sure," she said. "I'm livin' mysil in ane o' the best of 'im, an' it's
na mair space to 't than ud turn a cat. Ye're welcome to walk up, if
ye like to see what their dwellin's waur like in the auld time. It's a
self-contained stair ye see," she added with pride, as she marshalled
us up a twisting stone stairway, so narrow that even one person, going
alone, must go cautiously to avoid grazing elbows and shins on the
stone walls, at every turn. "I couldna abide the place but for the
self-contained stair: there's not many has them," she continued. "Mind
yer heads! mind yer heads! There's a stoop!" she cried; but it was too
late. We had reached, unwarned, a point in the winding stair where it
was necessary to go bent half double; only a little child could have
stood upright. With heads dizzy from the blow and eyes half blinded
by the sudden darkness, we stumbled on, and brought out in a
passage-way, perhaps three feet wide and ten long, from which opened
four rooms: one the kitchen, a totally dark closet, not over six feet
square; a tiny grate, a chair, table, and a bunk in the wall, where
the servant slept, were all its furniture. The woman lighted a candle
to show us how convenient was this bunk for the maid "to lie."
Standing in the middle of the narrow passage, one could reach his head
into kitchen, parlor, and both bedrooms without changing his position.
The four rooms together would hardly have made one good-sized chamber.
Nothing but its exquisite neatness and order saved the place from
being insupportable! Even those would not save it when herring suppers
should be broiling in the closet surnamed kitchen. Up a still smaller,
narrower crevice in the wall led a second "self-contained stair," dark
as midnight, and so low roofed there was no standing upright in it,
even at the beginning. This led to what the landlady called the
"lodgers' flairt." We had not courage to venture up, though she was
exceedingly anxious to show us her seven good bedrooms, three double
and four single, which were nightly filled with lodgers, at a shilling
a night.
Only the "verra rayspectable," she said, came to lodge with her. Her
husband was "verra pairticular." Trades-people from the country were
the chief of their customers, "an' the same a-comin' for seven year,
noo." No doubt she has as lively a pride, and gets as many
satisfactions between these narrow walls, as did the lords and ladies
of 1700. Evidently not the least of her satisfactions was the fact
that those lords and ladies had lived there before her.
Nowhere are Auld Reekie's antitheses of new and old more emphasized
than in the Cowgate. In 1530 it was an elegant suburb. The city walls
even then extended to enclose it, and it was eloquently described, in
an old divine's writings, as the place "ubi nihil est humile aut
rusticum, sed omnia magnifica."
In one of its grassy lanes the Earl of Galloway built a mansion. His
countess often went to pay visits to her neighbors, in great state,
driving six horses; and it not infrequently happened that when her
ladyship stepped into her coach, the leaders were standing opposite
the door at which she intended to alight.
Here dwelt, in 1617, the famous "Tam o' the Cowgate," Earl of
Haddington, boon companion of King James, who came often to dine with
him, and gave him the familiar nickname of Tam. Tam was so rich he was
vulgarly believed to have the philosopher's stone; but he himself once
gave a more probable explanation of his wealth, saying that his only
secret lay in two rules,--"never to put off till to-morrow that which
could be done to-day," and "never to trust to another what his own
hand could execute."
To-day there is not in all the world, outside the Jewish Ghetto of
Rome, so loathly wretched a street as this same Cowgate. Even at high
noon it is not always safe to walk through it; and there are many of
its wynds into which no man would go without protection of the police.
Simply to drive through it is harrowing. The place is indescribable.
It seems a perpetual and insatiable carnival of vice and misery. The
misery alone would be terrible enough to see; but the leering,
juggling, insolent vice added makes it indeed hellish. Every
curbstone, door-sill, alley mouth, window, swarms with faces out of
which has gone every trace of self-respect or decency; babies' faces
as bad as the worst, and the most aged faces worst of all. To pause on
the sidewalk is to be surrounded, in a moment, by a dangerous crowd of
half-naked boys and girls, whining, begging, elbowing, cursing, and
fighting. Giving of an alms is like pouring oil on a fire. The whole
gang is ablaze with envy and attack: the fierce and unscrupulous
pillage of the seventeenth century is re-enacted in miniature in the
Cowgate every day, when an injudicious stranger, passing through,
throws a handful of pennies to the beggars. The general look of
hopeless degradation in the spot is heightened by the great number of
old-clothes shops along the whole line of the street. In the days when
the Cowgate was an elegant suburb, the citizens were permitted by law
to extend their upper stories seven feet into the street, provided
they would build them of wood cut in the Borough Forest, a forest that
harbored robbers dangerous to the town. These projecting upper stories
are invaluable now to the old-clothes venders, who hang from them
their hideous wares, in double and treble lines, fluttering over the
heads and in the faces of passers-by; the wood of the Borough Forest
thus, by a strange irony of fate, still continuing to harbor dangers
to public welfare. If these close-packed tiers of dangling rags in the
Cowgate were run out in a straight single line, they would be miles
long; a sad beggars' arras to behold. The preponderance of tattered
finery in it adds to its melancholy: shreds of damask; dirty lace;
theatrical costumes; artificial flowers so crumpled, broken, and
soiled that they would seem to have been trodden in gutters,--there
was an indefinable horror in the thought that there could be even in
the Cowgate a woman creature who could think herself adorned by such
mockeries of blossoms. But I saw more than one poor soul look at them
with longing eyes, finger them, haggle at the price, and walk away
disappointed that she could not buy.
