I was alone in that great crowd, isolated and proscribed, and there was no help save in my own wits.
(The Power-House, page 88)
A short book, at just 110 pages in this paperback edition, The Power-House was expanded from a 1913 short story. It starts slowly but builds into an exciting (if sometimes incomprehensible) thriller set among the posh upper class of Edwardian England. The narrator is Sir Edward Leithen, a Scottish barrister and Conservative MP living in London, a character who was to go on and feature in four other Buchan novels which are, as a result, regarded as a set. Half-way through the novel we are told that he is 34 years old.
Frame narratives
It’s a frame narrative or story within a story. The first page explains that the following story was told by Leithen to a group of ‘us’ one evening during a hunting trip in Scotland, duck shooting at Glenaicill to be precise. We’re given the names of some of their circle of posh friends and their wacky adventures.
The main narrative starts with one of Leithen’s circle, fellow Conservative MP Tommy Deloraine, throwing a dinner party at which we’re introduced to a second group of posh, pukka pals (‘an Indian cavalry fellow; Chapman, the Labour member, whom Tommy called Chipmunk; myself, and old Milson of the Treasury’). I confess to finding this blizzard of names and characters a bit confusing. I was left wondering who was going to emerge as the central protagonist.
The use of a frame device reminds me of Joseph Conrad’s use of the technique in the novels narrated by his character Marlow (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Chance, The Arrow of Gold and the short story Youth). But the comparison only highlights the difference. Conrad is a literary giant, Buchan is a cheapjack entertainer. In Conrad the frame story of, say, Heart of Darkness, is an intimate part of the meaning of the narrative, giving it immeasurable depth and significance. Here the only reason for these two sets of posh names and settings (the Scottish duck shoot and the dinner party) is nothing creative or artistic but, as far as I can tell, snob value. It simply indicates the posh, upper-crust setting.
(Actually, half-way through, another thought occurred to me. One of Buchan’s chief characteristics as a writer is his prolificness. I’ve just read Prester John, whose protagonist is a young and relatively hard-up Scotsman; a few years after this book, Buchan published his most successful novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, which features a middle-class protagonist. Maybe the very showy showcasing of posh friends and connections in the Leithen books is not pure showing off but more to signal the difference in social class and setting of the Leithen novels from the other types. Not snobbery, but narrative positioning.)
Where is Pitt-Heron?
Anyway, when all the guests have left the party, Tommy tells Leithen (the narrator) that a mutual friend, Charles Pitt-Heron, a well-known adventurer and free spirit, has disappeared, not returning home to his lady wife a few days previously. His valet has found a card in his things with a Russian name on it, Konalevsky, and enquiries have shown that it belongs to an official at the Russian embassy. When Tommy went to see him Konalevsky told Tommy that Pitt-Heron has gone to Moscow, nobody knows why.
Now Tommy explains that he’s telling Leithen all this because he, Tommy, is all set to depart for Moscow with a view to tracking down Pitt-Heron, finding out what it’s all about, and offering him help. But he needs someone back in London to know what’s going on, where he’s gone, and generally look after his interests while he’s away. Puzzled by the whole thing, Leithen agrees.
So next day Tommy catches the boat-train from Victoria and Leithen goes round to see Pitt-Heron’s wife, Ethel. With the incestuousness characteristic of the British upper class, Leithen himself had feelings for Ethel before she married the mad adventurer, Tommy, so the visit has undertones. But she tells him she’s discovered the draft of a letter he wrote but obviously never got round to completing, warning of terrible danger and telling her to come and meet him at …. and the chosen destination hadn’t been filled in. What does it mean? Leithen promises his old flame to find out.
The Lumley-Pitt-Heron connection
The plot then thickens or gets more cluttered. Through a series of random incidents, Leithen becomes aware of a man who owns a big house in Blackheath named Pavia, and that he has an aggressive butler named Tuke. Checking up information in court cases he’s involved in, Leithen then discovers the house in South London is also registered to a man named Lumley. Could they be the same person?
When Leithen goes to this house to interview the butler (because he’s been involved in a car crash which is going to court), the owner is away, but Leithen discovers a scrap of paper with a cryptic message on it: ‘Suivez a Bokhare Saronov’. Why Bokhara? Who is Saronov?
