The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  Then had come long years of spiritual sloth. The world had been too much with him. But certain habits had continued. Still in his heart he had praised God for the pleasures of life, and had taken disappointments with meekness, as part of a divine plan. Always, when he reflected, he had been conscious of being a puppet in almighty hands. So he had never been much cast down or much puffed up. He had passed as a modest man – a pose, some said; a congenital habit, said others. His friends had told him that if he had only pushed himself he might have been Prime Minister. Foolish! These things were ordained.

  Now his castles had been tumbled down. Pleasant things they had been, even if made of paste-board; in his heart he had always known that they were paste-board. Here was no continuing city. God had seen fit to change the sunlight for a very dark shadow. Well, under the shadow he must not quail but keep his head high, not in revolt or in defiance, but because He, who had made him in His image, expected such courage. ‘Though Thou slay me, yet will I trust in Thee.’

  There was no shade of grievance in Leithen’s mind, still less self-pity. There was almost a grim kind of gratitude. He was now alone with God. In these bleak immensities the world of man had fallen away to an infinite distance, and the chill of eternity was already on him. He had no views about an after-life. That was for God’s providence to decree. He was an atom in infinite space, the humblest of slaves waiting on the command of an august master.

  He remembered a phrase of Cromwell’s about putting his mouth in the dust. That was his mood now, for he felt above everything his abjectness. In his old bustling world there were the works of man’s hands all around to give a false impression of man’s power. But here the hand of God had blotted out life for millions of miles and made a great tract of the inconsiderable ball which was the earth, like the infinite interstellar spaces which had never heard of man.

  18

  HE woke to a cold which seemed to sear that part of his face which the blanket left exposed. There was a great rosy light all about the tent which the frost particles turned into a sparkling mist.

  The Hare stood above him.

  ‘There is a man,’ he said, ‘beyond the river under the rocks. I have seen a smoke.’

  The news gave Leithen the extra incentive that made it possible for him to rise. He hung on to the Hare’s shoulder, and it was in that posture that he drank some strong tea and swallowed a mouthful of biscuit. The smoke, he was told, was perhaps a mile distant in a nook of the cliffs. The long pool of the river was frozen hard, and beyond it was open ground.

  Leithen’s strength seemed suddenly to wax. A fever had taken him, a fever to be up and doing, to finish off his business once for all. His weakness was almost a physical anguish, and there was a horrid background of nausea … But what did it all matter? He was very near his journey’s end. One way or another in a few hours he would be quit of his misery.

  The Hare guided him – indeed, half carried him – over the frozen hummocks of the pool. Beyond was a slight rise, and from that a thin spire of smoke could be seen in an angle of the cliffs. In the shelter of the rise Leithen halted.

  ‘You must stay here,’ he told the Indian, ‘and see what happens to me. If I am killed you will go back to where we came from and tell my friend what has happened. He may want to come here, and in that case you will show him the road. If I do not die now you will make camp for yourself a little way off and at dawn tomorrow you will come where the smoke is. If I am alive you may help me. If I am dead you must return to my friend. Do you understand?’

  The Hare shook his head. The orders seemed to be unacceptable, and Leithen had to repeat them again before he nodded in acquiescence.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said. ‘God bless you for an honest man.’

  The turf was frozen hard, but it was as level as a croquet lawn andmade easy walking. All Leithen’s attention was concentrated onhis crazy legs. They wobbled and shambled and sprawled, and each step was a separate movement which had to be artfully engineered. He took to counting them– ten, twenty, thirty, one hundred. He seemed to have made no progress. Two hundred, three hundred – here he had to scramble in and out of a small watercourse – four hundred, five hundred.

  A cry made him lift his eyes, and he saw a man perhaps two hundred yards distant.

  The man was shouting, but he could not hear what he said. A horrid nausea was beginning to afflict him – the overpowering sickness which comes to men who reach the extreme limits of their strength. Then there was a sound which was not the human voice, and something sang not far from his left shoulder. He had taken perhaps six further steps when the same something passed somewhere on his right.

