Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Her upbringing instilled in Susie what she later called ‘an instinct to please’, a very useful social accomplishment. But, when she met JB, she was in need of rescuing, for such a bookish, unworldly girl, without a father, was in constant danger of accepting a proposal from the wrong man.

  JB went to South Africa for a law case in May 1905 but, on his return the following month, the couple began to meet quite frequently. They both attended Lucy Lyttelton’s twenty-first birthday party in July, and went on with a party to Earl’s Court, probably to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which was a great hit there at the time. JB ever so casually told his mother who his companions were: ‘It was a very pleasant friendly party.’19

  That summer, Susie spent much time at Crabbet Park near Crawley in Sussex, a house owned by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the writer and traveller, but leased to the very hospitable Sir Edward Ridley and his wife, who had been connections of Cubby Medd, and who liked to surround themselves with young people. JB was invited down several times that August, when he was deputising for Strachey at The Spectator: ‘I am going down to Crabbet every evening this week,’ he wrote to his sister on the magazine’s writing paper. ‘It is very pleasant after a dusty day in town to get down to that lovely old house* and nice people.’20

  A tantalisingly undated letter written by Susie to her cousin, Hilda Lyttelton, from Crabbet Park, must derive from that summer, and is typical of her rather breathless style at the time:

  … we are very happy here. We have had Mr. Buchan and Mr. [Harold] Baker here for Sunday. What dears they are especially Mr Buchan – We had great fun as we all ragged each other hard – and a Crabbet Magazine was instituted in which we all wrote things. Parodies chiefly. They were awfully good some of them. Mr Baker’s parody of Walt Whitman took the biscuit I think! … I am reading Morris’ Life** which is awfully interesting. I spend my time reading here – and doing a very little drawing and a minus quantity of embroidery.21

  JB told his brother in India about his trips to Crabbet, to which Willie replied, ‘you seemed to be having a frivolous time at Crabbet Park in your [indecipherable] party of unchaperoned youth’.22 Years later, Susie recalled those days:

  There were many pleasant things to do at Crabbet – walks through the woods, lazy hours to be spent in boats on the lake over which the wild duck flighted at night. I remember … John lying under some trees outside the drawing-room window making notes for a review in the Spectator of a book on philosophy. He remarked at intervals ‘this man really shouldn’t write about philosophy when he knows so little about it’.

  We started by having an amusing friendship discussing life and literature at great length and writing long letters to each other. We soon found that life had brightened for us both. He had never really settled down in London after his time of hard work and high adventure in South Africa, and I was suffering from a feeling of aimlessness.23

  In mid-September, JB intended to go climbing with his brother Walter in the Cuillins of Skye, which he loved above all other mountain ranges. However, before he went, he received a letter from his mother begging him not to go, as it was too dangerous, particularly since Sandy Gillon wasn’t going with him, and he wasn’t going to Glasgow first. This nonsense prompted one of the angriest letters he ever wrote to her, in which he made it clear that he resented her lack of confidence in him, that he was a very safe climber, and that he never went anywhere without a professional guide. (He had conveniently forgotten his escapade with John Edgar.) ‘The Bird [Walter] will tell you I am one of the safest of climbers, more especially as I have him in my charge.’24 It must be said that Walter found his brother ‘exhilarating and terrifying’ as a climbing companion. In the end, she couldn’t stop him and he heard no more about it.

  That October, JB wrote to Susie, enclosing a copy of The Watcher by the Threshold: ‘I’m afraid all the stories are rather crude – they were written at Oxford: but I still have “kind feelings” for the last one [‘Fountainblue’], which indeed is more or less the subject of the novel at which I am being vanquished by an impossible “ingénue”. I am going to make her half-Polish and half-Spanish, speaking no language but Basque, so that I may not be compelled to give specimens of her conversation.’25

  Why he considered these stories suitable reading matter for a very sheltered young woman, it is hard to imagine. In particular, ‘No Man’s Land’ is a very scary story about a relict population of Picts in Scotland who, apart from killing lonely shepherds, from time to time kidnap Scots girls to widen their gene pool.

