by John Buchan
I had Tam to dinner at my hotel, and later, sitting smoking on the terrace and watching the flying-ants among the aloes, I told him the better part of the story I have here written down.
‘Man, Davie,’ he said at the end, ‘you’ve had a tremendous time. Here are you not eighteen months away from home, and you’re going back with a fortune. What will you do with it?’ I told him that I proposed, to begin with, to finish my education at Edinburgh College. At this he roared with laughter.
‘That’s a dull ending, anyway. It’s me that should have the money, for I’m full of imagination. You were aye a prosaic body, Davie.’
‘Maybe I am,’ I said; ‘but I am very sure of one thing. If I hadn’t been a prosaic body, I wouldn’t be sitting here to-night.’
Two years later Aitken found the diamond pipe, which he had always believed lay in the mountains. Some of the stones in the cave, being unlike any ordinary African diamonds, confirmed his suspicions and set him on the track. A Kaffir tribe to the north-east of the Rooirand had known of it, but they had never worked it, but only collected the overspill. The closing down of one of the chief existing mines had created a shortage of diamonds in the world’s markets, and once again the position was the same as when Kimberley began. Accordingly he made a great fortune, and to-day the Aitken Proprietary Mine is one of the most famous in the country. But Aitken did more than mine diamonds, for he had not forgotten the lesson we had learned together in the work of resettlement. He laid down a big fund for the education and amelioration of the native races, and the first fruit of it was the establishment at Blaauwildebeestefontein itself of a great native training college. It was no factory for making missionaries and black teachers, but an institution for giving the Kaffirs the kind of training which fits them to be good citizens of the state. There you will find every kind of technical workshop, and the finest experimental farms, where the blacks are taught modern agriculture. They have proved themselves apt pupils, and to-day you will see in the glens of the Berg and in the plains Kaffir tillage which is as scientific as any in Africa. They have created a huge export trade in tobacco and fruit; the cotton promises well; and there is talk of a new fibre which will do wonders. Also along the river bottoms the india-rubber business is prospering.
There are playing-fields and baths and reading-rooms and libraries just as in a school at home. In front of the great hall of the college a statue stands, the figure of a black man shading his eyes with his hands and looking far over the plains to the Rooirand. On the pedestal it is lettered ‘Prester John,’ but the face is the face of Laputa. So the last of the kings of Africa does not lack his monument.
Of this institution Mr Wardlaw is the head. He writes to me weekly, for I am one of the governors, as well as an old friend, and from a recent letter I take this passage:
‘I often cast my mind back to the afternoon when you and I sat on the stoep of the schoolhouse, and talked of the Kaffirs and our future. I had about a dozen pupils then, and now I have nearly three thousand; and in place of a tin-roofed shanty and a yard, I have a whole countryside. You laughed at me for my keenness, Davie, but I’ve seen it justified. I was never a man of war like you, and so I had to bide at home while you and your like were straightening out the troubles. But when it was all over my job began, for I could do what you couldn’t do — I was the physician to heal wounds. You mind how nervous I was when I heard the drums beat. I hear them every evening now, for we have made a rule that all the Kaffir farms on the Berg sound a kind of curfew. It reminds me of old times, and tells me that though it is peace nowadays we mean to keep all the manhood in them that they used to exercise in war. It would do your eyes good to see the garden we have made out of the Klein Labongo glen. The place is one big orchard with every kind of tropical fruit in it, and the irrigation dam is as full of fish as it will hold. Out at Umvelos’ there is a tobacco-factory, and all round Sikitola’s we have square miles of mealie and cotton fields. The loch on the Rooirand is stocked with Lochleven trout, and we have made a bridle-path up to it in a gully east of the one you climbed. You ask about Machudi’s. The last time I was there the place was white with sheep, for we have got the edge of the plateau grazed down, and sheep can get the short bite there. We have cleaned up all the kraals, and the chiefs are members of our county council, and are as fond of hearing their own voices as an Aberdeen bailie. It’s a queer transformation we have wrought, and when I sit and smoke my pipe in the evening, and look over the plains and then at the big black statue you and Aitken set up, I thank the Providence that has guided me so far. I hope and trust that, in the Bible words, “the wilderness and the solitary place are glad for us.” At any rate it will not be my fault if they don’t “blossom as the rose”. Come out and visit us soon, man, and see the work you had a hand in starting... ‘
I am thinking seriously of taking Wardlaw’s advice.
THE END
THE POWER-HOUSE
A thriller set in London, this novel first was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1913. The narrator is the barrister and Tory MP Edward Leithen, who features in a number of Buchan’s novels. The urban setting contrasts with that of its sequel, John Macnab, which is set in the Scottish Highlands. In the narrative, the ‘Power-House’ of the title is an international anarchist organisation led by rich Englishman Andrew Lumley, whose evil plan to destroy Western civilisation is thwarted by Leithen with the assistance of a burly Labour MP.
