by John Buchan
His positive work belongs to history. So long as his friends live the man himself will be held in affectionate memory, for it would not be easy to overrate his essential goodness. He lived most fully the creed which he preached. Whoever sought his advice was given the full benefit of his great powers of mind. There was nothing slipshod in his benevolence. He loved humanity and loved the State, not as an abstraction but as a community of lovable and fallible human beings. He had a religion in the deepest sense. I think he was one of the least worldly men I have ever known, almost as unworldly as Milner. He enjoyed the various comforts vouchsafed to us in this melancholy vale — good food, good wine, good talk; he was devoted to his friends and happy in their society; but he always seemed to me to sit loose to the things of Time. When friends failed him he had no reproaches. He bore unjust attacks and popular distrust with a noble magnanimity He lived his life as one who had a continuing vision of the unseen.
Another of my consolations was mountaineering. In South Africa I had scrambled among the kloofs of the Drakensberg and the ranges of the Northern Transvaal, and, long before, I had climbed in the Highlands, but it was not until 1904 that I paid my first visit to the Alps. There I did a number of the usual courses, my chief resorts being Chamonix and Zermatt, and in 1906 I became a member of the Alpine Club. But my favourite ground was the Scots hills, especially Skye and the Coolins. In them it was still possible to make first ascents, and I came to know every crack and cranny from Garbsheinn to Sgurr-nan-Gillian. It was my ambition to be the first to traverse the whole range in a summer’s day, but I put off the enterprise too long and others got in before me.
We have many confessions of faith from those who have lifted their eyes to the hills I like best Mr. Belloc’s in his Path to Rome. “Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky, but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing, creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at home in Heaven.” The wittiest thing ever said about mountaineering, I think, was by George Meredith, that “every step is a debate between what you are and what you might become.” For myself, it brought me again into touch with the wild nature with which I had lived intimately in South Africa. My other sport, fishing, did not do that in the same degree; it was essentially a “slow movement among pastures,” even when it was pursued in March on the Helmsdale among scurries of snow. Just as sailing a small boat brings one close to the sea, so mountaineering lays one alongside the bones of mother earth. One meets her on equal terms and matches one’s skill and endurance against something which has no care for human life. There is also the joy of technical accomplishment. I never took kindly to snow and ice work but I found a strong fascination in rock climbing, whether on the granite slabs of the Chamonix aiguilles, or the sheer fissured precipices of the Dolomites, or the gabbro of the Coolins. A long rock climb is a series of problems each one different from the rest, which have to be solved by ingenuity of mind and versatility of body. I was fortunate to have the opposite of vertigo, for I found a physical comfort in looking down from great heights. Bodily fitness is essential, for there are always courses which you must have the strength to complete or court disaster. In any mountaineering holiday there are miserable days when the muscles are being got into order by training walks; but when these are over I know no physical wellbeing so perfect as that enjoyed by the mountaineer.
Then there are the moments of illumination. On a snow mountain there is the miserable getting up in the small hours, coffee in a bleak dining-room by the light of a single candle, a long stumble through dark pine woods and over dusky alpine pastures, a slow ascent among the crevasses of the glacier, and then — the second breakfast high up on a snow ridge when the world seems to heave itself out of night into day. Or on a rock mountain, when, after hours spent hugging the framework of the earth in cracks and chimneys, one comes out at the top to a spacious sunlit universe. I always felt the drama of the transition most sharply in Skye when, after a course among difficult chimneys or over faces with exiguous holds, one reached the ridge and saw the Minch, incredibly far below, stretching its bright waters to the sunset and the ultimate isles. Such moments gave me the impression of somehow being outside the world in the ether to which clouds and birds belong, of being very nearly pure spirit — until hunger reminded me that I had still a body.
I never had an accident mountaineering, or anything like one, though I often got into trouble, and once or twice came so near the limits of my strength that the mountains seemed to be leaping like the Scriptural rams. But I had one experience which I shall not soon forget. It was in 1910 in the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge above Partenkirchen. There is a small rock peak in the neighbourhood called the Alpspitze which I set out to climb about 2 a.m. one June morning, with, as my companion, a young forester called Sebastian We duly reached the summit, and about 9 a.m., after breakfast at a little mountain inn, began our walk of six miles or so to the valley. It was a brilliant summer day with a promise of great heat, but our road lay through pleasant shady pine woods 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, as if terror were all around him so that he dared not look one way rather than another. Suddenly he began to run, and I ran too, some power not myself constraining me. Terror had seized me also, but I did not know what I dreaded; it was like the epidemic of giggling which overcomes children who have no wish to laugh. We ran — we ran 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. At last we fetched up beside the much-frequented valley highway, where we lay for a time utterly exhausted. For the rest of the road home we did not speak; we did not even dare to look at each other.
What was the cause a I suppose it was Panic. Sebastian had seen the goat- foot god, or something of the kind — he was forest born, and Bavarian peasants are very near primeval things — and he had made me feel his terror. I have never had any similar experience, but a friend of mine had something like it in Norway. He was alone, climbing in the Jotunheim, and suddenly in a wild upland glen the terror of space and solitude came upon him. He ran for dear life, crossed a considerable range of mountains, and at last reached a saeter. There was no one in the place, but there were cattle, and he found sanctuary in a byre, where he nuzzled his face into the neck of a most astonished cow!
