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  THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF MR ANDREW HAWTHORN & OTHER STORIES

  John Buchan was born in Perth in 1875. His father was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland; and in 1876 the family moved to Fife, where John walked six miles a day to school. Later they moved to Glasgow and, when he went to Glasgow University, he published articles in periodicals. When at Brasenose College, Oxford, he published five books and many articles, and won several awards, including the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. His career was diverse and successful, and despite ill health, he was a barrister and Member of Parliament, in addition to being a writer, soldier and publisher. He married, and had four children. He was created Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield in 1935 and became the Governor-General of Canada, until his death in 1940.

  His first success as an author came with Prester John in 1910, and he went on to write a series of adventure thrillers, or ‘shockers’ as he called them, all characterized by their authentically rendered backgrounds, romantic characters, their atmosphere of expectancy and world-wide conspiracies, and the author’s own enthusiasm. His main heroes were Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps and four other books, Dickson McCunn, the Glaswegian provision merchant with the soul of a romantic, and Edward Leithen, eminent lawyer. Buchan also established a reputation as an historical biographer with such works as Montrose, Oliver Cromwell and Augustus.

  Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967. His family moved to Malawi in 1972 where he was brought up. His first novel, the acclaimed The Last King of Scotland (1998), is set during Idi Amin’s rule of Uganda in the 1970s and won the Whitbread First Novel Award; his second novel, Ladysmith (1999), is set during the Anglo-Boer War in 1899; Zanzibar (2002), is set in East Africa and explores the events surrounding the bombings of American embassies in 1998. The Battle for Lake Tanganyika was published in 2004 and in 2007 he edited H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines for Penguin.

  The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories

  Introduced and selected by GILES FODEN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  ‘A Captain of Salvation’ and ‘A Journey of Little Profit’ first appeared in The Yellow Book in January 1896 and April 1896 respectively; ‘Politics and the May-Fly’ first appeared in Chamber’s Journal in May 1896: ‘Streams of Water in the South’ first appeared in Grey Weather in 1899; ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’, ‘Fountainblue’, ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ and ‘Space’ first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine (the former in The Atlantic Monthly at the same time) in December 1900, August 1901, June 1910 and May 1911 respectively; ‘“Divus” Johnston’ first appeared in The Golden Hynde in December 1913; ‘Basilissa’ and ‘Fullcircle’ first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine (the latter in The Atlantic Monthly at the same time) in April 1914 and January 1920 respectively; ‘The Loathly Opposite’, ‘Ship to Tarshish’ (originally entitled ‘Ships to Tarshish’), ‘Tendebant Manus’, ‘The last Crusade’, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ and ‘The Wind in the Portico’ first appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in October 1927, November 1927, December 1927, January 1928 (serially), February 1928 and March 1928 respectively; ‘The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn’ first appeared in Cynthia Asquith’s The Silver Ship in 1932.

  This edition, with minor emendations, follows the text of the three-volume Complete Short Stories published by Thistle Publishing in 1996

  Published by The Folio Society 2008

  Published in paperback in Penguin Classics 2009

  1

  Copyright by The Lord Tweedsmuir and Jean, Lady Tweedsmuir

  Introduction copyright © Giles Foden, 2008

  Chronology copyright © Sir John Keegan, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the Introducer has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 9781101491812

  CONTENTS

  Chronology

  Introduction

  A Captain of Salvation

  A Journey of Little Profit

  Politics and the May-Fly

  Streams of Water in the South

  The Watcher by the Threshold

  Fountainblue

  The Grove of Ashtaroth

  Space

  ‘Divus’ Johnston

  Basilissa

  Fullcircle

  The Loathly Opposite

  Ship to Tarshish

  Tendebant Manus

  The Last Crusade

  Sing a Song of Sixpence

  The Wind in the Portico

  The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn

  CHRONOLOGY

  1875 26 August: born in Perth, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotland Minister.

  1876 Buchan family moves to Fife.

  1888 Family moves to Glasgow.

  1888–92 Attends Hutcheson’s Grammar School, Glasgow.

  1892–5 First degree at Glasgow University.

  1895 Don Quixote of the Moors, Buchan’s first adventure story, published.

  1895–9 At Brasenose Collge, Oxford. Wins the Newdigate Prize for Poetry (1898). President of the Oxford Union in his final year. Achieves a first-class degree in Greats in 1899.

  1901 Called to the Bar but did not practise as a barrister.

  1901–3 In South Africa. Private secretary to Lord Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa.

  1906 Joins Nelson publishers.

  1907 Marries Susan Grosvenor; they have three sons and one daughter.

  1908 First child, Alice, born.

  1910 Publication of Prester John.

  1911 Publication of Sir Walter Raleigh biography.

  1914 Begins to write The Thirty-Nine Steps while ill in bed during the first months of the war.

  1915 Publication of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the first of the five Richard Hannay novels. Works as a journalist attached to the British Army in France, writing for The Times and the Daily News, covering the second Battle of Ypres and the Battle of Loos.

