The Leithen Stories Read Free

understand so typical of a Scots-influenced intelligentsia. Buchan’s first publication in 1894 had been Essays and Apothegms of Francis Lord Bacon: ‘all knowledge was his province’. His mission to know, but also to evangelise, made him what H.G. Wells called in, The New Machiavelli (1911) – with Buchan’s friend G.M. Trevelyan in mind – a secular monk. Wells didn’t mean this in any kindly sense, believing that science and sexual hedonism were delightfullycompatible. Leithen’s motor was quite obviously sublimation in the Freudian sense, but he was no less of a scientist for ending up a priest-king.
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    Christopher Harvie
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    (This introduction benefitted from discussions with my wife Virginia, the Rev. James Greig and Owen Dudley Edwards. Responsibility for any mistakes is mine alone.     C.H.)

THE POWER-HOUSE

TO MAJOR-GENERAL
SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.P .
    Â Â Â Â Â 
    My Dear General,
    A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dugouts and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities. I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share, one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
    J.B.

Preface by the Editor
    WE WERE AT Glenaicill – six of us – for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. 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.
    Conversation, I remember, turned on some of Jim’s trophies which grinned at us from the firelit walls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. Then Hoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on the Bramaputra, told us some queer things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jim said he couldn’t abide mud – anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. (He was to get enough of it last winter in the Ypres Salient.) You know how one tale begets another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for five of us had been a good deal about the world.
    All except Leithen, the man who was afterwards Solicitor-General, and, they say, will get to the Woolsack in time. I don’t suppose he had ever been farther from home than Monte Carlo, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.
    Jim had just finished a fairly steep yarn about his experiences on a Boundary Commission near Lake Chad, and Leithen got up to find a drink.
    â€˜Lucky devils,’ he said. ‘You’ve had all the fun out of life. I’ve had my nose to the grindstone ever since I left school.’
    I said something about his having all the honour and glory.
    â€˜All the same,’ he went on, ‘I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London. And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who satin my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” you know.’
    Then he told us this story. The version I give is one he afterwards wrote down, when he had looked up his diary for some of the details.

ONE
Beginning of the Wild-Goose Chase
    IT ALL STARTED one afternoon early in May when I came out of the House of Commons with Tommy Deloraine. I had got in by an accident at a