Mr. Standfast - John Buchan (autobiographies to read TXT) 📗

up as you would ask to see. And my wee Davie, him that’s in Germany, had aye a weak chest, and Jimmy was troubled wi’ a bowel complaint. That’s surely no justice!’⁠ ⁠…”

He broke off and lit a match by drawing it across the seat of his trousers. “It’s time I got the gas lichtit. There’s some men coming here at half-ten.”

As the gas squealed and flickered in the lighting, he sketched for me the coming guests. “There’s Macnab and Niven, two o’ my colleagues. And there’s Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, and a lad Wilkie⁠—he’s got consumption, and writes wee bits in the papers. And there’s a queer chap o’ the name o’ Tombs⁠—they tell me he comes frae Cambridge, and is a kind of a professor there⁠—anyway he’s more stuffed wi’ havers than an egg wi’ meat. He telled me he was here to get at the heart o’ the workingman, and I said to him that he would hae to look a bit further than the sleeve o’ the workin’-man’s jaicket. There’s no muckle in his head, poor soul. Then there’ll be Tam Norie, him that edits our weekly paper⁠—Justice for All. Tam’s a humorist and great on Robert Burns, but he hasna the balance o’ a dwinin’ teetotum⁠ ⁠… Ye’ll understand, Mr. Brand, that I keep my mouth shut in such company, and don’t express my own views more than is absolutely necessary. I criticize whiles, and that gives me a name of whunstane common sense, but I never let my tongue wag. The feck o’ the lads comin’ the night are not the real workingman⁠—they’re just the froth on the pot, but it’s the froth that will be useful to you. Remember they’ve heard tell o’ ye already, and ye’ve some sort o’ reputation to keep up.”

“Will Mr. Abel Gresson be here?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. Him and me havena yet got to the point o’ payin’ visits. But the men that come will be Gresson’s friends and they’ll speak of ye to him. It’s the best kind of introduction ye could seek.”

The knocker sounded, and Mr. Amos hastened to admit the first comers. These were Macnab and Wilkie: the one a decent middle-aged man with a fresh-washed face and a celluloid collar, the other a round-shouldered youth, with lank hair and the large eyes and luminous skin which are the marks of phthisis. “This is Mr. Brand boys, from South Africa,” was Amos’s presentation. Presently came Niven, a bearded giant, and Mr. Norie, the editor, a fat dirty fellow smoking a rank cigar. Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, when he arrived, proved to be a pleasant young man in spectacles who spoke with an educated voice and clearly belonged to a slightly different social scale. Last came Tombs, the Cambridge professor, a lean youth with a sour mouth and eyes that reminded me of Launcelot Wake.

“Ye’ll no be a mawgnate, Mr. Brand, though ye come from South Africa,” said Mr. Norie with a great guffaw.

“Not me. I’m a working engineer,” I said. “My father was from Scotland, and this is my first visit to my native country, as my friend Mr. Amos was telling you.”

The consumptive looked at me suspiciously. “We’ve got two⁠—three of the comrades here that the cawpitalist Government expelled from the Transvaal. If ye’re our way of thinking, ye will maybe ken them.”

I said I would be overjoyed to meet them, but that at the time of the outrage in question I had been working on a mine a thousand miles further north.

Then ensued an hour of extraordinary talk. Tombs in his singsong namby-pamby University voice was concerned to get information. He asked endless questions, chiefly of Gilkison, who was the only one who really understood his language. I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep. He was engaged in venting some private academic spite against society, and I thought that in a revolution he would be the class of lad I would personally conduct to the nearest lamppost. And all the while Amos and Macnab and Niven carried on their own conversation about the affairs of their society, wholly impervious to the tornado raging around them.

It was Mr. Norie, the editor, who brought me into the discussion.

“Our South African friend is very blate,” he said in his boisterous way. “Andra, if this place of yours wasn’t so damned teetotal and we had a dram apiece, we might get his tongue loosened. I want to hear what he’s got to say about the war. You told me this morning he was sound in the faith.”

“I said no such thing,” said Mr. Amos. “As ye ken well, Tam Norie, I don’t judge soundness on that matter as you judge it. I’m for the war myself, subject to certain conditions that I’ve often stated. I know nothing of Mr. Brand’s opinions, except that he’s a good democrat, which is more than I can say of some o’ your friends.”

“Hear to Andra,” laughed Mr. Norie. “He’s thinkin’ the inspector in the Socialist State would be a waur kind of awristocrat then the Duke of Buccleuch. Weel, there’s maybe something in that. But about the war he’s wrong. Ye ken my views, boys. This war was made by the cawpitalists, and it has been fought by the workers, and it’s the workers that maun have the ending of it. That day’s comin’ very near. There are those that want to spin it out till Labour is that weak it can be pit in chains for the rest o’ time. That’s the manoeuvre we’re out to prevent. We’ve got to beat the Germans, but it’s the workers that has the right to judge when the enemy’s beaten and not the cawpitalists. What do you say, Mr. Brand?”

Mr. Norie had obviously pinned his colours to the fence, but he gave me the chance I had been looking for. I let them have my views with a vengeance, and these views were that