The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  2

  In the spring of 1914 I badly needed a holiday, and Lamancha asked me to go cruising in his yacht. He gave me permission to bring Vernon, whom he knew slightly, for I wanted to be near him on the first Monday of April. We were to join the yacht at Constantinople, and cruise through the Northern Aegean to Athens, and then by way of the Corinth canal to Corfu, where we would catch the steamer for Brindisi and so home. Vernon was at first a little disinclined, for he had a notion that he ought to be at Severns, but when he allowed himself to be persuaded he grew very keen about the trip, for he had been little out of England.

  He and I travelled by the Orient Express to Constantinople, and after three days there and one day at Brousa shaped our course westward. We landed one morning on the Gallipoli peninsula, and found birds’ eggs on Achi Baba where in a year’s time there was to be nothing but barbed wire and trenches. We spent a day at Lemnos, which at that time few people had visited except the British Navy, and then turned south. On the first Monday of April we had half a gale, an uncomfortable thing in those shallow seas. It blew itself out in the afternoon, and after tea we anchored for the night under the lee of a big island. There was a little bay carved out of the side of a hill; the slopes were covered with heath and some kind of scrub, and the young green of crops showed in the clearings. Among the thyme of the nearest headland a flock of goats was browsing, shepherded by a little girl in a saffron skirt, who sang shrilly in snatches. After the yeasty Aegean the scene was an idyll of pastoral peace. Vernon had all day shown signs of restlessness, and he now proposed a walk; so, leaving the others playing bridge, we two were put ashore in the dinghy.

  We walked southward towards the other horn of the bay, past little closes of fruit blossom, and thickets of wildwood, and stony patches of downland bright with anemones and asphodel. It was a strange, haunted world, bathed in a twilight of gold and amethyst, filled with a thousand aromatic scents, and very silent except for the wash of the waves and a far-off bleating of goats. Neither of us wanted to talk, being content to drink in the magic of the evening. Vernon walked like a man in a dream, stopping now and then to lift his head and stare up the long scrubby ravines to the sharp line of the crest.

  Suddenly a cuckoo’s note broke into the stillness and echoed along the hillside. When it died away it seemed to be answered by a human voice, sweet and high and infinitely remote, a voice as fugitive as a scent or a colour.

  Vernon stopped short.

  ‘Listen to that,’ he cried. ‘It is the Spring Song. This has probably been going on here since the beginning of time. They say that nothing changes in these islands – only they call Demeter the Virgin Mary and Dionysos St Dionysius.’

  He sat down on a boulder and lit his pipe. ‘Let’s burn tobacco to the gods,’ he said. ‘It’s too enchanted to hurry through … I suppose it’s the way I’ve been educated, but I could swear I’ve known it all before. This is the season of the Spring Festival, and you may be sure it’s the same here today as it was a thousand years before Homer. The winter is over and the Underworld has to be appeased, and then the Goddess will come up from the shades.’

  I had never heard Vernon talk like this before, and I listened with some curiosity. I am no classical scholar, but at that moment I too felt the spell of a very ancient and simple world.

  ‘This was the beginning of the year for the Greeks, remember,’ he went on – ‘for the Greeks as we know them, and for the old Mediterranean peoples before them whose ritual they absorbed. The bones of that ritual never altered … You have to begin with purification – to feed the ghosts of the dead in the pot-holes with fireless and wineless sacrifices and so placate them, and to purify your own souls and bodies and the earth by which you live. You have your purgation herbs like buckthorn and agnus castus, and you have your pharmakos, your scape-goat, who carries away all impurities. And then, when that is done, you are ready for the coming of the Maiden. It is like Easter after Good Friday – the festival after the fast and penitence. It is always the woman that simple folk worship – the Mother who is also the Maid. Long ago they called her Pandora or Persephone, and now they call her the Blessed Virgin, but the notion is the same – the sinless birth of the divine. You may be sure it is she whom the peasants in this island worship, as their fathers did three thousand years ago – not God the Father.

  ‘The Greeks had only the one goddess,’ he went on, ‘though she had many names. Later they invented the Olympians – that noisy, middle-class family party – and the priests made a great work with their male gods, Apollo and the like. But the woman came first, and the woman remained. You may call her Demeter, or Aphrodite, or Hera, but she is the same, the Virgin and the Mother, the “mistress of wild things”, the priestess of the new birth in spring. Semele is more than Dionysos, and even to sophisticated Athens the Mailed Virgin of the Acropolis was more than all the pantheon … Don’t imagine it was only a pretty fancy. The thing had all the beauty of nature, and all the terror too.’ He flung back his head and quoted some sonorous Greek.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Euripides,’ he replied. ‘It has been well translated,’ and he quoted:

  For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air

  Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.

