THE PARLOUR.
The day went on, and went out, its short autumnal brightness quenched
in a chilly fog. All along the Widdiehill, the gas was alight in the
low-browed dingy shops. To the well-to-do citizen hastening home to
the topmost business of the day, his dinner, these looked the abodes
of unlovely poverty and mean struggle. Even to those behind their
counters, in their back parlours, and in their rooms above, everything
about them looked common--to most of them, save the owners, wearisome.
But to yon pale-faced student, gliding in the glow of his red gown,
through the grey mist, back to his lodging, and peeping in at every
open door as he passes, they are so full of mystery, that gladly would
he yield all he has gathered from books, for one genuine glance of
insight into the vital movement of the hearts and households of which
those open shops are the sole outward and visible signs. Each house is
to him a nest of human birds, over which brood the eternal wings of
love and purpose. Only such different birds are hatched from the same
nest! And what a nest was then the city itself!--with its university,
its schools, its churches, its hospitals, its missions; its homes, its
lodging-houses, its hotels, its drinking shops, its houses viler still;
its factories, its ships, its great steamers; and the same humanity
busy in all!--here the sickly lady walking in the panoply of love
unharmed through the horrors of vicious suffering; there the strong
mother cursing her own child along half a street with an intensity and
vileness of execration unheard elsewhere! The will of the brooding
spirit must be a grand one, indeed, to enclose so much of what cannot
be its will, and turn all to its purpose of eternal good! Our knowledge
of humanity, how much more our knowledge of the Father of it, is moving
as yet but in the first elements.
In his shed under the stair it had been dark for some time--too dark
for work, that is, and George Galbraith had lighted a candle: he never
felt at liberty to leave off so long as a man was recognizable in
the street by daylight. But now at last, with a sigh of relief, he
rose. The hour of his redemption was come, the moment of it at hand.
Outwardly calm, he was within eager as a lover to reach Lucky Croale’s
back parlour. His hand trembled with expectation as he laid from it the
awl, took from between his knees the great boot on the toe of which
he had been stitching a patch, lifted the yoke of his leather apron
over his head, and threw it aside. With one hasty glance around, as
if he feared some enemy lurking near to prevent his escape, he caught
up a hat which looked as if it had been brushed with grease, pulled
it on his head with both hands, stepped out quickly, closed the door
behind him, turned the key, left it in the lock, and made straight for
his earthly paradise--but with chastened step. All Mistress Croale’s
customers made a point of looking decent in the street--strove, in
their very consciousness, to carry the expression of being on their way
to their tea, not their toddy--or if their toddy, then not that they
desired it, but merely that it was their custom always of an afternoon:
man had no choice--he must fill space, he must occupy himself; and if
so, why not Mistress Croale’s the place, and the consumption of whisky
the occupation? But alas for their would-be seeming indifference!
Everybody in the lane, almost in the Widdiehill, knew every one of
them, and knew him for what he was; knew that every drop of toddy he
drank was to him as to a miser his counted sovereign; knew that, as
the hart for the water-brooks, so thirsted his soul ever after another
tumbler; that he made haste to swallow the last drops of the present,
that he might behold the plenitude of the next steaming before him;
that, like the miser, he always understated the amount of the treasure
he had secured, because the less he acknowledged, the more he thought
he could claim.
George was a tall man, of good figure, loosened and bowed. His face
was well favoured, but not a little wronged by the beard and dirt
of a week, through which it gloomed haggard and white. Beneath his
projecting black brows, his eyes gleamed doubtful, as a wood-fire where
white ash dims the glow. He looked neither to right nor left, but
walked on with moveless dull gaze, noting nothing.
“Yon’s his ain warst enemy,” said the kindly grocer-wife, as he passed
her door.
“Aye,” responded her customer, who kept a shop near by for old
furniture, or anything that had been already once possessed--“aye, I
daursay. But eh! to see that puir negleckit bairn o’ his rin scoorin’
aboot the toon yon gait--wi’ little o’ a jacket but the collar, an’
naething o’ the breeks but the doup--eh, wuman! it maks a mither’s hert
sair to luik upo’ ’t. It’s a providence ’at _his_ mither’s weel awa an’
canna see ’t; it wad gar her turn in her grave.”
George was the first arrival at Mistress Croale’s that night. He opened
the door of the shop like a thief, and glided softly into the dim
parlour, where the candles were not yet lit. There was light enough,
however, from the busy little fire in the grate to show the clean
sanded floor which it crossed with flickering shadows, the coloured
prints and cases of stuffed birds on the walls, the full-rigged barque
suspended from the centre of the ceiling, and, chief of all shows of
heaven or earth, the black bottle on the table, with the tumblers, each
holding its ladle, and its wine glass turned bottom upwards. Nor must
I omit a part without which the rest could not have been a whole--the
kettle of water that sat on the hob, softly crooning. Compared with the
place where George had been at work all day, this was indeed an earthly
paradise. Nor was the presence and appearance of Mistress Croale an
insignificant element in the paradisial character of the place. She
was now in a clean white cap with blue ribbons. Her hair was neatly
divided, and drawn back from her forehead. Every trace of dirt and
untidiness had disappeared from her person, which was one of importance
both in size and in bearing. She wore a gown of some dark stuff with
bright flowers on it, and a black silk apron. Her face was composed,
almost to sadness, and throughout the evening, during which she waited
in person upon her customers, she comported herself with such dignity,
that her slow step and stately carriage seemed rather to belong to the
assistant at some religious ceremony than to one who ministered at the
orgies of a few drunken tradespeople.
