Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “I’m very much obliged to you, Mr Milford. You’ve given me the afternoon of my life. If I can do anything for you in return . . .” The care-free boy had gone and the young man became suddenly formal, and rather impressive. But as he disappeared up the farm-road to the station Adam could hear his whistling begin again. The tune was “The Lincolnshire Poacher.”

  The way back for Adam lay through a wood of tall beeches which lined the northern slopes of the valley. The air was clear and sharpening with a premonition of frost, while behind the trees the sun was setting in a sky of dusky gold. Beyond the wood the ground fell to the hollow in the hills where the Court lay among trim lawns. Adam stopped to admire the old brick which glowed like a jewel in the sunset. From the chimneys spires of amethyst smoke rose into the still evening.

  A cocker spaniel fawned at his feet, a wire-haired terrier butted its head against his knees, and the owner of the dogs swung himself over a fence.

  “Had one of your idyllic days?” he asked. He looked into the fishing-bag. “Not bad. We’d better leave the fish at old Perley’s, for Jackie can’t abide grayling.”

  Kenneth Armine was three years Adam’s junior. At school he had been his fag, and their friendship had been sincere ever since, though till lately their converse had been intermittent. He had gone to Oxford and then to an honorary attachéship at an Embassy, after which followed half a dozen years of travel in outlandish places, varied by two unsuccessful contests for Parliament. In the war he had fought his way up from second-lieutenant to the command of a famous line battalion, and he had acquired a considerable reputation as a fire-eater. He was adored by his men, who let their imaginations expand on his doings. But the repute was unjustified, for he was the least pugnacious of mortals, and had a horror of suffering which he jealously concealed. The truth was that he had one of those short-range imaginations which are a safeguard against common fear, so that under shell-fire he was composed, and in an attack a model of businesslike calm. One young officer who accompanied him in a morning’s walk in an unpleasant part of the Ypres Salient reported that at a particularly unwholesome sunken road his commanding officer seemed to be deep in thought. But his mind was not on some high matter of strategy, for when he beckoned the nervous youth to him it was only to observe that this was a place where the partridges would come over well.

  Like many others of his type Armine went through the war without a scratch or an ailment. For some months he had a job with the Army on the Rhine, and then he came home and married. His father, the old Marquis of Warmestre, lived secluded with his collection of coins and gems at the main family place in Devonshire, and gave over Armine Court to his son. Armine was a friend of Christopher Stannix, in whose company Adam met him again and picked up the threads of their friendship. He had the slight trim figure of one who has once been a good light-weight boxer. Like all his family he was sallow and dark, with a hint of the Celt in his long nose and quick black eyes. Yet his stock was solid English, descending without admixture from the ancientry of Saxondom, and his Scottish Christian name was due to a mother’s whim.

  His muddy boots fell into step with Adam’s brogues, as they descended the slope to a ha-ha which bounded the lawns.

  “I’ve had a heavy agricultural afternoon,” Armine said. “Been round the near farms, and must have walked ten miles in mud. I can’t get these fellows to see reason. Old Stockley wants to buy his farm — made a bit of money, and would like to feel himself a landowner. I don’t mind, for very soon land is going to be a millstone round a man’s neck and I’d be glad to lessen the size of mine. But what on earth is old Stockley to do when he has spent his nest-egg on becoming a squire and is pinched for working capital? He is a fine Randolph Caldecott type with a red face and a bird’s-eye neckcloth, but his notion of farming is to hunt two days a week and to potter round his fields on a fat cob. How is he going to live when prices drop and there’s a glut of production throughout the globe? Labour costs are bound to go up — the labourer has higher wages but is a dashed lot worse off than his father for all that. And when trouble comes Stockley and his kind won’t have me to lean on, if they set up for themselves. A good thing for me, you say? Maybe, but we’ve been too long here for me to take a bagman’s view of property. I know it’s absurd, and Jenkinson keeps pressing me to take the chance of a good bargain, but I simply can’t do it. Too infernally unconscientious. There’s another chap called Ward — started ten years ago with a hundred pounds, and now has a pedigree flock of Oxford Downs, and a big milk run in Birkpool, and his wife and three sons and two daughters all work on the farm like blacks. I’d sell him his land to-morrow, but he is far too wise to buy — he likes a squire as a buffer. The trouble is that everybody wants to pinch some little advantage for themselves out of things as they are to-day, and nobody bothers to look ahead.”

