by John Buchan
‘You have heard nothing of him since?’
‘Not a word has come. Why should it? He has no care for Clairefontaine … Now, monsieur, it is imperative that you go to bed, for you are very weary. I will conduct you to the Prophet’s Chamber.’
Leithen was in the habit of falling asleep at once – it was now his one bodily comfort – but this night he lay long awake. He thought that he had read himself into the soul of Francis Galliard, a summary and provisional reading, but enough to give him a starting point. He was convinced beyond doubt that he had come to Clairefontaine in the spring. He could not mistake the slight hesitation in the speech of Father Paradis, the tremor of the eyelids, the twitch of the mouth before it set – he had seen these things too often in the courts to be wrong. The priest had not lied, but he had equivocated, and had he been pressed would have taken refuge in obstinate silence. Francis had been here and had enjoined secrecy on the priest and no doubt on old Augustin. He was on a private errand and wanted to shut out the world.
He could picture the sequence of events. The man, out of tune with his environment, had fallen into the clutches of the past. He had come to Chateau-Gaillard and seen the ravaged valley – ravaged by himself and his associates – and thereby a bitter penitence had been awakened. His purpose now was to make his peace with the past – with his family, his birthplace, and his religion. No doubt he had confessed himself to the priest. Perhaps he had gone, as Leithen had gone, to the secret meadow at the river head, and, looking to the north, had had boyish memories and ambitions awakened. It was his business – so Leithen read his thoughts – to make restitution, to appease his offended household gods. He must shake off the bonds of an alien civilisation, and, like his uncle and his brother and a hundred Gaillards of old, worship at the altars of the northern wilds.
Leithen fell asleep with so clear a picture in his mind that he might have been reading in black and white Francis’s confession.
12
‘WE go back to Quebec,’ he told Johnny next morning. ‘But first I want to go up the stream again.’
The mountain meadow haunted his imagination. There, the afternoon before, he had had the first hour of bodily comfort he had known for months. The place, too, inspired him. It seemed to stiffen his purpose and to quicken his fancy.
Once again he lay on the warm turf beside the spring looking beyond the near forested hills to the blue dimness of the far mountains. It was that halcyon moment of the late Canadian summer when there are no flies, and even the midday is cool and scented, and the first hints of bright colour are stealing into the woods.
‘I didn’t get a great deal out of the old man,’ said Johnny. ‘He kept me up till three in the morning listenin’ to his stuff. He was soused when he began, and well pickled before he left off, but he was never lit up – the liquor isn’t brewed that could light up that old carcase. I guess he’s got a grouse against the whole world. But I found out one thing. Brother Lew has been here this year.’
Leithen sat up. ‘How do you know?’
‘Why, he asked me if I was any relation to another man of my name – a fellow with half a thumb on his left hand and a scar above his right eyebrow. That’s Lew to the life, for he got a bit chawed up at Vimy. When I asked more about the chap he felt he had said too much and shut up like a clam. But that means that Lew has been here all right, and that Augustin saw him, for to my certain knowledge Lew was never before east of Quebec, and yon old perisher has never stirred out of this valley. So I guess that Lew and your pal were here, for Lew wouldn’t have come on his own.’
Leithen reflected for a moment.
‘Was Lew ever at the Ghost River?’ he asked. ‘I mean the river half-way between Coronation Gulf and the top of Hud-son’s Bay.’
‘Never heard of it. Nope. I’m pretty sure brother Lew was never within a thousand miles of it. It ain’t his bailiewick.’
‘Well, I fancy he’s there now … You and I are setting out for the Ghost River.’
13
LEITHEN spent two weary days in Montreal, mostly at the telephone, a business which in London he had always left to Cruddock or his clerk. He knew that the Northland was one vast whispering gallery, and that it was easier to track a man there than in the settled countries, so he hoped to get news by setting the machine of the R.C.M.P. to work. There was telephoning and telegraphing far and wide, but no result. No such travellers as Galliard and Lew Frizel had as yet been reported north of the railways. One thing he did ascertain. The two men had not flown to the Ghost River. That was the evidence of the Air Force and the private aeroplane companies. Leithen decided that this was what he had expected. If Galliard was on a mission of penitence he would travel as his uncle Aristide and his brother Paul had travelled – by canoe and trail. If he had started early in May he should just about have reached the Arctic shores.
