Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  Another day, and a bright one to the external world, again opens on us, the air soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves glittering. They cannot refresh her to whom mild weather was a natural enjoyment. Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid away among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No, no. She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere — somehow; where, we cannot tell; how, we cannot tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world for all that this world can give me....

  I have been to her room: there was no voice in it, no stirring; the pressure of the coffin was visible on the bed, but it had been removed elsewhere; all was neat as she loved it, but all was calm — calm as death. I remembered the last sight of her; she raised herself in bed and tried to turn her eyes after me, and said, with a sort of smile, “You all have such melancholy faces.” They were the last words I ever heard her utter, and I hurried away, for she did not seem quite conscious of what she said. When I returned, immediately before departure, she was in a deep sleep. It is deeper now. This was but seven days since.

  They are arranging the chamber of death; that which was long the apartment of connubial happiness, and of whose arrangements (better than in richer houses) she was so proud. They are treading fast and thick. For weeks you could have heard a footfall. Oh, my God!

  [The “stalk of carle-hemp”]

  These are the secular laments for the dead, but they were confided only to the Journal. Scott exerted himself to comfort his sons, who had arrived from Ireland and Oxford, and to tend the drooping Anne, and for the rest he turned to his work. His wife’s death had made his material losses shrink to their proper proportions, and he could face the world again, to use his own metaphor, like the Bass Rock, and not like the waves that broke on it. The “stalk of carle-hemp” was firm in him, and he choked down all unavailing regrets. “The melancholy hours of yesterday must not return. To encourage that dreamy state of incapacity is to resign all authority over the mind, and I have been wont to say—’My mind to me a kingdom is.’ I am rightful monarch; and, God to aid, I will not be dethroned by any rebellious passion that may rear its standard against me.”

  But it was to be a lonely kingdom.

  CHAPTER XI. — SERVITUDE (1826-1831)

  I

  [Woodstock]

  All of Woodstock was written in a time of anxiety, and much of it after the blow had fallen, in Scott’s first desperate effort to begin the work of restitution. Yet the book bears no mark of this sad preoccupation. A certain tenderness in the picture of the old cavalier squire whose world has been upturned, some traits of the dutiful daughter, may reflect his own case, and the opening words of the last chapter seem to be a cry wrung from the heart—”Years rush by us like the wind. We see not whence the eddy comes, nor whitherward it is tending, and we seem ourselves to witness their flight without a sense that we are changed; and yet Time is beguiling man of his strength, as the winds rob the woods of their foliage.” But for the rest the book is amazingly light-hearted, and the narrative, hammered out with a perplexed mind, is notably compact. Woodstock ranks high among the novels for the architecture of its plot; we know that Scott several times came to a standstill in writing it, and saw no solution for the puzzle he had invented, but the brownies who worked at the back of his head were kind to him. A great successor paid him the compliment of borrowing most of his machinery, for James III in Esmond is Charles, and Beatrix is Alice Lee, and Lockwood is Joceline, and Frank Castlewood is Albert Lee, and Colonel Esmond is Markham Everard. Nassau Senior’s criticism, that Scott errs in making his chief figures personages of the first historical importance, is not really relevant, for Cromwell and Charles II are introduced in incidents outside the main march of their familiar history. Scott was fortunate too in the setting of his tale. There is something in the wide woodlands and the soft muffled hills of the Oxford country which appeals strongly to the Borderer, as the present writer can bear witness, and he has caught its secret magic. Also in the background he had what he loved, a great, old, ruinous house. Woodstock is almost the best written of the novels, and — apart from the circumstances of its composition, which make it an astonishing achievement — it has the charm of a wise and mellow philosophy. If it is not to be ranked with the greatest, that is only because it rarely touches the deeper springs of life.

