The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  Johnny was getting very grave about supplies. As soon as the weather cleared an attempt must be made to get up the reserves from the Hares’ camp. They were out of sugar, almost out of tea and coffee, and their skins would give trouble unless they had fruit juice. But, above all, the hunting must be resumed. That was their main source of supply, and since Christmas the caribou had been harder to get, and February might bring savage weather.

  Of these anxieties Leithen knew nothing. He was overwhelmed with the miracle of vigour creeping back into his moribund body. On the road from the Sick Heart River he had found himself responding again to life, and had welcomed the change as the proper mood in which to die. But this was different – it was not the recognition of life, but life itself, which had returned to him.

  At night in the pit in the snow with Lew and the Hare he had become suddenly conscious of the mercifulness of things. There was a purpose of pity and tenderness in the iron compulsion of fate. Now this thought was always with him – the mercy as well as the omnipotence of God. His memory could range over the past and dwell lovingly and thankfully on its modest pleasures. A little while ago such memories, if he could have revived them, would have been a torment.

  * * *

  His mind ran up and down the panorama of his life, selecting capriciously. Oddly enough, it settled on none of the high lights. There had been moments of drama in his career – an adventure in the Aegean island of Plakos, for example, and more than one episode in the War. And there had been hours of special satisfaction – when he won the mile at school and college, his first big success at the Bar, his maiden speech in the House, his capture of the salmon when he and Lamancha and Palliser-Yeates poached in the Highlands. But though his memory passed these things in review, it did not dwell on them. Three scenes seemed to attract it especially, and he found that he could spend hours contentedly in reconstructing them and tasting their flavour.

  The first belonged to his childhood. One morning in spring he had left his Border home determined to find what lay beyond the head of a certain glen. He had his rod with him, for he was an ardent fisherman, and lunch in his pocket – two jam sandwiches, a dainty known as a currant scone, two bread-and-butter sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg, and an apple – lovingly he remembered every detail. His short legs had crossed the head of the glen beyond the well-eye of the burn, and had climbed to the tableland of peat haggs and gravel, which was the watershed. Here he encountered an April hailstorm, and had to shelter in a hagg, where he ate his luncheon with intense relish. The hail passed, and a mild blue afternoon succeeded, with the Cheviots clear on the southern sky-line.

  He had struggled across the peat bog, into the head of the glen beyond the watershed, where another burn fell in delectable pools among rowans and birches, and in these pools he had caught trout whose bellies were more golden and whose spots were brighter than the familiar fish in his own stream. Late in the evening he had made for home, and had crossed the hills in an April sunset of rose and saffron. He remembered the exultation in his small heart, the sense of being an explorer and an adventurer, which competed with a passionate desire for food.

  Everything that day had gone exactly right. No one had upbraided him for being late. The trout had been justly admired. He had sat down to a comfortable supper, and had fallen asleep and rolled off his chair in the middle of it. Assuredly a day to be marked with a white stone. He could recall the sounds that accompanied it – the tinkle of the burn in its tiny pools, the perpetual wail of curlews, the sudden cackle of a nesting grouse. And the scents, too – peat, wood smoke, crushed mountain fern, miles of dry bent, the pure, clean odour of icy water.

  This memory came chiefly in the mornings. In the afternoons, when he was not asleep, he was back at Oxford. The scene was always the same – supper in the college hall, a few lights burning, the twilight ebbing in the lancet windows, the old portraits dim as a tapestry. There was no dinner in hall in the summer term, only supper, when you could order what you pleased. The memory of the fare almost made him hungry – fried eggs, cold lamb and mint sauce and salad, stewed gooseberries and cream, cheese and wheaten bread, and great mugs of home-brewed beer … He had been in the open air most of the day, riding over Shotover or the Cumnor hills, or canoeing on the upper Thames in the grassy meadows above Godstow, or adventuring on a bicycle to fish the dry-fly in the Cotswold streams. His body had been bathed in the sun and wind and fully exercised, so his appetite was immense. But it was not the mere physical comfort which made him dwell on the picture. It was the mood which he remembered, and could almost recapture, the mood which saw the world as a place of long sunlit avenues leading to marvellous horizons. That was his twentieth year, he told himself, which mankind is always longing to find again.

