by John Buchan
‘He is a lawyer; he doesn’t use guns.’
‘Then I’m damned if I touch ye. Two months it is. What’s your fancy for Liverpool?’
This was too much for Manuel. I saw in what seemed to be one movement his hand slip from his pocket, Corbally’s arm swing in a circle, and a plaster bust of Julius Caesar tumble off the top of my bookcase. Then I heard the report.
‘Ye nasty little man,’ said Corbally, as he pressed him to his bosom in a bear’s hug.
‘You are a traitor,’ Manuel shouted. ‘How will we face the others? What will Alejandro say and Alcaza—’
‘I think I can explain,’ said the President pleasantly. ‘They won’t know for quite a time, and then only if you tell them. You two gentlemen are all that remain for the moment of your patriotic company. The other four have been the victims of the English police — two in Bryanston Square, and two in the Park close to the Marble Arch.’
Ye don’t say!’ said Corbally with admiration in his voice. ‘Faith, that’s smart work!’
‘They too will have a little holiday. A few months to meditate on politics, while you and I go to the Grand National.’
Suddenly there was a sharp rat-tat at my door. It was like the knocking in Macbeth for dramatic effect. Corbally had one pistol at my ear in an instant, while a second covered the President.
‘It’s all right,’ said the latter, never moving a muscle. ‘It’s General Valdez, whom I think you know. That was another argument which I was coming to if I hadn’t had the good fortune to appeal to Mr Corbally’s higher nature. I know you have sworn to kill me, but I take it that the killer wants to have a sporting chance of escape. Well, there wouldn’t have been the faintest shadow of a chance here. Valdez is at the door, and the English police are below. You are brave men, I know, but even brave men dislike the cold gallows.’
The knocker fell again. ‘Let him in, Leithen,’ I was told, ‘or he will be damaging your valuable door. He has not the northern phlegm of you and me and Mr Corbally.’
A tall man in an ulster, which looked as if it covered a uniform, stood on the threshold. Some one had obscured the lights on the landing so that the staircase was dark, but I could see in the gloom other figures. ‘President Pelem...’ he began.
‘The President is here,’ I said. ‘Quite well and in great form. He is entertaining two other guests.’
The General marched to my sitting-room. I was behind him and did not see his face, but I can believe that it showed surprise when he recognised the guests. Manuel stood sulkily defiant, his hands in his waterproof pockets, but Corbally’s light eyes were laughing.
‘I think you know each other,’ said the President graciously.
‘My God!’ Valdez seemed to choke at the sight. ‘These swine!... Excellency, I have ‘You have nothing of the kind. These are friends of mine for the next two months, and Mr Corbally and I are going to the Grand National together. Will you have the goodness to conduct them downstairs and explain to the inspector of police below that all has gone well and that I am perfectly satisfied, and that he will hear from me in the morning?... One moment. What about a stirrup-cup? Leithen, does your establishment run to a whisky and soda all round?’ It did. We all had a drink, and I believe I clinked glasses with Manuel.
I looked in at Lady Samplar’s dance as I had meant to. Presently I saw a resplendent figure arrive — the President, with the ribbon of the Gold Star of Bolivar across his chest. He was no more the larky undergraduate, but the responsible statesman, the father of his country. There was a considerable crowd in his vicinity when I got near him, and he was making his apologies to Mollie Nantley. She saw me and insisted on introducing me. ‘I so much wanted you two to meet. I had hoped it would be at my dinner — but anyhow I have managed it.’ I think she was a little surprised when the President took my hand in both of his. ‘I saw Mr Leithen play at Lord’s in’97,’ he said. ‘I was twelfth man for Harrow that year. It is delightful to make his acquaintance; I shall never forget this meeting.’
‘How English he is!’ Mollie whispered to me as we made our way out of the crowd.
They got him next year. They were bound to, for in that kind of business you can have no real protection. But he managed to set his country on its feet before he went down... No, it was neither Manuel nor Corbally. I think it was Alejandro the Scholar.
The Wind in the Portico
Pall Mall Magazine, 1928
A dry wind of the high places... not to fan nor to cleanse, even a full wind from those places shall come unto me.
