Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Before he proposed, however, he had first to secure his future. He could not expect much, if anything, in the way of a marriage settlement. He was naturally uncertain that journalism and the odd legal opinion together would give him a sufficiently substantial and reliable income for a London household, which would have to include several servants, rather than simply a gentleman’s gentleman who lived out.

  He decided to accept an invitation from Tommy Nelson to become a partner in the family publishing company, Thomas Nelson and Sons, as an editor and literary adviser, to be based mainly at the London office at 35/36 Paternoster Row, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. He travelled up to Edinburgh in early November to meet Tommy at Nelson’s headquarters in the Parkside Works in Newington and ten days later wrote to his mother: ‘I have investigated the business carefully, and have taken all sorts of advice, and I am satisfied they are continuing successful and capable of enormous development. They offer me a share in the profits and guarantee me a large minimum income … It would give me work I should be deeply interested in. I should live in London still and I should be able to go into Parliament within a reasonable time. Altogether I agree with Milner [whose name carried great weight with his mother, since his South African days] that it is the chance I have been looking for.’40

  The benefit was mutual. This was not a question of giving a job to an old chum simply for the sake of ‘auld lang syne’. JB had been reading manuscripts for publishers since his Oxford days; he was a published author, an assiduous reviewer of books and, perhaps most importantly, he had excellent literary connections in London, while not having entirely forgotten his Scottish roots. The firm, which had agencies also in Dublin, Leeds and New York, was on the cusp of a major expansion, and Tommy’s request came at an apposite moment. (Offices were opened in Leipzig and Paris in 1910 and Toronto in 1914.)

  The agreement with Nelson’s, initially for two years, was that he should work full time for them, as a partner until the firm became a limited company, and then as a director, for £1,000 a year. Once the partnership was incorporated, he would be given enough ordinary shares to yield £500 in a normal year; before that, Nelson’s guaranteed him an income of not less than £1,500 a year.

  When he got back to London, he wrote to his sister: ‘Everyone in London just now has a cold and is in a bad temper, except Strachey and Miss S.G. The latter has taken to learning Greek, has become a strong supporter of woman-suffrage, has invented a familiar spirit called “Sir Joseph” whose conversation is ridiculous, and is opening a church-bazaar next month.’41 He was at the stage of finding everything about her delightful.

  He proposed finally on 10 November, very likely in the drawing room at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street, Mrs Grosvenor and Marnie having made themselves scarce. Susie turned him down.

  Four days later, he wrote to his mother:

  I asked Susie Grosvenor to marry me, and it is a marvel to myself that I have been able to defer the question so long. We have been intimate friends for years [well, eighteen months at most] and I know her as well as I know myself. She has not accepted me yet for she is in a great state of doubt as to whether she might not spoil my life. No really nice woman ever wants to be married; they have all to be coerced into it. I have given her a week, and I think she will accept me. But you may imagine the kind of state of worry I live in just now.

  My dearest Mother, I want you to be kind to me about this and not make it harder for me. I know you will. [He knew nothing of the sort.] Burn this letter and keep what I have told you private for the meantime.42

  There are a number of puzzling aspects to this letter, most of them not amenable to rational explanation so long after the event. What exactly did Susie mean when she said she was worried she would spoil his life? Did she fear that she couldn’t keep up with the man her family persisted in calling a ‘genius’, for she certainly undervalued her own abilities, or was it that she worried about her periodic debilitating melancholy, which we may now identify as depression? And why did he tell his mother, knowing for sure that it would give her ammunition against a young woman she was bound to dislike, at least initially? Even more astonishing is the statement that no really nice woman wanted to marry. Was he trying to placate his mother by giving her the impression that all the running had been made by him? He didn’t succeed, if that was the case. Moreover, Mrs Buchan did not burn the letter. One thing is certain; this letter reveals his high state of anxiety, which had spurred this usually keenly rational being into writing irrational things. He thought he had made a mess of it.

