The Gap in the Curtain E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 404

Beschreibung

'For three minutes you will turn your eyes inward – into the darkness of the mind which I have taught you to make. Then – I will give the sign – you will look at the paper. There you will see words written, but only for one second. Bend all your powers to remember them.' What begins as a welcome, if slightly dull, weekend at his friend Lady Flambard's house in the Costwolds becomes for Sir Edward Leithen something altogether more intriguing. A fellow guest – the brilliant Professor Moe – enlists the help of Leithen and his companions in an experiment. If they do as he says, each will get a glimpse a year into the future in the pages of The Times. One of Buchan's most unusual novels, The Gap in the Curtain is a tense tale of unexpected from the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. With an introduction by Stuart Kelly. This edition is authorised by the John Buchan Society. 

Leseprobe

THE GAP IN THE CURTAIN

JOHN BUCHAN led a truly extraordinary life: he was a diplomat, soldier, barrister, journalist, historian, politician, publisher, poet and novelist. He was born in Perth in 1875, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow University then took a scholarship to Oxford. During his time there – ‘spent peacefully in an enclave like a monastery’ – he wrote two historical novels, one of them being A Lost Lady of Old Years.

In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George’s Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan moved to Canada in 1935 where he became the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.

Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan’s literary output was remarkable – thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. His distinctive thrillers – ‘shockers’ as he called them – were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.

John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published.

STUART KELLY is an author, broadcaster and writer for Scotsman Publications and the Guardian. He is the author of Scott-land and The Book of Lost Books, and has contributed to The Decadent Handbook, Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and the Scottish Government’s Introducing Scottish Literature.

This ebook edition published in 2012 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd West Newington House 10 Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

First published in 1932 by Hodder & Stoughton

Introduction copyright © Stuart Kelly, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-238-2 Print ISBN: 978-1-84697-224-9

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Introduction

The Gap in the Curtain is such an odd novel – a hybrid of social satire, political intrigue and science-fiction thriller, as if H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and the Anthony Trollope of the Palliser novels had attempted a collaboration – that it could only have come from an equally multifaceted man. Memorably described as a ‘Presbyterian Cavalier’ by biographer Andrew Lownie, John Buchan was fifty-six when The Gap in the Curtain was published in 1932. He had produced a best-selling novel each year since 1921, was an MP, representing the Combined Scottish Universities, and had, that year, been made a Companion of Honour to George V. His position, socially and critically, was secure enough to allow him to experiment; and the result is both the weirdest and most quintessentially Buchan-esque of his novels.

The Gap in the Curtain takes the form of a long prologue and then five distinct but interconnected novellas narrated by Sir Edward Leithen, who was introduced in The Power House and had also appeared in John Macnab and The Dancing Floor. It opens at Lady Flambard’s Whitsuntide house-party in the Cotswolds, where Leithen mordantly notes the difference between the participants: ‘we were the oddest mixture of the fresh and the blasé, the carefree and the careworn’. Among the saturnine guests are Leithen himself, the financier Arnold Tavanger, the politician David Mayot, the love-lorn Charles Ottery and a newcomer, Sir Robert Goodeve. All of them, along with Reggie Daker, a charming young gadabout who managed to fall from his horse and sustain a mild concussion, are invited to participate in an experiment proposed by one of the other guests: the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Professor August Moe. Moe, it transpires, has discovered a method to see the future. Each of the subjects catches a glimpse of The Times for the tenth of June, one year hence. The five novellas reveal how each of the men deal with the scrap of foresight: Tavanger has seen news of a major merger; Mayot has seen a political leader – referring to someone as Prime Minister who is not Prime Minister at the moment; Reggie will apparently be leaving on a trip to Yucatan; and Goodeve and Ottery see their obituaries. The conceit allows Buchan to explore many of his favourite themes; most notably, the nature of courage.

The idea of acquiring knowledge of the future provides unique challenges and opportunities to an author. In 2009/10, one of the most talked-about new television series had exactly the same premise as Buchan’s novel. FlashForward, based on a 1999 novel by the sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer, posited a global moment of precognition, where the sober FBI detective experienced himself drunk and hunted, the faithful wife found herself with another man and some people saw nothing at all. The series producers lacked the gift they gave their characters: it was cancelled after a single season. Nevertheless, the series posited the same kinds of emotional responses as Buchan does. Does one embrace the future, attempt to elude it, work to cause it, try to change it or simply resign oneself to it? FlashForward’s explanation for the phenomenon involved such modern concepts as quantum entanglement and Buchan was no less cutting-edge when it came to providing an intellectual architecture to his story.

Professor Moe – his name, incidentally, means tired, weary or jaded in Dutch – is never, thankfully, explicit about his procedure, nor can Leithen make much sense of the graphs and equations with which he is confronted. The process involves meditation, a kind of tincture, avoiding eating anything which once ‘possessed automobility’, some speculations on brain physiology and – a point which is, I think, crucial and to which we will return – the fact (concealed from the subjects) that Moe will die during their transport. The departure of his soul is the rending of the veil that provides the gap in the curtain.