Jeremiah IV. xi — xii
NIGHTINGALE WAS A hard man to draw. His doings with the Bedawin had become a legend, but he would as soon have talked about them as claimed to have won the war. He was a slim dark fellow about thirty-five years of age, very short-sighted, and wearing such high-powered double glasses that it was impossible to tell the colour of his eyes. This weakness made him stoop a little and peer, so that he was the strangest figure to picture in a burnous leading an army of desert tribesmen. I fancy his power came partly from his oddness, for his followers thought that the hand of Allah had been laid on him, and partly from his quick imagination and his flawless courage. After the war he had gone back to his Cambridge fellowship, declaring that, thank God, that chapter in his life was over.
As I say, he never mentioned the deeds which had made him famous. He knew his own business, and probably realised that to keep his mental balance he had to drop the curtain on what must have been the most nerve-racking four years ever spent by man. We respected his decision and kept off Arabia. It was a remark of Hannay’s that drew from him the following story. Hannay was talking about his Cotswold house, which was on the Fosse Way, and saying that it always puzzled him how so elaborate a civilisation as Roman Britain could have been destroyed utterly and left no mark on the national history beyond a few roads and ruins and place-names. Peckwether, the historian, demurred, and had a good deal to say about how much the Roman tradition was woven into the Saxon culture. ‘Rome only sleeps,’ he said; ‘she never dies.’
Nightingale nodded. ‘Sometimes she dreams in her sleep and talks. Once she scared me out of my senses.’
After a good deal of pressing he produced this story. He was not much of a talker, so he wrote it out and read it to us.
There is a place in Shropshire which I do not propose to visit again. It lies between Ludlow and the hills, in a shallow valley full of woods. Its name is St Sant, a village with a big house and park adjoining, on a stream called the Vaun, about five miles from the little town of Faxeter. They have queer names in those parts, and other things queerer than the names.
I was motoring from Wales to Cambridge at the close of the long vacation. All this happened before the war, when I had just got my fellowship and was settling down to academic work. It was a fine night in early October, with a full moon, and I intended to push on to Ludlow for supper and bed. The time was about half-past eight, the road was empty and good going, and I was trundling pleasantly along when something went wrong with my headlights. It was a small thing, and I stopped to remedy it beyond a village and just at the lodge-gates of a house.
On the opposite side of the road a carrier’s cart had drawn up, and two men, who looked like indoor servants, were lifting some packages from it on to a big barrow. The moon was up, so I didn’t need the feeble light of the carrier’s lamp to see what they were doing. I suppose I wanted to stretch my legs for a moment, for when I had finished my job I strolled over to them. They did not hear me coming, and the carrier on his perch seemed to be asleep.
The packages were the ordinary consignments from some big shop in town. But I noticed that the two men handled them very gingerly, and that, as each was laid in the barrow, they clipped off the shop label and affixed one of their own. The new labels were odd things, large and square, with some address written on them in very black capital letters. There was nothing in that, but the men’s faces puzzled me. For they seemed to do their job in a fever,
longing to get it over and yet in a sweat lest they should make some mistake. Their commonplace task seemed to be for them a matter of tremendous importance. I moved so as to get a view of their faces, and I saw that they were white and strained. The two were of the butler or valet class, both elderly, and I could have sworn that they were labouring under something like fear.
I shuffled my feet to let them know of my presence and remarked that it was a fine night. They started as if they had been robbing a corpse. One of them mumbled something in reply, but the other caught a package which was slipping, and in a tone of violent alarm growled to his mate to be careful. I had a notion that they were handling explosives.
I had no time to waste, so I pushed on. That night, in my room at Ludlow, I had the curiosity to look up my map and identify the place where I had seen the men. The village was St Sant, and it appeared that the gate I had stopped at belonged to a considerable demesne called Vauncastle. That was my first visit.
