Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “The President is dead,” said the Surgeon-General, and at the words it seemed that every head in the room was bowed on the breast.

  Stanton took a step forward with a strange appealing motion of the arms. It was noted by more than one that his pale face was transfigured.

  “Yesterday he was America’s,” he cried. “Our very own. Now he is all the world’s... Now he belongs to the ages.”

  EPILOGUE

  Mr. Francis Hamilton, an honorary attaché of the British Embassy, stood on the steps of the Capitol watching the procession which bore the President’s body from the White House to lie in state in the great Rotunda. He was a young man of some thirty summers, who after a distinguished Oxford career was preparing himself with a certain solemnity for the House of Commons. He sought to be an authority on Foreign affairs, and with this aim was making a tour among the legations. Two years before he had come to Washington, intending to remain for six months, and somewhat to his own surprise had stayed on, declining to follow his kinsman Lord Lyons to Constantinople. Himself a staunch follower of Mr. Disraeli, and an abhorrer of Whiggery in all its forms, he yet found in America’s struggle that which appealed both to his brain and his heart. He was a believer, he told himself, in the Great State and an opponent of parochialism; so, unlike most of his friends at home, his sympathies were engaged for the Union. Moreover he seemed to detect in the protagonists a Roman simplicity pleasing to a good classic.

  Mr. Hamilton was sombrely but fashionably dressed and wore a gold eyeglass on a black ribbon, because he fancied that a monocle adroitly used was a formidable weapon in debate. He had neat small side-whiskers, and a pleasant observant eye. With him were young Major Endicott from Boston and the eminent Mr. Russell Lowell, who, as Longfellow’s successor in the Smith Professorship and one of the editors of The North American Review, was a great figure in cultivated circles. Both were acquaintances made by Mr. Hamilton on a recent visit to Harvard. He found it agreeable to have a few friends with whom he could have scholarly talk.

  The three watched the procession winding through the mourning streets. Every house was draped in funeral black, the passing bell tolled from every church, and the minute-guns boomed at the City Hall and on Capitol Hill. Mr. Hamilton regarded the cortège at first with a critical eye. The events of the past week had wrought in him a great expectation, which he feared would be disappointed. It needed a long tradition to do fitting honour to the man who had gone. Had America such a tradition? he asked himself... The coloured troops marching at the head of the line pleased him. That was a happy thought. He liked, too, the business-like cavalry and infantry, and the battered field-pieces... He saw his Chief among the foreign Ministers, bearing a face of portentous solemnity... But he liked best the Illinois and Kentucky delegates; he thought the dead President would have liked them too.

  Major Endicott was pointing out the chief figures. There’s Grant... and Stanton, looking more cantankerous than ever. They say he’s broken-hearted.” But Mr. Hamilton had no eye for celebrities. He was thinking rather of those plain mourners from the west, and of the poorest house in Washington decked with black. This is a true national sorrow, he thought. He had been brought up as a boy from Eton to see Wellington’s funeral, and the sight had not impressed him like this. For the recent months had awakened odd emotions in his orderly and somewhat cynical soul. He had discovered a hero.

  The three bared their heads as the long line filed by. Mr. Lowell said nothing. Now and then he pulled at his moustaches as if to hide some emotion which clamoured for expression. The mourners passed into the Capitol, while the bells still tolled and the guns boomed. The cavalry escort formed up on guard; from below came the sound of sharp commands.

  Mr. Hamilton was shaken out of the admirable detachment which he had cultivated. He wanted to sit down and sob like a child. Some brightness had died in the air, some great thing had gone for ever from the world and left it empty. He found himself regarding the brilliant career which he had planned for himself with a sudden disfavour. It was only second-rate after all, that glittering old world of courts and legislatures and embassies. For a moment he had had a glimpse of the first-rate, and it had shivered his pretty palaces. He wanted now something which he did not think he would find again.

  The three turned to leave, and at last Mr. Lowell spoke.

  “There goes,” he said, “the first American!”

  Mr. Hamilton heard the words as he was brushing delicately with his sleeve a slight berufflement of his silk hat.

  “I dare say you are right, Professor,” he said. “But I think it is also the last of the Kings.”