  Armine expanded on the topic. He had large dreams for English agriculture. He wanted more people on the land — smaller farms, more arable, less pasture — but the drift seemed to be towards letting plough slip back to prairie. Stock, he held, was the English staple, for the quality of English stock would always beat the world, so he held that arable should be subsidiary to stock, and that the full richness of English pasturing was untapped. Adam, who knew nothing of midland farming, listened with half an ear.

  “I wish to Heaven,” his host concluded, “we could get the right kind of leader for our country labourers, somebody who would act as a gadfly and make our jolly old bucolics sit up and think. It’s the only chance of salvation for master and man. But the common breed of Labour leader has a head like a door-post.”

  “There was one on the river to-day,” said Adam, “a man called Utlaw from Birkpool.”

  Armine awoke to a lively interest.

  “Utlaw! The chap was in my battalion. Got a commission after Cambrai. Now I come to think of it, he wrote to me about fishing, and I told Jenkinson to give him a day whenever he asked for it. Why the devil doesn’t he look me up when he comes here? I’ve heard about his doings in Birkpool. He’s a big swell in his Union, and I’m told as red as they make ‘em. They want me to be Mayor of that delectable city, and if I am I daresay I’ll run up hard against Mr Utlaw. . . . But I don’t know. He was a dashed good battalion officer, and a very decent sort of fellow.”

  Armine continued to soliloquise.

  “I’m glad you mentioned him, for I must keep my eye on him. Horrid the way one forgets about all the good fellows one fought beside. I tell you what — Utlaw is some sort of shape as a leader. He had no luck in the war or he would have had his company. Bit of a sea-lawyer he was, but reasonable too. Now I remember, he put up a good show at Calais in December ‘18. You remember there was a nasty business with the troops there, for the demobbing was mismanaged and some of the older men were getting a dirty deal from the War Office. So far as my lot was concerned there was no trouble, for Utlaw got hold of them at the start, found out their grievances, made himself their spokesman, and gave me the case I wanted to put up to headquarters. It needed some doing to hold a lot of tired, disgruntled men and talk them into reason. . . . What’s he like now? The same tow-headed, cheery, talkative blighter? The next time he comes here I must get hold of him. I want a yarn with him, and he’d amuse Jackie.”

  Adam descended the broad shining staircase very slowly, for he felt that he was recovering a lost world. He had had a bath and had dressed leisurely before a bright fire, and his senses seemed to have a new keenness and to be the quick conveyers of memories. The scents of the Court — half-sweet, half-acrid — wood smoke, old beeswaxed floors, masses of cut flowers — blended into a delicate comfort, the essence of all that was habitable and secure. He had dwelt so long in tents that he had forgotten it. Now it laid a caressing touch on him, and seemed to clamour to have its spell acknowledged. He found himself shaking his head; he did not want it, and very gently he relaxed the clinging hands. But it was something to preserve — for others, for the world. As he descended he looked at the pict
ures on the staircase, furniture pictures most of them, with their crudities mellowed by time. There were two tall ivory pagodas at the foot of the stairs, loot from the Summer Palace; in the hall there were skins and horns of beasts, and curio cabinets, and settees whose velvet had withstood the wear of generations, and above the fireplace a family group of seventeenth-century Armines, with the dead infants painted beneath as a row of tiny kneeling cherubs. The common uses of four centuries were assembled here — crude English copies of Flemish tapestry, a Restoration cupboard, Georgian stools, a Coromandel screen, the drums of a Peninsular regiment, a case of Victorian samplers — the oddments left by a dozen generations. This was a house which fitted its possessors as closely as a bearskin fits the bear. To shake loose from such a dwelling would be like the pulling up of mandrakes. . . . Need there be any such shaking loose? Surely a thing so indigenous must be left to England? But at the back of his head he heard the shriek of the uprooted mandrakes.

