....Something fell from him—the elderliness, the preoccupation, the stiff dogma of his recent years. He recaptured the spirit which had open arms for novelty. He felt an eagerness to be up and doing— what, he was not clear—but something difficult and high-handed. The vanishing of his dream had left the chambers of his mind swept and garnished, and youth does not tolerate empty rooms.
❖
The Dancing Floor by John Buchan (1926)
* * *
The Dancing Floor is a superb novel braiding pagan and Christian, ancient and modern, youth and age, Fate and ingenuity, family shame and family honor. Its characters traverse landscape and social obligations in England and on the small Greek island of Plakos. The larger imperial island in the northwest of Europe is in the thick of post-bellum metropolitan life; in southeast Europe, on Plakos, ancient folkways are barely below the surface: in the island cemetery peasants still keep lamps at relatives' grave-heads to ward off vampires.
The recurring dream of Vernon Milburne
The novel begins far from Plakos. Barrister Edward Leithen meets young Vernon Milburne at a dance; Milburne is a college acquaintance of Leithen's nephew Charles.
"I have never seen any one so completely detached, so clothed with his own atmosphere," Leithen reflects.
Wealthy and alone in the world, Milburne needs the friendship and guidance Leithen can offer.
They meet again during an Eastern vacation: Leithen injures his ankle on a walking trip and the nearest house turns out to be Severns Hall, Milburne's home. (This will not be the last uncanny coincidence in The Dancing Floor).
As Leithen recuperates, Milburne unburdens himself about a dream he has had since childhood, one that recurs every April.
....Vernon's recollection of his childish nightmares was hazy. They varied, I gathered, but narrowed down in the end to one type. He used to find himself in a room different from the nursery and bigger, but with the same smell of wood smoke. People came and went, such as his nurse, the butler, Simon the head keeper, Uncle Appleby his guardian, Cousin Jennifer, the old woman who sold oranges in Axby, and a host of others. Nobody hindered them from going away, and they seemed to be pleading with him to come too. There was danger in the place; something was going to happen in the big room, and if by that time he was not gone there would be mischief… But it was quite clear to him that he could not go. He must stop there, with the wood smoke in his nostrils, and await the advent of the something. But he was never quite sure of the nature of the compulsion....
He was fifteen and at Eton when he made the great discovery. The dream had
become almost a custom now. It came in April at Severns about Easter-tide—a night's discomfort (it was now scarcely more) in the rush and glory of the holidays. There was a moment of the old wild heart-fluttering; but a boy's fancy is more quickly dulled than a child's, and the endless corridors were now more of a prison than a witch's antechamber. By this time, with the help of his diary, he had fixed the date of the dream; it came regularly on the night of the first Monday of April. Now the year I speak of he had made a long expedition into the hills, and had stridden homeward at a steady four miles an hour among the gleams and shadows of an April twilight. He was alone at Severns, so he had had his supper in the big library, where afterwards he sat watching the leaping flames on the open stone hearth. He was very weary, and sleep fell upon him in his chair. He found himself in the wood-smoke chamber, and before him the door leading to the unknown… But it was no indefinite fear that now lay beyond. He knew clearly—though how he knew he could not tell—that each year the something came a room nearer, and was even now but twelve rooms off. In twelve years his own door would open, and then— He woke in the small hours, chilled and mazed, but with a curious new assurance in his heart. Hitherto the nightmare had left him in gross terror, unable to endure the prospect of its recurrence, till the kindly forgetfulness of youth relieved him. But now, though his nerves were fluttering, he perceived that there was a limit to the mystery. Some day it must declare itself and fight on equal terms....
"I was taught to believe that everything in our lives is foreordained by God. No caprice of our own can alter the eternal plan. Now, why shouldn't some inkling of this plan be given us now and then—not knowledge, but just an inkling that we may be ready? My dream may be a heavenly warning, a divine foreshadowing—a privilege, not a cross. It is a reminder that I must be waiting with girt loins and a lit lamp when the call comes. That's the way I look on it, and it makes me happy."
