The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  Those troubled springs continued – odd interludes in a life of nearly unbroken health. Mrs Ganthony left because she could not control her tongue and increased the boy’s terrors, and Vernon was nine – he thought – before the dream began to take a really definite shape. The stage was emptying. There was nobody in the room now but himself, and he saw its details a little more clearly. It was not any apartment in Severns. Rather it seemed like one of the big old panelled chambers which he remembered from visits to the Midland country houses of his mother’s family, when he had arrived after dark and had been put to sleep in a great bed in a place lit with dancing firelight. In the morning it had looked only an ordinary big room, but at that hour of the evening it had seemed an enchanted cave. The dream-room was not unlike these, for there was the scent of a wood fire and there were dancing shadows, but he could not see clearly the walls or the ceiling, and there was no bed. In one corner was a door which led to the outer world, and through this he knew that he might on no account pass. Another door faced him, and he knew that he had only to turn the handle for it to open.

  But he did not want to, for he understood quite clearly what was beyond. There was a second room just like the first one; he knew nothing about it except that opposite the entrance another door led out of it. Beyond was a third chamber, and so on interminably. There seemed to the boy to be no end to this fantastic suite. He thought of it as a great snake of masonry, winding up hill and down dale away to the fells or the sea … Yes, but there was an end. Somewhere far away in one of the rooms was a terror waiting on him, or, as he feared, coming towards him. Even now it might be flitting from room to room, every minute bringing its soft tread nearer to the chamber of the wood fire.

  About this time of his life the dream was an unmitigated horror. Once it came while he was ill with a childish fever, and it sent his temperature up to a point which brought Dr Moreton galloping from Axby. In his waking hours he did not, as a rule, remember it clearly; but during the fever, asleep and awake, that sinuous building, one room thick, with each room opening from the other, was never away from his thoughts. It amazed him to think that outside were the cheerful moors where he hunted for plovers’ eggs, and that only a thin wall of stone kept him from pleasant homely things. The thought used to comfort him when he was awake, but in the dream it never came near him. Asleep, the whole world seemed one suite of rooms, and he, a forlorn little prisoner, doomed grimly to wait on the slow coming through the many doors of a fear which transcended word and thought.

  He became a silent, self-absorbed boy, and, though the fact of his nightmares was patent to the little household, the details remained locked up in his head. Not even to Uncle Appleby would he tell them, when that gentleman, hurriedly kind, came to visit his convalescent ward. His illness made Vernon grow, and he shot up into a lanky, leggy boy. But the hills soon tautened his sinews, and all the time at his preparatory school he was a healthy and active child. He told me that he tried to exorcise the dream through his religion – to ‘lay his burden on the Lord’, as the old evangelical phrase has it; but he signally failed, though he got some comfort from the attempt. It was borne in on him, he said, that this was a burden which the Lord had laid quite definitely on him and meant him to bear like a man.

  He was fifteen and at Eton when he made the great discovery. The dream had become almost a custom now. It came in April at Severns about Easter-tide – a night’s discomfort (it was now scarcely more) in the rush and glory of the holidays. There was a moment of the old wild heart-fluttering; but a boy’s fancy is more quickly dulled than a child’s, and the endless corridors were now more of a prison than a witch’s antechamber. By this time, with the help of his diary, he had fixed the date of the dream; it came regularly on the night of the first Monday of April. Now the year I speak of he had made a long expedition into the hills, and had stridden homeward at a steady four miles an hour among the gleams and shadows of an April twilight. He was alone at Severns, so he had had his supper in the big library, where afterwards he sat watching the leaping flames on the open stone hearth. He was very weary, and sleep fell upon him in his chair. He found himself in the wood-smoke chamber, and before him the door leading to the unknown … But it was no indefinite fear that now lay beyond. He knew clearly – though how he knew he could not tell – that each year the something came a room nearer, and was even now but twelve rooms off. In twelve years his own door would open, and then—

  He woke in the small hours, chilled and mazed, but with a curious new assurance in his heart. Hitherto the nightmare had left him in gross terror, unable to endure the prospect of its recurrence, till the kindly forgetfulness of youth relieved him. But now, though his nerves were fluttering, he perceived that there was a limit to the mystery. Some day it must declare itself and fight on equal terms.

