Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  His own case was first in his mind. All his life he had been mixed up in great affairs. He had had his share in “moulding a state’s decrees” and “shaping the whisper of a throne.” He had left England when Europe was a powder magazine and every patriot was bound to put himself at the disposal of his distracted land. Well, he had cast all that behind him — rightly, for he had to fight his own grim battle. In that battle he seemed to have won a truce, perhaps even a victory, and now he was being asked to stake all his winnings on a trivial cause — the malaise of human kites and crows roosting at the end of the earth.

  It may have been partly due to the return of his malady, but suddenly a great nausea filled his mind. He had been facing death with a certain courage because an effort was demanded of him, something which could stir the imagination and steel the heart. But now he was back among trivialities. It was not a surrender to the celestial will that was required of him, but a decision on small mundane questions — how to return a batch of lunatics to sanity, what risks a convalescent might safely run? He felt a loathing for the world, a loathing for himself, so when Lew sat himself down beside him he found sick eyes and an ungracious face.

  “We’ve got to leave,” Lew said. “We’re too high up here for the winter hunting, and it’ll be worse when the big snows come in February. We should be getting down to the bird country and the moose country. I reckon we must take the Hares’ camp on our road to see about our stuff. There’s a lot of tea and coffee left cached in the priest’s cellar.”

  Leithen turned a cold eye on him.

  “You want to help the Hares?” he said.

  “Why, yes. Johnny and me thought we might give the poor devils a hand. We could do a bit of hunting for them. We know the way to more than one moose ravage, and a few meals of fresh deer meat may put a little life into them.”

  “That sounds a big job. Am I fit to travel?”

  “Sure you’re fit to travel! We’ve got the huskies and we’ll go canny. It’s cold, but you’ll be as snug in a hole in the snow as in this camp. When you’re in good timber and know the way of it you can be mighty comfortable though it’s fifty under. Man! it’s what’s wanted to set you up. By the time the thaw-out comes you’ll be the toughest of the bunch.”

  “But what can I do? Hunt? I haven’t the strength for it, and I would only be an encumbrance.”

  “You’ll hunt right enough.”

  Lew’s frosty eyes had a smile in their corners. He had clearly expected argument, perhaps contradiction, but Leithen had no impulse to argue. He was too weary in body and sick in soul.

  It was different when Galliard came to him. Here was a man who had nothing to suggest, one who was himself puzzled. Confined for months to a small company, Leithen had become quick to detect changes of temper in his companions. Johnny never varied, but he could read Lew’s mutations like a book. Now he saw something novel in Galliard, or rather an intensifying of what he had already observed. This man was afraid, more than afraid; there was something like panic in his face when he allowed it to relax from restraint. This tale of the Hares’ madness had moved him strongly — not apparently to pity, but to fear, personal fear. It was another proof of the North’s malignity and power.

  He was clinging to Leithen through fear, clinging like a drowning man to a log. Leithen could bring the forces of a different world to fight the dominance of that old world which had mastered him. He wanted to be reassured about Leithen, to know that this refuge could be trusted. So he asked him a plain question.

  “Who are you? I know your name. You know my friends. But I know nothing more about you . . . except that you came out here to die — and may live.”

  The appeal in Galliard’s voice was so sincere that his question had no tinge of brusqueness. It switched Leithen’s mind back to a forgotten world which had no longer any meaning. To reply was like recalling a dream.

  “Yes, you are entitled to ask me that,” he said. “Perhaps I should have been more candid with you. . . . My name is Edward Leithen — Sir Edward Leithen — they knighted me long ago. I was a lawyer — with a great practice. I was also for many years a Member of Parliament. I was for a time the British Attorney-General. I was in the British Cabinet, too — the one before the present.”

  Galliard repeated the name with mystified eyes which seemed straining after a recollection.

  “Sir Edward Leithen! Of course I have heard of you. Many people have spoken of you. You were for my wife’s uncle in the Continental Nickel case. You had a big reputation in the States. . . . You are a bachelor?”

  “I have no wife or any near relations.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know. But I was once what I suppose you would call a sportsman. I used to have a kind of reputation as a mountaineer. I was never sick or sorry until this present disease got hold of me — except for a little damage in the War.”

  Galliard nodded. “You told me you were in the War. As what?”

  “I was chief staff officer of a rather famous British division.”

  Galliard looked at him steadily and in his face there was something like hope.

  “You have done a lot. You are a big man. To think of you roosting with us in this desert! — two half-breeds, two Indians, and a broken man like me. By God! Sir Edward, you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to get well, for I’m sunk without you.”

  He seized the other’s right hand and held it in both his own. Leithen felt that if he had been a woman he would have kissed it.

  7

  Galliard’s emotion gave the finishing touch to Leithen’s depression. He ate no supper and fell early asleep, only to waken in the small hours when the fire was at its lowest and the cold was like the clutch of a dead hand. He managed to get a little warmth by burying his head in the flap of his sleeping-bag. Drowsiness had fled from him, and his brain was racing like a flywheel.