  A young woman was standing on the kerb of the fireplace with her head resting on the ledge of the stone chimney. When she saw him she came forward and gave him both her hands.

  “Such a damned disinheriting countenance!” she quoted. “I never saw such a solemn face, Adam dear. Do you disapprove of my new arrangements? You can’t pull the Court about much, you know — something comes in the way and the furniture simply refuses to be moved. . . . I only got back an hour ago and I’m stiffer than a poker. Thirty miles in a car driven by myself after a day in those rotten Mivern pastures! Ken will be down in a moment. He has been farming, and I left him getting the mud out of his hair.”

  Jacqueline Armine had a voice so musical and soothing that whatever she said sounded delicious. She was tall, and the new fashion in clothes intensified her slimness. One could picture her long graceful limbs moving about the great house followed by a retinue of dogs and children. Dogs there were in plenty — two terriers, the cocker that Adam had met that afternoon, and a most ingratiating lurcher, but the children were represented only by a red-haired urchin of one year now asleep upstairs in bed. He drew his colouring from his mother, for Jacqueline’s hair was a brilliant thing, a fiery aureole in sunlight, but a golden russet in the shadows. It was arranged so as to show much of the forehead, and the height of the brow and her clear pale colouring gave her the air of a Tudor portrait. She came of solid East Anglian stock, for the Albans had been settled on the brink of the fen-country since the days of Hereward, but a Highland mother had given her a sparkle like light on a river shallow, as well as a voice which should have been attuned to soft Gaelic. Her manner seemed to welcome everyone into a warm intimacy, but it was illusory, for the real Jacqueline lived in her own chamber well retired from the public rooms of life. The usual thing said about her was that she oxygenated the air around her and made everything seem worth doing; consequently she was immensely popular, as those must be who give to the world more than they take from it. Having been brought up largely in the company of grooms and gillies she had a disconcerting frankness about matters commonly kept out of polite conversation. Someone once said that to know her was to understand what Elizabethan girls were like, virgins without prurience or prudery.

  At dinner Armine, who had gone without luncheon and tea, was very hungry, and it was his habit when hungry to be talkative. He discoursed on his farming investigations of the afternoon.

  “They keep on telling me that the one part of England that isn’t shell-shocked is the deep country. Like the county line regiments, they say — honest fellows that did their job and won the war, and never asked questions. It’s all bunkum. The old shire-horse of a farmer is just as unsettled as the rest of us, and wants to snaffle a bit for himself out of the pool. There is a lunatic idea about that we won something by the war, and that there’s a big pile of loot to be shared out. Whereas of course we won nothing. All we did was to lose a little less than the other chap, and that’s what we call a victory. The fellow that said that no war could ever be profitable to anybody was dead right. Yet everybody’s after his share in an imaginary loot. Old Stockley wants to become a squire, and Ward’s reaching out for another farm over Ambleton way. And Utlaw and his lot want higher wages and shorter hours. You must meet Utlaw, Jackie. He was in my battalion, and Adam forgathered with him to-day on the river. You’ve often said you wanted to make a domestic pet of a Labour leader. — And the politicians are promising a new earth, and the parsons a new Heaven, and there’s a general scramble each for the booty he fancies. But there’s no booty, only an overdraft at the bank.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said his wife. “You shouldn’t go too much into agricultural circles, Ken. It goes to your head, my dear, and you grouse like an old moss-back. You shall come to London with me at once and get your mind clear. You shall meet my Mr Creevey.”

  “Now who on earth is your Mr Creevey?”

  “He’s a friend of Aunt Georgie, and the cleverest thing alive. When I was up shopping last week, Aunt Georgie gave a party, and I sat next to Mr Creevey — rather a hideous young man till you notice his eyes. Somebody was talking just like you, how we had won the war only to lose the peace — that kind of melancholia. Up spake Mr Creevey and made us all cheerful again. I can’t repeat his arguments, for he talked like a very good book, but the gist of them was that we had gained what mattered most. He called it a quickened sense of acquisitiveness, and he said that the power to acquire would follow, if we had a little intelligence.”

