by John Buchan
‘Get that prentit,’ he said, ‘and pit up copies at every street corner and on a’ the public-hooses. And see that the doors o’ the publics are boardit up. That’ll do for the day. I’m feelin’ verra like my bed.’
Mam’selle Omèrine watched him with a smile. She caught his eye and dropped him a curtsey.
‘Monsieur le Roi d’Ypres,’ she said.
He blushed hotly.
For the next few days Private Galbraith worked harder than ever before in his existence. For the first time he knew responsibility, and that toil which brings honour with it. He tasted the sweets of office; and he, whose aim in life had been to scrape through with the minimum of exertion, now found himself the inspirer of the maximum in others.
At first he scorned advice, being shy and nervous. Gradually, as he felt his feet, he became glad of other people’s wisdom. Especially he leaned on two, Mam’selle Omèrine and her father. Likewise the priest, whom he called the minister.
By the second day the order in Ypres was remarkable. By the third day it was phenomenal; and by the fourth a tyranny. The little city for the first time for seven hundred years fell under the sway of a despot. A citizen had to be on his best behaviour, for the Acting Provost’s eye was on him. Never was seen so sober a place. Three permits for alcohol and no more were issued, and then only on the plea of medical necessity. Peter handed over to the doctor the flask of brandy he had carried off from the estaminet — Provosts must set an example.
The Draconian code promulgated the first night was not adhered to. Looters and violent fellows went to gaol instead of the gallows. But three spies were taken and shot after a full trial. That trial was the master effort of Private Galbraith — based on his own regimental experience and memories of a Sheriff Court in Lanarkshire, where he had twice appeared for poaching. He was extraordinarily punctilious about forms, and the three criminals — their guilt was clear, and they were the scum of creation — had something more than justice. The Acting Provost pronounced sentence, which the priest translated, and a file of mutilés in the yard did the rest.
‘If the Boches get in here we’ll pay for this day’s work,’ said the judge cheerfully; ‘but I’ll gang easier to the grave for havin’ got rid o’ thae swine.’
On the fourth day he had a sudden sense of dignity. He examined his apparel, and found it very bad. He needed a new bonnet, a new kilt, and puttees, and he would be the better of a new shirt. Being aware that commandeering for personal use ill suited with his office, he put the case before the Procureur, and a Commission de Ravitaillement was appointed. Shirts and puttees were easily got, but the kilt and bonnet were difficulties. But next morning Mam’selle Omèrine brought a gift. It was a bonnet with such a dicing round the rim as no Jock ever wore, and a skirt — it is the truest word — of that pattern which graces the persons of small girls in France. It was not the Lennox tartan, it was not any kind of tartan, but Private Galbraith did not laugh. He accepted the garments with a stammer of thanks—’They’re awfu’ braw, and I’m much obliged, Mem’ — and, what is more, he put them on. The Ypriotes saw his splendour with approval. It was a proof of his new frame of mind that he did not even trouble to reflect what his comrades would think of his costume, and that he kissed the bonnet affectionately before he went to bed.
That night he had evil dreams. He suddenly saw the upshot of it all —— himself degraded and shot as a deserter, and his brief glory pricked like a bubble. Grim forebodings of court-martials assailed him. What would Mam’selle think of him when he was led away in disgrace — he who for a little had been a king? He walked about the floor in a frenzy of disquiet, and stood long at the window peering over the Place, lit by a sudden blink of moonlight. It could never be, he decided. Something desperate would happen first. The crash of a shell a quarter of a mile off reminded him that he was in the midst of war — war with all its chances of cutting knots.
Next morning no Procureur appeared. Then came the priest with a sad face and a sadder tale. Mam’selle had been out late the night before on an errand of mercy, and a shell, crashing through a gable, had sent an avalanche of masonry into the street. She was dead, without pain, said the priest, and in the sure hope of Heaven.
The others wept, but Private Galbraith strode from the room, and in a very little time was at the house of the Procureur. He saw his little colleague laid out for death after the fashion of her Church, and his head suddenly grew very clear and his heart hotter than fire.
