by John Buchan
But Peter saw the figure by his side dimly, for his eyes were on the scene before him. He lay above the Painted Floor, in the very spot where he had been used to make his seat on holidays. The world seemed to have grown very quiet. The moon shone on the Floor, washing the tiles with silver, so that the place looked like a summer sea. And over its waters moved the presence that he had invoked, proud and tender and grave. She wore no crown, and there was no gold on her breast, only the robes of celestial blue. “I have given you life,” she seemed to say, and when he stretched out longing arms towards her she smiled like a mother.
Catti was cleaning his knife, and fingering now and then a new gash on his forehead.
“We must be in the deeps of Bernwood ere morning,” he said. “It appears that our new king is to rule not in England but in the greenwood.”
Pierce the Piper was whittling at a boxwood flute.
“I have found another of my trade,” he said. “My lord here is one that dreams dreams and sees visions.”
EPILOGUE
In the pleasant shire of Kent the manor of Roodhurst has long lost its rustic peace. The old house disappeared in the reign of Anne, and the park this twenty years has been carved into suburban roads and gardens. But the ancient flint-built church still stands, and on the left of the altar are the Messynger tombs. There, on a plinth of black marble, my lord lies carved in alabaster, with his robes curiously coloured and a gilded Garter jewel at his breast. For Sir Gabriel became a great man and the master of broad lands over all south England. Henry made him the Lord Messynger of Roodhurst, and under Mary he won an earl’s coronet and an ample fortune. Nor did Elizabeth degrade him. He trimmed his faith opportunely, and died in full possession of the wealth he had won and in the sunshine of his Queen’s favour.
On the shelf beneath him is the figure of his countess, less resplendent, but with a gilt coif above her marble face. On the entablature, among the heraldic scutcheons, may be read in lapidary Latin how Sabina, Comitessa de Roodhurst, died in the odour of sanctity in the year after her lord, hasting to rejoin him in Heaven. The inscription tells of her wifely merits, her pieties, her meekness, her assured hope of salvation. It enumerates her children, one son who continued the name, and no less than seven daughters, who found fitting husbands, so that, though the title died out soon after the Restoration, the blood of Messynger and Beauforest is still perpetuated in high places.
The name of the Countess Sabine flashes now and then into the national story — in state papers, in court memoirs, in the dedicatory addresses of many poets. But more is to be gathered from the local histories. She was a great lady in Kent, a figure like Anne Clifford in the North. Her beauty is extolled; her hair was unstreaked with grey till her death, and her figure, owing perhaps to her passion for horsemanship, remained to the end that of a slim nymph and not of a mother of children. She was the best of wives, and there is a tale of how, in her husband’s interest, she won by her arts the grace of a queen who did not love her own sex. Her virtues were eminent and high-handed; she ruled her lord’s estates with far-sighted skill, generous to those who obeyed her, but adamant to opposition, loved by some, feared by many, deeply respected by all. In her rural domain she was a lesser Gloriana, and men spoke of her as they spoke of Elizabeth, with pride and awe and a remote affection. In very truth, says her epitaph, a virtuous woman, a true mother in Israel, whose price was above rubies.
Sir Ralph Bonamy dwelt peacefully in Wood Eaton until his death at a ripe age in the same year as King Henry, keeping open house, breakfasting magnificently on beef and ale, hunting in Stowood, and fowling on Otmoor, and training such falcons as were not to be matched in England. To his house came Brother Tobias, when the community of Oseney was scattered, and there he spent his declining years as the family chaplain. Tobias became a silent old man, who stirred little from his chamber, where he was busy with a Latin version of Euripides in the manner of Seneca — a work which has not survived. Sometimes, seated among his books, he would receive in conference uncouth men out of the woods, and on a winter’s night by the hall fire he and Sir Ralph would speak of dangerous things. They agreed that the blanket of the dark had fallen on England, and that long before it lifted they would be both in Paradise. Sometimes they spoke of the Lady Messynger, and Brother Tobias would propound a fancy. He would tell how, in Euripides’ play, the true Helen was carried to Egypt, and how it was only a phantom Helen that went to Troy with Paris and brought on Greeks and Trojans unnumbered ills. So it was, he said, with the Lady Sabine. There was a true woman of that name, who was beloved by two noble youths, but where that woman was gone, said he, was known only to God. What survived was but a phantom, a hollow thing with much beauty and more cunning, who was mated to another hollow thing, and shone resplendently in a hollow world. The real Sabine was no doubt laid up in Heaven. And then he would laugh, and remind himself that such fancies might be Platonism but were not orthodoxy.
