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THE WATCHER BY THE THRESHOLD

THE WATCHER

BY THE THRESHOLD

John Buchan

General Editors:

Christopher Roden

and

Barbara Roden

THE WATCHER BY THE THRESHOLD

ISBN: 9781553102144 (Kindle edition)

ISBN: 9781553102151 (ePub edition)

Published by Christopher Roden

for Ash-Tree Press

P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

Canada V0K 1A0

http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

First electronic edition 2012

First Ash-Tree Press edition 2005

Selection © Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden 2005, 2012

Introduction © Kenneth Hillier

Cover artwork © Keith Minnion

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

Produced in Canada

CONTENTS

Introduction by Kenneth Hillier

A Journey of Little Profit

The Herd of Standlan

Streams of Water in the South

At the Article of Death

The Moor-Song

Comedy in the Full Moon

The Oasis in the Snow

No-Man’s Land

The Far Islands

The Watcher by the Threshold

Fountainblue

The Outgoing of the Tide

The Knees of the Gods

The Grove of Ashtaroth

Space

The Green Glen

The Green Wildebeest

Basilissa

Fullcircle

Watches of the Night

The Shut Door

Tendebant Manus

The Wind in the Portico

Skule Skerry

Dr Lartius

The Magic Walking Stick

The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn

Ho! The Merry Masons

Sources

Glossary

THE WATCHER

BY THE THRESHOLD

Introduction

IN JANUARY 1911, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagiation was published in Nelson’s Sixpenny Classics series. A nine-page Introduction included this appraisal of Poe’s writing:

. . . his real medium was prose, for he had in the highest degree the constructive imagination which can reproduce a realm of fancy with the minute realism of everyday life. He shows all around us the shadowy domain of the back-world, and behind our smug complacency the shrieking horror of the unknown. . . .

The writer of the Introduction, J[ohn].B[uchan]., went on to argue that if one had to choose the best dozen, first-class short stories in the world, Poe would deserve two places where the others would have only one. Poe had died aged just forty; in January 1911 John Buchan was thirty-six and had already had published thirty-one short stories of his own. Just under half dealt directly or indirectly with the supernatural. And they were justly admired. When, in 1912, The Bookman Special Christmas Number chose Buchan as the subject for its influential ‘Bookman Gallery’, its anonymous author claimed that ‘in his own peculiar manner he is probably the best modern exponent of the short story, which he has developed and brought to artistic perfection’. Buchan himself, writing to a school friend some years earlier, admitted ‘that to a person of my habits the short story is the real form’.

Although born in Perth, on 26 August 1875, Buchan’s earliest memories were of the north shores of the Firth of Forth. His father, the Reverend John Buchan, had moved to a new church at Pathhead, near Kirkcaldy, in 1876. The family remained there for twelve years and the younger John was joined by two brothers and two sisters. In his autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door, Buchan wrote that his earliest recollections were not of himself, but of his environment. He recalled that behind the Manse was the ‘deep country’, where lay the Black Wood which contained in the autumn ‘the thick, close odour of rotting leaves . . . [with] glimpses of uncanny scarlet toadstools which I believed to be the work of Lapland witches’. To the south lay the Firth of Forth, where the beam from the lighthouse on the island of Inchkeith was caused, according to the young Buchans, by a giant waving a lantern.

To this physical landscape were added two particular heady brews, both originating from the same source: their father. The Reverend Buchan was a great teller of stories, a veritable Tusitala of the household: the fairy tales of Andersen, Grimm, and George Macdonald jostled for position with Border ballads and Norse sagas. No wonder the younger John felt that ‘when we entered the woods we felt ourselves stepping into the veritable world of faery’. More potent than the sagas, however, was the Calvinism that directed the Buchan parents in their daily lives.