Brothers & Sisters - John & Anna Buchan Edition (Collection of Their Greatest Works). Buchan John

Mr Craw’s first fine rapture of wrath was cooling. He saw the good sense of Jaikie’s argument. Truth to tell, he had no desire to face the Evallonians, and he was beginning to see that fortune had indeed delivered his rivals into his hands. He did not answer, but he crumpled the Wire and tossed it to Jaikie’s side of the fireplace. It was a token of his reluctant submission.

      “I want to ask you something,” Jaikie continued. “It’s about Evallonia.”

      “I prefer not to discuss that hateful subject.”

      “I quite understand. But this is really rather important. It’s about the Evallonian Republic. What sort of fellows run it?”

      “Men utterly out of tune with the national spirit. Adventurers who owe their place to the injudicious patronage of the Great Powers!”

      “But what kind of adventurers? Are they the ordinary sort of middle-class republicans that you have, for example, in Germany?”

      “By no means. Very much the contrary. My information is that the present Evallonian Government is honeycombed with Communism. I have evidence that certain of its members have the most sinister relations with Moscow. No doubt they speak fair to foreign Powers, but there is reason to believe that they are only waiting to consolidate their position before setting up an imitation of the Soviet régime. One of their number, Mastrovin, is an avowed Communist, who might turn out a second Bela Kun. That is one of the reasons why Royalism is so living a force in the country. The people realise that it is their only protection against an ultimate anarchy.”

      “I see.” Jaikie tapped his teeth with the nail of his right forefinger, a sure proof that he had got something to think about.

      “Have you met any of those fellows? Mastrovin, for example?”

      “I am glad to say that I have not.”

      “You know some of the Royalists?”

      “Not personally. I have always in a matter like this avoided personal contacts. They warp the judgment.”

      “Who is their leader? I mean, who would sit on the throne if a Royalist revolution succeeded?”

      “Prince John, of course.”

      “What’s he like?”

      “I never met him. My reports describe him as an exemplary young man, with great personal charm and a high sense of public duty.”

      “How old?”

      “Quite young. Twenty-six or twenty-seven. I have seen his portraits, and they reminded me of our own Prince Charles Edward. He is very fair, for his mother was a Scandinavian Princess.”

      “I see.” Jaikie asked no more questions, for he had got as much information as for the moment he could digest. He picked up the despised Wire, straightened it out, and read the famous interview, which before he had only skimmed.

      He read it with a solemn face, for he was aware that Mr Craw’s eye was upon him, but he wanted badly to laugh. The thing was magnificent in its way, the idiomatic revelation of a mind at once jovial and cynical. Tibbets could not have invented it all. Where on earth had he got his material?

      One passage especially caught his notice.

      “I asked him, a little timidly, if he did not think it rash to run counter to the spirit of the age.

      “In reply Mr Craw relapsed smilingly into the homely idiom of the countryside. ‘The Spirit of the Age!’ he cried. ‘That’s a thing I wouldn’t give a docken for.’”

      Jaikie was a little startled. He knew someone who was in the habit of refusing to give dockens for things he despised. But that someone had never heard of Tibbets or Castle Gay, and was far away in his modest home of Blaweary.

      That day the two travellers escaped from the tyranny of ham and eggs. They ate an excellent plain dinner, cooked especially for them by Mrs Fairweather. Then came the question of how to spend the rest of the evening. Mr Craw was obviously unsettled, and apparently had no desire to cover foolscap in his bedroom, while the mystery afoot in Portaway made Jaikie anxious to make further explorations in the town. The polling was only a few days off, and there was that ferment in the air which accompanies an election. Jaikie proposed a brief inquisition into the politics of the place, and Mr Craw consented.

      A country town after dark has a more vivid life than a great city, because that life is more concentrated. There is no business quarter to become a sepulchre after business hours, since the domestic and the commercial are intermingled. A shopkeeper puts up his shutters, has his supper upstairs, and presently descends to join a group on the pavement or in a neighbouring bar parlour. The children do not seem to retire early to bed, but continue their games around the lamp-posts. There are still country carts by the kerbs, stray sheep and cattle are still moving countrywards from the market, and long-striding shepherds butt their way through the crowd. There is a pleasant smell of cooking about, and a hum of compact and contented life. Add the excitement of an election, and you have that busy burghal hive which is the basis of all human society—a snug little commune intent on its own affairs, a world which for the moment owes allegiance to no other.

      It was a fine evening, setting to a mild frost, when Jaikie and Mr Craw descended the Eastgate to the cobbled market place where stood the Town Hall. There it appeared from gigantic blue posters that the Conservative candidate, one Sir John Cowden, was holding forth, assisted by a minor member of the Government. The respectable burghers now entering the door did not promise much amusement, so the two turned up the Callowa into the oldest part of the old town, which in other days had been a nest of Radical weavers. Here their ears were greeted by the bray of a loud-speaker to which the wives by their house-doors were listening, and, having traced it to its lair, they found a beaky young man announcing the great Liberal Rally to be held that night in the new Drill Hall and to be addressed by the candidate, Mr Orlando Greenstone, assisted by no less a personage than his leader, the celebrated Mr Foss Jones.

      “Let’s go there,” said Jaikie. “I have never seen Foss Jones. Have you?”

      “No,” was the answer, “but he tried several times to make me a peer.”

      They had to retrace their steps, cross the Callowa bridge, and enter a region of villas, gardens, and ugly new kirks. There could be no doubt about the attraction of Mr Foss Jones. The road was thronged with others on the same errand as theirs, and when they reached the Drill Hall they found that it was already crowded to its extreme capacity. An excited gentleman, wearing a yellow rosette, was advising the excluded to go to the hall of a neighbouring church. There an overflow meeting would be held, to which Mr Foss Jones’s speech would be relayed, and the great man himself would visit it and say a word.

      Jaikie found at his elbow the mechanic from the Hydropathic called Wilkie.

      “I’m no gaun to sit like a deaf man listenin’ to an ear trumpet,” he was announcing. “Hullo, Mr Galt! Weel met! I was sayin’ that it’s a puir way to spend your time sittin’ in a cauld kirk to the rumblin’ o’ a tin trumpet. What about a drink? Or if it’s poalitics ye’re seekin’, let’s hear what the Socialists has to say. Their man the nicht is in the Masons’ Hall. They say he’s no much o’ a speaker, but he’ll hae a lively crowd aboot him. What d’ye say?… Fine, man. We’ll a’ gang thegither… Pleased to meet ye, Mr Carlyle… Ony relation o’ Jock Carlyle, the horse-doctor?”

      “Not that I am aware of,” said Mr Craw sourly. He was annoyed at the liberty taken by Jaikie with his surname, though he realised the reason for it.

      To reach the Masons’ Hall they had to recross the Callowa and penetrate a mesh of narrow streets east of the market square. The Labour party in Portaway made up for their lack of front-bench oratory by their enthusiasm for their local leaders. Jaikie found himself wedged into a back seat in a hall, which was meant perhaps to hold five hundred and at the moment contained not less than eight. On the platform, seen through a mist of tobacco smoke, sat a number of men in their Sunday clothes and wearing red favours, with a large, square, solemn man, one of the foremen at the Quarries,