Brought ForwardCunninghame Graham, R. B. (Robert Bontine)
History
Brought Forward
Cunninghame Graham, R. B. (Robert Bontine)
Fiction; Short stories
So, standing just outside the chapel in the cold, waiting till all the
usual greetings had been exchanged, I fell a-musing on the man whom I had
known so well. I saw him as he was thirty years ago, outlined against a
bing or standing in a quarry in some mining village, and heard his once
familiar address of “Men.” He used no other in those days, to the
immense disgust of legislators and other worthy but unimaginative men
whom he might chance to meet. About him seemed to stand a shadowy band,
most of whom now are dead or lost to view, or have gone under in the
fight.
John Ferguson was there, the old-time Irish leader, the friend of Davitt
and of Butt. Tall and erect he stood, dressed in his long frock-coat,
his roll of papers in one hand, and with the other stuck into his breast,
with all the air of being the last Roman left alive. Tom Mann, with his
black hair, his flashing eyes, and his tumultuous speech peppered with
expletives. Beside him, Sandy Haddow, of Parkhead, massive and Doric in
his speech, with a grey woollen comforter rolled round his neck, and
hands like panels of a door. Champion, pale, slight, and interesting,
still the artillery officer, in spite of Socialism. John Burns; and
Small, the miners’ agent, with his close brown beard and taste for
literature. Smillie stood near, he of the seven elections, and then
check-weigher at a pit, either at Cadzow or Larkhall. There, too, was
silver-tongued Shaw Maxwell and Chisholm Robertson, looking out darkly on
the world through tinted spectacles; with him Bruce Glasier, girt with a
red sash and with an aureole of fair curly hair around his head, half
poet and half revolutionary.
They were all young and ardent, and as I mused upon them and their fate,
and upon those of them who have gone down into the oblivion that waits
for those who live before their time, I shivered in the wind.
Had he, too, lived in vain, he whose scant ashes were no doubt by this
time all collected in an urn, and did they really represent all that
remained of him?
Standing amongst the band of shadowy comrades I had known, I saw him,
simple and yet with something of the prophet in his air, and something of
the seer. Effective and yet ineffectual, something there was about him
that attracted little children to him, and I should think lost dogs. He
made mistakes, but then those who make no mistakes seldom make anything.
His life was one long battle, so it seemed to me that it was fitting that
at his funeral the north-east wind should howl amongst the trees, tossing
and twisting them as he himself was twisted and storm-tossed in his
tempestuous passage through the world.
As the crowd moved away, and in the hearse and mourning-coaches the
spavined horses limped slowly down the road, a gleam of sunshine, such as
had shone too little in his life, lighted up everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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