by John Buchan
When I was on leave in February ’18 Charles dined with me at the Club – a much older and wiser Charles, with an empty sleeve pinned to his tunic, who was now employed in home training.
‘It’s a bloody and disgusting war,’ said my nephew, ‘and if any fellow says he likes it, you can tell him from me that he’s a liar. There’s only one man I ever met who honestly didn’t mind it, and that was old Vernon, and everybody knows that he’s cracked.’
He expatiated on the exact nature of Vernon’s lunacy.
‘Cracked – as – cracked, and a very useful kind of insanity, too. I often wished I had half his complaint. He simply didn’t give a hang for the old war. Wasn’t interested in it, if you see what I mean. Oh, brave as you-be-damned, of course, but plenty of other chaps were brave. His was the most cold-blooded, unearthly kind of courage. I’ve seen the same thing in men who were sick of life and wanted to be killed and knew they were going to be killed, but Vernon wasn’t that sort. He had no notion of being killed – always planning out the future and talking of what he was going to do after the war. As you know, he got badly mauled at Suvla, and he nearly croaked with malaria in Crete, and he had his head chipped at Neby Samwil, so he didn’t bear what you might call a charmed life. But some little bird had whispered in his ear that he wasn’t going to be killed, and he believed that bird. You never saw a fellow in your life so much at his ease in a nasty place.
‘It wasn’t that he was a fire-eater,’ Charles went on. ‘He never went out to look for trouble. It was simply that it made no difference to him where he was or what he was doing – he was the same composed old fish, smiling away, and keeping quiet and attending to business, as if he thought the whole thing rather foolishness.’
‘You describe a pretty high class of soldier,’ I said. ‘I can’t understand why he hasn’t gone quicker up the ladder.’
‘I can,’ said Charles emphatically. ‘He was a first-class battalion officer but he wasn’t a first-class soldier. The trouble with him, as I say, is that he wasn’t interested in the war. He had no initiative, you understand – always seemed to be thinking about something else. It’s like Rugby football. A man may be a fine player according to the rules, but unless his heart is in the business and he can think out new tactics for himself he won’t be a great player. Vernon wasn’t out to do anything more than the immediate situation required. You might say he wasn’t deadset enough on winning the war.’
I detected in Charles a new shrewdness. ‘How did the others get on with him?’ I asked.
‘The men believed in him and would have followed him into hell, and of course we all respected him. But I can’t say he was exactly popular. Too dashed inhuman for that. He ought to fall in love with a chorus-girl and go a regular mucker. Oh, of course, I like him tremendously and know what a rare good fellow he is! But the ordinary simple-minded, deserving lad jibs at Sir Galahad crossed with the low-church parson and the ‘Varsity don.’
The Broken Spurs came to France in the early summer of ’18, but I had no chance of meeting them. My life was rather feverish during the last weeks of the campaign, for I was chief staff-officer to my division, and we were never much out of the line. Then, as you know, I nearly came by my end in September, when the Boche made quite a good effort in the way of a gas attack. It was a new gas, which we didn’t understand, and I faded away like the grin of the Cheshire cat, and was pretty ill for a time in a base hospital. Luckily it didn’t do me any permanent harm, but my complexion will be greenery-yallery till the day of my death.
I awoke to consciousness in a tidy little bed to learn that the war was all but over and the Boche hustling to make peace. It took me some days to get my head clear and take notice, and then, one morning, I observed the man in the bed next to me. His head was a mass of bandages, but there was something about the features that showed which struck me as familiar. As luck would have it, it turned out to be Vernon. He had been badly hit, when commanding his battalion at the crossing of the Scheldt, and for a day or two had been in grave danger. He was recovering all right, but for a time neither of us was permitted to talk, and we used to lie and smile at each other and think of all the stories we would presently tell.
It was just after we got the news of the Armistice that we were allowed to say how d’ye do. We were as weak as kittens, but I, at any rate, felt extraordinarily happy. We had both come through the war without serious damage and a new world lay before us. To have Vernon beside me put the coping-stone on my contentment, and I could see that he felt the same. I remember the thrill I had when we could stretch out our arms and shake hands.