  The book is a swift succession of dramatic episodes. It opens brilliantly, with Trusty Tompkins’ discourse from the pulpit of Woodstock church — no man could make a better sermon than Scott in any vein. The scenes when Cromwell at Windsor looks on the Vandyke portrait of the dead king, when Everard and Charles face each other with drawn blades, when Cromwell’s heavy foot is heard on the stair of Everard’s lodging, when Wildrake’s sword breaks on the Lord Protector’s hidden armour, when Tompkins dies at the hands of Joceline, when Albert Lee outfaces Cromwell with the text “Had Zimri peace who slew his master?” — all are in a high key of romantic drama. In the comedy vein I need only cite the rabbling of the Parliament commissioners by the Woodstock ghost, and the fight between the tipsy Wildrake and the parson Rochecliffe. And behind them, as always with Scott, is a background of sagely conceived history. The figures are no puppets drawn from fancy but true products of their times, historically as well as dramatically significant. To take one instance — nothing could be better than the sketch of the elements which made up Cromwell’s following; Desborough the middle-class adventurer; Bletson the superstitious agnostic—”The devils, we are assured, believe and tremble; but on earth there are many who, in worse plight than even the natural children of perdition, tremble without believing, and fear even while they blaspheme”; Harrison, who looked forward to commanding a reserve of pikes at Armageddon; and, among the commonalty, Pearson the ex-pirate, Corporal Humgudgeon, and the merciful Zerubbabel Robins. How acute, too, is the exposition of the politics of the moderates, like Everard, who accepted Cromwell as the only alternative to anarchy.

  There is no slackness of drawing in the characters. Sir Henry Lee is a familiar figure, but not the less vivid on that account, Alice Lee is fantastic only to such as disbelieve in the courage of the pure in heart, and Markham Everard is saved from priggishness by his occasional fits of bad temper and his loyalty to Wildrake. Trusty Tompkins is a subtle portrait of a type of rogue common enough at the time, and in Holdenough Scott has drawn the honest, pragmatic English Presbyterian with truth and kindliness. Charles is one of his royal successes, infinitely to be preferred to the stock figure of Peveril. As for Cromwell, if he is not altogether the real man, he is nearer historical truth than any picture of him before Carlyle’s. Scott recognized the strange elements in his nature, his mysticism, his power of self-deception; and in his communings with Pearson and his final magnanimity, showed that he understood also the greatness of that lonely spirit. But to my mind the best of the characters is Roger Wildrake, “gentleman, of Squattlesea Mere, in the moist county of Lincoln.” He is the rakehelly cavalier of all time, bibulous, blasphemous, heroic, and endearing. Wherever he turns his bleared eye the narrative marches and the dialogue briskens. Take this as a specimen, when he is striving to shape his mouth to the Puritan speech: —

  “Are there any more news from Worcester fight?” asked Everard, in a tone so serious that it imposed on his companion, who replied in his genuine character —

  “Worse! d — n me, worse an hundred times than reported — totally broken. Noll hath certainly sold himself to the devil, and his lease will have an end one day — –that is all our present comfort.”

  “What! and would this be your answer to the first red-coat who asked the question?” said Everard. “Methinks you would find a speedy passport to the next corps de garde.”

  “Nay, nay,” answered Wildrake, “I thought you asked me in your own person
. Lack-a-day! a great mercy — a glorifying mercy — a crowning mercy — a vouchsafing — –an uplifting — I profess the malignants are scattered from Dan to Beersheba — smitten, hip and thigh, even until the going down of the sun.”

  “Heard you aught of Colonel Thornhaugh’s wounds?”

  “He is dead,” answered Wildrake; “that’s one comfort — the roundheaded rascal! Nay hold! it was but a trip of the tongue — I meant the sweet godly youth.”

  “And hear you aught of the young man, King of Scotland, as they call him?” said Everard.

  “Nothing, but that he is hunted like a partridge on the mountains. May God deliver him and confound his enemies! Zoons, Mark Everard, I can fool it no longer.”

