Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  III

  Each year from early summer until some date in September we children dwelt in the Borders. It was a complete break, for there seemed no link between the Tweedside hills and either the woods or the beaches of Fife. In those weeks we never gave our home a thought, and with bitter reluctance we returned to it. The Borders were to us a holy land which it would have been sacrilege to try to join on to our common life.

  We lived with our maternal grandparents in an old farmhouse close to the main Edinburgh-Carlisle road, where it descended from benty moorlands to the Tweed valley. My father’s family had been for the most part lawyers in Edinburgh and in the little burgh of Peebles, and owners of a small estate in Midlothian; my mother’s had for generations been sheep-farmers on the confines of three shires — Lanark, Midlothian and Tweeddale. The whole countryside was dotted with our relatives. My grandmother was a formidable old lady, who ruled her household like a grenadier. She had the hawk nose and the bright commanding eye of her kinsman, Mr. Gladstone, and she did not readily suffer the fool. But for us children she had an infinite tolerance. “Never daunton youth,” was her favourite adage; a text often on her lips was “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.”

  The farm stood at the mouth of a shallow glen bounded by high green hills. The stream in the glen joined a “water” flowing from the west, which three miles off entered Tweed. We were therefore at the meeting-place of the plateau of the Scottish midlands and the main range of the southern hills which runs from the Cheviots to Galloway. North and west we looked to inconsiderable uplands and ploughlands; east was an isolated knot of respectable summits; but south, beyond the trench of Tweed, was a sea of broad, blue, heathy mountains, the highest in the Lowlands, rolling to the fastnesses of Ettrick and Moffatdale. We had for our playground both the desert and the sown.

  Of the desert, till I had almost reached my teens, I was conscious only as a background; my business was with the immediate environment — the links of the burn, the fields of old pasture, certain ancient trees which had been standing when the vale was the demesne of a Jacobite laird, a seductive mill- dam lined with yellow flags, a water-meadow full of corncrakes, the confluence of the burn and the “water,” and the progress of the said water by fir-clad knolls and young plantations and brackeny downs to Tweed.

  A child’s imagination needs something small which it can seize and adopt as its very own. The things I remember most vividly from those early days are tiny nooks of meadow, woodland and hill. One was beside the burn, where a half-moon of hill-turf fringed a pool occupied by a big trout. An ancient beech in the background cast its shadow and its nuts over the grass. The place strongly took our fancy, and it was a favourite stage for our make- believe — suitable alike for playing at keeping shop, house or castle, as the bridge of Horatius (the pool being a satisfying end for False Sextus) or as sanctuary for a Jacobite with a price on his head...Another was a hollow in a near-by hill, from which stone had been taken long ago. It was floored with thyme and milkwort, and fringed with crimson bell-heather. It was of course the entrance to King Arthur’s sleeping-place, for Arthur and Merlin were in every legend of the valley, and often of an afternoon we laboured with fluttering hearts to enlarge a fox’s earth, expecting momentarily that the passage would open and the magic horn dangle before our eyes...Still a third was in a fir wood, a mossy den with a long prospect of the valley, where cushats, plovers and curlews kept up a cheerful din, and hunger could be sated by the largest and juiciest of blaeberries.

  As I advanced in years I became less interested in those fanciful nooks than in the hills themselves, where the shepherds lived and wrought. I had my first introduction to an old and happy world. I would be out at dawn to “look the hill,” delighting in the task, especially if the weather were wild. I attended every clipping, where shepherds came from ten miles round to lend a hand. I helped to drive sheep to the local market and sat, heavily responsible, in a corner of the auction-ring. I became learned in the talk of the trade, and no bad judge of sheep stock. Those Border shepherds, the men of the long stride and the clear eye, were a great race — I have never known a greater. The narrower kinds of fanaticism, which have run riot elsewhere in Scotland, rarely affected the Borders. Their people were “grave livers,” in Wordsworth’s phrase, God-fearing, decent in all the relations of life, and supreme masters of their craft. They were a fighting stock because of their ancestry, and of a noble independence. As the source of the greatest ballads in any literature they had fire and imagination, and some aptitude for the graces of life. They lacked the dourness of the conventional Scot, having a quick eye for comedy, and, being in themselves wholly secure, they were aristocrats with the fine manners of an aristocracy. By them I was admitted into the secrets of a whole lost world of pastoral. I acquired a reverence and affection for the “plain people,” who to Walter Scott and Abraham Lincoln were what mattered most in the world. I learned the soft, kindly, idiomatic Border speech. My old friends, by whose side I used to quarter the hills, are long ago at rest in moorland kirkyards, and my salutation goes to them beyond the hills of death. I have never had better friends, and I have striven to acquire some tincture of their philosophy of life, a creed at once mirthful and grave, stalwart and merciful.