  His dulled brain told him the meaning of it. ‘He must be bracketing,’ he said to himself. ‘The third shot will get me in the heart or the head, and then all will be over.’ He found himself longing for it as a sick man longs for the morning. But it did not come. Instead came the nausea and the extremity of weakness. The world swam in a black mist, and strength fled from his limbs, like air from a slit bladder.

  19

  WHEN Leithen’s weakness overpowered him he might lose consciousness, but when he regained it there was no half-way house of dim perception to return to. He alternated between a prospect of acid clarity and no prospect at all … Now he took in every detail of the scene, though he was puzzled at first to interpret them.

  At first he thought that it was night and that he was lying out of doors, for he seemed to be looking up to a dark sky. Then a splash of light on his left side caught his attention, and he saw that it outlined some kind of ceiling. But it was a ceiling which lacked at least one supporting wall, for there was a great blue vagueness pricked out with points of light, and ruddy in the centre with what looked like flames. It took him some time to piece together the puzzle … He was in a cave, and towards the left he was looking to the open where a big fire was burning … There was another light, another fire it seemed. This was directly in front of him, but he could not see the flames, only the glow on floor and roof, so that it must be burning beyond a projecting rib of rock. There must be a natural flue there, he thought, an opening in the roof, for there was no smoke to make his eyes smart.

  He was lying on a pile of spruce boughs covered with a Hudson’s Bay blanket. There was a bitter taste on his lips as he passed his tongue over them – brandy or whisky it seemed; anyhow some kind of spirit. Somebody, too, had been attending to him, for the collar of his dicky had been loosened, and he was wearing an extra sweater which was not his own. Also his moccasins had been removed and his feet rolled snugly in a fold of the blanket …

  Presently a man came into the light of the inner fire. The sight of him awoke Leithen to memory of the past days. This could only be Lew Frizel, whom he had come to find – a man who had gone mad, according to his brother’s view, for he had left Galliard to perish; one who a few hours back had beyond doubt shot at himself. Then he had marched forward without a tremor, expecting a third bullet to find his heart, for it would have been a joyful release. Now, freed from the extreme misery of weakness, he found himself nervous about this brother of Johnny’s – why, he did not know, for his own fate was beyond caring about. Lew’s madness, whatever it was, could not be wholly malevolent, for he had taken some pains to make comfortable the man he had shot at. Besides, he was the key to Galliard’s sanity, and Galliard was the purpose of his quest.

  He was a far bigger man than Johnny, not less, it appeared, than six feet two; a lean man, and made leaner by his dress, which was deer skin breeches, a tanned caribou shirt worn above a jersey, and a lumberman’s laced boots. His hair, as flaxen as a girl’s, had been self-cut into a bunch and left a ridiculous fringe on his forehead. It was only the figure he saw, a figure apparently of immense power and activity, for every movement was like the releasing of a spring.

  The man glanced towards him and saw that he was awake. He lit a lantern with a splinter from the fire, and came forward so that Leithen could see his face. Plainly he was Joh
nny’s brother, for there was the same shape of head and the same bat’s ears. But his eyes were a world apart. Johnny’s were honest, featureless pools of that indistinct colour which is commonly called blue or grey, but Lew’s were as brilliant as jewels, pale, but with the pallor of intense delicate colour, the hue of a turquoise, but clear as a sapphire, and with an adamantine brilliance. They were masterful, compelling eyes, wild, but to Leithen not mad – at least it was the madness of a poet and not of a maniac.

  He bent his big shoulders and peered into Leithen’s face. There was nothing of the Indian in him, except the round head and the bat’s ears. The man was more Viking, with his great high-bridged nose, his straight, bushy eyebrows, his long upper lip, and his iron chin. He was clean-shaven, too, unlike his brother, who was as shaggy as a bear. The eyes devoured Leithen, puzzled, in a way contemptuous, but not hostile.

  ‘Who are you? Where do you come from?’

  The voice was the next surprise. It was of exceptional beauty, soft, rich, and musical, and the accent was not Johnny’s lingua-franca of all North America. It was a gentle, soothing Scots, like the speech of a Border shepherd.

