Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  What he gained in stature was unmistakable; what others gained from him immeasurable. He gave himself away, right and left, with no thought for his own strength, with an inner generosity of spirit that was more than generosity…95 How he contrived to get through all the reading and writing he did, let alone everything else he accomplished, beats me; though I do not forget the ceaseless watchfulness and care, the aid and help, direct and indirect of his wife: a rare comradeship in life, in work and public service.96

  George Trevelyan wrote: ‘I don’t think I remember any one who has died during my lifetime whose death evoked a more enviable outburst of sorrow and love and admiration, public and private … What a friend! I feel he was [the] best human being I have known, and he gave himself so generously to so many friends’:97

  Whenever I saw John Buchan … I always felt ashamed in his presence that I was not more active, that I did not make more of the wonderful and variegated world of nature and of man, of past and of present, that was our common heritage. One’s own little fire was feeble beside his sunlike warmth, but it was part of the world which meant so much to him, and his interest in one seemed to add to one’s value. How many men and women of all sorts and conditions have come away from seeing John Buchan feeling just like that, going back the stronger to meet the world and wave of men.98

  Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, the Hollywood actor who had stayed at Rideau Hall, thought him ‘one of the greatest men of our day’ and ‘a hero to me’.

  All these were friends, pole-axed by sudden grief, but as telling was something that the republican-minded J. W. Dafoe wrote, not to Susie, but to a Canadian-born politician, Lord Greenwood. Dafoe was a very influential Canadian journalist and editor of the Manitoba Free Press, member of the Rowell Commission, and a Liberal who held no brief for Governor-Generals:

  The mourning for Lord Tweedsmuir in Canada was very general and most sincere. Ordinarily a certain proportion of grief for the death of eminent people is, so to speak, official, but I think there was a universal sense of bereavement at the death of Tweedsmuir. He made himself most acceptable to the people of Canada.

  Of all the Governor-Generals he had known in fifty years, JB was ‘the pick of the lot’.99

  He had made an impression in the United States as well. The New York Tribune opined that:

  History will have a tough time grading this extraordinary man’s many different contributions to the life of his generation in the order of their importance and excellence … Perhaps the whole effort at classification will be given up in favour of the lasting legend of his versatility and prodigious industry and the indelible impression of him as a person whose warmth of human feeling and adaptability matched his great gifts.100

  After Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Arthur Murray, the diplomat, wrote to George Trevelyan:

  My thoughts have turned from the President to John Tweedsmuir, who was one of his greatest friends. He had warm feelings of friendship for John, and held him, in the public sense, in the highest regard…101

  If he had lived until that autumn, JB planned to go back to Ruthin Castle to get his health right. He might perhaps have achieved the American ambassadorship, since the Marquess of Lothian unexpectedly died in December; this was the job he wanted and for which he was now very well qualified. On the other hand, his wary relations with Winston Churchill, by then Prime Minister, might not have helped his cause.

  What is certain is that, if he had survived, he would have continued to write daily while his health held up, fiction for relaxation and solid history for his legacy. At the time of his death he was contracted to write five books, including biographies of William the Conqueror and St Paul, and a novel entitled The Island Called Lone. His powers were not failing. Sick Heart River is for many people, even today, his best novel.

  Sick Heart River (Mountain Meadow in the United States) was partly written in the winter of 1938–9, then left alone until after war broke out the following autumn, and revised in December after JB had read Johnnie’s Baffin Island diary.

  This novel indicates how much the country and its diverse people had got into his bones. Lilian Killick, who typed it, told Susie that ‘His Excellency is writing a very odd book, so unlike him, so introspective.’102 Mrs Killick, who knew him as well as anybody outside his family, was puzzled, but she need not have been. What she was clacking out on a typewriter was a spiritual testament, wrapped around by a gripping story of survival and self-sacrifice in the far north of Canada.