  1916 Publication of Greenmantle (a Hannay novel) and of The Power House, the first of three novels featuring Barrister Sir Edward Leithen. Son William born. Appointed Second Lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps.

  1917 Appointed Director of Information for the government. Brother Alastair and friend Tommy Nelson killed on the Western Front.

  1919 P
ublication of Mr Standfast (a Hannay novel). Buys Elsfield Manor, Oxfordshire. Becomes a director of the news agency Reuters.

  1921 Publication of Huntingtower, the first of three novels featuring the hero Dickson McCunn, a retired Glasgow provisions merchant.

  1924 Publication of The Three Hostages (a Hannay novel).

  1925 Publication of John MacNab (a Leithen novel).

  1927 Elected Member of Parliament (Conservative) for the Scottish Universities.

  1929–32 Appointed President of the Scottish History Society.

  1930 Publication of Castle Gray (a McCunn novel).

  1932 Appointed Companion of Honour.

  1933–4 Appointed Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

  1935 Publication of House of the Four Winds (a McCunn novel). Alfred Hitchcock film of The Thirty-Nine Steps released. Appointed Governor-General of Canada and created Baron Tweedsmuir.

  1936 Publication of The Island of Sheep (Man from the Norlands) (a Hannay novel).

  1937 Elected Chancellor of Edinburgh University and made Privy Councillor. Mother, Helen Buchan, dies.

  1939 Appointed GCVO (Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order).

  1940 12 February: dies in Montreal.

  1941 Posthumous publication of Sick Heart River (Mountain Meadow) (a Leithen novel).

  INTRODUCTION

  These stories were published between 1896 and 1932. London’s Stock Market and clubland feature in a couple of them, but their true terrain is the Scottish moor – or its analogues in Alpine peak, African savannah and Canadian tundra. John Buchan’s primary concern in them is to examine how individuals end up in such places, and what others say about the space left behind. Why do we actively seek jeopardy? Why light out for perilous wilderness, treacherous mountain, stormy ocean? These are the questions asked by Buchan’s short stories.

  If there were such a thing as a prose of departure, then this book would be its best exemplum. Such a category, however, might obscure with too much fine literary feeling the male principle of striving to escape settled home life which is one of the things going on in these tales. For yes, it is mostly men round here. Or, more to the point, somewhere else. Not here. Doing their duty, maybe, in their own way, but not usually at the kitchen table.

  Buchan himself always loved walking, regularly covering thirty miles in one day. He knew the Highlands well, enjoying fishing and stalking. He knew even better the remoter spots of the Border hills, whose semi-nomadic shepherds made a great impression on him as a young man. But despite the aggressively male environment of his stories, whether it be club or camp, Buchan took his home life with him. After his marriage to Susan Grosvenor in 1907, they visited Scotland together nearly every year for a summer holiday.

  Some things don’t need too much explanation. A good deal of these stories are simple testaments to their author’s love of the outdoors. The weather plays a large role. So does hunting and fly-fishing, recalling similar episodes in John Macnab (1925), Buchan’s best-selling novel recounting how three powerful men try to poach two stags and a salmon from a Scottish estate.

  Yet while it is mainly the relation between men and landscapes which attracts Buchan’s pen, too much can be made of this. It is the skill of his characterisation and the clarity of his writing which put him in the front rank of British short-story writers. He is not just a landscape painter. The vividness of the scenes, the freshness of the style, the penetrating shrewdness of the psychology – this is why Buchan continues to appeal to a large popular audience. He does so despite the passionate disagreements about gender, class and Empire to which his work nowadays often gives rise.

  Another sign of Buchan’s literary virtue is the sheer complexity of some of the narrative structures on display here. Sometimes there are as many as three sets of interlocking narrators. Very often there is more than one occasion or jumping-off point from which the tale is told. Characters recur, interrupt each other’s narration, are referred to in asides.

  As a consequence of this technique, Buchan could include many of these tales in The Runagates Club (1928). His last collection of stories, it brought together disparate material under the guise of fantastic tales told by classic Buchan characters familiar from the novels – Lord Lamancha, Sandy Arbuthnot, Sir Edward Leithen and others – over lunch or after dinner at their club. Many of the narrating individuals have bit parts or interpolating roles in tales other than those they narrate. So the historian Martin Peckwether tells ‘Fullcircle’ (although the narrator in the original version reproduced here is called Jardine) but has an interpolating role in ‘Tendebant Manus’.

