Books with title The Runagates Club

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici.We were talking about the persistence of race qualities—how you might bury a strain for generations under fresh graftings but the aboriginal sap would some day stir. The obvious instance was the Jew, and Pugh had also something to say about the surprises of a tincture of hill blood in the Behari. Peckwether, the historian, was inclined to doubt. The old stock, he held, could disappear absolutely as if by a chemical change, and the end be as remote from the beginnings as—to use his phrase—a ripe Gorgonzola from a bucket of new milk."I don't believe you're ever quite safe," said Sandy Arbuthnot."You mean that an eminent banker may get up one morning with a strong wish to cut himself shaving in honour of Baal?""Maybe. But the tradition is more likely to be negative. There are some things that for no particular reason he won't like, some things that specially frighten him. Take my own case. I haven't a scrap of real superstition in me, but I hate crossing a river at night. I fancy a lot of my blackguard ancestors got scuppered at moonlight fords. I believe we're all stuffed full of atavistic fears, and you can't tell how or when a man will crack till you know his breeding.""I think that's about the truth of it," said Hannay, and after the discussion had rambled on for a while he told us this tale.Just after the Boer War (he said) I was on a prospecting job in the north-eastern Transvaal. I was a mining engineer, with copper as my speciality, and I had always a notion that copper might be found in big quantities in the Zoutpansberg foothills. There was of course Messina at the west end, but my thoughts turned rather to the north-east corner, where the berg breaks down to the crook of the Limpopo. I was a young man then, fresh from two years' campaigning with the Imperial Light Horse, and I was thirsty for better jobs than trying to drive elusive burghers up against barbed wire and blockhouses. When I started out with my mules from Pietersburg on the dusty road to the hills, I think I felt happier than ever before in my life.I had only one white companion, a boy of twenty-two called Andrew Du Preez. Andrew, not Andries, for he was named after the Reverend Andrew Murray, who had been a great Pope among the devout Afrikanders. He came of a rich Free State farming family, but his particular branch had been settled for two generations in the Wakkerstroom region along the upper Pongola. The father was a splendid old fellow with a head like Moses, and he and all the uncles had been on commando, and most of them had had a spell in Bermuda or Ceylon. The boy was a bit of a freak in that stock. He had been precociously intelligent, and had gone to a good school in the Cape and afterwards to a technical college in Johannesburg. He was as modern a product as the others were survivals, with none of the family religion or family politics, very keen on science, determined to push his way on the Rand—which was the Mecca of all enterprising Afrikanders—and not very sorry that the War should have found him in a place from which it was manifestly impossible to join the family banner. In October '99 he was on his first job in a new mining area in Rhodesia, and as he hadn't much health he was wise enough to stick there till peace came.