Slowly we began to build up each other’s records for the four years. I soon knew, what I had guessed before, the reason of that inhuman composure which Charles had described. Vernon had had a complete assurance that his day of fate was not due yet awhile, and therefore the war had taken a second place in his thoughts. Most men who fought bore the marks of it in harder lines about the mouth and chin and older eyes. But Vernon had kept his youth intact. His face had always had a certain maturity beyond his years, and his eyes had been curiously watchful. These traits were perhaps slightly intensified, but otherwise I noticed no difference.
‘You remember what I told you when we last met in October ’14?’ he said. ‘I was wrong and I’m rather sorry. I thought the war would last for six years and that the last stage of my dream would be in the field. That would have been such a simple and right solution. As it is, I must wait.’
I asked if the dream had come regularly in the past four years.
‘Quite regularly,’ was the answer. ‘The room hasn’t changed either, except that the dark shadow in the corner has moved, so I think it must be a human figure. The place is quite bare and empty now, except for the silver fire-dogs … I think there is a little window in the wall, rather high up.’
‘You have only two years more to wait,’ I said, ‘less – a year and a half.’ It was then November ’18.
‘I know … But I am impatient again. I thought the climax would come in the war, so I stopped speculating about it … I thought I would be called on as a soldier to do something very difficult, and I was quite ready … But that has all gone, and I am back in the fog. I must think it all out again from the beginning.’
THREE
THE IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCE of peace was to keep Vernon and myself apart. You see, we neither of us got better very quickly. When his wounds were healed a kind of neuritis remained; he was tortured with headaches, didn’t sleep well, and couldn’t recover his lost weight. He was very patient and cheerful about it, and did obediently what he was told, for his one object seemed to be to get fit again. We returned to England together, but presently the doctors packed him off abroad with instructions to bask in the sun and idle at a Riviera villa which had been dedicated to such cases. So I spent a lonely Christmas in London.
Heaven knows I had nothing to complain of compared with most fellows, but I count the six months after the Armistice the most beastly in my life. I had never been seriously ill before, all the four years of war I had been brimming over with energy, and it was a new experience for me to feel slack and underengined. The gas had left a sort of poison in my blood which made every movement an effort. I was always sleepy, and yet couldn’t sleep, and to my horror I found myself getting jumpy and neurotic. The creak of a cart in the street worried me so that I wanted to cry; London noise was a nightmare, and when I tried the country I had a like horror of its silence. The thing was purely physical, for I found I could think quite clearly and sanely. I seemed to be two persons, one self-possessed enough watching the antics of the other with disgust and yet powerless to stop them.
Acton Croke was reassuring. ‘You’re a sick man, and you’ve got to behave as such,’ he told me. ‘No attempt to get back into harness. Behave as if you were recovering from a severe operation – regular life, no overstrain physical or mental, simply lie fallow and let nature do its work. You have a superb constitution which, given a c
hance, will pick up its balance. But don’t forget that you’re passing through a crisis. If you play the fool you may have indifferent health for the rest of your days.’
I was determined that at all events that mustn’t happen, so I was as docile as a good child. As I say, I had mighty little to complain of, when you consider the number of good men who, far seedier than I, came back to struggle for their daily bread. I had made a bit of money, so I had a solid hump to live off. Also, I had a chance, if I wished, of becoming one of the law officers of the Crown. I was still a Member of Parliament, and at the December election, though I had never gone near the place, my old constituency had returned me with a majority of more than ten thousand. A pretty gilded position for a demobbed soldier! But for the present I had to put all that aside and think only of getting well.
There has been a good deal of nonsense talked about the horror of war memories and the passionate desire to bury them. The vocal people were apt to be damaged sensitives, who were scarcely typical of the average man. There were horrors enough, God knows, but in most people’s recollections these were overlaid by the fierce interest and excitement, even by the comedy of it. At any rate that was the case with most of my friends, and it was certainly the case with me. I found a positive pleasure in recalling the incidents of the past four years. The war had made me younger. You see – apart from regular officers – I had met few of my own years and standing. I had consorted chiefly with youth, and had recovered the standpoint of twenty years ago. That was what made my feeble body so offensive. I could not regard myself as a man in middle age, but as a sick undergraduate whose malady was likely to keep him out of the Boat or the Eleven.
