Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  The couple were sincerely happy and easy together. When Lucy Lyttelton, Susie’s cousin, became engaged to the Liberal politician, Charles Masterman, in 1908, JB wrote to her: ‘As Susie and I beat you by a year, out of the depth of my experience I am bound to “testify” as we say in Scotland. And my testimony is that most human joys are a little overrated when you come to try them yourself, but about true love nobody has ever been able to say half enough. You feel that just now, of course, but believe me you will always feel it.’3

  On his marriage to Susie, he acquired an extensive network of agreeable connections. These included most particularly the Stuart-Wortleys, since Susie’s mother, being a widow, was rather out of the Grosvenor orbit (and her family were much more fun). JB, as we have seen, was notably ‘clannish’ and he delighted in the idiosyncrasies and undoubted charm of these relations, listening respectfully to their complaints and lengthy descriptions of ailments. In return they enjoyed his wit and intellect, and the opportunity they now had, shamelessly, to trouble a man of such energy and good nature. They were not the only ones, although they probably felt they had the most legitimate claim on him; other grandes dames who, from time to time, felt entitled to bother him to do things for them included Lady Desborough, the Countess of Minto, Lady Cynthia Asquith and the Marchioness of Londonderry.

  A rich example of the way he was put upon was when he (together with Henry James) was asked in 1909 by Susie’s aunt Mamie, the Countess of Lovelace, to read through a lot of correspondence and adjudicate upon the obsession of her late husband, Ralph, concerning the slurs on the reputation of his grandmother, Lady Byron, and the conviction he had that Lord Byron had had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. The two men agreed that the Earl of Lovelace had been justified: ‘… Henry James and I waded through masses of ancient indecency, and duly wrote an opinion. The thing nearly made me sick, but my colleague never turned a hair. His only words for some special vileness were “singular” – “most curious” – “nauseating, perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant.” ’4

  In November 1908, Some Eighteenth Century Byways and Other Essays was published by Blackwood’s. Dedicated to JB’s mother, the book encompassed articles that first appeared in a variety of periodicals, but chiefly The Spectator, in the ten years between 1898 and 1908. These tended to be historical – on Bonnie Prince Charlie, Lady Louisa Stuart, Charles II, the Victorian Chancellors and Castlereagh – but there was also an important exposition of his views on fighting wars, ‘Count Tolstoi and the Idealism of War’, and a reflection on John Bunyan.

  In May 1909, Willie finally arrived home from India for his longed-for six months’ leave, some of it spent at Harehope in the Meldon Hills, not far from Peebles. This was a cherished and long-remembered summer holiday, when the family fished, walked and went rough shooting on the Tweeddale heights. When sailing back to India through the Red Sea, Willie pined for the ‘winds and the rain and the mist and the hills and that ever white road over the moor’.5

  The brothers had taken the opportunity, when together at Harehope, to discuss how they would fund their father’s retirement. The imminence of this had begun to press upon them, after Anna came back from India and noticed that her father was slower and less inclined to climb to the top of tall tenements. As a result of pressure from his children in the matter, Mr Buchan broached the subject with his Session and Presbytery that November. His retirement was given added urgency when, in the spring of 1910, he and his wife, together with Anna, Walter and Alastair, set off for a trip to Zermatt in Switzerland but only got as far as London, before he had a heart attack. The doctors were adamant that Mr Buchan must live a very quiet life from then on, so at this point he retired from the ministry.

  Almost immediately, he and his wife moved to Peebles, to a house called ‘Woodlands’, not far from Bank House, bought for them by their sons. The three boys also insisted that they supplement their father’s very modest annual pension of £120. When Mrs Buchan fell ill again, in the autumn of 1910, the brothers vied with each other as to who paid the medical expenses.

  In 1910, JB and Susie moved to a rather more spacious rented house at 13 Bryanston Street, only a few minutes’ walk from her mother. In April they accepted an invitation from Gerard Craig Sellar to join his steam yacht, Rannoch, at Constantinople, for a six-week ‘spring tour’, leaving the toddler Alice to cheer up her ailing grandmother in Peebles. They travelled in extreme comfort the entire way to Constantinople on the Orient Express train, spending enough time in the city to inhale something of its exotic atmosphere.