  However, it is easy to imagine how flattering it was for a twenty-three-year-old ingénue to be sent someone’s published work, so it is not surprising that she wrote back so enthusiastically: ‘I have just finished devouring it and I must tell you how awfully good I think the stories. They are so well sustained and interesting. The characters are so well drawn and clear … I hope we are going to see you again soon. If you would come in for tea or later any day you would always find us.’26 Susie’s letters were sweetly naïve, rather unsuccessful attempts at worldliness, and full of innocent gossip. ‘You write just as you speak,’ he was often to tell her. In November 1905, JB told Charlie Dick: ‘I am pretty busy with Board of Trade work at the Bar, and a good deal of the Spectator falls on my shoulders in these days [since Strachey was away pursuing his parliamentary candidature]. Also the world is too much with me late and soon … I mean le beau monde. I dine out or go to plays very nearly every night, and I am being dragged back to balls again.’27 This was the influence of Susie.

  It was a time of frenetic politics, and JB now knew many of the protagonists. The general election in early 1906 brought a crushing defeat for the Tories, and the victory of the ‘Little Englander’ faction in the triumphant Liberal Party. For a Free-Trader who, though he called himself a Tory was truly a Liberal Unionist, and one who believed in the Empire, this was not good news. In his spare time he had been writing The Mountain, a contemporary novel about a young Northumbrian, much like him, who wants to go out to east Africa; it relied heavily on memories of a trip to Northumberland with Charlie Dick when they were at the University of Glasgow. He ran out of steam after five chapters.

  In ‘A Reputation’, a short story published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1898,* JB seems to be describing the sort of multifaceted career that he was later to have. There was obviously a debate going on in his head about whether the pursuit of public reputation was a worthy ambition, for in this tale he suggests that it may not do a man any good. Arnold Layden is not an attractive figure. An eminent lawyer says of him, ‘Layden has chosen a damned hard profession. I never cared much for the fellow, but I admit he can work. Why, add my work to that of a first-class journalist, and you have an idea of what the man gets through every day of his life. And then think of the amount he does merely for show: the magazine articles, the lecturing, the occasional political speaking. All that has got to be kept up as well as his reputation in society. It would kill me in a week, and, mark my words, he can’t live long at that pitch.’ But that was exactly what JB was doing up until January 1906.

  However, in that month, Strachey offered him the job of assistant editor at The Spectator alongside Charles Graves, since the ageing Meredith Townsend had by now practically retired. It would mean a handsome £800 a year, conditional on him leaving the Bar, although he would be allowed to write books and magazine articles, as well as do any legal writing in his spare time. He would be expected to write a review, a leader and seven ‘notes’ a week, as well as help with the general editorial work. Strachey magnanimously told him that, although he himself would risk all his prosperity to resist Protectionism, he didn’t expect JB to do so. In reality he knew they were not far apart generally, and certainly not on the matter of Free Trade. If JB continued at the Bar there could be no retainer, but Strachey would guarantee him £150 of work a year. JB accepted the original offer, conditional on being allowed six weeks’ leave a year and with the proviso that when Townsend died, o
r retired, his salary would go up to £1,000. They also agreed that when Strachey was away, Graves would be editor and JB his assistant.

  He lost his work for the Attorney-General in any event, when the Conservatives left office in December 1905, but he also gave up going into court and being available to take on cases. However, he did continue to write legal opinions, as Strachey had said he might. And the new regime gave him a certain amount of leisure, which allowed him both to pursue a love affair and to finish a work of political thought on empire, which he called A Lodge in the Wilderness.

  Because of the iron rules concerning chaperonage of upper-class girls, courtships had to be pursued under the eyes both of observant, but mostly favourably disposed, contemporaries and also the rather more critical and cynical older generation. Fortunately for this couple, that generation was reasonably benign and, in Susie’s mother, JB found an active supporter.

  During tea parties held at Temple Gardens, and dinner parties at Upper Grosvenor Street, Mrs Grosvenor had the opportunity of sizing him up, and the two quickly established a rapport. He called her ‘Gerald’, a mystifying nickname but one which suggests that she was happy to be teased, and she undoubtedly enjoyed exchanging choice political and literary gossip with him. For JB, liking soon turned to a real affection, since Mrs Grosvenor was not only kindly, sympathetic, intelligent and socially concerned,* but she held an honoured position in a civilised and artistic circle, whose members required of him only that he be amusing and interesting. He soon grew to value her opinion. Although she mostly spent her time painting, he encouraged her to write a novel, The Bands of Orion, and helped to get it published by Heinemann in 1906.