  Armine shook his head.

  “That’s begging the whole question. It’s the lack of intelligence I complain of. What’s the good of wanting to acquire if you haven’t the sense to know how to do it. There’s a get-rich-quick mania about — that’s my complaint. Everybody wants to take short cuts — those rotten painters who splash about colours before they have learned how to draw, and those rotten writers whose tricks disguise their emptiness, and those rotten politicians who — who — well, I’m hanged if I know what they want to do. I don’t say we haven’t a chance, for the war has burned up a lot of rubbish, and you can’t go through four years of hell without getting something out of it — being keyed up to something pretty big. There’s a great game to be played, I don’t deny, but nobody is trying to understand the rules. We’re all muddled or feverish — all except Adam, who stands aside and smiles.”

  “I wish I knew what you were doing!” Lady Armine turned on Adam.

  “I’ve cross-examined him, Jackie,” said her husband. “He never tells me anything, and I’ve known him ever since he used to lick me for burning his toast.”

  Adam had slowly felt his way back into the social atmosphere. He was no longer tongue-tied, and his words were not drawn slowly and painfully as out of a deep well. But he was still the observer, and even the friendliest of company could not make him expand.

  “It wouldn’t interest you to hear what I’ve been doing. I’ve been exploring queer places.”

  “Among what Utlaw calls the ‘workers’?”

  “Yes. I’ve had a look at most of the big industries. From close at hand, too. I’ve lived among the people.”

  “And the intellectuals? They’re an uneasy lot. Every batch of them has got a different diagnosis and a different cure, and they’re all as certain about things as the Almighty.”

  Adam smiled. “I’ve sampled most varieties of them — the half-baked, the over-baked, and the cracked in the firing.”

  “Have you tried the uplift circles?” Jacqueline interposed.

  “You mean?”

  “Oh, all the fancy creeds. The gentry who minister to minds diseased. The mystics who lift you to a higher plane. The psycho-therapists who dig out horrors from your past. The Christian Scientists with large soft hands and a good bedside manner. The spooky people. Aunt Georgie has them all. The last I saw there was a drooping Hindu who was some kind of god.”

  “No,” said Adam, “I left the toy-shops alone!”

  “Well, and what do you make of it?” Armine was fiercely interrogative
. “You’ve had a look round politics. Is there any fellow in that show who can pull things straight? They’re playing the old game in which they are experts, but it isn’t the game the country requires. I had hopes of Kit Stannix, but I’m afraid the machine is too strong for him. He has become just a cog in it like the rest. And the Church — the Churches? Have you discovered a prophet who can put the fear of God into the tribes of Israel?”

  “Do you know my brother?” Jacqueline asked.

  Armine raised his head.

  “Yes,” said Armine. “What about Frank Alban? You haven’t run across him? Well, you ought to. Brother Frank is just a little different from anybody else. He takes my view of things, but, being a saint, he is hopeful.”

  “He’s at St Chad’s now,” said Jacqueline. “There are tremendous crowds at his Wednesday afternoon sermons. They are the strangest things you ever heard — mostly the kind of slangy familiar stuff he used to give the troops, and then suddenly comes a sort of self-communing that you can’t forget, and an impassioned appeal that makes you want to howl. Ken, this must be seen to at once. Adam and Frank must meet. They’d do each other good.”

  “That’s the best we can do for you,” said Armine. “Frank Alban with only one lung, and plenty of people who think him loony. . . . Another glass of port? Well, let’s get round the library fire, for it’s going to freeze. ‘Pon my soul, things are so dicky that I may have to take a hand myself.”

  II

  Mrs Gallop, at No 3, Charity Row, in the dingy suburb of Birkpool which went by the incongruous name of Rosedale, had found a tenant for the back room on her upper floor. The houses in the Row were a relic of happier days when Rosedale had been almost country, for they were small two-storeyed things, built originally to accommodate the first overspill of Birkpool residents. To-day their undue lowliness contrasted oddly with the tall tenements which hemmed them round.