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 power-house 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—­working-men 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 cat-calls.