The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  ‘They think I’m wise only because I don’t talk when I’ve nothing to say,’ he used to tell his friends. ‘Any fool these days can get a reputation if he keeps his mouth shut.’

  He was happy because his mind was filled with happy interests; he had no itching ambitions, he did his jobs as they came along with a sincere delight in doing them well, and a no less sincere delight in seeing the end of them. He was the extreme opposite of the man whose nerves demand a constant busyness because, like a bicyclist, he will fall down if he stays still.

  Leithen’s gaze passed to a young man who had Simon’s shape of head but was built on a smaller and more elegant scale. His hostess followed his eyes.

  ‘That’s our boy, Eric, and that’s his wife Delia, across the table. Pretty, isn’t she? She has the southern complexion, the real thing, which isn’t indigestion from too much hot bread at breakfast. What’s he doing? He’s on the Johns Hopkins staff and is making a big name for himself in lung surgery. Ever since a little boy he’s been set on doctoring and nothing would change him. He had a pretty good training – Harvard – two years at Oxford – a year in Paris – a long spell in a Montreal hospital. That’s a new thing about our boys, Sir Edward. They’re not so set nowadays on big business. They want to do things and make things, and they consider that there are better tools than dollars. George Lethaby is an example. He’s a poor man and always will be, for a diplomat can’t be a money-maker. But he’s a happier man than Harold Downes, though he doesn’t look it.’

  Mr Lethaby’s rugged face happened at the moment to be twisted into an expression of pain out of sympathy with some tale of the woman to whom he was talking, while his vis-à-vis, Mr Downes, was laughing merrily at a remark of his neighbour.

  ‘Harold has a hard life,’ said Mrs Ravelston. ‘He’s head of the Fremont Banking Corporation and a St Sebastian for everyone to shoot arrows at. Any more to be catalogued? Why, yes, there are the two biggest exhibits of all.’

  She directed Leithen’s eyes to two men separated by a handsome old woman whose hair was dressed in the fashion of forty years ago.

  ‘You see the man on the far side of Ella Purchass, the plump little man with the eagle beak who looks like he’s enjoying his food. What would you set him down as?’

  ‘Banker? Newspaper proprietor?’

  ‘Wrong. That’s Walter Derwent. You’ve heard of him? His father left him all kinds of wealth, but Walter wasted no time in getting out of oil into icebergs. He has flown and mushed and tramped over most of the Arctic, and there are heaps of mountains and wild beasts named after him. And you’d never think he’d moved further than Long Island. Now place the man on this side of Ella.’

  Leithen saw a typical English hunting man – lean brown face with the skin stretched tight over the cheek bones, pale, deep-set eyes, a small clipped moustache, shoulders a little stooped from being much on horse-back.

  ‘Virginian squire,’ he hazarded. ‘Warrenton at a guess.’

  ‘Wrong,’ she laughed. ‘He wouldn’t be happy at Warrenton, and I’m certain he wouldn’t be happy on a horse. His line is deep learning. He’s about our foremost pundit – professor at Yale – dug up cities in Asia Minor – edited Greek books. Writes very nice little stories, too. That’s Clifford Savory.’

  Leithen looked with interest at the pleasant vital face. He knew all about Clifford Savory. There were few men alive who were his equals in classical scholarship, and he had published one or two novels, delicate historical reconstructions, which were masterpieces in their way.

  His gaze circled round the table again, noting the friendliness of the men’s eyes, the atmosphere of breeding and simplicity and stability. He turned to his hostess—

  ‘You’ve got together a wonderful party for me,’ he said. ‘I feel what I always feel when I come here – that you are the friendliest people on earth. But I believe, too, that you are harder to get to know than our awkward, difficult, tongue-tied folk at home. To get to know really well, I mean – inside your plate-armour of general benevolence.’

  Mrs Ravelston laughed. ‘There may be something in that. It’s a new idea to me.’

  ‘I think you are sure of yourselves, too. There is no one at this table who hasn’t steady nerves and a vast deal of common sense. You call it poise, don’t you?’

