by John Buchan
‘“What’s she like?” I asked.
‘“Oh, a most remarkable figure. Very beautiful, but uncanny. She has long fair hair down to her knees.”
‘Of course I laughed. “You’re mixing her up with the Valkyries,” I said. “Lord, it would be an awkward business if you met that she-dragon in the flesh.”
‘But he was quite solemn about it, and declared that his waking picture of her was not in the least like his dreams. He rather agreed with my nonsense about the old Schloss. He thought that she was probably some penniless grandee, living solitary in a moated grange, with nothing now to exercise her marvellous brain on, and eating her heart out with regret and shame. He drew so attractive a character of her that I began to think that Channell was in love with a being of his own creation, till he ended with, “But all the same she’s utterly damnable. She must be, you know.”
‘After a fortnight I began to feel a different man. Dr Christoph thought that he had got on the track of the mischief, and certainly, with his deep massage and a few simple drugs, I had more internal comfort than I had known for three years. He was so pleased with my progress that he refused to treat me as an invalid. He encouraged me to take long walks into the hills, and presently he arranged for me to go out roebuck-shooting with some of the local junkers.
‘I used to start before daybreak on the chilly November mornings and drive to the top of one of the ridges, where I would meet a collection of sportsmen and beaters, shepherded by a fellow in a green uniform. We lined out along the ridge, and the beaters, assisted by a marvellous collection of dogs, including the sporting dachshund, drove the roe towards us. It wasn’t very cleverly managed, for the deer generally broke back, and it was chilly waiting in the first hours with a powdering of snow on the ground and the fir boughs heavy with frost crystals. But later, when the sun grew stronger, it was a very pleasant mode of spending a day. There was not much of a bag, but whenever a roe or a capercailzie fell all the guns would assemble and drink little glasses of Kirschwasser. I had been lent a rifle, one of those appalling contraptions which are double-barrelled shot-guns and rifles in one, and to transpose from one form to the other requires a mathematical calculation. The rifle had a hair trigger too, and when I first used it I was nearly the death of a respectable Saxon peasant.
‘We all ate our midday meal together and in the evening, before going home, we had coffee and cakes in one or other of the farms. The party was an odd mixture, big farmers and small squires, an hotelkeeper or two, a local doctor, and a couple of lawyers from the town. At first they were a little shy of me, but presently they thawed, and after the first day we were good friends. They spoke quite frankly about the war, in which every one of them had had a share, and with a great deal of dignity and good sense.
‘I learned to walk in Sikkim, and the little Saxon hills seemed to me inconsiderable. But they were too much for most of the guns, and instead of going straight up or down a slope they always chose a circuit, which gave them an easy gradient. One evening, when we were separating as usual, the beaters taking a short cut and the guns a circuit, I felt that I wanted exercise, so I raced the beaters downhill, beat them soundly, and had the better part of an hour to wait for my companions, before we adjourned to the farm for refreshment. The beaters must have talked about my pace, for as we walked away one of the guns, a lawyer called Meissen, asked me why I was visiting Rosensee at a time of year when few foreigners came. I said I was staying with Dr Christoph.
‘“Is he then a private friend of yours?” he asked.
‘I told him No, that I had come to his Kurhaus for treatment, being sick. His eyes expressed polite scepticism. He was not prepared to regard as an invalid a man who went down a hill like an avalanche.
‘But, as we walked in the frosty dusk, he was led to speak of Dr Christoph, of whom he had no personal knowledge, and I learned how little honour a prophet may have in his own country. Rosensee scarcely knew him, except as a doctor who had an inexplicable attraction for foreign patients. Meissen was curious about his methods and the exact diseases in which he specialised. “Perhaps he may yet save me a journey to Homburg?” he laughed. “It is well to have a skilled physician at one’s doorstep. The doctor is something of a hermit, and except for his patients does not appear to welcome his kind. Yet he is a good man, beyond doubt, and there are those who say that in the war he was a hero.”