The first edition
CONTENTS
PREFACE BY THE EDITOR.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
TO
MAJOR-GENERAL SIR FRANCIS LLOYD K.C.B.
MY DEAR GENERAL, A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dug-outs and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities, I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
J.B.
PREFACE BY THE EDITOR.
WE were at Glenaicill — six of us — for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.
Conversation, I remember, turned on some of Jim’s trophies which grinned at us from the firelit walls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. Then Hoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on the Bramaputra, told us some queer things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jim said he couldn’t abide mud — anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. (He was to get enough of it last winter in the Ypres Salient.) You know how one tale begets another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for five of us had been a good deal about the world.
All except Leithen, the man who was afterwards Solicitor-General, and, they say, will get to the Woolsack in time. I don’t suppose he had ever been farther from home than Monte Carlo, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.
Jim had just finished a fairly steep yarn about his experiences on a Boundary Commission near Lake Chad, and Leithen got up to find a drink.
“Lucky devils,” he said. “You’ve had all the fun out of life. I’ve had my nose to the grindstone ever since I left school.”
I said something about his h
aving all the honour and glory.
“All the same,” he went on, “I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London. And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ you know.”
Then he told us this story. The version I give is one he afterwards wrote down, when he had looked up his diary for some of the details.
CHAPTER I.
BEGINNING OF THE WILD-GOOSE CHASE.
IT all started one afternoon early in May when I came out of the House of Commons with Tommy Deloraine. I had got in by an accident at a by-election, when I was supposed to be fighting a forlorn hope, and as I was just beginning to be busy at the Bar I found my hands pretty full. It was before Tommy succeeded, in the days when he sat for the family seat in Yorkshire, and that afternoon he was in a powerful bad temper. Out of doors it was jolly spring weather; there was greenery in Parliament Square and bits of gay colour, and a light wind was blowing up from the river. Inside a dull debate was winding on, and an advertising member had been trying to get up a row with the Speaker. The contrast between the frowsy place and the cheerful world outside would have impressed even the soul of a Government Whip.
Tommy sniffed the spring breeze like a supercilious stag.
“This about finishes me,” he groaned. “What a juggins I am to be mouldering here! Joggleberry is the celestial limit, what they call in happier lands the pink penultimate. And the frowst on those back benches! Was there ever such a moth-eaten old museum?”
“It is the Mother of Parliaments,” I observed.
“Damned monkey-house,” said Tommy. “I must get off for a bit or I’ll bonnet Joggleberry or get up and propose a national monument to Guy Fawkes or something silly.”
I did not see him for a day or two, and then one morning he rang me up and peremptorily summoned me to dine with him. I went, knowing very well what I should find. Tommy was off next day to shoot lions on the Equator, or something equally unconscientious. He was a bad acquaintance for a placid, sedentary soul like me, for though he could work like a Trojan when the fit took him, he was never at the same job very long. In the same week he would harass an Under-Secretary about horses for the Army, write voluminously to the press about a gun he had invented for potting aeroplanes, give a fancy-dress ball which he forgot to attend, and get into the semi-final of the racquets championship. I waited daily to see him start a new religion.
That night, I recollect, he had an odd assortment of guests. A Cabinet Minister was there, a gentle being for whom Tommy professed public scorn and private affection; a sailor, an Indian cavalry fellow; Chapman, the Labour member, whom Tommy called Chipmunk; myself, and old Milson of the Treasury. Our host was in tremendous form, chaffing everybody, and sending Chipmunk into great rolling gusts of merriment. The two lived adjacent in Yorkshire, and on platforms abused each other like pick-pockets.
Tommy enlarged on the misfits of civilised life. He maintained that none of us, except perhaps the sailor and the cavalryman, were at our proper jobs. He would have had Wytham — that was the Minister — a cardinal of the Roman Church, and he said that Milson should have been the Warden of a college full of port and prejudice. Me he was kind enough to allocate to some reconstructed Imperial General Staff, merely because I had a craze for military history. Tommy’s perception did not go very deep. He told Chapman he should have been a lumberman in California. “You’d have made an uncommon good logger, Chipmunk, and you know you’re a dashed bad politician.”
When questioned about himself he became reticent, as the newspapers say. “I doubt if I’m much good at any job,” he confessed, “except to ginger up my friends. Anyhow I’m getting out of this hole. Paired for the rest of the session with a chap who has lockjaw. I’m off to stretch my legs and get back my sense of proportion.”
Someone asked him where he was going, and was told “Venezuela, to buy Government bonds and look for birds’ nests.”
Nobody took Tommy seriously, so his guests did not trouble to bid him the kind of farewell a prolonged journey would demand. But when the others had gone, and we were sitting in the little back smoking-room on the first floor, he became solemn. Portentously solemn, for he wrinkled up his brows and dropped his jaw in the way he had when he fancied he was in earnest.
