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THEY HAD ALL POETRY IN THEM, AND THE HEROIC, AND A GREAT UNWORLDLINESS. THEIR LIVES WERE LIKE OUR WEATHER—STORM AND SUN. ONE THING THEY NEVER FEARED—DEATH.

THE RUNAGATES CLUB

John Buchan tells in Memory Hold-the-Door how, as he lay ill during the early months of the World War, he 'invented a young South African called Richard Hannay, who had traits copied from many friends,' and amused himself considering what he would do in various emergencies. He gave Hannay certain companions, and the escapes, the hurried journeys, the high adventures of these braves gradually spread to fill eleven romances in the Greenmantle series, three in the Huntingtower group, and the single book, The Prince of the Captivity, in which two or three of the characters of the earlier tales appear.

To those who have come under the spell of these romances there is nothing to equal them. It is no explanation to say that they are 'well-written,' exciting; that they range through wild places, country lanes, or the stunted streets of London or Constantinople, or the islands of the Aegean—characters in other books are as brave and resourceful, women as fair, deeds as desperate; but here is a company of adventurers whose lives seem to give you a promise that a chance will come for you, amidst the dullest prose of life, to make the same wild dedication of yourself

'To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.'

Did it not come three times to an ageing Glasgow grocer,[1] as it did again and again to the Master of Clanroyden?

There will be nothing 'silly and fantastic' about it as Clanroyden says to Hannay there is about the Irish Sagas, but it will have 'the grave good sense which you find in the Norse Sagas and of course the Greek.' There is a great story-telling gift at work in these books, but I doubt if it is that as much as the characters of the men themselves which give them fascination. There had plainly been a Golden Age at Oxford when Buchan went down and he has wonderfully remembered and woven together the selected qualities of the Elizabethan lads he knew there. No character, I should judge, is based on one actual person. In Memory Hold-the-Door he does say that his character Sandy Arbuthnot, Lord Clanroyden, was suggested by Aubrey Herbert, but as one reads the chapter 'This for Remembrance,' the chapter of laurel and rue for his friends killed in the War, one sees how many of these men were given a new immortality through all his tales. In the case of Clanroyden some of the qualities of Auberon Herbert are so evident that this writer at first thought Aubrey Herbert was a misprint.

Plainly the characters, the lives, and the fates of these two men, his friends, Aubrey Herbert, the son of the Earl of Carnarvon, and Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, greatly influenced all the romances. It was natural that this should be so. The book most widely quoted through the tales, and their implicit creed, is Pilgrim's Progress. I read it through again as I began this introduction and I was happy to come on a line Buchan had not quoted which seemed to me wonderfully to summarize the attitude of his characters. Christian says to By-Ends, 'If you will go with us, you must go against wind and tide.'

With all their advantages of birth and wealth, few men have gone so gallantly against wind and tide as the two Herberts. Aubrey Herbert, almost blind through his life, managed to be with the Guards at Mons, to be at Anzac,[2] and at Kut el Amara. Auberon Herbert, one leg gone, still got into the Royal Air Force and was killed in France.

Aubrey Herbert was born in 1880, Lord Clanroyden in 1882. Both were educated at Eton and Oxford. Herbert was an attaché at Constantinople and travelled widely through the Turkish provinces and like Clanroyden was the blood brother of every Albanian bandit. It is his deep knowledge of the Middle East that we see in Clanroyden's part in Greenmantle. And we see also in Clanroyden what Desmond MacCarthy saw in Herbert—'the embodiment of this spirit which made mishaps, and even graver misfortunes, more tolerable in his company.'

Readers, however, will recognise Clanroyden also in Buchan's description of Bron Herbert who came back to England after the South African War to have a leg amputated at the knee. Buchan says: 'To a man of his tastes such a loss might well have been crippling. To Bron it simply did not matter at all. He behaved as if nothing had happened and went on with the life he loved. He was just as fine a sportsman as before, and his high spirits were, if anything, more infectious.' He hunted, played tennis, and stalked on some of the roughest hills in Scotland. He became a pilot in 1915, though many years over age, and his wonderful eye and nerve stood him in good stead.

Buchan writes of the day of his death in 1916: "The concluding days of October and the first week of November were full of strong gales from the southwest, which gravely hampered our flying, for our machines drifted too far over the enemy lines, and had to fight their way back slowly against a head wind. It was an eerie season on the bleak Picardy downs, scourged and winnowed by blasts, with the noise of guns from the front line coming fitfully in the pauses, like the swell of breakers on a coast. One evening, I rode over to have tea with Bron, when the west was crimson with sunset and above me huge clouds were scudding before the gale. They were for the most part ragged and tawny, like wild horses, but before them went a white horse, the leader of the unearthly cavalry. It seemed to me that I was looking at a ride of Valkyries, the Shield Maids of Odin, hasting eastward to the battle-front to choose the dead for Valhalla. . . ." Maurice Baring came to tell him next day Bron was missing. Early in December they heard that he was dead.

It is obvious here how wonderfully Buchan has mingled the patterns of these men. Much plainly of the character of Peter Pienaar in Greenmantle and Mr. Standfast, one of the great Boer hunters, was drawn from the aristocrat Bron Herbert, and yet it is Lord Clanroyden again Buchan is describing in Memory Hold-the-Door when he says, 'I have never known a more whole-hearted, hard-bitten nomad than Bron. . . . He was a gipsy to the core of his being, a creature of the wayside camp, wood-smoke, and the smell of earth.' And in Clanroyden there is unquestionably a good deal of T. E. Lawrence. In his book, Colonel Lawrence, Liddell Hart says, 'In the spring of 1916 he had a long-range hand in a more important matter, the "capture" of Erzerum by the Russian Caucasus Army after a curiously half-hearted defence. Readers of John Buchan's subsequent novel Greenmantle may find it worth while to remember that fiction has often a basis of fact.' Clanroyden's later strategy in his Olifa campaign in Courts of the Morning is very much that of Lawrence in Arabia, with a memory, too, of the march of Montrose to Philiphaugh.

In Sick Heart River, Sir Edward Leithen's thoughts go back to his friends in England—Hannay, Clanroyden, Roylance, Palliser-Yeates, and Lord Lamancha. We know amazingly little about the fascinating Lord Lamancha. We see him first coming into dinner in John Macnab, 'a tallish man with a long, dark face, a small dark moustache, and a neat pointed chin which gave him something of the air of an hidalgo.' In Memory Hold-the-Door Buchan tells of meeting Basil Blackwood, of whom he had heard much at Oxford, in South Africa: 'With his pointed face and neat black moustache he had the air of a Spanish hidalgo, and there was always about him a certain silken foreign grace.' 'It was of a piece,' Buchan says, with the anomalies of the War that 'a man of such varied powers and rich experience should fall at the age of forty-six as a Second Lieutenant' in a raid before Ypres. Buchan speaks of Blackwood's propensity for making fun of things and of drafting a despatch to the Colonial Office for Lord Milner in South Africa, beginning, 'With reference to my able despatch of such and such a date.'