  JB wrote to Gilbert Murray from the boat: ‘I had a very interesting time in Constantinople for I saw many of the Turks, both “young” and “old” and had interminable political discussions … It is Cromwellian England over again with a dash of Venice. This would not matter so much if the Committee [of Union] was sympathetic to the average Turk. But they are mostly quaint Positivist intellectuals, whose one strong interest is military…’ He also told him he was worried there would soon be another outbreak of anti-Armenian feeling.6

  They cruised in the Rannoch to the foot of Mount Olympus and to Troy, which they surveyed under the eyes of a guard of Turkish soldiers. Years before, JB and Charlie Dick had had the idea of writing a romance about the Ionian Migrations. So, after they had steamed round Lemnos, Imbros and Samothrace, JB went ashore near Thermopylae, to walk in the hills and find the place, Kallidromo, where the Phocians had guarded the goat path that the Persians needed to take if they were to outflank the Greeks at the pass of Thermopylae. ‘It is a most glorious country, and the scenery is pure Theocritus,’ he told Dick.7 They then sailed down the coast of Euboea to Athens, passing the Petali islands on the way, where they were intrigued by a shuttered and impenetrable house, standing back from the shore in a walled garden.

  They spent a week in Athens sightseeing, as well as travelling to the Straits of Salamis to see the site of the naval battle between the Greeks and Persians in 480 BC, then sailed off into the Gulf of Corinth and on to Delphi. ‘What a place! It is set far up in a gorge of Parnassus, and even from the ruin one can judge what a place it must have been … Early next morning, I climbed the crags and got well up Parnassus. These Greek mountains look bleak and rocky from below, but when you climb them, you find little green meadows and thickets and the most amazing flowers I have ever seen.’8 They then cruised round the Ionian islands, going past Ithaca, and came off the boat at Corfu, where they witnessed the celebration of Easter and the killing of the Paschal Lamb.

  This leisurely tour proved important, both because JB’s wanderings around Thermopylae inspired one of his very best short stories, ‘The Lemnian’, and its associated poem, ‘Atta’s Song’, both published the following year,* and because the ‘shuttered and impenetrable’ house would appear first in another supernatural short story, ‘The Basilissa’.9 This tale is about a highly sensitive young man who dreams every April of a series of rooms, dreading the last one, containing ‘a terrible Something’, which comes closer by one room every year. More than ten years later, he worked up this short story into the novel, The Dancing Floor.

  It was now a decade since JB had published a proper work of fiction, although he had been working on one, on and off, since 1907. Prester John,* a story aimed at schoolchildren, finally came out in August 1910. It was the fruit of a maturing attitude about how to put a novel together and it turned out to be a much less laborious task than John Burnet of Barns or The Half-Hearted had been.

  He dedicated it, in verse form, to Lionel Phillips. An American edition, with the title The Great Diamond Pipe, came out that October from Dodd, Mead and Co. Prester John was more of a success than any of his earlier novels, and it lasted the course better. It tells the story of a young lad, Davie Crawfurd, who goes to South Africa to become a shopkeeper, and helps thwart a potentially dangerous but brave native rising by a black ordained minister, the Reverend John Laputa, whom he first sees dance on the sands of th
e Fife coast. (JB had occasionally met African ministers in his childhood, when they were invited to preach in his father’s church.) The charismatic Laputa claims to be the successor of the legendary Prester John, who some said was a Christian king of Ethiopia in the Middle Ages, in order to unify scattered African tribes. It is obvious, from his portrayal of Jim Arcoll, the intelligence officer who is keeping tabs on Laputa, that JB knew quite a lot about secret-service intelligence; he had gained this knowledge from his acquaintanceship in South Africa with men such as Lieutenant Edmund Ironside and Lieutenant-Colonel David Henderson, Director of British Military Intelligence during the Boer War. (The latter – head of the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War – was a Scotsman who had been to the University of Glasgow, and who JB referred to as ‘beloved’, his warmest term of affection, reserved for only a very few friends.)

