned by the people who had worked with him. The Governor of Bengal, Lord Carmichael, wrote to JB: ‘He was generally looked on as quite one of the best officers in Bengal, and everyone prophesied success for him.’31

  JB’s most anthologised and best-known poem, ‘Fratri Dilectissimo’ (‘most beloved brother’), was written soon after Willie’s death. It memorialises their childhood games and friendship:

  When we were little wandering boys,

  And every hill was blue and high,

  On ballad ways and martial joys

  We fed our fancies, you and I.

  With Bruce we crouched in bracken shade,

  With Douglas charged the Paynim foes;

  And oft in moorland noons I played

  Colkitto* to your grave Montrose…

  Dear heart, in that serener air,

  If blessed souls may backward gaze,

  Some slender nook of memory spare

  For our old happy moorland days.

  I sit alone and musing fills

  My breast with pain that shall not die,

  Till once again o’er greener hills

  We ride together, you and I.32

  This poem forms the preface to a privately printed book, entitled W.H.B, compiled by Anna. In it is reproduced the Blackwood’s article on Willie’s journey in Sikkim as well as a tribute by Isla Macpherson, the daughter of an Indian Civil Service colleague, to whom Willie had proposed in 1910. Had she accepted (and her letter to Anna after his death is filled with regret), she would have found no such opposition from his mother as Susie had to endure, since Isla’s ancestor, Macpherson of Cluny, was a prominent supporter of Prince Charlie in the ’45. JB erected a tablet to Willie’s memory in the antechapel at Brasenose College with an epitaph, which he adapted from Walter Savage Landor: Patriae quaesivit gloriam videt Dei. It translates as ‘He sought the glory of his country, and now sees God.’

  Willie’s death sent JB to bed with stomach pain, not surprisingly, although he managed to contrive to do some work there, including writing part of his (first) biography of the Marquis of Montrose. This capacity to write, when otherwise hors de combat, was to prove invaluable to him for the rest of his life. When, a month later, he had recovered, there were more political speeches to make: this was a difficult time, politically, both because of the war between Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire, and the unresolved issue of Irish Home Rule.

  Indeed, JB gave a speech at Innerleithen on 18 December 1912, which he reckoned was one of the best he had given to date. He had it printed as a pamphlet, entitled What the Home Rule Bill means. It is a closely argued attack on the Home Rule Bill on a number of grounds – constitutional, legal and economic – but there was one simple political point, namely, that Ulster Protestants would not sign up to it. Although he was not against devolution on local issues (and would speak up for that in the House of Commons in the late 1920s), he thought that union was strength, and a more progressive force than narrow nationalism. That said, his view was tinged by his dislike of Irish nationalists, especially those who forever harked back to ancient wrongs, and his even greater dislike of the coercion, rather than persuasion, as he saw it, of 1,500,000 Ulstermen by the majority.

  After Willie died, Mrs Buchan spent several months with her son and daughter-in-law in London, allowing Walter space to get on with his book on the Duke of Wellington’s military campaigns, which was published in 1914. (Walter’s most substantial contribution to history, however, was as editor of the three-volume A History of Peebleshire published in 1925, with a chapter by his eldest brother on the literature of the county.) When Helen went home in mid-February her daughter arrived to stay. Anna was very fond of Alice and young John, taking them on outings and happily allowing herself to be drawn into their world. She was by this time thirty-six, and set fair for spinsterhood. She was slim, with fair hair and piercing, intelligent eyes, as well as a long nose and slightly undershot jaw. She was striking-looking rather than handsome. Nevertheless, according to JB, she looked very pretty in her new evening gown at a dinner party the Buchans hosted for Willie’s soldier/explorer friend, Cecil Rawling. Rawling and JB hatched a plot to attempt climbing Mount Everest, reconnoitring the north side one year, and climbing it the next. JB thought that their expedition had a good chance of being sanctioned by the India Office, although in the event the war intervened to prevent it.

  In early 1913, JB wrote to his friend the writer Hugh Walpole, in reply to an invitation, that ‘Susie and I think of taking a long cruise to the Azores and, if so, I shall amuse myself writing a real shocker – a tribute at the shrine of my master in fiction – E. Phillips Oppenheim – the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah.’ Some commentators have chosen to take exception to this remark, reminding us, rather ponderously, that there have been many greater Jewish writers than E. Phillips Oppenheim. It is hard to see why they bother, since this was so plainly a joke.

  He went on: ‘Alas, I hope to be abroad on the date of the Literary Fund dinner. Besides, Hugh dear, I really can’t go to these beanfeasts. I love writers individually, but assembled in bulk they affect me with overpowering repugnance, like a gathering of clerics!’33 This attitude must have made it rather easier for some highbrow writers to persuade themselves that his talents were meagre and his fiction lightweight.

  In May the Buchans did indeed go on the cruise to the Azores, taking Mrs Buchan and Anna with them. It was not such a success as the tour of the Mediterranean with Gerard Craig Sellar, because Susie had a bad cough and Mrs Buchan was not a relaxed traveller, but JB did manage to write much of The Power-House. This is a book that, in many ways, foreshadows
The Thirty-Nine Steps and introduces to his long-form fiction the bachelor barrister, Edward Leithen, fighting desperate evil on the familiar streets of London. The Power-House was serialised by Blackwood’s Magazine in 1913, and by Living Age in the United States in 1914, but not published in hardback until 1916, by which time its author was a great deal better known.

  That summer, at the family’s request, he wrote a private memoir of Lord Ardwall, Johnnie Jameson’s recently deceased father. When he sent the monograph to Jameson at the end of July, the latter was wildly enthusiastic and grateful (like Sandy Gillon, he was always warmly appreciative of anything JB ever wrote), and urged him to consider giving it a wider currency than the Ardwall circle. JB complied and it was published by Blackwood’s that November. Andrew Jameson, Lord Ardwall painted a vivid word picture of a larger-than-life, witty, rumbustious, sometimes alarming character, who had been an Edinburgh advocate and became a well-known judge.

  In September Nelson’s published The Marquis of Montrose, JB’s first attempt at a serious biography. He had long thought to try to rehabilitate, from a low base, the reputation of ‘the Presbyterian cavalier’, King Charles I’s Captain-General in Scotland. The dedication was to his brother, ‘W.H.B.’, and included the poem ‘Fratri Dilectissimo’. The book dealt mainly with Montrose’s campaigns, but JB had not yet learned to be objective enough about his hero and the result was not universally popular with the critics. The British Weekly, whose editor, Robertson Nicoll, never missed an opportunity to take a potshot at him, said that it was biased and careless. The Scottish Historical Review observed that there was ‘an asperity of tone and an unguardedness of statement, which suggests the brilliant litterateur rather than the cautious historian’.34