There is a strong suggestion, I think, of Raymond Asquith in the character of Vernon Milburne in The Dancing Floor. Edward Leithen first sees him at the Amysforts' ball. 'He was uncommonly handsome after the ordinary English pattern. What struck me was his poise. He was looking at the pretty spectacle with a curious aloofness—with eyes that received much but gave out nothing. I have never seen anyone so completely detached, so clothed with his own atmosphere.' In Memory Hold-the-Door, again in the 'This for Remembrance' chapter, Buchan speaks of Raymond Asquith, who was killed with the Grenadier Guards at Givenchy, as he remembered him at Oxford: 'The figure of Raymond in those days stands very clear in my memory, for he always had the complete detachment from the atmosphere which we call distinction. . . . His manner was curiously self-possessed and urbane, but there was always in it something of a pleasant aloofness, as of one who was happy in society but did not give to it more than a fraction of himself.'

To those who knew them there are doubtless many glimpses of his friends in the gentlemen adventurers of whom he wrote—Hugh and Alan Dawnay, Nelson, Sellar, and many others must have been drawn on.

There is certainly one living man whose life contributed to the saga. Sir Richard Hannay, the leading character of the whole Greenmantle series, the South African engineer who came to London in the fatal June of 1914 and was fated to find The Thirty-Nine Steps, was born in 1877—Buchan himself was born in 1875. Hannay was a little older than a man whose exploits were greatly to influence his life. The man was Sir Edmund Ironside. Harold Nicholson reports[3] that at a review of the First Canadian Division at Aldershot, the second Lord Tweedsmuir upon being presented to Ironside told him that his father had based his character of Sir Richard Hannay on the exploits of Ironside. Even here, in a living man, it is fascinating to see the novelist's skill at work. Hannay is not a photograph of Ironside—he is another man born four years earlier, leading a different life. Ironside's fondness for playing Patience in times of stress is not a quality of Hannay's, but is of his American friend, John S. Blenkiron. Ironside speaking German and the Taal of the veldt managed, during the Herero campaign of the Germans in South-West Africa, to serve in disguise with the German Staff, and to undergo the strain Hannay stood in Greenmantle of serving with the Germans as a Boer, ostensibly speaking only Dutch or Taal, while understanding and mentally recording what the German Staff was saying in its own language.

However, if Hannay was Ironside in part, he was Buchan himself in many ways, perhaps most of all in his purchase of Fosse Manor after the War, when like Buchan 'the War left [him] with an intense craving for a country life. It was partly that I wanted quiet after turmoil, the instinct that in the Middle Ages took men into monasteries. But it was also a new-found delight in the rhythm of nature, and in small homely things after so many alien immensities.'

Enough, however, of sources and parallels of character. These tales are decidedly not romances à la clef, and we must leave surmise for their realities. Beyond the plots and actions of the books, their essential realities are the characters of the men and the scenes in which they move.

It is in 1907 or 1908 that we first meet Edward Leithen, then a philistine lawyer, telling a story to an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill.[4] It was a story of a mathematical genius named Hollond who had stumbled on a theory of corridors in space constantly shifting according to inexorable laws. The mathematics of the idea gradually filled him with a sort of dynamic horror and he went out to Chamonix and died at the Grépon, apparently after having gone up the Mumméry crack by himself. Leithen told the story at '"the eerie hour between dog and wolf," as the French say.'

In the thirty years that follow we see Leithen on many occasions as the man of action, but, although he himself can do spectacular things on the Chamonix Aiguilles and outwalk a gillie in the Highlands, he is, of all the group, the most sensitive to the presence of things unseen and to the end that awaits all men. The hour between dog and wolf strikes often for him. It is very interesting to see what J. W. Dunne, in his Experiment with Time, twenty years later, did with the ideas that Hollond was wrestling with, and through Dunne, J. B. Priestley's play Of Time and the Conways was influenced by Hollond.

Late in June, 1910, a Mr. Andrew Lumley died suddenly of heart failure in the night in London, and there were two column obituaries about him in The Times and The Post. He was close on seventy and his death revealed to the nation that he had been a second Maecenas. That autumn at Glenaicill, where they had gone for the duck-shooting, Leithen told five of his friends the story of The Power House. 'Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.'

The story has to do with the sudden unexplained flight of the rich Charles Pitt-Heron from London to Bokhara and on to 'the roof of the world [and] the snowy saddle of the pass which led to India.' His friend Deloraine sets out after him. In London, however, lies the secret of his flight, and by a chain of circumstances Leithen from his rooms in the Temple has more to do with the rescue than Deloraine. After a motor accident, while he is away from London on a brief trip, Leithen comes to a house called High Ashes.

'The house, as seen in the half-light, was a long white-washed cottage, rising to two storeys in the centre. It was plentifully covered with creepers and roses, and the odour of flowers was mingled with the faintest savour of wood-smoke pleasant to a hungry traveller in the late hours. I pulled an old-fashioned bell, and the door was opened by a stolid parlour-maid.'

Much of the unique charm of these tales is illustrated by this paragraph. It might well have come out of Cranford or Mansfield Park. The 'old-fashioned bell' puts utter Victorian respectability on the house. And in the house there is no sudden change. Cleaned and refreshed, Leithen comes down to 'a library, the most attractive I think I have ever seen . . . a table was laid in a corner, for the room was immense, and the shaded candlesticks on it, along with the late June dusk, gave such light as there was. . . . Dinner was a light meal but perfect in its way. There were soles, I remember, an exceedingly well-cooked chicken, fresh strawberries, and a savoury.' His host, 'a very dignified and agreeable figure who greeted one in a voice so full and soft that it belied his obvious age,' and Leithen 'talked of the weather and the Hampshire roads.'

It is only after dinner, when the talk has broadened and deepened, that Leithen noticed Mr. Lumley's eyes. 'His eyes were paler than I had ever seen in a human head—pale, bright, and curiously wild.' Then in the quiet June night Lumley begins the first of those marvellously prophetic attacks on Civilisation, which all the evil conspirators of the romances voice in one form or another.

'"Civilisation is a conspiracy. . . . Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare. . . . A little mechanical device will wreck your navies. A new chemical combination will upset every rule of war. . . . One or two minute changes might sink Britain to the level of Ecuador. And yet we never think these things are possible. We think our castles of sand are the ramparts of the universe. . . . The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge is still kept secret." He quoted me one or two cases. . . . They were of different kinds—a great calamity, a sudden break between two nations, a blight on a vital crop, a war, a pestilence. . . . If he was right, these things had not been the work of nature or accident, but of devilish art. The nameless brains he spoke of, working silently in the background, now and then showed this power by some cataclysmic revelation. . . . "I only know of the existence of great extra-social intelligences. They may be," Lumley says, "idealists and desire to make a new world. . . . Civilisation knows how to use such powers as it has, while the immense potentiality of the unlicensed is dissipated in vapour. Civilisation wins because it is a world-wide league; its enemies fail because they are parochial. But supposing anarchy learned from civilisation and became international. Suppose that links in the cordon of civilisation were neutralised by links in a far more potent chain."'

This view of the world to come was written about at the time when Henry Adams foresaw that at his centenary in 1938, 'for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.'

