THE KINGDOM OF FIFE
From Edinburgh as I looked out on the Forth from every vantage point, I
was conscious of the hills of Fife ever backing in the prospect. And I
kept repeating to myself the old rhyme of the witches--
"The Thane of Fife had a wife,
Ah, where is she now!"
I determined to set sail and find not the wife, but the kingdom.
It is a continuing splendour, this name--the Kingdom of Fife. Than the
thing nothing could be less royal, more democratic. For Fifeshire is
given over to farm lands and coal fields and treeless stretches, and the
fringe of Fife is made up of fishing villages "a hodden gray plaid wi' a
gowden fringe," said a King Jamie. It lies there, separate from
Scotland, although very Scottish, between the firths of the Forth and
the Tay, with the Ochil hills a barrier on the landside. The separating
firths are now connected with Scotland by great bridges, over which the
trains pass with reluctance. And the wind is always blowing in Fife, a
cold, stern, relentless, Calvinistic wind, off the North Sea. Not by
every wind of doctrine but by a disciplining Calvinistic wind is this
Kingdom swept into conformity.
There is no end of castles and of historic memories lying like pebbles
upon the seashore of the Firth. Pick up any sea shell--I do not remember
seeing any, so combed have these beaches been from the memory of
man--and it will whisper a tale in your ear.
But there is for me but one pilgrimage to be made in Fifeshire, to
Kirkcaldy; to the place, not of Ravenscraig Castle, nor because Adam
Smith and political economy were here born twins, nor because Carlyle
taught here for two years, nor because Edward Irving preached here;
their dwellings and schools and graves can be seen. But because Marjorie
Fleming was born here, passed to and fro, from Granton to Burntisland,
in those brief beautiful nine years that were granted to her, and to us,
and lies buried in the old kirkyard of Abbotshall.
Perhaps you do not know Marjorie. She was the friend, the intimate
friend of Sir Walter Scott. And I can but think how large and void the
world was a century ago, in that Charles Lamb was living in London when
Marjorie was living in Kirkcaldy, and was dreaming of his "Dream
Children," when he might have known this most precious child, fit to be
the friend of Lamb as she was of Sir Walter.
Other men who have loved her with a tenderness which can belong but to
the living child, immortally living, are Dr. John Brown who wrote the
wonder book about her fifty years ago, through which most of us have
claimed Marjorie as our own, and Mark Twain, who only a month before he
died--and joined her--wrote as tenderly and whimsically of her as he
ever wrote of any child or any maid. Among such august company we almost
hesitate to enter, but surely at this distance of time we may lay our
love beside that of the great men who found Pet Marjorie one of the most
precious human treasures the world has ever held.
She was but a little girl, and only nine years all told, when the last
day came to her a hundred and more years ago, December 19, 1811. The
first six years she lived in Kirkcaldy, "my native town which though
dirty is clene in the country," Marjorie wrote this from Edinburgh a
little patronizingly, and Marjorie was never strong on spelling. The
next three years she lived with her aunt in the Scottish capital, where
she wrote those journals and letters which have kept her memory warm to
this day. In July of 1811 she returned to the town by the North Sea, and
in December she was gone.
In the morning of the day on which I made my pilgrimage I went up to the
Parliament buildings in the Old Town, looked them about, saw the lawyers
pacing to and fro, as Stevenson had paced, but not for long--the
absurdity of it!--and then down the hill in the shadow of three men.
"One November afternoon in 1810"--(the year in which the "Lady of the
Lake" was published) "three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen
escaping like school boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in
arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of
sleet." They were Lord Erskine, William Clerk--and the third we all
know; what service of romance has he not performed for us! As the snow
blattered in his face he muttered, "how it raves and drifts! On-ding o'
snaw--aye, that's the word, on-ding." And so he approached his own door,
Castle Street, No. 39. There, over the door, looking forth on the world,
is his face to-day, looking up Young Street.
