The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  ‘And there’s more,’ he went on. ‘Look at the passage about the hallowing of the maiden and the youth. How does it go?’ He picked up the paper and read: ‘“Then the Consecrator shall set aside a youth and a virgin, who shall remain consecrate in a sanctity which for all others shall be a place unapproachable. For seven days they shall be fed with pure food, eggs and cheese and barley-cakes and dried figs and water from the well by the white cypress.” Do you see what that means? It was a human sacrifice. The fellow who wrote this skates lightly over the facts – I don’t believe he was a Christian after all, or he wouldn’t have taken it so calmly. The boy and the girl had to die before the Gods could be re-born. You see, it was a last resource – not an annual rite, but one reserved for a desperate need. All the words are ritual words – horkos, the sanctuary, and abatos, the tabu place, and hosioter, the consecrator. If we knew exactly what hosiotheis meant we should know a good deal about Greek religion. There were ugly patches in it. People try to gloss over the human sacrifice side, and of course civilised Greeks like the Athenians soon got rid of it; but I haven’t a doubt the thing went on all through classical times in Thessaly and Epirus and Arcadia and some of the islands. Indeed in the islands it survived till almost the other day. There was a case not so long ago in Santorini.’

  He pressed me to tell him the origin of the paper, but I felt reluctant to mention Miss Arabin. He was so deeply prejudiced against the girl, that it seemed unfair to reveal to him even the most trivial of her private affairs. I put him off by saying it was the property of a client, and that I would find out its history and tell him later.

  ‘I have made a copy of the Greek text,’ he said. ‘May I keep it?’

  I told him, certainly. And that was all that happened during the evening. Formerly we would have sat up talking and smoking till all hours, but now I felt that the curtain was too heavy between us to allow of ordinary conversation. We would get at once into difficult topics. Besides I did not want to talk. The fact was that I was acquiring an obsession of my own – a tragic defiant girl moving between mirthless gaiety and menaced solitude. She might be innocent of the witchcraft in which Plakos believed, but she had cast some outlandish spell over me.

  Before the end of the week Miss Arabin rang me up.

  ‘You’re Sir Edward Leithen? I sent you some papers. Have you looked at them?’

  I told her I had.

  ‘Then you had better come and talk to me. Come on Saturday and I’ll give you luncheon. Half-past one.’

  There was no word of thanks for my trouble, but I obeyed the summons as if it had been a royal command. She had taken a flat in a block off Berkeley Square, and I wondered what sort of environment she had made for herself. I think I expected a slovenly place full of cushions and French novels and hot-house flowers. Instead I found a large room wholly without frippery – a big bare writing-table, leather arm-chairs like a man’s smoking-room, and on the walls one or two hunting prints and some water-colour sketches of English landscape. There were few books, and those I looked at were county history. It was a mild frosty day and the windows were wide open. The only decorations were some dogwood branches and hedgerow berries – the spoil which townsfolk bring back in winter from country week-ends.

  She was in tweeds, for she was off to Wirlesdon that afternoon, and – perhaps in my honour – she had forborne to powder her face. Once again I was struck by the free vigour of her movements, and the quick vitality of her eyes. The cabaret atmosphere was clearly no part of the real woman; rather, as I now saw her, she seemed to carry with her a breath of the fields and hills.

  At luncheon we talked stiltedly of the Nantleys and hunting. but no sooner was coffee served than she came to business.

  ‘Theodore has told you about me? You see the kind of fence I’m up against. What I want to know is just exactly how high and thick it is, and that no one can tell me. I liked your looks the first time I saw you, and everyone says you are clever. Now, understand one thing about me. I’m not going to show the white feather. Whatever it is, I’m going to stick it out. Have you that clear in your head?’

  As I looked at the firm little chin I believed her.

  ‘Well, can you enlighten me about the fence? You’ve heard all that Theodore has to say, and you know the cheerful sort of family I belong to. Did you find anything in the papers?’

