"ANENT."
We conversed awhile in whispers to avoid disturbing the other
worshippers--I always feel like that in the British Museum--and finally
abandoned our respective tasks and issued forth together. With a little
persuasion I prevailed upon my companion to come and lunch with me, and
we repaired to a rather old-fashioned and thoroughly British
establishment close by, where the fare is solid and the "portions"
generous.
My guest, after a brief effort at self-repression, fell upon the food in
a fashion that told me a far more vivid tale of his present
circumstances than the most lengthy explanation could have done. When he
was full I gave him a cigar, and he leaned back in his padded arm-chair
and surveyed me with the nearest approach to emotion that I have ever
observed in the countenance of a Scot.
"I was wanting that," he remarked frankly, and he smiled largely upon
me. He was looking less gaunt now, and the rugged lines of his face were
tinged with a more healthy colour. He was a handsome youth, I noticed,
with shrewd grey eyes and a chin that stood out like the ram of a
battle-ship.
He told me all about himself, some of which has been set down here
already. He had done well at Edinburgh University, and, having obtained
his Arts degree, was on the point of settling down to study for the
ministry--the be-all and end-all of the hope of a humble Scottish
household--when disaster came tumbling upon his family. His brother
David fell sick in his lungs, and the doctor prescribed a sojourn in a
drier climate for at least a year.
The next part of the narrative was rather elliptical; but from the fact
that money was immediately forthcoming to send David abroad, and that
Robin had simultaneously given up his work in Edinburgh and returned
home to help his father about the farm, I gathered that a life's
ambition had been voluntarily sacrificed on the altar of family duty.
Anyhow, when David returned, marvellously and mercifully restored to
health, setting his younger brother free once more, two precious years
had flown; so that Robin now found himself, at the age of twenty-three,
faced with the alternative of making a fresh start in life or remaining
on the farm at home, that most pathetic and forlorn of failures, a
"stickit minister." The family exchequer had been depleted by David's
illness, and Robin, rather than draw any further on the vanishing little
store of pound-notes in the cupboard behind the kitchen chimney,
determined to go to London and turn his education to some account.
He had arrived three years ago, with a barrel of salt herrings and a bag
of meal; and from that time he had earned his own living--if it could be
called a living.
"Once or twice," he said, "I have had an article taken by one of the big
reviews; sometimes I get some odd reporting to do; and whiles I just
have to write chatty paragraphs about celebrities for the snippety
papers."
"Uphill work that, I should think."
"Uphill? Downhill! Man, it's degrading. Do you know what I was doing in
that Museum this morning?"
"What?"
"Have you heard tell of a man they call Dean Ramsay?"
"Let me see--yes. He was a sort of Scottish Sidney Smith, wasn't he?"
"That is the man. Well, he collected most of the good stories in
Scotland and put them in a book. I was copying a few of them out; and I
shall father them on to folk that the public wants to hear about. I get
a guinea a column for that."
"I know the sort of thing," I said. "_'A good story is at present going
the round of the clubs, concerning----'_"
"Not 'concerning'--'anent'!"
"I beg your pardon--'anent a certain well-known but absent-minded Peer
of the Realm.'"
"That's the stuff. You have the trick of it. Then sometimes I do bits of
general information--computations as to the height of a column of the
picture postcards sold in London in a year, and all that. Nobody can
check figures of that kind, so the work is easy--and correspondingly
ill-paid!" (I cannot reproduce the number of contemptuous _r_'s that
Robin threw into the adverb.)
"It's a fine useful place the Museum," he continued reflectively. "You
were busy there this morning yourself. You would be collecting _data_
anent--I mean _about_--the Island of Caerulea."