  II

  [In Edinburgh lodgings]

  The summer in Mrs Brown’s lodging-house was a comfortless business, though his old butler Dalgleish insisted on attending him and looking after his needs. These were modest enough — a ploughman’s dinner of broth and boiled beef, relieved by little luxuries like a bit of Gruyère cheese, which he would buy for himself on his way home. June and July were very hot, and outside the gutters stank and drunken chairmen quarrelled. Scott slept badly, and was haunted by dreams of his dead wife; but neither the discomfort of his environment nor his bodily frailty was allowed to interfere with his work. In former days his evenings had been given up to his family and friends or to light reading in an armchair, but now he seemed to grudge every minute not spent at his desk. Imaginative writing, which had once been done “at large leisure in noble mornings,” was now the weary task of the small hours. His only exercise was his daily walk to the Parliament House, and his return through Princes Street Gardens, for which he had a private key, and the only break which he permitted himself in his task seems to have been occasional meetings with old friends and acts of charity. Yet the toil was not the martyrdom it sounds. He loved the act of composition, and in the midst of his labours wrote copiously in his Journal; and he had the satisfaction of seeing his pile of work mounting steadily and of knowing that every page meant a lessening of his burden.

  In the middle of July he went gladly to Abbotsford, a little surprised at the eagerness with which he faced again that house of sad memories. “Nature has given me a kind of buoyancy, I know not what to call it, that mingled even with my deepest afflictions and most gloomy hours. I have a secret pride — I fancy it will be so most truly termed, which impels me to mix with my distresses strange fragments of mirth, which have no mirth in them.” A visit from Walter and Jane cheered him, and the whole family made a pilgrimage to Drumlanrig. He found healthy exercise in thinning his plantations, though the work soon tired him. “One sure thing is, that all wise men will soon contrive to lay aside inclination when performance grows toilsome. I have hobbled over many a rough heugh in my day — no wonder if I must sing at last —

  Thus says the auld man to the aik tree

  Sair failed, hinny, since I kenn’d thee.”

  And he could still get entertainment from the foppery of the world. Sir John Sinclair, who ranked with Lord Buchan as the most preposterous of living Scotsmen — Scott’s name for him was the “Cavaliero Jackasso” wrote to him proposing to arrange a marriage with the widowed Duchess of Roxburgh, though Lady Scott was scarcely four months in her grave.

  [London and Paris]

  In the late autumn he found it necessary to go to London and Paris, in the interests of his Napoleon, so, when he had assured himself that he was in no danger of arrest from his English creditors, he set out with Anne on October 12th. They visited the Morritts at Rokeby, and Scott was delighted with the unchangingness of old England; “one race of red-nosed innkeepers are gone, and their widows, eldest sons and head-waiters exercise hospitality in their room with the same bustle and importance.” In London he saw many of his friends, gave sittings to painters and sculptors, pulled various political strings on behalf of Lockhart and Charles, and — a proof of the diversity of his interests — breakfasted one day with George IV at the royal cottage in Windsor Park, and supped next night on oysters and broiled bones with Terry above the Adelphi theatre.

  On October 26th he set out for France. Calais stirred unavailing regrets:—”Lost, as all know, by the bloody papist bitch (one must be vernacular when on French ground) Queen Mary, of red-hot memory. I would rather she had burned a score more of bishops.” His fame had not declined in Paris. The fish-wives from the Halles presented him with a bouquet like a maypole; at the Odéon he saw the opera based on Ivanhoe, and found it strange to hear the words, which he had dictated to Laidlaw in the agony of his cramp, recited in a foreign tongue; at the Tuileries Charles X, as he passed into chapel, stopped to say “a few civil words,” a civility which Scott was to repay when that monarch was again in exile in Holyrood. He had talks with Marshal Macdonald, and Marmont, and Fitz-James, the great-grandson of James II. But Paris was too full of ghosts. At the British Embassy he remembered Castlereagh and departed glories. “I have seen in these rooms the Emperor Alexander, Platoff, Schwarzenberg, old Blücher, Fouché, and many a marechal whose truncheon had guided armies — all now at peace, without subjects, without dominion, and where their past life, perhaps, seems but the recollection of a feverish dream.”