  The discovery opened a new stage in his life. As he thought over the matter in the next few days he had the sense of being forewarned and prepared for some great test of courage. The notion exhilarated as much as it frightened him. Late at night, or on soft dripping days, or at any moment of lessened vitality, he would bitterly wish that he had been born an ordinary mortal. But on a keen morning of frost, when he rubbed himself warm after a cold tub, or at high noon of summer, the adventure of the dream almost pleased him. Unconsciously he must have braced himself to a harder discipline. His fitness, moral and physical, became his chief interest for reasons that would have been unintelligible to his friends or his masters.

  He passed through school – as I knew from Charles – an aloof and rather splendid figure, a magnificent athlete with a brain as well as a body, a good fellow in everyone’s opinion, but a grave one. He could have had no real intimates, for he never shared the secret of the spring dream. At this period, for some reason which he could not tell, he would have burned his hand off sooner than breathe a hint of it. Pure terror absolves from all conventions and demands a confidant, so terror, I think, must have largely departed from the nightmare as he grew older. Fear, indeed, remained, and awe and disquiet, but these are human emotions, whereas terror is of hell.

  Had he told anyone, he would no doubt have become self-conscious and felt acutely his difference from other people, so it was a sound instinct which kept him silent. As it was, he seems to have been an ordinary schoolboy, much liked, and, except at odd moments, unaware of any brooding destiny. As he grew older, and his ambition awoke, the moments when he remembered the dream were apt to be disagreeable, for a boy’s ambitions are strictly conventional and his soul revolts at the abnormal. By the time he was ready for the university he wanted above all things to run the mile a second faster than anyone else, and he had hopes of academic distinction, for he was an excellent classic. For most of the year he lived with these hopes and was happy: then came April, and for a short season he was groping in dark places. Just before and after each dream he was in a mood of exasperation; but when it actually came he was plunged in a different atmosphere, and felt the quiver of fear and the quick thrill of expectation.

  During his first year at Oxford he had made an attempt to avoid it. He and three others were on a walking tour in Brittany in gusty spring weather, and came late one evening to an inn by an estuary where sea-gulls clattered about the windows. Youth-like they made a great and foolish feast, and sat all night round a bowl of punch, while school songs and ‘John Peel’ contended with the dirling of the gale. At daylight they took the road again, without having closed an eye, and Vernon told himself that he was rid of his incubus. He wondered at the time why he was not more cheerful, for to his surprise he had a sense of loss, of regret, almost of disappointment.

  ‘That was last year,’ he said, and he opened the little locked diary and showed me the entry. ‘Last night I went to bed not knowing what to think, but far more nervous than I had been since I was a baby. I hope I didn’t show it, but I wasn’t much in the mood for guests when you turned up.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked eagerly. ‘Did the dream come back?’ />
  He nodded and passed me the diary so that I could read that morning’s entry. The dream had not failed him. Once more he had been in the chamber with the wood fire: once again he had peered at the door and wondered with tremulous heart what lay beyond. For the something had come nearer by two rooms, and was now only seven doors away. I read the bare account in his neat, precise handwriting, and it gave me a strong impression of being permitted to peep through a curtain at a stage mysteriously set. I noticed that he had added some lines from Keats’s ‘Indian Maid’s Song’:

  I would deceive her,

  And so leave her.

  But ah! she is so constant and so kind.

  There was a mark of exclamation against the ‘she’, as if he found some irony in it.

  3

  He seemed to be waiting for me to speak, waiting shyly and tensely like a child expecting the judgement of an elder. But I found it hard to know what to say.

  ‘That is a very wonderful story!’ I ventured at last. ‘I am honoured that you should have chosen me to tell it to. Perhaps it will be a relief to you to know that someone else understands what you are going through … I don’t suppose you want sympathy, but I would like to congratulate you on your fortitude.’

  ‘I don’t need sympathy – or congratulation. But I want help – the help of your brain and your experience … You see, in seven years some tremendous experience is coming to me, and I want – I’d like – to know what it is.’