  From that countryside an older world had not quite departed. On the green hill-roads drovers still passed with their herds of kyloes, moving from the north to the Border, and so blocking the bridge of Peebles that small boys could not get home from school. Falkirk Tryst still flourished; my youngest uncle used to drive sheep there, sleeping on the road beside his flock. Edie Ochiltree and the blue-gowns had gone, but the tramp might still be a professional man and no wastrel, one who peregrinated the country for seasonal jobs and could fascinate children with outland tales. Old folks had still stories to tell of James Hogg and Walter Scott. There was a great-uncle of ours who lived to be a friend of my own children, and who as a small boy had as his nurse an old woman who had been scared as a little girl by the clans passing in the ‘Forty-five on their march to Derby. And the highroad, which now glistens with tarmac, was a thoroughfare only for sheep and vagrants and an occasional farmer’s gig or baker’s cart. In all its upper stretches, before it crossed the watershed into Annandale, the space between the ruts was shaggy with heather.

  So there were stages in our Border childhood; first the miniature world of nooks and playgrounds; then the middle distance, the adjacent hills and the neighbouring glens; and last, as we grew older and stronger, the high places, adventures and explorations. In the first, I remember, a certain straight mile of highway seemed an interminable thing, and was broken up for me by gates — the White Yett, the Black Yett; in the second, it was no more than a tiresome prologue; in the third, it was scarcely even an episode. From constant scrambling we children became a clan of hardy mountaineers who could ascend a steep face faster than the shepherds. But our staying power was limited, and after a long day we would crawl home very weary. Our zest for the business never flagged, for our horizon had suddenly widened. In Fife beyond the woods there was nothing to explore except flat fields, while what lay across the magical summer sea was in the world of dreams. But in the Borders, just outside our narrow range, lay a great back-country, whose inhabitants we sometimes met and about whose wonders we were abundantly informed. If we could only cross a ridge of hill or push beyond a turning in the road our eyes would behold it.

  There were two main arenas to explore: the Hills and the Road. The first was the tangle of uplands to the south beyond the Tweed valley. We knew that they stretched for fifty miles to the English border. They held in their recesses a hundred places whose names were like music to us — Yarrow and Ettrick and Eskdalemuir; legendary streams like Manor and Talla and Megget and Gameshope; spots famous in history and familiar to us from Sir Walter and the Ballads. But they were all beyond our orbit. Even to come within sight of them meant ascending one of the long tributary glens of Tweed and crossing a form
idable watershed. We could see from our home the summits of their guardian mountains, Scrape and Broad Law and Dollar Law and Cramait Craig. At first it was the desire for trout that led us to the burns on the other side of Tweed. Gradually we passed from the pools at the foot, fringed with birches and rowans, to the upper courses where good fish could be taken in runnels a foot wide. Then came a day when fishing was unprosperous and we boldly climbed the ridge beyond the springs in the hope of surprising a new world. Alas! the Tweedside hills are not a sharp “divide,” and there were hours of weary tramping over bent and bog before we got our prospect. But there were things to draw us on — cloudberries, which only grow on the high tops, and deep peat-haggs which were unknown on our familiar hills Sometimes we were rewarded with a vision, though it meant a desperate journey back. I shall never forget one afternoon when from some ridge — I think it was Dollar Law — I saw a far gleam of silver, and with a beating heart knew that I was looking on St. Mary’s Loch.

