I have named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty
Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the
choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain
water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for
the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and
darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold;
and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill
just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black
heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other
mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I
was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been
busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on
many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of
view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be
exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb
to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as
low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may
be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds;—and the year
of grace, so that when I turn to leave the riverside I may find the old
manse and its inhabitants unchanged.
It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces
by a great hedge of beech, and over-looked by the church and the terrace
of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall
“spunkies” might be seen to dance at least by children; flower-plots
lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a
pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with
an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water everywhere, and the
sound of mills—the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain; the
birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods
pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the
midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish
stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I
supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is
difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of
stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came to man
and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the face of the
earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with
outlandish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of
the little chambers brightened with the wonders of the East. The dullest
could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign
places: a well-beloved house—its image fondly dwelt on by many
travellers.
Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him,
judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as a man
of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the display of
what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a lover of his life and
innocent habits to the end. We children admired him: partly for his
beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are concerned
for beauty and, above all, for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn
light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers,
in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy,
of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind of
terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or letters
to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a library of
bloodless books—or so they seemed in those days, although I have some of
them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read them; and these
lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our imaginations. But
the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured
and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for I have no such passions
now) the greed with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to
say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at
the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might reward
me with an Indian picture.
“Thy foot He’ll not let slide, nor will
He slumber that thee keeps,”
it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to set
in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a task in
recitation that really merited reward. And I must suppose the old man
thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the performance; for
he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and
gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we
were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception into so tender a
surprise that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of
those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon
reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should strip
himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts and reminders of his absent
sons; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow it upon me. He
had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that to my aunt; he had
fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod in the last century; and
his ways were still Spartan for the young. The last word I heard upon
his lips was in this Spartan key. He had over-walked in the teeth of an
east wind, and was now near the end of his many days. He sat by the
dining-room fire, with his white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a
somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old
Scotch medicine, Dr. Gregory’s powder. Now that remedy, as the work of a
near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the
imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. The old gentleman had
taken it with a wry face; and that being accomplished, sat with perfect
simplicity, like a child’s, munching a “barley-sugar kiss.” But when my
aunt, having the canister open in her hands, proposed to let me share in
the sweets, he interfered at once. I had had no Gregory; then I should
have no barley-sugar kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation. And
just then the phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door—for such was
our unlordly fashion—I was taken for the last time from the presence of
my grandfather.
Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must
suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I,
though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them.
He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it
in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the
quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have
been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also, and am persuaded
I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made
embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never
made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of
knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it.
He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better
with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had
chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may possibly
inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try
as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all
the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my
blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and
centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love
of mills—or had I an ancestor a miller?—and a kindness for the
neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry—or had
I an ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played
himself?—for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me
played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green
avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still
a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed,
perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet
thought upon; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its
site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener’s. All this I
had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I
have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our
first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of
Burns’s Dr. Smith—“Smith opens out his cauld harangues.” I have
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at
first hand.
And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this _homunculus_ or
part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.
Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other _homunculos_ or
part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower
order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to
college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking
down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron;—we may have had a
rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain carpenter in I know
not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon some holiday excursion, we
may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a flower-garden and seen
a certain weaver plying his shuttle. And these were all kinsmen of mine
upon the other side; and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half
of my unborn father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we
went by to college. Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the
young student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in
that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. It would
not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the lamp and oil
man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a
lighthouse-engineer, should have a grandson; and that these two, in the
fulness of time, should wed; and some portion of that student himself
should survive yet a year or two longer in the person of their child.
But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy; and
it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
backward the careers of our _homunculos_ and be reminded of our antenatal
lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at
Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of
letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St.
Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the
great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and
shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the ’15; I was in a West
India merchant’s office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie’s, and
managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt’s; I was with my
engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he
sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the
_Pirate_ and the _Lord of the Isles_; I was with him, too, on the Bell
Rock, in the fog, when the _Smeaton_ had drifted from her moorings, and
the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he
must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible words;
and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a “thrawe,” and his
workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved
reading in his Bible—or affecting to read—till one after another slunk
back with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes, parts of me
have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well. And
away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up can be
traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of ascendants:
Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly preferable)
system of descent by females, fleërs from before the legions of Agricola,
marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldæan plateaus; and,
furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see peering through the
disparted branches? What sleeper in green tree-tops, what muncher of
nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal in his habits. . . .
And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with
me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in
his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an
aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories,
like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts
awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be
distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the
old divine.