Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “It was all I had hoped for. We put into little decayed wayside ports, with a background of palms and green-shuttered white houses. All were hot and some smelt abominably, but there is nothing quite like them elsewhere. You feel around them still the romance of that greatest of the Crusades, the Portuguese Age of Adventure. You can picture the days when those fierce dark sea-captains, with half their men sick and their own faces haggard with the long voyage round the Cape, put into their harbours and said prayers of thanksgivings before the humble mission shrines. Those were the great days, when Albuquerque was conquering the Indies and in treaty with the Sultan for the Holy Sepulchre. And you can read in them, too, the visible record of the degeneration of a race. Once, in spite of heat and fever, they were the abodes of men. Hard-handed seigneurs lived in the prazos, and the soldiers who swaggered on the quays were no carpet-knights. But now you have a breed of dwarfish people, with black blood showing in their eyes and finger-nails, and the soldiers, in flapping trousers and tinsel medals, might have walked out of a comic opera. They have long ago forgotten Europe and the white man’s pride, and Albuquerque is only a myth to swear by. The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. There is something about the weather, and the colour of the sea, and the colour of the vegetation, which speaks of decadence and apathy. But some places have found a life of their own, which has no reminiscence of Europe in it. I found out Inhambane, Mr Astbury, with your river and boatmen and everything. There’s no decadence there — only a wholesome, sleepy barbarism.”

  “I did not land,” said Mr Wakefield stolidly, “till we reached Natal. I refused to land, for I am depressed by the imperial failures of other peoples. Personally I attribute Portugal’s fiasco to that dead-weight of Roman Catholicism which she carried with her. But I was much cheered by Natal. Some of the Ministers got up a dinner for me, and I made a speech in which I hope I gave the colony some useful advice.”

  “He made a speech,” said Mrs Wilbraham tragically, “and the name of Natal was never mentioned in it. Nothing but Canada, Canada.”

  “How could I deliver a panegyric on a place in which I had only lived for two days? I told them about the country I do know and left them to draw the moral. If I had begun to patronise them with advice on their domestic affairs they would all have been in arms. When we get the Premier of Natal over to Toronto you may bet that he’ll talk about Natal and nothing else. The secret of keeping the peace in the colonies is for each man to expatiate on his own hen-roost. Colonials have known that for a long time, but English statesmen are just beginning to learn it.”

  “In another minute,” said Mrs Yorke, “we shall be talking politics. What is your story, Flora?”

  “Sir Edward got his big eland and thinks it a record, but he hasn’t looked up Rowland Ward yet. There isn’t really much to tell about our doings. We wandered along from day to day in perfect weather through a great green country. Ask Caroline.”

  “I can’t add anything,” said Lady Amysfort. “It was a time of perfect rest. I thought of nothing in the daytime except the beauty of the place and the flowers and the wild beasts, and how good it was to look forward to dinner and the evening round the fire. After dinner we talked about everything in the world and rediscovered all the most profound platitudes. And one went to bed thinking how nice waking would be. It was a very happy time, but like all happy times it had no landmarks.”

  The Duchess turned dejectedly to Lady Lucy. “It is what I always find. People who do interesting things have not a word to say about them. Surely you have something to tell me about the Mountains of the Moon?”

  “Oh yea We climbed Kiyanja, and Marjory nearly ended her mortal career by sliding down a snow-slope. It is impossible to give you any conception of the upper Mubuku valley by mere description. You have to see it to believe in it. Imagine a giant Alpine flora — groundsels like shrubs, heather in trees, azaleas and Alpine roses making a flame - coloured forest, and creepers of every tint blazing between the trunks. And at the end you come out on a glacier, and far up in a rocky cup there is a spring. It took me some time to realise that this was the real source of the Nile — the place which Alexander the Great saw in his dreams, and Speke and Baker thought they had found in Lake Victoria. All around us was a snow-field which might have been on the aiguilles above Chamonix. I have often felt the lack of the true geographical imagination, for I could not focus the place in my thoughts. The little trickle I drank of, instead of running down to feed some tame Swiss torrent, was the head waters of the greatest and most mysterious river in the world.... We camped beside it, and bitterly cold we found it, and then before dawn next morning we started for the summit. I thought the snow very difficult, and it was a blessing to get on hard rock. In one couloir Marjory fell and pulled Mr Astbury out of his steps. They were well held, but it took us an hour to get them up, for we had to dig gigantic caverns before we got a step that was really safe.”