  The third memory was the most freakish. It belonged to his early days at the Bar, when he lived in small ugly rooms in one of the Temple courts, and had very little money to spend. It was the first day of the Easter vacation, and he was going to Devonshire with Palliser-Yeates to fish the Exmoor hill streams. The cheapest way was to drive with his luggage direct to Paddington, after the meagre breakfast which his landlady provided. But it seemed an occasion to celebrate, so he had broken his journey at his club in St James’s Street, a cheerful, undistinguished young man’s establishment, and had breakfasted there with his friend. It had been a fresh April morning; gulls had been clamorous as he drove along the Embankment, and a west wind had been stirring the dust in Pall Mall … He remembered the breakfast in the shabby old coffee room, and Palliser-Yeates’ fly-book which he spilt all over the table. Above all he remembered his own boyish anticipations. In twenty-four hours he would be in a farmhouse which smelt of paraffin and beeswax and good cooking, looking out on a green valley with a shallow brown stream tumbling in riffles and drowsing in pools under banks of yellow bent. The larch plantations would be a pale mist on the hillsides, the hazel coverts would be budding, plovers would be everywhere, and water ouzels would be flashing their white breasts among the stones … The picture was so dear and home-like that he found himself continually returning to it. It was like a fire at which he could warm his hands.

  But there came a time when this pleasant picture-making ceased, and his mind turned back on itself. He had lost the hard stoical mood in which he had left London, but he was not clear as to what had replaced it. What was he doing here in a hut inside the Arctic Circle, among mountains which had never been explored and scarcely visited, in the company of Indians and half-breeds? … And then he slowly became conscious of Galliard.

  All these weeks he had not noticed Galliard’s presence or inquired what had happened to him. This man, the original purpose of his journey, had simply dropped out of his line of vision. He pondered on the queer tricks which the mind can play. The Frizels and the Indians were the human background to his life, but it was a background undifferentiated, for he never troubled to distinguish between the two Hares, and Lew, who was his daily ministrant, seemed to have absorbed the personality of Johnny. Galliard had sunk also into this background. One evening, when he saw what appeared to be three Frizels in the hut, he thought his mind wandering.

  Moreover, the broken man, bedridden, half crazy, whom he had left behind when he set out for the Sick Heart River had disappeared. What he saw now was a big fellow, dressed in the same winter kit as Lew and Johnny, and busy apparently on the same jobs. He cut down young spruces and poplars for fuel, he looked after the big fire which burned outside and was used chiefly for melting snow and ice into water, and sometimes he hunted and brought back game. Slowly his figure disentangled itself from its background and was recognised. It had followed Leithen’s example and shaved its beard, and the face was very much like that of the picture in the Park Avenue apartment.

  Leithen’s vitality had sunk so low that he had spoken little during his early recovery, and afterwards had been too much engaged with his own thoughts. This detachment had prevented him listening to the talk in the hut. His attention was only engag
ed when he was directly addressed, and that was done chiefly by Lew. But now, while he did not attempt to overhear, he was conscious of the drone of conversation after supper in the evening, and began to distinguish the different notes in it. There was no mistaking Lew’s beautiful rich tones with their subtle Scots cadences, and Johnny’s harsher and more drawling voice. Then he became aware of a third note, soft like Lew’s, but more nasal, and one afternoon, at the tailend of a blizzard, when Leithen lay abed in the firelight and the others were getting kindlings from the wind-felled trees, this voice addressed him.

  ‘Can we talk now?’ it said. ‘I’ve been waiting for this chance now that you’re mending. I think we have much to say to each other.’

  Leithen was startled. This was what he had not heard for months, an educated voice, a voice from his own world. A stone had been thrown into the pool of his memory and the ripples stretched to the furthest shore. This was Galliard; he remembered everything about Galliard, reaching back to Blenkiron’s first mention of him in his Down Street rooms.

