The Secret Vanguard Read Online Free PDF Page A

the assault. ‘I remember, now, something we had to learn at school. Our flagship was the Lion –’
    The uncommunicative person frowned. And the fourth occupant of the compartment, an undistinguished young man with sandy hair, looked up curiously from his magazine. But again Sheila was scarcely listening. She had recalled her disappointment on first crossing the bridge. That, of course, had been because of the Marine Gardens… had they been at Portobello, and were they there still? In the Marine Gardens there had been a gigantic scenic railway, a switchback up and down which shouting and laughing and breathless people were swept in charging coaches. And so she had come to suppose that on the bridge trains would behave in the same way – that they would make the crossing sweeping magnificently up and down the bold outline of the cantilevers. Her indignation when the great moment came and she found herself part of a sedate and level crawl through a maze of dull red girders and tubes had been extreme.
    The expansive man had become frankly aggressive. ‘Our flagship,’ he reiterated loudly and rapidly, ‘was the Lion and a mighty roar had she and she was first in the van sir when the foemen turned to flee–’
    With a jerk the train moved on. It made a considerable clatter on the bridge. The expansive man obstinately raised his voice. ‘And if e’er again they try sir to creep out warily–’
    The uncommunicative man gave a grunt of frank disgust.
    ‘We’ll send them staggering back to port from the grey North Sea.’ The expansive man put a quite terrific emphasis on ‘staggering’; he seemed to concentrate in the word all the growing animosity he felt towards the reserved person at the other end of the seat.
    Sheila had not noticed how it began. But certainly the oncoming man – he was a powerful and florid person, with something obscurely disturbing about his bearing – certainly the oncoming man had been at it before the train left the Caledonian station. He was of a type, no doubt, whom reticence or reserve in a chance companion will drive to outrageousness. And certainly the reserved man was reserved to a point of ostentation; he had crackled his Scotsman forbiddingly when addressed and had uttered scarcely half a dozen words during the journey. Just how it had got to poetry – or to what the aggressive man thought of as poetry – Sheila could not remember. At any rate, it was mildly absurd.
    North Queensferry. Sheila, who had a copy of The Antiquary open before her, turned back to the first page. It was early in a fine summer’s day, she read , when a young man of genteel appearance, having occasion to go towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in one of those public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the Queensferry, at which place, as the name implies, and as is well known to all my northern readers, there is a passage-boat for crossing the Firth of Forth .
    An ever-so-mildly interesting young man in an ever-so-mildly interesting situation. Nice to be Sir Walter Scott and able to open a tale of romantic adventure with that leisurely, confident, book-wormy prose. Nice that readers stood for it; nice that one could feel oneself as a reader standing for it today. It was Sir Walter’s confidence that got one. And perhaps he was confident because his age had been fairly close to the real thing – shipwrecks and smugglers, family secrets and mysterious beldames being part of a just-vanishing Scotland. Perhaps –
    The reserved man had lowered his Scotsman . In the most temporary way, it was evident; nevertheless, it was possible to feel that something decisive was about to happen. The sandy-haired youth had this feeling; Sheila sensed that he had stopped reading his magazine. The expansive man was going to be crushed; the reserved man, long passively resistant behind his paper, was going to fire a single decisive salvo from an altogether superior armament. That was it,