  THE END

  HUNTINGTOWER

  First published in 1922, this novel is the first of Buchan’s three Dickson McCunn books, set near Carrick in south west Scotland. The hero is 55-year old grocer Dickson McCunn, who has sold his business and taken early retirement. As soon as he ventures out to explore the world, he is swept out of his bourgeois rut into bizarre and outlandish adventures, becoming something of a reluctant hero.

  The story revolves around the imprisonment of an exiled Russian noblewoman under false pretences by Bolshevik agents. The Scottish local community mobilises to uncover and thwart the conspiracy against her, defending the neutrality of Scotland against the Russian revolutionary struggle. A narrative steeped in espionage and covert violence is set against the seemingly tranquil Scottish rural backdrop, as found in many of Buchan’s novels, including the famous The Thirty-Nine Steps.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1. HOW A RETIRED PROVISION MERCHANT FELT THE IMPULSE OF SPRING

  CHAPTER 2. OF MR. JOHN HERITAGE AND THE DIFFERENCE IN POINTS OF VIEW

  CHAPTER 3. HOW CHILDE ROLAND AND ANOTHER CAME TO THE DARK TOWER

  CHAPTER 4. DOUGAL

  CHAPTER 5. OF THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER

  CHAPTER 6. HOW MR. MCCUNN DEPARTED WITH RELIEF AND RETURNED WITH RESOLUTION

  CHAPTER 7. SUNDRY DOINGS IN THE MIRK

  CHAPTER 8. HOW A MIDDLE-AGED CRUSADER ACCEPTED A CHALLENGE

  CHAPTER 9. THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE CRUIVES

  CHAPTER 10. DEALS WITH AN ESCAPE AND A JOURNEY

  CHAPTER 11. GRAVITY OUT OF BED

  CHAPTER 12. HOW MR. MCCUNN COMMITTED AN ASSAULT UPON AN ALLY

  CHAPTER 13. THE COMING OF THE DANISH BRIG

  CHAPTER 14. THE SECOND BATTLE OF THE CRUIVES

  CHAPTER 15. THE GORBALS DIE-HARDS GO INTO ACTION

  CHAPTER 16. IN WHICH A PRINCESS LEAVES A DARK TOWER AND A PROVISION MERCHANT RETURNS TO HIS FAMILY

  DEDICATION

  TO W. P. KER

  If the Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford has not forgotten the rock whence he was hewn, this simple story may give an hour of entertainment. I offer it to you because I think you have met my friend Dickson McCunn, and I dare to hope that you may even in your many sojournings in the Westlands have encountered one or other of the Gorbals Die-Hards. If you share my kindly feeling for Dickson, you will be interested in some facts which I have lately ascertained about his ancestry. In his veins there flows a portion of the redoubtable blood of the Nicol Jarvies. When the Bailie, you remember, returned from his journey to Rob Roy beyond the Highland Line, he espoused his housekeeper Mattie, “an honest man’s daughter and a near cousin o’ the Laird o’ Limmerfield.” The union was blessed with a son, who succeeded to the Bailie’s business and in due course begat daughters, one of whom married a certain Ebenezer McCunn, of whom there is record in the archives of the Hammermen of Glasgow. Ebenezer’s grandson, Peter by name, was Provost of Kirkintilloch, and his second son was the father of my hero by his marriage with Robina Dickson, oldest daughter of one Robert Dickson, a tenant-farmer in the Lennox. So there are coloured threads in Mr. McCunn’s pedigree, and, like the Bailie, he can count kin, should he wish, with Rob Roy himself through “the auld wife ayont the fire at Stuckavrallachan.”

  Such as it is, I dedicate
to you the story, and ask for no better verdict on it than that of that profound critic of life and literature, Mr. Huckleberry Finn, who observed of the Pilgrim’s Progress that he “considered the statements interesting, but tough.” J.B.

  PROLOGUE

  The girl came into the room with a darting movement like a swallow, looked round her with the same birdlike quickness, and then ran across the polished floor to where a young man sat on a sofa with one leg laid along it.

  “I have saved you this dance, Quentin,” she said, pronouncing the name with a pretty staccato. “You must be lonely not dancing, so I will sit with you. What shall we talk about?”