‘I maun resign this job,’ he told the Committee of Public Safety.
‘I’ve been forgettin’ that I’m a sodger and no a Provost. It’s my duty to get a nick at thae Boches.’
They tried to dissuade him, but he was adamant. His rule was over, and he was going back to serve.
But he was not allowed to resign. For that afternoon, after a week’s absence, the British troops came again into Ypres.
They found a decorous little city, and many people who spoke of ‘le Roi’ - which they assumed to signify the good King Albert. Also, in a corner of the cathedral yard, sitting disconsolately on the edge of a fallen monument, Company Sergeant-Major Macvittie of the 3rd Lennox Highlanders found Private Peter Galbraith.
‘Ma God, Galbraith, ye’ve done it this time! You’ll catch it in the neck! Absent for a week wi’out leave, and gettin’ yoursel’ up to look like Harry Lauder! You come along wi’ me!’
‘I’ll come quiet,’ said Galbraith with strange meekness. He was wondering how to spell Omèrine St Marais in case he wanted to write it in his Bible.
The events of the next week were confusing to a plain man. Galbraith was very silent, and made no reply to the chaff with which at first he was greeted. Soon his fellows forbore to chaff him, regarding him as a doomed man who had come well within the pale of the ultimate penalties.
He was examined by his Commanding Officer, and interviewed by still more exalted personages. The story he told was so bare as to be unintelligible. He asked for no mercy, and gave no explanations. But there were other witnesses besides him — the priest, for example, and Monsieur St Marais, in a sober suit of black and very dark under the eyes.
By and by the Court gave its verdict. Private Peter Galbraith was found guilty of riding roughshod over the King’s Regulations; he had absented himself from his battalion without permission; he had neglected his own duties and usurped without authority a number of superior functions; he had been the cause of the death or maltreatment of various persons who, whatever their moral deficiencies, must be regarded for the purposes of the case as civilian Allies. The Court, however, taking into consideration the exceptional circumstances in which Private Galbraith had been placed, inflicted no penalty and summarily discharged the prisoner.
Privately, his Commanding Officer and the still more exalted personages shook hands with him, and told him that he was a devilish good fellow and a credit to the British Army.
But Peter Galbraith cared for none of these things. As he sat again in the trenches at St Eloi in six inches of water and a foot of mud, he asked his neighbour how many Germans were opposite them.
‘I was hearin’ that there was maybe fifty thoosand,’ was the answer. Private Galbraith was content. He thought that the whole fifty thousand would scarcely atone for the death of one slim, dark-eyed girl.
Fullcircle
Blackwood’s Magazine, 1920
Between the Windrush and the Colne
I found a little house of stone —
A little wicked house of stone.
THE OCTOBER DAY was brightening toward late afternoon when Leithen and I climbed the hill above the stream and came in sight of the house. All morning a haze with the sheen of pearl in it had lain on the folds of downland, and the vision of far horizons, which is the glory of Cotswold, had been veiled, so that every valley seemed as a place inclosed and set apart. But now a glow had come into the air, and for a little the autumn lawns stole the tints of summer. The gold of sunshine was warm on the grasses, and only the r
iot of colour in the berry-laden edges of the fields and the slender woodlands told of the failing year.
We were looking into a green cup of the hills, and it was all a garden. A little place, bounded by slopes that defined its graciousness with no hint of barrier, so that a dweller there, though his view was but half a mile on any side, would yet have the sense of dwelling on uplands and commanding the world. Round the top edge ran an old wall of stones, beyond which the October bracken flamed to the skyline. Inside were folds of ancient pasture, with here and there a thorn-bush, falling to rose gardens and, on one side, to the smooth sward of a terrace above a tiny lake.
At the heart of it stood the house like a jewel well-set. It was a miniature, but by the hand of a master. The style was late seventeenth century, when an agreeable classic convention had opened up to sunlight and comfort the dark magnificence of the Tudor fashion. The place had the spacious air of a great mansion, and was furnished in every detail with a fine scrupulousness. Only when the eye measured its proportions with the woods and the hillside did the mind perceive that it was a small dwelling.