The country house
In a huge coincidence, Leithen undertakes a motor car tour of the West Country (the car is driven by his chauffeur, Stagg) but, on the way back, in Surrey, they crash, not seriously, but both are a little cut and shaken. Leaving Stagg to look after getting the motor repaired, Leithen goes wandering the neighbourhood to see if he can find a nice upper-middle-class chap who can put him up. The coincidence is that he comes across a lovely grand house, home to a very friendly old man.
Altogether it was a very dignified and agreeable figure who greeted me in a voice so full and soft that it belied his obvious age. 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. We drank a ’95 Perrier-Jouet and some excellent Madeira.
International anarchy
After dinner the two very civilised men sit by the fire for a long conversation. The gracious host very slowly steers the subject round to international affairs, points out the thinness of the veneer of civilisation, suggests how little it would take to sink the currency, the only thing which keeps civilisation together is the compact of most of its educated members to do so. But what would happen if that failed, if some members rejected the compact or social contract?
What is everything you read in the papers is just persiflage, even the stuff about wars and new weapons is only the surface? What if the real power lies hidden?
The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret
And so, in this mesmeric scene, Leithen finds himself being drawn into a vision of a vast international conspiracy. ‘Supposing anarchy learned from civilisation and became international,’ the host says. But you would want a great military genius, a modern-day Napoleon to manage such a conspiracy, objects Leithen.
‘Let us call it iconoclasm, the swallowing of formulas, which has always had its full retinue of idealists. And you do not want a Napoleon. All that is needed is direction, which could be given by men of far lower gifts than a Bonaparte. In a word, you want a Power-House, and then the age of miracles will begin.’
Their after-dinner chat tails off and Leithen goes to bed in the spare bedroom, but he can’t sleep because of the vision of international anarchy which has opened before him. Next morning he is up early, deliberately to avoid further conversation with his unnerving host.
In fact it is only as the housekeeper serves him an early breakfast, that she mentions that her master’s name is Mr Andrew Lumley. Lumley! The same name that’s come up regarding the house in London and mysterious connections with Pitt-Heron.
Leithen is driven back to London by Stagg, in the now-repaired motor, reeling from the coincidences which have brought him to spend the night in the home of the very person who seems to be involved in Pitt-Heron’s disappearance.
Developments
Mr Lumley, the quietly civilised connoisseur and man behind the Power-House, not only has a country house in Surrey, and a house in Blackheath, but mostly stays in rooms at the Albany in central London.
His butler’s real name is Josiah Routh. Leithen finds out that he is a crook who made a career as a trade unionist until he was caught embezzling funds and did a runner. Now, as he pieces together the evidence, Leithen realises that:
- Pitt-Heron is mixed up somehow with Lumley and become so frightened for his life that he fled to Moscow.
- Tommy has contacted a mutual friend in the Moscow embassy and gone to find Pitt-Heron.
Leithen has a contact at ‘one of the embassies’ (surely the French embassy?) who he calls Felix. He goes to see Felix and together they ponder where the Tommy and Pitt-Heron would then travel to. If Pitt-Heron was going on from Moscow to Bokhara, then they would probably head south towards British India.
This Felix becomes a source of information, first that Tommy arrived in Moscow, then that he set off towards central Asia, and then that he was pursued by another Englishman, a man answering to the description of Tuke, the super-butler, also known as Routh. This Routh had hooked up with a Russian named Saronov. So Saronov and Tuke are in pursuit of Pitt-Heron and Tommy in the wilds of Central Asia.
Complicated, isn’t it? And doesn’t totally make sense. We have no idea how Pitt-Heron is connected to Lumley or why he’s fleeing into Central Asia of all places.
Anyway, Leithen also reaches out to a contact of his in Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, one Macgillivray. They meet for a drink and Leithen asks this old hands if he’s ever heard of the Power-House? Macgillivray laughs and says there are hundreds of criminal organisations with florid names, colourful names are the hallmark of half-baked political subversives round the world.
