Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  Galliard’s face passed from an amused inquisitiveness to an extreme gravity.

  “Our Uncle John! Tell me, what job did he give you?”

  “To find out where you had gone, and join you, and, if possible, bring you back. No, not bring you — for I expected to be dead before that — but to persuade you.”

  “You were in New York? You saw our Uncle John there?”

  “No. In London. I know his other niece, Lady Clanroyden — Clanroyden was at school and college with me — and I had some business once with Blenkiron. He came to my rooms one morning last summer, and told me about you.”

  Galliard’s eyes were on the ground. He seemed to have been overcome by a sudden shyness, and for a moment he said nothing. Then he asked —

  “You took on the job because you liked Blenkiron? Or perhaps Lady Clanroyden?”

  “No. I happen to like Lady Clanroyden very much — and old Blenkiron, too. But my motive was purely selfish. I wasn’t interested in you — I didn’t want to do a kindness to anybody — I wanted something that would keep me on my feet until I died. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had never heard the name of any of the people concerned. I was thinking only of myself, and the job suited me.”

  “You saved my life. If you and Johnny hadn’t followed our trail I would long ago have been a heap of bones under the snow.” Galliard spoke very softly, as if he were talking to himself.

  Leithen felt acutely uncomfortable.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But that was an accident, and there’s no gratitude due, any more than to the policeman who calls an ambulance in a street accident.”

  Galliard raised his head.

  “You were in New York? Whom did you meet there? My wife?”

  “Yes. The Ravelstons, of course. And some of your friends like Bronson Jane, and Derwent, and Savory. But principally your wife.”

  “Can you” — the man stuttered—”can you tell me about her?”

  “She is a brave woman, but I need not tell you that. Anxious and miserable, of course, but one would never guess it. She keeps a stiff face to the world. She tells people that you are in South America inquiring into a business proposition. She won’t have any fuss made, for she thinks it might annoy you when you come back.”

  “Come back! She believes I will come back?”

  “Implicitly. She thinks you had reached crossroads in your mind and had to go away and think it out and decide which one to take. When you have decided, she thinks you will come back.”

  “Then why did she want you to go to look for me?”

  “Because there was always a chance you might be dead — or sick. I sent her a message from Fort Bannerman saying that I had ascertained you were alive and well up to a week before.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I guessed that you had gone first to Clairefontaine. I got no news of you there, but some little things convinced me that you had been there. Then I guessed you had gone North where your brother and your uncle had gone. So I followed. I saw their graves, and then Johnny told me about Lew’s craze for the Sick Heart River, and I guessed again that he had taken you there. It was simply a series of lucky guesses. If you like, you can call them deductions from scanty evidence. I was lucky, but that was because I had made a guess at what was passing in your mind, and I think I guessed correctly.”

  “You didn’t know me — never met me. What data had you?”

  “Little things picked up in New York and at Clairefontaine. You see I am accustomed to weighing evidence.”

  “And what did you make of my psychology?”

  “I thought you were a man who had got into a wrong groove and wanted to get out before it was too late. . . . No, that isn’t the right way to put it. If it had been that way, there was no hope of getting you back. I thought you were a man who thought he had sold his birthright and was tortured by his conscience and wanted to buy it back.”

  “You think that a more hopeful state of affairs?”

  “Yes. For it is possible to keep your birthright and live in a new world. Many men have done it.”

  Galliard got up and pulled on his parka and mitts. “I’m going out,” he said, “for I want to think. You’re a wizard, Mr. Leithen. You’ve discovered what was wrong with me; but you’re not quite right about the cure I was aiming at. . . . I was like Lew, looking for a Sick Heart River. . . . I was seeking the waters of atonement.”

  For a moment Leithen was alarmed. Galliard had seemed the sanest of men, all the saner because he had divested himself of his urban trappings and had yet kept the accent of civilisation. But his last words seemed an echo of Lew — Lew before his cure. But a glance at the steady eyes and grave face reassured him.

  “I mean what I say,” Galliard continued. “I had been faithless to a trust and had to do penance for it. I had forgotten God and had to find Him. . . . We have each of us to travel to his own Sick Heart River.”

  2

  In the days of short commons Lew was a tower of strength. He ran the camp in an orderly bustle, the Indians jumped to his orders, and Johnny worked with him like an extra right hand. His friendly gusto kept up everyone’s spirits, and Leithen was never aware of the scarcity of rations.

  It was a moment when he seemed to have reached the turning-point of his disease. Most of his worst discomforts had gone, and only weakness vexed him and an occasional scantiness of breath. The night sweats had ceased, and the nausea, and he could eat his meals with a certain relish. Above all, power was creeping back into his limbs. He could put on his clothes without having to stop and pant, and something of his old striding vigour was returning to his legs. He felt himself fit for longer walks than the weather and the narrow camp platform permitted.

  Lew watched him with an approving eye. As he passed he would stop and pat him on his shoulder.

  “You’re doing fine,” he would say. “Soon you’ll be fit to go huntin’. You much of a shot?”

  “Fair.”

  Lew laughed. “If an Old Countryman ‘lows he’s a fair shot, it means he’s darned good.”