In May, four years later, a South African named Richard Hannay, with enough money to have a good time, 'was the best bored man in the United Kingdom.' But when he came back to his flat in Portland Place there was a stranger named Scudder waiting for him. Hannay listened to his story and on the strength of it gave him lodging for the night. He stayed three days, gradually telling Hannay more of the doom that was hanging over Europe. When Hannay came home to dinner the third night, Scudder was lying skewered to the floor with a long knife through his heart. So began the first of Hannay's hurried journeys: The Thirty-Nine Steps. He sought refuge from police and the men who had killed Scudder in the glens of Galloway, and there we begin to know this man of action. It is not Hannay's courage and resource which most grip us. Other men down the long roll from D'Artagnan have been as brave and resourceful in danger. Other men have seen only down a narrow lane of duty. There are in Hannay, however, two special qualities. He is in conflict with the forces of evil. They are seeking to destroy a world in which he was bored, but which he suddenly sees in its visible beauty, the beauty of the face of England, and the austere beauty of Scotland. He sees the 'spring coming with every hill showing as clear as a cut amethyst. The air had the queer rooty smell of bogs, but it was as fresh as mid-ocean, and it had the strangest effect on my spirits. I actually felt light-hearted. I might have been out for a spring holiday tramp, instead of a man of thirty-seven, very much wanted by the police.' He is a man for whom the heavens truly declare the glory of God. In all the perils he faces for the twenty years we know him, he is always acutely affected by the visible world. In Constantinople two years later all his self-assurance comes back because 'the wind had gone to the south and the snow was melting fast. There was a blue sky above Asia and away to the north masses of white cloud drifting over the Black Sea. What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty, the beauty of unexpected horizons and tongues of grey water winding below cypress-studded shores.' So it is till his last adventure in the Norlands when he was so aware of 'the summer days when it was never dark, the fresh, changing seas, the hardy delicate springs, the roaring windy autumns, the long grey firelit winters.'

Then there is this other unexpected quality in a man of action. He feels the terror of the hunted, the loneliness of the forsaken, and the sudden waves of depression and surrender that all men know, and when it is time to act he must, as he says, 'rake up the pluck to set my teeth and choke back the horrid doubts that flood in on me.'

When he escapes from his pursuers in Scotland, he comes to a rendezvous on the Kennet in Berkshire, where 'after Scotland the air smelled heavy and flat but infinitely sweet, for there the limes and chestnuts and lilac-bushes were domes of blossoms.' There he goes to the house of Sir Walter Bullivant, of the Foreign Office, and tells him Scudder's desperate story of what hangs over Europe, and his own perils and escapes in Scotland, and as they talk a call comes through from London saying that, as Scudder prophesied, Karolides has been assassinated. Three weeks later England was at war.

The events of Greenmantle begin in November, 1915, when Hannay was convalescing from his wounds received at Loos the bloody twenty-fifth of September. He was in a country house in Hampshire with Sandy Arbuthnot, a brother officer, when a telegram from Bullivant summoned him to London. There he hears a strange story of Germany's plans for a Holy War in the Middle East. The details are slight. A muleteer had staggered dying into the British camp at Kut, three months before. On a sheet of paper had been written 'Kasredin,' 'Cancer,' 'V.I.' The dying muleteer had been Bullivant's son, an intelligence officer of the Indian Army. Hannay is asked to go in disguise through Germany to Constantinople to learn the secret of the message.

He asks permission to bring Arbuthnot into the plan;[5] and with him meets an American engineer, John Scantlebury Blenkiron. Arbuthnot, who is an expert on the Near East, heads for Constantinople from Cairo, where he goes as a King's Messenger. Blenkiron goes openly to Berlin as a pro-German American, and Hannay decides to sail to Portugal and emerge there as a Boer, speaking only Dutch. He sails as Cornelius Brandt. In Lisbon he meets an old pal, Peter Pienaar, one of the great Dutch hunters, who joins him and back through Rotterdam they go to Berlin.

On the sixteenth day of January, 1916, the four make their rendezvous at the Golden Horn with the secrets of Kasredin, Cancer, and V.I. in their possession, the secrets of Germany's plan for a Holy War, of which a woman, Hilda von Einem, is the inspiration and leader.[6] Hannay knew nothing about women, 'but every man has in his bones a consciousness of sex. I was shy and perturbed, but horribly fascinated. This slim woman, poised exquisitely like some statue between the pillared lights, with her fair cloud of hair, her long delicate face, and her pale bright eyes, had the glamour of a wild dream. I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but I longed to rouse her interest. To be valued coldly by those eyes was an offence to my manhood, and I felt antagonism rising within me.'

Then, after the strain of the journey and cramped perils of Constantinople, Hilda von Einem, believing their story, gives them passports for Erzerum and the great hills. As they are about to go, Sandy, who has insinuated himself into the von Einem's household, disguised as a leader of a Senussi cult, makes one of his astoundingly prophetic summaries of the Germans he is fighting and that England fought again in 1939:

'Germany wants to simplify life, Germany's simplicity is that of the neurotic, not the primitive. . . . She wants to destroy and simplify; but it isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilisation to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the soul of his people, Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the world. . . .

'It was glorious to be out in the open again. Peter's face wore a new look, and he sniffed the bitter air like a stag. There floated up from the little wayside camps the odour of wood-smoke and dung-fires. That, and the curious acrid winter smell of great wind-blown spaces will always come to my memory as I think of that day.' They have learned the plan and broken it. Hilda von Einem had tracked them to a kranz in the hills. She offers them terms because of Sandy. She pleads there on the hillside 'for his return, for his partnership in her great adventure, pleading, for all I knew, for his love. Sandy says to her in English, "You must know, Madam, that I am a British Officer."' He goes on that he and his friends came East to destroy Greenmantle and her devilish ambitions. She still pleads. 'Not a flicker of weakness or disappointment marred her air.' Arbuthnot refused. She offers then to save them all. 'Then she seemed to make a last appeal. She spoke in Turkish now, and I do not know what she said, but I judged it was the plea of a woman to her lover. Once more she was the proud beauty, but there was a tremor in her pride—I had almost written tenderness. To listen to her was like horrid treachery, like eavesdropping on something pitiful.'

Then, as she turns from Arbuthnot's last refusal, a long-range Russian shell explodes in a mushroom of red earth, and in a moment the man who defeated her, whom she had brought to the edge of madness with her wickedness, carried her light, dead body back and said, 'Dick, we must bury her here. You see, she . . . liked me. I can make her no return but this.'

They are in at the kill at Erzerum. The Grand Duke's Cossacks break through the Turkish lines and Sandy in green silk as the Prophet rides in their van into Erzerum, Hannay with a broken arm following in the great press of riders.

'That was the great hour of my life and to live through it was worth a dozen years of slavery. Great God! What an hour it was! Everything flitted past me like smoke, or like the mad finale of a dream just before waking. . . . I felt the shadows of the Palantuken glen fading, and the great burst of light as we emerged on the wider valley. Somewhere before us was a pall of smoke scarred with red flames, and beyond, the darkness of still higher hills. . . . I felt the smell of sheepskin and lathered horses, and above all the bitter smell of fire. Down in the trough lay Erzerum, now burning in many places, and from the east, past the silent forts, horsemen were closing in on it.'

