The Leithen Stories (64 page)

She produced from an escritoire a half-sheet of paper. Leithen read –

‘Dearest, I am sick – very sick in mind. I am going away. When I
am cured I will come back to you. All my love.'

‘He packed a bag himself – the butler knew nothing about it. He took money with him – at least there was a large sum drawn from his account. No, he didn't wind up things at the office. He left some big questions undecided, and his partners have had no end of trouble. He didn't say a word to any of them, or to anybody else that I know of. He left no clue as to where he was going. Oh, of course, we could have put on detectives and found out something, but we dare not do that. Every newspaper in the land would have started a hue and cry, and there would have been a storm of gossip. As it is, nobody knows about him except his partners, and one or two friends, and Uncle Blenkiron, and Babs and you. You see he may come back any day quite well again, and I would never forgive myself if I had been neurotic and let him down.'

Leithen thought that neurotic was the last word he would have chosen to describe this wise and resolute woman.

‘What was he like just before he left? Was there any change in his manner? Had he anything to worry him?'

‘Nothing to worry him in business. Things were going rather specially well. And, anyhow, Francis never let himself be worried by affairs. He prided himself on taking things lightly – he was always what the old folk used to call debonair. But – yes, there were little changes in him, I think. All winter he had been almost too good and gentle and yielding. He did everything I asked him without questioning, and that was not always his way … Oh! and he did one funny thing. We used to go down to Florida for a fortnight after Christmas – we had a regular foursome for golf, and he liked to bask in the sun. This year he didn't seem to care about it, and I didn't press him, for
I'm rather bored with golf, so we stayed at home. There was a good deal of snow at Combermere – that's our New Jersey home – and Francis got himself somewhere a pair of snow-shoes and used to go for long walks alone. When he came back he would sit by the hour in the library, not dozing, but thinking. I thought it was a good way of resting and never disturbed him.'

‘You never asked what he was thinking about?'

‘No. He thought a good deal, you see. He always made leisure to think. My only worry was about his absurd modesty. He was sure of himself, but not nearly so sure as I was, and recently when people praised him and I repeated the praise he used to be almost cross. He wrote a memorandum for the Treasury about some tax scheme, and Mr Beverley said that it was a work of genius. When I told him that, I remember he lay back in his chair and said quite bitterly, ‘Quel chien de génie!' He never used a French phrase except when he was tired or upset. I remember the look on his face – it was as if I had really pained him. But I could find nothing to be seriously anxious about. He was perfectly fit and well.'

‘Did he see much of anybody in particular in the last weeks?'

‘I don't think so. We always went about together, you know. He liked to talk to Mr Jane and Mr Savory, and they often dined with us. I think young Eric Ravelston came once or twice to the house – Walter Derwent, too, I think. But he saw far more of me than of anybody else.'

Her face suddenly stiffened with pain.

‘Oh, Sir Edward, you don't think that he's dead – that he went away to die?'

‘I don't. I haven't any fear of that. Any conclusion of mine would be worthless at the present stage, but my impression is that Mr Galliard's trouble has nothing to do with his health. You and he have made a wonderful life together. Are you certain that he quite fitted into it?' She opened her eyes.

‘He was a huge success in it.'

‘I know. But did the success give him pleasure?'

‘I'm sure it did. At least for most of the time.'

‘Yes, but remember that it was a strange world to him. He hadn't been brought up in it. He may have been homesick for something different.'

‘But he loved me!' she cried.

‘He loved you. And therefore he will come back to you. But it may be to a different world.'

NEW scenes, new faces, the interests of a new problem had given Leithen a few days of deceptive vitality. Then the reaction came, and for a long summer's day he sat on the veranda of his hotel bedroom in body a limp wreck, but with a very active mind. He tried to piece together what he had heard of Galliard, but could reach no conclusion. A highly strung, sensitive being, with Heaven knew what strains in his ancestry, had been absorbed into a new world in which he had been brilliantly successful. And then something had snapped, or some atavistic impulse had emerged from the deeps, something strong enough to break the tie of a happy marriage. The thing was sheer mystery. He had abandoned his old world and had never shown the slightest hankering after it. What had caused this sudden satiety with success?

Bronson Jane and Savory thought that the trouble was physical, a delicate machine over-wrought and over-loaded. The difficulty was that his health had always been perfect, and there was no medical adviser who could report on the condition of his nerves. His friends thought that he was probably lying hidden in some quiet sunny place, nursing himself back to vigour, with the secretiveness of a man to whom a physical breakdown was so unfamiliar that it seemed a portent, almost a crime.

But Savory had been enlightening. Scholarly, critical, fastidious, he had spoken of Galliard, the ordinary successful financier with no special cultural background, with an accent almost of worship.

‘This country of ours,' he told Leithen, ‘is up against the biggest problem in her history. It is not a single question like slavery or state rights, or the control of monopolies, or any of the straightforward things that have made a crisis before. It is a conglomeration of problems, most of which we cannot define. We have no geographical frontier left, but we've an eternal frontier in our minds. Our old American society is really in dissolution. All of us have got to find a new way of life. You're lucky in England, for you've been at the job for a long time and you make your revolutions so slowly and so quietly that you don't notice them – or anybody else. Here we have to make
ours against time, while we keep shouting about them at the top of our voices. Everybody and everything here has to have a new deal, and the different deals have to be fitted together like a jig-saw puzzle, or there will be an infernal confusion. We're a great people, but we're only by fits and starts a nation. You're fortunate in your British Empire. You may have too few folk, and these few scattered over big spaces, but they're all organically connected, like the separate apples on a tree. Our huge population is more like a collection of pebbles in a box. It's only the containing walls of the box that keep them together.'

So much for Savory's diagnosis.

