What was the cause? I suppose it was Panic.1

 

1907 brought an end to the restlessness: Buchan’s career changed direction for the better when he became chief literary adviser to the publishing firm of Nelson’s. For the next seven years, Buchan chose the titles for the firm’s Sixpenny Classics and for the famous Sevenpenny Library. He  retained his connection with the Spectator, writing reviews and articles. In 1912 he published The Moon Endureth, his fourth collection of short stories. The Athenaeum was not alone in pointing out that the stories showed ‘a marked leaning towards the mysterious and the bizarre’. 

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Buchan’s first collection, Scholar Gipsies, published in September 1896, had been, in fact, a mixture of short stories, poems, and essays—all set in the Upper Tweed Valley. The cover of the book portrayed a goat-foot Pan piping to three nymphs and, at first sight, the author seemed to be reflecting the modish literary paganism of the turn of the century—so well portrayed in the work of Arthur Machen and Kenneth Grahame (Buchan gave his sister the latter’s Pagan Papers)—this stereotype apparently reinforced by his inclusion in three of the famous Yellow Book volumes. However, as Janet Adam Smith has cogently argued, Buchan used Pan and the pagan world to give expression to feelings about a landscape, ‘about the changing moods of a man in a landscape (who sees Natura Benigna change suddenly to Natura Maligna), and about the sensations he associated with certain places . . . Pagan gods to him stood for . . . something primitive, an element sweet but potentially dangerous.’2

If Scholar Gipsies had been full of the delights of the open-air life of the Borders, it was also an accurate portrayal of its physical discomforts and the brooding nature of the bleak uplands. Grey Weather, published in March 1899, and subtitled Moorland Tales of My Own People, returned to the reaches of the Upper Tweed. ‘A Journey of Little Profit’ tells of an ungodly drover who seeks shelter for the night, only to realise that his host is the Devil. Buchan is, perhaps unjustly, not renowned for his humour, but the story has some delicious banter between the two and, although the drover has to lose his flock to save his soul, he has to admit to Mr. S. that ‘You’ve an ill name, and an ill trade, but you’re no a bad sort yourself, and, do you ken, I like you.’ ‘The Herd of Standlan’ is another satirical tale laced with the supernatural. The immediate landscape plays a powerful role in the story of a shepherd who, in trying to save a fisherman from drowning, himself gets trapped in the rocks with a broken arm. The landscape oppresses: the pool is ‘shut in by high, dark cliffs . . . the rocks are never dry but always black with damp and shadow . . . It is an Inferno on the brink of Paradise. . . .’ Physical pain and mental terror collide: ‘I felt sweat standin’ on my face like frost on tatties . .