  ‘Tell me who you are,’ the voice continued.

  Leithen did not answer. He was wondering how to begin an explanation of a purpose which must seem wholly fantastic. He, the shell of a creature, had set out to rescue this smiling frontiersman who seemed to fit perfectly into his environment.

  ‘Johnny says that you know some of my friends. Do you mind telling me your name? I don’t trust Johnny’s ear, but I think he said “Leven.”’

  ‘Not quite. Leithen.’

  Galliard repeated the word, boggling, like all his countrymen, at the ‘th.’ ‘Scotch, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I live in England.’

  ‘You’ve been a pretty sick man, I gather, but you’re mending fast. I wonder what brought a sick man to this outlandish place in midwinter? These mountains are not exactly a sanatorium … You don’t mind my asking questions? You see, we come out of the same world, and we’re alone here – the only people of our kind for a thousand miles.’

  ‘I want you to ask questions. It’s the easiest way for me to tell you my story … I crossed the Atlantic last summer thinking that I was a dying man. The best English authority said so, and the best American authority confirmed his view. I’m unmarried, and I didn’t want to die in a nursing-home. I’ve always been an active man, and I proposed to keep going until I dropped. So I came out here.’

  Galliard nodded. His brown eyes had a smiling, comprehending friendliness.

  ‘That I understand – and admire. But why to America? – Why just here? – And on a trip like this?’

  ‘I had to have a job. I must be working under orders, for it was the only way to keep going. And this was the job that offered itself.’

  ‘Yes, but please tell me. How did it happen that a sick Englishman was ordered to the Arctic Circle? What kind of job?’

  Leithen smiled. ‘You will think it fantastic. The idea came from a kinsman of yours – a kinsman by marriage. His name is Blenkiron.’

  Galliard’s face passed from an amused inquisitiveness to an extreme gravity.

  ‘Our Uncle John! Tell me, what job did he give you?’

  ‘To find out where you had gone, and join you, and, if possible, bring you back. No, not bring you – for I expected to be dead before that – but to persuade you.’

  ‘You were in New York? You saw our Uncle John there?’

  ‘No. In London. I know his other niece, Lady Clanroyden – Clanroyden was at school and college with me – and I had some business once with Blenkiron. He came to my rooms one morning last summer, and told me about you.’

  Galliard’s eyes were on the ground. He seemed to have been overcome by a sudden shyness, and for a moment he said nothing. Then he asked—

  ‘You took on the job because you liked Blenkiron? Or perhaps Lady Clanroyden?’

  ‘No. I happen to like Lady Clanroyden very much – and old Blenkiron, too. But my motive was purely selfish. I wasn’t interested in you – I didn’t want to do a kindness to anybody – I wanted something that would keep me on my feet until I died. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had never heard the name of any of the people concerned. I was thinking only of myself, and the job suited me.’

  ‘You saved my life. If you and Johnny hadn’t followed our trail I would long ago have been a heap of bones under the snow.’ Galliard spoke very softly, as if he were talking to himself.

  Leithen felt acutely uncomfortable.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But that was an accident, and there’s no gratitude due, any more than to the policeman who calls an ambulance in a street accident.’

  Galliard raised his head.

  ‘You were in New York? Whom did you meet there? My wife?’

  ‘Yes. The Ravelstons, of course. And some of your friends like Bronson Jane, and Derwent, and Savory. But principally your wife.’

  ‘Can you’ – the man stuttered – ‘can you tell me about her?’

  ‘She is a brave woman, but I need not tell you that. Anxious and miserable, of course, but one would never guess it. She keeps a stiff face to the world. She tells people that you are in South America inquiring into a business proposition. She won’t have any fuss made, for she thinks it might annoy you when you come back.’

  ‘Come back! She believes I will come back?’

  ‘Implicitly. She thinks you had reached cross-roads in your mind and had to go away and think it out and decide which one to take. When you have decided, she thinks you will come back.’

  ‘Then why did she want you to go to look for me?’