This exaltation of victory, after the perils and prisons the adventurers had been through, is that of Hannay, the man of action, Hannay brought up on Walter Scott, but it is interesting to remember that such an experience, that of leading his cavalry into burning Richmond the day that Lee evacuated it, was also 'the great hour of his life' to so different a man as Charles Francis Adams.

When Hannay is pulled out of the army next, for the adventures recounted in Mr. Standfast, it is June, 1917, and he is a Brigadier in France with a D.S.O. from the Somme, the C.B. for the Greenmantle business, and the Legion of Honour. In the nine months that follow he is engaged in tracking the German Secret Service through England, Scotland, Northern France, Switzerland, and there is a wild twenty-four hours in Italy. Arbuthnot was not with him. We learn years later[7] that he was in Persia that winter, and though there is no confirmation of it, it is probable that the frustration of Wassmuss,[8] the German T. E. Lawrence, was Sandy's work. Blenkiron is with him, though, and two new people join the great circle, Archie Roylance, the airman and ornithologist, and the V.A.D., Mary Lamington. The story takes its name from the character that Peter Pienaar has come to be. Absurdly over age, Pienaar had shaved his beard, got into the Royal Flying Corps, and made a tremendous reputation at the front. But in October, 1916, fighting his way back from the German lines in a southwest gale, Pienaar had been brought down, much as Bron Herbert was. At New Year's, in 1917, Hannay heard from him from Switzerland, where he was interned, crippled for life.

If everything else in the book were omitted, except those pages about Peter Pienaar, no right-minded man or boy could read it without a sense of the nobility of mankind. 'Somehow or other he had got a Pilgrim's Progress, from which he seemed to extract enormous pleasure. . . . I sensed what the loss of a leg must mean to him, for bodily fitness had always been his pride. The rest of life must have unrolled itself before him very drab and dusty to the grave. But he wrote as if he were on the top of his power.'

We have already noted that it is not the adventures themselves which make the whole Greenmantle saga so notable, but rather the men themselves and the scenes in which they move. In Mr. Standfast there is heart-chilling adventure, but the splendour of the book is its picture of that greater love which leads men to lay down their lives for a friend. The scenes in Switzerland, when Hannay as a spy goes to nurse Peter Pienaar, are as moving as anything in literature, and I do not know where literature holds a truer picture of the comradeship that exists between men of mature years, after they have shared danger and glory together and are ready, when the last adventure is done, for the fireside, their pipes, and the memories of the days of their reckless strength.

Pienaar in his crippled torture 'never had a word of complaint. That was the ritual he had set himself, his point of honour, and he faced the future with the same kind of courage as that with which he had tackled a wild beast or Lensch himself. Only it needed a far bigger kind of fortitude.... Once when I said something about his patience he said he had got to try to live up to Mr. Standfast. He had fixed on that character to follow, though he would have preferred Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, if he had thought himeslf good enough.'

It is in this book that Hannay meets and falls in love with Mary Lamington, almost twenty years his junior, but of that later. And it is in this book that some of Buchan's dry humour is at its best, as when Hannay, fleeing in disguise, falls in with some British soldiers on leave and pretends to be drunk, 'knowing the infinite pity of the British soldier for one so taken.' Lost on a lonely road with Archie Roylance, they fear they are in the German lines until they hear a soldier coming whistling down the road. 'That's an Englsihman,' said Archie joyfully, 'No Boche could make such a beastly noise.'

In point of time the events of _The Dancing Floor_, which ends on Easter Day, 1920, come next in the series. This is a story which begins in January, 1913, and it is told by Sir Edward Leithen as he comes home from a shooting holiday in North Ontario several years later. On the frontispeice are quoted the words from the Aeneid, _Quisque suos patimur manes_, Each of us suffers his own fate, which is so important a part of the philosophy of these books.

In 1915 at the Amysforts' ball he meets Vernon Milburne, an Oxford friend of his nephew, Charles. Vernon Milburne is the character so reminiscent of Raymond Asquith. A close friendship begins between them (for Leithen had 'a preposterous weakness for youth') although Leithen was born in 1876 and Milburne, perhaps in 1892 or '93. Milburne tells him of the strange dream he has had every year since childhood, and out of that dream and the Easter myth in an Aegean island comes the long and haunting story.

It will be remembered that Leithen says in _The Power House_ that Ethel Pitt-Heron 'happened to be the only person that ever captured my stony heart.' That was in 1910. In 1919 he meets the young and fascinating Koré Arabin, and between Leithen and her, with over twenty years' difference in their ages, there blossoms for a moment that tender love between girl and mature man which so often fascinates both and then falls away like the forsythia blooms in May. It is fascinating to consider how marriage would have affected Leithen. He was close to proposing it. She would almost certainly have accepted. Leithen says himself, 'I could not get the girl from my thoughts. Her face was rarely out of my mind with its arrogant innocence, its sudden brilliances, 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. We had become the closest of friends, and friendship with Koré Arabin was a dangerous pastime.' And then he adds, 'We were by way of dining with the Lamanchas, and I think if we had met that evening I should have asked her to marry me...but we did not meet, for by the evening she was gone.'

When Leithen follows her to the Aegean and is able to save her from a sacrifice, older than Christianity, he is able to watch Vernon Milburne lying asleep beside her in Leithen's boat, and able to think of their marriage quite calmly. But it is interesting to admirers of Leithen's character that he never mentions Koré Arabin again and that for all the depths and length of his friendship with Milburne he apparently never saw him again after that Easter. Perhaps he thought it best for all never to see either of them again.

It is not fair to the reader, I think, to pass any of these books without mention of the weather Buchan loved so well. Leithen, early in November, 1920, goes down to Wirlesdon.

'Is there anything in the world like the corner of a great pasture hemmed in with smoky-brown woods in an autumn twilight, or the jogging home after a good run when the moist air is quickening to frost and the mud ruts are lemon-coloured in the sunset; or a morning in November when, on some upland, the wind tosses the driven partridges like leaves over tall hedges, through the gaps of which the steel-blue horizons shine? It is the English winter that intoxicates me even more than the English May, for the noble bones of the land are bare, and you get the essential savour of earth and wood and water.'

It is the next spring that we again meet Sir Richard Hannay. He has married Mary Lamington and bought Fosse Manor, the home of her Wymondham aunts where he met her in the opening event of Mr. Standfast. They have a son Peter John 'rising fifteen months,' and after the turbulent war years are settled down to the peace of the green heart of England. The description of that life, in the first chapter of The Three Hostages, as Hannay comes up through the fields in 'the cold pearly haze at sunset' in mid-March, is one of the most delightful I know.

But as Lady Hannay comes downstairs to dinner with him, he feels a little shiver run along her arm and she whispers, 'It's too good and beloved to last. Sometimes I am afraid.' And then she quotes the Greek word Aidos, meaning you must walk humbly and delicately to propitiate the fates, that tabu, half-Calvinistic, half-Greek, which so many of Buchan's characters feel.

It is too good and beloved to last. A summons comes to him for service which he longs to refuse. He has every rational reason for refusing, but he obeys it. In trying to rationalise his desire to refuse, Hannay points out to himself and to others that he has earned the right to rest; that it was one thing to respond to his country's call in war for any service however distasteful, but that having served he has no further obligations. The enormously wealthy American Jew, Mr. Julius Victor, appeals to him 'as a Christian gentleman' for his help, and Hannay says that during the War 'I was in the mood for any risk and my wits were strung up and unnaturally keen. But that's all done with. I'm in a different mood now and my mind is weedy and grass-grown.' So he turns down appeals from three men, only, when they are gone, to telegraph them that he will come.