The next task was to get a machine for himself. He hired an aeroplane from Air-Canada, a Baird-Sverisk of a recent pattern, and was lucky enough to get one of the best of the northern flyers, Job Teviot, for his pilot, and one Murchison as his mechanic. The contract was for a month, but with provision for an indefinite extension. All this meant bringing in his bankers, and cabling home, and the influence of Ravelstons had to be sought to complete the business. The barometer at Montreal stood above 100˚, and there were times before he and Johnny took off when he thought that his next move would be to a hospital.
He felt stronger when they reached Winnipeg, and next day, flying over the network of the Manitoba lakes, he found that he drew breath more easily. He had flown little before, and the air at first made him feel very sleepy. This passed, and, since there was no demand for activity, his mind turned in on itself. He felt like some disembodied creature, for already he seemed to have shed all ordinary interests. Aforetime on his travels and his holidays he had been acutely interested in what he saw and heard, and part of his success at the Bar had been due to the wide range of knowledge thus acquired. But now he had no thoughts except for the job on hand. He had meant deliberately to concentrate on it, in order to shut out fruitless meditations on his own case; but he found that this concentration had come about automatically. He simply was not concerned about other things. In New York he had listened to well-informed talk about politics and business and books, and it had woke no response in his mind. Here in Canada he did not care a jot about the present or future of a great British Dominion. The Canadian papers he glanced at were full of the perilous situation in Europe – any week there might be war. The news meant nothing to him, though a little while ago it would have sent him home by the next boat. The world had narrowed itself to Francis Galliard and the frail human creature that was following him.
By and by it was the latter that crowded in on his thoughts. Since he had nothing to do except watch a slowly moving landscape and the cloud shadows on lake and forest, he began to reflect on the atom, Edward Leithen, now hurrying above the world. The memory of Felicity kept returning – the sudden anguish in her eyes, her cry ‘I love him! I love him!’ and he realised how lonely his life had been. No woman had ever felt like that about him; he had never felt like that about any woman. Was it loss or gain? Gain, he told himself, for he implicated no one in his calamity. But had he not led a starved life? A misfit like Galliard had succeeded in gaining something which he, with all his social adaptability, had missed. He found himself in a mood almost of regret. He had made a niche for himself in the world, but it had been a chilly niche. With a start he awoke to the fact that he was very near the edge of self-pity, a thing forbidden.
In a blue windless twilight they descended for the night at a new mining centre on the Dog-Rib River. Johnny pitched a tent and cooked supper, while the pilot and the mechanic found quarters with other pilots who ran the daily air service to the south. There was a plague of black flies and mosquitoes, but Leithen was too tired to be troubled by them, and he had eight hours of heavy, unrefreshing sleep.
When he stood outside the tent next morning,
looking over a shining lake and a turbulent river, he had a moment of sharp regret. How often he had stood like this on a lake shore – in Scotland, in Norway, in Canada long ago – and watched the world heave itself out of night into dawn! Like this – but how unlike! Then he had been exhilarated with the prospect of a day’s sport, tingling from his cold plunge, ravenous as a hawk for breakfast, the blood brisk in his veins and every muscle in trim. Now he could face only a finger of bacon and a half-cup of tea, and he was weary before the day had begun.
‘There’s plenty here knows Lew,’ Johnny reported. ‘They haven’t come this way. If they’re at the Ghost River, my guess is that they’ve gone by the Planchette and The Old Man Falls.’
They crossed Great Slave Lake and all morning flew over those plains miscalled the Barrens, which, seen from above, are a delicate lace-work of lakes and streams criss-crossed by ridges of bald rock and banks of gravel, and with now and then in a hollow a patch of forest. They made camp early at the bend of a river, which Johnny called the Little Fish, for Murchison had some work to do on the engine. While Leithen rested by the fire Job went fishing and brought back three brace of Arctic char. He announced that there was another camp round the next bend – a white man in a canoe with two Crees – a sight in that lonely place as unexpected as the great auk. Somewhat refreshed by his supper, Leithen in the long-lighted evening walked upstream to see his neighbour.