  ‘You’ve read them yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘I tried to, but I’m not clever, you see. I thought my grandfather’s journal great nonsense. I had never heard of most of the names. But you’re good at these things. Did you make nothing of them?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I ran over the items in the bundle, not mentioning the Greek manuscript, which seemed to me to have nothing to do with the subject. ‘But there must be other papers.’

  She flushed slightly. ‘There were many others, but I burned them. Perhaps you can guess why.’

  ‘Miss Arabin,’ I said, ‘I want to help you, but I don’t think we need bother about the papers. Let’s go back to the beginning. I suppose it’s no use my urging you to get out of Plakos, settle in England and wipe all the past out of your memory?’

  ‘Not the slightest.’

  ‘I wonder why. After all it’s only common sense.’

  ‘Common cowardice,’ she retorted, with a toss of her head. ‘I have known Theodore all my life and I have forbidden him to raise that question. I have known you about a month and I forbid you.’

  There was something so flat-footed and final about her that I laughed. She stared at me haughtily for a moment, and then laughed also.

  ‘Go on with what you were saying,’ she said. ‘I stay at Plakos, and you must make your book for that. Now then.’

  ‘Your family was unpopular – I understand, justly unpopular. All sorts of wild beliefs grew up about them among the peasants and they have been transferred to you. The people are half savages, and half starved, and their mood is dangerous. They are coming to see in you the cause of their misfortunes. You go there alone and unprotected and you have no friends in the island. The danger is that, after a winter of brooding, they may try in some horrible way to wreak their vengeance on you. That is what I learned from Mr Ertzberger.’

  The summary, as I made it, sounded unpleasant enough, but the girl did not seem to feel it so. She nodded briskly. ‘That, at any rate, is what Theodore says. He thinks they may make me a sacrifice. Stuff and nonsense, I say.’

  The word ‘sacrifice’ disquieted me. It reminded me of the Greek which Vernon had translated.

  ‘Some risk there must be,’ I went on, ‘but what I cannot tell is the exact amount of it. Even among a savage people unpopularity need not involve tragedy. You were in Plakos last spring. Tell me what happened.’

  She fitted a cigarette into a long amber holder, and blew a cloud of smoke which she watched till it disappeared.

  ‘Nothing much. I was left entirely to myself. There was only one servant in the house, old Mitri the steward, and I had also my maid. The whole establishment was sent to Coventry. We had to get our food from the mainland, for we could buy nothing, except now and then a little milk through Mitri’s married daughter. It wasn’t pleasant, I can tell you. But the worst was when I went for a walk. If I met a man he would make the sign of the evil eye and spit. If I spoke to a child its mother would snatch it up and race indoors with it. The girls and women all wore blue beads as a charm against me and carried garlic. I could smell it wherever I went. Sometimes I wanted to cry and sometimes I wanted to swear, but you can do nothing with a silent boycott. I could have shaken the fools.’

  ‘What had they against you? Did you ever find out?’

  ‘Oh, Mitri used to tell us gossip that he had heard through his daughter, but Mitri isn’t too popular himself, and he is old and can go about very little. It seemed they called me Basilissa. That means Queen and sounds friendly enough, but I think the word they really used was diabolissa, which means a she-devil. The better disposed ones thought I was a Nereid – tha
t’s what they call fairies – but some said I was a strigla – that’s a horrible kind of harpy, and some thought I was a vrykolakas, which is a vampire. They used to light little fires in the graveyards to keep me away. Oh, I got very sick of my reputation. It was a hideous bore not to be able to go anywhere without seeing scared people dodging up by-ways, and making the sign of the cross and screaming for their children – simply damnable.’

  ‘It must have been damnable. I should have thought it rather terrifying too.’

  ‘Don’t imagine that they frightened me. I was really more sorry than angry. They were only foolish people scared half out of their minds, and, after all, my family has done a good deal to scare them. It is folly – nothing but folly, and the only way to beat folly is to live it down. I don’t blame the poor devils, but I’m going to bring them to a better mind. I refuse to run away because of a pack of fairy tales.’