‘This surprised me, for I could not imagine Dr Christoph in any fighting capacity, apart from the fact that he must have been too old. I thought that Meissen might refer to work in the base hospitals. But he was positive; Dr Christoph had been in the trenches; the limping leg was a war wound.
‘I had had very little talk with the doctor, owing to my case being free from nervous complications. He would say a word to me morning and evening about my diet, and pass the time of day when we met, but it was not till the very eve of my departure that we had anything like a real conversation. He sent a message that he wanted to see me for not less than one hour, and he arrived with a batch of notes from which he delivered a kind of lecture on my case. Then I realised what an immense amount of care and solid thought he had expended on me. He had decided that his diagnosis was right — my rapid improvement suggested that — but it was necessary for some time to observe a simple regime, and to keep an eye on certain symptoms. So he took a sheet of notepaper from the table and in his small precise hand wrote down for me a few plain commandments.
‘There was something about him, the honest eyes, the mouth which looked as if it had been often compressed in suffering, the air of grave goodwill, which I found curiously attractive. I wished that I had been a mental case like Channell, and had had more of his society. I detained him in talk, and he seemed not unwilling. By and by we drifted to the war and it turned out that Meissen was right.
‘Dr Christoph had gone as medical officer in November’14 to the Ypres Salient with a Saxon regiment, and had spent the winter there. In’15 he had been in Champagne, and in the early months of’16 at Verdun, till he was invalided with rheumatic fever. That is to say, he had had about seventeen months of consecutive fighting in the worst areas with scarcely a holiday. A pretty good record for a frail little middle-aged man!
‘His family was then at Stuttgart, his wife and one little boy. He took a long time to recover from the fever, and after that was put on home duty. “Till the war was almost over,” he said, “almost over, but not quite. There was just time for me to go back to the front and get my foolish leg hurt.” I must tell you that whenever he mentioned his war experience it was with a comical deprecating smile, as if he agreed with anyone who might think that gravity like this should have remained in bed.
‘I assumed that this home duty was medical, until he said something about getting rusty in his professional work. Then it appeared that it had been some job connected with Intelligence. “I am reputed to have a little talent for mathematics,” he said. “No. I am no mathematical scholar, but, if you understand me, I have a certain mathematical aptitude. My mind has always moved happily among numbers. Therefore I was set to construct and to interpret cyphers, a strange interlude in the noise of war. I sat in a little room and excluded the world, and for a little I was happy.”
‘He went on to speak of the enclave of peace in which he had found himself, and as I listened to his gentle monotonous voice, I had a sudden inspiration.
‘I took a sheet of notepaper from the stand, scribbled the word Reinmar on it, and shoved it towards him. I had a notion, you see, that I might surprise him into helping Channell’s researches.
‘But it was I who got the big surprise. He stopped thunder-struck, as soon as his eye caught the word, blushed scarlet over every inch of face and bald forehead, seemed to have difficulty in swallowing, and then gasped. “How did you know?”
‘I hadn’t known, and now that I did, the knowledge left me speechless. This was the loathly opposite for which Channell and I had nursed our hatred. When I came out of my stupefaction I foun
d that he had recovered his balance and was speaking slowly and distinctly, as if he were making a formal confession.
‘“You were among my opponents... that interests me deeply... I often wondered... You beat me in the end. You are aware of that?” ‘I nodded. “Only because you made a slip,” I said.
‘“Yes, I made a slip. I was to blame — very gravely to blame, for I let my private grief cloud my mind.”
‘He seemed to hesitate, as if he were loath to stir something very tragic in his memory.
‘“I think I will tell you,” he said at last. “I have often wished — it is a childish wish — to justify my failure to those who profited by it. My chiefs understood, of course, but my opponents could not. In that month when I failed I was in deep sorrow. I had a little son — his name was Reinmar — you remember that I took that name for my code signature?”
‘His eyes were looking beyond me into some vision of the past.