Moe’s views about the nature of time have a more immediate source. In 1927, an Irish aeronautical engineer called J. W. Dunne published An Experiment with Time where he recorded instances of precognition, premonitory dreaming and déjà vu, and then sought to explain these occurrences through a new theory of time. Dunne believed that the ‘flow’ of time was a by-product of human consciousness and that in fact, past, present and future existed in a simultaneous state. Sally Flambard in Buchan’s novel summarises Dunne and Moe’s position: ‘He thinks that Time is not a straight line but full of coils and kinks. He says the future is here with us now, if we only knew how to look for it.’ Like Moe, Dunne believed that hypnagogic states were conducive to dislocating the observer from normal modes of perceiving time, and that, as Leithen says, ‘it involved many new dimensions’. ‘Time – all time – is with us now’ is Moe’s succinct description of his insight, and it exactly matches that of J. W. Dunne.

Dunne’s work attracted the attention of other authors at the time. J. B. Priestley’s plays, Dangerous Corner (1932), Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have Been Here Before (also 1937) all attempted to use Dunne’s more flexible concept of time to introduce both dramatic ironies and alternate time-lines. T. S. Eliot is sometimes thought to have been alluding to Dunne’s theories with the lines from Burnt Norton (1936): ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.’ It was a major influence on Jorge Luis Borges’ friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, by name in The Dream of Heroes (1954) and thematically in Morel’s Invention (1940). That Buchan had read Dunne seems hinted at when Leithen says he had ‘been reading lately about telegnosis’.

Buchan is too astute a novelist to take a current idea and naively use it as a premise for the more interesting human and moral aspects of a story, and this holds true for A Gap in the Curtain as well. Moe is almost preternatural from the beginning, ‘one of the biggest men I have ever seen’ with a curious lock of hair on an otherwise bald head. He has ‘the brooding power and the ageless wisdom of the Sphinx’. His illness, and power, are mentioned constantly; and it is his presence and then absence, more than the strictures on vegetarianism, the ‘intercalated cell’ and the ‘mildest drug . . . as innocuous as a glass of tonic water’ that triggers the action. Moe’s beliefs are referred to as ‘mystical’ as often as they are ‘scientific’; Leithen refers to the man himself as ‘demonic.

There had been a very famous previous book on seeing one’s own future. Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm was published in book form in 1919 as part of the collection, Seven Men. In it, ‘Beerbohm’ tells the story of a poet, the titular Enoch, who makes a pact with the Devil to go forward one hundred years, to 3 June 1997, from ten past two to seven, into the Round Reading Room of the British Library and read what future writers make of his work. All he can find is a single reference to a story by Max Beerbohm about ‘an immajnari karrakter kauld “Enoch Soames” – a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im!’ (an imaginary character called ‘Enoch Soames’ – a third-rate poet who believes himself a great genius and makes a bargain with the Devil in order to know what posterity thinks of him!) Beerbohm’s story is echoed in one of Buchan’s conclusions: ‘our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven . . . if he [man] knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup’.

Matters theological were definitely on Buchan’s mind as he wrote The Gap in the Curtain. In 1930 he had published, with George Adam Smith, The Kirk in Scotland. As James Robertson has observed, The Gap in the Curtain is a meditation on free will and predestination, with ‘Time’ being substituted for ‘God’, written by an author deeply imbued with Calvinist thinking. At the time of writing the novel, Buchan was an elder in St Columba’s Church, London, and would, the next year, become the King’s Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. That Buchan could take up that position was due, in part, to the 1929 reconciliation between the United Free Church of Scotland and the Church of Scotland; his father had been a Free Church minister. Although many of the contentious issues separating the Kirk and the Free Kirk had been matters of governance and patronage, the earliest theologians within the Free Kirk had been deeply influenced by scholastic Calvinism. Although Pamela gives a spirited defence of Free Will – when the depressed Charles says ‘You can’t stop what is to be by saying that it won’t be’ she replies ‘Yes, you can. That’s the meaning of Free Will” – the actual picture is rather more complicated.

In Predestination, Calvin wrote: ‘If God controls the purposes of men and turns their thoughts and exertions to whatever purpose he pleases, men do not therefore cease to form plans and to engage in this or the other undertaking. We must not suppose that there is a violent compulsion, as if God dragged them against their will; but in a wonderful and inconceivable manner he regulates all the movements of men, so that they still have exercise of their Will.’ In the Institutes, this is even more clear: ‘Man, though acted upon by God, at the same time still acts.’ A surface reading of The Gap in the Curtain would make the book seem utterly deterministic. All five of the prophetic visions will come true. But the manner in which they come true, and the responses of each of the five protagonists to their precognition, leaves ample room for Free Will as well. Any moral judgement of the characters depends on how they used their own Free Will within the context of the determined outcome they foresaw. Like the narrator of Eliot’s Dry Salvages, each of them could say ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’.