  One evening just before supper when the others were splitting firewood, Lew sat himself down before Leithen and tapped him on the knee.

  “Mr. Galliard,” he said—”I’d like to say something about Mr. Galliard. You know I acted mighty bad to him, but then I was out of my senses, and he wasn’t too firm in his. Well, I’m all right now, but I’m not so sure that he is. His health’s fine, and he can stand a long day in the bush. But he ain’t happy — no happier than when he first hired me way back last spring. I mean he’s got his wits back, and he’s as sensible as you and me, but there’s a lot worryin’ him.” Lew spoke as if he found it difficult to say what he wanted.

  “I feel kindo’ responsible for Mr. Galliard,” he said, “seeing that he’s my master and is paying me pretty high. And you must feel kindo’ responsible for him or you wouldn’t have come five thousand miles looking for him. . . . I see you’ve started talking to him. I’d feel easier in my mind if you had a good long pow-wow and got out of him what’s biting him. You don’t happen to know?”

  Leithen shook his head.

  “Only that he wasn’t happy and thought he might feel better if he went North. But the plan doesn’t seem to have come off.”

  The conversation, as it fell out, was delayed until early in February, when, in a spell of fine weather, Johnny and the smaller Indian had set off to the Hares’ camp to bring back supplies by dog-team. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was beginning to go down in a sea of gold and crimson. Leithen sat at the hut door, facing the big fire on the platform which Galliard had been stoking. The latter pulled out a batch of skins and squatted on them opposite him.

  “Can we talk?” he said. “I’ve kept away from you, for I’ve been trying to think out what to say. Maybe you could help me. I’d like to tell you just how I was feeling a year ago.”

  Then words seemed to fail him. He was overcome with extreme shyness, h
is face flushed, and he averted his eyes.

  “I have no business to trouble you with my affairs,” he stammered. “I apologise . . . I am a bore.”

  “Get on, man,” said Leithen. “I have crossed half the world to hear about your affairs. They interest me more than anything on earth.”

  But Galliard’s tongue still halted, and he seemed to find it impossible to start.

  “Very well,” said Leithen. . . . “I will begin by telling you what I know about you. You come from the Clairefontaine valley in Quebec, which Glaubsteins have now made hideous with a dam and a pulp mill. I believe your own firm had a share in that sacrilege. You belong to an ancient family, now impoverished, and your father farmed a little corner of the old seigneury. . . . When you were nineteen or so you got sick of your narrow prospects and went down to the States to try your luck. After a roughish time you found your feet, and are now a partner in Ravelstons, and one of the chief figures in American finance. . . . Meantime your father died, soon after you left him. Your brother Paul carried on the farm, and then he also got restless, and a year or two ago went off to the North, pretending he was going to look for your uncle Aristide, who disappeared there years before. Paul got to the river which Aristide discovered, and died there — the graves of both are there, and you saw them last summer. . . . At the other end something happened to you. You started out for Clairefontaine with Lew, and then you were at Ghost River, and then came on here. Is that sketch correct?”

  Galliard nodded. His eyes were abstracted, as if he were in the throes of a new idea.

  “Well, you must fill out the sketch. But let me tell you two other things. I went to Clairefontaine after you, and after you to the Ghost River, and I saw the crosses in the graveyard. Also, long ago, when I was a young man, I went hunting in Quebec, and I came out by way of Clairefontaine. I found the little meadow at the head of the stream, and I have never forgotten it. When I knew I had to die, my first thought was to go there, for it seemed the place to find peace.”

  Galliard’s face woke to a sudden animation.

  “By God! that’s a queer thing. I went to that meadow — the first thing I did after I left New York. There’s a fate in this! . . . I think now I can get on with my story. . . .”

  It was a tale which took long in the telling, and it filled several of the short winter twilights. There were times when the narrative lagged, and times when it came fast and confusedly. Galliard had curious tricks of speech; sometimes elaborate, the product of wide reading, and sometimes halting, amateurish, almost childlike, as if he were dragging his thoughts from a deep well.

  From the village school of Chateau-Gaillard, he said, he had gone to the University of Laval. He was intended for the law, and his first courses were in classics and philosophy. He enjoyed them, and for a little even toyed with the notion of giving his life to those studies and looking for a university post. What switched his thoughts to another line was a slow revolt against the poverty-stricken life at Clairefontaine. He saw his father and brother bowed down with toil, for no purpose except to win a bare living. In the city he had occasional glimpses of comfort and luxury, and of a wide coloured world, and these put him wholly out of temper with his home. He did a good deal of solid thinking. If he succeeded as a lawyer he would exchange the narrow world of a country farm for the narrow world of a provincial city — more ease, certainly, but something far short of his dreams. He must make money, and money could only be made in big business. In Canada his own French people did little in business, having always left that to the English, and in Canada he might have to fight against prejudice. So he determined to go to the country where he believed there was no prejudice, where business was exalted above all callings, and where the only thing required of a man was to be good at his job.