The quaint mottoes here and there in the grimy walls, built in when
the Cowgate people were not only comfortable but pious, must serve
often now to point bitter jests among the ungodly. On one wretched,
reeking tenement is: "Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt
his name together. 1643." On another, "All my trist is in ye Lord."
A token I saw in the Cowgate of one life there not without hope and
the capacity of enjoyment. It was in a small window, nine stories up
from the ground, in a wynd so close that hands might be clasped from
house to house across it. It was a tiny thing, but my eye fell on it
with as much relief as on a rift of blue sky in a storm: it was a
little green fern growing in a pot. Outside the window it stood, on a
perilously narrow ledge. As I watched it I grew frightened, lest the
wind should blow it down, or a vicious neighbor stone it off. It
seemed the brave signal flying of a forlorn hope, of a dauntless,
besieged soul that would never surrender; and I shall recollect it
long after every other picture of the Cowgate scenes has grown dim.
The more respectable of the pawnbrokers' or second-hand-goods shops in
Edinburgh are interesting places to rummage. If there were no other
record of the slow decay and dwindling fortunes of the noble Scottish
folk, it could be read in the great number of small dealers in relics
of the olden time.
Old buckles and brooches and clan badges; chains, lockets, seals,
rings; faded miniatures, on ivory or in mosaics, of women as far back
as Mary's time, loved then as well as was ever Mary herself, but
forgotten now as if they had never been; swords rusty, bent, battered,
and stained; spoons with forgotten crests; punch-ladles worn smooth
with the merry-makings of generations,--all these one may find in
scores of little one-roomed shops, kept perhaps by aged dames with the
very aroma of the antique Puritanism lingering about them still.
In such a room as this I found a Scotch pebble brooch with a quaint
silver setting, reverently and cautiously locked in a glass case. On
the back of it had been scratched, apparently with a pin, "Margret
Fleming, from her brother." I bore it away with me triumphantly, sure
that it had belonged to an ancestor of Pet Marjorie.
Almost as full of old-time atmosphere as the pawnbrokers' shops are
the antiquarian bookstores. Here one may possess himself, if he likes,
of well-thumbed volumes with heraldic crests on titlepages, dating
back to the earliest reading done by noble earls and baronets in
Scotland; even to the time when not to know how to read was no
indelible disgrace. In one of these shops, on the day I bought Margret
Fleming's brooch, I found an old torn copy of "Pet Marjorie." Speaking
of Dr. Brown and Rab to the bookseller,--himself almost a relic of
antiquity,--I was astonished and greatly amused to hear him reply:
"It's a' a feection.... He can't write without it.... I knoo that
darg.... A verra neece darg he was, but--a--a--a"--with a shake of the
head--"it's a verra neece story, verra neece.... He wrote it up, up;
not but that Rab was a verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."
Not a word of more definite disclaimer or contradiction could I win
from the canny old Scot. But to have hastily called the whole story a
lee, from beginning to end, would hardly have shaken one's confidence
in it so much as did the thoughtful deliberation of his "He was a
verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."
One of our "cawdies," during our stay in Edinburgh, was a remarkable
fellow. After being for twenty years a gentleman's servant, he had
turned his back on aristocracy, and betaken himself to the streets
for a living; driving cabs, or piloting strangers around the city, as
might be. But his earlier habits of good behavior were strong in him
still, and came to the surface quickly in associations which revived
them. His conversation reminded us forcibly of somebody's excellent
saying that Scotland would always be Scott-land. Not a line of Scott's
novels which this vagabond cawdie did not seemingly know by heart.