  ‘I can see it all,’ he cried. ‘The sacred basket, the honey and oil and wine, the torches crimsoning the meadows, the hushed quiet people waiting on the revelation. They are never more than a day or two from starvation all the winter, and the coming of the Maiden is a matter for them of life and death. They wait for her as devout souls today wait for the Easter Resurrection. I can hear the ritual chant and the thin clear music of the flutes … Yes, but they were seeing things which are now hid from us – Dionysos with his thyrsus, and goat-feet in the thickets, and the shadows of dancing nymphs! If you starve for three months and put your soul into waiting for the voice from heaven you are in the mood for marvels. Terror and horror, perhaps, but unspeakable beauty, too, and a wild hope. That was the Greek religion, not the Olympians and their burnt offerings. And it is the kind of religion that never dies.’

  I thought this pretty good for the scion of an evangelical family, and I said so.

  He laughed. ‘It isn’t my own creed, you know. I dislike all kinds of priestcraft. But, though I’m a stout Protestant, I’m inclined to think sometimes that it is a pity that we have departed from the practice of all other religions and left out the Mother of God … Let’s go on – I want to see what is on the other side of the cape.’

  Beyond the little headland we came suddenly on a very different scene. Here was the harbour of the island. Beside a rude quay some fisherboats lay at anchor with their brown sails furled. Along the waterfront ran a paved terrace, a little dilapidated and with bushes growing in the cracks of the stones. Above rose a great building, showing to seaward as a blank white wall pierced with a few narrow windows. At first sight I took it for a monastery, but a second glance convinced me that its purpose had never been religious. It looked as if it had once been fortified, and the causeway between it and the sea may have mounted guns. Most of it was clearly very old, but the architecture was a jumble, showing here the enriched Gothic of Venice and there the straight lines and round arches of the East. It had once, I conjectured, been the hold of some Venetian sea-king, then the palace of a Turkish conqueror, and was now, perhaps, the manor-house of this pleasant domain. The owners, whoever they might be, were absent, for not a chimney smoked.

  We passed the quay and wandered along the great terrace, which was as solidly masoned as a Roman road. For a little the house hung sheer above us, its walls level with the rock, with in three places flights of steps from the causeway ending in small postern doors. Obviously the main entrance was on the other side. There were no huts to be seen, and no sign of life except a little group of fishermen below on the shore, who were sitting round a fire over which a pot was boiling. As we continued along the terrace beyond the house we came to orch
ards and olive yards, no doubt part of the demesne, and had a glimpse of a rugged coast running out into the sunset.

  The place impressed even my sluggish fancy. This great silent castle in the wilds, hung between sky and earth, and all rosy in the last fires of the sun, seemed insubstantial as a dream. I should not have been surprised if it had vanished like a mirage and left us staring at a bare hillside. Only the solid blocks of the causeway bound us to reality. Here, beyond doubt, men had lived and fought far back in the ages. The impression left on my mind was of a place inhabited for aeons, sunk for the moment in sleep, but liable to awake suddenly to a fierce life. As for Vernon he seemed positively rapt.

  ‘There’s your castle in Spain,’ he cried. ‘Odd thing! but I seem to have seen all this before. I knew before we turned the corner that there were olive trees there, and that the rocks tumbled just in that way into the cove. Listen!’

  The sound of voices drifted up from the beach, and there was a snatch of a song.

  ‘That’s Antiphilos of Byzantium – you remember in the Anthology – the fisher-boys singing round the broth-pot. Lord what a haunted spot! I’d like to spend the night here.’

  I can give no reason for it, but I suddenly felt a strange uneasiness, which made me turn back and stride at a good pace along the terrace. We seemed to have blundered outside the ordinary natural world. I had a feverish desire to get away from the shadow of that pile of masonry, to get beyond the headland and in sight of the yacht. The place was wonderful, secret, beautiful, yet somehow menacing. Vernon clearly felt nothing of all this, for he grumbled at my haste. ‘Hang it, we’re not walking for a wager,’ he complained. ‘There’s loads of time before dinner … I want to stay on here a bit. I never saw such a place.’

  At the beginning of the paved terrace close to the quay we came suddenly upon two men, probably from the fishermen’s party we had seen on the shore. They were well-set-up fellows, with handsome clear-cut faces, for the true Greek strain is still found in the islands. We came on them by surprise as we turned the corner of a rock and they may have thought from our direction that we were coming from the house. Anyhow they seemed to get the fright of their lives. Both leaped aside and looked at us with startled angry eyes. Then they flung up their right hands; and for a moment I thought they were going to attack us.

  But they contented themselves with spitting on their breasts and each holding out a clenched fist with the little finger and the thumb extended. I had seen this before – the ancient protection against the evil eye. But what impressed me was the expression in their faces. It was at Vernon that they stared, and when their stare moved from him it took in the pile of the house above. They seemed to connect us in some way with the house, and in their eyes there was an almost animal fear and hate … I looked after them when they had passed, and observed that they were hurrying with bent heads up the path which may have led to their village.