  He left Laval and went to a technical college, where he acquired the rudiments of accounting and a smattering of engineering science. The trouble came when his father discovered the change. The elder Gaillard had something of the seigneur left in him. There was a duty owed to gentle birth. A gentleman might be a farmer who laboured from dawn to dusk in the fields; he could be a priest; he could be a lawyer; but if he touched trade he forfeited his gentility. Moreover, the father hated the very word America. So when the son frankly announced his intention there was a violent family quarrel. Next day he left for Boston and he never saw his father again.

  Galliard scarcely mentioned his early struggles. They had to be taken for granted like infantile ailments. He took up the tale when he had come to New York and had met Felicity Dasent.

  To Leithen’s surprise he spoke of Felicity without emotion. He seemed to be keeping his mind fixed on the need to make his story perfectly clear — an intellectual purpose which must exclude sentiment.

  He had fallen deeply in love with her after a few meetings. To him she represented a new world very different from the tough world of buying and selling in which he had found his feet. It was a world which satisfied all the dreams of his boyhood and youth, a happy, gracious place with, as its centre, the most miraculous of beings. It was still more different from Clairefontaine with its poverty and monotony and back-breaking toil. Felicity seemed far further removed from Clairefontaine than from the grubbiest side of Wall Street. The old petty world of Mass and market was infinitely remote from her gracious and civilised life. It was a profanation to think of the two together. Only the meadow at the head of the stream seemed to harmonise with his thoughts about her.

  Then came their marriage, and Galliard’s entry into society, and his conspicuous social success. After that the trouble began in his soul. . . .

  He was not very clear about its beginnings. He found things in which he had had an acute interest suddenly go stale for him. He found himself in revolt against what he had once joyfully accepted, and when he probed for the reason he discovered, to his surprise, that it was because it clashed with some memory which he thought he had buried. At first he believed that it was only regret for his departing youth. Boyish recollections came back to him gilded by time and distance. But presently he realised that the trouble was not nostalgia for his dead boyhood, but regret for a world which was still living and which he had forsaken. Not exactly regret, either; rather remorse, a sense that he had behaved badly, had been guilty in some sense of a betrayal.

  He fought against the feeling. It was childish, with no basis of reason. He was a rich man, and, if he liked, could have a country house in Quebec, which would offer all the enchantments of his youth without its poverty. . . . But he realised miserably that this was no solution. It was not Quebec that he wanted, but a different world of thought, which was hopelessly antagonistic to that in which he now dwelt. To his consternation he discovered that distaste for his environment was growing fast. What had been the pleasures of his life became its boredoms; high matters of business were only a fuss about trifles; men whom he had once reverenced seemed now trivial and wearisome. A lost world kept crowding in on him; he could not recover it, but he felt that without it there was no peace for him in life. There was only one stable thing, Felicity, who moved in a happy sphere of her own, from which he daily felt more estranged.

  Ridiculous little things tormented him — a tune which reminded him of a French chanson, the smell of a particular tobacco which suggested the coarse stuff grown at Clairefontaine. He dared not go shooting or fishing because of their associations; golf, which belonged wholly to his new world, he came to loathe.

  “It was like a cancer,” he said. “A doctor once told me that cancer was a growth of certain cells at a wild pace — the pace at which a child grows in the womb — a sort of crazy resurgence of youth. It begins by being quite innocent, but soon it starts pressing in on other cells and checking their growth, and the thing becomes pathological. That was what happened to me. The old world came to bulk so big in my life that it choked the rest of me like a cancer in the mind.”

  He had another trouble, the worst of all. He had been brought up a strict Catholic, bu
t since he left home he had let his religion fall from him. He had never been to Mass. Felicity was an Episcopalian who took her creed lightly, and they had been married in a fashionable New York church. Now all the fears and repressions of his youth came back to him. He had forgotten something of desperate importance, his eternal welfare. He had never thought much about religion, but had simply taken it for granted till he began to neglect it, so he had no sceptical apparatus to support him. His conduct had not been the result of enlightenment, but flat treason.

  “I came to realise that I had forgotten God,” he said simply.

  The breaking-point came because of his love for Felicity. The further he moved away from her and her world, the dearer she became. The one thing he was resolved should not happen was a slow decline in their affection. Either he would recover what he had lost and harmonise it with what he had gained, or a clean cut would be made, with no raw edges to fester. . . . So on a spring morning, with a breaking heart, he walked out of Felicity’s life. . . .

  “You have guessed most of this?” he asked.

  “Most of it,” said Leithen. “What I want to know is the sequel. You have been nearly a year looking for your youth. What luck?”

  “None. But you don’t put it quite right, for I was willing enough to grow old decently. What I had to recover was the proper touch with the world which I had grown out of and could no more reject than my own skin. Also I had to make restitution. I had betrayed something ancient and noble, and had to do penance for my sins.”

  “Well?” Leithen had to repeat the question, for words seemed to have failed Galliard.

  “I did both,” he said slowly. “To that extent I succeeded. I got into touch with my people’s life, and I think I have done penance. But I found that more was needed. I belong to the North, and to go on living I had to master the North. . . . But it mastered me.”

  Leithen waited for Galliard to expound this saying, but he waited a long time. The other’s face had darkened, and he seemed to be wrestling with difficult thoughts. At last he asked a question.