Scottish history, too, he had at his tongue's end, and its most
familiar episodes sounded new and entertaining as he phrased them.
Even the death of Queen Mary seemed freshly stated, as he put it,
when, after summing up the cruelties she had experienced at the hands
of Elizabeth, he wound up with, "And finally she beheaded her, and
that was the last of her,"--a succinctness of close which some of
Mary's historians would have done well to simulate.
Of Jeanie Deans and Dumbiedikes he spoke as of old acquaintances. He
pointed out a spot in the misty blue distance where was Dumbiedikes'
house, where Jeanie's sweetheart dwelt, and where the road lay on
which Jeanie went to London.
"It was there the old road to London lay; and wouldn't you think it
more natural, sir, that it was that way she went, and it was there she
met Dumbiedikes, and he gave her the purse? I'll always maintain, sir,
that it was there she got it."
Of the two women, Jeanie Deans and Mary Queen of Scots, Jeanie was
evidently the vivider and more real in his thoughts.
The second day of our stay in Edinburgh was a gay day in the castle.
The 71st Highlanders had just returned from a twelvemonth's stay at
Gibraltar. It was people's day. Everywhere the bronzed, tired,
happy-looking fellows, in their smartened uniforms, were to be
encountered, strolling, lounging, sitting with sweethearts or
wives,--more of the former than the latter. It struck me also that the
women were less good-looking than the men; but they were all
beautified by happiness, and the merry sounds of their laughter, and
the rumble of skittles playing filled all the place. Inside the
castle, the room in which the regalia were on exhibition was thronged
with country people, gazing reverently on its splendors.
"Keep yer eye on't, as ye walk by, an' mark the changes o' 't," I
heard one old lady say to her husband, whose wandering gaze seemed to
her neglectful of the opportunity.
A few gay-dressed women, escorted by officers, held themselves apart
from the soldiers' sweethearting, and were disposed, I thought, to
look a little scornfully on it. The soldiers did not seem to mind the
affront, if they saw it; no doubt, they thought their own sweethearts
far the better looking, and if they had ever heard of it would have
quoted with hearty good-will the old ballad,--
"The lassies o' the Cannongate,
Oh, they are wondrous nice:
They winna gie a single kiss,
But for a double price.
"Gar hang them, gar hang them,
Hie upon a tree;
For we'll get better up the gate,
For a bawbee!"
Most picturesque of all the figures to be seen in Edinburgh are the
Newhaven fishwives. With short, full blue cloth petticoats, reaching
barely to their ankles; white blouses and gay kerchiefs; big,
long-sleeved cloaks of the same blue cloth, fastened at the throat,
but flying loose, sleeves and all, as if thrown on in haste; the girls
bareheaded; the married women with white caps, standing up stiff and
straight in a point on the top of the head; two big wickerwork creels,
one above the other, full of fish, packed securely, on their broad
shoulders, and held in place by a stout leather strap passing round
their foreheads, they pull along at a steady, striding gait, up hill
and down, carrying weights that it taxes a man's strength merely to
lift. In fact, it is a fishwife's boast that she will run with a
weight which it takes two men to put on her back. By reason of this
great strength on the part of the women, and their immemorial habit of
exercising it; perhaps also from other causes far back in the early
days of Jutland, where these curious Newhaven fishing-folk are said to
have originated,--it has come about that the Newhaven men are a
singularly docile and submissive race. The wives keep all the money
which they receive for the fish, and the husbands take what is given
them,--a singular reversion of the situation in most communities. I
did not believe this when it was told me; so I stopped three fishwives
one day, and without mincing matters put the question direct to them.
Two of them were young, one old. The young women laughed saucily, and
the old woman smiled; but they all replied unhesitatingly, that they
had the spending of all the money.
"It's a' spent i' the hoos," said one, anxious not to be thought too
selfish,--"it's a' spent i' the hoos. The men, they cam home an' tak
their sleep, an' then they'll be aff agen."
"It 'ud never do for the husbands to stoop in tha city, an' be
spendin' a' the money," added the old woman, with severe emphasis.
I learned afterward that on the present system of buying and selling
the fish, the fishermen do receive from their labor an income
independent of their wives. They are the first sellers of the
fish,--selling them in quantity to the wholesale dealers, who sell in
turn at auction to the "retail trade," represented by the wives. This
seems an unjust system, and is much resented by both husbands and
wives; but it has been established by law, and there is no help for
it. It came in with the introduction of the steam trawlers. "They're
the deestrooction o' the place," said one of the fish women. "A mon
canna go oot wi' his lines an' mak a livin' noo. They just drag
everything; they tak a' the broods; they're dooin' a worrld o' harrm.
