Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  It will be for the historian of the future to expound the work he did in the world. In this brief note I am concerned only with the personality of the man, a personality greater perhaps than any of his achievements, a personality which was in itself an achievement. His simplicity, honesty, and warm human sympathy made themselves felt not only in the Empire, but throughout the globe, so that millions who owed him no allegiance seemed to know and love him. For he was a pillar of all that was stable and honourable and of good report in a distracted world. In the United States he was never, in conversation or in the Press, called the “king of England,” but the “king”; for them there was only one King; the Throne of Britain long ago lost their allegiance, but not their hearts. The same was true of almost every nation. It is to the credit of mankind that it responds to what is best in itself, when that best — which rarely happens — is so pinnacled that none can miss it. He feared God and loved and served his people, and, through them, all peoples. In Carlyle’s phrase about Scott, no sounder piece of manhood was fashioned in our generation, for he had in him both warmth and light.

  “Blest are those

  Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled.”

  CHAPTER X — FIRST AND LAST THINGS

  I

  To anyone whose imagination has been caught by ancient Rome one picture must keep recurring. It is the living-room of a country house — farm or villa — in which, among objects of domestic use, a space was reserved for the images of the dead. I do not mean the grandiose lararium of the rich, but the modest household where there was no room to segregate the family busts. I picture those wax memorials, often rude and discoloured, lit by the glow of the hearth-fire when the storm howled without, catching the sun on a bright morning, and drawing the wondering eyes of the children when an elder spoke of the past and jerked a thumb upwards towards some ancestor. In such a life the dead remained in a real sense within the family circle. Piety was nourished not by the memory only but by the eye.

  So among these chapters it may be permitted to allot one to the pictures which, as we grow older, acquire a sharper outline than the contemporary scene — those family recollections which are the first, and also, I think, the last, things in a man’s memory. As one ages, the memory seems to be inverted and recent events to grow dim in the same proportion as ancient happenings become clear. To-day, for instance, I am a little hazy about the Great War but very clear about the South African campaign. And I seem to live more intimately with those who died long ago than with men and women whom I see every day. Lockhart’s lines are less a precept for conduct than the recognition of a fact in human psychology:

  “Be constant to the dead,

  The dead cannot deceive.”

  My father died in his early sixties when I was in my thirty-seventh year. His strong physique was worn out by unceasing toil in a slum parish, an endless round of sermons and addresses, and visits at all hours to the sick and sorrowful. He had retired to his native Tweeddale, where he had a brief leisure among the scenes of his youth before he died peacefully in his sleep. For the last dozen years of his life I saw less of him, for my own life was spent in London or abroad. The picture in my memory belongs to my childhood, amplified a little by the reflections of adolescence.

  As a young man he had bushy whiskers and must have looked very much like Matthew Arnold, but as time passed these grew smaller until they vanished altogether. He had the ruddy complexion of a countryman, and that air of gentle, wondering cheerfulness which God sometimes gives to His servants:

  “The good are always the merry,

  Save by an evil chance.”

  When I first met Charles Gore I observed in him the same benign, surprised enjoyment of the mere fact of living.

  My father had been a good classical scholar, and he remained a voracious reader. He had a notable memory for poetry and could repeat every Border ballad that was ever printed and many still unpublished. He had a profound knowledge of Scottish songs, both words and tunes, and I could wish that I had taken down from him some of the traditional fragments. He was also an excellent field botanist. He had read much history and was an unashamed partisan. The past to him was a design in snow and ink, one long contest between villains of admitted villainy and honest men. His dividing line was oddly drawn. In the eighteenth century the Jacobites were for him the children of light; in the seventeenth the Covenanters. For the latter indeed he cherished a fervent private cult, admitting no flaw in their perfection. But his children observed that his special admiration was reserved for those among the Covenanters who had something of the Cavalier romance — Hackstoun of Rathillet, the Black MacMichael, Paton of Meadowhead — and he would permit no criticism of Montrose.

  It was odd that he should have been by profession a theologian, for he was wholly lacking in philosophical interest or aptitude. But a stalwart theologian of the old school he was, rejoicing in the clamped and riveted Calvinistic logic and eager to defend it against all comers. In church politics he belonged to the extreme Conservative wing, and it was his delight, when a member of the Annual Assembly, to stir up all the strife he could by indicting for heresy some popular preacher or professor. There was no ill-feeling in the matter, and he might profoundly respect the heretic, but he conceived it his duty to defend the faith of his fathers against every innovator. Partly the interest was intellectual. He liked a clear pattern and a clean logic, however austere. He greatly admired the Puritan divine and he had a special liking for the later Jonathan Edwards. Partly it was sentimental — a love of old ways and a fast-vanishing world. Partly it was the reaction against two things which he whole-heartedly disliked — a glib modernism and the worship of fashion. He had no belief in compromises and a facile liberalism; he never cherished the illusion that the Christian life was an easy thing, and on this score he had to testify against many false prophets. He had a complete distrust of current fashions and of the worship of the “voice of the people” and the “spirit of the age” and such fetishes. He believed that a majority was usually wrong, and he would have been terrified to find himself on a side which was superior in numbers. He had the same taste as his children for things old and unpopular and shabby.

