Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  He accepted a second breakfast — tea and two of Mrs Gallop’s indifferent eggs.

  “Maister Scrope sent me here,” he explained. “He wanted me to get a line on Joe Utlaw, and as I ken a’ the Union folk and they ken me, he thocht I would be better at the job than you. I’ve been here three weeks, and I think I’ve made a fair diagnosis. He’ll dae. Utlaw will dae. Yon yin has the root o’ the matter in him.”

  When his clay pipe was lit Mr Amos expanded.

  “There’s twae types o’ Labour prophets on the road the day. There’s them that canna see an inch beyond bigger wages and shorter hours, and there’s them that takes the long view. I ca’ them the arithmetical and the pheelosophical schools. Utlaw belongs to the second. The warst o’t is that most o’ his school are inclined to a windy Socialism. He is not, at least not in the ordinary sense, and that’s a proof o’ an independent mind. The feck o’ the workers o’ my acquaintance wad spew if they properly understood what the Socialism was that a man like Tombs preaches. They’ve mair in common wi’ an oppressive Tweedside laird than wi’ the wersh callants that ca’ themselves Marxians. But unless there’s folk to guide them richt they’ll be stampeded like sheep intil a fauld whaur they dinna belong. Utlaw kens this, and that’s why I say he’s a man wi’ a superior and independent mind.

  “He’s a queer yin too.” Amos removed his pipe and grinned broadly, thereby revealing a dazzling set of new, ill-fitting teeth. “He doesna care muckle what he says. He can be dooms funny when he likes — whiles not altogether decent — like Robert Burns he can give ye a waft o’ the kitchen-midden. But his great gift is for rough-tonguing without offence. I’ve heard straight langwidge in my time, but no often as straight as his. He can misca’ an audience till ye’d think they’d want his blood, and yet they only like him the better for’t. I’ve been considerin’ the why and wherefore o’t and my conclusion is this. He’s the common denominator of a’ that’s English. Not Scotch — he wadna gang down wi’ our lads, and he’d get his heid broke afore he was a week on the Clyde. But he’s English to the marrow o’ his banes, and the folk that listen to him ken that they’re listenin’ to their ainsels if they had just the power o’ expression.

  “His danger?” he said in reply to a question of Adam’s. “‘Deed I think that he’ll maybe be ower successful. He has an uncommon gift o’ the gab, and he’s young, and he has imagination, and guid kens this warld’s a kittle place for them that has ten talents. I whiles think that there’s mair to be gotten out o’ the folk that has just the yin talent — or maybe twae. Brains and character are no often in equal proportions, and if they’re no, the balance, as Robert Burns says, is wrang adjusted.”

  Adam attended St Mark’s when Frank Alban preached. The church was in the centre of a large slum parish, and had been famous in the past for certain audacities of ritual which had led to episcopal interference. Its vicar had recently died, and at the moment the living was vacant. There was a movement abroad which called itself the Faith and Brotherhood League, and under its auspices special sermons were being preached in the industrial cities. St Mark’s had been selected in Birkpool because of its size and its situation.

  The place was crowded, for Alban’s recent utterances had given him some celebrity in the popular press. The congregation was made up largely of women, most of them well-dressed, but there was a fair proportion of young men. Adam went there expecting little, but eager to see Jacqueline Armine’s brother. He had not been greatly impressed by what he had read in the newspapers. The Wednesday services at St Chad’s, from the published extracts, had seemed to him clever nonsense, the provocative utterance of paradoxical youth. He expected this, combined with some breezy, man-to-man padre talk, for Alban had made a considerable reputation among the troops in the war.

  The first sight of the man confirmed this expectation. Frank Alban had none of his sister’s colouring. He had a finely cut pale face like a tragic actor’s, dark hair thinning into a natural tonsure, and nondescript deep-sunk eyes. He looked a fragile, almost a sick man. . . . Then came a series of surprises. To begin with there was the voice. It was sweet, not powerful, husky and a little breathless, the voice of a man with weak lungs. But it had a curiously attractive, even compelling, power. One could not choose but listen. The face of the man, too, was transfigured when he spoke, as if a light had been lit behind it. The impression he gave was one of intense, quivering earnestness. He read the New Testament lesson, a chapter of St John’s Gospel, and Adam thought that he had never heard the Scriptures more nobly interpreted. It was not that the voice and elocution were pre-eminent, but that the reader seemed to be communicating to his audience exultingly a revelation which had just been granted him.