There's somethin' a dooin' aboot it in the House o' Commons, noo, but
a canna till hoo it wull go. They ull be the deestrooction o' this
place, if they're na pit stop to." And she shook her fist vindictively
at a puffing trawler which had just pushed away from the wharf.
Whoever would see the Newhaven fishwives at their best must be on the
Newhaven wharf by seven o'clock in the morning, on a day when the
trawlers come in and the fish is sold. The scene is a study for a
painter.
The fish are in long, narrow boxes, on the wharf, ranged at the base
of the sea wall; some sorted out, in piles, each kind by itself:
skates, with their long tails, which look vicious, as if they could
kick; hake, witches, brill, sole, flounders, huge catfish, crayfish,
and herrings, by the ton. The wall is crowded with men, Edinburgh
fishmongers, come to buy cheap on the spot. The wall is not over two
feet wide; and here they stand, lean over, jostle, slip by to right
and left of each other, and run up and down in their eager haste to
catch the eye of one auctioneer, or to get first speech with another.
The wharf is crowded with women,--an army in blue, two hundred, three
hundred, at a time; white caps bobbing, elbows thrusting, shrill
voices crying, fiery blue eyes shining, it is a sight worth going to
Scotland for. If one has had an affection for Christie Johnstone, it
is a delightful return of his old admiration for her. A dozen faces
which might be Christie's own are flashing up from the crowd; one
understands on the instant how that best of good stories came to be
written. A man with eyes in his head and a pen in his hand could not
have done less. Such fire, such honesty, such splendor of vitality,
kindle the women's faces. To spend a few days among them would be to
see Christie Johnstone dramatized on all sides.
On the morning when I drove out from Edinburgh to see this scene, a
Scotch mist was simmering down,--so warm that at first it seemed of no
consequence whatever, so cold that all of a sudden one found himself
pierced through and through with icy shivers. This is the universal
quality of a Scotch mist or drizzle.
The Newhaven wharf is a narrow pier running out to sea. On one side
lay the steam trawlers, which had just unloaded their freight; on the
other side, on the narrow, rampart-like wall of stone, swarmed the
fishmonger men. In this line I took my place, and the chances of the
scramble. Immediately the jolly fishwives caught sight of me, and
began to nod and smile. They knew very well I was there to "speir" at
them.
"Ye'll tak cauld!" cried one motherly old soul, with her white hair
blowing wildly about almost enough to lift the cap off her head. "Com
doon! Ye'll tak cauld."
I smiled, and pointed to my water-proof cloak, down which, it must be
admitted, the "mist" was trickling in streams, while the cloak itself
flapped in the wind like a loose sail. She shook her head scornfully.
"It's a grat plass to tak cauld!" she cried. "Ye'll doo wull to com
doon."
There were three auctioneers: one, a handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed
young fellow, was plainly a favorite with the women. They flocked
after him as he passed from one to another of the different lots of
fish. They crowded in close circles around him, three and four deep;
pushing, struggling, rising on tiptoes to look over each other's
shoulders and get sight of the fish.
"What's offered for this lot o' fine herrings? One! One and sax!
Thrippence ha'! Going, going, gone!" rang above all the clatter and
chatter of the women's tongues. It was so swift that it seemed over
before it was fairly begun; and the surging circles had moved along to
a new spot and a new trade. The eyes of the women were fixed on the
auctioneer's eyes; they beckoned; they shook forefingers at him; now
and then a tall, stalwart one, reaching over less able-bodied
comrades, took him by the shoulder, and compelled him to turn her way;
one, most fearless of all, literally gripped him by the ear and pulled
his head around, shrieking out her bid. When the pressure got
unbearable, the young fellow would shake himself like a Newfoundland
dog, and, laughing good-naturedly, whirl his arms wide round to clear
a breathing space; the women would fall back a pace or two, but in a
moment the rings would close up again, tighter than ever.
The efforts of those in the outer ring to break through or see over
the inner ones were droll. Arms and hands and heads seemed fairly
interlinked and interwoven. Sometimes a pair of hands would come into
sight, pushing their way between two bodies, low down,--just the two
hands, nothing more, breaking way for themselves, as if in a thicket
of underbrush; presently the arms followed; and then, with a quick
thrust of the arms to right and left, the space would be widened
enough to let in the head, and when that was fairly through the
victory was won. Straightening herself with a big leap, the woman
bounded in front of the couple she had so skilfully separated, and a
buzzing "bicker" of angry words would rise for a moment; but there was
no time to waste in bad temper where bargains were to be made or lost
in the twinkling of an eye.
