The Runagates Club Read online

  The Runagates Club

  Also published by Handheld Press

  HANDHELD CLASSICS

  What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War by Ernest Bramah

  Desire by Una L. Silberrad

  HANDHELD RESEARCH

  The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White edited by Peter Haring Judd

  First published in the UK in 1928 by Hodder & Stoughton, London.

  This ePub edition published in 2017 by Handheld Press Ltd.

  34 Avenue Heights, Basingstoke Road, Reading RG2 0EP

  www.handheldpress.co.uk

  Copyright of the Introduction and Notes © Kate Macdonald 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The right of Kate Macdonald to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  ISBN 978-1-9998280-7-3

  Series design by Nadja Guggi and typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Open Sans.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group Ltd.

  Contents

  Introduction by Kate Macdonald

  Preface

  I. The Green Wildebeest: Sir Richard Hannay’s story

  II. The Frying-Pan and the Fire: The Duke of Burminster’s story

  1. The Frying-Pan

  2. The Fire

  III. Dr Lartius: Mr Palliser-Yeates’ story

  IV. The Wind in the Portico: Mr Henry Nightingale’s story

  V. ‘Divus’ Johnston: Lord Lamancha’s story

  VI. The Loathly Opposite: Major Oliver Pugh’s story

  VII. Sing a Song of Sixpence: Sir Edward Leithen’s story

  VIII. Ship to Tarshish: Mr Ralph Collatt’s story

  IX. Skule Skerry: Mr Anthony Hurrell’s story

  X. ‘Tendebant Manus’: Sir Arthur Warcliff’s story

  XI. The Last Crusade: Mr Francis Martendale’s story

  XII. Fullcircle: Mr Martin Peckwether’s story

  Notes

  Author’s works

  Further reading

  Kate Macdonald is a literary historian and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. She has published widely on twentieth-century British book history and publishing culture, on publishing during the First World War, and on the fiction and professions of John Buchan. Her most recent books are Novelists Against Social Change (2015) and Rose Macaulay, Gender and Modernity (ed. 2017).

  Introduction

  BY KATE MACDONALD

  Background

  All twelve of John Buchan’s short stories in The Runagates Club had been published before. Their successful recombination into a collection is due to their framing, as Buchan sets them out as after-dinner stories told in a dining club of close male friends, with the reader listening in. All the storytelling characters have specialist expertise and social position, and inhabit the fictional world that Buchan had begun to invent in 1900 in The Half-Hearted, his first novel with a present-day setting. This clubland setting is the habitat of his leading protagonists Edward Leithen and Richard Hannay, their friends and families, and their adventures. It reinforces their social and political values in a fantasy of gentlemanly conviviality that his readers are invited to share.

  The Runagates stories are among Buchan’s finest, making The Runagates Club one of Buchan’s most popular works. One of its first reviews praised it for being ‘full of the ingenuity of plot, the swift action and the precision of character for which Mr Buchan is famous, the dozen stories which comprise this volume are as unerringly good as anything he has done of this class of fiction’.1 By this time Buchan’s reputation as an author was based on the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916), and The Runagates Club was a continuation of this particular kind of masculine adventure that combined Edwardian and even Victorian values in a modern post-war world. Buchan himself was a Victorian, the product of a Presbyterian manse, Brasenose College at the University of Oxford, the Bar, civil service in South Africa, journalism on The Spectator, publishing with Thomas Nelson & Son and propaganda as the British government’s Director of Information during the First World War. By 1928 Buchan was Deputy-Director of Reuters, a Member of Parliament, and in 1935 would become Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada. In his lifetime he published over 100 books at a punishing pace, and was most beloved for his tweedy, authoritative thrillers in that genre’s least cynical form.

