Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  Brown stared. ‘My dear man, they are not trippers. They are going to do the traverse of the Coolins — Sgurr-nan Gillean to Garsbheinn. They will breakfast at Glenbrittle about nine o’clock.’

  ‘Now, look here, Brown,’ said Smith, ‘what is the good of talking rot to me? That traverse has never been done in the longest summer’s day, and in a winter night it is unthinkable—’

  He stopped, for it seemed to him that everything about his present position was unthinkable. How had he come there, what had happened to the Sligachan Inn, what above all things had happened to Brown, who used to be a tubby little man tired out by a day’s grouse shooting? Had he, Smith, gone to sleep like Rip Van Winkle and awakened in a new century? The odd thing was that he felt no alarm, only an insatiable curiosity. He wanted to cross-examine Brown, but he did not know how to begin, for his ignorance would seem to the other to call for an explanation he was unable to give.

  You have been away from mountaineering for some years,’ said Brown politely. ‘I don’t wonder that it all seems odd to you.’

  ‘I wish you’d explain things a bit,’ said Smith. ‘What do people do nowadays? As you say, I have been out of the world for some time. About Chamonix, for instance?’

  ‘Ah, there you touch upon a sore subject. There has been a great row, but happily it is now settled. There are railways, of course, up Mont Blanc and the Verte and the Grandes Jorasses, but these we did not mind. But last year they proposed to put electric lifts on the Aiguilles, and then we had to draw the line. There are five expresidents of the Alpine Club in the Cabinet, including the Foreign Secretary, so we brought pressure to bear on France, and after a little fuss she climbed down. There is not much good climbing left at Chamonix, but the Aiguilles still make a pleasant day.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Smith. ‘A pleasant day!’

  ‘Oh, yes. One of the most popular scrambles in Europe is to start from the Montanvert and run over the Charmoz, Grèpon, Blaitière, Plan, and Midi. The best time is nine and a half hours.’

  ‘That,’ said Smith excitedly, ‘is an infernal lie.’

  Brown coloured. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said stiffly. ‘Do you doubt my word?’

  Smith saw that he had made a mistake. ‘Forgive me, old man, but it seems so strange to me. I am sorry for being rude, but I feel exactly like some kind of Rip Van Winkle awakening to a more strenuous world. What about Zermatt?’

  ‘Alas,’ said Brown, restored to good temper, ‘that is a sad tale. No mountaineer goes there now except for exercise. The Dent Blanche still offers interesting snow work for beginners. But the other peaks are festooned with railways, and the Matterhorn, as you have probably heard, is covered in.’

  ‘Covered in,’ said Smith in amazement. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Oh, you go to the Schwarzsee or the Zmutt, and you find a door where you take a ticket — 10 francs it costs. Then you are conducted by housemaids up carpeted stairs heated by electricity. At every third landing or so there is a restaurant where you can lunch, and there are balconies for the view. In the end you come to a little glass cupola, and you raise a skylight and climb out on the top. Or if you like you can do the whole thing in a lift. The summit is a sort of German beer-garden.’

  ‘Then where do people climb nowadays — serious climbers, I mean?’ asked Smith with a doleful sinking of heart.

  ‘Mainly in the Himalaya and the Karakoram. Everest and the other great peaks are a little hackneyed, but there are still a good many summits unclimbed. There are one or two places also in the Kuen-lun and the Bolivian Andes where I am told you have a chance of first ascents. Ruwenzori, too, has a good reputation because of the difficulty of equatorial snow.’

  ‘And what about Scotland?’ said Smith, looking sadly around the room, filled for him with so many memories of wearied and contented evenings.

  ‘Scotland is still fairly good, given the right kind of weather, but the Coolins are almost the only hills which are worth doing. You see all the other places like Coire Mhic Fhearchair and Ben Nevis and the Sutherland hills are a little too much scrambled about on. But some of us combined and had the Coolins made a climbing reserve, and we don’t allow fancy railways on the peaks. Of course they are useless in summer, only fit for tourists and artists and people out of training. But given a really good snow-storm or a pitch-dark night, and you may get some very fair scrambling. I had quite a hard time last Christmas Eve in a blizzard doing the traverse of the range. We nearly got hung up at the Alasdair-Dubh Gap. The best thing here, I think, is the Waterpipe Gully, when there is a real torrent coming down it, provided you keep to the gully all the time, and don’t go out on the face. You’re half drowned before you finish, but it’s excellent fun.’