  The young man did not answer at once, for his gaze was held by her face. He had never dreamed that the gawky and rather plain little girl whom he had romped with long ago in Paris would grow into such a being. The clean delicate lines of her figure, the exquisite pure colouring of hair and skin, the charming young arrogance of the eyes — this was beauty, he reflected, a miracle, a revelation. Her virginal fineness and her dress, which was the tint of pale fire, gave her the air of a creature of ice and flame.

  “About yourself, please, Saskia,” he said. “Are you happy now that you are a grown-up lady?”

  “Happy!” Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music. “The days are far too short. I grudge the hours when I must sleep. They say it is sad for me to make my debut in a time of war. But the world is very kind to me, and after all it is a victorious war for our Russia. And listen to me, Quentin. Tomorrow I am to be allowed to begin nursing at the Alexander Hospital. What do you think of that?”

  The time was January 1916, and the place a room in the great Nirski Palace. No hint of war, no breath from the snowy streets, entered that curious chamber where Prince Peter Nirski kept some of the chief of his famous treasures. It was notable for its lack of drapery and upholstering — only a sofa or two and a few fine rugs on the cedar floor. The walls were of a green marble veined like malachite, the ceiling was of darker marble inlaid with white intaglios. Scattered everywhere were tables and cabinets laden with celadon china, and carved jade, and ivories, and shimmering Persian and Rhodian vessels. In all the room there was scarcely anything of metal and no touch of gilding or bright colour. The light came from green alabaster censers, and the place swam in a cold green radiance like some cavern below the sea. The air was warm and scented, and though it was very quiet there, a hum of voices and the strains of dance music drifted to it from the pillared corridor in which could be seen the glare of lights from the great ballroom beyond.

  The young man had a thin face with lines of suffering round the mouth and eyes. The warm room had given him a high colour, which increased his air of fragility. He felt a little choked by the place, which seemed to him for both body and mind a hot-house, though he knew very well that the Nirski Palace on this gala evening was in no way typical of the land or its masters. Only a week ago he had been eating black bread with its owner in a hut on the Volhynian front.

  “You have become amazing, Saskia,” he said. “I won’t pay my old playfellow compliments; besides, you must be tired of them. I wish you happiness all the day long like a fairy-tale Princess. But a crock like me can’t do much to help you to it. The service seems to be the wrong way round, for here you are wasting your time talking to me.”

  She put her hand on his. “Poor Quentin! Is the leg very bad?”

  He laughed. “O, no. It’s mending famously. I’ll be able to get about without a stick in another month, and then you’ve got to teach me all the new dances.”

  The jigging music of a two-step floated down the corridor. It made the young man’s brow contract, for it brought to him a vision of dead faces in the gloom of a November dusk. He had once had a friend who used to whistle that air, and he had seen him die in the Hollebeke mud. There was something macabre in the tune... He was surely morbid this evening, for there seemed something macabre about the house, the room, the dancing, all Russia... These last days he had suffered from a sense of calamity impending, of a dark curtain drawing down upon a splendid world. They didn’t agree with him at the Embassy, but he could not get rid of the notion.

  The girl saw his sudden abstraction.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked. It had been her favourite question as a child.

  “I was thinking that I rather wished you were still in Paris.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I think you would be safer.”

  “Oh, what nonsense, Quentin dear! Where should I be safe if not in my own Russia, where I have friends — oh, so many, and tribes and tribes of relations? It is France and England that are unsafe with the German guns grumbling at their doors... My complaint is that my life is too cosseted and padded. I am too secure, and I do not want to be secure.”

  The young man lifted a heavy casket from a table at his elbow. It was of dark green imperial jade, with a wonderfully carved lid. He took off the lid and picked up three small oddments of ivory — a priest with a beard, a tiny soldier, and a draught-ox. Putting the three in a triangle, he balanced the jade box on them.

  “Look, Saskia! If you were living inside that box you would think it very secure. You would note the thickness of the walls and the hardness of the stone, and you would dream away in a peaceful green dusk. But all the time it would be held up by trifles — brittle trifles.”

  She shook her head. “You do not understand. You cannot understand. We are a very old and strong people with roots deep, deep in the earth.”