This same decision to leave well-earned peace and rest for profitless hazards is repeatedly made by the inner circle of the men in these books. They are worldly men. If they are romantic, they are nonetheless realists and I submit that it is their sense of realism rather than their romanticism which affects their decisions.

They, all have great privileges. They are all spared the great disturber of men's mental equilibrium. They are selfish and worldly, but they see very clearly that their privileges can never be paid for completely and balanced off. There are more instalments due. They cannot live with themselves if they turn their backs on their obligation to pay with their bodies for all that they possess. If they should refuse danger and discomfort, then there is no meaning in the things they believe in.

In The Three Hostages, for the second time in peace we come on another power house. Through the melodrama of the adventure, there is a grim reality that seems even truer today. Medina, talking to his 'disciple' Hannay in 1921, thinks curiously like another gangster of Berchtesgaden, and the shudder that he sends through the capitals and markets of the world, as Palliser-Yeates describes it in 'the dining-room in Mervyn Street [as] the evening light shone with the candles on the table, and made a fairy-like scene of the flowers and silver,' reads in detail like the crises before and after Munich.

The tale has for me the best adventure of them all; it has the same divine glimpses of weather, Hannay and Arbuthnot must fight against powers of darkness not only outside, but those of fear and discouragement within—but it is 1921, a year of peace, and it marks the first awareness on their part that their war services were not sufficient to pay for a lifetime of ease and comfort. They must continue to pay.

In The Three Hostages, Medina, on several occasions, takes Hannay to dine at The Thursday, a London dining club made up of fifteen men who had been leading queer lives during the War and wanted to keep together. The food and wine were at first execrable and Lord Lamancha gave it the name of The Runagates Club from a line in the sixty-eighth Psalm, 'He letteth the runagates continue in scarceness.' But under the firm hand of the Duke of Burminster it got its own chef and rooms, and as the food improved the name was changed to The Thursday.

There were, as we have said, fifteen members, of whom Medina, on the strength of his exploits with Denikin in South Russia, was one. It was proved that these exploits were frauds, and it may be supposed that he was dropped from membership. In the volume The Runagates Club twelve members' after-dinner stories are recorded. One of these is Sir Richard Hannay's and we may assume that he was elected in Medina's place. We also know that Sandy Arbuthnot was a member, but we do not know the names of the fourteenth and fifteenth members, and it would be fascinating to know them. It would seem to me likely that MacGillivray was one. I like to think that the fifteenth chair was saved for one who probably never occupied it and who was to die splendidly on the Val Saluzzana, 'loftily lying'—Colonel Melfort, The Prince of the Captivity.

The main interest of The Runagates Club's stories is in the last one, 'Fullcircle.' It is a delightful little story, about a late seventeenth-century Cotswold house and its effect on some people who lived there. But in the telling of it Sir Edward Leithen, speaking of his own Tudor manor of Borrowby, says, "The people who built this sort of thing lived close to another world and they thought bravely of death—they had all poetry in them, and the heroic, and a great unworldliness. They had marvellous spirits, and plenty of joys and triumphs, but they had also their hours of black gloom. Their lives were like our weather—storm and sun. One thing they never feared—Death. He walked too near them all their days to be a bogey."

Leithen evidently said this in about 1923, and sixteen years later it was to be wonderfully applicable to his own life.

Before discussing John Macnab, which is a very different type of adventure from the others, a Buchan chronicler must fairly state the confusion of dates which this book involves. The copyright of this book is plainly 1925 and it appears just as plainly to record certain events in Scotland between July and September, 1924. The Higher Criticism will, however, just as plainly show that the copyright date of the book is an error. The events it records occurred definitely from July to September, 1929. In The Island of Sheep, Peter John Hannay is indisputably in his fourteenth year, which fixes the date as 1933. Lord Clanroyden clearly refers to the events in The Courts of the Morning as having been 'two years ago,' namely, 1930-31. In The Courts of the Morning Archibald Roylance is on his honeymoon which occurred the winter after John Macnab.

The story itself is a light and a delightful one, but it has three important contributions to make to the whole saga. It gives us our only full-length picture of the fascinating Charles Merkland, Lord Lamancha. It introduces us to Janet Raden.

It should have warned us in its opening pages when Sir Edward Leithen calls on the great specialist, Acton Croke, for what he calls taedium vitae, that his pallor from an overdose of German gas, which we noted in The Runagates Club, had a serious cause. Certainly Croke should have been warned.

We have already noted an awareness, in The Three Hostages, of the payment that had to be continually made for the privileges these men enjoyed. In the quiet summer of John Macnab three of the men, Sir Edward Leithen, Pallister-Yeates, the banker, and Lord Lamancha went on strike against the privileges themselves. Work and play had become too easy, nothing was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon, and the specialist, whom two of them consulted, said, 'You're secure and respected and rather eminent—well, somehow or other get under the weather. . . . You need to be made to struggle for your life again, your life or your reputation.'

They meet Archie Roylance, the ex-airman and ornithologist, at dinner and he suggests their coming to his house at Crask in the Highlands and anonymously daring three neighbours of his to prevent their killing a stag on two preserves and taking a salmon on the other's river. They accept and the excitement of the poaching gives them back their zest. How they do it is a fascinating story, and while they are doing it their host, Roylance, meets and falls in love with Janet Raden, younger daughter of Colonel Alastair Raden, one of their 'enemies.' She has some clear-eyed things to say to Roylance who is standing for Parliament. She tells him her sister and father are the very last of the Radens and that is as it should be. 'The old life of the Highlands is going, and people like ourselves must go with it. There's no reason why we should continue to exist. We've long ago lost our justification. . . . We're only survivals. . . . Our Gaelic motto was . . . "Sons of Dogs, come and I will give you flesh." As long as we lived up to that we flourished, but as soon as we settled down and went to sleep and became rentiers we were bound to decay. . . . Somehow the fire went out of their blood, and they became vegetables. Their only claim was the right of property, which is no right at all. . . . Nobody in the world today has a right to anything which he can't justify. [My sister] Agatha adores decay—sad old memories, and lost causes, and all the rest of it. I'm quite different. I believe I'm kind, but I'm certainly hard-hearted.'

Now part of this, of course, is the restlessness of a lonely girl in the Highlands for more life, but there is also in it that realism which I find so redeeming in the men and women of these adventures. It is interesting to the readers to see how frequently the women of the books put into words the unexpressed creeds of their hard-bitten men.

During the poaching, Leithen makes friends with a wee laddie, Fish Benjie, and Lord Lamancha with a dog, Bluidy Mackenzie, who has never found anyone before who really understood him. There is a pleasant picture of Leithen reading Redgauntlet after he had got his salmon. Toward the end the game begins to take a dangerous turn. Lord Lamancha finds himself in a mean dilemma after his fist-fight with the navvy, Jim Stokes. The end, of course, is happy, and it is very interesting that the end is only happy because a vulgar and nouveau lord, on whom and on whose standards these fine gentlemen look down, suddenly reveals, in very human fashion, an unsuspected fineness and a very saving canniness.