She was seated on the horsehair sofa in the fire-twilight, waiting for
customers, when the face of Galbraith came peering round the door-cheek.
“Come awa ben,” she said, hospitably, and rose. But as she did so,
she added with a little change of tone, “But I’m thinkin’ ye maun hae
forgotten, Sir George. This is Setterday nicht, ye ken; an’ gien it war
to be Sunday mornin’ afore ye wan to yer bed, it wadna be the first
time, an’ ye michtna be up ear’ eneuch to get yersel shaved afore kirk
time.”
She knew as well as George himself that never by any chance did he
go to church; but it was her custom, as I fancy it is that of some
other bulwarks of society and pillars of the church, “for the sake
of example,” I presume, to make not unfrequent allusion to certain
observances, moral, religious, or sanatory as if they were laws that
everybody kept.
Galbraith lifted his hand, black, and embossed with cobbler’s wax,
and rubbed it thoughtfully over his chin: he accepted the fiction
offered him; it was but the well-known prologue to a hebdomadal passage
between them. What if he did not intend going to church the next day?
Was that any reason why he should not look a little tidier when his
hard week’s-work was over, and his nightly habit was turned into the
comparatively harmless indulgence of a Saturday, in sure hope of the
day of rest behind.
“Troth, I didna min’ ’at it was Setterday,” he answered. “I wuss I had
pitten on a clean sark, an’ washen my face. But I s’ jist gang ower to
the barber’s an’ get a scrape, an’ maybe some o’ them ’ill be here or I
come back.”
Mistress Croale knew perfectly that there was no clean shirt in
George’s garret. She knew also that the shirt he then wore, which
probably, in consideration of her maid’s festered hand, she would wash
for him herself, was one of her late husband’s which she had given him.
But George’s speech was one of those forms of sound words held fast by
all who frequented Mistress Croale’s parlour, and by herself estimated
at more than their worth.
The woman had a genuine regard for Galbraith. Neither the character
nor fate of one of the rest gave her a moment’s trouble; but in her
secret mind she deplored that George should drink so inordinately,
and so utterly neglect his child as to let him spend his life in the
streets. She comforted herself, however, with the reflection, that
seeing he would drink, he drank with no bad companions--drank at all
events where what natural wickedness might be in them, was suppressed
by the sternness of her rule. Were he to leave her fold--for a fold in
very truth, and not a sty, it appeared to her--and wander away to Jock
Thamson’s or Jeemie Deuk’s, he would be drawn into loud and indecorous
talk, probably into quarrel and uproar.
In a few minutes George returned, an odd contrast visible between the
upper and lower halves of his face. Hearing his approach she met him at
the door.
“Noo, Sir George,” she said, “jist gang up to my room an’ hae a wash,
an’ pit on the sark ye’ll see lyin’ upo’ the bed; syne come doon an’
hae yer tum’ler comfortable.”
George’s whole soul was bent upon his drink, but he obeyed as if she
had been twice his mother. By the time he had finished his toilet, the
usual company was assembled, and he appeared amongst them in all the
respectability of a clean shirt and what purity besides the general
adhesiveness of his trade-material would yield to a single ablution
long delayed. They welcomed him all, with nod, or grin, or merry
word, in individual fashion, as each sat measuring out his whisky, or
pounding at the slow-dissolving sugar, or tasting the mixture with
critical soul seated between tongue and palate.
The conversation was for some time very dull, with a strong tendency
to the censorious. For in their circle, not only were the claims of
respectability silently admitted, but the conduct of this and that man
of their acquaintance, or of public note, was pronounced upon with
understood reference to those claims--now with smile of incredulity or
pity, now with headshake regretful or condemnatory--and this all the
time that each was doing his best to reduce himself to a condition in
which the word conduct could no longer have meaning in reference to him.
All of them, as did their hostess, addressed Galbraith as Sir George,
and he accepted the title with a certain unassuming dignity. For, if it
was not universally known in the city, it was known to the best lawyers
in it, that he was a baronet by direct derivation from the hand of King
James the Sixth.
The fire burned cheerfully, and the kettle making many journeys
between it and the table, things gradually grew more lively. Stories
were told, often without any point, but not therefore without effect;
reminiscences, sorely pulpy and broken at the edges, were offered
and accepted with a laughter in which sober ears might have detected
a strangely alien sound; and adventures were related in which truth
was no necessary element to reception. In the case of the postman,
for instance, who had been dismissed for losing a bag of letters the
week before, not one of those present believed a word he said; yet as
he happened to be endowed with a small stock of genuine humour, his
stories were regarded with much the same favour as if they had been
authentic. But the revival scarcely reached Sir George. He said little
or nothing, but, between his slow gulps of toddy, sat looking vacantly
into his glass. It is true he smiled absently now and then when the
others laughed, but that was only for manners. Doubtless he was seeing
somewhere the saddest of all visions--the things that might have been.
The wretched craving of the lower organs stilled, and something spared
for his brain, I believe the chief joy his drink gave him lay in the
power once more to feel himself a gentleman. The washed hands, the
shaven face, the clean shirt, had something to do with it, no doubt,
but the necromantic whisky had far more.
What faded ghosts of ancestral dignity and worth and story the evil
potion called up in the mind of Sir George!--who himself hung ready
to fall, the last, or all but the last, mildewed fruit of the tree of
Galbraith! Ah! if this one and that of his ancestors had but lived to
his conscience, and with some thought of those that were to come after
him, he would not have transmitted to poor Sir George, in horrible
addition to moral weakness, that physical proclivity which had now
grown to such a hideous craving. To the miserable wretch himself it
seemed that he could no more keep from drinking whisky than he could
from breathing air.