After listing some connections and references to the colour green in the life and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and covering some similar occurrences of this colour in the life and works of Rudyard Kipling, the next step was to look for green connections in the life and works of John Buchan.
Buchan's works certainly contain a very large number of references to the colour green, but they are mostly casual and incidental. Many come from his frequent and routine descriptions of landscapes and the sea for example, and some just describe clothes of a colour suitable for wearing in the countryside and other wide open spaces. His books would greatly shrink if all these adjectives of colour were removed, but this would make little difference to most of the stories!
Even so, I have found some green references that can't be discounted quite so easily.
Buchan's exciting adventure story Greenmantle is an obvious candidate for inclusion, but its green aspects have mostly been covered already.
The Three Hostages has also been the subject of a previous article, but the green elements were not mentioned as they were not of particular interest at the time.
A major character is called Doctor Greenslade.
One of the cryptic clues to the location of the hostages is “the green fields of Eden”.
One of the hostages, who is hidden in plain sight in a low-class dance hall, is frequently referred to as “the girl in green”.
A small green bottle plays a large part in defeating the villain Dominick Medina.
When Richard Hannay is sent for treatment to the practitioner Madame Breda, he finds that her front door has been newly painted a vivid green.
Richard Hannay tells his young friend Archie Roylance to look out for a green light. Archie is a great birdwatching enthusiast; nesting greenshanks and green sandpipers are mentioned in this connection.
Minor references include a set of green Chinese jars and a green herb fire.
The House of the Four Winds (1935) is yet another of Buchan's exciting adventure stories. It is set in a fictional central European country called Evallonia; it is included here because of this description of a back-to-nature youth movement:
“They're said to be more than half a million strong, all likely lads in hard condition and jolly well trained--they've specialised in marksmanship, for which Evallonia was always famous. They have the arms and the money, and, being all bound together by a blood oath, their discipline is the stiffest thing on earth. Oh, and I forgot to tell you--they wear green shirts--foresters' green. They have a marching song about the green of their woodlands, and the green of their mountain lakes, and the green shirts of Evallonia's liberators.”
Buchan's books are packed with references to natural green features such as hills, valleys, banks, trees, grass, meadows and moss. These are mostly just basic descriptions of the surrounding scenery, but he has something significant to say about the awe-inspiring effects of certain green places in his autobiographical work Memory Hold-the-Door (1940):
“Greenness, utter, absolute greenness, has all my life seemed to me uncanny, and the places which in my memory are infested with a certain awe are the green places. Take the Devil's Beef Tub, the green pit in the hills on the road from Tweed to the head of Annan. Rudyard Kipling once told me that, far as he had wandered, and much as he had seen, this uncanny hollow seemed more than any other spot to be consecrated to the old gods. The haunted chasm in Kubla Khan was in a Green hill. There was a song popular on the Border called The wild glen sae green. It was in such green "hopes," as we called them, that sometimes I came to the edge of fear”
A 'hope' is a local name for a small upland valley or hollow enclosed at the upper end by green hills or ridges.
The Green Glen is a short story with a supernatural theme. It is included in The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies (1912).
The story is set in Scotland; it features a haunted glen, or narrow valley. This glen is an uncanny green place such as Buchan mentions above:
“I remember my amazement at its indescribable greenness. There was the yellow-green of moss, the old velvet of mountain-turf, the grey-green of bent on the hill brow, but all was green...The green hills shut me in, and the awe of them brooded over me. I was mortally afraid, and not ashamed of my fear. I could not give a name to it, but something uncanny was in the air: not terrible exactly, or threatening, but inhumanly strange.”
This tale is set in the frontiers of South Africa. A hotheaded young man desecrates the scared grove of an African tribe and brings a sinister curse involving a green wildebeest upon himself as a result:
“I saw a wildebeest as big as a house--an old brute, grey in the nozzle and the rest of it green--green, I tell you.”
In Memory Hold-the-Door, John Buchan mentions being influenced by two prominent men with Green in their names:
“...I accepted the brand of idealism which was then fashionable, that derived from Thomas Hill Green...”
Thomas Hill Green was an English philosopher.
“...I had become attached to the study of law, and under the inspiration of a great scholar, the late A. H. J. Greenidge, had taken a lively interest in the most arid details of the Greek and Roman legal systems.”
A. H. J. Greenidge was a writer on ancient history and law.
This is not the end of the noteworthy references to the colour green in the life and works of John Buchan: some more interesting connections will appear in a future article.