  Probably the most important character in this respect is Sir Edward Leithen, Border Scot, London-based barrister and MP. One of the powerful men who takes up the poaching challenge in John Macnab, he is said by Susan Buchan to have been the closest of Buchan’s characters to that of the author himself. He is the linchpin of Buchan’s world.

  Leithen is often up in Scotland taking a rest from hard work, but he has nothing on Buchan himself in this respect. Buchan’s own life is like a morality tale promoting personal industry. His literary output comprised thirty novels and more than sixty non-fiction books. Little read today, the non-fiction books, including biographies of Walter Scott and Cromwell and a massive history of the First World War, contain some of his best work. Yet despite the pride he took in it, and the success it brought him, writing formed only a small part of John Buchan’s achievements.

  Born in Perth in 1875, he was the son of a minister of the Free Kirk who preached in the Gorbals. He was educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School and at Glasgow University, in whose magazine he published his first short story, ‘On Cademuir Hill’ (1894). He won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was awarded a first in Greats and wrote his first two historical novels, Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895) and John Burnet of Barns (1898).

  After Oxford Buchan studied for the Bar, combining journalism and legal work until 1901 when he took a job as a civil servant in South Africa, arriving there in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War. By 1903, he was back in London, producing a copious stream of journalism, stories and full-length books. Buchan continued to work as a barrister at this time, specialising in tax work and publishing a textbook on the subject. In 1907, he also became a director of the publishing firm Thomas Nelson.

  In the First World War, he was a correspondent for The Times and a staff officer at General Haig’s headquarters. He later worked in intelligence and propaganda, before being appointed Director of the Ministry of Information. During this period too, he published some of his greatest novels, including The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Green-mantle (1916), both of which sold in vast quantities.

  After the war, Buchan became deputy chairman of Reuters, the news agency. In 1920, he bought a rambling Oxfordshire manor house, Elsfield, versions of which would feature in various stories and novels. In 1927, Buchan won the seat for the Scottish Universities as a Tory MP, all the while continuing his prodigious literary output. Honours flowed in middle age. He was made Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield and a Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In 1935, Buchan was appointed Governor-General of Canada. He died in 1940 in Montreal from a cerebral stroke, leaving behind him the brooding Sick Heart River (1941), in which Leithen is killed off.

  As Andrew Lownie – Buchan’s biographer, and the person responsible for unearthing and collecting many of Buchan’s more elusive stories – has noted, Buchan’s method of publication of stories changed during the First World War. Before the war, he tended to write short stories and publish them in magazines ad hoc, only collecting them in book form when he had amassed enough. After the war, he wrote stories expressly intended to be collected in books and then sold first serial rights at the time of book publication.

  Structurally, these stories owe a good deal to fairy- and folk-tales in their use of traditional situations, motifs and patterns. They also often
spring from a quotation or a Biblical reference or from Buchan’s wealth of classical learning. Another notable aspect of the stories is Buchan’s smooth use of Scots dialect and idiom.

  Thematically, there is much play with ‘the gods of the Pagans’. Buchan is fascinated by the survival of atavistic forces in the modern age. In a typical gambit, a kind of literary camouflage, positive primitivism is often used to fight negative atavism. Ancestral forces are themselves deployed against the family curse, and understanding old rituals becomes the best way of deflecting their deleterious effects. In such contexts, doing one’s duty ostensibly means the triumph of courage over fear, civilised belief over barbaric superstition, fortitude over weak-mindedness. However, the way the stories themselves so often depend on the unknown for their power suggests something more complex may be taking place.

  The story ‘Basilissa’, originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1914 and later transformed into the novel The Dancing Floor (1926), contains many of these currents. It is the tale of a young man, Vernon, who is haunted by a recurrent dream from boyhood of a house on an island in which something happens. He does not know quite what the thing is, only that he will be brought where he is needed at the appointed time, when fate will take a hand (as it often does in this writer’s work).

  Other common Buchan themes are the delicate balance of civilisation and anarchy and – in effect the same concern in microcosm – the relationship between personal willpower and sensuality. In ‘A Captain of Salvation’, the story of a man brought down by drink and ‘evil living’, then redeemed by the Salvation Army and his own strength of will, we see an individual representation of Buchan’s general preoccupation with the fragility of ordered society: ‘He simply went under, disappeared from the ranks of life into the seething, struggling, disordered crowd below.’

  ‘A Captain of Salvation’ was first published in 1896 in The Yellow Book, alongside contributions from George Gissing, Kenneth Grahame and H. G. Wells. Its hero’s former life was one of reckless adventure throughout the Empire. Meeting Hilton, an old colleague in crime who tempts him to resume their activities, the Captain is subject to an internal struggle. The temptation is vouchsafed in the form of geographically expansive narratives, as Hilton reminds him of the pagan joy of picketing in the Drakensberg, sailing down the Irrawaddy, or sugar farming in Queensland.