  Susie had not, however, turned him down flatly, and it is likely that her mother had stern words to say to her. For on 14 November, in response to an invitation to dine at Upper Grosvenor Street, he wrote a letter that any young woman would like to receive:

  I will come to dinner tonight as you suggest. I quite understand your wanting to take time to decide and I love you for it, for you are very wise and I should not expect you to make [up] your mind easily. I am afraid I was very stupid and nervous on Saturday and did not say half what I meant. You see I have had no experience and I am always apt to understate my feelings. [He had obviously talked too much about his ambitions and excellent prospects and not enough about how he couldn’t live without her.] What I wanted to say to you – and what I shall keep on saying – is that you have come to mean far more to me than anything else in the world. I used to think only of my ambitions, but now everything seems foolish and worthless without you. I think I have always been in love with you since I first saw you, but last Christmas I began to realise how much you had come to mean to me. And then for a long time I was quite hopeless, for I did not think I could ever make you care for me in that way or give you the kind of things you wanted in life. Of late – quite unreasonably perhaps – I have begun to hope, and during the last month I felt that I had to put matters to the test as soon as possible.

  Of course that is only my side of the case. I am miserably conscious how unworthy I am of you, for I think the whole world must be in love with your grace and kindness. And I have not very much to offer except chances. But I think I could make you happy, and one thing I can give you, the most complete devotion and loyalty. You are the only woman I have ever been in love with, and ever shall be in love with.

  I don’t want you to decide hastily, and above all I don’t want you to let any kindliness or pity for a friend influence [you], if you are not quite sure. (I oughtn’t to write this, for you are so candid and wise and honourable that I know you would never say what you didn’t really and truly mean…) But, oh my dear dear child,* if you can care for me, you will make me so gloriously happy, and I think we should both be happy people in life.

  I won’t write any more for I shall see you soon. Brighton was very pleasant. I was very restless and distrait and must have been a great nuisance to Harold [Baker, his old Oxford friend], but it made me feel very well. Yours ever JB.43

  Not surprisingly this did the trick.

  Even after their engagement, the only intimation that their relationship was physical comes in teasing comments about her golden hair becoming thoroughly disordered when they meet. The habit then of reticence about such matters (at a time when anyone might pick up a letter lying around) was too strong to break, on paper at least. Nevertheless, this was a true love match, and – as is obvious from all the extant letters to each other up to the last time they were separated in the autumn of 1938 – it was one that lasted.

  Sundry writers have surmised over the years that there was a strong element of calculation in JB’s wish to marry Susie; that she provided an entrée into the heart of the British establishment that a Scottish parvenu required if he was to ‘get on’. The evidence simply does not bear this out. To begin with, he was already very well set up in her milieu before he met her. From his youth, he was known to a number of well-connected Scots, such as Andrew Lang, Augustine Birrell and the Marquess of Tullibardine, since class barriers were never so adamantine in Scotland as in
England. At Oxford, he made a number of friends, whose parents would have dined with Susie’s mother. What is more, the Grosvenors were most notable for their wealth rather than distinction or fame in any other field, and Susie’s immediate family were not capable of advancing JB’s career in any particularly useful or material way. A more calculating man would instead have courted the likes of Miss Florence Wolseley, the heiress, or Lady Grizel Cochrane, the daughter of a Scottish earl.

  If he had not discovered that he loved Susie and felt impelled to ask her to share his life, he might well have remained a bachelor. There was no stigma attached to it, as there was to spinsterhood; there were plenty of opportunities for social life and companionship amongst men, in particular, in London, and he could afford to pay staff to cook and clean for him. Moreover, there was no pressure from his family for him to marry, indeed quite the reverse, since his father had been the only one of six children to marry, while his mother had two bachelor brothers and, despite herself being happily married, was inclined to think JB’s marriage would break up the closeness of the family. If he had not fallen in love, he might still have married in the end but it would have been in order to have children, and the joy that he knew, from his own experience with a much younger brother, that they could bring. His most complex and best-realised fictional character, Edward Leithen, never marries, which suggests that JB had no prejudice against bachelordom.