Tavanger has the universe’s only cast-iron piece of financial speculation; that a ‘combine’ will be announced. It gives him a new lease of life as he sets about acquiring as many shares as possible in one of the companies, only to realise that acquiring control of the companies without controlling the scientific processes that render them valuable is meaningless. He is Buchan’s great Stoic, for whom the game is almost more important than the prize. Although humbled, he neither regrets the adventures nor bemoans his missed chances. Another source lurking behind The Gap in the Curtain may be Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 poem ‘If . . .’, and Tavanger exemplifies the lines:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss:

By contrast, Mayot plays the arch-Machiavellian, using his insight that a new Prime Minister will be elected to manipulate the situation to his advantage. Mayot is by far the least likeable of the five – some of Buchan’s pronouncements on career politicians more given to currying favour than upholding principles might have been written about the 21st-century denizens of Westminster. Mayot does not realise that others have volition as well; and fails to imagine that one of his colleagues might have what is pointedly described by Buchan as ‘a vision like Paul on the road to Damascus’. Nevertheless, the experience is ironically educational. Another character, after the revelation, says of the chameleon-like politician, ‘I must say I rather respect him for backing his fancy so steadily. He was shrewd enough to spot the winner, but not the race it would win.’ Fate turns Mayot into a more honourable man than he actually was.

Reggie Daker’s narrative is a moment of comic relief, in a serious novel studded throughout with gleeful asides and pithy turns-of-phrase. Reggie’s first reaction to his premonition is simply to dismiss it as impossible: not only has he no intention of going to Yucatan, he has no intention of going anywhere. Reggie bears more than a passing similarity to Bertie Wooster, and his genius – ‘to make an art of English life’ – is co-opted by the mildly ferocious Verona Cortal and her family into a kind of mercantile, ersatz simulacrum. Almost as if to compensate for the rigorous Scottish inclination of the philosophical themes (Buchan wryly comments that one of the side-effects of Moe’s treatment is the participants lack a sense of humour or metaphor – they became ‘unconscious Caledonians’) Buchan revels in the Englishness of England throughout: the fly-fishing stretches, the hunts, the clubs, the house-parties, the stately piles, the sheer climate of England. Reggie, of course, by the end wants nothing more than to escape from the clutches of the Cortals, and heads straight off to Yucatan on a whim. He cannot escape his destiny, and could not imagine that he would embrace it so willingly.

Before turning to the two more sombre sections, it is worth noting what an exceptionally horsy novel The Gap in the Curtain is. Very early on, Leithen says, ‘It is easy enough to be a carthorse, and it is easy enough to be a race-horse, but it is difficult to be a cart-horse which is constantly being asked to take Grand National fences’, and almost every character is either on horseback or has equine images applied to them: Reggie – of course, a keen if incautious horseman – sees ‘a hint of fetters’ in Verona’s eyes; Charles snaps ‘the way a race-horse suddenly goes wrong’; Tavanger ‘wins the first race by a short head’; in the political debate the opposition ‘search out the joints in the harness’. It is not, I think, too speculative a leap to link the preponderance of equine imagery with Buchan’s Calvinistic approach to determinism: we can champ at the bit, but the ultimate direction is determined by the rider.

Goodeve’s section is by far the most melancholy, and in it Buchan anatomises the sin of despair. Goodeve is initially presented as the most interesting and attractive of the five characters, a progressive who maintains that one ‘must resist the pull of his ancestors’. By the end, he is alone, surrounded by portraits of those ancestors and self-committed to a death as untimely as theirs. That Buchan’s theology was fully worked out, and not merely an expedient narrative device, is proven by one almost heartless passage. Goodeve decides against taking a boat-trip – and dies on the expected day. Buchan notes that the boat he was due to sail on sank with all hands. The inevitability of destiny is writ large. Goodeve’s problem is that the foreknowledge of death leads him into anomie. His promising career comes to nothing – but there was nothing stopping him being even more promising in the time he had left. One of the book’s darkest deployments of euphemism and irony is Goodeve’s maiden speech as an MP. It is a triumphant success (as he knew it would be), but his career falters thereafter. He seems not to have realised that an obituary that only cited his maiden speech might be tactfully making a comment on the rest of his career. Goodeve’s only act of will is to will himself to death.