  “Had you any view?”

  “For five minutes on the top we saw the kingdoms of the earth spread out beneath us. Then the mist came down, and we had a weary descent before we reached our high camp. Marjory and I were utterly tired and soaked to the bone. Do you remember that evening, Mr Astbury, with the rain pelting on our tents, after we had drunk soup and brandy and got into dry clothes? You said that these occasions got rid of every difference of education and temperament and sex, and made us all elemental human creatures, and I quite agreed with you. It was worth while travelling a long way to hear our critical Marjory gloating over food like a glutton and talking wild mountaineering slang with the guides.”

  “She’s an uncommonly fine climber,” said Mr Astbury with conviction. “There was a bit on the highest rocks, as bad as anything on the Grèpon, and she took it like a chamois. I don’t praise you, Lady Lucy, for there’s nothing you can’t do. Besides, you are an old mountaineer. But it gives me enormous pleasure to have made another convert.”

  “Perhaps I should not care for ordinary climbing,” said Miss Haystoun, who looked very beautiful with the flush of sunburn in place of her wonted pallor. “But Ruwenzori can be like nothing in the world. The sharp contrast between the rich moist glens and the cool snow is an intoxication in itself. Besides, why should I not be a lover of mountains? We have all in our breasts odds and ends of strange souls. If we were clean-cut, four-square beings we should not be worth talking to.”

  Lord Appin nodded approval. “When I was a very young man at Oxford,” he said, “I evolved what I flattered myself was a new system of philosophy. I called it Romanticism. It was a very crude system, strong on the aesthetic and ethical sides, but lamentably weak in logic and metaphysics. Its central doctrine, if it could be said to have one, was that truth, virtue, happiness, all the ideals, were attained by the clash of opposites. Holiness was possible only as the result of the struggle of the soul with an alien world; happiness as the outcome of pain endured and difficulties surmounted. The beauty of art was the conquest of human genius over intractable matter. And romance — an abstraction of my own which I interwove with the whole system — was the perpetual contrast between the human spirit and its environment — nobility side by side with baseness in one soul, or the courage of man transcending impossible disasters, or beauty flowering in a mean place. It was a very young man’s confession of faith, and yet there was the glimmering of a truth at the back of it. It was my instinctive protest against the undue simplification of life. We are all a strange compound, and we shall never reach our full stature by starving certain parts of our nature of their due. What you call romance, Marjory, is another form of the old conflict between the real and the ideal, the world into which we are born and the world which we would recreate for ourselves. It involves conflict between ideals, but not the neglect and starvation of any. Of course this truth is at the bottom of our new conception of empire. Imperialism—”

  But at this point the Duchess rose. “You are slipping into politics, Bob,” she said. “Never
mind Imperialism to-night, but by all means let us talk about romance. Letty has a fascinating story she might tell us if you asked her very nicely....”

  Soon the company were settled comfortably around the fire in the inner hall. Mrs Yorke, after a little pressure, had sent to her room for a despatch-box, from which she took a small manuscript book.

  “I don’t know why I should bore you with family history,” she said, “but I was once rash enough to tell Susan this story, and she liked it, and said it was an allegory and true of us all. I have no theories about it, except that it seems to fit in very well with what Lord Appin has been saying. So if it amuses you, you shall have it.