I said nothing, for I did not share his Calvinism, but I felt that suddenly that library had become rather a solemn place. I had listened to the vow of the young Hannibal at the altar.
* * *
The enigma of Koré Arabin
After the war and recovery, Leithen returns to the law. Socially he begins crossing paths with a strong-willed young woman named Corrie Arabin. Leithen finds she is the only child of Shelley Arabin, a kind of Wilde/Crowley social blot with an evil reputation. Before his death he confined his worst enormities to his house and property on Plakos. Corrie now wishes to cleanse the house of her father's evil, make amends to the locals, and restore the family reputation.
Theodore Ertzberger, a City magnate, tries to enlist Leithen in his attempts to keep Corrie from returning to Plakos.
....Her innocence kept her from understanding. And then as she grew older and began to have an inkling of horrors, she was in flaming revolt... I managed to get her sent away, first to school, then to my wife's charge. Otherwise I think there would have been a tragedy."
"But surely with her father's death the danger is gone."
He shook his head. "Plakos is a strange place, for the tides of civilization and progress seem to have left it high and dry. It is a relic of old days, full of wild beliefs and pagan habits. That was why Shelley could work his will with it. He did not confine his evil-doing to his friends and the four walls of his house. He laid a spell of terror on the island. There are horrid tales—I won't trouble you with them—about his dealings with the peasants, for he revelled in corrupting youth. And terror grew soon into hate, till in his last days the man's nerve broke. He lived his last months in gibbering fear. There is something to be said after all for mediaeval methods. Shelley was the kind of scoundrel whom an outraged people should have treated with boiling oil."
"Does the hatred pursue his daughter?" I asked.
"Most certainly. It took years for Plakos to recognize Shelley's enormities, and now the realization has become cumulative, growing with every month. I have had inquiries made—it is easy for me since I have agents everywhere in the Aegean—and I can tell you the thing has become a mania. The war brought the island pretty near starvation, for the fishing was crippled and a succession of bad seasons spoiled the wretched crops. Also there was a deadly epidemic of influenza. Well, the unsettlement of men's minds, which is found all over the world to-day, has become in Plakos sheer madness. Remember, the people are primitive, and have savagery in their blood and odd faiths in their hearts. I do not know much about these things, but scholars have told me that in the islands the old gods are not altogether dead. The people have suffered, and they blame their sufferings on the Arabins, till they have made a monstrous legend of it. Shelley is in hell and beyond their reach, but Shelley's daughter is there. She is the witch who has wronged them, and they are the kind of folk who are capable of witch-burning."
"Good God!" I cried. "Then the girl ought never to be allowed to return."
"So I thought, and hence my little conspiracy which failed. I may tell you in confidence that it was I who prompted the action of the Greek Government, and was prepared to find the compensation. But I was met by a stone wall. She insists on holding on to the place. Worse, she insists on going back. She went there last spring, and the spring is a perilous time, for the people have had the winter to brood over their hatred. I do not know whether she is fully conscious of the risk, for sometimes I think she is still only a child. But last year she was in very real danger, and she must have felt it. Behind all her bravado I could see that she was afraid."
It was an odd tale to hear in a commonplace drawing-room, and it was odder to hear it from such a narrator. There was nothing romantic about Ertzberger. I daresay he had the imaginative quickness of his race, but the dominant impression was of solid good sense. He looked at the thing from a business man's point of view, and the cold facts made him shudder.
"What on earth is her reason?" I asked. "Has she any affection for Plakos?"
"She hates it. But there is some stubborn point of honour which forbids her to let it go. She has her grandfather's fierce obstinacy. Fate has dared her to defend her own, and she has accepted the challenge... It is not merely the sense of property. I think she feels that she has a duty—that she cannot run away from the consequences of her father's devilry. Her presence there at the mercy of the people is a kind of atonement."