You would have laughed if you could have seen the way I spent my time. I was so angry with my ill health that I liked to keep on reminding myself of the days when I had been at the top of my form. I remember I made out a complete record of my mountaineering exploits, working them out with diagrams from maps and old diaries, and telling myself furiously that what I had once done I could do again … I got out my old Oxford texts and used to construe bits of the classics, trying to recapture the mood when those things meant a lot to me … I read again all the books which used to be favourites but which I hadn’t opened for a score of years. I turned up the cram books for the Bar exams, and the notes I had taken in my early days in chambers and the reports of my first cases. It wasn’t sentiment, but a deliberate attempt to put back the clock, and, by recalling the feelings of twenty-five, to convince myself that I had once been a strong man … I even made risky experiments. I went up to Oxford in vacation and managed to get put up in my old diggings in the High. That would have been intolerable if they had recalled war tragedies, but they didn’t. The men who had shared them with me were all alive – one a Colonial bishop, one a stockbroker, another high up in the Indian Civil Service. It did me good to see the big shabby sitting-room where, in my day, a barrel of beer had adorned one corner. In March, too, I spent three nights at a moorland inn on the Borders which had once been the head-quarters of a famous reading-party. That was not quite so successful, for the weather and the food were vile, and I was driven to reflect on the difference of outlook between twenty and forty-three.
Still my childishness did me good, and I began slowly to gain ground. The spring helped me, which was early that year, you remember, so that the blossom had begun on the fruit trees in the first days of April. I found that it was the time just before the war that it comforted me most to recall, for then I had been healthy enough and a creature more near my present state than the undergraduate of twenty. I think, too, it was because those years were associated with Vernon. He was never much out of my mind, and the reports from him were cheering. The headaches had gone, he had recovered his power of sleep, and was slowly putting on weight. He had taken to sailing a small boat again, had bought a racing cutter, and had come in third in one of the events at the Cannes Regatta.
I had this last news in a letter which reached me while I was staying at Minster Carteron, and it turned my mind back to the yachting trip I had made with Vernon in 1914 in the Aegean. It revived the picture I had almost forgotten – the green island flushed with spring, the twilight haunted with wild music, the great white house hanging like a cliff over the sea. I had felt the place sinister – I remembered the two men with scared faces and their charm against the evil eye – and even after five years a faint aura of distaste lingered about the memory. That was sufficient to awake my interest, and one afternoon I rummaged in the library. Plakos had been the island’s name, and I searched for it in gazetteers.
It was the day of the famous April snowstorm which wrought such havoc among English orchards. The windows of the great room were blurred with falling snow, and the fires on the two hearths were hissing and spluttering while I pursued my researches. Folliot, I remember, was dozing beside one of them in an arm-chair. You know old Folliot, with his mild cattish ways and his neat little Louis Napoleon beard. He wants to be the Horace Walpole of our time, and publishes every few years a book of reminiscences, from which it would appear that he has been the confidant of every great man in Europe for the last half-century. He has not much of a mind, but he has a good memory, and after all there is a faint interest about anybody who has dined out in good company for fifty years.
I woke the old fellow when I dropped by misadventure a big atlas on the floor, and he asked testily what I was after.
‘I’m trying to find a beastly Greek islet,’ I said. ‘You haven’t by any chance in your travels visited a place called Plakos?’
The name roused him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but of course I have often heard of it. It belonged to Shelley Arabin.’
‘Now, who on earth was Shelley Arabin?’
‘You young men!’ old Folliot sighed. ‘Your memories are so short and your ignorance so vast. Shelley Arabin died last year, and had half a column in The Times, but he will have a chapter in my memoirs. He was one of the most remarkable men of his day. Shelley Arabin – to think you never heard of him! Why, I knew his father.’