  “Please God you are right,” he said. “But, Saskia, you know that if I can ever serve you, you have only to command me. Now I can do no more for you than the mouse for the lion — at the beginning of the story. But the story had an end, you remember, and some day it may be in my power to help you. Promise to send for me.”

  The girl laughed merrily. “The King of Spain’s daughter,” she quoted,

  “Came to visit me, And all for the love Of my little nut-tree.”

  The other laughed also, as a young man in the uniform of the Preobrajenski Guards approached to claim the girl. “Even a nut-tree may be a shelter in a storm,” he said.

  “Of course I promise, Quentin,” she said. “Au revoir. Soon I will come and take you to supper, and we will talk of nothing but nut-trees.”

  He watched the two leave the room, her gown glowing like a tongue of fire in that shadowy archway. Then he slowly rose to his feet, for he thought that for a little he would watch the dancing. Something moved beside him, and he turned in time to prevent the jade casket from crashing to the floor. Two of the supports had slipped.

  He replaced the thing on its proper table and stood silent for a moment.

  “The priest and the soldier gone, and only the beast of burden left. If I were inclined to be superstitious, I should call that a dashed bad omen.”

  CHAPTER 1. HOW A RETIRED PROVISION MERCHANT FELT THE IMPULSE OF SPRING

  Mr. Dickson McCunn completed the polishing of his smooth cheeks with the towel, glanced appreciatively at their reflection in the looking-glass, and then permitted his eyes to stray out of the window. In the little garden lilacs were budding, and there was a gold line of daffodils beside the tiny greenhouse. Beyond the sooty wall a birch flaunted its new tassels, and the jackdaws were circling about the steeple of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk. A blackbird whistled from a thorn-bush, and Mr. McCunn was inspired to follow its example. He began a tolerable version of “Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch.”

  He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster. Calculation revealed to him the fact that in his fifty-five years, having begun to shave at eighteen, he had wasted three thousand three hundred and seventy hours — or one hundred and forty days — or between fou
r and five months — by his neglect of this admirable invention. Now he felt that he had stolen a march on Time. He had fallen heir, thus late, to a fortune in unpurchasable leisure.

  He began to dress himself in the sombre clothes in which he had been accustomed for thirty-five years and more to go down to the shop in Mearns Street. And then a thought came to him which made him discard the grey-striped trousers, sit down on the edge of his bed, and muse.

  Since Saturday the shop was a thing of the past. On Saturday at half-past eleven, to the accompaniment of a glass of dubious sherry, he had completed the arrangements by which the provision shop in Mearns Street, which had borne so long the legend of D. McCunn, together with the branches in Crossmyloof and the Shaws, became the property of a company, yclept the United Supply Stores, Limited. He had received in payment cash, debentures and preference shares, and his lawyers and his own acumen had acclaimed the bargain. But all the week-end he had been a little sad. It was the end of so old a song, and he knew no other tune to sing. He was comfortably off, healthy, free from any particular cares in life, but free too from any particular duties. “Will I be going to turn into a useless old man?” he asked himself.

  But he had woke up this Monday to the sound of the blackbird, and the world, which had seemed rather empty twelve hours before, was now brisk and alluring. His prowess in quick shaving assured him of his youth. “I’m no’ that dead old,” he observed, as he sat on the edge of he bed, to his reflection in the big looking-glass.

  It was not an old face. The sandy hair was a little thin on the top and a little grey at the temples, the figure was perhaps a little too full for youthful elegance, and an athlete would have censured the neck as too fleshy for perfect health. But the cheeks were rosy, the skin clear, and the pale eyes singularly childlike. They were a little weak, those eyes, and had some difficulty in looking for long at the same object, so that Mr. McCunn did not stare people in the face, and had, in consequence, at one time in his career acquired a perfectly undeserved reputation for cunning. He shaved clean, and looked uncommonly like a wise, plump schoolboy. As he gazed at his simulacrum he stopped whistling “Roy’s Wife” and let his countenance harden into a noble sternness. Then he laughed, and observed in the language of his youth that there was “life in the auld dowg yet.” In that moment the soul of Mr. McCunn conceived the Great Plan.