  Smith, having no comment to make adequate to his surprise, disregarded Brown’s disapproval and lit his pipe.

  ‘Have some Talisker,’ he said hospitably to his companion.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Brown in consternation. ‘What are you saying? The thing’s forbidden as a beverage, and there’s a tremendous penalty on its sale. Unless you’re ill, and have a doctor’s certificate, you can’t get it... You were asking about Ben Nevis. The last time I was there was when my battalion of the Scottish Mountain Rifles went into camp on the top in December. We had some good practice with ice-axes among the gullies.’

  ‘What in the name of wonder are the Scottish Mountain Rifles?’ asked Smith, and then he repented of his question, fearing that Brown might think him a maniac and tell him no more. But Brown seemed to have a love for explaining what to him must have been the obvious, and continued without a sign of surprise.

  ‘In old days they were called the Scottish Horse. But when motors displaced horses in war it was thought best to utilise the advantage Scotland offered, and turn them into a mountain corps. About the same time the deer-forests were made national manœuvre grounds, so they had every chance in training. They are a very fit lot of men, and all of them can climb rocks with heavy baggage, and handle an ice-axe. The officers are ex-officio members of the Alpine Club. I should like to have shown you the way the sergeants took their men up the Ben Nevis buttresses.’

  A question had long been hovering on Smith’s lips. ‘But what started all this colossal revolution?’ he asked.

  Brown stared. ‘This is schoolboy history with a vengeance. Every one knows that it began years ago when the Labour Party first came into power, and introduced geist into our national life. The first Haldane Ministry nationalised the great landed estates, introduced conscription, made the phonetic spelling of Gaelic names compulsory, and united the Empire. After that, of course, it was a short step to physical training and the reform of diet and the reconstruction of the individual life. Now, thank Heaven, we are on the road to national health — some way off it yet, but still on the road.’

  ‘What the devil do you mean by geist?’ asked Smith testily, darkly suspicious of something which stood between him and his Talisker.

  ‘Reason,’ said Brown, ‘reason - science - intelligence - all the things that used to be at a discount in politics, and are now the only things that matter. We have got rid of feudalism and clericalism and prejudice on the one hand, and doctrinairedom on the other.’

  ‘And has all the world got geist like you?’

  Brown laughed. ‘Oh no! We have it in the Empire - at least the rudiments of it. The other peoples, except Japan, refused it, and have suffered accordingly. To-day we divide the world between us. Japan has China and the American continent. Europe is a collection of small republics under our suzerainty, all except France, which we have neutralised, and keep as an independent centre of art and culture.’

  ‘Give me some dates,’ said Smith plaintively; ‘my memory is so bad nowadays.’

  ‘You seem to have become very stupid, old man,’ said Brown. ‘It’s all due to that infamous tobacco of yours. I oughtn’t to have to instruct you in these rudiments. The beginning was in 1911, the date of the first Haldane Ministry. In 1915
we fought the Triple Alliance. In 1916 Japan conquered and annexed the United States, and in 1920 there was the famous Conference of Ecclefechan between the Mikado and our Emperor. In 1921 the last Liberal died, and was preserved in the British Museum. In 1923—’

  But at this moment Smith unfortunately chose to knock the ashes out of his pipe. As a Gladstonian of the old school, Brown’s last remark had annoyed him greatly, and he was about to declare that the new régime, for all its mountaineering pride, was one from which beer and skittles, not to mention tobacco and Talisker, were deplorably absent. But the sound of his pipe-bowl, hammered against the mantelpiece, seemed to echo and reverberate with uncanny persistence...

  And then he suddenly awoke to the fact that he was not in the Sligachan smoking-room, but in his bedroom at Chamonix, and that the boots was beating at his door, and striving in broken English to tell him that it was two o’clock in the morning.