Then, as he grew restless and would awa, I followed him through Young
Street up to No. 1, North Charlotte Street. It is a substantial
building, still of dignified and fair estate; neighbourhoods are not
transformed in a Scots century as they are in America. But it carries no
tablet to tell the world that here Marjorie lived. It was here that at
the age of six she wrote her first letter to Isa Keith. It was here that
Marjorie saw "regency bonnets" and with eyes of envy; as indeed she
envied and desired with the passionate depths of her nature all lovely
and strange things. Here she read the Newgate calendar, and found it a
fascinating affair--Marjorie less than nine! And here that Isabel Keith,
her adored cousin, would not permit the little bookworm to read much of
lovers or to talk of them. Marjorie says very gravely, "a great many
authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally," but Isa was never
able quite to cure Marjorie of her interest in love.
That evening Sir Walter carried her, through the "on-ding o' snaw," in a
shepherd's plaid, over to Castle Street. I walked through the narrow
stone-lined thoroughfare on a hot July morning--and I could feel the
cold and snow of that winter a century back, and see the strong, lame,
great man, carrying the wee wifie in the neuk of his plaid, to the warm
firelight of his castle. Marjorie and he would romp there the evening
long. She would hear him say his lessons, "Ziccoty, diccoty, dock," or
"Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven," while Marjorie "grew quite bitter in
her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidness."
Then they would read ballads together; and then "he would take her on
his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in King John till he
swayed to and fro sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature,
like one possessed, repeating--
"'For I am sick, and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrongs, and therefore full of fears;
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears;
A woman, naturally born to fears.'"
I walked out through what used to be fields, and is now much suburban
dwelling, toward Braehead.--"I am going to-morrow to a delightful place,
Braehead by name, where there is ducks, cocks, bubblyjocks, 2 dogs, 2
cats and swine which is delightful"--to Ravelston--"I am at Ravelston
enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing sweetly, the calf
doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face."
Ravelston is still a place of delight, with its great cliffs breaking
the surface of the park and a deep-lying lake with dark woodlands. I
wish Marjorie might have known the ballad by Sydney Dobell; it has the
magic quality she would have felt.
"Ravelston, Ravelston,
The merry path that leads
Down the golden morning hill,
And through the silver meads;
"She sang her song, she kept her kine,
She sat beneath the thorn,
When Andrew Keith of Ravelston
Rode thro' the Monday morn.
"Year after year, where Andrew came,
Comes evening down the glade,
And still there sits a moonshine ghost
Where sat the sunshine maid.
"She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine;
O Keith of Ravelston
The sorrows of thy line!"
In the late afternoon I took tram for Leith, changing of course at
Pilrig, because Leith remains haughtily aloof from Edinburgh and
emphasizes it through this break at the boundary. "When we came to
Leith," says Boswell, "I talked perhaps with too boasting an air, how
pretty the Frith of Forth looked; as indeed, after the prospect from
Constantinople, of which I have been told, and that from Naples, which I
have seen, I believe the view of the Frith and its environs from the
Castle-hill of Edinburgh is the finest prospect in Europe, 'Aye,'
replied Dr. Johnson, 'that is the state of the world. Water is the same
everywhere.'"
And so, down to the pier, stopping on the way to look at a New Haven
fishwife in her picturesque costume, which she has worn ever since the
Danes came over. Yes, and looking for a suitable piece of earth for
Queen Magdalene to kiss, "Scottis eard!" Well, if not here, there is
Scottis eard worthy elsewhere.
I asked for the ferry to Burnt-is-land. The conductor of the tram
looked, yes, and laughed. Burnt-island, he dared, _dared_ to repeat. And
so, I took ferry from Granton to--Burnt-island.
