The Gap in the Curtain (22 page)

Authors: John Buchan

Chapter 6

The diary told the tale of the next three weeks. Charles had to return to his diary, for he had no other confidant. And a stranger story I have never read.

From the first he was certain that Pamela would die. He was quite clear about this, and he had also become assured of his own end. Their love was to be blotted out by the cold hand of death. For a day or two he was in a stupor of utter hopelessness, waiting on fate like a condemned man who hears the gallows being hammered together and sees the clock moving towards the appointed hour.

Some of the entries were clear enough. He thought that Pamela would die at once while he himself must wait until June, and there were distraught queries as to how he could endure the interval. His appointed hour could not be anticipated, and a world without Pamela was a horror which came near to unhinging his mind. His writing tailed away into blots and dashes. In his agony he seemed several times to have driven his pen through the paper . . .

Then suddenly the mist cleared. The diary was nothing but jottings and confused reflections, so the sequence of his moods could not be exactly traced, but it was plain that something tremendous had happened . . .

It seemed to have come suddenly late at night, for he noted the hourâ1:30âand that he had been walking the Embankment since eight. Hitherto he had had a dual consciousness, seeing Pamela and himself as sufferers under the same doom, and enduring a double torture. Love and fear for both the girl and himself had brought his mind almost to a delirium, but now there descended upon it a great clarity.

The emotion remained, but now the object was single, for his own death dropped out of the picture. It became suddenly too small a thing to waste a thought on. There were entries like this: “I have torn up the almanac on which I had been marking off the days till June tenth . . . I have been an accursed coward, God forgive me . . . Pamela is dying, and I have been thinking of my own wretched, rotten life.”

He went on steadily with his work, because he thought she would have wished him to, but he never moved far from a telephone. Meanwhile, the poor child was fighting a very desperate battle. I went round to South Audley Street as often as I could, and a white-faced Mollie gave me the last bulletins. There was one night when it seemed certain that Pamela could not see the morning, but morning came and the thread of life still held. She was delirious, talking about Charles mostly, and the mountain inn in the Tyrol where they were going for their honeymoon. Thank God, Charles was not there to listen to that!

He did not go near the house, which I thought was wise, but the diary revealed that he spent the midnight hours striding about Mayfair. He was waiting for her death, waiting for Mollie's summons to look for the last time upon what was so dear . . .

He was no longer in torment. Indeed, he was calm now, if you can call that calm which is the uttermost despair. His life was bereft of every shadow of value, every spark of colour, and he was living in a bleak desert, looking with aching eyes and a breaking heart at a beautiful star setting below the skyline, a star which was the only light in the encroaching gloom to lead him home. That very metaphor was in the diary. He probably got it out of some hymn, and I never in my life knew Charles use a metaphor before.

And then there came another changeâit is plain in the diaryâbut this time it was a wholesale revolution, by which the whole man was moved to a different plane.

His own predestined death had been put aside as too trivial for a thought, but now suddenly Death itself came to have no meaning. The ancient shadow disappeared in the great brightness of his love.

Every man has some metaphysics and poetry in his soul, but people like Charles lack the gift of expression. The diary had only broken sentences, but they were more poignant than any eloquence. If he had cared about the poets he might have found some one of them to give him apt words; as it was, he could only stumble along among clumsy phrases. But there was no doubt about his meaning. He had discovered for himself the immortality of love. The angel with whom he had grappled had at last blessed him.

He had somehow in his agony climbed to a high place from which he had a wide prospect. He saw all things in a new perspective. Death was only a stumble in the race, a brief halt in an immortal pilgrimage. He and Pamela had won something which could never be taken away . . . This man of prose and affairs became a mystic. One side of him went about his daily round, and waited hungrily for telephone calls, but the other was in a quiet country where Pamela's happy spirit moved in eternal vigour and youth. He had no hope in the lesser sense, for that is a mundane thing; but he had won peace, the kind that the world does not give.

Hope, the lesser hope, was to follow. There came a day when the news from South Audley Street improved, and then there was a quick uprush of vitality in the patient. One morning early in May Mollie telephoned to me that Pamela was out of danger. I went straightway to the city and found Charles in his office, busy as if nothing had happened.

I remember that he seemed to me almost indecently composed. But when he spoke he no longer kept his eyes down, but looked me straight in the face, and there was something in those eyes of his which made me want to shout. It was more than peaceâit was a radiant serenity. Charles had come out of the Valley of the Shadow to the Delectable Mountains. Nothing in Heaven or earth could harm him now. I had the conviction that if he had been a poet he could have written something that would have solemnised mankind. As it was, he only squeezed my hand.

Chapter 7

I went down to Wirlesdon for the wedding, which was to be in the village church. Charles had gone for an early morning swim in the lake, and I met him coming up with his hair damp and a towel over his shoulder. I had motored from London and had
The Times
in my hand, but he never glanced at it. Half an hour later I saw him at breakfast, but he had not raided the pile of newspapers on the side table.

It was a gorgeous June morning, and presently I found Pamela in the garden, busy among the midsummer flowersâa taller and paler Pamela, with the wonderful pure complexion of one who has been down into the shades.

“It's all there,” she whispered to me, so that her sister Dollie should not hear. “Exactly as he saw it . . . We shall have a lot of questions to answer today . . . I showed it to Charles, but he scarcely glanced at it. It doesn't interest him. I believe he has forgotten all about it.”

“A queer business, wasn't it?” Charles told me in the autumn. “Oh yes, it was all explained. There was an old boy of my name, a sort of third cousin of my great-grandfather. I had never heard of him. He had been in the Scots Guards, and had retired as a captain about fifty years ago. Well, he died in a London hotel on June ninth. He was a bachelor, and had no near relations, so his servant sent the notice of his death to
The Times
. The man's handwriting was not very clear, and the newspaper people read the age as thirty-six instead of eighty-six . . . Also, the old chap always spoke of his regiment as the Scots Fusilier Guards, and the servant, not being well up in military history, confused it with the Scots Fusiliers . . . He lived in a villa at Cheltenham, which he had christened Marlcote, after the family place.”

THE END

About the Author

Author of the iconic novel
The Thirty-Nine Steps
,
John Buchan
filled many roles including barrister, colonial administrator, publisher, Director of Intelligence, and Member of Parliament.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, first in the Richard Hannay series
,
is widely regarded as the starting point for espionage fiction and was written to pass time while Buchan recovered from an illness. During the outbreak of the First World War, Buchan wrote propaganda for the British war effort, combining his skills as author and politician. In 1935 Buchan was appointed the 15th Governor General of Canada and established the Governor General's Literacy Award. Buchan was enthusiastic about literacy and the evolution of Canadian culture. He died in 1940 and received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.

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EPub Edition October 2014 ISBN: 9781443440929

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