‘“He was, as you say, my mascot. He was all my family, and I adored him. But in those days food was not plentiful. We were no worse off than many million Germans, but the child was frail. In the last summer of the war he developed phthisis due to malnutrition, and in September he died. Then I failed my country, for with him some virtue seemed to depart from my mind. You see, my work was, so to speak, his also, as my name was his, and when he left me he took my power with him... So I stumbled. The rest is known to you.”
‘He sat staring beyond me, so small and lonely, that I could have howled. I remember putting my hand on his shoulder, and stammering some platitude about being sorry. We sat quite still for a minute or two, and then I remembered Channell. Channell must have poured his views of Reinmar into Dr Christoph’s ear. I asked him if Channell knew.
‘A flicker of a smile crossed his face.
‘“Indeed no. And I will exact from you a promise never to breathe to him what I have told you. He is my patient, and I must first consider his case. At present he thinks that Reinmar is a wicked and beautiful lady whom he may some day meet. That is romance, and it is good for him to think so... If he were told the truth, he would be pitiful, and in Herr Channell’s condition it is important that he should not be vexed with such emotions as pity.”’
Tendebant Manus
Pall Mall Magazine, 1927
Send not on your soul before
To dive from that beguiling shore,
And let not yet the swimmer leave
His clothes upon the sands of eve.
A.E. HOUSMAN
ONE NIGHT WE were discussing Souldern, who had died a week before and whose memorial service had been held that morning in St Margaret’s. He had come on amazingly in Parliament, one of those sudden rises which were common in the immediate post-war years, when the older reputations were being questioned and the younger men were too busy making a livelihood to have time for hobbies. His speeches, his membership of a commission where he had shown both originality and courage, and his reputed refusal, on very honourable grounds, of a place in the Cabinet, had given him in the popular mind a flavour of mystery and distinction. The papers had devoted a good deal of space to him, and there was a general feeling that his death — the result of a motor smash — was a bigger loss to the country than his actual achievement warranted.
‘I never met him,’ Palliser-Yates said. ‘But I was at school with his minor. You remember Reggie Souldern, Charles? An uncommon good fellow — makings of a fine soldier, too — disappeared with most of his battalion in March’18, and was never heard of again. Body committed to the pleasant land of France but exact spot unknown - rather like a burial at sea.’
‘I knew George Souldern well enough,’ said Lamancha, whom he addressed. ‘I sat in the House with him for two years before the war. That is to say, I knew as much of him as anybody did, but there was very little you could lay hold of. He used to be a fussy, ineffective chap, very fertile in ideas which he never thought out, and always starting hares that he wouldn’t hunt. But just lately he seems to have had a call, and he looked as if he might have a career. Rotten luck that a sharp corner and a lout of a motor-cyclist should have put an end to it.’
He turned to his neighbour. ‘Wasn’t he a relation of yours, Sir Arthur?’
The man addressed was the oldest member of the Club and by far the most distinguished. Sir Arthur Warcliff had been a figure of note when most of us were in our cradles. He began life in the Sappers, and before he was thirty had been in command of a troublesome little Somaliland expedition; then he had governed a variety of places with such success that he was seriously spoken of for India. In the war he would have liked to have returned back to soldiering, but they used him as the Cabinet handy-man, and he had all the worst diplomatic and administrative jobs to tackle. You see, he was a master of detail and had to translate the generalities of policy into action. He had never, as the jargon goes, got his personality over the footlights, so he was only a name to the public - but a tremendous name, of which every party spoke respectfully. He had retired now, and lived alone with his motherless boy. Usually, for all his sixty-five years, he seemed a contemporary, for he was curiously young at heart, but every now and then we looked at his wise, worn face, realised what he had been and was, and sat at his feet.
‘Yes,’ he said in reply to Lamancha. ‘George Souldern was my wife’s cousin, and I knew him well for the last twenty years. Since the war I knew him better, and in the past eighteen months I was, I think, his only intimate friend.’
