I START IN LIFE AS AN EMINENT PERSON.
Mr. Scougall was a lean, strident man who, if he lectured us
often, whipped us on the whole with judgment and when we deserved it.
So we bore him no grudge. But neither did we love him nor take any
lively interest in him as a bridegroom, and I was startled to find
these feelings shared by Mr. George in the porter's box when I
discussed the news with him. "I'm to have a new suit of clothes,"
said Mr. George, "but whoever gets Scougall, he's no catch."
This sounded blasphemous, while it gave me a sort of fearful joy.
I reported it, under seal of secrecy, to Miss Plinlimmon.
"Naval men, my dear Harry," was her comment, "are notoriously blunt
and outspoken, even when retired upon a pension; perhaps, indeed, if
anything, more so. It is in consequence of this habit that they have
sometimes performed their grandest feats, as, for instance, when
Horatio Nelson put his spy-glass up to his blind eye. I advise you
to do the same and treat Mr. George as a chartered heart of oak,
without remembering his indiscretions to repeat them." She went on
to tell me that sailor-men were beloved in Plymouth and allowed to do
pretty well as they pleased; and how, quite recently, a Quaker lady
had been stopped in Bedford Street by a Jack Tar who said he had
sworn to kiss her. "Thee must be quick about it, then," said the
Quaker lady. And he was.
I suppose this anecdote encouraged me to be more familiar with Mr.
George. At any rate, I confided to him next day that I thought of
being a soldier.
"Do you know what we used to say in the Navy?" he answered. "We used
to say, 'A friend before a messmate, a messmate before a shipmate, a
shipmate before a dog, and a dog before a soldier.'"
"You think," said I, somewhat discouraged, "that the Navy would be a
better opening for me?"
"Ay," he answered again, eyeing me gloomily; "that is, if so be ye
can't contrive to get to jail." He cast a glance down upon his
jury-leg and patted the straps of it with his open palm. "The leg,
now, that used to be here--I left it in a French prison called Jivvy,
and often I thinks to myself, 'That there leg is having better luck
than the rest of me.' And here's another curious thing. What d'ye
think they call it in France when you remember a person in your
will?"
I hadn't a notion, and said so.
"Why, 'legs,'" said he. "And they've got one of mine. If a man was
superstitious, you might almost call it a coincidence, hey?"
This was the longest conversation I ever had with Mr. George. I have
since found that sentiments very like his about the Navy have been
uttered by Dr. Samuel Johnson. But Mr. George spoke them out of his
own experience.
Mr. Scougall's bride was the widow of a Plymouth publican who had
sold his business and retired upon a small farm across the Hamoaze,
near the Cornish village of Anthony. On the wedding morning (which
fell early in July) she had, by agreement with her groom, prepared a
delightful surprise for us. We trooped after prayers into the
dining-hall to find, in place of the hateful porridge, a feast laid
out--ham and eggs, cold veal pies, gooseberry preserves, and--best of
all--plate upon plate of strawberries with bowl upon bowl of cool
clotted cream. Not a child of us had ever tasted strawberries or
cream in his life, so you may guess if we ate with prudence.
At half-past ten Miss Plinlimmon (who had not found the heart to
restrain our appetites) marshalled and led us forth, gorged and
torpid, to the church where at eleven o'clock the ceremony was to
take place. Her eyes were red-rimmed as she cast them up towards the
window behind which Mr. Scougall, no doubt, was at that moment
arraying himself: but she commanded a firm step, and even a firm
voice to remark outside the wicket, as she looked up at the
chimney-pots, that Nature had put on her fairest garb.
The day, to be sure, was monstrously hot and stuffy. Not a breath of
wind ruffled the waters of the dock, around the head of which we
trudged to a recently erected church on the opposite shore.
I remember observing, on our way, the dazzling brilliance of its
weathercock.
We found its interior spacious but warm, and the air heavy with the
scent--it comes back to me as I write--of a peculiar sweet oil used
in the lamps. Perhaps Mr. Scougall had calculated that a ceremony so
interesting to him would attract a throng of sightseers; at any rate,
we were packed into a gallery at the extreme western end of the
church, and in due time watched the proceedings from that respectful
distance and across a gulf of empty pews.
--That is to say, some of us watched. I have no doubt that Miss
Plinlimmon did, for instance; nay, that her attention was riveted.
Otherwise I cannot explain what followed.
On the previous night I had gone to bed almost supperless, as usual.
I had come, as usual, ravenous to breakfast, and for once I had
sated, and more than sated, desire. For years after, though hungry
often enough in the course of them, I never thought with longing upon
cold veal or strawberries, nor have I ever recovered an unmitigated
appetite for either.
It is certain, then, that even before the ceremony began--and the
bride arrived several minutes late--I slumbered on the back bench of
the gallery. The evidence of six boys seated near me agrees that, at
the moment when Mr. Scougall produced the ring, I arose quietly, but
without warning, and made my exit by the belfry door. They supposed
that I was taken ill; they themselves were feeling more or less
uncomfortable.
