He brought a team from Inversnaid
To play our Third Fifteen,
A man whom none of us had played
And very few had seen.
He weighed not less than eighteen stone,
And to a practised eye
He seemed as little fit to run
As he was fit to fly.
He looked so clumsy and so slow,
And made so little fuss;
But he got in behind--and oh,
The difference to us!
He was never a golfer; one of his best light pieces, published later in
the _Saturday Review_, dealt in kindly ridicule of _The City of Golf_.
'Would you like to see a city given over,
Soul and body, to a tyrannising game?
If you would, there's little need to be a rover,
For St. Andrews is the abject city's name.'
He was fond, too fond, of long midnight walks, for in these he overtasked
his strength, and he had all a young man's contempt for maxims about not
sitting in wet clothes and wet boots. Early in his letters he speaks of
bad colds, and it is matter of tradition that he despised flannel. Most
of us have been like him, and have found pleasure in wading Tweed, for
example, when chill with snaw-bree. In brief, while reading about
Murray's youth most men must feel that they are reading, with slight
differences, about their own. He writes thus of his long darkling
tramps, in a rhymed epistle to his friend C. C. C.
'And I fear we never again shall go,
The cold and weariness scorning,
For a ten mile walk through the frozen snow
At one o'clock in the morning:
Out by Cameron, in by the Grange,
And to bed as the moon descended . . .
To you and to me there has come a change,
And the days of our youth are ended.'
One fancies him roaming solitary, after midnight, in the dark deserted
streets. He passes the deep porch of the College Church, and the spot
where Patrick Hamilton was burned. He goes down to the Castle by the
sea, where, some say, the murdered Cardinal may now and again be seen, in
his red hat. In South Street he hears the roll and rattle of the
viewless carriage which sounds in that thoroughfare. He loiters under
the haunted tower on Hepburn's precinct wall, the tower where the lady of
the bright locks lies, with white gloves on her hands. Might he not
share, in the desolate Cathedral, _La Messe des Morts_, when all the lost
souls of true lovers are allowed to meet once a year. Here be they who
were too fond when Culdees ruled, or who loved young monks of the Priory;
here be ladies of Queen Mary's Court, and the fair inscrutable Queen
herself, with Chastelard, that died at St. Andrews for desire of her; and
poor lassies and lads who were over gay for Andrew Melville and Mr.
Blair; and Miss Pett, who tended young Montrose, and may have had a
tenderness for his love-locks. They are _a triste_ good company, tender
and true, as the lovers of whom M. Anatole France has written (_La Messe
des Morts_). Above the witches' lake come shadows of the women who
suffered under Knox and the Bastard of Scotland, poor creatures burned to
ashes with none to help or pity. The shades of Dominicans flit by the
Black Friars wall--verily the place is haunted, and among Murray's
pleasures was this of pacing alone, by night, in that airy press and
throng of those who lived and loved and suffered so long ago--
'The mist hangs round the College tower,
The ghostly street
Is silent at this midnight hour,
Save for my feet.
With none to see, with none to hear,
Downward I go
To where, beside the rugged pier,
The sea sings low.
It sings a tune well loved and known
In days gone by,
When often here, and not alone,
I watched the sky.'
But he was not always, nor often, lonely. He was fond of making his
speech at the Debating Societies, and his speeches are remembered as
good. If he declined the whisky and water, he did not flee the weed. I
borrow from _College Echoes_--