‘Was he a really big man?’ Sandy Arbuthnot asked. ‘I don’t take much stock in his profession — but I thought — just for a moment — in that Irish row - that I got a glimpse of something rather out of the ordinary.’
‘He had first-class brains.’
Sandy laughed. ‘That doesn’t get you very far,’ he said. The phrase ‘first-class brains’ had acquired at the time a flavour of comedy.
‘No. It doesn’t. If you had asked me the question six years ago I should have said that George was a brilliant failure. Immensely clever in his way, really well educated — which very few of us are — laborious as a beaver, but futile. The hare that is always being passed by every kind of tortoise. He had everything in his favour, but nothing ever came out as he wanted it. I only knew him after he came down from Oxford, but I believe that at the University he was a nonpareil.’
‘I was up with him,’ said Peckwether, the historian. ‘Oh, yes, he was a big enough figure there. He was head of Winchester, and senior scholar of Balliol, and took two Firsts and several University prizes in his stride. He must have sat up all night, for he never appeared to work — you see, it was his pose to do things easily — a variety of the Grand Manner. He was a most disquieting undergraduate. In his political speeches he had the air of having just left a Cabinet meeting.”Was he popular?’ someone asked.
‘Not a bit,’ said Peckwether. ‘And for all his successes we didn’t believe in him. He was too worldly-wise — what we used to call ‘banausic’ — too bent on getting on. We felt that he had all his goods in the shop window, and that there was no margin to him.’
Sir Arthur smiled. ‘A young man’s contemporaries are pretty shrewd judges. When I met him first I felt the same thing. He wasn’t a prig, and he had a sense of humour, and he had plenty of ordinary decent feeling. But he was the kind of man who could never forget himself and throw his cap over the moon. One couldn’t warm to him... But, unlike you, I thought he would succeed. The one thing lacking was money, and within two years he had remedied that. He married a rich wife; the lady died, but the fortune remained. I believe it was an honest love match, and for a long time he was heart-broken, and when he recovered he buried himself in work. You would have said that something was bound to happen. Young, rich, healthy, incredibly industrious, able, presentable — you would have said that any constituency would have welcomed him, that his party would have jumped at him, that he would have been a prodigious success.
‘But he wasn’t. He made a bad candidate, and ha
d to stand three times before he got into the House. And there he made no kind of impression, though he spoke conscientiously and always on matters he knew about. He wrote a book on the meaning of colonial nationalism — fluent, well expressed, sensible, even in parts eloquent, but somehow it wasn’t read. He was always making speeches at public dinners and at the annual meetings of different kinds of associations, but it didn’t seem to signify what he said, and he was scarcely reported. There was no conspiracy of silence to keep him down, for people rather liked him. He simply seemed to have no clear boundary lines and to be imperfectly detached from the surrounding atmosphere. I could never understand why.’
‘Lack of personality,’ said Lamancha. ‘I remember, feeling that.’
‘Yes, but what is personality? He had the things that make it — brains and purpose. One liked him — was impressed by his attainments, but, if you understand me, one wasn’t impressed by the man... It wasn’t ordinary lack of confidence, for on occasion he could be aggressive. It was the lack of a continuity of confidence — in himself and in other things. He didn’t believe enough. That was why, as you said, he was always starting hares that he wouldn’t hunt. Some excellent and unanswerable reason would occur to him why he should slack off. He was what I believe you call a good party man and always voted orthodoxly, but, after four years in the House, instead of being a leader he was rapidly becoming a mere cog in the machine. He didn’t seem to be able to make himself count.
‘That was his position eight years ago, and it was not far from a tragedy. He was as able as any man in the Cabinet, but he lacked the daemonic force which even stupid people sometimes possess. I can only describe him in paradoxes. He was at once conceited and shy, inordinately ambitious and miserably conscious that he never got the value of his abilities out of life... Then came the war.’