An old sailor, who stood near me on the wall, twice saved me from
going backwards into the sea, in my hasty efforts to better my
standpoint. He also seemed to be there simply as a spectator, and I
asked him how the women knew what they were buying; buying, as they
did, by the pile or the box.
"Oh, they'll giss, verra near," he said; "they've an eye on the fish
sense they're bawn. God knows it's verra little they mak," he added,
"an' they'll carry's much's two men o' us can lift. They're extrawnery
strang."
As a lot of catfish were thrown down at our feet, he looked at them
with a shudder and exclaimed,--
"I'd no eat that."
"Why not?" said I. "Are they not good?"
"Ah, I'd no eat it," he replied, with a look of superstitious terror
spreading over his face. "It doesna look richt."
A fresh trawler came in just as the auction had nearly ended. The
excitement renewed itself fiercely. The crowd surged over to the
opposite side of the pier, and a Babel of voices arose. The skipper
was short and fat, and in his dripping oilskin suit looked like a
cross between a catfish and a frog.
"Here, you Rob," shouted the auctioneer, "what do you add to this fine
lot o' herrin'?"
"Herring be d----d!" growled the skipper, out of temper, for some
reason of his own; at which a whirring sound of ejaculated
disapprobation burst from the women's lips.
The fish were in great tanks on the deck. Quickly the sailors dipped
up pails of the sea-water, dashed it over them, and piled them into
baskets, in shining, slippery masses: the whole load was on the pier,
sorted, and sold in a few minutes.
Then the women settled down to the work of assorting and packing up
their fish. One after another they shouldered their creels and set off
for Edinburgh. They seemed to have much paying back and forth of
silver among themselves, one small piece of silver that I noticed
actually travelling through four different hands in the five minutes
during which I watched it. Each woman wore under her apron, in front,
a sort of apron-like bag, in which she carried her money. There was
evidently rivalry among them. They spied closely on each other's
loads, and did some trafficking and exchange before they set off. One
poor old creature had bought only a few crayfish, and as she lifted
her creel to her back, and crawled away, the women standing by looked
over into her basket, and laughed and jeered at her; but she gave no
sign of hearing a word they said.
Some of them were greatly discontented with their purchases when they
came to examine them closely, especially one woman who had bought a
box of flounders. She emptied them on the ground, and sorted the few
big ones, which had been artfully laid on the top; then, putting the
rest, which were all small, in a pile by themselves, she pointed
contemptuously to the contrast, and, with a toss of her head, ran
after the auctioneer, and led him by the sleeve back to the spot where
her fish lay. She was as fierce as Christie herself could have been at
the imposition. She had paid the price for big flounders, and had got
small ones. The auctioneer opened his book and took out his pencil to
correct the entry which had been made against her.
"Wull, tak aff saxpence," he said.
"Na! na!" cried she. "They're too dear at seven saxpence."
"Wull, tak aff a saxpence; it is written noo,--seven shillin'."
She nodded, and began packing up the flounders.
"Will you make something on them at that price?" I asked her.
"Wull, I'll mak me money back," she replied; but her eyes twinkled,
and I fancy she had got a very good bargain, as bargains go in
Newhaven; it being thought there a good day's work to clear three
shillings,--a pitiful sum, when a woman, to earn it, must trudge from
Newhaven to Edinburgh (two miles) with a hundred pounds of fish on her
back, and then toil up and down Edinburgh hills selling it from door
to door. One shilling on every pound is the auctioneer's fee. He has
all the women's names in his book, and it is safe to trust them; they
never seek to cheat, or even to put off paying. "They'd rather pay
than not," the blue-eyed auctioneer said to me. "They're the honestest
folks i' the warld."
As the last group was dispersing, one old woman, evidently in a state
of fierce anger, approached and poured out a torrent of Scotch as
bewildering and as unintelligible to me as if it had been Chinese. Her
companions gazed at her in astonishment; presently they began to
reply, and in a few seconds there was as fine a "rippet" going on as
could have been heard in Cowgate in Tam's day. At last a woman of near
her own age sprang forward, and approaching her with a determined
face, lifted her right hand with an authoritative gesture, and said in
vehement indignation, which reminded me of Christie again,--
"Keep yersil, an' haud yer tongue, noo!"
"What is she saying?" I asked. "What is the matter?"
"Eh, it is jist nathin' at a'," she replied. "She's thet angry, she
doesna knaw hersil."