‘Francis is just the kind of fellow we need,' he went on. ‘He sees what's coming. He's the most intellectually honest creature God ever made. He has a mind which not only cuts like a scalpel, but is rich and resourceful – both critical and creative. He hasn't any prejudices to speak of. He's a fascinating human being and rouses no antagonisms. It looks like he has dragged his anchor at present. But if we could get him properly moored again he's going to be a power for good in this country. We've got to get him back, Sir Edward – the old Francis.'

The old Francis? Leithen had queried.

‘Well, with the old genius. But with an extra anchor down. I've never been quite happy about the strength of his moorings.'

WALTER Derwent at first had nothing to tell him. Francis Galliard had not been interested in travel in far places. He was treasurer of his Polar Institute, but that was out of personal friendship. Francis had not much keenness in field sports either, though his wife had made him take up fox-hunting. He never went fishing, and in recent years he had not shot much, though he sometimes went after duck to Minnesota and the Virginia shore. He was not much of a bird-shot, but he was deadly with the rifle on the one occasion when Derwent had been with him after deer …

Derwent screwed up his pleasant rosy face till, with his eagle beak, he looked like a benevolent vulture. And then suddenly he let drop a piece of information which made Leithen sit up.

‘But he did ask me – I remember – if I could recommend him a really first-class guide, a fellow that understood wood-craft and knew the Northern woods. Maybe he was asking on
behalf of someone else, for he couldn't have much use himself for a guide.'

‘When was that?' Leithen asked sharply.

‘Some time after Christmas. Early February, I reckon. Yes, it was just after our Adventurers' Club dinner.'

‘Did you recommend one?'

‘Yes. A fellow called Lew Frizel, a 'breed, but of a very special kind. His mother was a Cree Indian and his father one of the old-time Hudson's Bay factors. I've had Lew with me on half a dozen trips. I discovered him on a trap-line in northern Manitoba.'

‘Where is he now?'

‘That's what I can't tell you. He seems to have gone over the horizon. I wanted him for a trip up the Liard this fall, but I can get no answer from any of his addresses. He has a brother Johnny who is about as good, but he's not available, for he has a job with the Canadian Government in one of its parks – Waskesieu, up Prince Albert way.'

Leithen paid a visit to the Canadian Consulate, and after a talk with the Consul, who was an old friend, the telegraph was set in motion. Johnny Frizel, sure enough, had a job as a game warden at Waskesieu.

Another inquiry produced a slender clue. Leithen spent a morning at the Ravelston office and had a long talk with Galliard's private secretary, an intelligent young Yale man. From the office diary he investigated the subjects which had engaged Galliard's attention during his last weeks in New York. They were mostly the routine things on which the firm was then engaged, varied by a few special matters on which he was doing Government work. But one point caught Leithen's eye. Galliard had called for the papers about the Glaubstein pulp mill at Chateau-Gaillard and had even taken them home with him.

‘Was there anything urgent about them?' he asked.

The secretary said no. The matter was dead as far as Ravelstons were concerned. They had had a lot to do with financing the original proposition, but long ago they had had their profit and were quit of it.

LEITHEN'S last talk was with young Eric Ravelston. During the days in New York he had felt at times his weakness acutely,
but he had not been conscious of any actual loss of strength. He wanted to be assured that he had still a modest reservoir to draw upon. The specialist examined him carefully and then looked at him with the same solemn eyes as Acton Croke.

‘You know your condition, of course?' he asked.

‘I do. A few weeks ago I was told that I had about a year to live. Do you agree?'

‘It's not possible to fix a time schedule. You may have a year – or a little less – or a little more. If you went to a sanatorium and lived very carefully you might have longer.'

‘I don't propose to lead a careful life. I've only a certain time and a certain amount of dwindling strength. I'm going to use them up on a hard job.'

‘Well, in that case you may fluff out very soon, or you may go on for a year or more, for the mind has something to say in these questions.'

‘There's no hope of recovery?'

‘I'm afraid there's none – that is to say, in the light of our present knowledge. But, of course, we're not infallible.'

‘Not even if I turn myself into a complete invalid?'

‘Not even then.'

‘Good. That's all I wanted to know. Now I've one other question. I'm going to look for Francis Galliard. You know him, but you never treated him, did you?'

Eric Ravelston shook his head.

‘He didn't want any treatment. He was as healthy as a hound.'

Something in the young man's tone struck Leithen.

‘You mean in body. Had you any doubt about other things – his mind, for instance?'

The other did not at first reply.

‘I have no right to say this,' he spoke at last. ‘And, anyhow, it isn't my proper subject. But for some time I have been anxious about Francis. Little things, you know. Only a doctor would notice them. I thought that there was something pathological about his marvellous vitality. Once I had Garford, the neurologist, staying with me and the Galliards came to dinner. Garford could not keep his eyes off Francis. After they had gone he told me that he would bet a thousand dollars that he crumpled up within a year … So if there's a time limit for you, Sir Edward, there's maybe a time limit also for Francis.'

LEITHEN disembarked on a hot morning from the Quebec steamer which served the north shore of the St Lawrence. Chateau-Gaillard was like any other pulp-town – a new pier with mighty derricks, the tall white cylinders of the pulp mill, a big brick office, and a cluster of clapboard shacks which badly needed painting. The place at the moment had a stagnant air, for the old cutting limits had been exhausted and the supply of pulp-wood from the new area was still being organised. A stream came in beyond the pier, and the background was steep scrub-clad hills cleft by a wedge-like valley beyond which there rose distant blue lines of mountain.

For the first mile or two the road up the valley was a hard, metalled highway. Leithen had not often felt feebler in body or more active in mind. Thoreau had been a favourite author of his youth, and he had picked up a copy in New York and had read it on the boat. Two passages stuck in his memory. One was from
Walden
–

‘If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimiter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throat and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.'