The section concerning Charles Ottery is a pendant to and refutation of Goodeve’s timor mortis. Charles is not less afraid of death, but his fear leads him through apathy into risk-taking, bravado, self-destructive indulgence, and finally, through love, to a great and profound serenity. Buchan writes: ‘His own predestined death had been put aside as too trivial for a thought, but now suddenly Death itself came to have no meaning.’ One does not require a strict diet, guru-like physicist and mysterious medicine to have an absolutely certain foreknowledge of one future event: that we will all die. The Gap in the Curtain is about this more than anything else. Buchan’s response is clear. Charles writes in his diary: ‘I have been an accursed coward’, and the words ‘courage’ and ‘brave’ occur more and more frequently towards the end. The old bore Folliot’s one saving grace in the novel is the realisation that the Goodeves can face death in hot blood but not with equanimity: ‘They had spirit, if you like, but not fortitude.’ The five studies offer versions of recklessness and endurance, fortitude and daring, and resolves on courage.

Buchan died eight years after publishing The Gap in the Curtain. In his professional life he would go on to some of his greatest achievements (the Governor Generalship of Canada, elevation to the peerage, and membership of the Privy Council). In his writerly life, he would still produce novels such as The Island of Sheep (the final Hannay novel), The House of the Four Winds (the last Dickson McCunn novel) and The Free Fishers (his farewell to historical fiction), as well as numerous biographies. But The Gap in the Curtain is like the opening notes of the finale. His most significant late work, and his last, Sick Heart River, brings back Sir Edward Leithen, this time facing death himself, and it seems to expand on and deepen part of the final section of The Gap in the Curtain. Charles Ottery decides during his year of wrestling with the inevitable that ‘if he went into the wilds he might draw courage from that primeval Nature which was all uncertainties and hazard. So in August he set off for Newfoundland alone’ – exactly what Leithen will do in that final, astonishing novel. In this novel so full of wit, ingenuity, intrigue and insight, the most memorable image is of the boat in the mist, with some passengers dancing to jazz music while others look out into the brume. Buchan had begun to look into the brume himself.

Stuart Kelly

2012

To

Contents

1. Whitsuntide at Flambard

2. Mr Arnold Tavanger

3. The Right Honourable David Mayot

4. Mr Reginald Daker

5. Sir Robert Goodeve

6. Captain Charles Ottery

ONE

Whitsuntide at Flambard

‘Si la conscience qui sommeille dans l’instinct se réveillait, s’il s’intériorisait en connaissance au lieu de s’extérioriser en action, si nous savions l’interroger et s’il pouvait répondre, il nous livrerait les secrets de la vie.’

BERGSON, Evolution Créatrice

‘But no!’ cried Mr Mantalini. ‘It is a demn’d horrid dream. It is not reality. No!’

DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby

Whitsuntide at Flambard

I

AS I took my place at the dinner-table I realised that I was not the only tired mortal in Lady Flambard’s Whitsuntide party. Mayot, who sat opposite me, had dark pouches under his eyes and that unwholesome high complexion which in a certain type of physique means that the arteries are working badly. I knew that he had been having a heavy time in the House of Commons over the Committee stage of his Factory Bill. Charles Ottery, who generally keeps himself fit with fives and tennis, and has still the figure of an athletic schoolboy, seemed nervous and out of sorts, and scarcely listened to his companion’s chatter. Our hostess had her mid-season look; her small delicate features were as sharp as a pin, and her blue eyes were drained of colour. But it was Arnold Tavanger farther down the table who held my attention. His heavy sagacious face was a dead mask of exhaustion. He looked done to the world and likely to fall asleep over his soup.

It was a comfort to me to see others in the same case, for I was feeling pretty near the end of my tether. Ever since Easter I had been overworked out of all reason. There was a batch of important Dominion appeals before the Judicial Committee, in every one of which I was engaged, and I had some heavy cases in the Commercial Court. Of the two juniors who did most of my ‘devilling’ one had a big patent-law action of his own, and the other was in a nursing-home with appendicitis. To make matters worse, I was chairman of a Royal Commission which was about to issue its findings, and had had to rewrite most of the report with my own hand, and I had been sitting as a one-man Commission in a troublesome dispute in the shipbuilding trade. Also I was expected to be pretty regularly in the House of Commons to deal with the legal side of Mayot’s precious Bill, and the sittings had often stretched far into the next morning.

There is something about a barrister’s spells of overwork which makes them different in kind from those of other callings. His duties are specific as to time and place. He must be in court at a certain hour. He must be ready to put, or reply to, an argument when he is called upon; he can postpone or rearrange his work only within the narrowest limits. He is a cog in an inexorable machine, and must revolve with the rest of it. For myself I usually enter upon a period of extreme busyness with a certain lift of spirit, for there is a sporting interest in not being able to see your way through your work. But presently this goes, and I get into a mood of nervous irritation. It is easy enough to be a cart-horse, and it is easy enough to be a race-horse, but it is difficult to be a cart-horse which is constantly being asked to take Grand National fences. One has to rise to hazards, but with each the take-off gets worse and the energy feebler. So at the close of such a spell I am in a wretched condition of soul and body – weary but without power to rest, and with a mind so stale that it sees no light or colour in anything. Even the end of the drudgery brings no stimulus. I feel that my form has been getting steadily poorer, and that virtue has gone out of me which I may never recapture.