  But, except as regards dogma, he had little of the conventional Calvinistic temper. He had no sympathy with the legalism of that creed, the notion of a contract between God and man drawn up by some celestial conveyancer. I could wish that he had lived to read Karl Barth, for their views had much in common. In the beleaguered city of the Faith he thought it his duty now and then to man a gun on the dogmatic ramparts, but more of his time was devoted to easing the life of the civilians and strengthening their hope. What he preached for forty years was a very simple and comforting gospel. His evangel had neither the hysteria nor the smugness of ordinary revivalism. He believed profoundly in the fact of “conversion,” the turning of the face to a new course. But, the first step having been taken, he would insist upon the arduousness of the pilgrimage as well as upon its moments of high vision and its ultimate reward. His religion was tender and humane, but it was also well-girded. He had no love for those who took their ease in Zion.

  To his children he was a companion rather than a mentor; or, to put it otherwise, his life was the example, not his precepts, for he rarely preached to us. He could judge sternly but never harshly. He hated lying and cowardice, and he was distrustful of large professions. He was nervous about the value of youthful piety and used to rejoice that his family, bad as they were, were not prigs. For cant, and indeed for all rhetoric, he had a strong distaste. Beginning life as a Liberal he lost his confidence in Mr. Gladstone after Gordon’s death in Khartoum, and the Home Rule question drove him to the Unionist side. He detected in Ulster some kinship with his beloved Covenanters.

  My father was an instance of what I think was commoner among the Puritans than is generally supposed — a stiff dogmatic theology which in practice was mellowed by common sense and kindliness and was conjoined with a perpetual delight in the in
nocent pleasures of life. He was like that seventeenth-century Scots minister who besought his flock to thank God, if for nothing else, for a good day for the lambs. He could preach a tough doctrinal sermon with anybody; but his discourses which remain in my memory were those spoken at the close of the half-yearly Communions, when he invited his hearers, very simply and solemnly, to share his own happiness.

  For he was above all things a happy man. Straitened means and a laborious life did not weaken his relish for common joys. He found acute delight in the simplest things, for he savoured them with a clean palate. Like the old preacher he could exclaim, “All this — and Heaven too.” He had always the background of an assured faith to correct man’s sense of the fragility of his hopes. Also he had none of the little fears and frustrations which are apt to cloud enjoyment. I do not think that he was afraid of anything — except of finding himself in a majority. He was wholly without ambition. He did not know the meaning of class-consciousness; he would have stood confidently before kings, and was quite incapable of deferring to anybody except the very old and the very poor. He was not, I suppose, the conventional saint, for he was not over-much interested in his own soul. But he was something of the apostle, and, if it be virtue to diffuse a healing grace and to lighten the load of all who cross your path, then he was the best man I have ever known.

  II

  My father was a true son of Mary; my mother own daughter to Martha. Had she had his character the household must have crashed, and if he had been like her, childhood would have been a less wonderful thing for all of us.

  Not many sons and mothers can have understood each other better than she and I; indeed, in my adolescence we sometimes arrived at that point of complete comprehension known as a misunderstanding. We had no quarrels, for to each of us that would have been like quarrelling with oneself, but we had many arguments. Instinctively we seemed to grasp the undisclosed and hardly realised things which were at the back of the other’s mind. As I grew older what had been a little frightening became an immense comfort, for we were aware that in seeking sympathy there was no need for elaborate explanations. We knew each other too well.

  My mother was married at seventeen, and had at once to take charge of a kirk and a manse, to which was soon added a family. A Scots minister must be something of a diplomat if he is to keep his congregation in good temper; my father had about as much diplomacy as a rhinoceros, for he was utterly regardless of popular opinion, so my mother had to be ceaselessly observant, and an habitual smoother of ruffled feathers. The family income was small, and my father had no sense of homely realities. We children used to say that he might have been a great general, for it would have been impossible for an opponent to guess what he was going to do next. So the management of the household fell wholly on my mother. Both tasks she willingly undertook and — against great odds — succeeded in. She brought up her family in comfort, and saw to it that they lacked no reasonable opportunities. Successive congregations were handled so adroitly that my father’s defects in tact were covered and the charm of his personality given full play.

  Having found her task in life my mother became a rigid specialist. Her world was the Church, or rather a little section of the Church. Her ambitions were narrowly ecclesiastical. A popular preacher, a famous theologian seemed to her the height of human greatness — a view which was not shared by her family. My father’s lack of such ambitions was to her, I think, a sorrow. Yet in theology she had no real interest, and her religion depended little upon dogma and much on her generous human instincts. The Church to her was like a secular profession, a field for administrative talent, not a mystic brotherhood. She had a passion for church services, which were to her a form of ritual; so many in the week were a proper recognition of the claims of religion. So was the reading of the requisite number of chapters from the Bible and other devotional literature. My father rarely spoke of religious matters outside the pulpit; from my mother’s conversation they were never absent; such references were in her eyes a testimony, a proper acknowledgment of man’s frailty and dependence. She would have been very happy in the Church of Rome, with its clear schedule of duties, or in any faith where merit could be acquired by an infinity of small devotional acts. Her clear practical intelligence was at ease only among things concrete and defined. She was as little of a mystic as a Scotswoman can be.