He found a middle-aged American cleaning a brace of ptarmigan which he had shot, and doing it most expertly. He was a tall man, in breeches, puttees, and a faded yellow shirt, and Leithen took him for an ordinary trapper or prospector until he heard him speak.
‘I saw you land,’ the stranger said. ‘I was coming round presently to pass the time of day. Apart from my own outfit you are the first man I’ve seen for a month.’
He prepared a bed of hot ashes, and with the help of rifle rods set the birds to roast. Then he straightened himself, filled a pipe, and had a look at Leithen.
‘I’m an American,’ he said. ‘New York.’
Leithen nodded. He had already detected the unmistakable metropolitan pitch of the voice.
‘You’re English? Haven’t I seen you before? I used to be a good deal in London … Hold on a minute. I’ve got it. I’ve heard you speak in the British Parliament. That would be in—’ And he mentioned a year.
‘Very likely,’ said Leithen. ‘I was in Parliament then. I was Attorney-General.’
‘You don’t say. Well, we’re birds of the same flock. I’m a corporation lawyer. My name’s Taverner. Yours – wait a minute – is Leven.’
‘Leithen,’ the other corrected.
‘Odd we should meet here in about the wildest spot in North America. It’s easy enough to come by air, like you, but Matthew and Mark and I have taken two blessed months canoeing and portaging from railhead, and it will take us about the same time to get back.’
‘Can corporation lawyers with you take four months’ holiday?’
Mr Taverner’s serious face relaxed in a smile.
‘Not usually. But I had to quit or smash. No, I wasn’t sick. I was just tired of the dam’ racket. I had to get away from the noise. The United States is getting to be a mighty noisy country.’
The cry of a loon broke the stillness, otherwise there was no sound but the gurgle of the river and the grunting of one of the Indians as he cleaned a gun.
‘You get silence here,’ said Leithen.
‘I don’t mean physical noise so much. The bustle in New York doesn’t worry me more than a little. I mean noise in our minds. You can’t get peace to think nowadays.’ He broke off. ‘You here for the same cause?’
‘Partly,’ said Leithen. ‘But principally to meet a friend.’
‘I hope you’ll hit him off. It’s a biggish country for an assignation. But you don’t need an excuse for cutting loose and coming here. I pretend I come to fish and hunt, but I only fish and shoot for the pot. I’m no sort of sportsman. I’m just a poor devil that’s been born in the wrong century. There’s quite a lot of folk like me. You’d be surprised how many of us slip off here now and then to get a little quiet. I don’t mean the hearty, husky sort of fellow who goes into the woods in a fancy mackinaw and spends his time there drinking whisky and playing poker. I mean quiet citizens like myself, who’ve simply got to breathe fresh air and get the din out of their ears. Canada is becoming to some of us like a medieval monastery to which we can retreat when things get past bearing.’
Taverner, having been without white society for so long, seemed to enjoy unburdening himself.
‘I’m saying nothing against my country. I know it’s the greatest on earth. But my God! I hate the mood it has fallen into. It seems to me there isn’t one section of society that hasn’t got some kind of jitters – big business, little business, politicians, the newspaper men, even the college professors. We can’t talk except too loud. We’re bitten by the exhibitionist bug. We’re all boosters and high-powered salesmen and propagandists, and yet we don’t know what we want to propagand, for we haven’t got any kind of common creed. All we ask is that a thing should be colourful and confident and noisy. Our national industry is really the movies. We’re one big movie show. And just as in the movies we worship languishing Wops and little blonde girls out of the gutter, so we pick the same bogus deities in other walks of life. You remember Emerson speaks about some nations as having guano in their destiny. Well, I sometimes think that we have got celluloid in ours.’
There was that in Leithen’s face which made Taverner pause and laugh.