  The club is Buchan’s affirmation of masculine fellowship and common values: ‘they were of one family and totem, like old schoolfellows’. In this world women are all but irrelevant, as are families and children. In contrast, the men’s scholarly knowledge and military service are expected and necessary, as these factors have moulded their characters. Within the framework of the club’s history — Lord Lamancha adopts the name of the club from Psalm 68: ‘He letteth the runagates continue in scarceness’, because their dinners were at first ‘execrable’ — the unnamed editorial narrator has ‘chosen’ twelve stories to showcase the fabulous storytelling skills of the club members. The entertainingly non-conformist nature of their adventures reinforces their association as ‘runagates’, vagabonds and wanderers who do not follow the crowd.

  The stories’ themes thus contrast amusingly with the social assurance of the club setting, and the characters’ secure positions in their world. A further contrast to this deeply-felt security is embedded in each story: the dominant emotion evoked in all of them is fear. Sometimes this fear is straightforwardly supernatural: ‘The Wind in the Portico’ and ‘Skule Skerry’ are two of Buchan’s most frightening stories, and the terrors in ‘The Green Wildebeest’ convince Hannay to adopt a very sober respect for African belief systems. Sometimes the fears are psychological (‘Ship to Tarshish’), possibly even psychiatric (‘“Tendebant Manus”’), and sometimes they are simply social (‘The Frying-Pan and the Fire’, and ‘“Divus” Johnston’). The reader is induced to feel the protagonists’ fears, either by narrative tension (‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’), or by the alarming changes observed in ‘Fullcircle’. ‘The Last Crusade’ tackles the public’s fear of manipulation by journalism and fake news. ‘The Loathly Opposite’ and ‘Dr Lartius’ are First World War stories that revisit the very recent fear of a military enemy, and the fear of the consequences of defeat.

  It is likely that Buchan developed The Runagates Club, his first short story collection for eighteen years — if the linked stories of The Path of the King (1921) are thought of rather as chapters of a novel — after he was invited to write eight new stories for the revived Pall Mall Magazine, which was relaunched in 1927. The first story to appear in the magazine, ‘The Green Wildebeest’, was trailed as ‘John Buchan’s latest short story, told by Sir Richard Hannay’. This was good use of Buchan’s celebrity as an author and as a public personality. In the first issues of the magazine he appeared alongside his equally celebrated peers: the hugely prolific Edgar Wallace, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Hilaire Belloc, Ethel Mannin, Arnold Bennett, Denis Mackail and Valentine Williams. Buchan’s last story in the magazine came out in April 1928, and three months later The Runagates Club was published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and in the USA, on 12 and 13 July 1928 respectively.

  ‘The Green Wildebeest’

  First published in The Pall Mall Magazine 1:5 (September 1927), 2–12.

  Buchan was a canny marketer of his own product, and this Hannay adventure — th
e only time Hannay appears in a short story — was a strong opening story to ensure good sales for the book. ‘The Green Wildebeest’, which included an epigraph in the book version, gave Buchan a chance to take Hannay’s admirers back to adventures that predate his first appearance in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Buchan would later write a second ‘origin episode’ for Hannay, embedded in The Island of Sheep (1936). With ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ (1910) and Prester John (1910), these are the best of Buchan’s African fictions, creative expressions of the power of his South African experience on his imagination, surviving long after Buchan’s work there as an imperial civil servant reallocating farmland after the Boer War.

  One of the least palatable aspects of Buchan’s writing for today’s readers is how he allows his characters to make value judgements based on ‘breeding’ and race. These function as character markers that the reader is expected to recognise and agree with, a relic of the period’s cultural background. In this story, Hannay is adamant that the re-emergence of ‘the aboriginal sap’ of genetic and cultural background makes some people more susceptible to ‘atavistic fears’ than others. The conversation between Peckwether and Sandy in the framing narrative that opens ‘The Green Wildebeest’, about worship of Baal and bankers, clearly refers to the events of Buchan’s much earlier story ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, in which a character is identified as of Jewish descent (not pejoratively), and by this inheritance of blood is more predisposed to being influenced by supernatural forces than other characters.