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici.We were talking about the persistence of race qualities—how you might bury a strain for generations under fresh graftings but the aboriginal sap would some day stir. The obvious instance was the Jew, and Pugh had also something to say about the surprises of a tincture of hill blood in the Behari. Peckwether, the historian, was inclined to doubt. The old stock, he held, could disappear absolutely as if by a chemical change, and the end be as remote from the beginnings as—to use his phrase—a ripe Gorgonzola from a bucket of new milk."I don't believe you're ever quite safe," said Sandy Arbuthnot."You mean that an eminent banker may get up one morning with a strong wish to cut himself shaving in honour of Baal?""Maybe. But the tradition is more likely to be negative. There are some things that for no particular reason he won't like, some things that specially frighten him. Take my own case. I haven't a scrap of real superstition in me, but I hate crossing a river at night. I fancy a lot of my blackguard ancestors got scuppered at moonlight fords. I believe we're all stuffed full of atavistic fears, and you can't tell how or when a man will crack till you know his breeding.""I think that's about the truth of it," said Hannay, and after the discussion had rambled on for a while he told us this tale.Just after the Boer War (he said) I was on a prospecting job in the north-eastern Transvaal. I was a mining engineer, with copper as my speciality, and I had always a notion that copper might be found in big quantities in the Zoutpansberg foothills. There was of course Messina at the west end, but my thoughts turned rather to the north-east corner, where the berg breaks down to the crook of the Limpopo. I was a young man then, fresh from two years' campaigning with the Imperial Light Horse, and I was thirsty for better jobs than trying to drive elusive burghers up against barbed wire and blockhouses. When I started out with my mules from Pietersburg on the dusty road to the hills, I think I felt happier than ever before in my life.I had only one white companion, a boy of twenty-two called Andrew Du Preez. Andrew, not Andries, for he was named after the Reverend Andrew Murray, who had been a great Pope among the devout Afrikanders. He came of a rich Free State farming family, but his particular branch had been settled for two generations in the Wakkerstroom region along the upper Pongola. The father was a splendid old fellow with a head like Moses, and he and all the uncles had been on commando, and most of them had had a spell in Bermuda or Ceylon. The boy was a bit of a freak in that stock. He had been precociously intelligent, and had gone to a good school in the Cape and afterwards to a technical college in Johannesburg. He was as modern a product as the others were survivals, with none of the family religion or family politics, very keen on science, determined to push his way on the Rand—which was the Mecca of all enterprising Afrikanders—and not very sorry that the War should have found him in a place from which it was manifestly impossible to join the family banner. In October '99 he was on his first job in a new mining area in Rhodesia, and as he hadn't much health he was wise enough to stick there till peace came.I had known him before, and when I ran across him on the Rand I asked him to come with me, and he jumped at the offer. He had just returned from the Wakkerstroom farm, to which the rest of his clan had been repatriated, and didn't relish the prospect of living in a tin-roofed shanty with a father who read the Bible most of the day to find out why exactly he had merited such misfortunes. Andrew was a hard young sceptic, in whom the family piety produced acute exasperation… . He was a good-looking boy, always rather smartly dressed, and at first sight you would have taken

Making History. The Home of 99p/99c History Books.Twelve stories told by members of the Runagates Club. Richard Hanny, hero of The Thirty-nine Steps reappears recounting a trek into the bush in The Green Wildebeest. In Dr Lartius, John Palliser-Yeates describes an ingenious Secret Service operation during the First World War. A German code is finally broken in The Loathly Opposite.

The Runagates Club is John Buchan's last collection of short stories, and is a classic of British interwar short fiction. These twelve stories were written from 1913 to 1927, when he was at the peak of his powers. Buchan's most popular character Richard Hannay battles an ancient curse in South Africa in `The Green Wildebeest'. Edward Leithen tags along in an assassins' war in `Sing a Song of Sixpence'. The Runagates Club features First World War spy and code-cracking thrillers `The Loathly Opposite' and `Dr Lartius'; tales of supernatural possession in deepest Wales, comfortable Oxfordshire and the House of Commons, in `The Wind in the Portico', Fullcircle' and `"Tendebant Manus"'; and stories of survival in the far North and in Depression-era Canada with `Skule Skerry' and `Ship to Tarshish'. What makes The Runagates Club special is that Buchan designed it as a showcase to bring together the best of his magazine fiction. He repurposed these stories with new beginnings, framing them as after-dinner stories told over the port in a late 1920s private gentleman's dining-club. The narrators are a ready-made cast of storytelling characters, and Buchan filled out their backgrounds to fit the patrician, clubland background. This is interwar story-telling at its very best, with a critical introduction by Kate Macdonald.

Just after the Boer War (he said) I was on a prospecting job in the north-eastern Transvaal. I was a mining engineer, with copper as my speciality, and I had always a notion that copper might be found in big quantities in the Zoutpansberg foothills. There was of course Messina at the west end, but my thoughts turned rather to the north-east corner, where the berg breaks down to the crook of the Limpopo. I was a young man then, fresh from two years' campaigning with the Imperial Light Horse, and I was thirsty for better jobs than trying to drive elusive burghers up against barbed wire and blockhouses. When I started out with my mules from Pietersburg on the dusty road to the hills, I think I felt happier than ever before in my life.