  ‘I wonder if a good doctor wouldn’t be the best person to consult.’

  ‘No, no,’ he cried almost angrily. ‘I tell you there’s nothing pathological about it – not now that I’m a man. I don’t want it exorcised as if it were an evil spell. I think – now – that I’d break my heart if it all vanished into moonshine … I believe in it as I believe in God, and I’m ready to face whatever is coming. But I want to be forewarned and forearmed, if possible, for it’s going to be a big thing. If I only knew something about what was coming – even the smallest something!’

  Those were the days before psychoanalysis had become fashionable, but even then we had psychologists, and in my bewilderment I tried that tack.

  ‘Might not it all spring from some fright – some strange experience at any rate – which you had as a baby? Such things often make an abiding impression.’

  He smiled. ‘You’re still thinking it is pathological. Fright would account for recurring nightmares, but surely not for a thing so rational as this – a fixed day every year, the same room, the time limit. It would not explain the thing moving on a room last year when I had no dream.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ I admitted. ‘Have you looked up your family history? I have heard stories of inherited obsessions and premonitions – what they call a “weird” in Scotland.’

  ‘I thought of that, but there’s nothing – nothing. There are no Milburne records much beyond my grandfather, and by all accounts they were the most prosaic kind of business men. My mother’s family – well, there’s plenty of records there and I’ve waded through most of the muniment-room at Appleby. But there’s no hint of anything mysterious in the Douglas-Ernotts. They were a time-serving lot, who knew how the cat was going to jump, but they kept out of crime and shunned anything imaginative like the plague. I shouldn’t think one of them had ever an ambition which couldn’t be put in terms of office or money, or a regret except that he had missed a chance of getting at the public purse. True-blue Whigs, all of them.’

  ‘Then I’m hanged if I know what to say. But, now you’ve told me, I want you to remember that you can always count on me. I may not be able to help, but I’m there whenever you want me. Perhaps – you never know – the thing will reveal itself more clearly in the next seven years and come within the scope of my help. I’ve taken a tremendous liking to you, my dear chap, and we’re going to be friends.’

  He held out his hand.

  ‘That’s kind of you … Shall I tell you what I think myself? I was taught to believe that everything in our lives is foreordained by God. No caprice of our own can alter the eternal plan. Now, why shouldn’t some inkling of this plan be given us now and then – not knowledge, but just an inkling that we may be ready? My dream may be a heavenly warning, a divine foreshadowing – a privilege, not a cross. It is a reminder that I must be waiting with girt loins and a lit lamp when the call comes. That’s the way I look on it, and it makes me happy.’

  I said nothing, for I did not share his Calvinism, but I felt that suddenly that library had become rather a solemn place. I had listened to the vow of the young Hannibal at the altar.

  TWO

  1

  I HAVE A PREPOSTEROUS weakness for youth, and I fancy there is something in me which makes it accept me as a coeval. It may be my profession. If you are a busy lawyer without any outside ambitions you spend your days using one bit of your mind, and the rest remains comparatively young and unstaled. I had no wife and few near relations, and while I was daily growing narrower in my outlook on the present and the future I cherished a wealth of sentiment about the past. I welcomed anything which helped me to recapture the freshness of boyhood, and Vernon was like a spring wind in my arid life. Presently we forgot that I was nearly twice his age, and slipped into the manner of contemporaries. He was far more at his ease with me than with the men of his own year. I came to think that I was the only person in the world who knew him, for though he had an infinity of acquaintances and a good many people who ranked as friends I suppose I was his only comrade. For I alone knew the story of his dreams.