It is a long journey across the Firth. Far down the waters rises the
bold rock of the Bass, around which I had sailed a day before, looking
for a landing for some one more ponderous than solan geese or kittie
wake, and not finding it; although I was told that from Canty
bay--excellent Scots name--the innkeeper will row you o'er, and you may
walk where James I was waiting for the boat which should carry him to
safety in France, and getting instead the boat which carried him to
prison in England. Still I like to remember that Henry IV declared in
explanation that he "could speak very good French" himself, if that were
what they were sending Scottish Jamie o'er the water for; Henry who had
years of the Hundred Years' War behind him.
[Illustration: TANTALLON CASTLE.]
The rock is rent by a cavern running clean through. It's quite a
terrific place, and seven acres of benty grass must have seemed small
refuge for the Covenanters who were lodged here numerously in Killing
Time.
On the mainshore, the Lothian, rises Tantallon Castle, where Marmion
dared to beard Angus Bell-the-Cat. It still looks pretty tremendous, and
still stands, like the Coliseum. "Ding doon Tantallon? Build a brig to
the Bass!" runs the proud proverb.
But we are on our way across the Firth. There was a certain magic about
it on my day of pilgrimage. The north shore lay sparkling in the late
afternoon sun, blue shimmering land against a clear blue sky, the thin
rim of the continent playing here and there with opalescent colour where
man had builded village or castle, or where man had not destroyed the
ancient green. The south shore lay vague and gray, and growing darker,
against the falling afternoon, while the Lammermuirs stood up in paler
dusk in the background, and the sun blazed behind them. And all about
the Firth glittered like an inland lake, a Great Lake. I thought of how
the Roman galleys and Norse fleets had come this way, and looked and
departed. And how kings had brought their armies here, and looked,
perhaps besieged, and departed. And how time and time and time again,
French fleets had sailed in here to help their continuing ally,
Scotland. And how kings had sailed out from here to France, and how
Scots knights had sailed out from here for France, the Crusades,
anywhere that promised adventure. And here Saxon Margaret had sailed in
to be Scotland's queen. And here Scottish Mary had sailed in to be
Scotland's queen, and not to be. Far out in the offing the sun shone
golden upon the brown sails of a single fishing boat, tacking to catch a
homing wind, a ghost where once had sailed the war and merchant fleets
of nations.
At Burntisland I did not pause to visit Rossend Castle where Mary is
supposed to have had her affair with Chastelard; certainly not. Nor at
Kinghorn, where Alexander III, within a few months after he had married
in haunted Kelso, and within a few hours perhaps after he had drunk the
blude red wine in Dunfermline, came galloping by this way, the horse
stumbled, the king fell, and
"Quhen Alysandyr oure King was dede
That Scotland led in luve and le ...
Succoure Scotland and remede
That stands in perplexite."
_Kirkcaldy_
If Kirkcaldy was a "lang toun" in the olden days, it is longer to-day,
stretching from Linktown to Dysart, and broadening inland to Gallatown,
where they make the famous Wemyss pottery. To-day Kirkcaldy makes
linoleum and jute and engineering works, and it is the center of a
string of fishing villages, a "metropolitan borough system," hundreds of
boats fishing the North Sea with KY marked as their home port, when
their sailor men make home in any of these picturesque and smelling
villages, St. Monan, Pittenweem, Cellardyke, Crail where Mary of
Lorraine landed, Largo where Sir Andrew Wood the admiral lived, and
where Alexander Selkirk lived what time he did not live as Crusoe in
Juan Fernandez, and Anstruther--
"Wha wad na be in love
Wi' bonny Maggie Lauder,
A piper met her gaen to Fife
And speired what wast they ca'd her....
I've lived in Fife
Baith maid and wife
These ten years and a quarter,
Gin ye should come to Anster Fair
Speir ye for Maggie Lauder."
There is also some castellated splendour, Ravenscraig, and Wemyss on the
site of the castle of MacDuff, then of Fife, this Wemyss being the
ill-fated place where Mary first met Darnley.