  In her turn, she introduced him to important political and intellectual figures or promoted burgeoning friendships. For example, through her he met Moritz Bonn, the clever young German-Jewish economist who had studied and later taught at the London School of Economics, and who was to become a lifelong friend of the family.

  In February 1906, JB’s Uncle Willie died, after a long illness. JB went north for his funeral, which was attended by 800 people ‘for he was a well-known and much beloved man in all the countryside’.28 His death was a grief to JB, since his uncle had been very kind to him and had widened his horizons as no one else in his family had thought to do. Willie Buchan’s death meant a change of the guard in Peebles, but that turned out to be a peculiarly smooth transition. His nephew, Walter, the twenty-three-year-old advocate, was appointed the agent (manager) of the Commercial Bank as well as town clerk and procurator fiscal in his uncle’s place. He moved to Bank House.

  At this point, Willie’s two sisters decided to go to live in Guernsey, no doubt to warm their elderly bones, so Walter asked Anna to leave home in Glasgow in order to keep house for him in Peebles. This arrangement suited Walter, but, more importantly, he knew it would save her from the risk of gradually settling into a confined, spinsterish middle age looking after her ageing parents.

  It was from early 1906 that JB began to nickname Susie ‘Miss Clara’, which almost certainly derives from the name of the girl in ‘Fountainblue’, the last of the stories in The Watcher by the Threshold. She is a shadowy figure who falls in love with the nice, ineffectual man, rather than the great but difficult man who saves her life.

  His courtship of Susie continued slowly and circumspectly. By early April, however, they had established a firm correspondence, itself a mark of regard, for it required her permission (and possibly Mrs Grosvenor’s as well). He wrote, ‘It is so kind of you to allow me to write you this scrawl’, and signed it ‘JB’. In that letter, sent from Kildonan, where he was staying with Gerard Craig Sellar and fishing for salmon on the River Helmsdale, he demanded to know who the villain was who had said he was ‘a ladies’ man’, a piece of gossip that she had sent him. ‘A smoking pistol or a bloodstained sword will alone wipe out the insult. I don’t suppose any charge – except that of being a Liberal – could be more shamefully untrue, and if Gerald believes it, it will really be too much for me to bear.’29 Susie had also passed on Violet Asquith’s remarks about the Balliol set (including her brother Raymond) as being dirty, blasphemous and woman-hating. He rejected it, saying he was not dirty, nor conspicuously blasphemous, nor woman-hating, but prepared to accept that he was the opposite of ‘susceptible’. Her rallying reply was, ‘I was very much amused indeed at your remarks about the Balliol set, especially the extreme “hauteur” with which you speak of the “woman-hating” accusation. To quote you, “the true members of the set never troubled themselves sufficiently about the subject to form any opinion”. I feel thoroughly put in my place along with the rest of my sex. I shall never err on the side of thinking that we are important again.’30

  When sending her two books of French poetry for her twenty-fourth birthday on 20 April, ‘because you said I might’,31 he was still not quite sure if he had presumed too much. A few days later he wrote that he was going to a dance, rather on sufferance, but was glad there was a chance she might be there. ‘I hope you will spare a few minutes from your Guardsmen to talk to me. I promise not to relapse into any barbarous exclamation like “Heck”.’32 Her teasing him about his use of Scots expressions prompted him to try to teach her some. In early April he wrote asking her how she was getting on with her studies in the Scottish language and defying her to translate ‘How mony nievefu’s of stoor mak’ a gowpen of glaur?’*

  At a time when the couple were still pursuing a diffident correspondence, her family were already speculating as to whether they would make a match of it. Her aunt Katharine Lyttelton wrote to a relation on 13 April: ‘I never know quite what to think about Susie and Buchan. I might add that it has not come to a climax yet. I love the little man, but it is difficult to be sure that there is enough there to make him blossom into a Birrell or an Asquith. (Birrell is worth 500 Asquiths by the way)…’33 (Augustine Birrell, the Liberal MP and President of the Board of Education, may have been worth 500 H.H. Asquiths, but it is not a name to conjure with these days.) However, these matchmaking ladies would have to wait a while longer before JB proposed.