  My flat in Down Street became his headquarters in London, and I never knew when he would stick his head into my Temple chambers and insist on our dining or lunching together. In the following winter I went to Oxford occasionally, nominally to visit Charles; but my nephew led a much occupied life, and it generally ended by my spending my time with Vernon. I kept a horse with the Bicester that season and we hunted occasionally together, and we had sometimes a walk which filled the short winter day, and dined thereafter and talked far into the night. I was anxious to learn how his contemporaries regarded him, and I soon found that he had a prodigious reputation, which was by no means explained by his athletic record. He at once impressed and puzzled his little world. I think it was the sense of brooding power about him which attracted people and also kept them at a respectful distance. His ridiculous good looks and his gentle courtesy seemed to mark him out for universal popularity, but there was too much austerity for a really popular man. He had odd ascetic traits. He never touched wine now, he detested loose talk, and he was a little intolerant of youthful follies. Not that there was anything of the prig in him – only that his character seemed curiously formed and mature. For all his urbanity he had a plain, almost rugged, sagacity in ordinary affairs, a tough core like steel harness under a silk coat. That, I suppose, was the Calvinism in his blood. Had he been a less brilliant figure, he would probably have been set down as ‘pi’.

  Charles never professed to understand him, and contented himself with prophesying that ‘old Vernon would be the devil of a swell some day’. On inquiry I found that none of his friends forecast any special career for him; it would have seemed to them almost disrespectful to condescend upon such details. It was not what Vernon would do that fired their sluggish imaginations, but what they dimly conceived that he already was.

  There was the same fastidiousness about all his ways. I have never known a better brain more narrowly limited in its range. He was a first-class ‘pure’ scholar and had got a Craven and been proxime for the Hertford. But he was quite incapable of spreading himself, and his prospects looked bad for ‘Greats’ since he seemed unable to acquire the smattering of loose philosophy demanded by that school. He was strictly circumscribed in his general reading; I set it down at first to insensitiveness, but came soon to think it fastidiousness. If he could not have exactitude and perfection in his knowledge, he preferred to remain ignorant. I saw in him the makings of a lawyer. Law was just the subject for a
finical, exact and scrupulous mind like his. Charles had once in his haste said that he was not a man of the world, and Charles had been right. He was a man of his own world, not the ordinary one. So with his intellectual interests. He would make his own culture, quite regardless of other people. I fancy that he felt that his overmastering private problem made it necessary to husband the energies of his mind.

  During that year I think he was quite happy and at peace about the dream. He had now stopped hoping or fearing: the thing had simply become part of him, like his vigorous young body, his slow kindliness, his patient courage. He rarely wanted to talk of it, but it was so much in my thoughts that I conducted certain researches of my own. I began by trying the psychological line, and plagued those of my acquaintances who had any knowledge of that dismal science. I cannot say I got much assistance. You see I had to state a hypothetical case, and was always met by a demand to produce the patient for cross-examination – a reasonable enough request, which of course I could not comply with. One man, who was full of the new Vienna doctrine, talked about ‘complexes’ and ‘repressions’ and suggested that the dream came from a child having been shut up by accident in a dark room. ‘If you can dig the memory of it out of his subconsciousness, you will lay that ghost,’ he said. I tried one evening to awake Vernon’s earliest recollections, but nothing emerged. The dream itself was the furthest-back point in his recollection. In any case I didn’t see how such an explanation would account for the steady development of the thing and its periodicity. I thought I might do better with family history, and I gave up a good deal of my leisure to the Douglas-Ernotts. There was nothing to be made of the Ernotts – gross utilitarian Whigs every one of them. The Douglas strain had more mystery in it, but the records of his branch of the great Scottish house were scanty, and sadly impersonal. Douglases many had endured imprisonment and gone to the scaffold, but history showed them as mere sounding names, linked to forays and battles and strange soubriquets, but as vague as the heroes of Homer. As for the Milburnes, I got an ancient aunt who had known Vernon’s father to give me her recollections, and a friend on the Northern Circuit collected for me the Lancashire records. The first of them had been a small farmer somewhere on the Ribble: the second had become a mill-owner; and the third in the early nineteenth century had made a great fortune, had been a friend of William Wilberforce and later of Richard Cobden, and had sat in the first Reform parliament. As I looked at the portrait of that whiskered reformer, bland and venerable in his stiff linen and broadcloth, or at the early Millais of his son, the bearded Evangelical, I wondered what in them had gone to the making of Vernon. It was like seeking for the ancestry of a falcon among barnyard fowls.