  The next surprise was the sermon. Here was none of the jolly man-and-a-brother business which Adam had anticipated. Alban stood in the pulpit like some mediæval preaching friar, and held his hearers in a sort of apocalyptic trance. He had no topical allusions, no contemporary morals; his theme was the eternal one of the choice which confronts every mortal, the broad path or the narrow path, the mountain-gate which is too narrow for body and soul and sin. It reminded Adam of sermons he had heard from old Calvinistic divines in his youth. The tenor was the same, though it was notably free from the language of conventional piety. In a world, said the preacher, where everyone was clamouring for material benefits, there was a risk of soul-starvation. He pictured the Utopia of the arrivistes and the Utopia of the social reformers, the whole gamut of dreams from the vulgar to the idealistic. But did even the noblest express the full needs of humanity? He repeated in his wistful voice the text which Scrope had once quoted to Adam: “Behold the tears of such as were oppressed and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, but they had no comforter.”

  In the church porch, as the solemnised and rather mystified congregation dispersed, Adam ran across Andrew Amos.

  “What did ye think o’ him?” asked the old man, who had not forgotten the sermon-tasting habits of his youth in spite of his latter-day scepticism. “Yon’s an orator and no mistake. Man, it’s queer to reflect that if he strippit his discourse of Biblical jargon, it would be a very fair statement of faact. There’s a sound biological basis for the doctrine o’ the twa roads. In a’ evolution there’s a point where a movement must swither between progress and degeneration, and that’s just the amount o’ free-will I’ll admit in the universe.”

  That night Utlaw came up to Adam’s room before going to bed. He too had been to St Mark’s.

  “That’s dangerous stuff,” was his comment. “I’ve heard a lot about Frank Alban, but I never thought he was that class. Oh, wonderful, I allow! If anybody in my job could talk like that he’d be leading the country inside four years. But all the same it’s dangerous stuff. That’s the ‘otherworldliness’ that our Marxians are terrified of. If you take his view, then all we’re trying to achieve is futile, and the only thing that matters is for a man to save his soul though he lives his life in hoggish misery. That sort of thing is the anodyne that blankets reform. . . . All the same there’s some truth in it, but I can’t quite fix it. No soft soap about Frank Alban. He is out to make the world uncomfortable, and, by God, he succeeds. My mind felt all rubbed up the wrong way. . . . By the way, he’s staying some days in Birkpool. He’s coming to tea with some of us at the Institute on Wednesday. You’d better come along. You know his sister and might like to meet him.”

  Frank Alban out of church was a most unclerical figure, for he turned up on the Wednesday night in a tweed suit and an Eton Ramblers’ tie. He had none of the hearty ways of the traditional army padre, and none of the earnestness of his preaching manner. He looked a retiring delicate man, perhaps a few years over thirty. His voice was low and hoarse, and he was liable to fits of coughing.

  But he had the gift of putting people at their ease. There was something about his shy friendliness which bound together in one fraternity the motley group in the upper room of the Institute.
The guests were all Utlaw’s friends and associates — minor Union officials, the organisers of W.E.A. classes, a Socialist parson who had won a seat on the town council, one or two women, including Florrie Covert. Alban greeted Adam as a stranger, at which Florrie opened her eyes. She had gathered from Utlaw that Adam knew Lady Armine through her brother.

  It appeared that Alban had been spending his time looking at housing conditions in Birkpool and going over some of the chief works. He deplored the flimsiness of his London life.