  The Road also was an avenue for us into the unknown. It was the Great South Road from the Scottish capital to England. Armies had marched along it; Prince Charlie’s ragged Highlanders had footed it; in my grandparents’ memory coaches had jingled down it, and horns and bugles had woke the echoes in the furthest glens. Far more than the railway, it was for me a link with the outer world. It followed Tweed to its source, past places which captured my fancy — the little hamlet of Tweedsmuir where Talla Water came down from its linns; the old coaching hostelries of the Crook and the Bield; Tweedhopefoot, famous in Covenanting days; Tweedshaws, where the river had its source; and then, beyond the divide, the mysterious green chasm called the Devil’s Beef Tub, and the Annan and the Esk, and enormous half-mythical England. Those upper glens had the general name of the “Muirs,” and a shepherd from “up the water” was to me a potent figure of romance. Many a summer afternoon my feeble legs carried me up the valley, always a little further, till one day I had a glimpse of the steeple of Tweedsmuir kirk.

  It was my furthest effort on foot, achieved when I must have been about twelve years of age. After that a craze for fishing took me in thrall, and I was sixteen and the possessor of a shabby bicycle before I next explored the Road. Now the business was easy. In a few hours I could be at the head of the valley, and look down into the pit of the Beef Tub and south over the blue champaign of Annandale. But a bicycle could be put to a nobler purpose than trundling along a highway, and I used it principally to take me to remote glens where I could fish unfrequented streams. So my frontier shifted from the Road back again to the Hills. It was in them that the true field for exploration lay, and I and my fishing-rod were soon making notable journeys, starting and returning in the small hours.

  Wood, sea and hill were the intimacies of my childhood, and they have never lost their spell for me. But the spell of each was different. The woods and beaches were always foreign places, in which I was at best a sojourner. But the Border hills were my own possession, a countryside in which my roots went deep.

  So strong did I feel my proprietary interest that I projected a history of our glen in the style of Gilbert White’s Selborne, in which every trickle of a burn would have had its chronicle. This attachment to a corner of earth induced a love of nature in general, and from my early affection I have drawn a passion for landscapes in many parts of the globe, landscapes often little akin to the gentle Border hills.

  Most of us have certain childish memories which we can never repeat, since they represent moments when life was in utter harmony and sense and spirit perfectly attuned. Such memories for me are all of Tweedside, and I have welcomed with delight any maturer experience which had a hint of their magic. Three I have always cherished. One was the waking on a hot July morning with a day of moorland wandering before me. Around me were the subtle odours of an old house, somewhere far off the fragrance of coffee, and the smell of new-mown hay drifting through the open window. Through the same window came a multitude of sounds — the clank of the neighbouring smithy, the clucking of hens, sheep fording the burn. From my bed I could see the sky blue as deep-sea water, and against it the bare green top of a hill. Even to-day a fine morning gives me something of the thrill of those summer awakenings.

  Another memory is of a long tramp on a drove-road in the teeth of the wind, with the rain in my face and mist swirling down the glens. I felt that I was contending joyfully with something kindly at heart, something to stir the blood and at the same time instinct with a delicate comfort — the homely smell of sheep, the scent of peat-reek, the glimpse of firelight from a wayside cottage.

  The third was family prayers of a Sabbath evening. It was the custom to return from church through the fields, which lay yellow in the sunset. While our elders cast a half-ashamed sabbatical eye over the crops of meadow hay and the kyloes in the pastures, we children, feeling the bonds of the Sabbath ritual slackening, were hard at work planning enterprises for the morrow. Then in the dusky parlour, with its comforting secular aroma of tobacco, my grandfather read chapters of both Testaments and a lengthy prayer from some forgotten Family Altar. I did not follow one word, for my thoughts were busy with other things. He read in a high liturgical manner, his voice rising and falling in reverent cadences. It seemed to us children a benediction on the enforced leisure of the day and a promise of a new and glorious week of wind and sun.