Tobias was dead and Sir Ralph was dead before Simon Rede returned to England. He had sailed with Breton captains to the coasts of the New World, and had been much engaged in the early religious wars of France. He returned in the eighth year of Elizabeth to a moiety of his estate — a man far older than his age. To Court he never went, nor did he find a wife, but lived solitary in the Boarstall tower, dying at last of a fever in his sixtieth year. The manor went to a great-nephew, who pulled down the old walls and built that noble house which Sir William Campion in the Civil Wars defended for King Charles.
You will find a note of Simon and of Sir Ralph in the local histories, but not of Peter. After that Christmas Eve on the Painted Floor he disappears clean out of any record. Avelard and Neville papers reveal nothing, for there was no more talk of trouble in the west. He went down into a world of which there has never been a chronicle, the heaths and forests of old England. But somewhere in Bernwood or Savernake or Charnwood or Sherwood he may have found a home, or on the wild Welsh marches, or north among the heather of the dales. Or he may have been a wanderer, taking for his domicile the whole of the dim country whose border is the edge of the highroad and the rim of the tillage and the last stone walls of the garths. The blanket of the dark might lift for England, but no light will ever reveal those ancient recesses.
Yet I cherish the belief that of Peter we have one faint record. I present it, such as it is, in the words of a letter from my friend, the rector of a Northants parish, who desires to be unnamed, but who is very learned in the antiquities of that wide forest country, which is now a thing of patches, but which once flowed over half the midlands:
“There died here last week,” he writes, “an old man, the last of his name, one Obadiah Bunn. He was an extraordinary old fellow, a real forester — not a gipsy, but an adept in all gipsy lore. I am sorry he has gone, for I learned a lot from him, and I am sorry that the family is extinct, for it interested me enormously. The Boons, Boones, Bunns — the spelling varies — seem to have been in this neighbourhood for at least three hundred years. According to local tradition, they have always been of the same type — the men tall and well-made, the women (there was rarely more than one in any Bunn family) remarkably handsome. They were a queer folk, silent and self-contained, and keeping very much to themselves — odd-tempered at times — decent on the whole, for they never produced a drunkard — wonderful horse-breakers and horse-copers and dog-trainers and poachers — relics of an earlier England. They had not the gipsy colouring, being mostly fair, and nothing annoyed them more than to be taken for gipsies. One feature which local gossip says characterised the whole strain was a slight cleft in the upper lip, which, combined with their fine carriage, gave them an odd air of masterfulness. They were great wanderers, for only one or two of the men in each generation remained at home, the others emigrating or joining the army. I believe I can put up a good case for the view that Daniel Boone, the American hunter and frontiersman, came of their stock.
“You remember Chief Justice Crewe’s famous question: ‘Where is Bohun
? where is Mowbray? where is Mortimer?’ . . . Gone in name, but not perhaps in blood. Somewhere those high strains are in the commonalty of England, for it is the commonalty that endures. Can I answer one part of the question? Will you think me fantastic if I look on those stiff dwellers in our forest bounds, those men and women with the curl of the lip and the quiet eyes, as the heirs of Bohun? If so, old Obadiah Bunn was the last of a proud race.”