  “There was a certain relative of my husband’s whom I shall call Sir Charles Weston. It is not his real name, and Lord Appin will probably see through the disguise, as Susan did, but I owe it to my self-respect not to be more explicit. He. was an eminent lawyer — at least he made a large fortune in the law courts — and, above all things, he was an earnest Liberal. His life was published not so very long ago in two volumes, and I remember that his biographers said that he was almost the last of the old stalwart God-fearing statesmen. They said that he lived only for the great causes of peace, economy, and reform. He left among his papers some notes, called ‘Reflections on certain modern tendencies,’ which are not very cheerful reading. He assumes the rôle of a minor prophet, and cries ‘Ichabod’ to the future of Israel.

  “I only met him once, shortly after my marriage. He had disapproved of it strongly; indeed there was hardly a vice which he did not trace to the ‘Americanising’ of England.

  He said that the people of the United States had fallen like Lucifer from their high estate, and the latest American he had any respect for was Jefferson. Once he made Henry very angry by telling him that all American women seemed to be serving behind an intellectual counter. However, he disapproved so much of Henry on every ground that one blunder more or less did not make much difference. I had to be taken to see him, and the prospect made me very nervous. But he turned out quite kind, and he had nice, courtly, old-fashioned manners, which I thought sweet. He was a great philanthropist, but rather a dictator, I fancy, for he had no idea of giving the poor any choice in the way they should be helped. His face was like an old woman’s — amiable, vacant, a little foolish, though he had moments of mental activity when a kind of power would come into it. His talk was one mosaic of moral and political platitudes; and I should have said that he had never possessed the imagination of a cow.

  “Well, he died, full of years and honour, and to our amazement he left all his papers to Henry. We sorted them out, and the Liberation Society, or something of the kind, wanted to have his life written, so we handed over the bulk of them. But one little diary we kept to ourselves. There was a big diary in about thirty volumes which plays a great part in the biography. But the little diary which we found in an old safe did not appear in that work.

  “I shall never forget the day we found it. Henry picked it up and said, ‘Another diary,’ opened it at random, and began to read: ‘Rhoda came to-night as I sat alone in the Purple Chamber. There was no lamp, and her pale beauty shone in the dusk like the silver of moonlight. I thought how in this little dancing-girl one caught something of the mystery’ — and then Henry could read no more, but sat down and gasped. When he found his breath he could only keep repeating, ‘The old scamp!’

  “We tried another page, and found an account of some battle that Sir Charles talked of having fought, and then a long tale of a mid-winter march on the Danube. Henry, when he heard this, observed that to his certain knowledge his relative had never been out of England. Last of all, we came on a reference to Theodora, his wife. ‘My great-aunt,’ said Henry, ‘was christened Elizabeth Anne. There are three possible explanations of this affair. Either he was a most uncommon old sinner, or a most accomplished liar, or as mad as a March hare. I incline to the last.’

  “But he was wrong, for in a little while we hit upon the right explanation. I think I was the first to see it, but after we had read the diary through, doubt was impossible. We saw that behind the bland Sir Charles there had stood another figure, Heaven knows what revenant from the splendid past. There were two souls in his body, one timid, pragmatical, humane, slow, and stupid — the soul of all democratic lawyers from the beginning of time; the other the soul of a king, merciless, passionate, and incomparably able. So all the time he lived a double life. In the daytime he went through the ordinary routine. He was a great advocate of the reform of the criminal law, he was president of the London Missionary Society, and in the House of Commons he was famous for his attacks upon Tory extravagance, and especially upon militarism. He emptied the House, for he was the prince of bores. Disraeli said that he made a solitude and called it a Peace debate.

  “But late at night and in the early mornings and at odd moments the other soul had its chance. And then he was an Emperor of Byzantium, ruling half the world with an iron hand. The diary showed his accession to power, for to begin with he was only John Chrysaor, the General of the Army of the East. Bit by bit he became the strong man in the empire. He won the Church to his side, and when he fought a great battle on the eastern marches which turned back the tide of Mohammedan invasion, he became the popular hero. The Emperor died, leaving an effeminate son as his successor; but John hurried back to New Rome, cleared out the mob of eunuchs and parasites, and seized the throne with universal goodwill. Then began a reign of iron, as appeared from the little diary. The Emperor John fought the Church and won, he subdued a Dacian insurrection, he built palaces and churches, he ransacked East and West for art treasures, and he had great dreams of restoring the unity of the empire and carrying his court to Rome.