At that time I was busy on a critical edition of Theocritus, for which I was making a new collation of the manuscripts. There was a variant of the Medicean Codex in England, which nobody had seen since Gaisford, and after a good deal of trouble I found that it was in the library of a man called Dubellay. I wrote to him at his London club, and got a reply to my surprise from Vauncastle Hall, Faxeter. It was an odd letter, for you could see that he longed to tell me to go to the devil, but couldn’t quite reconcile it with his conscience. We exchanged several letters, and the upshot was that he gave me permission to examine his manuscript. He did not ask me to stay, but mentioned that there was a comfortable little inn in St Sant.
My second visit began on the 27th of December, after I had been home for Christmas. We had had a week of severe frost, and then it had thawed a little; but it remained bitterly cold, with leaden skies that threatened snow. I drove from Faxeter, and as we ascended the valley I remember thinking that it was a curiously sad country. The hills were too low to be impressive, and their outlines were mostly blurred with woods; but the tops showed clear, funny little knolls of grey bent that suggested a volcanic origin. It might have been one of those backgrounds you find in Italian primitives, with all the light and colour left out. When I got a glimpse of the Vaun in the bleached meadows it looked like the ‘wan water’ of the Border ballads. The woods, too, had not the friendly bareness of English copses in wintertime. They remained dark and cloudy, as if they were hiding secrets. Before I reached St Sant, I decided that the landscape was not only sad, but ominous.
I was fortunate in my inn. In the single street of one-storied cottages it rose like a lighthouse, with a cheery glow from behind the red curtains of the bar parlour. The inside proved as good as the outside. I found a bedroom with a bright fire, and I dined in a wainscoted room full of preposterous old pictures of lanky hounds and hollow-backed horses. I had been rather depressed on my journey, but my spirits were raised by this comfort, and when the house produced a most respectable bottle of port I had the landlord in to drink a glass. He was an ancient man who had been a gamekeeper, with a much younger wife, who was responsible for the management. I was curious to hear something about the owner of my manuscript, but I got little from the landlord. He had been with the old squire, and had never served the present one. I heard of Dubellays in plenty - the landlord’s master, who had hunted his own hounds for forty years, the Major his brother, who had fallen at Abu Klea; Parson Jack, who had had the living till he died, and of all kinds of collaterals. The ‘Deblays’ had been a high-spirited, open-handed stock, and much liked in the place. But of the present master of the Hall he could or would tell me nothing. The Squire was a ‘great scholard’, but I gathered that he followed no sport and was not a convivial soul like his predecessors. He had spent a mint of money on the house, but not many people went there. He, the landlord, had never been inside the grounds in the new master’s time, though in the old days there had been hunt breakfasts on the lawn for the whole countryside, and mighty tenantry dinners. I went to bed with a clear picture in my mind of the man I was to interview on the morrow. A scholarly and autocratic recluse, who collected treasures and beautified his dwelling and probably lived in his library. I rather looked forward to meeting him, for the bonhomous sporting squire was not much in my line.
After breakfast next morning I made my way to the Hall. It was the same leaden weather, and when I entered the gates the air seemed to grow bitterer and the skies darker. The place was muffled in great trees which even in their winter bareness made a pall about it. There was a long avenue of ancient sycamores, through which one caught only rare glimpses of the frozen park. I took my bearings, and realised that I was walking nearly due south, and was gradually descending.
The house must be in a hollow. Presently the trees thinned, I passed through an iron gate, came out on a big untended lawn, untidily studded with laurels and rhododendrons, and there before me was the house front.
I had expected something beautiful — an old Tudor or Queen Anne façade or a dignified Georgian portico. I was disappointed, for the front was simply mean. It was low and irregular, more like the back parts of a house, and I guessed that at some time or another the building had been turned round, and the old kitchen door made the chief entrance. I was confirmed in my conclusion by observing that the roofs rose in tiers, like one of those recessed New York skyscrapers, so that the present back parts of the building were of an impressive height.
The oddity of the place interested me, and still more its dilapidation. What on earth could the owner have spent his money on? Everything - lawn, flower-beds, paths - was neglected. There was a new stone doorway, but the walls badly needed pointing, the window woodwork had not been painted for ages, and there were several broken panes. The bell did not ring, so I was reduced to hammering on the knocker, and it must have been ten minutes before the door opened. A pale butler, one of the men I had seen at the carrier’s cart the October before, stood blinking in the entrance.