"Has she any friends in the island?"
"An old steward is the only man in the house. She may have her well-wishers outside, but they cannot be many, for she has not lived continuously there for years. Last spring I tried to have her guarded, but she saw through my plan and forbade it. All I could do was to have the place watched on my own account. This winter my information is that things are worse. There is famine in the hills, and the hillmen are looking with jealous eyes towards the house by the sea. The stories grow wilder, too."
"What kind?"
"Oh, witchcraft. That the Arabins are sorcerers, and that she herself is a witch. Every misfortune in the island is laid to her account. God knows what may happen this spring, if she persists in going back! My hope was that she might find some lover who would make her forget the obsession, but on the contrary the obsession has made her blind to lovers. Perhaps you have noticed it... She seems to flirt outrageously, but she keeps every man at a distance ... Now, do you understand Miss Arabin a little better?"
I was beginning to. A picture was growing up in my mind of something infinitely pathetic, and terribly alone. A child terrified by a nightmare life which she did not understand—carried off to a new environment from which she extracted what was most feverish and vulgar, for she had no canons, yet keeping through it all a pitiful innocence—returning to a half-comprehension which revolted her soul—resolute to face the consequences of the past with an illogical gallantry. I did not know when I had heard a tale that so moved me.
Leithen has a chance to talk with Corrie when they are both guests at a country house party.
"Your family was unpopular—I understand, justly unpopular. All sorts of wild beliefs grew up about them among the peasants, and they have been transferred to you. The people are half savages, and half starved, and their mood is dangerous. They are coming to see in you the cause of their misfortunes. You go there alone and unprotected, and you have no friends in the island. The danger is that, after a winter of brooding, they may try in some horrible way to wreak their vengeance on you. That is what I learned from Mr. Ertzberger."
The summary, as I made it, sounded unpleasant enough, but the girl did not seem to feel it so. She nodded briskly. "That, at any rate, is what Theodore says. He thinks they may make me a sacrifice. Stuff and nonsense, I say."
The word "sacrifice" disquieted me. It reminded me of the Greek which Vernon had translated.
"Some risk there must be," I went on, "but what I cannot tell is the exact moment of it. Even among a savage people unpopularity need not involve tragedy. You were in Plakos last spring. Tell me what happened."
She fitted a cigarette into a long amber holder, and blew a cloud of smoke which she watched till it disappeared.
"Nothing much. I was left entirely to myself. There was only one servant in the house, old Mitri the steward, and I had also my maid. The whole establishment was sent to Coventry. We had to get our food from the mainland, for we could buy nothing, except now and then a little milk through Mitri's married daughter. It wasn't pleasant, I can tell you. But the worst was when I went for a walk. If I met a man he would make the sign of the evil eye and spit. If I spoke to a child its mother would snatch it up and race indoors with it. The girls and women all wore blue beads as a charm against me, and carried garlic. I could smell it wherever I went. Sometimes I wanted to cry, and sometimes I wanted to swear, but you can do nothing with a silent boycott. I could have shaken the fools."
"What had they against you? Did you ever find out?"
"Oh, Mitri used to tell us gossip that he had heard through his daughter, but Mitri isn't too popular himself, and he is old and can go about very little. It seemed they called me Basilissa. That means Queen, and sounds friendly enough, but I think the word they really used was diabolissa, which means a she-devil. The better disposed ones thought I was a Nereid—that's what they call fairies—but some said I was a strigla—that's a horrible kind of harpy, and some thought I was a vrykolakas, which is a vampire. They used to light little fires in the graveyards to keep me away. Oh, I got very sick of my reputation. It was a hideous bore not to be able to go anywhere without seeing scared people dodging up byways, and making the sign of the cross, and screaming for their children—simply damnable."
"It must have been damnable. I should have thought it rather terrifying too."