  Despite being a very exciting tale, containing wonderful descriptions of South African landscapes, and with a noble, if flawed, African protagonist, Prester John is well-nigh unreadable now, since the language used by some of the characters for the indigenous Africans – ‘savages’ in particular – is unacceptable to the modern reader. It makes uncomfortable reading, notwithstanding that such expressions were commonplace in 1910, do not appear to have been loaded with such negative connotations and attracted no discernible adverse criticisms at the time or for many years after.

  It was in 1910 that JB began seriously to think about a parliamentary career, now that he was well established in publishing, and earning a reasonable living, yet had time to spare. He encountered no opposition from his partners at Nelson’s. His parents were periodically ill, sometimes separately, sometimes together, and that may well have decided him to seek a Border constituency to fight in the Unionist interest. In October, for example, he spent much time at Peebles, toing and froing from Parkside, as his mother was very ill, in great pain and very weak. She would periodically ‘go off in a swoon’ and JB was very worried that one of these attacks would kill her. ‘She is absolutely resigned to dying, which is a bad sign,’ he told his wife. ‘I am torn between anxiety for Mother and my longing for you.’10 At this moment of crisis, Walter found a tenant for ‘Woodlands’ so that his parents could move into Bank House, where they could be looked after by Anna and himself, as well as by kindly servants. They would stay there until their deaths.

  Mrs Buchan staggered on into 1911, sometimes suffering extremely high temperatures, which made her delirious. Finally, in March, JB persuaded her to come to London to be examined by Sir Almroth Wright, a terrifyingly eminent and expensive doctor with a name out of Trollope and a specialism in bacteriology. He diagnosed her condition as pernicious anaemia and she stayed three months in London to be treated by him. By May, Wright thought he had scotched ‘the microbe’ using ‘vaccinations’.

  Meanwhile, Susie was suffering from one of the periodic bouts of depression, which descended on her from time to time throughout her married life – what JB referred to, guardedly, in letters to her as ‘le chien noir’. These episodes brought out the most protective instincts in JB, for whom such an affliction was almost unknown. ‘Never fear about your nerves, my little Moufflée, you and I together will put them all right,’11 he wrote to her in February 1911.

  That spring he was adopted as the Conservative and Unionist candidate for the constituency of Peebles and Selkirk, a (usually) Liberal seat whose incumbent at that time was the well-respected Donald Maclean.* In June the Buchans accepted an invitation from Moritz Bonn and his wife, Theresa, to stay with them at a house they had rented by a small lake called Rosensee outside Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge. (It is a piquant irony that, in February 1917, Bonn was working as a propagandist for the German government, endeavouring to encourage the Americans to stay out of the war, while his friend, JB, was doing the exact opposite.)

  JB was never so completely happy as when he was amongst mountains and, while staying with the Bonns, he set out one morning before dawn to climb the Alpspitze, accompanied only by a young forester called Sebastian. They duly reached the top but, on the walk down to the valley, something happened that he never forgot:

  It was a brilliant summer day with a promise of great heat, but our road lay through pleasant shady pinewoods and flowery meadows. I noticed that my companion had fallen silent, and, glancing at him, was amazed to see that his face was dead-white, that sweat stood in beads on his forehead, and that his eyes were staring ahead as if he were in an agony of fear…

  Sebastian began to run heedlessly down the hillside and JB caught his terror and ran, too:

  … like demented bacchanals, tearing down the glades, leaping rocks, bursting through thickets, colliding with trees, sometimes colliding with each other, and all the time we never uttered a sound.

  JB thought, on reflection, that what had seized them with panic was that Sebastian ‘had seen the goat-foot god…’12

  Something similar had happened to JB as a boy, when he found himself utterly alone on a Peebleshire hill, out of sight of sheep or sound of birds. An imagination that can break the bounds of reason is an uncomfortable thing to possess, but this acute sensitivity to atmosphere is, at the same time, a great benefit to a writer, and something of these sensations found their way into his supernatural fiction.

  *

  After their trip to Bavaria, the Buchans joined the family once more at Harehope, staying for a couple of months while JB visited many parts of the constituency. That year JB and Willie (in India) competed with each other as to who was to buy a car and hire a chauffeur, so that their mother could get some restorative fresh air, and so JB could visit his far-flung potential constituents. JB won.