THE END
THE GAP IN THE CURTA IN
This 1932 novel includes science fiction conventions not often found in Buchan’s works. In the narrative, five guests gather at a country house, where they have been chosen by a brilliant scientist to take part in a shocking experiment, which will let them glimpse one year into the future. However, when the experiment takes place, two of the guests see their own obituaries in a newspaper and so begins the challenge to change their destinies.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. WHITSUNTIDE AT FLAMBARD
CHAPTER II. MR ARNOLD TAVANGER
CHAPTER III. THE RT. HON. DAVID MAYOT
CHAPTER IV. MR REGINALD DAKER
CHAPTER V. SIR ROBERT GOODEVE
CHAPTER VI. CAPTAIN CHARLES OTTERY
TO
SYBIL
AND
LAMBERT MIDDLETON
CHAPTER I. WHITSUNTIDE AT FLAMBARD
“Si la conscience qui sommeille dans l’instinct se réveillait, s’il s’intériorisait en connaissance au lieu de s’extérioriser en action, si nous savions l’interroger et s’il pouvait répondre, il nous livrerait les secrets de la vie.”
BERGSON, L’Evolution Créatrice.
“But no!” cried Mr Mantalini. “It is a demn’d horrid dream. It is not reality. No!”
Nicholas Nickleby.
I
As I took my place at the dinner-table I realised that I was not the only tired mortal in Lady Flambard’s Whitsuntide party. Mayot, who sat opposite me, had dark pouches under his eyes and that unwholesome high complexion which in a certain type of physique means that the arteries are working badly. I knew that he had been having a heavy time in the House of Commons over the Committee stage of his Factory Bill. Charles Ottery, who generally keeps himself fit with fives and tennis, and has still the figure of an athletic schoolboy, seemed nervous and out of sorts, and scarcely listened to his companion’s chatter. Our hostess had her midseason look; her small delicate features were as sharp as a pin, and her blue eyes were drained of colour. But it was Arnold Tavanger farther down the table who held my attention. His heavy, sagacious face was a dead mask of exhaustion. He looked done to the world, and likely to fall asleep over his soup.
It was a comfort to me to see others in the same case, for I was feeling pretty near the end of my tether. Ever since Easter I had been overworked out of all reason. There was a batch of important Dominion appeals before the Judicial Committee, in every one of which I was engaged, and I had some heavy cases in the Commercial Court. Of the two juniors who did most of my “devilling” one had a big patent-law action of his own, and the other was in a nursing-home with appendicitis. To make matters worse, I was chairman of a Royal Commission which was about to issue its findings, and had had to rewrite most of the report with my own hand, and I had been sitting as a one-man Commission in a troublesome dispute in the shipbuilding trade. Also I was expected to be pretty regularly in the House of Commons to deal with the legal side of Mayot’s precious Bill, and the sittings had often stretched far into the next morning.
There is something about a barrister’s spells of overwork which makes them different in kind from those of other callings. His duties are specific as to time and place. He must be in court at a certain hour. He must be ready to put, or to reply to, an argument when he is called upon; he can postpone or rearrange his work only within the narrowest limits. He is a cog in an inexorable machine, and must revolve with the rest of it. For myself I usually enter upon a period of extreme busyness with a certain lift of spirit, for there is a sporting interest in not being able to see your way through your work. But presently this goes, and I get into a mood of nervous irritation. It is easy enough to be a carthorse, and it is easy enough to be a racehorse, but it is difficult to be a carthorse which is constantly being asked to take Grand National fences. One has to rise to hazards, but with each the take-off gets worse and the energy feebler. So at the close of such a spell I am in a wretched condition of soul and body — weary, but without power to rest, and with a mind so stale that it sees no light or colour in anything. Even the end of the drudgery brings no stimulus. I feel that my form has been getting steadily poorer, and that virtue has gone out of me which I may never recapture.