Janet Raden became Lady Roylance that November, and in the following August she was staying at Laverlaw, Lord Clanroyden's[9] sixteenth-century house[10] in the Borders, with her husband when Hannay came up with a story of talk that their American friend, Blenkiron, was in serious trouble and that something ought to be done about it. Sandy dismissed the idea rather summarily and the more so when Janet said that she had met a niece or cousin of Blenkiron, an American girl named Dasent, who said she had been at Laverlaw that summer.

After Christmas the Roylances started for South America on their honeymoon and a month later were dining at the Hotel de la Constituçion on a little promontory over the harbor of Olifa, with the Pacific outside the windows. Their host, an Olifero, was telling them something of that amazing republic, the country without problems or perhaps whose problems had been solved by the vast mineral production of the Gran Seco Province, and by its governor Castor, the actual dictator of the country. Their host told them, though, that 'We have chosen prosperity and the price we pay for it is our pride. Olifa is a well-nourished body without a soul. . . . We have a stable government because our people have lost interest in being governed.'

It had not always been so. When Castor, a European, emerged out of nothing five years before, Olifa had lived all its life till then on the edge of bankruptcy and revolution. He had wrought a miracle out of the copper wealth of the Gran Seco.

The Roylances are eager to see the Gran Seco, but first they go fifty miles by train and twenty-four by motor to the San Fuentes Ranch at Veiro in the horse-country. The ranch is delightful, a mixture of Newmarket and Scotland,[11] but a guest warns them after dinner to get out of Olifa.

Back in Olifa City they meet Castor at dinner. He arranges their visit to the almost forbidden Gran Seco, warning them that 'We have established, as it were, a Sheffield and a Birmingham in a rude hill-country, and we must limit our administrative problems.'

So they go. In a noisy crowd of American tourists Janet recognizes the Dasent girl she had met in Scotland, and at their hotel, late at night, Lord Clanroyden, dressed as a waiter, comes in. He tells them they must leave the Gran Seco, that he needs their help in Olifa, that they must meet Miss Dasent there. He doesn't know her Christian name.

Barbara Dasent meets them at the San Fuentes Ranch. After dinner their host Don Mario led the way to his sitting-room, where, according to custom, a wood-fire crackled on the wide hearth. The curtains, usually left untouched to reveal the luminous night, were now closely drawn.' Clanroyden stood with his back to the fire.

He tells them why he is there and what he proposes to do. The world today he says is stuffed with megalomania, with men who want to be dictators, to deprive the world of its soul and rule its inanimate corpse.[12] Castor is such a man. 'He will do any evil in order that what he considers good may come.' Behind the placid front of Olifa City, with the resources of the Gran Seco, this new Power House, 'this greatest agent provocateur in history,' is at work with the ultimate purpose of making trouble on a vast scale for America, a country better integrated in the Civil War even than now.

Blenkiron had first got on to Castor. After a very long time his agents had reached Clanroyden. Now both of them propose to destroy Castor's plan, to use his own strength to do it, by kidnapping him to head a revolt against Olifa, and thereby to save his soul and Olifa's.

Very naturally the Roylances and Barbara Dasent ask Sandy why he is doing this. He says this: 'I don't know. I think I would go on with this affair, even if your uncle [Blenkiron] were out of it. You see, down at the bottom of my heart I hate the things that Castor stands for. I hate cruelty. I hate using human beings as pawns in a game of egotism. I hate all rotten machine-made, scientific creeds. I loathe and detest all this superman cant. I really believe in liberty, though it's out of fashion.'

The Roylances agree to go in with him and he gives them a toast which was to haunt Janet's dreams:

'I drink to our meeting in The Courts of the Morning.'

The story follows of the 'revolution' planned and successfully carried out by Clanroyden, Blenkiron, the Roylances, Barbara Dasent, and Luis de Marzaniga against the strength of Olifa's splendid mercenary army under Lossberg.[13] Militarily it is accomplished by Sandy's superb genius in selecting and applying to the terrain and the problem the principles of three great captains—Montrose, Stonewall Jackson, and Lawrence of Arabia—and it is done against terrific odds. The telling of it is one of the longest and most engrossing of the romances. It is full of meat.

Aside from the unfailing fascination of Clanroyden's character, the human situation most stirring in the book is the slow, convincing discovery of his other self by Castor. Janet Roylance tells him 'Lord Clanroyden is daring, but that is not because he thinks too much of himself, but because he believes he has great allies.' Castor laughs as she goes on,

'Exultations, agonies

And love, and man's unconquerable mind.'

But when Castor's conquistadors carry her off and Barbara expects to find in him triumph, perhaps, or a cynical amusement, she finds a haggard, suffering man in torment. He had suddenly become human, terribly human.

There is a living scene between him and Barbara Dasent in which he condemns Clanroyden, saying, 'He has started a fire which he cannot control, and soon it will burn down his own house. His own house, I say. He was a friend of Lady Roylance.' Barbara answers, 'So were you, I think. Have you too not kindled a fire which you cannot control? The conquistadors and the bodyguard were your own creation.'

Slowly through love and suffering he begins the stages of human wisdom, spernere mundum, spernere sese, spernere nullum. 'I have gone through the first stage. I have despised the world. I think I have reached the second—I am coming to despise myself . . . and I am afraid.' And as this develops, though the revolt is going badly, Sandy is suddenly rallied from his fatigue and discouragement as Castor, distracted with fear for Lady Roylance, says, 'I have had dreams and now I am trampling on them.'

'You mean that?' Sandy asks. 'By God, then we cannot be beaten. We have won the big stake.'

They do win it, and Clanroyden, El Lobo Gris, rides into Olifa at the head of his battered commandos, and the multitude seemed to catch its breath, as they saw the man who might be their king.

But before the triumph, in the night at the San Fuentes Ranch, Castor had died splendidly to save Janet and old San Fuentes from the assassins of his own bodyguard. Archie Roylance was not there as he lay dying in Janet's arms. 'He was beyond speech and his eyes were vacant and innocent like a child's. She pressed her face to his and kissed him on the lips.'

When Archie came in ten minutes later, Sandy said to him gently: 'She is safe—by a miracle. But Castor is dead—he died in her arms. Don't disturb her yet, Archie. A woman can only love one man truly, but many men may love her.' Then he tells him Castor died with her kiss on his cheek and says to let her stay a little longer beside him.

At the end, when they want him to stay in Olifa, Sandy tells Janet how full his mind is of home, 'the scent of the hay in the Oxford meadows, the moor-burn and the peat reek in April . . . the beloved old musty smell of the library at Laverlaw and logs crackling on a December evening.' She tells him he is lonely. She speaks of Barbara Dasent and he flushes under his sunburn, and Janet, her eyes wet with tears, kisses him and sends him down the path to find her.

I think it was a wrench for both of them. Sandy says, a moment before, 'When Archie arrived [after Castor was killed] and his first cry was for you, I remembered that I had nobody to feel like that about . . . and I wanted someone—her—so badly.'