  In early June he took Anna mountaineering for the second time, having accompanied her to Zermatt in 1904. This time it was Chamonix, and JB was still a little nervous when writing to Susie from there: ‘I hope getting letters does not bore you. Please forgive me if it does, but I have an idle hour before dinner and I thought I might employ it worse than in writing to you … Fresh snow falls on the tops every night, and the line of white against the morning blue is worth coming a long way to see. My sister, who has never climbed here before, is disappointed with Mont Blanc, which she says is a dull aggressive white thing, like a Nonconformist conscience. She is even more disgusted with the jokes I keep making to cheer my heart in difficult rock chimneys – which she calls “esprit d’escalier”.’34

  On his return to England, he gave Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism and Haldane’s The Pathway to Reality* to Susie, and, later, these books to her mother as well. Susie must have had a stab at the Plato because there are comments on philosophy in her hand at the back of the book. The same month his brother, Willie, came back for three months’ leave, and was introduced to Susie at a dinner party in London.

  In September the Buchan brothers and Anna went to Skye to climb in the Cuillins,** this time with no apparent protests from their mother, and stayed at the renowned mountaineers’ resort, the Sligachan Inn. In a letter to Susie he wrote that they climbed the north face of Sgùrr nan Gillean, ‘where among other delicacies there were 100 feet of sheer rock to climb by cracks. Willie is a very poor climber [one can only pity him] and Anna and I had a lot of trouble with him. Besides he had a vulgar desire to take photographs and he always wanted lunch, which your true mountaineer thinks nothing of.’ He said that his letter was dull, ‘but there is nothing to write about when your mind has the perfect contentment of a Buddhist lama and your body the weariness of St Laurence after a long day on the gridiron’. He hoped to meet her at Rounton i
n Yorkshire, and sent white heather from the ‘Glen of the Fairies so it might be lucky’.35

  Susie, staying with her mother in Schlangenbad in Germany, told him she thought this letter ‘very characteristic and couldn’t have been written by anyone else – you sound very happy and contented in your favourite strenuous way. You are to repeat every Scrap of Gossip that you hear … Gerald and I will discuss it quietly and gravely over our meals instead of talking about Snakes or the Pathway to Reality which are at present her favourite subjects. They tell us that there are gold and silver ones – (snakes not Pathways) in the woods here…’36

  He replied, ‘You are a great angel to write me such a long delightful letter … You must come to Rounton* … Please do, like a Christian and a lady … I am so glad that she [Gerald] is getting on with the Pathway to Reality. She mustn’t mind if she comes to great snags … The book I thought she ought to read next was Wallace’s Prolegomena to Hegel [sic] but on second thoughts I think Plato would be better.’37 It is amusing to think of these stately Edwardian ladies, sitting in a plush hotel in a spa town in Germany, without a word of the Classics between them, struggling with Hegelian philosophy to please an enthusiastic and attractive young man.

  After the trip to Skye, JB wrote to Susie from Cloan in Auchterarder, home of R. B. (Richard) Haldane, Secretary of State for War and author of the famous Pathway to Reality: ‘It is very nice of you to think me like Charles James Fox; but alas and alack! I am not. I wish I was never idle and never bored. I am incorrigibly idle at present, and I have been comprehensively bored ever since you left these shores.’38

  It was about this time that JB finally decided to put his resolution to the test and ask Susie to marry him. The timing was probably prompted by the projected publication of A Lodge in the Wilderness on 14 November. Although the first edition was published anonymously, for reasons unknown, JB’s friends almost certainly would guess it was from his pen and he knew that, buried not very deep in this symposium, was a paean of love for Susie. (He is Hugh Somerville in the book, and she Lady Flora Brune – fictional names never were his strong suit.) There are even expressions from their letters in it: at one point Lady Flora says to Hugh, ‘If I were not such a Christian and such a lady…’39