  Susie’s mother also came north to keep them company. ‘I am hugely enjoying being with Susie and John,’ she told a sister. ‘They have got a motor and we go huge long expeditions in which John pays visits to all sorts of houses and cottages and nurses the constituency in the most approved manner. Susie is looking wonderfully well considering all things [she was pregnant again] … I’m beginning to feel quite fit again in this splendid air with very little to do except talk myself hoarse to Susie and John. It is a heavenly little place high up in the hills. Very simple but quite comfortable enough.’13 It must have been quite spacious, for Mrs Grosvenor never went anywhere without enormous domed trunks for her clothes, masses of painting equipment and a lady’s maid. Meanwhile, during that summer, JB’s parents pottered about Broughton and the retired minister worked on a history of Peebleshire poets.

  In local halls all over the constituency, JB drew good crowds, who were often appreciative, but they could be deadly hecklers, especially as he was standing as a Tory. JB came from a mainly Liberal family, and from a country where the Liberal party’s dogmas ‘were so completely taken for granted that their presentation partook less of argument than of a tribal incantation. Mr. Gladstone had given it [the Liberal Party] an aura of earnest morality, so that its platforms were also pulpits and its harangues had the weight of sermons. Its members seemed to assume that their opponents must be lacking either in morals or mind.’14 Something of the flavour of those political meetings at which JB spoke can be gleaned from his novels. In John Macnab he describes graphically how nervous Sir Archie Roylance is before his first public speech, and in The Thirty-Nine Steps he makes a joke at the expense of the Liberals, especially those who denied the menace of Germany, by having the young, callow Radical candidate, Sir Harry, speak what seems to Hannay to be naïve nonsense at his political meeting:

  He was all for reducing our Navy as a proof of our good faith, and then sending Germany an ultimatum telling her to do the same or we would knock her into a cocked hat. He said that, but for the Tories, Germany and Britain would be fellow-workers in peace and reform. I thought of the little black book in my pocket! [which contained the notes Scudder made about the German Black Stone gang]. A giddy lot Scudder’s friends cared for peace and reform.15

  In the autumn Nelson’s published Sir Walter Ral
eigh, an expansion of JB’s Stanhope prize essay, which was aimed at teenagers. He dedicated it to ‘My dear Ted’, the young son of George Brown, from ‘Your affectionate friend, J.B.’ The same month his brother Alastair started his studies at the University of Glasgow. At the same time, his brother Willie, with two friends, made an epic journey through Sikkim to the Talung Glacier, from where Mount Kanchenjunga rears up sheer, with Everest showing behind it. No European traveller had ever got so close to Kanchenjunga and the men did useful surveying work. Willie described the trip in detail in an article published in Blackwood’s Magazine in April 1912 (the same edition that contained JB’s bleak short story of Border reivers [raiders], ‘The Riding of Ninemileburn’). William Blackwood wrote to Willie: ‘I read your article … with intense interest and admiration, being struck by the power possessed by two brothers of such vivid, descriptive writing.’16 ‘It is very nice to find myself cheek by jowl with your fine story, though hardly fair to my article!’17 Willie wrote to his brother.

  At the end of October 1911, Mrs Buchan became very ill once more and her husband was sufficiently alarmed to write to JB twice about her. She was so weak that he doubted she would survive till Willie came home the following summer. But it was he, not his wife, who died, suddenly and painlessly, one Sunday afternoon in November at Bank House. Willie in India was distraught when he received the telegram and also ‘desperately afraid that the blow will be too much for Mother’s strength and I live in daily fear of another cable’.18

  However, like many people who are apt to make ‘a pother about trifles’, Mrs Buchan faced real grief and loss with courage and few complaints. When JB dashed up to Peebles, he found her ‘really wonderful, reading letters of sympathy, and better in health to my eyes than she has been for long. I took my last look of my beloved old Father. He was lying most majestic in death, like a great statue … The people of Peebles have all been exceedingly kind. The clannishness of a little county town shows its good side on these occasions.’19