  She was a possessive mother and fiercely maternal. The bodily and spiritual well-being of her flock was never out of her mind. She nursed its members devotedly through their illnesses, and my carriage accident, which involved nearly a year in bed, must have taken severe toll of her strength. She lived in a perpetual expectation of disaster, not to herself but to her children, and wore out her strength with needless anxieties; but when disaster did come she faced it with coolness and courage. She must have had a remarkable talent for administration to make a tiny income go so far, and to steer my father among the pitfalls of his profession. Her success was largely due, as I have said, to a rigid specialisation on two things, family and Church. In a bookish household she alone was totally uninterested in literature. Public affairs only affected her if they affected her kirk.

  But her passionate possessiveness was never allowed to become a vice. She had no desire to mollycoddle us. As children we were given much liberty of action, though it cost her anxious hours, and as we grew older and had to shape our careers she never tried to interfere with our decisions. She longed to keep us near her, but she did not complain when we scattered like woodcock over the globe. Her view seems to have been that, while humanity was a frail thing, at the mercy of the Devil and wholly dependent upon God, the particular specimens that belonged to her were as much to be trusted as any other, and a lack of trust would have meant a lack of faith in the Almighty.

  About the middle of her life she fell into bad health, and pernicious anaemia brought her to death’s door. For four years she was a very sick woman until she was cured by the genius of Sir Almroth Wright. This time of ill- health was also a time of sorrow. In 1911 my father died, my brother William in 1912, and five years later her youngest son, Alastair, fell in the Great War. For a little it looked as if she would sink under the double burden of bereavement and sickness.

  But a miracle happened. She rose above her sorrows and her frailty, and the last twenty years of her life were not only, I think, the happiest, but the most active. She died in her eighty-first year, having been about her usual avocations almost up to the last day. She had become very small and slight, but her bodily energy put youth to shame, and it was matched by a like activity of mind. While church affairs were still her chief preoccupation, she developed a new interest in secular politics. Her preferences in human nature had once been circumscribed, except where there was a call for charity, but now they covered all sorts and conditions. She made intimate friends of devout Catholics, and of people with no religion at all. The old house at Peebles, above the bridge of Tweed, where she lived with my sister and brother, became a port of call for the whole shire, indeed for the whole Lowlands. Young people came to her for counsel and their elders for sympathy, and none went empty away.

  Only then I began to realise how remarkable were my mother’s powers of mind as well as of heart. She had a really penetrating intelligence. In the ordinary business of life she was apt to deal in moral and religious platitudes and in the prudential maxims, which the Scots call “owercomes” and which flourished especially in her family. But when things became serious all this went by the board, and she judged a situation with a mathematical clarity. She had a wild subtlety of her own which gave her a wide prospect over human nature, and she could assess character with an acumen none the less infallible because charity was never absent. My one complaint was that in practice she was too charitable. No tramp was ever turned away from her door, and her tenderness towards bores was the despair of her family.

  In these last years, as I have said, her interests broadened. Literature was no longer despised, nor politics, and she condescende
d to read some of my own speeches and romances. She longed to travel, and when well over seventy she was always imploring me to take her by air to Palestine. In her eightieth year she visited me in Canada and covered a large part of the Canadian East. The truth is that the world, which had once been a bugbear, was now regarded more kindly. She discovered a surprising number of unexpected “temples of the Holy Ghost.” Her great moments, I think, were my tenures of the office of Lord High Commissioner in Edinburgh, where she found the Church and the World in the friendliest accord.

  To the end she remained a countrywoman — a Border countrywoman. She had the country dislike of overstatement and the country love of pricking bubbles. She feared praise as the Greeks feared Nemesis. Lord Baldwin once said kind things to her about a speech of mine, to which she replied that at any rate it was short! She had the robust humour of the Border glens, robust and yet subtle. Like most country folk she scarcely knew the name of a bird or a plant, but she was entirely at home with nature and talked to dogs, cattle and horses as if they were blood relations. She had the lovable country habit of going nowhere without carrying gifts, generally some simple kind of country produce. If her beloved little ghost should ever visit its familiar places I think that it will have a basket on its arm — fresh eggs, perhaps, or new churned butter, or a picking of gooseberries.

  III

  Two of my brothers died in their early youth.

  Alastair, the youngest, fell at the head of his company of Royal Scots Fusiliers on the first morning of the battle of Arras. He was one of those people who seemed to have been born especially for the Great War. Cheerful, dreamy, absent-minded, he went creditably through the stages of school and college, and decided on chartered accountancy as his profession. But he never seemed to take any of these things quite seriously, as if he were waiting for another kind of summons.