Pursued
Leithen becomes convinced he’s being spied on, the eerie feeling that people are watching him and following him in the streets. He bumps into Lumley in Piccadilly who very politely warns him to steer clear of the Pitt-Heron affair. The sense of paranoia and urban claustrophobia thickens.
So much so that Leithen reaches out to the bluff Yorkshire Labour MP Chapman and asks him to move in with him, to be a kind of bodyguard. He has to tell Chapman about the international conspiracy he’s stumbled across and the latter is very excited at the prospects of fighting and punch-ups. The pair take to practicing boxing for half an hour every morning.
Der Krafthaus
Leithen runs into Macgillivray in his club who tells him that, as it happens, a letter from a German colleague contains references to several espionage plans, all linked to something called the Krafthaus, Krafthaus being German for ‘power house’.
Macgillivray’s correspondent concluded by saying that, in his opinion, if this Krafthaus could be found, the key would be discovered to the most dangerous secret organisation in the world. He added that he had some reason to believe that the motive power of the concern was English.
Premonitions
In his imagination Leithen sees Tommy and Pitt-Heron riding south from Bokhara, being pursued by Tuke and Saronov, certain that when they meet up there will be death – ‘and I knew, though how I could not tell, that death would attend the meeting.’
Leithen has come clean to his friend in the Foreign Office, Felix, and asked him to get the British Embassy to despatch help to Tommy and Pitt-Heron. All he can do is hope that help will arrive in time.
Leithen attends a big political dinner given by the chief of his party in the House of Lords. There are fifty or sixty guests and he is horrified to see Lumley sitting at the top of the table as one of the most honoured guests. When he asks the man sitting next to him who the guy at the head of the table is, the man (an Under-Secretary) replies that he is Lumley, one of the most powerful men in England: ‘If you wanted any out-of-the-way bit of knowledge you could get it by asking Lumley. I expect he pulls the strings more than anybody living.’
The trap
Macgillivray phones Leithen to say he has something important to tell him and invites him to an out-of-the-way restaurant in Fitzrovia, Rapaccini’s in Antioch Street. It’s a trap. Leithen is shown into a small dining room and the door is locked behind him. There’s bottles of champagne and he’s tempted to drink but is too tense.
After a long wait, the odd-looking French windows open from outside to reveal a burly crook. Now, as it happens, this is a crook Leithen once acted as defence lawyer for and got off, one Bill Docker. (Not the most original name for a working class London man, is it?)
Docker is surprised to see him and explains that he’s been paid to force him outside and into a waiting car which will drive him away (why? where?). Leithen tries to persuade him to let him go, but Docker says if he does a) he’ll have his own throat cut and b) ‘they’ will just send someone else.
Now during this tense conversation Docker had helped himself to several glasses of the champagne and now begins to feel woozy. It is, of course, drugged, and when Leithen points this out to him, Docker becomes angry at his own employers and, with his bull-like physique, smashes the locked door down before proceeding to pass out.
Leithen grabs a champagne bottle as a weapon and goes out into the corridor where he immediately encounters one of the waiters with a knife but clobbers him over the head with the bottle. Just as Docker had been battering the door, Leithen had heard the voice of his friendly Labour MP, Chapman, yelling up the stairs. Now Leithen jumps over the banisters and falls amid three other waiters who try to corner him but they all fall in a roiling ruck. Chapman wades in, disperses them and pulls Leithen to safety.
Out in the street, Chapman explains that after Leithen rang to say he was going to Rapaccini’s, he suddenly remembered it was the London base for Tuke, the renegade trade unionist, and immediately suspected something fishy, so had hurried round. The supposed ‘manager’ tried to put him off but Chapman barged past him and started yelling Leithen’s name just, as chance would have it, as Docker was breaking the door down.
Now they booth hustle out of the place and walk sharpish along Oxford Street, west back towards Leithen’s flat. On the way he is several times jostled by random passersby off the pavement and once into the door into building works, crying out for Chapman who came wading in to save him.
In other words, the Power-House seems to be a vast organisation, with followers everywhere, who have been ordered to capture him.