  He had lost all his philosophy. The return of pain and discomfort after an apparent convalescence had played havoc with his stoicism. Miserably, penitently, he recalled the moods he had gone through since he had entered the North. At first there had been sullen, hopeless fortitude, a grim waiting upon death. There had been a sense of his littleness and the omnipotence of God, and a resignation like Job’s to the divine purpose. And then there had come a nobler mood, when he had been conscious not only of the greatness but of the mercy of God, and had realised the vein of tenderness in the hard rock of fate. He had responded again to life, and after that response his body seemed to have laboured to reach the sanity of his mind. His health had miraculously improved. . . . And now he had lost all the ground he had made, and was down in the dust again.

  His obsession was the fear that he would not recover and — at the heart of everything — lay the fear of that fear. He knew that it meant that his whole journey to the North had failed of its true purpose, and that he might as well be dying among the pillows and comforts of home. The thought stung him so sharply that he shut his mind to it and fixed his attention resolutely on the immediate prospect.

  Lew and Johnny wanted to go to the Hares’ assistance. Lew said that in any case they must be getting down country. Once there they must hunt both for the Hares’ sake and for their own. Lew had said that he, Leithen, would be able to hunt — arrant folly, for a few days of it in his present state would kill him.

  Had he been a mere subaltern in the party he would have accepted this programme as inevitable. But he knew that whatever Lew might plan it would be for him to approve, and ultimately to carry out. The Frizels were old professionals at the business, and yet it would be he, the novice, who would have to direct it. His weakness made him strongly averse to any exertion of mind and body, especially of mind. He might endure physical torment like a Spartan, but he shrank with horror from any necessity to think and scheme. Let the Frizels carry him with them wherever they liked, inert and passive, until the time came when they could shovel his body into the earth.

  But then there was Galliard. He w
as the real problem. It was to find him and save him that he had started out. He had found him, but he had yet to save him. . . . Now there seemed to be a way of salvation. The man was suffering from an ancient fear and there could be no escape except by facing that fear and beating it. This miserable business of the Hares had provided an opportunity. Here was a chance to meet one of the North’s most deadly weapons, the madness with which it could affect the human mind, and by checking that madness defeat the North. He had seen this motive confusedly in Galliard’s eyes.

  He could not desert a man who belonged to his own world, and who mattered much to that world, a man, too, who had flung himself on his mercy. But to succeed in Galliard’s business would involve more than hunting docilely in Lew’s company with Lew to nurse him.

  As he fell asleep to the sound of one of the Hares making up the morning fire he had the queer fancy that the Sick Heart River was dogging them. It had come out of its chasm and was flowing in their tracks, always mastering their course and their thoughts. Waters of Death! — or Waters of Healing?

  8

  They broke camp on a morning which, as Johnny declared in disgust, might have been April. In the night the wind had backed to the south-west and the air was moist and heavy, though piercingly cold. It was the usual thaw which, in early February, precedes the coming of the big snows.

  The sledges were loaded with the baggage and the dogs harnessed. Johnny and one of the Hares were in charge of them, while Lew went ahead to break the trail. All of the men except Leithen had back-packs. He carried only a slung rifle, for Lew had vetoed his wish to take a share of the burden. The hut was tidied up, all rubbish was burnt, and, according to the good custom of the North, a frozen haunch of caribou and a pile of cut firewood were left behind for any belated wanderer.

  Leithen looked back at the place which for weeks had been his home with a sentimental regret of which he was half-ashamed. There he had had a promise of returning health and some hours of what was almost ease. Now that promise seemed to have faded away. The mental perturbation of the last days had played the devil with his precarious strength. His breath was troubling him again, and his legs had a horrid propensity to buckle under him.

  The first part of the road was uphill, out of the woods into the scattered spruces, and then to the knuckle of barrens which was the immediate height of land, and from which he had first had a view of the great mountain country where the Sick Heart flowed. That ascent of perhaps three miles was a heavy task for him. Lew mercifully set a slow pace, but every now and then the dogs would quicken and the rest of the party had to follow suit. Leithen found that after the first half-mile his feet were no longer part of his body, his moccasins clogged with the damp snow, and at each step he seemed to be dragging part of the hillside after him. His thighs, too, numbed, and he had a sickening ache in his back. He managed to struggle beyond the tree line into the barrens and then collapsed in a drift.

  Galliard picked him up and set him on the end of one of the sledges. He promptly got off and again fell on his face. A whistle from Galliard brought Lew back and a glance showed the latter where the trouble lay.

  “You got to ride,” he told Leithen. “The dogs ain’t too heavy loaded, and the ground’s easy. If you don’t you’ll be a mighty sick man, and there’s no camp for a sick man until we get over the divide into the big timber.”

  Leithen obeyed, and finished the rest of the ascent in a miserable half-doze, his arms slung through the baggage couplings to keep him from falling off. But at the divide, where a halt was called and tea made, he woke to find his body more comfortable. He was able to swallow some food, and when they started again he insisted on walking with Galliard. They were now descending, and Galliard’s arm linked with his steadied his shambling footsteps.