  The book bears no dedication, but there are quotations at the beginning of each of the three parts. The first is from the Proverbs of Alfred: ‘Thus said Alfred: If thou has a woe, tell it not to the weakling, Tell it to thy saddle-bow, and ride singing forth.’ The second is from Psalm 46: ‘There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God.’ The third is a translation from Plato’s Phaedo 58: ‘I had a singular feeling at being in his company. For I could hardly believe that I was present at the death of a friend, and therefore I did not pity him.’ Anyone who reads Sick Heart River will see how apposite are those quotations, the kind that JB had been able to summon at will all his adult life.

  The time is the present and the hero, the rich and successful but ultimately lonely Sir Edward Leithen, who, just as Europe is plunging headlong into dreaded conflict, and after a diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, decides he must find a way of usefully employing what time is left to him. He is determined to die standing, as Vespasian said that an emperor should. So he takes up an invitation by John S. Blenkiron, to go looking for a missing New York banker, a French Canadian émigré, who is somewhere in the remoteness of Canada’s far north. He does it with the help of as motley a crew of comrades as are to be found in Huntingtower, including Scottish–Indian ‘half-breeds’ (Metis), First Nations tribesmen and Catholic missionaries.

  JB was not dying in 1939 and did not know that Sick Heart River would be his last novel, but it would be strange if he never thought about death. Now that his mother was ‘away’, his thoughts turned more and more to the past. He was the same age as his father had been when he died, he knew that his strength and powers of endurance were on the wane, the pain was almost constant, and he just could not put on weight. Like his pious Scots forebears, he was concerned with his ‘latter end’. As the critic M. R. Ridley puts it: ‘When he wrote it [Sick Heart River] he was, I think, keenly, but tranquilly, aware of the shadow of the wings of Azrael … There are … few books so clearly written sub specie aeternitatis.’103 But it would not be true to say that the epiphany that Leithen, the lapsed Calvinist, experiences concerning the mercy of God was JB’s. JB was never a lapsed Christian and Leithen was not Buchan.

  Writing his reminiscences in 1939 triggered so many memories that it would be odd if some of these did not haunt him. And he put several into Sick Heart River. At one point Leithen recalls three especially delectable times in his youth: a long day’s tramp in the Border hills as a boy with a fishing rod in hand; supper in his college hall in Oxford, after a day spent in the open air in the surrounding countryside; sitting in a young man’s club in London, looking at fly-books with a friend before setting off for a fishing trip on Exmoor.

  It is difficult to get all the marrow out of this novel without an understanding of the sore physical trial that JB’s life had become in his final year, together with his belief, ultimately, in the illusory nature of worldly success, and his long-held and ongoing determination to ‘make his soul’. If Death came, it would not find him unprepared. As it turned out, Death crept upon him unawares – mercifully, we would say – but he was ready for it. Like Leithen, he made his soul and died standing.

  Many years earlier, as a very young man, he had written about dying:

  He whose aim is high, whose mark is in the clouds, who presses hot-foot on the race, will make light of the sudden darkness which obscures his aim for the moment, the sudden ditch into which he stumbles ere he can climb up the other side. He has no thought of death. He ca
res not a jot for negatives when he has the burning positive of fiery energy within him; and confident of immortality, he lays aside the mortal and passes beneath the archway.104

  *Supplies for the journey.

  *The most expensive rooms, with treatment thrown in, cost 30 guineas a week in 1925.

  *This fine monument, by Vernon March, consists of a granite arch with twenty-two bronze figures of servicemen and women from the First World War.

  *Now in the John Buchan Story Museum in Peebles.

  *The film Hyde Park on Hudson (2012) includes a fictionalised depiction of the Royal visit to Hyde Park.

  *The film, ‘Ferdinand the Bull’, came out in 1938. JB to Walter Buchan, 5 October 1929, NLS, Acc. 11627/84.

  **William Buchan was accepted by the RAF to train as a pilot in early 1940. His father did not live to hear of it.

  *He was to buy JB’s library as a gift for Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1955.