I had been in two minds about accepting Sally Flambard’s invitation. She is my very good friend but her parties are rather like a table d’hôte. Her interests are multitudinous, and all are reflected in her hospitality, so that a procession goes through her house which looks like a rehearsal for the Judgment Day. Politics, religion, philanthropy, letters, science, art and the most brainless fashion – she takes them all to her capacious heart. She is an innocent lion-hunter, too, and any man or woman who figures for the moment in the Press will be a guest at Flambard. And she drives her team, for all are put through their paces. Sally makes her guests work for their entertainment. In her own way she is a kind of genius, and what Americans call a wonderful ‘mixer’. Everyone has got to testify, and I have seen her make a bishop discourse on Church union and a mathematician on hyperspace to an audience which heard of the topics for the first time. The talk is apt to be a little like a magazine page in a popular newspaper – very good fun, if you are feeling up to it, but not quite the thing for a rest-cure.

It was my memory of Flambard itself that decided me. The place is set amid the greenest and quietest country on earth. The park is immense, and in early June is filled with a glory of flowers and blossoming trees. I could borrow one of Evelyn’s horses and ride all day through the relics of ancient forests, or up on to the cool, windy spaces of the Downs. There was good dry-fly fishing in the little Arm, which runs through a shallow vale to the young Thames. At Whitsuntide you can recover an earlier England. The flood of greenery hides modern blemishes which are revealed by the bareness of winter, and an upland water-meadow is today just as it met the eye of the monks when they caught their Friday’s trout, or of the corsleted knights as they rode out to the king’s wars. It is the kind of scene that comforts me most, for there, as some poet says, ‘old Leisure sits knee-deep in grass’. Also the house is large enough for peace. It is mostly Restoration period, with some doubtful Georgian additions, but there is a Tudor wing, the remnant of the old house, which the great Earl of Essex once used as a hunting-lodge. Sally used to give me a room at the top of the Essex wing, with a wide prospect north into the Cotswold dales. The hall and the drawing-rooms and the great terrace might be as full of ‘turns’ as a music-hall stage, but somewhere in the house fatigue could find sanctuary.

I had arrived just in time to dress for dinner, and had spoken to none of my fellow-guests, so my inspection of the table had a speculative interest. It was a large party, and I saw a good many faces that I knew. There were the Nantleys, my best of friends, and their daughter Pamela, who was in her first season. There was old Folliot, the bore of creation, with his little grey imperial, and his smirk, and his tired eyes. He was retailing some ancient scandal to Mrs Lamington, who was listening with one ear and devoting the other to what Lady Altrincham was saying across the table. George Lamington a little farther down was arguing with his host about the Ascot entries – his puffy red face had that sudden shrewdness which it acquires when George’s mind is on horses. There was a man opposite him of whom I could only catch the profile – a dark head with fine-drawn features. I heard his voice, a pleasant voice, with full deep tones like a tragic actor’s, and, as he turned, I had an impression of a face full of swift, nervous strength. There was a good deal of youth in the party, four girls besides Pamela Brune, and several boys with sleek hair and fresh voices. One of them I knew, Reggie Daker, who was a friend of my nephews.

I was on Sally’s left hand, and as she was busy with Mayot, and the lady on my left was deep in a controversy with her neighbour over some book, I was free to look about me. Suddenly I got a queer impression. A dividing line seemed to zigzag in and out among us, separating the vital from the devitalised. There was a steady cackle of talk, but I felt that there were silent spaces in it. Most of the people were cheerful, eupeptic souls who were enjoying life. The Nantleys, for example, sedate country gentlefolk, whose days were an ordered routine of pleasant cares. . . . Pamela Brune? I was not so sure of her, for a young girl’s first season is a trying business, like a boy’s first half at school. . . . Old Folliot, beyond doubt – he was perfectly happy as long as he was in a great house with somebody to listen to his archaic gossip. . . . Evelyn Flambard and George Lamington and the boys who were talking Ascot and next winter’s hunting plans. . . . Lady Altrincham, sixty but with the air of thirty, who lives for her complexion and her famous pearls. . . . But I realised that there were people here who were as much at odds with life as myself – Mayot and Tavanger and Charles Ottery, and perhaps the dark fellow who sat opposite George Lamington.

Sally turned to me, hiding a yawn with her small hand. Her head on its slim neck was as erect as a bird’s, and her body had a darting, bird-like poise, but I could see that the poise required some effort to maintain it. She patted my sleeve in her friendly way.