"Don't imagine that they frightened me. I was really more sorry than angry. They were only foolish people scared half out of their minds, and, after all, my family has done a good deal to scare them. It is folly—nothing but folly, and the only way to beat folly is to live it down. I don't blame the poor devils, but I'm going to bring them to a better mind. I refuse to run away because of a pack of fairy tales."
"There were no hostile acts?" I asked.
She seemed to reflect. "No," she answered. "One morning we found a splash of blood on the house door, which sent old Mitri to his prayers. But that was only a silly joke."
"Mr. Ertzberger hinted that there might be trouble this year from the people in the hills?"
Her face hardened.
"I wish to Heaven I knew that for certain. It would be the best news I ever got. Those hillmen are not my people, and if they interfere I will have them whipped off the place. I will not have any protection against my own peasantry—Theodore is always pressing me, but I won't have it—it would spoil everything—it wouldn't be the game. But if those filthy mountaineers come within a mile of Plakos I will hire a regiment to shoot them down. Pray God they come. We of the coast have always hated the mountains, and I believe I could rally my people."
"But I thought you owned the whole island?"
"No one owns the hills. My grandfather obtained the seigneury of Plakos, but he never claimed more than the good land by the sea. The hills have always been a no-man's-land full of bandits. We paid them dues—I still pay them—and we did not quarrel, but there was no coming and going between us. They are a different race from our pure Greek stock—mongrels of Slav and Turk, I believe."
Leithen plunges himself into the problem of keeping Corrie from returning to Plakos in April. He even weighs marrying her. But she leaves London for Plakos before he can make his proposal.
The riddle of the Dancing Floor
Book III of The Dancing Floor follows Leithen to Plakos. Corrie is already sequestered in her house, which is surrounded by locals who want to make sure she does not leave.
Leithen and Maris (a local employee of Theodore Ertzberger) consult the local priest.
"You must enter the House," said the priest, in reply to Maris's question, "but it will be a task, I promise you, for Digenes the Cyprian. The place is guarded at all hours, and no one enters or leaves it without the knowledge of the warders. But it might be achieved by bold men under cover of dark. The moon is nearing its full, and when it has set in the small hours there might be a chance."
I got out the map of the island, and tried to get him to give me my bearings. But he was hopeless with a map, and instead on the white hearthstone he drew a plan of his own. The main road to the House from Kynaetho ran west from the village square, up a lane lined with crofts and past a big olive grove, till it reached the wood of chestnuts which was the beginning of the demesne. All the ground on this side rose steeply, and there were dwellings almost to the gates, so that it would be hard to escape detection. To the left the slopes curved in a shallow vale, bounded on the east by the main road to the hills and to Vano, and to south and west by a rim of upland beyond which lay the rugged coastline and the sea. This vale was broad and flat, and tilted up gently towards the west, and it bore the curious name of the Dancing Floor. In the old days, said the priest, the Panegyria were held in it, the island festivals before poverty and madness came to Plakos. The Dancing Floor bordered on the demesne, and he thought that a way of entry might be found there.
I made Maris ask about the shore road, but the priest was emphatic against it. There was no way into the House on that side except by the staircases from the jetty, which Vernon and I had seen in 1914, and there it was certain the watchers would be most vigilant. Besides the staircases were disused, and he believed that the postern doors had been walled up. The cliffs could not be climbed, and if the coast was followed towards the south the difficulties increased. From my recollection of the place, I thought he exaggerated, but I was not prepared to bank on a dim memory.
"There is no time to lose," he said, with an earnestness which convinced me that, though our motives might be different, our purposes were alike. "In two days it will be Good Friday, and the night after comes the solemn hour when our Lord breaks the bonds of death. I grievously fear that that is the hour which my foolish folk have fixed for this sacrilege. If great sin is to be averted, the woman must be gone by then and the House given to the flames. The flames, I say, for whatever happens, there will be no peace in Plakos till it is in ashes. But let it be burned honestly and religiously, and not made an altar to the outland devils whom Holy Church has long ago cast into the darkness."