I cannot but feel that Sandy's love of Barbara Dasent and her marriage to him arose from loneliness and the sense of the years slipping away rather than anything more profound. He was not particularly suited to marriage. Barbara was a good twenty years younger and his slave and, as people say, much too good for him. But I think it might just as well have been Janet or some other slim, boyish girl.

The tears in Janet's eyes, however, I do not see as entirely those of happiness. A year before she had been a lonely younger daughter in a Scottish home. She had met the charming Archie Roylance. He had been her salvation. It is impossible not to like his irrepressible schoolboy spirits and boyish charm.[14] He brought her into the great world and the great circle—Clanroyden, Hannay, Leithen, Palliser-Yeates, Lamancha—and I cannot but feel that this young woman, who described herself as hard-hearted, while loving and honouring her gallant boyish husband, must have sometimes mounted the Trojan walls and sighed her soul toward the Grecian tents.

I place the opening of The Gap in the Curtain in 1930, the year when Easter fell on April 20, and Whitsunday was in June. Sir Edward Leithen had gone down for Whitsunday to Flambard, the house with its Tudor wing, 'the remnant of the old house, which the great Earl of Essex once used as a hunting-lodge.' Leithen was very tired—he was beginning to show increasing signs of unusual fatigue—from a hard spring, and the size of the house party rather depressed him. There was present, however, a Professor Moe, a first-class mathematician and physicist, 'rather in the Einstein way.' Moe was a dying man with a new theory of time. Lady Flambard tried to explain it to Leithen—'He thinks that time is not a straight line, but full of coils and kinks. He says that the Future is here with us now, if we only knew how to look for it.'

For all his weariness and scepticism, Leithen was interested in the great man and the experiment he proposed to try. Perhaps he was reminded of the time over twenty years before when he had known Hollond, the half-mad trifler with time who died on the Grépon. In any event he agreed to participate in the experiment, when, four days later, on June 10, they would try, after a form of purification, to see for one instant of time a newspaper of June 10 the next year. Five guests and himself with Lady Flambard offered themselves. At the moment of revelation Moe died, Lady Flambard fainted, distracting Leithen's attention, but five other men saw the next year's paper.

Leithen tells us what they saw and what happened the next year. Two of the men read their own death-notices and their stories are the most significant. Each thought he had a year to live and each faced the future bravely. One of them, Sir Robert Goodeve, had bravery without fortitude and died shivering by a fire in his library at Goodeve, the wonderful moated house in the Downs, of heart failure that came about by the slow, relentless sapping fear. The other, Charles Ottery, was also brave without fortitude and a fine career began to go to pieces under his fright. With it went the inner life of his fiancée, Pamela Brune, Leithen's godchild. They meet, after their estrangement and dissipation, at the Lamanchas' in Devonshire after Christmas. Pamela saw how ill and broken Ottery looked. 'Oh, Charles,' she cried, 'what has happened to us?' The word 'us' broke him down, 'and as they went down the road in the winter gloaming, with the happy lights of the house in the valley beneath them, he told her all.'

The next day at his rooms in Mount Street there followed as touching a scene between two lovers as I know of. It is not a scene of passion or even of high emotion, but it is one in which two valuable, unhappy human beings, intensely needing each other, try to find a way out of the tragedy that is closing in on them. Dux femina facti.

'Courage is the thing,' Sir James Barrie began his famous Rectorial address at Glasgow. It was only by courage, by adding fortitude to bravery, doubtless because they had each other for its give-and-take, that Death itself came to have no meaning. 'The ancient shadow disappeared in the great brightness of love.'

In another of the stories, that of Mr. Reginald Daker, there is a scene at Leriot, Lamancha's place on the Borders, that gives another of the too few glimpses of Charles Merkland, Lord Lamancha. There are eight men there for the shooting and Reggie Daker, the London dilettante, is overwhelmed.

'You never saw such a set of toughs. Real hearties. . . . To listen to them you would think it was a kind of disgrace to enjoy life at home as long as there was some filthy place abroad where they could get malaria and risk their necks. . . . They were such cocksure pagans—never troubled to defend their views . . . the riddle of the Bramaputra gorges . . . to penetrate the interior of New Guinea and climb Carstensz . . . the second Everest expedition . . . birds in the frozen tundras of the Yenesei . . . and Lamancha, the savage at Leriot who sighed for the Arabian desert.'

In the opening of The Island of Sheep Peter John Hannay is fourteen years old. He was born in December, 1919, so that the book begins in the fall of 1933. By Higher Criticism we have already fixed on the Roylance marriage as November, 1929, and the Olifa incident as opening in 1930. Our only question here is that in The Island of Sheep Sandy refers to Olifa as two years before—therefore, 1931, which I take it is the date he left The Courts of the Morning when it was all over.

Hannay's last recorded adventure begins on an October evening in 1933. Old memories of past ardours and glories have been awakened by a speech in the House. He is fifty-six years old and feels rather dismal about the danger of petty degenerations of his soul. 'I had all the blessings a man can have, but I wasn't earning them. I tried to tell myself that I deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age.'

In January he went down to the Hanham Flats in Norfolk for a few days' goose-shooting with his son. That chapter, for men who love birds and sea-marshes, the chill hunger of the hunter before dawn is one of the most glorious ever written.[15] At the Rose and Crown at Hanham[16] they meet a frightened, outlandish man. In March, back at Fosse, when the Clanroydens are staying with them, Hannay speaks to Sandy of his feeling of getting old and slack and of not deserving or earning his right to all his comfort. Sandy tells him to enjoy his comforts 'but sit loose to them,' and that night Sandy tells him a story of a man named Haraldsen and a Tablet of Jade. This Haraldsen was a man whom Hannay had known in Africa thirty years before. They had been through a weird adventure together with a man named Lombard.

Lombard has meanwhile become a 'stockbroker and a commuter and bald and plump and something in big business,' and next year he hoped to be a Director of the Bank of England. Suddenly in the summer he wrote to Hannay that he must see him, and when they lunched together in London he reminded Hannay of an oath they had taken in Africa thirty years before to stand by Haraldsen or come to his son's help should he ever need it. Hannay himself calls it Moonlight Sonata stuff—and the story Lombard tells him of a gang of London City sharpers trying to blackmail young Haraldsen out of his great fortune makes him scoff. If it is anything serious, Hannay says he will take a hand, but that Lombard with a big business and a settled life has no call to answer. Lombard's answer is a very interesting one.

Hannay meets Haraldsen's son. He is the frightened man he had met in the autumn at Hanham. The story of threat and extortion rings true and he brings the strangely scared viking to Fosse Manor. There gradually it becomes evident that these blackmailers mean business, and in the blue June weather Clanroyden comes down and hears the story. After dinner, with young Peter John attending the council, Glenroyden tells them the threat is very real and that leading it is D'Ingraville, one of Castor's conquistadors, a dangerous and very desperate man, and those are not words Sandy used lightly.

As the lines draw closer about Fosse, they find it necessary to move Haraldsen secretly to Laverlaw—and to Haraldsen's plight we owe our knowledge of that wonderful house and valley in the Borders where 'the moorlands lap it round as the sea laps a rock.' There in 'the glen of the Laver below us, with the house and its demesne like jewels in a perfect setting and the far blue distances to the north,' both families and Haraldsen are at peace, and fortitude begins to come back to the frightened guest.