‘I am so glad you came,’ she said. ‘I know you want a rest.’ She screwed up her eyes and peered at me. ‘You look as if you hadn’t been in bed for a month!’

‘I’m nearly all out,’ I said. ‘You must let me moon about by myself, please, for I’m no sort of company for anybody.’

‘You shall do exactly as you like. I’m pretty tired also, and I’m giving a ball next week and there’s Ascot looming ahead. Happily we’re having quite a small party – and a very quiet one.’

‘Is this the lot?’ I asked, looking down the table. I knew her habit of letting guests appear in relays during a weekend till the result was a mob.

‘Practically. You know all the people?’

‘Most of them. Who’s the dark fellow opposite George Lamington?’

Her face brightened into interest. ‘That’s my new discovery. A country neighbour, no less – but a new breed altogether. His name is Goodeve – Sir Robert Goodeve. He has just succeeded to the place and title.’

Of course I knew Goodeve, that wonderful moated house in the lap of the Downs, but I had never met one of the race. I had had a notion that it had died out. The Goodeves are one of those families about which genealogists write monographs, a specimen of that unennobled gentry which is the oldest stock in England. They had been going on in their undistinguished way since Edward the Confessor.

‘Tell me about him,’ I said.

‘I can’t tell you much. You can see what he looks like. Did you ever know a face so lit up from behind? He was the son of a parson in Northumberland, poor as a church mouse, so he had to educate himself. Local grammar school, some provincial university, and then with scholarships and tutoring he fought his way to Oxford. There he was rather a swell and made friends with young Marburg, old Isaac’s son, who got him a place in his father’s business. The War broke out, and he served for four years, while Marburgs kept his job open. After that they moved him a good deal about the world, and he was several years in their New York house. It is really a romance, for at thirty-five he had made money, and now at thirty-eight he has inherited Goodeve and a good deal more. Yes, he’s a bachelor. Not rich as the big fortunes go, but rich enough. The thing about him is that he has got his jumping-off ground reasonably young, and is now about to leap. Quite modest, but perfectly confident, and terribly ambitious. He is taking up politics, and I back him to make you all sit up. I think he’s the most impressive mortal I have ever met. Bored stiff with women – as stony-hearted as you, Ned. He’s a sort of ascetic, vowed to a cause.’

‘His own career?’ I asked.

‘No. No. He’s not a bit of an egotist. There’s a pent-up force that’s got to come out. He’s a fanatic about some new kind of Empire development, and I know people who think him a second Rhodes. I want you to make friends with him and tell me what you think, for in your fish-like way you have good judgment.’

Sally yawned again, and I respected more than ever the courage of women who can go on till they drop and keep smiling. She turned away in response to a question of Mayot’s, and I exchanged banalities with the lady on my other side. Presently I found myself free again to look round the table. I was right: we were the oddest mixture of the fresh and the blasé, the carefree and the careworn. To look at Tavanger’s hollow eyes and hear in one’s ear the babble of high young voices made a contrast which was almost indecent. I had a feeling as if we were all on a vast comfortable raft in some unknown sea, and that, while some were dancing to jazz music, others were crowding silently at the edge, staring into the brume ahead. Staring anxiously, too, for in that mist there might be fearful as well as wonderful things. I found myself studying George Lamington’s face, and felt a childish dislike of him. His life was so padded and cosseted and bovine. He had just inherited another quarter of a million from an uncle, and he had not the imagination of a rabbit in the use of money. Why does wealth make dull people so much duller? I had always rather liked George, but now I felt him intolerable. I must have been very tired, for I was getting as full of silly prejudices as a minor poet.

Sally was speaking again, as she collected eyes.

‘Don’t be afraid. This is going to be a very peaceful party.’

‘Will you promise me,’ I said, ‘that I won’t come down tomorrow and find half a dozen new faces at breakfast?’

‘Honest Injun,’ she replied. ‘They are all here except one, and he arrives tonight.’

When the women had gone Evelyn Flambard brought his port to my side. Having exhausted horses during dinner, he regaled me with the Englishman’s other main topic, politics. Evelyn despaired of the republic. He had grievances against the budget, the new rating law, and the Government’s agricultural policy. He was alarmed about the condition of India where he had served in his old Hussar days, and about Egypt, where he had large investments. His views on America were calculated to make a serious breach between the two sections of the Anglo-Saxon race. But if he feared the Government he despised the Opposition, though for politeness’ sake he added that his strictures did not apply to me. There was no honest Toryism left, so his plaint ran; there was not a pin to choose between the parties; they were all out to rob struggling virtue – meaning himself and other comfortable squires. He nodded down the table towards Goodeve. ‘Look at that chap,’ he whispered darkly. ‘I mean to say, he don’t care a straw what he says or does, and he’ll have Tommy Twiston’s seat, which is reckoned the safest in England. He as good as told George Lamington this afternoon that he’d like to see a Soviet Government in power for a week in England under strict control, for it was the only way to deal with men like him. Hang it all, there’s nothing wrong with old George except that he’s a bit fussy, if you see what I mean.’

