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

ye the whole clash o’ the West country, and I look to ye to keep him off the drink. He’s aye arguin’ that writin’ and drinkin’ gang thegither, and quotin’ Robert Burns, but the creature has a wife and five bairns dependin’ on him.”

I spent a fantastic day. For two hours I sat in Norie’s dirty den, while he smoked and orated, and, when he remembered his business, took down in shorthand my impressions of the Labour situation in South Africa for his rag. They were fine breezy impressions, based on the most wholehearted ignorance, and if they ever reached the Rand I wonder what my friends there made of Cornelius Brand, their author. I stood him dinner in an indifferent eating-house in a street off the Broomielaw, and thereafter had a drink with him in a public-house, and was introduced to some of his less reputable friends.

About teatime I went back to Amos’s lodgings, and spent an hour or so writing a long letter to Mr. Ivery. I described to him everybody I had met, I gave highly coloured views of the explosive material on the Clyde, and I deplored the lack of clearheadedness in the progressive forces. I drew an elaborate picture of Amos, and deduced from it that the Radicals were likely to be a bar to true progress. “They have switched their old militancy,” I wrote, “on to another track, for with them it is a matter of conscience to be always militant.” I finished up with some very crude remarks on economics culled from the table-talk of the egregious Tombs. It was the kind of letter which I hoped would establish my character in his mind as an industrious innocent.

Seven o’clock found me in Newmilns Street, where I was seized upon by Wilkie. He had put on a clean collar for the occasion and had partially washed his thin face. The poor fellow had a cough that shook him like the walls of a powerhouse when the dynamos are going.

He was very apologetic about Amos. “Andra belongs to a past worrld,” he said. “He has a big reputation in his society, and he’s a fine fighter, but he has no kind of Vision, if ye understand me. He’s an auld Gladstonian, and that’s done and damned in Scotland. He’s not a Modern, Mr. Brand, like you and me. But tonight ye’ll meet one or two chaps that’ll be worth your while to ken. Ye’ll maybe no go quite as far as them, but ye’re on the same road. I’m hoping for the day when we’ll have oor Councils of Workmen and Soldiers like the Russians all over the land and dictate our terms to the pawrasites in Pawrliament. They tell me, too, the boys in the trenches are comin’ round to our side.”

We entered the hall by a back door, and in a little waiting-room I was introduced to some of the speakers. They were a scratch lot as seen in that dingy place. The chairman was a shop-steward in one of the Societies, a fierce little rat of a man, who spoke with a cockney accent and addressed me as “Comrade.” But one of them roused my liveliest interest. I heard the name of Gresson, and turned to find a fellow of about thirty-five, rather sprucely dressed, with a flower in his buttonhole. “Mr. Brand,” he said, in a rich American voice which recalled Blenkiron’s. “Very pleased to meet you, sir. We have come from remote parts of the globe to be present at this gathering.” I noticed that he had reddish hair, and small bright eyes, and a nose with a droop like a Polish Jew’s.

As soon as we reached the platform I saw that there was going to be trouble. The hall was packed to the door, and in all the front half there was the kind of audience I expected to see⁠—workingmen of the political type who before the war would have thronged to party meetings. But not all the crowd at the back had come to listen. Some were scallawags, some looked like better-class clerks out for a spree, and there was a fair quantity of khaki. There were also one or two gentlemen not strictly sober.

The chairman began by putting his foot in it. He said we were there tonight to protest against the continuation of the war and to form a branch of the new British Council of Workmen and Soldiers. He told them with a fine mixture of metaphors that we had got to take the reins into our own hands, for the men who were running the war had their own axes to grind and were marching to oligarchy through the blood of the workers. He added that we had no quarrel with Germany half as bad as we had with our own capitalists. He looked forward to the day when British soldiers would leap from their trenches and extend the hand of friendship to their German comrades.

“No me!” said a solemn voice. “I’m not seekin’ a bullet in my wame,”⁠—at which there was laughter and catcalls.

Tombs followed and made a worse hash of it. He was determined to speak, as he would have put it, to democracy in its own language, so he said “hell” several times, loudly but without conviction. Presently he slipped into the manner of the lecturer, and the audience grew restless. “I propose to ask myself a question⁠—” he began, and from the back of the hall came⁠—“And a damned sully answer ye’ll get.” After that there was no more Tombs.

I followed with extreme nervousness, and to my surprise got a fair hearing. I felt as mean as a mangy dog on a cold morning, for I hated to talk rot before soldiers⁠—especially before a couple of Royal Scots Fusiliers, who, for all I knew, might have been in my own brigade. My line was the plain, practical, patriotic man, just come from the colonies, who looked at things with fresh eyes, and called