  ‘Maybe, but this is a picked party, remember.’

  ‘Because of its poise?’

  ‘No. Because every man here is a friend of Francis Galliard.’

  ‘Friend? Do you mean acquaintance or intimate?’

  The lady pursed her lips.

  ‘I’m not sure. I think you are right and that we are not an easy people to be intimate with unless we have been brought up with the same background. Francis, too, is scarcely cut out for intimacy. Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘No. I heard his name for the first time a few weeks ago. Which of you knows him best? Mr Ravelston?’

  ‘Certainly not Simon, though he’s his business partner. Francis has a good many sides, and most people know only one of them. Bronson could tell you most about his work. He likes my Eric, but hasn’t seen much of him in recent years. I know he used to go duck-shooting in Minnesota with George Lethaby, and he’s a trustee of Walter Derwent’s Polar Institute. I fancy Clifford Savory is nearer to him than most people. And yet … I don’t know. Maybe nobody has got to know the real Francis. He has that frank, forthcoming manner which conceals a man, and he’s mighty busy too, too busy for intimacies. I used to see him once or twice a week, but I couldn’t tell you anything about him that everybody doesn’t know. It won’t be easy, Sir Edward, to get a proper notion of him from second-hand evidence. Felicity’s your best chance. You haven’t met Felicity yet?’

  ‘I’m leaving her to the last. What’s she like? I know her sister well.’

  ‘She’s a whole lot different from Babs. I can tell you she’s quite a person.’

  Leithen felt that if his hostess had belonged to a different social grade she would have called her a ‘lovely woman.’ Her meaning was clear. Mrs Galliard was someone who mattered.

  He was beginning to feel very weary, and, knowing that he must ration his strength, he made his excuses and did not join the women after dinner. But he spent a few minutes in the library, to which the men retired for coffee and cigars. He had one word with Clifford Savory.

  ‘I heard you five years ago at the Bar Association,’ Savory said. ‘You spoke on John Marshall. I hope you’re going to give me an evening on this visit.’

  Bronson Jane accompanied him to the door.

  ‘You’re taking it easy, I understand, Sir Edward, and going slow with dinners. What about the Florian tomorrow at half past five? In these hot days that’s a good time for a talk.’

  5

  THE library of the Florian Club looked out on the East River, where the bustle of traffic was now dying down and the turbid waters catching the mellow light of the summer evening. It might have been a room in an old English country house with its Chippendale chairs and bookcases, and the eighteenth-century mezzo-tints on the walls. The two men sat by the open window, and the wafts of cool evening air gave Leithen for the first time that day a little physical comfort.

  ‘You want me to tell you about Francis Galliard?’

  Bronson Jane’s wholesome face showed no signs of fatigue, though he had been having a gruelling day.

  ‘I’ll tell you all I can, but I warn you that it’s not much. I suppose I’m as close to him as most people, but I can’t say I knew him well. No one does – except perhaps his wife. But I can give you the general lay-out. First of all, he is a French-Canadian. Do you know anything about French Canada?’

  ‘I once knew a little – a long time ago.’

  ‘Well, they are a remarkable race there. They ought to have made a rather bigger show in the world than they have. Here’s a fine European stock planted out in a new country and toughened by two centuries of hardship and war. They keep their close family life and their religion in
tact and don’t give a cent for what we call progress. Yet all the time they have a pretty serious fight with nature, so there is nothing soft in them. You would say that boys would come out of those farms of theirs with a real kick in them, for they have always been a race of pioneers. But so far Laurier is their only great man. You’d have thought that now and then they would have produced somebody big in the business line, like the Scots. You have young Highlanders, haven’t you, coming out of the same primitive world, who become business magnates? We have had some of them in this country.’

  ‘Yes. That is not uncommon in Scotland.’