I said that I rather agreed with Goodeve, and that set Evelyn pouring out his woes to the man on the other side. Reggie Daker had come up next me, his eye heavy with confidences. I had acted as a sort of father-confessor to Reggie ever since he came down from the University, but I hadn’t much credit by my disciple. He was infinitely friendly, modest and good-humoured, but as hard to hold as a knotless thread. Usually he talked to me about his career, and I had grown very tired of finding him jobs, which he either shied off or couldn’t hold for a week. Now it seemed that this was not his trouble. He had found his niche at last, and it was dealing in rare books. Reggie considered that a lad like himself, with a fine taste and a large acquaintance, could make a lot of money by digging out rarities from obscure manor-houses and selling them to American collectors. He had taken up the study very seriously, he told me, and he actually managed to get a few phrases of bibliophile’s jargon into his simple tale. He felt that he had found his life’s work, and was quite happy about it.

The trouble was Pamela Brune. It appeared that he was deeply in love, and that she was toying with his young heart. ‘There’s a strong lot of entries,’ he explained, ‘and Charles Ottery has been the favourite up till now. But she seems a bit off Charles, and . . . and . . . anyhow, I’m going to try my luck. I wangled an invitation here for that very purpose. I say, you know – you’re her godfather, aren’t you? If you could put in a kind word . . .’

But my unreceptive eye must have warned Reggie that I was stony soil. He had another glass of port, and sighed.

I intended to go to bed as soon as I decently could. I was not sleepy, but I was seeing things with the confusion of a drowsy man. As I followed my host across the hall, where someone had started a gramophone, I seemed more than ever to be in a phantasmal world. The drawing-room, with the delicate fluted pilasters in its panelling and the Sir Joshuas and Romneys between them, swam in a green dusk, which was partly the afterglow through the uncurtained windows and partly the shading of the electric lamps. A four at bridge had been made up, and the young people were drifting back towards the music. Lady Nantley beckoned me from a sofa. I could see her eyes appraising my face and disapproving of it, but she was too tactful to tell me that I looked ill.

‘I heard that you were to be here, Ned,’ she said, ‘and I was very glad. Your god-daughter is rather a handful just now, and I wanted your advice.’

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘She’s looking uncommonly pretty.’ I caught a glimpse of Pamela patting her hair as she passed a mirror, slim and swift as a dryad.

‘She’s uncommonly perverse. You know that she has been having an affair with Charles Ottery ever since Christmas at Wirlesdon. I love Charles, and Tom and I were delighted. Everything most suitable – the right age, enough money, chance of a career, the same friends. There’s no doubt that Charles adores her, and till the other day I thought that she was coming to adore Charles. But now she has suddenly gone off at a tangent, and has taken to snubbing and neglecting him. She says that he’s too good for her, and that his perfections choke her – doesn’t want to play second fiddle to an Admirable Crichton – wants to shape her own life – all the rubbish that young people talk nowadays.’

Mollie’s charming eyes were full of real distress, and she put an appealing hand on my arm.

‘She likes you, Ned, and believes in you. Couldn’t you put a little sense into her head?’

I wanted to say that I was feeling like a ghost from another sphere, and that it was no good asking a tenuous spectre to meddle with the affairs of warm flesh and blood. But I was spared the trouble of answering by the appearance of Lady Flambard.

‘Forgive me, Mollie dear,’ she said, ‘but I must carry him off. I’ll bring him back to you presently.’

She led me to a young man who was standing near the door. ‘Bob,’ she said, ‘this is Sir Edward Leithen. I’ve been longing for you two to meet.’

‘So have I,’ said the other, and we shook hands. Now that I saw Goodeve fairly, I was even more impressed than by his profile as seen at dinner. He was a finely made man, and looked younger than his thirty-eight years. He was very dark, but not in the least swarthy; there were lights in his hair which suggested that he might have been a blond child, and his skin was a clear brown, as if the blood ran strongly and cleanly under it. What I liked about him was his smile, which was at once engaging and natural, and a little shy. It took away any arrogance that might have lurked in the tight mouth and straight brows.

‘I came here to meet you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m a candidate for public life, and I wanted to see a man who interests me more than anybody else in the game. I hope you don’t mind my saying that. . . . What about going into the garden? There’s a moon of sorts, and the nightingales will soon begin. If they’re like the ones at Goodeve, eleven’s their hour.’

We went through the hall to the terrace, which lay empty and quiet in a great dazzle of moonlight. It was only about a fortnight till midsummer, a season when in fine weather in southern England it is never quite dark. Now, with a moon nearing the full, the place was bright enough to read print. The stone balustrade and urns were white as snow, and the two stairways that led to the sunk garden were a frosty green like tiny glaciers.