II
In the autumn of 1906 my unsettled years came happily to an end, for I became engaged to Susan Grosvenor, and we were married in the following July. I had no longer any craving for a solitary life at some extremity of the Empire, for England was once more for me an enchanted land, and London a magical city. I think that, in spite of my many friends and interests, I had been suffering from loneliness, since my family were four hundred miles away. Now I acquired a vast new relationship — Grosvenors, Wellesleys, Stuart-Wortleys, Lytteltons, Talbots — and above all I found the perfect comrade. I have been happy in many things, but all my other good fortune has been as dust in the balance compared with the blessing of an incomparable wife.
Just before my marriage I changed my profession, and at the invitation of my Oxford friend, Thomas Arthur Nelson, became a partner in his publishing firm, one of the oldest in Britain, which had its headquarters and its printing works in Edinburgh, and branches in London, New York and throughout the Empire.
It is not easy to draw on a little canvas the man whose nature is large and central and human, without cranks or oddities. The very simplicity and wholesomeness of such souls defy an easy summary, for they are as spacious in their effect as daylight or summer. Often we remember friends by a gesture, or a trick of expression, or by a favourite phrase, or some nicety of manner. These were trivial things in our friendship, bu
t they spring first to the mind in the act of recollection. But with Tommie Nelson I do not find myself thinking of such idiosyncrasies. I can recall many mannerisms of his, but it is only by an effort of thought, for they do not run to meet the memory. His presence warmed and lit up so big a region of life that in thinking of him one is overwhelmed by the multitude of things that he made better by simply existing among them. If you remove a fire from a hearth, you will remember the look, not so much of the blaze itself, as of the whole room in its pleasant glow.
At Oxford he and I were exactly contemporary. He was in some ways the most conspicuous figure of our academic generation, as president of Vincent’s, a rugby “Blue” and an “Internationalist,” and I think that, if at any time of our four years’ residence a poll had been taken for the most popular man in the University, he would have headed it. When I joined his firm in the autumn of 1906 I found that he had changed very little, except that his hair was slightly grizzled. He always looked fit, with a clear brown skin and the untroubled eyes of a boy. I never saw him haggard except at the Front. He was an adept in all Scottish sports — a good shot with gun and rifle, a bold rider to hounds, and a fisherman of the first order. He was a fine sportsman, not merely because he did everything well and with immense gusto, but because he had in his bones a love of wild life and adventure and contest. He was very serious too. He looked upon all classes of men with friendliness and understanding, and some response was won from the most angular. For all his abounding zest he had a rather grave, reflecting mind, natural in one who kept so fine a mental balance; and as time went on this seriousness increased. Yet he was very shy of talking about his creed, for he had a horror of anything like rhetoric and grandiosity. He could never forget what Carlyle has put into famous words: “It is a sad but sure truth that every time you speak of a fine purpose, especially if with eloquence and to the admiration of by-standers, there is the less chance of your ever making a fact of it in your own poor life.”
For ten years I was associated with him in business, and I cannot imagine a happier companionship. But, looking back, I can see that I was never quite at ease about him. I felt that he was fitted for greater things than anything I could foresee. About some people one has that consciousness of powers too big for their environment. A life of great domestic happiness, innumerable friends, a world enlivened and comforted by his presence — it would have seemed enough for most people, but it seemed too little for Tommie...Then came the War and the old life passed away in a night.
At first I saw nothing of him and we did not meet until the autumn of 1916. during the later stages of the battle of the Somme. He was having a trying time, with a number of observation posts to look after, and no kind of home anywhere. He was happier when, in early 1917, he entered the Tank service. When I used to visit Hugh Elles’s mess at Bermicourt I found that he had recovered his youth. But that youth was near its close, for in the last day of the battle of Arras he was killed instantaneously by a long-distance shell. I had to do a good deal of searching before I found and identified his grave.
His death made a bigger hole in the life of Scotland than that of any other man of his years. Heu! quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse. He was a rare being because he was so superbly normal, so wholly in tune with ordinary humanity, and therefore fitted to help in the “difficult but not desperate life of man.” In the case of others we might regret the premature loss to the world of some peculiar talent; with Tommie we mourned especially the loss of a talent for living worthily and helping others to do likewise. It is the kind of loss least easy to forget, and yet one which soon comes to be contemplated without pain, for he had succeeded most fully in life.
III
In business I found that I had a reasonable amount of leisure, for my firm was well organised and I had able colleagues. We were a progressive concern, and in our standardised Edinburgh factories we began the publication of cheap books in many tongues. On the eve of the War we must have been one of the largest businesses of the kind in the world, issuing cheap editions of every kind of literature, not only in English, but in French, German, Magyar and Spanish, and being about to start in Russian. I had opportunities for European travel, and, when our children were young, my wife and I visited the Balkans and Constantinople, Spain, Portugal, the Canaries and the Azores; we had a wonderful yachting trip in the Aegean and along the Dalmatian coast; we went to Norway to fish; and we had part of a summer in the Bavarian highlands. But most of our holidays were spent in Scotland.