Of his impression of the Dancing Floor itself, when he encounters it later that night, Leithen reports:
It was not a valley so much as an upland meadow, for there was no stream in it nor had there ever been one, and, though tilted up gently towards the west, most of it was as flat as a cricket-field. There it lay in the moonlight, yellow as corn in its cincture of broken ridges, a place plainly hallowed and set apart. All my life I have cherished certain pictures of landscape, of which I have caught glimpses in my travels, as broken hints of a beauty of which I hoped some day to find the archetype. One is a mountain stream running in broad shallows and coming down through a flat stretch of heather from a confusion of blue mountains. Another is a green meadow, cut off like a garden from neighbouring wildernesses, secret and yet offering a wide horizon, a place at once a sanctuary and a watch-tower. This type I have found in the Scottish Borders, in the Cotswolds, once in New Hampshire, and plentifully in the Piedmont country of Virginia. But in the Dancing Floor I had stumbled upon its archetype. The moonlight made the farther hills look low and near, and doubtless lessened the size of the level ground, but the constriction only served to increase its preciousness.
I sat down and stared at the scene, and in that moment I underwent a great lightening of spirit. For this meadow was a happy place, the home of gentle and kindly and honourable things. Mildness and peace brooded over it. The priest had said that it was "nefasta," but he could only have meant that it was sacred. Sacred indeed it must be, what the Greeks of old called a temenos, for the dullest could not be blind to the divinity that dwelt here. I had a moment of wonder why the Arabins, lords of the island, had not included a spot so gracious in their demesne, until I saw that that could not be. The Dancing Floor must be open to the winds and the starry influences and the spirits of earth; no human master could own or enclose it.
You will call me fantastic, but, dull dog as I am, I felt a sort of poet's rapture as I looked at those shining spaces, and at the sky above, flooded with the amber moon except on the horizon's edge, where a pale blue took the place of gold, and faint stars were pricking. The place was quivering with magic drawn out of all the ages since the world was made, but it was good magic. I had felt the oppression of Kynaetho, the furtive, frightened people, the fiasco of Eastertide, the necromantic lamps beside the graves. These all smacked evilly of panic and death. But now I was looking on the Valley of the Shadow of Life. It was the shadow only, for it was mute and still and elusive. But the presage of life was in it, the clean life of fruits and flocks, and children, and happy winged things, and that spring purity of the earth which is the purity of God.
Locals and hill people will perform rites at the Dancing Floor on the night of Good Friday to choose the male youth who will sacrifice Corrie when the mob sets light to her house.
In Part IV of The Dancing Floor we learn this youth is Vernon Milburne. In this section of the novel Buchan recounts the coincidences that got him on Plakos. Wanting to be at sea on the night of his final nightmare, when the dream's final door would open and display its revelation, Vernon is caught in a violent storm. Exhausted, he anchors at Plakos without realizing where he is. Once ashore, Corrie's servant smuggles him into the house.
At this point, Buchan has given us most of the novel's second half: Leithen and Vernon Milburne to-ing and fro-ing around the northern tip of Plakos, frantic to rescue Corrie Arabin from death.
When the climax comes on the night before Easter and the Arabin house is burning "like a haystack," Leithen sees Vernon and Corrie at the same moment the mob of villagers and hill people do: as the pair emerge from the house's flaming doorway
The spell of the waiting people made me turn, as they had turned, to the gap in the wall. Through it, to the point where the glow of the conflagration mingled with the yellow moonlight, came the two figures.
I think I would have dropped on my knees, but that Maris fetched me a clout on the back, and his exultant voice cried in my ear. "Bravo," he cried. "By the Mother of God, they win! That is a great little lady!"
There was something in the familiarity, the friendly roughness of the voice which broke the spell. I suddenly looked with seeing eyes, and I saw Koré.