  ‘The Green Wildebeest’ repeats this trope in the context of Boer farmers. Although Buchan’s South African scout and war hero Peter Pienaar is an important influence in the Hannay canon, Buchan seemed to be unable to tell stories from a Boer perspective, only telling stories about them.2 Hannay’s travelling companion, Andrew Du Preez, is part of a family of fighting Boers. He is described as good-looking and smartly dressed, but (from Hannay’s perspective) has a ‘dull complexion’, exacerbated by Hannay’s racist epithet of ‘dash of the tar-brush’, indicating that Hannay believes Andrew’s ancestry to include indigenous African genes. This is necessary for the plot, as Andrew is thus susceptible to influences to which Hannay is oblivious, and cannot experience himself.

  Buchan also uses Andrew’s Boer background to explain this character’s suspicion of black Africans, since he treats the villagers in the kraal with disdain: ‘a backveld Dutchman can never keep his hands off a Kaffir’. Although Hannay is suitably respectful toward the African villagers, and the priest (which is not how the illustrator of the dustwrapper for the 1930 Nelson’s edition chose to depict their relationship), there is a social hierarchy firmly in place, based on race. The social contempt of the ‘Englishman’ (Hannay is technically a Rhodesian of Scots descent, but ‘English’ was a standard synonym for ‘British’) for the Boer is mirrored by the Boer’s disregard for the native African he calls a ‘Kaffir’.

  However, with the figure of the African priest Buchan achieves something new that he had not found necessary, or had not been capable of, in his earlier fiction. Hannay treats the old man with respect, because he can classify him as possibly having Zulu blood, a contemporary indicator of nobility and military prowess that Buchan had explored at length in Prester John. Nonetheless, the classification is still hierarchical: the priest looks less ‘African’, more ‘high-boned and regular’ than the other Africans living in the vicinity. This story thus suggests that ‘ordinary’ black Africans are inadequate as figures of authority — someone extraordinary has to hold that position. Temporarily, the priest need not count as a ‘Kaffir’.

  Buchan’s description of the bush setting relies on natural characteristics to suggest eeriness and unnaturalness. Earlier on the trip there had been an abundance of animal life, but things become strange as Hannay’s party nears the great cliff where the priest’s sanctuary sits. The absence of open water makes no sense in a valley like a ‘green cup’, and is also dangerous, since restricted access to water threatens life and health. Hannay shoots two doves and they have ‘that unpleasant metallic green that you find in a copper country’. The colour green in Buchan’s fiction was usually a code for the uncanny.

  Once inside the sanctuary, the lack of animal life and the silent water welling up from below the surface of the sacred pool unnerves Hannay. This state of mind is encouraged by the stone parapet around the spring. The stonework indicates that the shrine was built by a far older civilisation than the primitive huts in the kraal, and is evidence that power and knowledge had inhabited this area long before the arrival of whites. Hannay finds this as alarming as the strange events happening around the shrine. After Andrew has committed violence and descends into delirium, Hannay travels back to the green valley to consult the priest. Andrew’s apparent possession by spirits has become as likely in Hannay’s mind as a diagnosis of insanity: from this we see that this story is about Hannay’s unresolved fear that rational man can no longer account for things found in nature, or from outside the white man’s experience.

  ‘The Frying-Pan and the Fire’

  First published in The Pall Mall Magazine 2:6 (April 1928), 68–82.