  “St Chad’s is too fashionable. How can I speak to men’s hearts if there is a microphone two feet off broadcasting my sermon as if it were a music-hall turn, and half a dozen reporters looking out for spicy tit-bits? I know it is all well meant, but it kills freedom. The result is that I dare not be unprepared, and must write everything beforehand, and that you know, Mr Utlaw, is the end of sincere speaking. You can’t hope to persuade unless you can look into people’s eyes. . . . Also there are too many women.”

  “What ails you at the women?” Florrie asked tartly.

  “There are too many of them, and they are there for the wrong purpose. They are either good souls who lead a sheltered life, or girls looking for a new sensation.”

  “You mean they’re in love with you?” said Florrie.

  He flushed. “God forbid! I mean that I’ve nothing to say to them. If I’m any use it’s not in confirming believers in their faith or giving the idle a new thrill. My job is to trouble people’s minds as my own is troubled. I want to be a gadfly to sting honest lethargy into thought. We’re done, you know, if we go on being self-satisfied.”

  “That’s my complaint about you,” said a shaggy youth in a red tie. “You want to keep us in a state of blind torpor about the dirty deal we’re getting in this world, and satisfy us with celestial husks.”

  Frank did not answer. Instead he asked questions — questions about the way in which the Birkpool workers lived. He had seen enough for himself to make his interrogations intelligent, and Utlaw, who did most of the answering, took him seriously.

  “They’ve a better life than their fathers had who were in the same job. You can say that if you can say nothing else. Big wages were earned in the war, and there were a good many nest-eggs laid by. At present there’s not much poverty and only the average amount of unemployment. That will come, for the whole system is rotten. The firms have been afraid to declare too big dividends, so they’ve been ‘cutting the cake,’ as we call it, and distributing bonus shares to their shareholders. What’s the result? Every business is over-capitalised and trembling like a pyramid stuck on its point. Once let the draught come — and it’s coming all right — and the whole thing will topple over. It’s a mug’s game, and do you think our fellows don’t know it? It’s maddening for an intelligent man to see a business on which his livelihood depends at the mercy of stock-jobbing finance and him and his friends powerless to interfere. The human touch has gone to-day. There’s a board of big-wigs in London, and a general manager who spends his life in the train and doesn’t know a single man by head-mark, and, as like as not, a works manager who knows the men all right but whose job is only to be a slave-driver. Oh, there’s plenty of decent fellows among the masters, but the system is bad. Capital gets too much out of the pool, and labour and brains too little. That’s the first thing we’ve got to change.”

  The parson town-councillor replied to one of Frank’s questions about housing. Birkpool, he said, was as bad as any place in the land, except some of the mining villages in the North. There was little comfort and not much decency. The parson was a dreamer, but he was also full of facts.

  “The life is hard,” he said, “but that by itself wouldn’t matter. It’s not so hard as a miner’s or a deep-sea fisherman’s. The trenches were foul enough, but our men learned there the blessings of cleanliness, and they haven’t forgotten it. The younger lot don’t take well with six days of filth year in and year out and a perfunctory clean-up at the week-ends. The marvel is that they manage somehow to keep their self-respect.”

  The talk ranged at large, Frank interrupting many times with questions. He never looked at Adam, but he kept his eyes steadily on Utlaw.

  “You say we’re at the cross-roads?” he asked. “You mean, that the men want more of everything — money, leisure, chances? Their horizon has been enlarged? That’s partly the spread of education, I suppose, and partly the war.”

  “Yes, but we’re at the cross-roads in another sense. Unless I’m wildly wrong we’re on the brink of devilish bad times. Britain has lost her monopoly in most things, and she has to compete against rivals who can undersell her every day. How are we going to meet that situation? By scaling down our standard of life?”

  “By God, no,” said the young man with the red tie. “We can’t scrap what we have so painfully won. There’ll be a revolution first.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Utlaw. “It’s no good kicking against the pricks. Our people will stand up to an economic crisis as they stood up to the war, if it’s put fairly before them. But they must be prepared for it. You must take them into your confidence. Above all, they must be certain that they are getting a fair deal.”