She was dressed in white, the very gown which had roused Vernon's ire at my cousin's dance the summer before. A preposterous garment I had thought it, the vagary of an indecent fashion. But now—ah now! It seemed the fitting robe for youth and innocence—divine youth, heavenly innocence—clothing but scarcely veiling the young Grace who walked like Persephone among the spring meadows. Vera incessu patuit Dea. It was not Koré I was looking at, but the Koré, the immortal maiden, who brings to the earth its annual redemption.
I was a sane man once more, and filled with another kind of exaltation. I have never felt so sharp a sense of joy. God had not failed us. I knew that Koré was now not only safe but triumphant.
And then I recognized Vernon.
I did not trouble to think by what mad chance he had come there. It seemed wholly right that he should be there. He was dressed like the runner of the day before, but at the moment I did not connect the two. What I was looking at was an incarnation of something that mankind has always worshipped—youth rejoicing to run its race, that youth which is the security of this world's continuance and the earnest of Paradise.
I recognized my friends, and yet I did not recognize them, for they were transfigured. In a flash of insight I understood that it was not the Koré and the Vernon that I had known, but new creations. They were not acting a part, but living it. They, too, were believers; they had found their own epiphany, for they had found themselves and each other. Each other! How I knew it I do not know, but I realized that it was two lovers that stood on the brink of the Dancing Floor. And I felt a great glow of peace and happiness.
With that I could face the multitude once more. And then I saw the supreme miracle.
People talk about the psychology of a crowd, how it is different in kind from the moods of the men who compose it. I daresay that is true, but if you have each individual strained to the extreme of tension with a single hope, the mood of the whole is the same as that of the parts, only multiplied a thousandfold. And if the nerve of a crowd goes there is a vast cracking, just as the rending of a tree-trunk is greater than the breaking of a twig.
For a second—not more—the two figures stood on the edge of the Dancing Floor in the sight of the upturned eyes. I do not think that Koré and Vernon saw anything— they had their own inward vision. I do not know what the people saw in the presences that moved out of the darkness above them.
But this I saw. Over the multitude passed a tremor like a wind in a field of wheat. Instead of a shout of triumph there was a low murmur as of a thousand sighs. And then there came a surge, men and women stumbling in terror. First the fringes opened and thinned, and in another second, as it seemed to me, the whole mass was in precipitate movement. And then it became panic—naked, veritable panic. The silence was broken by hoarse cries of fear. I saw men running like hares on the slopes of the Dancing Floor. I saw women dragging their children as if fleeing from a pestilence... In a twinkling I was looking down on an empty glade with the Spring of the White Cypress black and solitary in the moonlight.
I did not doubt what had happened. The people of Plakos had gone after strange gods, but it was only for a short season that they could shake themselves free from the bonds of a creed which they had held for a thousand years. The resurgence of ancient faiths had obscured but had not destroyed the religion into which they had been born. Their spells had been too successful. They had raised the Devil and now fled from him in the blindest terror. They had sought the outlands, had felt their biting winds, and had a glimpse of their awful denizens, and they longed with the passion of children for their old homely shelters. The priest of Kynaetho would presently have his fill of stricken penitents.
* * *
Since 2017 I have seen a sucker for stories in the horror mode that take place in Greece. That was the year I first read Simon Raven's sublime Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960) and Ramsey Campbell's novel Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach (2015).
The Dancing Floor has a lighter touch and a cozier, "safer" tone than those two masterpieces of the UK "abroad macabre."
Buchan's off-island outsiders are not met with more than implied violence. Vernon's recurring nightmare turns out to be subsumed in his broader course toward heroism and love. Kore Arabin, always confident she is master of her own fate, finds within herself a steel capable of turning the tables on the Fates themselves on their home ground.
The Dancing Floor is full to overflowing with what we seek in Buchan's stories and novels: classical and pagan survivals, wild landscapes, exertion to the point of physical exhaustion, and plenty of precarious reconnoitering. The Dancing Floor is a perfect engine for escape.
What could be better?
Jay
6 February 2021
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