  This story was originally entitled ‘Human Quarry’, and is an upper-class chase through the heather. This game of orienteering under pressure goes awry when Burminster, the quarry, loses his way, becoming a hunted man in reality and has to fend for himself with few resources. He rises to the challenge by hiding in plain sight, using disguises and confusing his pursuers, a classic Buchan plot point from many of his earlier novels. But in this story Burminster is acting out the theory to demonstrate how things can go wrong. He is not in danger of his life, as earlier characters would have been in the same situation, but he can’t reveal his identity without catastrophic social exposure. As such, rather than being a tense life and death thriller, the plot of this story draws heavily on Buchan’s wonderful poaching romp, John Macnab (1925), in which the same dilemma of social exposure threatens the characters. Several of the situations that Burminster gets into come from this novel, and others were drawn from Buchan’s own experience, such as the German hydropathic dietary regime which he underwent as a treatment for his recurring internal complaint, and the political meeting (reused from both The Thirty-Nine Steps and John Macnab).

  The tone throughout is comic, putting this non-serious character through hubristic experiences designed to shake his self-confidence. The pacing, sentence rhythms and preposterous situations also create comedy, showing how the man of high estate is plunged into low company, which he rather likes, for a short time. But when he realises that he has no money, and is unexpectedly on the run from the police, he is turned temporarily into a man of low estate, a very neat reversal of fortune for a character who represents landownership and Conservative political privilege.

  ‘Dr Lartius’

  First published in The Graphic, 100:2608 (24 November 1919), 4, 6, 8, 54, 56.

  ‘Dr Lartius’ was bought by The Graphic in July 1919 for their Jubilee number for £125 (equivalent to £6500 in 2017).3 It shares ideas with some of Buchan’s fiction from the early 1930s, and may have influenced a subplot in his novel A Prince of the Captivity (1933). However, the fact that it was written in the immediate aftermath, if not during the First World War, puts ‘Dr Lartius’ in the same category as Mr Standfast (1919), a Buchan thriller based on wartime disguise likely to have been drawn from his work as Director of Information. Buchan’s occupation in his government work from 1917 was to direct and control British propaganda, aimed at the Home Front and at enemy and occupied populations. The work of the titular character in ‘Dr Lartius’ is to influence the desire of the German population sufficiently to make them demand peace at any price, in the closing months of the war.

  We first observe this British secret agent at work in London, from where he is deported as an undesirable alien, to gain him credibility with the Germans. He moves to Munich to continue his work as a superior fortune-teller to the intellectuals and upper classes.
He sows doubt about the virtue of war, and encourages the desire for peace among the rich and dilettante who come to visit him as a new fashion. He is unable, however, to dissemble to those who come to him to ask for news of their dead sons. The sayings of the ‘Wise Doctor’ go viral, producing pervasive propaganda to demoralise the German population and make them demand peace even if it is not their victory. His escape back to the Allied side of the frontier is a classic Buchan adventure in its economy of narrative and telling descriptive details.

  Buchan’s skill in this story lies in persuading the reader to suspend disbelief. We have to believe that the Germans would be interested in harnessing the vaguely described and lightly worded ‘skills’ of Dr Lartius, because this is where the tension of the story lies. If the reader does not believe that the Germans want to use a fortune-teller to read the thoughts of British servicemen during Allied military movements, then the story has failed. Buchan’s assurance leads the reader willingly through this inventive retelling of the last years of the war.

  ‘The Wind in the Portico’

  First published in The Pall Mall Magazine 2:5 (March 1928), 23–34.

  Henry Nightingale reads aloud to the club the story of his encounter with Dubellay, the owner of an obscure Latin manuscript, and his obsession with the proper offerings to make to a god. Buchan characters rarely die, but in this story one does, most horribly, by supernatural means. By establishing the story as part of the pursuit of scholarly knowledge Buchan turns the description of what should be an intellectual exercise into a terrifying encounter with a legend.

  The scholarly perspective helps the reader understand the dangerous inadequacies in Dubellay’s learning, and anticipates his vulnerability before the wrath of the god. The structure of the story maps onto that of ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ of eighteen years earlier, suggesting that Buchan’s supernatural writing tended to follow a pattern of foreshadowing, encounter, human resistance and then the revenge of the uncanny influence. ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ also contains shared motifs of an ancient religion regenerated by an inexpert devotee, and the deadly nature of the worship.