  “I want you to tell me something,” said Frank. He had been sitting on the table dangling his legs, and he now stood up before the gas fire. “I see generally what you’re after — a fairer share of the reward of industry for labour and more say in its management. You want first of all security, and after that better chances, better conditions and more leisure. You want to give the ordinary fellow a better life. But merely tinkering at his material environment won’t do that.”

  “Agreed,” said Utlaw. “We’ve got to go further and think of what you call his soul. Leisure’s no use to him unless he is fitted to make something out of it. He must be given access to all the treasures of thought and knowledge which till the other day were the perquisites of the few.” Utlaw delivered this oracularly, for it had been the peroration of a speech.

  “I know, I know,” said Frank. “There’s fine work being done in that direction — I’ve seen something of it in Birkpool this week. But does it go far enough? After all, everyone hasn’t a capacity for culture. But everyone has a soul to be saved and perfected.”

  There was an odd silence in the room, for Frank’s voice had lost its easy friendliness and suddenly become hoarse and strained. He was not looking at Utlaw now, but through him to something very distant.

  “This is my point,” he said, and the words seemed to come with difficulty. “Succeed as much as you please, recast industry on a better pattern, and manual labour will still be the ancient curse of Adam. It has lost the interest of the craftsman, and is for the most part a dismal monotonous grind. . . . Again, you may tidy up your shops and factories, but most of the work will have to be done among dirt — and not honest country muck but the hideous grime of man’s devising. Too much of that kind of dirt is bad for the human spirit. . . . Then you say that even the material side is insecure. At any moment, in spite of all you have done, the worker may have to face an economic blizzard, and he has no shelter against it such as his master possesses. But you admit that he must stand up and face it, for there is no other way. . . . What does all that mean? Surely that the one thing which matters is to strengthen the man’s soul. Open his eyes, enlarge his interests as much as you please, but make certain above all that he has an inner peace and fortitude of spirit.”

  “How are you going to do it?”

  Frank smiled.

  “I apologise for talking shop. My answer is by what theologians call the grace of God. The way to it was laid down nineteen hundred years ago, and it is still open. . . .”

  “Christ was a red-hot Socialist,” said the young man.

  “Not the ordinary kind,” said Frank. “He did not call the rich men knaves — he called them fools.”

  Adam found his arm seized as he made his way home, and to his surprise saw Frank at his side.

  “I didn’t
introduce myself properly,” he said, “for I gather that you don’t want to have attention called to you. I noticed you never opened your mouth tonight. But I know a good deal about you from Jackie. Lyson, too — you served with him, didn’t you? He’s an old friend of mine, and once he told me a little — a very little — about your doings. I want to talk to you — not now, but somewhere soon — a long talk. You can help me a lot.”

  The street was well lit, so he may have seen surprise in Adam’s face, for he laughed.

  “Oh, I know I’m supposed to be officially helpful, but I’m a broken reed. I’m as much adrift from my moorings as anybody. I’m sick to death of my work in London, and unless I chuck it I shall become a public scandal. I believe in God, but I’m not very clear about anything else. I call myself a Seeker. You remember Cromwell’s words—’The best sect next to a Finder, and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be at the end.’ That’s my comfort, and I’m on the look out for others to keep me company. . . . You’re one. Kenneth Armine’s voice becomes reverential when he mentions you, and he has no great bump of veneration. . . . And I think Utlaw is another. You agree? One man with faith can move mountains, but three might be an Army of the Lord.”

  III

  A month later Adam noticed that Utlaw’s face had begun to wear a curious look of strain and worry. He dated it from Twining’s great meeting in the Town Hall, a Labour rally at which Utlaw had proposed the vote of thanks in a speech which completely outclassed the banal rhetoric of the principal orator. Twining was a man who had grown grey in the service of the party, and was very generally respected, but constant speaking out-of-doors had stripped his voice of all tone, and his ideas were those of the last little official handbook. After him Utlaw’s living appeal was like champagne after skim milk. It had been a fine performance, but it had been interrupted. He got no such respectful hearing as Twining got. Clearly there were elements in Birkpool hostile to him, and one man in particular had made himself conspicuous by savage interjections.