He led me in without question, when I gave my name, so I was evidently expected. The hall was my second surprise. What had become of my picture of the collector? The place was small and poky, and furnished as barely as the lobby of a farmhouse. The only thing I approved was its warmth. Unlike most English country houses there seemed to be excellent heating arrangements.
I was taken into a little dark room with one window that looked out on a shrubbery, while the man went to fetch his master. My chief feeling was of gratitude that I had not been asked to stay, for the inn was paradise compared with this sepulchre. I was examining the prints on the wall, when I heard my name spoken and turned round to greet Mr Dubellay.
He was my third surprise. I had made a portrait in my mind of a fastidious old scholar, with eye-glasses on a black chord, and a finical weltkind-ish manner. Instead I found a man still in early middle age, a heavy fellow dressed in the roughest country tweeds. He was as untidy as his demesne, for he had not shaved that morning, his flannel collar was badly frayed, and his fingernails would have been the better for a scrubbing brush. His face was hard to describe. It was high-coloured, but the colour was not healthy; it was friendly, but it was also wary; above all, it was unquiet. He gave me the impression of a man whose nerves were all wrong, and who was perpetually on his guard.
He said a few civil words, and thrust a badly tied brown paper parcel at me.
‘That’s your manuscript,’ he said jauntily.
I was staggered. I had expected to be permitted to collate the codex in his library, and in the last few minutes had realised that the prospect was distasteful. But here was this casual owner offering me the priceless thing to take away.
I stammered my thanks, and added that it was very good of him to trust a stranger with such a treasure.
‘Only as far as the inn,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t like to send it by post. But there’s no harm in your working at it at the inn. There should be confidence among scholars.’ And he gave an odd cackle of a laugh.
‘I grea
tly prefer your plan,’ I said. ‘But I thought you would insist on my working at it here.’
‘No, indeed,’ he said earnestly. ‘I shouldn’t think of such a thing... Wouldn’t do at all... An insult to our freemasonry... That’s how I should regard it.’
We had a few minutes’ further talk. I learned that he had inherited under the entail from a cousin, and had been just over ten years at Vauncastle. Before that he had been a London solicitor. He asked me a question or two about Cambridge — wished he had been at the University — much hampered in his work by a defective education. I was a Greek scholar? — Latin, too, he presumed. Wonderful people the Romans... He spoke quite freely, but all the time his queer restless eyes were darting about, and I had a strong impression that he would have liked to say something to me very different from these commonplaces - that he was longing to broach some subject but was held back by shyness or fear. He had such an odd appraising way of looking at me.
I left without his having asked me to a meal, for which I was not sorry, for I did not like the atmosphere of the place. I took a short cut over the ragged lawn, and turned at the top of the slope to look back. The house was in reality a huge pile, and I saw that I had been right and that the main building was all at the back. Was it, I wondered, like the Alhambra, which behind a front like a factory concealed a treasure-house? I saw, too, that the woodland hollow was more spacious than I had fancied. The house, as at present arranged, faced due north, and behind the south front was an open space in which I guessed that a lake might lie. Far beyond I could see in the December dimness the lift of high dark hills.
That evening the snow came in earnest, and fell continuously for the better part of two days. I banked up the fire in my bedroom and spent a happy time with the codex. I had brought only my working boots with me and the inn boasted no library, so when I wanted to relax I went down to the tap-room, or gossiped with the landlady in the bar parlour. The yokels who congregated in the former were pleasant fellows, but, like all the folk on the Marches, they did not talk readily to a stranger and I heard little from them of the Hall. The old squire had reared every year three thousand pheasants, but the present squire would not allow a gun to be fired on his land and there were only a few wild birds left. For the same reason the woods were thick with vermin. This they told me when I professed an interest in shooting. But of Mr Dubellay they would not speak, declaring that they never saw him. I daresay they gossiped wildly about him, and their public reticence struck me as having in it a touch of fear.