The stone of Cotswold takes curiously the colour of the weather. Under thunderclouds it will be as dark as basalt; on a grey day it will be grey like lava but in sunshine it absorbs the sun. At the moment the little house was pale gold, like honey.
Leithen swung a long leg across the stile.
‘Pretty good, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s pure, authentic Sir Christopher Wren. The name is worthy of it, too. It is called Fullcircle.’
He told me its story. It had been built after the Restoration by the Carteron family, whose wide domains ran into these hills. The Lord Carteron of the day was a friend of the Merry Monarch; but it was not as a sanctuary for orgies that he built the house. Perhaps he was tired of the gloomy splendour of Minster Carteron, and wanted a home of his own and not of his ancestors’ choosing. He had an elegant taste in letters, as we can learn from his neat imitations of Martial, his pretty Bucolics and the more than respectable Latin hexameters of his Ars Vivendi. Being a great nobleman, he had the best skill of the day to construct his hermitage, and thither he would retire for months at a time, with like-minded friends, to a world of books and gardens. He seems to have had no ill-wishers; contemporary memoirs speak of him charitably and Dry den spared him four lines of encomium. ‘A selfish old dog,’ Leithen called him. ‘He had the good sense to eschew politics and enjoy life. His soul is in that little house. He only did one rash thing in his career — he anticipated the King, his master, by some years in turning Papist.’
I asked about its later history.
‘After his death it passed to a younger branch of the Carterons. It left them in the eighteenth century, and the Applebys got it. They were a jovial lot of hunting squires and let the library go to the dogs. Old Colonel Appleby was still alive when I came to Borrowby. Something went wrong in his inside when he was nearly seventy, and the doctors knocked him off liquor. Not that he drank too much, though he did himself well. That finished the poor old boy. He told me that it revealed to him the amazing truth that during a long and, as he hoped, publicly useful life he had never been quite sober. He was a good fellow and I missed him when he died. The place went to a remote cousin called Giffen.’
Leithen’s eyes as they scanned the prospect, seemed amused.
‘Julian and Ursula Giffen — I dare say you know the names. They always hunt in couples, and write books about sociology and advanced ethics and psychics — books called either “The New This or That” or “The Truth about Something or Other”. You know the sort of thing. They’re deep in all the pseudo-sciences. They’re decent souls, but you can guess the type. I came across them in a case I had at the Old Bailey —— defending a ruffian who was charged with murder. I hadn’t a doubt he deserved hanging on twenty counts, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him on this one. Dodderidge was at his worst — it was just before they induced him to retire — and his handling of the jury was a masterpiece of misdirection. Of course, there was a shindy. The thing was a scandal, and it stirred up all the humanitarians till the murderer was almost forgotten in the iniquities of old Dodderidge. You must remember the case. It filled the papers for weeks. Well, it was in that connection that I fell in with the Giffens. I got rather to like them, and I’ve been to see them at their house in Hampstead. Golly, what a place! Not a chair fit to sit down on, and colours that made you want to howl. I never met people whose heads were so full of feathers.’
I said something about that being an odd milieu for him.
‘Oh, I like human beings, all kinds. It’s my profession to study them, for without that the practice of the law would be a dismal affair. There are hordes of people like the Giffens — only not so good, for they really have hearts of gold. They are the rootless stuff in the world today. In revolt against everything and everybody with any ancestry. A kind of innocent self-righteousness — wanting to be the people with whom wisdom begins and ends. They are mostly sensitive and tenderhearted, but they wear themselves out in an eternal dissidence. Can’t build, you know, for they object to all tools, but very ready to crab. They scorn any form of Christianity, but they’ll walk miles to patronise some wretched sect that has the merit of being brand-new. “Pioneers” they call themselves — funny little unclad people adventuring into the cold desert with no maps. Giffen once described himself and his friends to me as “forward-looking”, but that, of course, is just what they are not. To tackle the future you must have a firm grip of the past, and for them, the past is only a pathological curiosity. They’re up to their necks in the mud of the present - but good, after a fashion; and innocent - sordidly innocent. Fate was in an ironical mood when she saddled them with that wicked little house.’