I had been in two minds about accepting Sally Flambard’s invitation. She is my very good friend, but her parties are rather like a table d’hôte. Her interests are multitudinous, and all are reflected in her hospitality, so that a procession goes through her house which looks like a rehearsal for the Judgement Day. Politics, religion, philanthropy, letters, science, art and the most brainless fashion — she takes them all to her capacious heart. She is an innocent lion-hunter, too, and any man or woman who figures for the moment in the Press will be a guest at Flambard. And she drives her team, for all are put through their paces. Sally makes her guests work for their entertainment. In her own way she is a kind of genius, and what Americans call a wonderful “mixer.” Everyone has got to testify, and I have seen her make a bishop discourse on Church union, and a mathematician on hyper-space to an audience which heard of the topics for the first time. The talk is apt to be a little like a magazine page in a popular newspaper — very good fun, if you are feeling up to it, but not quite the thing for a rest-cure.
It was my memory of Flambard itself that decided me. The place is set amid the greenest and quietest country on earth. The park is immense, and in early June is filled with a glory of flowers and blossoming trees. I could borrow one of Evelyn’s horses and ride all day through the relics of ancient forests, or up on to the cool, windy spaces of the Downs. There was good dry-fly fishing in the little Arm, which runs through a shallow vale to the young Thames. At Whitsuntide you can recover an earlier England. The flood of greenery hides modern blemishes which are revealed by the bareness of winter, and an upland water-meadow is today just as it met the eye of the monks when they caught their Friday’s trout, or of the corsleted knights as they rode out to the King’s wars. It is the kind of scene that comforts me most, for there, as some poet says, “old Leisure sits knee-deep in grass.” Also the house is large enough for peace. It is mostly Restoration period, with some doubtful Georgian additions, but there is a Tudor wing, the remnant of the old house, which the great Earl of Essex once used as a hunting lodge. Sally used to give me a room at the top of the Essex wing, with a wide prospect north into the Cotswold dales. The hall and the drawing-rooms and the great terrace might be as full of “turns” as a music-hall stage, but somewhere in the house fatigue could find sanctuary.
I had arrived just in time to dress for dinner, and had spoken to none of my fellow-guests, so my inspection of the table had a speculative interest. It was a large party, and I saw a good many faces that I knew. There were the Nantleys, my best of friends, and their daughter Pamela, who was in her first season . . . There was old Folliot, the bore of creation, with his little grey imperial, and his smirk, and his tired eyes. He was retailing some ancient scandal to Mrs Lamington, who was listening with one ear and devoting the other to what Lady Altrincham was saying across the table. George Lamington a little farther down was arguing with his host about the Ascot entries — his puffy red face had that sudden shrewdness which it acquires when George’s mind is on horses . . . There was a man opposite him of whom I could only catch the profile — a dark head with fine-drawn features. I heard his voice, a pleasant voice, with full deep tones like a tragic actor’s, and, as he turned, I had an impression of a face full of swift, nervous strength . . . There was a good deal of youth in the party
, four girls besides Pamela Brune, and several boys with sleek hair and fresh voices. One of them I knew, Reggie Daker, who was a friend of my nephew’s.
I was on Sally’s left hand, and as she was busy with Mayot, and the lady on my left was deep in a controversy with her neighbour over some book, I was free to look about me. Suddenly I got a queer impression. A dividing line seemed to zigzag in and out among us, separating the vital from the devitalised. There was a steady cackle of talk, but I felt that there were silent spaces in it. Most of the people were cheerful, eupeptic souls who were enjoying life. The Nantleys, for example, sedate country gentlefolk, whose days were an ordered routine of pleasant cares . . . Pamela Brune? I was not so sure of her, for a young girl’s first season is a trying business, like a boy’s first half at school . . . Old Folliot, beyond doubt — he was perfectly happy as long as he was in a great house with somebody to listen to his archaic gossip . . . Evelyn Flambard and George Lamington and the boys who were talking Ascot and next winter’s hunting plans . . . Lady Altrincham, sixty but with the air of thirty, who lives for her complexion and her famous pearls . . . But I realised that there were people here who were as much at odds with life as myself — Mayot and Tavanger and Charles Ottery, and perhaps the dark fellow who sat opposite George Lamington.