  “You’re getting well,” Galliard told him.

  “I’m feeling like death!”

  “All the same you’re getting well. A month ago you couldn’t have made that first mile. You are feeling worse than you did last week, but you’ve forgotten how much worse you were a month ago. You remember young Ravelston, the doctor man? I once heard him say that Nature’s line of recovery was always wavy and up and down, and that if a man got steadily better without any relapse there was trouble waiting for him.”

  Leithen felt himself preposterously cheered by Galliard’s words. They were now descending into the nest of shallow parallel glens which ultimately led to Lone Tree Lake. They followed the trail which Johnny had lately taken, and though it required to be broken afresh owing to recent snow, it was sufficiently well marked to make easy travelling. Before the light faded in the afternoon it was possible for Leithen and Galliard to lag well behind the sledges without any risk of losing themselves. The descent was never steep, and the worst Leithen had to face were occasional slopes of mushy snow where the foot-holds were bad. He had a stick to help him, and Galliard’s right arm. There was no view, for the clouds hung low on the wooded ridges, and streamers of mist choked the aisles of the trees. Exertion had for Leithen taken the sting out of the cold, and his senses were alive again. There were no smells, only the bleak odour of sodden snow, but the woods had come out of their winter silence. The hillside was noisy with running water and the drip of thawing spruces.

  Galliard had the in-toed walk which centuries ago his race learned from the Indians. He moved lightly and surely in difficult places where the other slipped and stumbled, and he could talk with no need to save his breath.

  “You left England a month or two after I left New York. What was the situation in Europe in the summer? It was bad enough in the spring.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about Europe then,” Leithen answered. “You see, I did not see how it could greatly concern me. I didn’t give much attention to the press. But my impression is that things were pretty bad.”

  “And in the United States?”

  “There I think they took an even graver view. They did not talk about it, for they thought I would not live to see it. But again my impression is that they were looking for the worst. I heard Bronson Jane say something to Lethaby about zero hour being expected in September.”

  “Then Europe may have been at war for months. Perhaps the whole world. At this moment Canadian troops may be on the seas. American, too, maybe. And up here, on the same continent, we don’t know one thing about it. You and I have dropped pretty completely out of the world, Sir Edward.”

  “Supposing there is war,” he went on. “Some time or other Lew and Johnny will get the news. They won’t say much, but just make a bee-line for the nearest end of steel, same as they did in ‘14. They won’t worry what the war is about. There’s a scrap, and Britain is in it, and, being what they are, they’re bound to be in it too. It must be a wonderful thing to have an undivided mind.”

  He glanced curiously at his companion. “You have that mind,” he said. “You’ve got a hard patch to hoe, but you’ve no doubts about it.”

  “If I live I shall have doubts in plenty,” was the answer. “But you — you seem to fit into this life pretty well. You go hunting with Lew as if you were bred to it. You’re as healthy as a hound. You have a body that can defy the elements. What on earth is there for you to fear? Look at me. I’d be an extra-special crock in a hospital for the sick and aged. You stride like a free man and I totter along like a sick camel. The cold invigorates you and it paralyses me. You face up to the brutishness of Nature, and I shrink and cower and creep under cover. You can defy the North, but my only defiance is that the infernal thing can’t prevent my escape by death.”

  “You are wrong,” said Galliard solemnly. “You have already beaten the North — you have never been in danger — because you know in your heart that you do not give a cent for it. I am beaten because it has closed in on me above and below, and I cannot draw breath without its permission. You say I stride like a free man. I tell you that whatever my legs do my heart crawls along on sufferance. I look at those hills and I am terrified at what may lie behind them.
I look at the sky and think what horrid cruelty it is planning — freezing out the little weak sprouts of life. You would say that the air here is as pure as mid-ocean, but I tell you that it sickens me as if it came from a charnel house. . . . That’s the right word. It’s a waft of death. I feel death all around me. Not swift, clean annihilation, but death with torture and horror in it. I am in a world full of spectres, and they are worse than the Wendigo ghoul that the Montagnais Indians used to believe in at home. They said that you knew it was coming by the smell of corruption in the air. And I tell you I feel that corruption — here — now.”

  Galliard’s square, weather-beaten face was puckered like an old woman’s. He had given Leithen his arm to support him, and now he pressed the other’s elbow to his side as if the contact was his one security.

  9

  That night when Leithen stumbled into camp he found that even in the comfortless thaw Lew had achieved comfort. The camp was made in an open place away from the dripping trees. The big hollow which the men had dug with their snow-shoes was floored with several layers of spruce branches, and on a bare patch in the centre a great fire was blazing. The small tent had been set up for Leithen, but since there was no fall the others were sufficiently dry and warm on the fir boughs.

  Movement and change had revived him and though his legs and back ached he was not too much exhausted by the day’s journey. Also he found to his surprise that his appetite had come back. Lew had managed to knock down a couple of grouse, and Leithen with relish picked the bones of one of them. All soon went to sleep except Johnny, who was busy mending one of his snow-shoes by the light of the fire.