  ‘I came with Johnny – your brother. He’s in camp three days’ journey back. We’ve found Galliard, the man who was with you. He was pretty sick and wanted nursing.’

  ‘Galliard!’ The man rubbed his eyes. ‘I lost him – he lost himself. Come to think of it, he wasn’t much of a pal. Too darned slow. I had to hurry on.’

  He lowered his blazing splinter and scanned Leithen’s thin face and hollow eyes and temples. He looked at the almost transparent wrist. He lifted the blanket and put his head close to his chest so that he could hear his breathing.

  ‘What brought you here?’ he asked fiercely. ‘You haven’t got no right here.’

  ‘I came to find you. Galliard needs you. And Johnny.’

  ‘You took a big risk.’

  ‘I’m a dying man, so risk doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You’re over Jordan now. The Sick Heart is where you come to when you’re at the end of your road … I had a notion it was the River of the Water of Life, same as in Revelation.’

  The man’s eyes seemed to have lost their glitter and become pools of melancholy.

  ‘Well, it ain’t. It’s the River of the Water of Death. The Indians know that and they only come here to die. Some, at least; but it isn’t many that gets here, it being a damn rough road.’

  He took Leithen’s hand in his gigantic paw.

  ‘You’re sick. Terrible sick. You’ve got what the Hares call tfitsiki and white folk T.B. We don’t suffer from it anything to signify, but it’s terrible bad among the Indians. It’s poor feeding with them; but that’s not what’s hunting you. Where d’you come from? Edmonton way, or New York like the man Galliard?’

  ‘I come from England. I’m Scots, same as you.’

  ‘That’s mighty queer. You’ve come down north to look for Galliard? He’s a sick man, too, sick in his mind, but he’ll cure. You’re another matter. You’ve a long hill to climb and I doubt if you’ll win to the top of it.’

  ‘I know. I’m dying. I made my book for that before I left England.’

  ‘And you’re facing up to it! There’s guts left in the old land. What’s your name? Leithen! That’s south country. We Frizels come from the north.’

  ‘I’ve seen Johnny’s ring with the Fraser arms.’

  ‘What’s brother John thinking about me?’

  ‘He’s badly scared. He had to stay to attend to Galliard, and it’s partly to ease his mind that I pushed on here.’

  ‘I guess his mind wanted some easing. Johnny’s thinking about mad trappers. Well, maybe he’s right. I was as mad as a loon until this morning … I’ve been looking for the Sick Heart River since I was a halfling, and Galliard come along and gave me my chance at last. God knows what he was looking for, but he fell in with me all right, and I treated him mighty selfish. I was mad and I don’t mind telling you. That’s the way the Sick Heart takes people. I thought when I found it I’d find a New Jerusalem with all my sins washed away, and the angels waiting for me … Then you come along. I shot at you, not to kill, but to halt you – when I shoot to kill I reckon I don’t miss. And you came on quite regardless, and that shook me. Here, I says, is someone set on the Sick Heart, and he’s going to get there. And then you tumbled down in a heap, and I reckoned you were going to die anyway.’

  Lew was speaking more quietly and the light had gone from his eyes.

  ‘Something sort of clicked inside my head,’ he went on, ‘and I began to look differently at things. The sight of you cleared my mind. One thing I know – this is the River of the Water of Death. You can’t live in this valley. There’s no life here. Not a bird or beast, not a squirrel in the woods, not a rabbit in the grass, let alone bear or deer.’

  ‘There are warm springs,’ Leithen said. ‘There must be duck there.’

  ‘Devil a duck! I looked to find the sedges full of them, geese and ducks that the Eskimos and Indians had hurt and that couldn’t move south. Devil a feather! And devil a fish in the river! When God made this place He wasn’t figuring on humans taking up lots in it … I got a little provender, but if you and I don’t shift we’ll be dead in a week.’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘A hindquarter of caribou – lean, stringy meat – a couple of bags of flour – maybe five pounds of tea.’