  “I am not going to retell this wild story, but once, after I had been ill, I amused myself with taking the two diaries and comparing the entries. In the little book no year was given, but it seemed to correspond to a certain epoch in the long one, and the days and months followed as regularly as in the other. So I chose parallel passages of the same date, to show the gulf between the two souls.

  “The first is dated June 10th. In the large diary he wrote —

  “‘I have been in the House all afternoon. Indian frontier policy was discussed, and Disraeli made a flippant and hectoring reply to the profound arguments of Mr G — . Many applauded, and, being unable to find a chance to speak, I came away greatly saddened. Liberalism for the moment is eclipsed and shadowed by a vulgar worship of reaction. Do these vain people who prate about the prestige of Britain ever reflect, I wonder, on the shallow foundations of their creed? We have taken upon ourselves responsibilities which carry with them no increase in moral stature — nay, which minister to the lowest and most depraved elements in our nature. We claim a right to rule certain dark-skinned peoples, thereby offending against the oldest and most indisputable of human rights — the right to liberty. It tickles our sense of authority, and degrades alike our reason and our conscience. And it always brings war. These stay-at-home roysterers are very ready to unsheath the sword. Well for their peace of mind that they cannot realise the horrors of which they are, before God, the cause. The older I grow the deeper becomes my conviction that in these days of enlightenment no war can be justified. Every war — I do not care what its pretext — must be a blunder in statesmanship and a sin against the Most High.’

  “On the same day he wrote in the little diary —

  “‘It is the evening of the greatest day in my life. The blood is crusted over my eyes, my left arm is crippled, and I am caked in dust A quarter of my men are slain, but the enemy have been ground between the millstones. I staked everything on a great throw and I have won. I sent my cavalry into a death-trap well aware that few would return, but the ruse succeeded, and the Emirs found their own shambles before the sun set.... To-morrow at dawn five thousand captives, with the Cross branded on their shoulders, shall be sent to New Borne as the first fruits of my victory. The plunder follows, and I can see the weak e
yes of my Imperial Master glitter when he sees the spoils of Damascus in his treasury.... I have taken the first step in the great march to a Throne and nothing but death can stop my pilgrimage. Nay, death is an ally: he will not betray one who has offered him such princely bribes....’

  “The strange thing,” Mrs Yorke continued, “is that the entries in the two books always correspond. If any subject has been occupying his mind in the one diary it reappears in some form or other in the second. For instance, he made a great speech at a meeting at Exeter Hall to protest against Gordon’s proposal to take Zebehr Pasha, the ex-slave-dealer, as his colleague. It is printed in full in the Life, and the editors remark that ‘the passionate conscience of England spoke through its chosen mouthpiece.’ In the entry in the little diary we read —

  “‘To-day the fruits of my Dacian wars were sold in the market. Fifty maids were kept for the Palace, and five hundred of the lustiest young men were enrolled in the Praetorians. New Borne will be full of stalwart barbarians, and the Circus enriched by promising recruits. Would that each year could see an infusion of such virile stock among our languid citizens!’

  “On September 25th he was adding to Fairholme, his place in Surrey, and was very much worried about the cost. Says the big diary —

  “‘I can postpone the addition no longer, but I seriously grudge the outlay. I have taken the best advice I could find and have made considerable reductions in the estimates, but the expense still seems to me undue. The ground-floor of the new wing will be occupied by a library and a billiard-roorn, the floor above by six bedrooms, each of which — my wife insists — must have its own bathroom. Elizabeth is anxious that the housemaids shall have better quarters, so the top-floor will be utilised...’