  ‘There were no hostile acts?’ I asked.

  She seemed to reflect. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘One morning we found a splash of blood on the house door, which sent old Mitri to his prayers. But that was only a silly joke.’

  ‘Mr Ertzberger hinted that there might be trouble this year from the people in the hills?’

  Her face hardened.

  ‘I wish to Heaven I knew that for certain. It would be the best news I ever got. Those hillmen are not my people, and if they interfere I will have them whipped off the place. I will not have any protection against my own peasantry – Theodore is always pressing me, but I won’t have it – it would spoil everything – it wouldn’t be the game. But if those filthy mountaineers come within a mile of Plakos I will hire a regiment to shoot them down. Pray God they come. We of the coast have always hated the mountains, and I believe I could rally my people.’

  ‘But I thought you owned the whole island?’

  ‘No one owns the hills. My grandfather obtained the seigneury of Plakos, but he never claimed more than the good land by the sea. The hills have always been a no-man’s-land full of bandits. We paid them dues – I still pay them – and we did not quarrel, but there was no coming and going between us. They are a different race from our pure Greek stock – mongrels of Slav and Turk, I believe.’

  The spirit of the girl comforted me. If Ertzberger’s news was true, it might save the situation, and bring the problem out of the realm of groping mystery to a straightforward defence of property … But after all the hills were distant, and the scared tenants were at the house door. We must face the nearer peril.

  ‘Is there no one in the village,’ I said, ‘whom you can have it out with? No big farmer? What about the priests?’

  She shook her head. ‘No one. The priests do not love my family, for they call themselves Christians, while we are Catholics.’

  Twenty years spent in examining witnesses has given me an acute instinct about candour. There was that in the girl’s eyes and voice as she spoke which told me that she was keeping something back, something which made her uneasy.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ I said. ‘Has no priest talked to you?’

  ‘Yes, there was one. I will tell you. He is an old man, and very timid. He came to me at night, after swearing Mitri to tell no one. He urged me to go away for ever.’

  Her eyes were troubled now, and had that abstracted look which I had noted before.

  ‘What was his reason?’

  ‘Oh, care for his precious church. He was alarmed about what had happened at Easter.’

  She stopped suddenly.

  ‘Have you ever been in Greece at Easter – during the Great Week? No? Then you cannot imagine how queer it is. The people have been starved all Lent, living only on cuttle-fish soup and bread and water. Everyone is pale and thin and illtempered. It is like a nightmare.’

  Then in rapid staccato sentences she sketched the ritual. She described the night of Good Friday, when the bier with the figure of the crucified Christ on it stands below the chancel step, and the priests chant their solemn hymn, and the women kiss the dead face, and the body is borne out to burial. With torches and candles flickering in the night wind, it is carried through the village streets, while dirges are sung, and the tense crowd breaks now and then into a moan or a sigh. Next day there is no work done, but the people wander about miserably, waiting on something which may be either death or deliverance. That night the church is again crowded, and at midnight the curtains which screen the chancel are opened, and the bier is revealed – empty, but for a shroud. ‘Christ is risen,’ the priest cries, as a second curtain is drawn back, and in the sanctuary in an ineffable radiance stands the figure of the risen Lord. The people go mad with joy, they light their tapers at the priest’s candle, and like a procession of Bacchanals stream out, shouting ‘He is risen indeed’. Then to the accompaniment of the firing of guns and the waving of torches the famished peasants, maddened by the miracle they have witnessed, feast till morning on wine and lamb’s flesh in the joy of their redemption.

  She drew the picture for me so that I saw it as if with my own eyes, and my imagination quickened under the spell of her emotion. For here was no longer the cool matter-of-fact young woman of the world, with no more than tolerance for the folly of superstition. It was someone who could enter into that very mood, and feel its quivering nerves and alternate despair and exultation.

  ‘What had the priest to complain of?’ I asked.

  ‘He said that the people were becoming careless of the Easter holiness. He said that last year the attendance at the rite was poor. He feared that they were beginning to think of something else.’