  Vernon laughed. ‘Queer chaps! They looked as scared as if they had seen Pan.’

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ I told him when we were approaching the dinghy. ‘Some of your infernal gods and goddesses have got loose in it. I feel as if I want to run.’

  ‘Hullo!’ he cried. ‘You’re getting as impressionable as a minor poet … Hark! There it is again! Do you hear? The Spring Song?’

  But the thin notes which drifted down from the upland no longer seemed to me innocent. There was something horrible about that music.

  Next morning, when we were steaming south in calm weather with the island already dim behind us, I found Vernon smoking peacefully on deck and looking at sea-birds through a glass. He nodded gaily as I sat down beside him.

  ‘I had the dream all right – one room nearer. But the room in which I wait has changed. It must be due to being out here, for hitherto I’ve always spent April in England. I suppose I furnished it unconsciously with things I had seen at home – there was a big lacquer cabinet for one thing, and something like pictures or tapestry on the walls – and there were great silver fire-dogs. But now it’s quite bare. The same room of course – I couldn’t mistake it – but scarcely any furniture in it except a dark lump in a corner … Only the fire-dogs are the same … Looks as if the decks were being cleared for action.’

  I had expected to find him a little heavy about the eyes, but he appeared as fresh as if he had just come from a morning swim, and his voice had a boyish carelessness.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost every scrap of funk or nervousness about the dream? It’s a privilege, not an incubus. Six years to wait! I wish I knew how I was going to put them in. It will be a dull business waiting.’

  3

  Fate contrived that to Vernon, as to several million others, the next four years should scarcely deserve the name of dull. By the middle of August I was being cursed by a Guards sergeant in Chelsea barracks yard, and Vernon was training with his Yeomanry somewhere in Yorkshire.

  My path was plain compared to that of many honest men. I was a bachelor without ties, and though I was beyond the statutory limit for service I was always pretty hard trained, and it was easy enough to get over the age difficulty. I had sufficient standing in my profession to enable me to take risks. But I am bound to say I never thought of that side. I wanted, like everybody else, to do something for England, and I wanted to do something violent. For me to stay at home and serve in some legal job would have been a thousand times harder than to go into the trenches. Like everybody else, too, I thought the war would be short, and my chief anxiety was lest I should miss the chance of fighting. I was to learn patience and perspective during four beastly years.

  I went to France in October ’14, and Vernon dined with me before I started. He had got a curious notion into his head. He thought that the war would last for full six years, and his reason was that he was convinced that his dream had to do with it. The opening of the last door would be on the battlefield – of that he was convinced. The consequence was that he was in no hurry. My nephew Charles, who was in the same Yeomanry, spent his days pleading to be sent abroad and trying to exchange into any unit he thought would get away first. On the few occasions I met him he raved like a lunatic about the imbecility of a Government that kept him kicking his heels in England. But Vernon, the night he dined with me, was as placid as Buddha. ‘I’m learning my job,’ he said, ‘and I’ve a mighty lot to learn. I ought to be a fair soldier in six years’ time – just when the crisis is due.’ But he was very anxious about me, and wanted to get into the Guards to be beside me. Only his fatalism kept him from agitating for a change, for he felt that as he had begun in the Yeomanry, Providence most likely meant him to continue there. He fussed a good deal about how we were to correspond, for I seemed to have taken the place of his family. But on the whole I was happy about him, his purpose was so clear and his mind so perfectly balanced. I had stopped thinking seriously about the dream, for it seemed only a whimsy in the middle of so many urgent realities.

  I needn’t tell you the kind of time I had in France. It was a long dismal grind, but I had the inestimable advantage of good health, and I was never a day off duty because of sickness. I suppose I enjoyed it in a sense: anyhow I got tremendously keen about my new profession, and rose in it far quicker than I deserved. I was lucky, too. As you know, I stopped something in every big scrap – at Festubert, Loos, Ginchy, Third Ypres, Cambrai and Bapaume – so that I might have covered my sleeve with woundstripes if I had been so minded. But none of the damage was serious and I can hardly find the marks of it today. I think my worst trial was that for more than three years I never had a sight of Vernon.

  He went out in the summer of ’15 to the Dardanelles and was in the Yeomanry fight at Suvla, where a bit of shrapnel made rather a mess of his left shoulder. After that he was employed on various staff jobs, and during ’16 was engaged in some kind of secret service in the Aegean and the Levant. I heard from him regularly, but of course he never spoke of his work. He told me he had learned modern Greek and could speak it like
a native, and I fancy he had a hand in Venizelos’s revolution. Then he went back to his regiment, and was in the ‘Broken Spurs’ division when the Yeomanry were dismounted. He was wounded again in Palestine in ’17, just before the taking of Jerusalem, and after that was second in command of a battalion.