The belfry stairway, by which we had reached the door of our gallery,
wound upward beyond it to the top of the tower, and gave issue by a
low doorway upon the dwarf battlements, from which sprang a spire
some eighty feet high. This spire was, in fact, a narrowing octagon,
its sides hung with slate, its eight ridges faced with Bath stone,
and edged from top to bottom with ornamental crockets.
The service over, bride and bridegroom withdrew with their friends to
the vestry for the signing of the register; and there, while they
dallied and interchanged good wishes, were interrupted by the beadle,
a white-faced pew-opener, and two draymen from the street, with news
(as one of the draymen put it, shouting down the rest) that "one of
Scougall's yellow orphans was up clinging to the weathercock by his
blessed eyebrows; and was this a time for joking, or for feeling
ashamed of themselves and sending for a constable?"
The drayman shouted and gesticulated so fiercely with a great hand
flung aloft that Mr. Scougall, almost before comprehending,
precipitated himself from the church. Outside stood his hired
carriage with its pair of greys, but the driver was pointing with his
whip and craning his neck like the rest of the small crowd.
It may have been their outcries, but I believe it was the ringing of
the dockyard bell for the dinner-hour, which awoke me. In my dreams
my arms had been about some kindly neck (and of my dreams in those
days, though but a glimpse ever survived the waking, in those
glimpses dwelt the shade, if not the presence, of my unknown mother).
They were, in fact, clasped around the leg of the weathercock.
Unsympathetic support! But I have known worse friends. A mercy it
was, at any rate, that I kept my embrace during the moments when
sense returned to me, with vision of the wonders spread around and
below. Truly I enjoyed a wonderful view--across the roofs of
Plymouth, quivering under the noon sun, and away to the violet hills
of Dartmoor; and, again, across the water and shipping of the Hamoaze
to the green slopes of Mount Edgcumbe and the massed trees slumbering
in the heat. Slumber, indeed, and a great quiet seemed to rest over
me, over the houses, the ships, the whole wide land. By the blessing
of Heaven, not so much as the faintest breeze played about the spire,
or cooled the copper rod burning my hand (and, again, it may have
been this that woke me). I sat astride the topmost crocket, and
glancing down between my boot heels, spied the carriage with its pair
of greys flattened upon the roadway just beyond the verge of the
battlements, and Mr. Scougall himself dancing and waving his arms
like a small but very lively beetle.
Doubtless, I had ascended by the narrow stairway of the crockets: but
to descend by them with a lot of useless senses about me would be a
very different matter. No giddiness attacked me as yet; indeed I
knew rather than felt my position to be serious. For a moment I
thought of leaving my perch and letting myself slip down the face of
the slates, to be pulled up short by the parapet; but the length of
the slide daunted me, and the parapet appeared dangerously shallow.
I should shoot over it to a certainty and go whirling into air.
On the other hand, to drop from my present saddle into the one below
was no easy feat. For this I must back myself over the edge of it,
and cling with body and legs in air while I judged my fall into the
next. To do this thirty times or so in succession without mistake
was past hoping for: there were at least thirty crockets to be
manoeuvred, and a single miscalculation would send me spinning
backwards to my fate. Above all, I had not the strength for it.
So I sat considering for a while; not terrified, but with a brain
exceedingly blank and hopeless. It never occurred to me that, if I
sat still and held on, steeplejacks would be summoned and ladders
brought to me; and I am glad that it did not, for this would have
taken hours, and I know now that I could not have held out for half
an hour inactive. But another thought came. I saw the slates at the
foot of the weathercock, that they were thinly edged and of light
scantling. I knew that they must be nailed upon a wooden framework
not unlike a ladder. And at the Genevan Hospital, as I have
recorded, we wore stout plates on our shoes.
I am told that it was a bad few moments for the lookers-on when they
saw me lower myself sideways from my crocket and begin to hammer on
the slates with my toes: for at first they did not comprehend, and
then they reasoned that the slates were new, and if I failed to kick
through them, to pull myself back to the crocket again would be a
desperate job.
But they did not know our shoe-leather. Mr. Scougall, whatever his
faults, usually contrived to get value for his money, and at the
tenth kick or so my toes went clean through the slate and rested on
the laths within. Next came the most delicate moment of all, for
with a less certain grip on the crocket I had to kick a second hole
lower down, and transfer my hand-hold from the stone to the wooden
lath laid bare by my first kicks.
This, too, with a long poise and then a flying clutch, I
accomplished; and with the rest of my descent I will not weary the
reader. It was interminably slow, and it was laborious; but, to
speak comparatively, it was safe. My boots lasted me to within
twenty feet of the parapet, and then, just as I had kicked my toes
bare, a steeplejack appeared at the little doorway with a ladder.
Planting it in a jiffy, he scrambled up, took me under his arm, bore
me down and laid me against the parapet, where at first I began to
cry and then emptied my small body with throe after throe of
sickness.
I recovered to find Mr. Scougall and another clergyman (the vicar)
standing by the little door and gazing up at my line of holes on the
face of the spire. Mr. Scougall was offering to pay.
"But no," said the vicar, "we will set the damage down against the
lad's preservation; that is, if I don't recover from the contractor,
who has undoubtedly swindled us over these slates."