News from Asia
They make it back to his flat where they virtually barricade themselves in before calming down. Leithen is smoking a pipe when Felix phones with news of goings-on on Turkmenistan. Felix had commissioned some British Indian frontier police to shadow Tuke and Saronov from Moscow. They followed them into a valley where they met Tommy and Pitt-Heron and, after a little parlay, Tuke had fired deliberately at Pitt-Heron, grazing his ear, whereupon Tommy had charged him and knocked the pistol from his hand. Tuke turned to flee but was killed by a long shot from the police on the hillside. Meanwhile Tommy had felled Saronov with his fists, and the man had abjectly surrendered.
This is all well and good but what’s it all about? What has Pitt-Heron got to do with Lumley? Why did he flee? Why did he flee to Moscow, of all places, and then onto Central Asia? What was so important that Tuke was sent thousands of miles to kill him?
Break for it
Next day Leithen writes a full account of events to date, in duplicate. He sends Chapman to deliver one of them to Macgillivray at Scotland Yard. But a few hours later he’s rung up by a doctor from St Thomas’s Hospital who tells him that Chapman has been admitted for cuts and bruises sustained when he was run over by a car in Whitehall. And that while he was being helped to his feet, someone pickpocketed the letter. The enemy now know how much he knows.
When Leithen tries to phone Felix he discovers the phone line has been cut. He is under siege in his flat. But he had previously arranged to be picked up by his man Stagg the chauffeur at 2pm. A little late, Stagg appears in the car and Leithen makes a dash for it. He has the other letter on him and is going to deliver it to the embassy in Belgravia. But he tells Stagg to do a detour west to throw followers off the scent. But half way down the Edgeware Road he realises the driver of his car does not have the Boer War scar on his neck that he and Stagg have sometimes discussed. He is an imposter!
Next time they come to a traffic jam Leithen jumps out and makes his way between cars then pedestrians to a shop he knows, where he asks the owner to be let out the back entrance into a mews. He doubles back through Hyde Park, across Park Lane and through Mayfair. He has that classic thriller sensation of moving among the urban crowds who are living their everyday boring lives while he is involved in a life-or-death, high stakes chase.
I was alone in that great crowd, isolated and proscribed, and there was no help save in my own wits.
As he crosses into Green Park more and more ‘innocent’ bystanders are revealed as being in on the conspiracy, moving in on him, trying to cut him off, as he runs down into Belgrave Square, and then along the mews behind the (French?) embassy. In a comic scene he bursts into the kitchen, mortally offending the chef who was in the final stages of creating a perfect casserole (surely the French embassy?).
A footman, nervously fingering in his pocket what Leithen suspects is a pistol, tries to apprehend him but at this moment the butler appears and suavely agrees to take Leithen to see his friend, Felix. For a moment I thought Felix might be in on the conspiracy (since it’s always the person you trust the most who betrays you), but Felix remains true and lets Leithen send a message to Macgillivray summarising events and, most boldly, to Lumley himself at the Albany, informing him that he intends to call on him at 8pm tonight. Then he makes one more request, that he be allowed a serving of the chef’s wonderful casserole at 7pm.
Face to face with Lumley
This short intense but puzzling yarn comes to a climax when Leithen makes his way from Belgrave Square up and along Piccadilly to confront Lumley at the Albany. He is shown into the quiet man’s rooms and they have a very enjoyable, highly theatrical confrontation. What is repeatedly emphasised is the way they respect each other as gentlemen and so won’t resort to anything crude. Instead Leithen says that at 9.30 he will hand over everything he knows to the police, which gives Lumley an hour and 45 minutes to pack his bags and flee the country. Why is he letting him go, in exchange for Pitt-Heron, in exchange for Lumley forgiving and forgetting whatever hold he has over Pitt-Heron. A favour for a favour.
Lumley delivers the classic speech of the baddie, respecting the brains and character of his enemy, lamenting that he didn’t meet him when he was younger and could have recruited him for his crusade.
Do you know, Mr. Leithen, it is a mere whimsy of fate that you are not my disciple. If we had met earlier and under other circumstances I should have captured you.
‘I abominate you and all your works,’ I said, ‘but I admire your courage.’ (p.101)
All accompanied with some bucket philosophy, because Lumley is the kind of baddie (like Moriarty) who justifies his crimes with specious sophistry.