  ‘Because there was always a chance you might be dead – or sick. I sent her a message from Fort Bannerman saying that I had ascertained you were alive and well up to a week before.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I guessed that you had gone first to Clairefontaine. I got no news of you there, but some little things convinced me that you had been there. Then I guessed you had gone North where your brother and your uncle had gone. So I followed. I saw their graves, and then Johnny told me about Lew’s craze for the Sick Heart River, and I guessed again that he had taken you there. It was simply a series of lucky guesses. If you like, you can call them deductions from scanty evidence. I was lucky, but that was because I had made a guess at what was passing in your mind, and I think I guessed correctly.’

  ‘You didn’t know me – never met me. What data had you?’

  ‘Little things picked up in New York and at Clairefontaine. You see I am accustomed to weighing evidence.’

  ‘And what did you make of my psychology?’

  ‘I thought you were a man who had got into a wrong groove and wanted to get out before it was too late … No, that isn’t the right way to put it. If it had been that way, there was no hope of getting you back. I thought you were a man who thought he had sold his birthright and was tortured by his conscience and wanted to buy it back.’

  ‘You think that a more hopeful state of affairs?’

  ‘Yes. For it is possible to keep your birthright and live in a new world. Many men have done it.’

  Galliard got up and pulled on his parka and mitts. ‘I’m going out,’ he said, ‘for I want to think. You’re a wizard, Mr Leithen. You’ve discovered what was wrong with me; but you’re not quite right about the cure I was aiming at … I was like Lew, looking for a Sick Heart River … I was seeking the waters of atonement.’

  For a moment Leithen was alarmed. Galliard had seemed the sanest of men, all the saner because he had divested himself of his urban trappings and had yet kept the accent of civilisation. But his last words seemed an echo of Lew – Lew before his cure. But a glance at the steady eyes and grave face reassured him.

  ‘I mean what I say,’ Galliard continued. ‘I had been faithless to a trust and had to do penance for it. I had forgotten God and had to find Him … We have each of us to travel to his own Sick Heart River.’

  2

  IN the days of short commons Lew was a tower of strength. He ran
the camp in an orderly bustle, the Indians jumped to his orders, and Johnny worked with him like an extra right hand. His friendly gusto kept up everyone’s spirits, and Leithen was never aware of the scarcity of rations.

  It was a moment when he seemed to have reached the turning-point of his disease. Most of his worst discomforts had gone, and only weakness vexed him and an occasional scantiness of breath. The night sweats had ceased, and the nausea, and he could eat his meals with a certain relish. Above all, power was creeping back into his limbs. He could put on his clothes without having to stop and pant, and something of his old striding vigour was returning to his legs. He felt himself fit for longer walks than the weather and the narrow camp platform permitted.

  Lew watched him with an approving eye. As he passed he would stop and pat him on his shoulder.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ he would say. ‘Soon you’ll be fit to go huntin’. You much of a shot?’

  ‘Fair.’

  Lew laughed. ‘If an Old Countryman ’lows he’s a fair shot, it means he’s darned good.’

  One evening just before supper when the others were splitting firewood, Lew sat himself down before Leithen and tapped him on the knee.

  ‘Mr Galliard,’ he said – ‘I’d like to say something about Mr Galliard. You know I acted mighty bad to him, but then I was out of my senses, and he wasn’t too firm in his. Well, I’m all right now, but I’m not so sure that he is. His health’s fine, and he can stand a long day in the bush. But he ain’t happy – no happier than when he first hired me way back last spring. I mean he’s got his wits back, and he’s as sensible as you and me, but there’s a lot worryin’ him.’ Lew spoke as if he found it difficult to say what he wanted.

  ‘I feel kind o’ responsible for Mr Galliard,’ he said, ‘seeing that he’s my master and is paying me pretty high. And you must feel kind o’ responsible for him or you wouldn’t have come five thousand miles looking for him … I see you’ve started talking to him. I’d feel easier in my mind if you had a good long pow-wow and got out of him what’s biting him. You don’t happen to know?’