On my marriage I gave up mountaineering as scarcely a married man’s game. I still fished whenever and wherever I got the chance, and I discovered a new sport in deer-stalking. About that time I ceased to shoot with a gun. for my love of birds was so great that I disliked killing them. I had never been much of a gun shot at my best, like the Ancient Mariner, “stopping one of three,” but I was fairly good on my day with a rifle. Stalking supplied the hunting element, and also took me to the high tops as much as in my old climbing days. In my time I have stalked in over twenty deer forests, and I have always had a clear view of how the game should be played. I liked best those forests in which long experience gave me some knowledge of the ground, so that I was not the slave of the stalker. I was a professed scavenger, and shot only for the sake of the forest. I wanted to kill freaks like hummels and switch-horns and old back-going beasts that would perish in the next winter. I would gladly stalk a young royal, but when I got my sights behind his shoulder I would take off my cap to him and go home — a habit popular with owners but not so popular with stalkers and gillies. Then I was in terror of wounding, and in the days of my pride, when I could trust myself, I generally took neck shots, which meant a dead kill or a clean miss. I only once wounded a stag, and after a sleepless night I got him the following day.
Stalking gave me a host of pleasures. In the first place, like Duncan Ban Macintyre, I loved the dun deer and was never tired of watching them and studying their ways. Those beautiful wild things were my chief link with the natural world. This love of the deer is common among stalkers and gillies, but in my experience it is rare among the “gentlemen,” who are too apt to regard them like the targets on a rifle range. Hence the talk in a lodge smoking-room in the evening is apt to be a dreary business: the steepness of the hills is cursed, weather and wind anathematised, and the shot, the least important part, described in weary detail. Such sportsmen recapitulate their dull experiences until they grow old and die, like the shade of Orion which Odysseus saw in Hades chasing the wraiths of the beasts which he once hunted on the hills.
Then there was the technical interest of the stalk, of which the shot is only the conventional finale. The red deer is by nature a woodland animal, but in Scotland he inhabits mountains which are for the most part treeless, and he has had to develop a new technique of defence. Living under conditions which are more or less artificial, he has become far more wary than, say, the African kudu or the Canadian wapiti. His sense of smell and hearing are acute but his eyesight is indifferent, for though he can see things far off he is not clever at recognising them. I found endless interest in devising new ways of circumventing him, devices which every professional stalker knows, but which he does not usually communicate to his “gentlemen.” For example, if you are looking down on a glen with stags in the bottom and the wind is wrong, it is often possible to have your scent carried by the wind so that it ricochets off the opposite wall of the glen, and, coming up behind the stags, makes them move towards you. Camouflage, too, is important. I always believed in breaking up my costume, for, whatever the forest, its colour will not be uniform, and I would wear, say, a checked jacket, grey flannel knickerbockers and grey-blue stockings. The ground often consists of a ribbon of turf bounded by heather and shingle, and by crawling along the border-line between the green and the rough, keeping half of the body in each, if the wind is right it is possible to get within shot, though you are in full view of the deer.
I enjoyed greatly the co
mpany of the gillies, whether Highland or Lowland — and some of the best were Lowlanders. From them I heard many tales of the ancient world of the hills The old type of gillie is fast disappearing — the type with a beard like Moses and little English, who always lit the dottle in a foul pipe before starting on a steep ascent. The new kind of gillie, who has usually served in the War, can point out a stag with the precision of an artillery observer. The old type used to labour heavily. “D’ye see yon white stone?”—”I see a million white stones.” “Ah, but d’ye see another?” But he had often wonderful phrases. “Gang quiet, sir,” I remember one telling me. “Gang as if ye was something growing.” Gaelic, unfortunately, was the true key to their world, and I used to lament that I had no Gaelic, having, like my father before me, tried in vain to learn the tongue. For that you must have had a Gaelic-speaking nurse.
But especially I rejoiced in the companionship of the hills. I have stalked in every kind of forest — the machairs of the Isles, the great round shoulders of the Cairngorms, the splintered peaks of Torridon and Glencoe and Dalness, which are almost mountaineering ground, the varied rock and bent of the Black Mount. What I liked best was to get to the heights early in the morning — and early in the season when the stags feed high — and spend the day exploring the corries from above. The sport had not the sustained tension of mountaineering; indeed, much of its charm lay in the long spells of idle waiting, one’s nose in thyme or heather, when the mind was gathered into the mountain peace. The high moments were the start in the freshness of morning, when the dew was on the birches, and one had the first spy from a hillock in the glen; the sunny hours on the tops when cloud shadows patterned the conies; the return ‘in the evening in a flaming sunset with — or without — a lumpish hill pony carrying a stag. Such a day could not be blank even if one never saw a shootable beast, or missed him when seen, for, as Sir Walter Scott said of himself when he watched Tom Purdie at work, “one’s fancy could be running its ain riggs in another world.”