“I’ve taken on a queer job, Leithen,” he said, “and I want you to hear about it. None of my family know, and I would like to leave someone behind me who could get on to my tracks if things got troublesome.”
I braced myself for some preposterous confidence, for I was experienced in Tommy’s vagaries. But I own to being surprised when he asked me if I remembered Pitt-Heron.
I remembered Pitt-Heron very well. He had been at Oxford with me, but he was no great friend of mine, though for about two years Tommy and he had been inseparable. He had had a prodigious reputation for cleverness with everybody but the college authorities, and used to spend his vacations doing mad things in the Alps and the Balkans, and writing about them in the halfpenny press. He was enormously rich — cotton-mills and Liverpool ground-rents — and being without a father, did pretty much what his fantastic taste dictated. He was rather a hero for a bit after he came down, for he had made some wild journey in the neighbourhood of Afghanistan, and written an exciting book about it.
Then he married a pretty cousin of Tommy’s, who happened to be the only person that ever captured my stony heart, and settled down in London. I did not go to their house, and soon I found that very few of his friends saw much of him either. His travels and magazine articles suddenly stopped, and I put it down to the common course of successful domesticity. Apparently I was wrong.
“Charles Pitt-Heron,” said Tommy, “is blowing up for a most thundering mess.”
I asked what kind of mess, and Tommy said he didn’t know. “That’s the mischief of it. You remember the wild beggar he used to be, always off on the spree to the Mountains of the Moon or somewhere. Well, he has been damping down his fires lately, and trying to behave like a respectable citizen, but God knows what he has been thinking! I go a good deal to Portman Square, and all last year he has been getting queerer.”
Questions as to the nature of the queerness only elicited the fact that Pitt-Heron had taken to science with some enthusiasm.
“He has got a laboratory at the back of the house — used to be the billiard-room — where he works away half the night. And Lord! The crew you meet there! Every kind of heathen — Chinese and Turks, and long-haired chaps from Russia, and fat Germans. I’ve several times blundered into the push. They’ve all got an odd secretive air about them, and Charlie is becoming like them. He won’t answer a plain question or look you straight in the face. Ethel sees it too, and she has often talked to me about it.”
I said I saw no harm in such a hobby.
“I do,” said Tommy grimly. “Anyhow, the fellow has bolted.”
“What on earth — —” I began, but was cut short.
“Bolted without a word to a mortal soul. He told Ethel he would be home for luncheon yesterday, and never came. His man knew nothing about him, hadn’t packed for him or anything; but he found he had stuffed some things into a kit-bag and gone out by the back through the mews. Ethel was in terrible straits and sent for me, and I ranged all yesterday afternoon like a wolf on the scent. I found he had drawn a biggish sum in gold from the bank, but I couldn’t find any trace of where he had gone.
“I was just setting out for Scotland Yard this morning when Tomlin, the valet, rang me up and said he had found a card in the waistcoat of the dress clothes that Charles had worn the night before he left. It had a name on it like Konalevsky, and it struck me that they might know something about the business at the Russian Embassy. Well, I went round there, and the long and short of it was that I found there was a fellow of that name among the clerks. I saw him, and he said he had gone to s
ee Mr Pitt-Heron two days before with a letter from some Embassy chap. Unfortunately the man in question had gone off to New York next day, but Konalevsky told me one thing which helped to clear up matters. It seemed that the letter had been one of those passports that Embassies give to their friends — a higher-powered sort than the ordinary make — and Konalevsky gathered from something he had heard that Charles was aiming at Moscow.”
Tommy paused to let his news sink in.
“Well, that was good enough for me. I’m off to-morrow to run him to ground.”
“But why shouldn’t a man go to Moscow if he wants?” I said feebly.
“You don’t understand,” said the sage Tommy. “You don’t know old Charles as I know him. He’s got into a queer set, and there’s no knowing what mischief he’s up to. He’s perfectly capable of starting a revolution in Armenia or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That’s the damned thing about the artistic temperament. Anyhow, he’s got to chuck it. I won’t have Ethel scared to death by his whims. I am going to hale him back from Moscow, even if I have to pretend he’s an escaped lunatic. He’s probably like enough one by this time if he has taken no clothes.”
I have forgotten what I said, but it was some plea for caution. I could not see the reason for these heroics. Pitt-Heron did not interest me greatly, and the notion of Tommy as a defender of the hearth amused me. I thought that he was working on very slight evidence, and would probably make a fool of himself.
“It’s only another of the man’s fads,” I said. “He never could do things like an ordinary mortal. What possible trouble could there be? Money?”
“Rich as Crœsus,” said Tommy.
“A woman?”
“Blind as a bat to female beauty.”