  *Governor-General of Canada himself between 1952 and 1959, the first Canadian to fill the role.

  *The Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 3.

  **Mackenzie King noted this, too.

  Afterword

  Susie settled back at Elsfield with her mother and Lilian Killick in 1940, accepting evacuees, organising classes for schoolgirls, worrying about her sons (all of whom came through the war), distributing the many ‘comforts’ sent over by church members in Ottawa, and giving hospitality to Canadian troops stationed nearby. Her mother died that August, aged eighty-two, and her death was much regretted, for she had been a solid rock. Susie remained close to Anna and Walter Buchan, visiting them regularly until their deaths, respectively, in 1948 and 1954.

  However, without JB writing books and selling film rights, the house became too expensive to run and, in 1954, she retired to small-town life in Burford. She sold JB’s library of 4,500 volumes to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His speeches, scrapbooks, book manuscripts* and much of his correspondence also went to Queen’s, while most of the rest of the material was deposited later in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

  Susie kept herself occupied by writing pleasant, perceptive fiction as well as sprightly memoirs of her early life, now much mined for telling detail by social historians. She also worked hard to keep her husband’s memory green, putting together The Clearing House,** an anthology of his writings, and John Buchan by his Wife and Friends. She invited Janet Adam Smith, one of those clever undergraduates who came to tea at Elsfield in the 1920s, to write what turned out to be a masterly and highly readable biography. She received JB’s fans kindly, and concerned herself – mostly at a distance, since she never learned to drive a car – with her fifteen grandchildren. But the house on the hill in Burford was cold and stiff and terribly empty of life. How much she must have missed the quick step in the hall.

  While working on this book, I have been haunted by my grandmother’s predicament in her long widowhood. I have also had moments of unease about setting her properly in the story, since she so plainly did not want to be there. Her habitual discretion, so obvious in the letters and such a virtue in the wife of a public man, was the reason why she is such an indistinct figure even, or perhaps especially, in the biographies (despite Janet Adam Smith having had many conversations with her), and only glimpsed intermittently in her children’s memoirs. It suited her for all the attention to be on JB, but I knew that the story could not be told once more without ushering her gently into the light. As Alec Maitland wrote to her when JB died: ‘without your love and sympathy and understanding he could never have done what he did or indeed have been what he was’.1

  I came to know her best once I was old enough to drive the thirty miles to Burford. Mourning the untimely death of my mother, I was in sore need of a cheerleader – a role, I now realise, she was born to play. I have a sheaf of encouraging letters from her, including one wishing me luck in my Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations; she told me she had long been sorry not to have gone to university, from which she would have undoubtedly benefited. Her tenacious desire to write and be published is testimony to that.

  She would sit, straight-backed and stately, in a winged chair by the fire in the sitting room, puffing delicately on a cigarette, which she held by the tips of two of her long fingers. The cigarettes were the Canadian du Maurier brand, in a distinctive red and silver square cardboard box. Sadly, I never saw the gold cigarette case, with the Royal crest picked out in diamonds, that the King gave her in 1939; no doubt it was locked away in a safe. Her eyes were rosemary-blue, her golden-grey hair as fine as floss silk, her hands blue-veined and slender, and her cheek, when I kissed her goodbye, as soft and yielding as velvet. She had an unusually sweet smile. Her voice was smoke-deep but musical and she spoke as she must have done when she was a ‘young gairl’, calling me ‘dawling’ and referring to Canada as ‘Cenedaa’.

  I can still conjure the prickle of embarrassment I felt nearly half a century ago when, after lunch one day, she asked me to go upstairs to her bedroom to help her undress, as she wanted an afternoon rest. For a buttoned-up teenager this was a trial, even though it consisted of no more than helping her take off her dress, necklace and shoes. It occurs to me only now that, for a woman who had the services of a lady’s maid for much of her life, being helped to undress by a young woman must have seemed perfectly natural.