  ‘There’s an Indian with me,’ said Leithen. ‘He’s gone to earth a mile or so back. I told him to wait to see what happened to me. He’ll be hanging about tomorrow morning, and he’s got some food.’

  Lew rapped out a dozen questions, directed to identifying the Hare. Finally he settled who he was and gave him a name.

  ‘What’s he got?’ he demanded.

  ‘Flour and oatmeal and bacon and tea, and some stuff in tins. Enough for a week or so.’

  ‘That’s no good,’ said Lew bitterly. ‘We’ve got to winter here or perish. Man, d’you not see we’re in a trap? Nothing that hasn’t wings could get out of this valley.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  Lew smiled grimly. ‘God knows! I was mad, as I told you. I found a kind of crack in the rocks and crawled down it like a squirrel, helping myself with tree roots and creepers. The snow hadn’t come yet. I fell the last forty feet, but by God’s mercy it was into a clump of scrub cedar. I lost nothing except half my kit and the skin of my face. But now the snow is here and that door is shut.’

  ‘The Hare and I came down by the snow, and it’s the snow that’s going to help us out again.’

  Lew looked at him with unbelief in his eyes.

  ‘You’re a sick man – sick in the head, too. Likewise you’re tireder than a flightin’ woodcock. You’ve got to sleep. I’m goin’ to shift your bed further out. Frost won’t be bad tonight, and you want the air round you. See, I’ll give you another blanket.’

  Leithen saw that Lew was robbing his own bed, but he was too feeble to protest. He dropped straight away into the fathomless depths of exhausted sleep.

  When he woke, with rime on his blankets and sunlight in his eyes, he saw that the Hare had been retrieved and was now attending to the breakfast fire. For a little he lay motionless, puzzling over what had happened to him. As always now at the start of a day, he felt wretchedly ill, and this morning had been no exception. But his eyes were seeing things differently … Hitherto the world had seemed to him an etching without colour, a flat two-dimensioned thing which stirred no feeling in his mind of either repulsion or liking. He had ceased to respond to life. A landscape was a map to him which his mind grasped, but which left his interest untouched …

  Now he suddenly saw the valley of the Sick Heart as a marvellous thing. This gash in the earth, full of cold, pure sunlight, was a secret devised by the great Artificer and revealed to him and to him only. There was no place for life in it – there could not be – but neither was there room for death. This peace was beyond living and dying. He had a sudden
vision of it under a summer sun – green lawns, green forests, a blue singing stream, and cliffs of serrated darkness. A classic loveliness, Tempe, Phaeacic. But no bird wing or bird song, no ripple of fish, no beast in the thicket – a silence rather of the world as God first created it, before He permitted the coarse welter of life.

  Lew boiled water, gave Leithen his breakfast, and helped him to wash and dress.

  ‘You lie there in the sun,’ he said. ‘It’s good for you. And listen to what I’ve got to say. How you feeling?’

  ‘Pretty bad.’

  Lew shook his head. ‘But I’ve seen a sicker man get better.’

  ‘I’ve had the best advice in the world, so I don’t delude myself. I haven’t got the shadow of a chance.’

  Lew strode up and down before the cave like a sentry.

  ‘You haven’t a chance down here, living in a stuffy hole and eating the sweepings of a store. You want strong air, it don’t matter how cold, and you want fresh-killed meat cooked rare. I’ve seen that work miracles with your complaint. But God help you! there’s no hope for you here. You’re in your grave already – and so are all of us. The Hare knows. He’s squatting down by the water and starting on the dirges of his tribe.’

  Then he took himself off, apparently on some futile foraging errand, and Leithen, half in the sun, half in the glow of the fire, felt his weakness changing to an apathy which was almost ease. This was the place to die in – to slip quietly away with no last convulsive attempt to live. He had reacted for a moment to life, but only to the afterglow of it. The thought of further effort frightened him, for there could be no misery like the struggle against such weakness as his. It looked as if the fates which had given him so much, and had also robbed him so harshly, had relented and would permit a quiet end. Whitman’s phrase was like a sweetmeat on his tongue: ‘the delicious nearby assurance of death.’