Like lightning in the quiet June, the gang strikes at Haraldsen's child, a girl at school in England. Lombard, playing up wonderfully to the tradition and training of his youth, rescues her. Then Haraldsen sees some young shepherd dogs attack the old pack-leader and sees the dog turn and fight. It reminds him of what he had forgotten. At Hanham he had seen a goose escape a hawk by flying low. He had thought he might escape by being quiet and humble. '. . . I was wrong, for humility drains manhood away, but does not give safety. . . . I have been a coward and I have seen the folly of cowardice. I have been sick too . . . I will no longer avoid my danger, but go out to meet it, since it is the will of God.'

The last round is fought on Haraldsen's Isle of Sheep in the Northern Ocean near Iceland, Hannay, Lombard, Haraldsen, a boy and a girl—with Clanroyden coming on. There they wait beleaguered in Haraldsen's vast viking hall, only the rain, wind, and mists of the North between them and their enemies. Haraldsen triumphs. He saves the life of Lord Clanroyden. But he would assuredly have died, like Goodeve, or lived a terrified and hunted man without the courage, the understanding, the willingness to 'sit loose to comforts' which animated the two men who became his friends. They were as MacCarthy said of Bron Herbert—'The embodiment of the spirit which make mishaps and even grave misfortunes more tolerable in their company.' Amici usque!

Now in Sick Heart River comes the last canto of the dramatic poem in many parts. It is another June, that of 1938. Sir Edward Leithen is walking home to his rooms in Down Street from the House. He saw in memory a London of forty and of twenty-five years before.[17] The West London that he was actually passing through is now no more. He thinks of 'how many snowy winter nights he had known there, cheerful with books and firelight; and autumn twilights when he was beginning to get in the stride after the long vacation; and spring mornings when the horns of elfland were blowing even in Down Street.'

Leithen had been told that day, by Acton Croke, whom he saw before the Macnab adventure, that he was dying, slowly dying—a year, perhaps a little longer, and then the end. Life had been a cup running over.

In the dawn of the next day he realised he wanted only one more thing from life, to 'die standing, as Vespasian said an emperor should.'

That morning Blenkiron brings him the chance to die standing and he takes it. He is asked to find a man of great value who has disappeared from the financial world of New York and gone completely over the horizon. New York is the beginning of the long journey. There Leithen meets Bronson Jane, and Savory, the Yale classical scholar with the hunting squire's appearance. One must regret that he had no earlier opportunity to know them because in their brief acquaintance there are seeds of the friendship he had with the great circle he had left in England.

The hunt goes out into the unknown North, with Leithen gambling his failing strength of body against wind and weather across the Manitoba lakes, Great Slave Lake to Ghost River inside the Circle, until he looks on the Arctic Ocean. It affected Leithen as the sight of the mouth of the Mackenzie did Buchan. '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 tremendous deathly waste, pale like a snake's belly. A thing beyond humanity and beyond time.'

That is not the end. The bitter trail is beaten on to the Sick Heart River, Rivière de Coeur Malade, across the Yukon watershed. There waters of atonement are thought to flow, and now the search for a man has become something far greater.

Professor Hocking, when he was delivering his valedictory lecture at Yale before going to Harvard, was asked to define Beauty. He answered quickly: "Beauty, I believe, is one means of anticipating the achievement which all of us hope for at the further end of eternity—the complete subjugation of matter to the uses and ends of the spirit. Here in what is beautiful we see that attainment before our eyes and its presence sustains us in the long journey."

It is this beauty which Leithen finds that he has gone out to seek. He is sustained in the long journey first by his 'noble frosty egoism,' and then by the sudden over-powering realisation that all men, great and small, must strive sub specie aeternitatis, and at last very humanly by the thought of reunion with his friends in England, 'Lamancha on the long slopes of Cheviot, Roylance on the wind-blown thymy moors of the west, Sandy in his Border fortress, Hannay (half Nestor, half Odysseus) by the clear streams and gentle pastures of Cotswold.' His heart remembers how!

If someone were to ask me what makes these books most fascinating to me, I think I should say their prophecy, their scenes, their men, their houses. In the first adventure beginning definitely after the War, Greenslade says, 'There has never been such a chance for a rogue since the world began.' In the same book Sandy says, at The Thursday, 'The real magician, if he turned up today, wouldn't bother about drugs and dopes. He would dabble in far more deadly methods, the compulsion of a fiery nature over the limp things that men call their minds.' This was written in 1924. But what Sandy says then Lumley was saying in effect in 1910 and Castor in 1931, and finally when Hitler said it the world accepted it. Buchan seems to have foreseen in amazing clairvoyance the gangster-rule of the world—Lumley, von Einem, von Schwabing, Medina, Castor, all propose and to a degree succeed in what Hitler has done so thoroughly.

I have tried by quotation to give some idea of Buchan's gift for weather and landscape, yet one of the joys of the books is to open them and find another morning, another moor, sea, or mountain seen and described with the delight with which Shakespeare saw Warwickshire in his youth.

What makes the men so memorable is of course not their bravery or competence. Their moments of exhilaration are followed by very human moments of fright, nor are they impeccable. Hannay himself knows there is an 'unworthy sense of superiority which a man gets from seeing an old friend whom he greatly admires behave rather badly.' They 'sit loose to their comforts,' it is true, and they recognise there is no final right, but that rights must continue to be earned. Their creed is 'mirthful and grave, stalwart and merciful.' The social philosopher will of course say that all that is very easy for them. After all, they have all been spared the three main disturbers of man's mental equilibrium—the problem of money does not exist for them; they are involved in the complex of problems centring about parents and family; they are spared the torments of sexual jealousy. Hannay has a flash of it after his engagement to Mary Lamington in Paris in February, 1918, but his marriage, Clanroyden's, Roylance's, and Lamancha's,[18] are all idyllic and Leithen's heart, though it lights up on four occasions for a lady, does so with no more than 'a dim tenderness.'

It would be a mistake, I believe, to conclude from this that Buchan was not aware of the fierceness with which men and women beat upon each other to the grave. Hilda von Einem's death-speech to Sandy comes from the dark abysses, and Janet Roylance is stricken at Castor's death with the same numb helplessness as Anna Karenina when Vronsky falls in the steeplechase, and she must cloak her anguish from the watching crowd. Buchan's attitude in matters of sex is that of his hero, Sir Walter Scott, but in that connection Buchan quotes in his Sir Walter Scott a marvellously telling passage from The Antiquary as evidence that Scott is not unaware of the dark secrets of memory.

The braves of the tales are unquestionably worldlings in every sense of the word. Much can be said against their way of life. It would have been impossible without the sweat and labour of less fortunate men. But the world would be a poorer and more evil place without them. What one of their houses, Bullivant's place on the Kennet, High Ashes, Fosse Manor, Laverlaw, Machray, the San Fuentes Ranch, would anyone not like to live in? So it is with them.

When the gates close on Christian's glimpse of the New Jerusalem, he says very simply, 'Which when I had seen I wished myself among them.'

There is nothing better or truer to say of the scenes, and the men and women of these adventures.

Howard Swiggett