I drew up an arm-chair to the hearth opposite him. ‘It’s a foul afternoon,’ I said, ‘and there’s nothing to do. I want to hear about Shelley Arabin. I take it from his name that he was a Levantine.’
Folliot was flattered by my interest. He had begun to bore people, for the war had created a mood unfavourable to his antique gossip. He still stayed a good deal in country houses, but spent most of his time in the libraries and got rather snubbed when he started on his reminiscences.
‘Bless you, no! A most ancient English house – the Arabins of Irtling in Essex. Gone out for good now, I fear. As a boy I remember old Tom Arabin – a shaggy old bandit, who came to London once in five years and insulted everybody and then went back again. He used to dine with my family, and I remember watching him arrive, for I had a boyish romance about the man who had been a friend of Byron. Yes, he was with Byron when he died at Missolonghi, and he was an intimate of all the poets of that time – Byron, Shelley – he called his son after Shelley – Keats too, I think – there’s a mention of him in the Letters I’m almost sure – and he lived with Landor in Italy till they quarrelled. A most picturesque figure, but too farouche for comfort. With him a word was a blow, you understand. He married – now, now, who did he marry? – one of the Manorwaters, I fancy. Anyhow, he led her the devil of a life. He bought or stole or acquired somehow the island of Plakos, and used it as a base from which to descend periodically upon the civilized world. Not a pleasant old gentleman, but amazingly decorative. You may have seen his translation of Pindar. I have heard Jebb say that it was a marvellous piece of scholarship, but that his English style was the exact opposite of everything that Pindar stood for. Dear me! How short the world’s memory is!’
‘I want to hear about his son,’ I said.
‘You shall – you shall! Poor Shelley, I fear he had not the kind of upbringing which is commonly recommended for youth. Tom disliked his son, and left him to the care of t
he family priest – they were Catholics of course. All his boyhood he spent in that island among the peasants and the kind of raffish company that his father invited to the house. What kind of company? Well, I should say all the varieties of humbug that Europe produces – soldiers of fortune and bad poets and the gentry who have made their native countries too hot for them. Plakos was the refuge of every brand of outlaw, social and political. Ultimately the boy was packed off to Cambridge, where he arrived speaking English a generation out of date and with the tastes of a Turkish pasha, but with the most beautiful manners. Tom, when he wasn’t in a passion, had the graciousness of a king, and Shelley was a young prince in air and feature. He was terribly good-looking in a way no man has a right to be, and that prejudiced him in the eyes of his young contemporaries. Also there were other things against him.’
‘How long did Cambridge put up with him?’ I asked.
‘One year. There was a scandal – rather a bad one, I fancy – and he left under the blackest kind of cloud. Tom would not have him at home, but he gave him a good allowance, and the boy set up in London. Not in the best society, you understand, but he had a huge success in the half-world. Women raved about him, and even when his reputation was at its worst, he would be seen at a few good houses … I suppose a lawyer does not concern himself with poetry, but I can assure you that Shelley Arabin made quite a name for himself in the late eighties. I believe bibliophiles still collect his first editions. There was his epic on the Fall of Jerusalem – a very remarkable performance as a travesty of history. And there were his love sonnets, beautiful languid things quite phosphorescent with decay. He carried Swinburne and Baudelaire a stage further. Well, that mood has gone from the world and Shelley Arabin’s reputation with it, but at one time sober critics felt obliged to praise him even when they detested him. He was a red-hot revolutionary, too, and used to write pamphlets blackguarding British policy … I saw quite a lot of him in those days, and I confess that I found him fascinating. Partly it was his beauty and his air, partly that he was like nobody I had ever met. He could talk wonderfully in his bitter, high-coloured way. But I never liked him. Oh no, I never liked him. There was always a subtle cruelty about him. Old Tom had been a blackguard, but he had had a heart – Shelley behind all his brilliance was ice and stone. I think most people came to feel this, and he had certainly outstayed his welcome before he left London.’