  He was back in London on November 10th, and Anne and he spent a busy fortnight. He arranged for Charles’s nomination to the Foreign Office, saw much of Samuel Rogers, Theodore Hook and Allan Cunningham, met for the first time Fanny Burney, had long conversations with the Duke of Wellington anent his Napoleon, and was entertained by Croker and Peel at ministerial banquets. On his way north he breakfasted with Charles at Brasenose and found to his grief that the beauties of Oxford had lost their charm for him, and that he thought more about luncheon and the excellent ale of University College. “Remembering the ecstatic feelings with which I visited Oxford more than twenty-five years since, I was surprised at the comparative indifference with which I revisited the same scenes. Reginald Heber, then composing his Prize Poem, and imping his wings for a long flight of honourable distinction, is now dead in a foreign land — Hodgson and other able men all entombed. The towers and halls remain, but the voices which fill them are of modern days. Besides, the eye becomes satiated with sights, as the full soul loathes the honeycomb.”

  Edinburgh was reached on November 27th. He had secured better lodgings in a house in Walker Street, and he sat himself down to a winter of unremitting toil. The weather was bleak, and he found his fingers cramped with chilblains, he suffered grievously from rheumatism and bile, and camomile poultices alternated with pen and ink. He had no one to look after him but old Dalgleish, and he remembered sadly how he had once enjoyed little illnesses when his wife was there to nurse him. The note of mortality in the Journal becomes more clamant. “There is some new subject of complaint every moment; your sicknesses come thicker and thicker; your comforting or sympathizing friends fewer and fewer; for why should they sorrow for the course of nature? ... The best is, the long halt will arrive at last and cure all.” He realized the shortness of the time permitted him and the steady ebbing of his strength.

  O Lord, what are we — lords of nature? Why, a tile drops from a housetop, which an elephant would not feel more than the fall of a sheet of pasteboard, and there lies his lordship. Or something of inconceivably minute origin, the pressure of a bone, or the inflammation of a particle of the brain takes place, and the emblem of the Deity destroys himself or someone else. We hold our health and our reason on terms slighter than one would desire were it in their choice to hold an Irish cabin.

  During the Christmas holiday at Abbotsford he struggled with pain and overwork, and December closed with sombre thoughts.

  It must be allowed that the regular recurrence of annual festivals among the same individuals has, as life advances, something in it that is melancholy. We meet on such occasions like the survivors of some perilous expedition, wounded and weakened ourselves, and looking through the diminished ranks of those who remain, while we think of th
ose who are no more. Or they are like the feasts of the Caribs, in which they held that the pale and speechless phantoms of the deceased appeared and mingled with the living.

  [The Theatrical Fund dinner]

  The year 1827 brought improved health and spirits. For one thing he began to sleep better, and he got a chamois-leather knee-cap which eased his rheumatism. He resumed dining out in moderation, and on February 23rd took the chair at the celebrated Theatrical Fund dinner, where he first publicly admitted the authorship of the Waverley Novels. This had long been an open secret, and the formation of the Trust, which revealed all his dealings with Constable, had finally established it. But, since this was his first public dinner since his disaster, Lord Meadowbank, who was to propose his health, wished to make a definite announcement. Scott agreed, only bidding him not say much about so old a story. Meadowbank’s speech was received with wild applause, and Scott replied gracefully, admitting the charge, and adding “The wand is now broken and the book buried.” The affair made a great sensation, but Scott seems to have considered it of little importance.

  Meantime he was toiling prodigiously at Napoleon and the first Chronicles of the Canongate for his creditors, and at magazine articles to earn a little pocket-money for himself. He was now living on his small private income and his official salaries. He had got James Hogg’s nephew Robert as an amanuensis, and on a day when he was free from Court would dictate from six in the morning till six in the evening, breakfast and luncheon being served to him as he worked. Politics had begun to interest him again, for in January Lord Liverpool had resigned, and in April Canning, after breaking with Peel and Wellington, became Prime Minister. Scott’s sympathies were on the whole with Canning, though he differed reluctantly from his idol the Duke.