  She became progressively deafer as she aged, and I was sometimes faced with an alarming ear trumpet, into which I alternately bellowed and whispered. Despite that, she was a very good listener, asking me what I had been doing, what I was reading, where my studies were taking me, what flowers I liked. She sent me books of German poetry and encouraged me to learn some of Heine’s poems ‘because they are so elegant’. She gave me H. G. Wells’ The New Machiavelli, and told me that the house on fire during the dinner party in the book had belonged to a cousin of hers. Even here she was reticent: I had to consult Wells’ autobiography to discover that the cousin was Harry Cust. (It is possible that she didn’t want to proclaim that particular connection.) She also gave me her books of memoirs to read, in lieu of telling me about her earlier life. When she was very old and rather frail, I would go out into the garden, pick anything that was flowering and bring it in to talk to her about it. As far as she was concerned, these visits were about me, not her; listening to other people was, after all, how she had spent much of her life.

  In 1976, the year before she died, I was working in Holland, and came across an English-language copy of Montrose in the local library. I gratefully abandoned my grim Dutch-language studies and read it through like a novel. I wrote to tell her how fascinated, thrilled and, frankly, appalled I had been by it, and she replied that she had always been careful (far too careful in my view) not to force JB’s books on his grandchildren, but was very happy that I had found his non-fiction for myself.

  I sometimes wonder why my grandmother talked so little about my grandfather to me. Surely it was not because I wasn’t listening, since my dealings with her were profoundly respectful. (No one at my school had a Granny remotely like her and she was the family matriarch.) Now, having spent so much time in her company over the last four years, I see that it was an unassuageable grief that struck her dumb. I perfectly understand, although I am very sorry for it. When she spoke, it was so often with a dying fall. JB’s death had, in that inelegant phrase, knocked the stuffing out of her. She needed his energy to shine brightly. In any event, she probably thought that he revealed himself so completely in his works, that the answers to my timidly unspoken questions simply required me to read them with care and an open mind. And, since she could see what kind of person I was, she must have thought that, one day, I would feel impelled to go looking for him.

  *The only book manuscript that is missing is The Thirty-Nine Steps; no one knows what happened to that.

  **With the assistance of Catherine Carswell, the Scottish novelist and biographer, whose family had been helped by JB.

  Notes<
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  1 Childhood and Youth, 1875–1895

  1O. Douglas, Ann and Her Mother, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1922, p. 26.

  2Reproduced in the Free Church Newsletter 1973, Fife Cultural Trust (Kirkcaldy Local Studies).

  3Douglas, Ann and Her Mother, p. 77.

  4Anna Buchan, W. H. B., privately printed, October 1913, p. 15.

  5John Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1940, pp. 17–18.

  6Fife Free Press, November 1888, Fife Cultural Trust (Kirkcaldy Local Studies).

  7Anna Buchan, Unforgettable, Unforgotten, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1945, p. 31.

  8John Buchan, Sir Walter Scott, Cassell, London, 1932, p. 23.

  9A fellow minister, quoted by Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1965, p. 21.

  10Recalled by JB in an early essay, ‘Urban Greenery’, in Scholar Gipsies, The Bodley Head, London, 1896, pp. 99–103.

  11Notes sent by John Hutchison, Rector of Hutchesons’ Grammar School, to Janet Adam Smith, 1958. National Library of Scotland (NLS), Acc. 11164/11.

  12Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door, p. 32.

  13Reprinted from The Hutchesonian in The John Buchan Journal, no. 20, spring 1999, p. 2.

  14Anna Buchan, John Buchan 1847–1911, privately printed, Peebles, 1912, pp. 13–14.

  15Ibid., p. 318.

  16Ibid., p. 321.

  17Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door, p. 16.

  18Ibid., p. 17.

  19Buchan, Unforgettable, Unforgotten, p. 22.

  20Fife Free Press, November 1888, Fife Cultural Trust (Kirkcaldy Local Studies).

  21Buchan, John Buchan 1847–1911.

  22Ibid., p. 143.