  ‘Something else!’ Two of the most commonplace words in the language. She spoke them in an even voice in an ordinary London dining-room, with outside the wholesome bustle of London and the tonic freshness of an English winter day. She was about to go off to a conventional English week-end party at a prosaic country house. But the words affected me strangely, for they seemed to suggest a peril far more deadly than any turbulence of wild men from the hills – a peril, too, of which she was aware.

  For she was conscious of it – that was now perfectly clear to me – acutely conscious. She had magnificent self-command, but fear showed out from behind it, like light through the crack of a shutter. Her courage was assuredly not the valour of ignorance. She was terrified, and still resolute to go on.

  It was not my business to add to that terror. Suddenly I had come to feel an immense pity and reverence for this girl. Ertzberger was right. Her hardness, her lack of delicacy and repose, her loud frivolity, were only on the surface – a protective sheathing for a tormented soul. Out of a miserable childhood and a ramshackle education she had made for herself a code of honour as fine and as hard as steel. It was wildly foolish, of course, but so perhaps to our dull eyes the innocent and the heroic must always be.

  Perhaps she guessed my thoughts. For when she spoke again it was gently, almost hesitatingly.

  ‘I scarcely hoped that you could tell me anything about Plakos. But I rather hoped you would say I am right in what I am doing. Theodore has been so discouraging … I rather hoped from your face that you would take a different view. You wouldn’t advise me to run away from my job—?’

  ‘God forbid that I should advise you at all,’ I said. ‘I see your argument, and, if you will let me say so, I profoundly respect it. But I think you are trying yourself – and your friends also – too high. You must agree to some protection.’

  ‘Only if the hill folk give trouble. Don’t you see, protection would ruin everything if I accepted it against my own people? I must trust myself to them – and – and stick it out myself. It is a sort of atonement.’

  Then she got up briskly and held out her hand. ‘Thank you very much, Sir Edward. It has done me good to talk to you. I must be off now or I’ll miss my train. I’ll give your love to Mollie and Tom.’

  ‘We shall meet again. When do you leave England?’

  ‘Not till March. Of course we’ll meet again. Let me know if you have any bright id
ea … Elise, Elise! Where’s that fool woman?’

  Her maid appeared.

  ‘Get a taxi at once,’ she ordered. ‘We haven’t any time to waste, for I promised to pick up Lord Cheviot at his flat.’

  I asked one question as I left. ‘Have you ever heard of a place called Kynaetho?’

  ‘Rather. It’s the big village in Plakos close to the house.’

  SEVEN

  I ONCE READ in some book about Cleopatra that that astonishing lady owed her charm to the fact that she was the last of an ancient and disreputable race. The writer cited other cases – Mary of Scots, I think, was one. It seemed, he said, that the quality of high-coloured ancestors flowered in the ultimate child of the race into something like witchcraft. Whether they were good or evil, they laid a spell on men’s hearts. Their position, fragile and forlorn, without the wardenship of male kinsfolk, set them on a romantic pinnacle. They were more feminine and capricious than other women, but they seemed, like Viola, to be all the brothers as well as all the daughters of their father’s house, for their soft grace covered steel and fire. They were the true sorceresses of history, said my author, and sober men, not knowing why, followed blindly in their service.

  Perhaps Koré Arabin was of this sisterhood. At any rate one sober man was beginning to admit her compelling power. I could not get the girl from my thoughts. For one thing I had awakened to a comprehension of her beauty. Her face was rarely out of my mind, with its arrogant innocence, its sudden brilliancies and its as sudden languors. Her movements delighted me, her darting grace, the insolent assurance of her carriage, and then, without warning, the relapse into the child or the hoyden. Even her bad manners soon ceased to annoy me, for in my eyes they had lost all vulgarity. They were the harshnesses of a creature staving off tragedy. Indeed it was her very extravagances that allured, for they made me see her as a solitary little figure set in a patch of light on a great stage among shadows, defying of her own choice the terrors of the unknown.