‘Forgive my rigmarole,’ he said. ‘It’s a relief to get one’s peeves off the chest, and I reckon I’m safe with you. You see, I come of New England stock, and I don’t fit in too well with these times.’
‘Do you know a man called Galliard?’ Leithen asked. ‘Francis Galliard – a partner in Ravelstons?’
‘A little. He’s a friend of Bronson Jane, and Bronson’s my cousin. Funny you should mention him, for if I had to choose a fellow that fitted in perfectly to the modern machine, I should pick Galliard. He enjoys all that riles me. He’s French, and that maybe explains it. I’ve too much of the Puritan in my blood. You came through New York, I suppose. Did you see Galliard? How is he? I’ve always had a liking for him.’
‘No. He was out of town.’
Leithen got up to go. The long after-glow in the west was fading, and the heavens were taking on the shadowy violet which is all the northern summer darkness.
‘When do you plan to end your trip?’ Taverner asked as he shook hands.
‘I don’t know. I’ve no plans. I’ve been ill, as you see, and it will depend on my health.’
‘This will set you up, never fear. I was a sick man three years ago and I came back from Great Bear Lake champing like a prize-fighter. But take my advice and don’t put off your return too late. It don’t do to be trapped up here in winter. The North can be a darn cruel place.’
14
LATE next afternoon they reached the Ghost River delta, striking in upon it at an angle from the south-west. The clear skies had gone, and the ‘ceiling’ was not more than a thousand feet. Low hills rimmed the eastern side, but they were cloaked in a light fog, and the delta seemed to have no limits, but to be an immeasurable abscess of decay. Leithen had never imagined such an abomination of desolation. It was utterly silent, and the only colours were sickly greens and drabs. At first sight he thought he was looking down on a bit of provincial Surrey, broad tarmac roads lined with asphalt footpaths, and behind the trim hedges smooth suburban lawns. It took a little time to realise that the highways were channels of thick mud, and the lawns bottomless quagmires. He was now well inside the Circle, and had expected from the Arctic something cold, hard, and bleak, but also clean and tonic. Instead he found a horrid lushness – an infinity of mire and coarse vegetation, and a superfluity of obscene insect life. The place was one huge muskeg. It was like the no-man’s-land between the trenches in the War – a colossal no-
man’s-land created in some campaign of demons, pitted and pocked with shell-holes from some infernal artillery.
They skirted the delta and came down at its western horn on the edge of the sea. Here there was no mist, and he could look far into the North over still waters eerily lit by the thin evening sunlight. It was like no ocean he had ever seen, for it seemed to be without form or reason. The tide licked the shore without purpose. It was simply water filling a void, a treacherous, deathly waste, pale like a snake’s belly, a thing beyond humanity and beyond time. Delta and sea looked as if here the Demiurge had let His creative vigour slacken and ebb into nothingness. He had wearied of the world which He had made and left this end of it to ancient Chaos.
Next morning the scene had changed, and to his surprise he felt a lightening of both mind and body. Sky and sea were colourless, mere bowls of light. There seemed to be no tides, only a gentle ripple on the grey sand. Very far out there were blue gleams which he took to be ice. The sun was warm, but the body of the air was cold, and it had in it a tonic quality which seemed to make his breathing easier. He remembered hearing that there were no germs in the Arctic, that the place was one great sanatorium, but that did not concern one whose trouble was organic decay. Still, he was grateful for a momentary comfort, and he found that he wanted to stretch his legs. He walked to the highest point of land at the end of a little promontory.
It was a place like a Hebridean cape. The peaty soil was matted with berries, though a foot or two beneath was eternal ice. The breeding season was over and the migration not begun, so there was no bird life on the shore; the wild fowl were all in the swamps of the delta. The dead-level of land and sea made the arc of sky seem immense, the ‘intense inane’ of Shelley’s poem. The slight recovery of bodily vigour quickened his imagination. This was a world not built on the human scale, a world made without thought of mankind, a world colourless and formless, but also timeless; a kind of eternity. It would be a good place to die in, he thought, for already the clinging ties of life were loosened and death would mean little since life had ceased.