‘Wicked’ did not seem to me to be a fair word. It sat honey-coloured among its gardens with the meekness of a dove.
The sound of a bicycle on the road behind made us turn round, and Leithen advanced to meet a dismounting rider.
He was a tallish fellow, some forty years old, perhaps, with one of those fluffy blond beards that have never been shaved. Short-sighted, of course, and wore glasses. Biscuit-coloured knickerbockers and stockings clad his lean limbs.
Leithen introduced me. ‘We are walking to Borrowby and stopped to admire your house. Could we have just a glimpse inside? I want Jardine to see the staircase.’
Mr Giffen was very willing. ‘I’ve been over to Clyston to send a telegram. We have some friends for the week-end who might interest you. Won’t you stay to tea?’
He had a gentle, formal courtesy about him, and his voice had the facile intonations of one who loves to talk. He led us through a little gate, and along a shorn green walk among the bracken, to a postern which gave entrance to the garden. Here, though it was October, there was still a bright show of roses, and the jet of water from the leaden Cupid dripped noiselessly among fallen petals. And then we stood before the doorway above which the old Carteron had inscribed a line of Horace.
I have never seen anything quite like the little hall. There were two, indeed, separated by a staircase of a wood that looked like olive. Both were paved with black-and-white marble, and the inner was oval in shape, with a gallery supported on slender walnut pillars. It was all in miniature, but it had a spaciousness which no mere size could give. Also it seemed to be permeated by the quintessence of sunlight. Its air was of long-descended, confident, equable happiness.
There were voices on the terrace beyond the hall. Giffen led us into a little room on the left. ‘You remember the house in Colonel Appleby’s time, Leithen. This was the chapel. It had always been the chapel. You see the change we have made. — I beg your pardon, Mr Jardine. You’re not by any chance a Roman Catholic?’
The room had a white panelling and, on two sides, deep windows. At one end was a fine Italian shrine of marble, and the floor was mosaic, blue and white, in a quaint Byzantine pattern. There was the same air of sunny cheerfulness as in the rest of the house. No m
ystery could find a lodgement here. It might have been a chapel for three centuries, but the place was pagan. The Giffens’ changes were no sort of desecration. A green baize table filled most of the floor, surrounded by chairs like a committee room. On new raw-wood shelves were files of papers and stacks of blue-books and those desiccated works into which reformers of society torture the English tongue. Two typewriters stood on a side table.
‘It is our workroom,’ Giffen explained. ‘We hold our Sunday moots here. Ursula thinks that a week-end is wasted unless it produces some piece of real work. Often a quite valuable committee has its beginning here. We try to make our home a refuge for busy workers, where they need not idle but can work under happy conditions.’
‘“A college situate in a clearer air,”’Leithen quoted.
But Giffen did not respond except with a smile; he had probably never heard of Lord Falkland.
A woman entered the room, a woman who might have been pretty if she had taken a little pains. Her reddish hair was drawn tightly back and dressed in a hard knot, and her clothes were horribly incongruous in a remote manor-house. She had bright eager eyes, like a bird, and hands that fluttered nervously. She greeted Leithen with warmth.
‘We have settled down marvellously,’ she told him. ‘Julian and I feel as if we had always lived here, and our life has arranged itself so perfectly. My mothers’ cottages in the village will soon be ready, and the Club is to be opened next week. Julian and I will carry on the classes ourselves for the first winter. Next year we hope to have a really fine programme. And then it is so pleasant to be able to entertain one’s friends. Won’t you stay to tea? Dr Swope is here, and Mary Elliston, and Mr Percy Blaker — you know, the Member of Parliament. Must you hurry off? I’m so sorry. - What do you think of our workroom? It was utterly terrible when we first came here - a sort of decayed chapel, like a withered tuberose. We have let the air of heaven into it.’