  All my life I have been haunted — and cheered — by these recollections: the green summit against the unclouded blue above a populous friendly world, the buffets of rain on the moorland road, the drone of my grandfather’s voice in the Sabbath twilight. Each was a summons to action. But there was a fourth which spoke only of peace. This was the coming down from the hills, very hungry and foot-sore, to a whitewashed farm on the brink of the heather, where, in a parlour looking out on a garden of gooseberries and phloxes, with a glimpse beyond of running water, I was stayed with tea and new-baked scones and apple-and-rowan-berry jelly. Then I demanded nothing more of life except to be allowed to go on living in that quiet world of pastoral. The dying shepherd asked not for the conventional Heaven, but for “Bourhope at a reasonable rent,” and, if Paradise be a renewal of what was happy and innocent in our earthly days, mine will be some such golden afternoon within sight and sound of Tweed.

  CHAPTER II — PORTA MUSARUM

  I

  I never went to school in the conventional sense, for a boarding school was beyond the narrow means of my family. But I had many academies. The first was a dame’s school, where I learned to knit, and was expelled for upsetting a broth pot on the kitchen fire. The next was a board school in the same Fife village. Then came the burgh school of the neighbouring town, which meant a daily tramp of six miles. There followed the high school of the same town, a famous institution in which I believe Thomas Carlyle once taught. When we migrated to Glasgow I attended for several years an ancient grammar school on the south side of the river, from which, at the age of seventeen, I passed to Glasgow University.

  Had I gone to a public school I might have developed into a useful wing three-quarter in the rugby game. Otherwise I do not think I missed much. I and my brothers were, I fear, incapable of what is called the public-school spirit. While devotees of the open air we lacked interest in games, and had few of the usual boyish ambitions. We had no wish to run with the pack, for we were absorbed in our private concerns. School to me was therefore only a minor episode. The atmosphere I lived in was always that of my home. I never felt the shyness and repression of the small boy which I have read of in school stories. At my various schools I had my ups and downs, but they mattered little and were forgotten in an hour. My interest in the world at large was not checked by any artificial conventions, and, though I was afraid of many things, I had none of the social fears and resentments of the traditional schoolboy.

  Yet, looking back, I seem to have enjoyed my schools enormously. There I mixed on terms of comradeship and utter equality with children from every kind of queer environment. At my village school my chief frie
nd was the son of a notorious local ne’er-do-well, and the two of us captained a gang of barefooted ragamuffins who waged ceaseless war against the local “gentry,” the sons of well-to-do manufacturers. With one especially, who seemed to us gigantic in height and ferocious in temper, we avoided close combat and engaged him at a distance with bows and arrows. I did not meet my antagonist again until one day in 1916 during the battle of the Somme — he was then a major-general and is now a peer — when I found him of modest stature and exceeding affability.

  My lack of the usual code had one serious drawback. Youthful high spirits had to be worked off somehow, and adventures — often unjustifiable adventures — took the place of games. As a family we were too easily “dared,” as the phrase went, to attempt things dangerous or ridiculous. We were of Walter Bagehot’s opinion that the greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do, and the consequence was that we were an anxiety to our parents, and often, owing to bodily damage, an affliction to ourselves. At my later schools this foolishness abated and I fell more into the normal habits of youth, but even then school played but a small part in my life. It was an incident, an inconsiderable incident; a period of enforced repression which ended daily at four in the afternoon.

  II

  My boyhood must have been one of the idlest on record. Except in the last year of my Glasgow grammar school, I do not think that I ever consciously did any work. I sat far down in my classes, absorbing automatically the rudiments of grammar and mathematics, without conviction and with no shadow of a desire to excel. Now and then I shone, it is true, when I showed a surprising knowledge of things altogether outside the curriculum, for I was always reading, except in the Border holidays. Early in my teens I had read Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and a host of other story-tellers; all Shakespeare; a good deal of history, and many works of travel; essayists like Bacon and Addison, Hazlitt and Lamb, and a vast assortment of poetry, including Milton, Pope, Dante (in a translation), Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. Matthew Arnold I knew almost by heart; Browning I still found too difficult except in patches. My taste was for solemn gnomic verse with a theological flavour; my special favourites were Yesterday, To-day and Forever by a former Bishop of Exeter, and the celebrated Mr. Robert Pollok’s Course of Time; and my earliest poetic effort was not lyrical but epic, the first canto of a poem on Hell.