‘I am a sceptic about most things,’ he said, ‘but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.’
Lumley asks to be left alone while he ponders his next move and/or makes plans to pack to catch the next boat-train. Leithen never felt so relieved as when he emerges back onto the busy streets of Piccadilly, among normal men and women.
I had carried myself boldly enough in the last hour, but I would not have gone through it again for a king’s ransom. Do you know what it is to deal with a pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.
So then he goes to see Chapman, the Labour MP who has been such a brick and sure ally. Chapman is understandably scandalised that Leithen is letting Lumley get away. He wants to have him arrested along with all the people in his network, and accused in a big public trial which would provide an opportunity for blockbuster speeches delivered by himself (Chapman) in Parliament, denouncing the wickedness of capitalism. It is only when Leithen points out that the deal he did was solely to protect his pal Tommy Deloraine and Charles Pitt-Heron, that Chapman grudgingly agrees to be sworn to secrecy.
(It’s easy to forget the suave humour which ripples all through Buchan. Even at the most tense moments his characters are liable to have a pukka quip on their lips, or a sly aside about the various character stereotypes they deal with, Docker the worker, Chapman tribune of the people etc. Part of upper-class sang-froid.)
Lumley’s end and tying up loose ends
In their big confrontation scene, Lumley had made the cynical point that maybe he wasn’t defeated, maybe he was relieved. He had been carrying the burden of super-intelligence and secret agency for decades. (‘No man since Napoleon has tasted such power.’)
So Leithen isn’t surprised to read in the following morning’s paper that Mr Lumley had not taken advantage of the time Leithen gave him to catch the boat-train to the continent but had, instead, died in his sleep of heart failure, presumably suicide (?). Three days later Leithen attends Lumley’s funeral and is impressed by the number of VIPs and top people who carry or follow the casket to the grave.
The papers, also, are full of Lumley’s charitable work, of his achievements as a collector and as a civilised host of parties and receptions. Not a word is breathed anywhere of the secret Leithen uncovered, Leithen’s role as leader of an international terror and anarchist organisation.
Leithen arranges for Lumley’s death to be mentioned in the Russian papers that Tommy and Pitt-Heron could be counted on to read. This is to alert Pitt-Heron that the man who had hounded him out of England is dead, without giving away the fact that he (Leithen) knows about the connection. In other words, done with delicacy and tact. Gentlemen.
All of which leads up very neatly to Leithen being paid a visit a few weeks later by Tommy, looking tanned and travelled, who – in complete ignorance of Leithen’s role in the affair – proceeds to rib Leithen about what a very boring, office-bound existence he leads.
And Leithen plays along, never letting him know that in Tommy’s absence, it was he, Leithen, who had played the key role in the affair, who had arranged for his protection in distant Asia, who had disposed of the great antagonist. How cool, clever and entertaining.
BUT – we never did find out what Lumley was up to and what he was holding over Pitt-Heron or why the latter fled 3,000 miles to escape it. Strange how this short text has all the feel of a thriller but with this great big plot hole right at the centre.
AND – Leithen is mighty confident that with Lumley dead the Power-House will evaporate into thin air, but will it? Surely such a vast enterprise would just find a new cog to fill the slot, like James Bond’s SPECTRE or SMERSH. And anyway, is Lumley really dead? Surely all the best baddies fake their deaths only to return from the grave in the gripping sequel!
Social history
People in conversation, on the radio and telly, in comedies and dramas, complain about the colonisation of the rest of England by Londoners buying up second homes and yet, here, in 1916, we have Leithen lamenting that:
The south of England is now so densely peopled by Londoners that even in a wild district where there are no inns and few farms there are certain to be several week-end cottages.
In 1916!
Artspeak
Lumley at one point dismisses the cheap rhetoric of anarchists and communists who spout slogans without appreciating the true nature of power, describing it as:
‘the half-scientific, half-philosophic jargon which is dear at all times to the hearts of the half-baked.’
Which rang a bell for someone who has just been to four contemporary art exhibitions and read hundreds of wall labels filled with the same endlessly repeated jingle of art critical terms.
Books & Boots 