We threaded the maze of plots and lily-ponds and came out on a farther lawn, which ran down to the little river. That bit of the Arm is no good for fishing, for it has been trimmed into a shallow babbling stretch of ornamental water, but it is a delicious thing in the landscape. There was no sound except the lapse of the stream, and the occasional squattering flight of a moorhen. But as we reached the brink a nightingale began in the next thicket.

Goodeve had scarcely spoken a word. He was sniffing the night scents, which were a wonderful blend of early roses, new-mown hay, and dewy turf. When we reached the Arm, we turned and looked back at the house. It seemed suddenly to have gone small, set in a great alleyway of green between olive woods, an alleyway which swept from the high downs to the river meadows. Far beyond it we could see the bare top of Stobarrow. But it looked as perfect as a piece of carved ivory – and ancient, ancient as a boulder left millenniums ago by a melting icecap.

‘Pretty good,’ said my companion at last. ‘At Flambard you can walk steadily back into the past. Every chapter is written plain to be read.’

‘At Goodeve, too,’ I said.

‘At Goodeve, too. You know the place? It is the first home I have had since I was a child, for I have been knocking about for years in lodgings and tents. I’m still a little afraid of it. It’s a place that wants to master you. I’m sometimes tempted to give myself up to it and spend my days listening to its stories and feeling my way back through the corridors of time. But I know that that would be ruin.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you cannot walk backward. It is too easy, and the road leads nowhere. A man must keep his eyes to the front and resist the pull of his ancestors. They’re the devil, those ancestors, always trying to get you back into their own rut.’

‘I wish mine would pull harder,’ I said. ‘I’ve been badly overworked lately, and I feel at this moment like a waif, with nothing behind me and nothing before.’

He regarded me curiously. ‘I thought you looked a little done up. Well, that’s the penalty of being a swell. You’ll lie fallow for a day or two and the power will return. There can’t be much looking backward in your life.’

‘Nor looking forward. I seem to live between high blank walls. I never get a prospect.’

‘Oh, but you are wrong,’ he said seriously. ‘All your time is spent in trying to guess what is going to happen – what view the Courts will take of a case, what kind of argument will hit the prospective mood of the House. It is the same in law and politics and business and everything practical. Success depends on seeing just a little more into the future than other people.’

I remembered my odd feeling at dinner of the raft on the misty sea, and the anxious peering faces at the edge.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But just at the moment I’m inclined to envy the people who live happily in the present. Our host, for example, and the boys and girls who are now dancing.’ In the stillness the faint echo of music drifted to us from the house.

‘I don’t envy them a bit,’ he said. ‘They have no real sporting interest. Trying to see something solid in the mist is the whole fun of life, and most of its poetry.’

‘Anyhow, thank Heaven, we can’t see very far. It would be awful to look down an avenue of time as clear as this strip of lawn, and see the future as unmistakable as Flambard.’

‘Perhaps. But sometimes I would give a good deal for just one moment of prevision.’

After that, as we strolled back, we talked about commonplace things – the prospects of a not very secure Government, common friends, the ways of our hostess, whom he loved, and the abilities of Mayot, which – along with me – he doubted. As we entered the house again we found the far end of the hall brightly lit, since the lamps had been turned on in the porch. The butler was ushering in a guest who had just arrived, and Sally had hastened from the drawing-room to greet him.

The newcomer was one of the biggest men I have ever seen, and one of the leanest. A suit of grey flannel hung loose upon his gigantic bones. He reminded me of Nansen, except that he was dark instead of fair. His forehead rose to a peak, on which sat one solitary lock, for the rest of his head was bald. His eyes were large and almost colourless, mere pits of light beneath shaggy brows. He was bowing over Sally’s hand in a foreign way, and the movement made him cough.

‘May I present Sir Edward Leithen?’ said Sally. ‘Sir Robert Goodeve . . . Professor Moe.’

The big man gave me a big hand, which felt hot and damp. His eyes regarded me with a hungry interest. I had an impression of power – immense power, and also an immense fragility.

II

I did not have a good night; I rarely do when I have been overworking. I started a chapter of Barchester Towers, dropped off in the middle, and woke in two hours restless and unrefreshed. Then I must have lain awake till the little chill before dawn which generally sends me to sleep. The window was wide open and all the minute sounds of a summer night floated through it, but they did not soothe me. I had one of those fits of dissatisfaction which often assail the sleepless. I felt that I was making very little of my life. I earned a large income, and had a considerable position in the public eye, but I was living, so to speak, from hand to mouth. I had long lost any ordinary ambitions, and had ceased to plan out my career ahead, as I used to do when I was a young man. There were many things in public life on which I was keen, but it was only an intellectual keenness; I had no ardour in their pursuit. I felt as if my existence were utterly shapeless.