  Smith got up in a daze and struggled into his clothes. As a sign of his preoccupation he told me that he was half-way to the Blaitière chalet before it occurred to him to notice the state of the weather.

  The Company of the Marjolaine

  Blackwood’s Magazine, 1909

  Qu’est-c’ qui passe ici si tard,

  Compagnons de la Marjolaine?

  Chansons de France

  This extract from the unpublished papers of the Manorwater family has seemed to the Editor worth printing for its historical interest. The famous Lady Molly Carteron became Countess of Manorwater by her second marriage. She was a wit and a friend of wits, and her nephew, the Honourable Charles Hervey-Townshend (afterwards our Ambassador at The Hague), addressed to her a series of amusing letters while making, after the fashion of his contemporaries, the Grand Tour of Europe. Three letters, written at various places in the Eastern Alps and dispatched from Venice, contain the following short narrative. (JB)

  I

  ...I CAME DOWN from the mountains and into the pleasing valley of the Adige in as pelting a heat as ever mortal suffered under. The way underfoot was parched and white; I had newly come out of a wilderness of white limestone crags, and a sun of Italy blazed blindingly in an azure Italian sky. You are to suppose, my dear Aunt, that I had had enough and something more of my craze for foot-marching. A fortnight ago I had gone to Belluno in a post-chaise, dismissed my fellow to carry my baggage by way of Verona, and with no more than a valise on my back plunged into the fastnesses of those mountains. I had a fancy to see the little sculptured hills which made backgrounds for Gianbellin, and there were rumours of great mountains built wholly of marble which shone like the battlements of the Celestial City. So at any rate reported young Mr Wyndham, who had travelled with me from Milan to Venice. I lay the first night at Piave, where Titian had the fortune to be born, and the landlord at the inn displayed a set of villainous daubs which he swore were the early works of that master. Thence up a toilsome valley I journeyed to the Ampezzan country, where indeed I saw my white mountains, but, alas! no longer Celestial. For it rained like Westmoreland for five endless days, while I kicked my heels in an inn and turned a canto of Ariosto into halting English couplets. By and by it cleared, and I headed westward towards Bozen, among the tangle of wild rocks where the Dwarf King had once his rose garden. The first night I had no inn, but slept in the vile cabin of a forester, who spoke a tongue half Latin, half Dutch, which I could not master. The next day was a blaze of heat, the mountain paths lay thick with dust, and I had no wine from sunrise to sunset. Can you wonder that, when the following noon I saw Santa Chiara sleeping in its green circlet of meadows, my thought was only of a deep draught and a cool chamber? I protest that I am a great lover of natural beauty, of rock and cascade, and all the properties of the poet; but the enthusiasm of M. Rousseau himself would sink from the stars to earth if he had marched since breakfast in a cloud of dust with a throat like the nether millstone.

  Yet I had not entered the place before Romance revived. The little town — a mere wayside halting-place on the great mountain road to the North — had the air of mystery which foretells adventure. Why is it that a dwelling or a countenance catches the fancy with the promise of some strange destiny? I have houses in my mind which I know will some day and somehow be intertwined oddly with my life; and I have faces in memory of which I know nothing save that I shall undoubtedly cast my eyes again upon them. My first glimpses of Sant Chiara gave me this earnest of romance. It was walled and fortified, the streets were narrow pits of shade, old tenements with bent fronts swayed to meet each other. Melons lay drying on flat roofs, and yet now and then would come a high-pitched northern gable. Latin and Teuton met and mingled in the place, and, as Mr Gibbon has taught us, the offspring of this admixture is something fantastic and unpredictable. I forgot my grievous thirst and my tired feet in admiration and a certain vague expectation of wonders. Here, ran my thought, it is fated, maybe, that Romance and I shall at last compass a meeting. Perchance some princess is in need of my arm, or some affair of high policy is afoot in this jumble of old masonry. You will laugh at my folly, but I had an excuse for it. A fortnight in strange mountains disposes a man to look for something at his next encounter with his kind, and the sight of Sant Chiara would have fired the imagination of a judge in Chancery.