  ‘Well, Francis is the only specimen I’ve struck from French Canada. He came out of a farm in the Laurentians, somewhere back of the Glaubsteins’ new pulp town at Chateau-Gaillard. I believe the Gaillards go right back to the Crusades. They came to Canada with Champlain, and were the seigneurs of Chateau-Gaillard, a tract of country as big as Rhode Island. By and by they came down in the world until now they only possess a little bit of a farm at the end of nowhere.’

  ‘What took him out of the farm? The French don’t part easily from the land.’

  ‘God knows. Ambition? Poverty? He never told me. I don’t just know how he was raised, for he never speaks of his early days. The village school, I suppose, and then some kind of college, for his first notion was to be a priest. He had a pretty good education of an old-fashioned kind. Then something stirred in him and he set off south like the fairy-tale Younger Son, with his pack on his back and his lunch in his pocket. He must have been about nineteen then.’

  Leithen’s interest quickened. ‘Go on,’ he said, as Bronson paused. ‘How did he make good?’

  ‘I’m darned if I know. There’s a fine story there, but I can’t get it out of him. He joined a French paper in Boston, and went on to another in Louisiana, and finished up in Chicago on a financial journal. I fancy that several times he must have pretty nearly starved. Then somehow he got into the bond business and discovered that he had a genius for one kind of finance. He was with Connolly in Detroit for a time, and after that with the Pontiac Trust here, and then Ravelstons started out to discover new blood and got hold of him. At thirty-five he was a junior partner, and since then he has never looked back. Today he’s forty-three, and there aren’t five men in the United States whose repute stands higher. Not bad for a farm boy, I’ll say.’

  ‘Does he keep in touch with his people?’

  ‘Not he. That door is closed and bolted. He has never been back to Canada. He’s a naturalised American citizen. He won’t speak French unless he’s forced to, and then it’s nothing to boast of. He writes his name “Galliard,” not Gaillard. He has let himself become absorbed in our atmosphere.’

  ‘Really absorbed?’

  ‘Well – that’s just the point. He has adopted the externals of our life, but I don’t know how much he’s changed inside. When he married Felicity Dasent five years ago I thought we had got him for keeps. You don’t know Mrs Galliard?’

  Leithen shook his head. He had been asked this question now a dozen times since he landed.

  ‘No? Well, I won’t waste time trying to describe her, for you’ll soon be able to judge for yourself; but I should call her a possessive personality, and she certainly annexed Francis. Oh, yes, he was desperately in love and only too willing to do what she told him. He’s a good-looking fellow, but he hadn’t bothered much about his appearance, so she groomed him up and made him the best-dressed man in New York. They’ve got a fine apartment in Park Avenue and her dinners have become social events. The Dasents are a horsey family and I doubt if Francis had ever mounted a horse until his marriage, but presently she had him out regularly with the Westbrook. He bought a country place in New Jersey and is going to start in to breed ’chasers. Altogether she gives him a pretty full life.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘No, not yet. A pity, for a child would have anchored Francis. I expect he has family in his blood like all his race.’

  ‘He never appeared to be restless, did he?’ Leithen asked.

  ‘Not that I noticed. He seemed perfectly content. He used to work too hard and wear himself out, and every now and then have to go off for a rest. That’s the tom-fool habit we all have here. You see, he hadn’t any special tastes outside his business to make him keen about leisure. Felicity changed all that. She isn’t anything of the social climber, or ambitious for herself, but she’s mighty ambitious for her man. She brought him into all kinds of new circles, and he shines in them, too, for he has excellent brains – every kind of brains. All the gifts which made him a power in business she developed for other purposes. He was always a marvel in a business deal, for he could read other men’s minds, and he would have made a swell diplomatist. Well, she turned that gift to social uses, with the result that every type mixes well at their parties. You’ll hear as good talk at their table as you’ll get anywhere on the civilised globe. He can do everything that a Frenchman can do, or an Englishman or an American. She has made him ten times more useful to Ravelstons than before, for she has made him a kind of national figure. The Administration has taken to consulting him, and he’s one of the people that foreigners coming over here have got to see. I fancy she has politics at the back of her mind – last winter, I know, they were a good deal in Washington.’