  A few days after the successful proposal, Anna wrote a generous, if not entirely frank, letter to Susie:

  I have thought of you such a lot since John wrote me his great news last Friday. John has been all the world to me since I can remember anything and I don’t really think there ever was a kinder and more considerate brother. I used to wonder what I should do when John married but now that John has found the one woman in the world, I find I don’t grudge him to you in the least and can only rejoice with him in his great joy.

  He is so blissfully happy and he says such lovely things about you. When I meet you, he declares, I shall be sure to fall in love with you too. I am prepared to be very proud if you will let me be very fond of John’s wife. I am looking forward so much to meeting you. You will try to like me, won’t you, for John’s sake?44

  The letter from Mrs Buchan to Susie was not so effusive. It is plain where she thought the balance of benefit lay:

  My dear Miss Grosvenor,

  I have just heard from John of his engagement to you and am writing to assure you of a very friendly welcome into our family – which has always been a most happy one. I think you are to be congratulated, for if John is as good to his wife as he has been to his Mother you ought to be a very happy woman. It is my earnest prayer that this may be the beginning of a most happy and useful life for both of you. I shall be very grateful to you if you make a happy home for my dear boy. My son Walter, with whom I am living at present, joins with me in every fond wish. We shall look forward to making your acquaintance when it suits you to pay us a visit.

  With love and again hoping for you all that is best.

  Yrs v. sincerely

  Helen Buchan45

  However, in private, the complaints about JB’s engagement were long and bitter, and made Mrs Buchan ‘depressed’. Despite her assurances to Susie, Anna was not happy either. Fortunately, JB had a stout ally in Willie in India. Once the news reached him, he wrote to his mother: ‘I am altogether delighted and feel sure that John has done a very wise thing, though it does take a little time to adjust one’s point of view from John the Confirmed Bachelor to John the Engaged … I have written to Susie expressing my approval of her as a sister in law!’46

  His mother didn’t agree, for Willie was moved to write to her again on Christmas Day: ‘I don’t think you are taking John’s engagement in the proper spirit. It isn’t true to say that John is selfish when you know what a good son and brother he has been. In a matter like this John is the best judge, and how much happier you would be if you would only realise that. This whole thing is perfectly natural and inevitable and desirable, and in his own best interests. Of course it isn’t pleasant for you, as that sort of thing never can be to a Mother, but you want to take a much broader view of life, old body. I know that your mournfulness is chiefly due to your not being very well and Father being seedy. I am very sorry indeed to hear it, and I do hope you are both all right now, and will write me more cheerful letters.’47

  Mrs Buchan cannot be entirely blamed for her attitude. She had never met Susie, who came from a world she knew nothing about, being English and Anglican, nor had she watched the courtship unfold. Indeed, it is highly likely that Willie, as well as Anna, had taken care not to tell their mother what was afoot. Consequently, JB’s letter announcing his engagement must have come as a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky.