  I strode happily into the courtyard of the Tre Croci, and presently had my expectation confirmed. For I found my fellow, Gianbattista — a faithful rogue I got in Rome on a Cardinal’s recommendation — hot in pursuit with a lady’s maid. The woman was old, harsh-featured — no Italian clearly, though she spoke fluently in the tongue. She rated my man like a pick-pocket, and the dispute was over a room.

  ‘The signor will bear me out,’ said Gianbattista. ‘Was not I sent to Verona with his baggage, and thence to this place of ill manners? Was I not bidden engage for him a suite of apartments? Did I not duly choose these fronting on the gallery, and dispose therein the signor’s baggage? And lo! an hour ago I found it all turned into the yard and this woman installed in its place. It is monstrous, unbearable! Is this an inn for travellers, or haply the private mansion of these Magnificences?’

  ‘My servant speaks truly,’ I said, firmly yet with courtesy, having had no mind to spoil adventure by urging rights. ‘He had orders to take these rooms for me, and I know not what higher power can countermand me.’

  The woman had been staring at me scornfully, for no doubt in my dusty habit I was a figure of small count; but at the sound of my voice she started, and cried out, You are English, signor?’

  I bowed an admission.

  ‘Then my mistress shall speak with you,’ she said, and dived into the inn like an elderly rabbit.

  Gianbattista was for sending for the landlord and making a riot in that hostelry; but I stayed him, and bidding him fetch me a flask of white wine, three lemons, and a glass of eau de vie, I sat down peaceably at one of the little tables in the courtyard and prepared for the quenching of my thirst. Presently, as I sat drinking that excellent compound which was my own invention, my shoulder was touched, and I turned to find the maid and her mistress. Alas for my hopes of a glorious being, young and lissom and bright with the warm riches of the south! She had plump red cheeks, and fair hair dressed indifferently in the Roman fashion. Two candid blue eyes redeemed her plainness, and a certain grave and gentle dignity. She was notably a gentlewoman, so I got up, doffed my hat, and awaited her commands.

  She spoke in Italian. ‘Your pardon, signor, but I fear my good Cristine has done you unwittingly a wrong.’

  Cristine snorted at this premature plea of guilty, while I hastened to assure the fair apologist that any rooms I might have taken were freely at her service.

  I spoke unconsciously in English, and she replied in a halting parody of that tongue. ‘I understand him,’ she said, ‘but I do not speak him happily. I will discourse, if the signor pleases, in our first speech.’ She and her father, it appeared, had come over the Brenner, and arrived that morning at the Tre Croci, where they purposed to lie for some day
s. He was an old man, very feeble, and much depending upon her constant care. Wherefore it was necessary that the rooms of all the party should adjoin, and there was no suite of the size in the inn save that which I had taken. Would I therefore consent to forgo my right, and place her under an eternal debt?

  I agreed most readily, being at all times careless where I sleep, so the bed be clean, or where I eat, so the meal be good. I bade my servant see the landlord and have my belongings carried to other rooms. Madame thanked me sweetly, and would have gone, when a thought detained her.

  ‘It is but courteous,’ she said, ‘that you should know the names of those whom you have befriended. My father is called the Count d’Albani, and I am his only daughter. We travel to Florence, where we have a villa in the environs.’

  ‘My name,’ said I, ‘is Hervey-Townshend, an Englishman travelling abroad for his entertainment.’

  ‘Hervey?’ she repeated. ‘Are you one of the family of Miladi Hervey?’

  ‘My worthy aunt,’ I replied, with a tender recollection of that preposterous woman.

  Madame turned to Cristine, and spoke rapidly in a whisper.

  ‘My father, sir,’ she said, addressing me, ‘is an old frail man, little used to the company of strangers; but in former days he has had kindness from members of your house, and it would be a satisfaction to him, I think, to have the privilege of your acquaintance.’

  She spoke with the air of a vizier who promises a traveller a sight of the Grand Turk. I murmured my gratitude, and hastened after Gianbattista. In an hour I had bathed, rid myself of my beard, and arrayed myself in decent clothing. Then I strolled out to inspect the little city, admired an altar-piece, chaffered with a Jew for a cameo, purchased some small necessaries, and returned early in the afternoon with a noble appetite for dinner.