  Bronson lit a fresh cigar.

  ‘All set fair, you’d say, for the big success of our day. And then suddenly one fine morning he slips out of the world like the man in Browning’s poem, and God knows what’s become of him.’

  ‘You know him reasonably well? Is he happy?’

  Bronson laughed. ‘That’s a question I couldn’t answer about my own brother. I doubt if I could answer it about myself. He is gay – that is the French blood, maybe. I doubt if he has ever had time to consider whether he is happy or not, he lives such a bustling life. There can’t be much of the introvert in Francis.’

  A man had entered the room and was engaged in turning over the magazines on one of the tables.

  ‘Here’s Savory,’ Bronson whispered. ‘Let’s have him join us. He’s a rather particular friend of Francis.’ He raised his voice, ‘Hullo, Clifford! Come and have a drink. Sir Edward wants to see you.’

  Clifford Savory, looking more like a country squire than ever in his well-cut grey flannels, deposited his long figure in an armchair and sipped the whisky-and-soda which the club servant brought him.

  ‘We were talking about Galliard,’ Bronson said. ‘Sir Edward has heard a lot about him and is keen to meet him. It’s just too bad that he should be out of town at present. It seems that Francis has got a reputation across the water. What was it you wanted to ask, Sir Edward? How much of his quality comes from his French blood?’

  Savory joined his finger-tips and regarded them meditatively.

  ‘That’s hard to say. I don’t know enough of the French in Canada, for they’re different from the French in Europe. But I grant you that Galliard’s power is exotic – not the ordinary gifts that God has given us Americans. He can argue a case brilliantly with the most close-textured reasoning; but there are others who can do that. His real strength lies in his flair, which can’t be put down in black and white. He has an extra sense which makes him conscious of things which are still in the atmosphere – a sort of instinct of what people are going to think quite a bit ahead, not only in America, but in England and Europe. His mind is equipped with no end of sensitive antennae. When he trusts that instinct he is never wrong, but now and then, of course, he is over-ridden by prosaic folk. If people had listened to him in ’29 we should be better off now.’

  ‘That’s probably due to his race,’ said Leithen. ‘Whenever you get a borderland where Latin and Northman meet, you get this uncanny sensitiveness.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Savory, ‘and yet in other things his race doesn’t show up at all. Attachment to family and birthplace, for instance. Francis has forgotten all about his antecedents. He cares as little about his origin as Melchizedek. He is a
s rootless as the last-arrived Polish immigrant. He has pulled up his roots in Canada, and I do not think he is getting them down here – too restless for that.’

  ‘Restless?’ Leithen queried.

  ‘Well, I mean mobile – always on the move. He is restless in another way, too. I doubt if he is satisfied by what he does, or particularly happy. A man can scarcely be if he lives in a perpetual flux.’

  6

  A figure was taking shape at the back of Leithen’s mind, a figure without material mould, but an outline of character. He was beginning to realise something of the man he had come to seek. The following afternoon, when he stood in the hall of the Galliards’ apartment in Park Avenue, he had the chance of filling in the physical details, for he was looking at a portrait of the man.

  It was one of the young Van Rouyn’s most celebrated achievements, painted two years earlier. It showed a man in riding breeches and a buff leather coat sitting on a low wall above a flower garden. His hair was a little ruffled by the wind, and one hand was repelling the advances of a terrier. Altogether an attractive detail of what should have been a ‘conversation piece.’ Leithen looked at the picture with the liveliest interest. Galliard was very different from the conception he had formed of him. He had thought of him as a Latin type, slim and very dark, and it appeared that he was more of a Norman, with well-developed shoulders like a football player. It was a pleasant face, the brown eyes were alight with life, and the mouth was both sensitive and firm. Perhaps the jaw was a little too fine drawn, and the air of bonhomie too elaborate to be quite natural. Still, it was a face a man would instinctively trust, the face of a good comrade, and there could be no question about its supreme competence. In every line there was energy and quick decision.