  A Lodge in the Wilderness, a fictional political symposium published by Blackwood’s,* was dedicated to ‘G.C.S.’ (Gerard Craig Sellar). The action takes place in a country house, Musuru, which resembles the fantasy house that JB wanted to build at ‘Buchansdorp’, but set on a high plateau in east Africa. The high-minded, well-heeled characters, nine men and nine women, from the upper and professional classes, are all there at the invitation of Francis Carey, a thinly fictionalised portrait of the late Cecil Rhodes. The fictional characters approximate to a number of real people, including Lord Rosebery, Lord Milner, the Canadian statesman Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Rand magnate Alfred Beit, Lady Leconfield, and Susie’s aunt, Katharine Lyttelton, as well as a big-game hunter, a soldier and a journalist. The women talk sense, and are taken seriously by the men, which in itself may have been refreshing. The protagonists, who display a number of different viewpoints – there are free traders and protectionists, Tories and Liberals – debate what Empire means and how it should best be developed. ‘Hugh Somerville’, JB himself, says: ‘What we are going to talk about is the whole scheme of life which a new horizon and a new civic ideal bring with them. It affects the graces as closely as the business of life, art and literature as well as business and administration.’48 There is a specific rejection of ‘Jingoism’ by Lord Appin (Lord Rosebery): – ‘[Jingoism] means that we regard our empire as a mere possession, as the vulgar rich regard their bank accounts – a matter to boast of, and not an added duty … [Jingoism] belongs to the school of thought which thinks of the Empire as England, with a train of dependencies and colonies to enhance her insular prestige; but it has no kinship with the ideal of an empire moving with one impulse towards a richer destiny.’49 The measured and reflective, if over-idealistic, tone of the book ensured a positive reception at the time and, a century later, the Dictionary of National Biography averred that ‘it remains one of the clearest and fairest analyses of British imperial endeavours’.50 As a guide to JB’s attitudes and interests, it is instructive that the portrayals of the Jewish financier and the Canadian politician are favourable. But the modern reader inevitably catches a strong whiff of paternalism.

  Thanks mostly to Mrs Buchan’s attitude, the engagement did not progress along a primrose path. Willie wrote early in the New Year that he was sorry JB had had a ‘slight breakdown’, by which he meant that he had been ill, since he was not suffering from a nervous collapse in December. (Either that, or it is a euphemism of his mother’s for the effect of a row with her.) Relations between him and his mother were plainly very strained. He was not much in evidence that Christmas, avoiding the kirk service on the Sunday before, so that he could go for a long walk with Walter. He left home on Christmas Day in the afternoon to eat a solitary dinner in Edinburgh and catch the night train, in order to arrive at Crabbet Park on Boxing Day, and spend the holiday with Susie and her family and friends. With what relief must he have settled into post-Christmas festivities with the woman he loved and amongst courteous, kindly, agreeable, uncensorious English people.

  Devoted to his mother as he was, JB had chosen a bride who was almost the antithesis of her. With the exception of the golden hair, conspicuous family loyalty, proneness to low moods an
d pronounced social conscience, there were no shared characteristics. Susie was much taller, and more languid, lacking Mrs Buchan’s almost daemonic energy (Susie had breakfast in bed all her life), not at all interested in household matters, religious only in a muted and restrained Anglican way, chronically indecisive, absent-minded, always mislaying her possessions, and, crucially, coming from a markedly privileged and thoroughly entitled background. She might have to put up with possessing few dresses, but she could indulge her love of the contemporary theatre and spend time amongst friends in some of the grandest country houses of England. She was related to almost all the great, in the sense of historically prominent, families in England, whose traced lineage went back close to a thousand years, a fact that at the time would have impressed many a fond mother. Susie’s interest in politics and intellectual matters, and the fact that she was gentle, feminine, a very good listener, discreet, unselfish, without pretentiousness, and that she plainly adored him, were all virtues that would recommend her to JB, of course, and they would eventually win Mrs Buchan round. But it was tough going at first.

  It is customary for a large, close-knit family to feel that anyone marrying into it has most of the luck and privilege on their side. Even so, it still seems odd that the Buchans – especially JB’s mother but Anna as well – did not consider that Susie was good enough for their John. What makes the irony even more piquant is that the aristocratic families that crowded around Susie, who it might be assumed would have been snobbish about a Scottish son of the manse, without title or inherited money, seem to have appreciated his qualities from a very early stage and were (mainly) delighted with the connection. As a relation said, when congratulating Susie on her engagement: ‘So you aren’t going to be a fat Duchess after all. I had always looked forward to being given one finger to shake at an omnium gatherum garden-party by your Grace, and now you’re going to marry something like a genius instead.’51 Susie’s mother wrote to one of her sisters: ‘I love him dearly. I don’t think you could help loving him. He is so manly and simple and so intelligent.’52