Abbotshall kirkyard is at the right of the railway station as the train
pulls in to Kirkcaldy. In his book of Scotch pilgrimages when William
Winter was on his way to St. Andrews, past Kirkcaldy, he wrote "gazing
as I pass at its quaint church among the graves." I suppose he did not
know what grave.
But first I would find where she had lived. Kirkcaldy is close set
against the sea. Here on winding High Street, I found the house in which
she had lived, standing much as it did no doubt a hundred years ago,
except for a new coat of tan on the stone. From those upper windows
Marjorie looked out on the coach going away toward Edinburgh. The
ground floor is occupied by a book store, where I could buy no book
about Marjorie. Under a window you enter the archway and find yourself
in a little green-grassed court, which is all that is left of Marjorie's
garden. The house proper fronted the garden in that comfortable
excluding way which British people still prefer for their places of
habitation. It is still occupied as a dwelling, and the nursery still
looks as it did in Marjorie's day, and the drawing-room, where she wrote
that letter to Isa Keith--"I now sit down on my botom to answer all your
kind and beloved letters." The door of the nursery was open. I
remembered those last days, when lying ill, her mother asked Marjorie if
there was anything she wished. "Oh, yes, if you would just leave the
room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the Leal,' and I will
lie still and think and enjoy myself."
"I'm wearin' awa', Jean,
Like snaw wreaths in thaw, Jean,
I'm wearin' awa',
To the Land o' the Leal."
The kirkyard lies on the outskirts of the town. It was a beautiful place
as the Scotch sun sank behind the Fife hills and the Firth. The
organist was playing and the music drifted out through the narrow
lancet windows when I found the little white cross marked "Pet
Marjorie," and the old gray tombstone with its simple token, "M. F.
1811."
For a hundred years then she has been lying there. But Marjorie has
become one of the immortal dream children of the world. I laid my fresh
flowers beside another's which had withered, and went my ways into the
dusk.
_St. Andrews_
Past Kirkcaldy the road leaves the sea and runs northward through
meadows between fields which have the look of centuries-old cultivation,
at peace like the fields and villages of the English Midland, to St.
Andrews.
"St. Andrews by the Northern Sea,
A haunted town it is to me!
A little city, worn and gray,
The gray North Ocean girds it round;
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound;
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street,
And still endure, and still decay,
Towers that the salt winds vainly beat.
Ghost-like and shadowy they stand
Dim mirrored in the wet sea-sands.
"St. Leonard's Chapel, long ago
We loitered idly where the tall
Fresh-budded mountain ashes blow
Within thy desecrated wall;
The tough roots rent the tombs below,
And April birds sang clamorous,
We did not dream, we could not know
How hardly Fate would deal with us!
"O broken minster, looking forth
Beyond the bay, above the town,
O winter of the kindly North,
O college of the scarlet gown!"
Small wonder St. Andrews is the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, and
smaller wonder, remembering the Calvinistic wind, that here happened the
brunt of the fight between the old faith and the new.
It is a clean and seemly town, with much historic memory and much
present day dignity, a small gray town, "the essence of all the
antiquity of Scotland in good clean condition," said Carlyle. Its
ancient sights the cathedral and the castle; its living sight the
university and the golf links.
The town stands on a promontory, three long streets converging on the
cathedral and castle lying in ruins. The cathedral, a hundred years in
the building, and very splendid in its wealth of detail, its vastness
of space like that of York or Amiens, was dedicated in the days of The
Bruce, with the king present to endow it with a hundred marks "for the
mighty victory of the Scots at Bannockburn, by St. Andrew's, the
guardian of the realm." For three hundred years its wax tapers lighted
the old rites according to which The Bruce worshiped; he was not
covenanted. Then the torch of the reformation was applied to it, the
torch of the flaming tongue of John Knox.
To-day there are three towers left of the five--Dr. Johnson hoped that
one which looked unstable on the day of his visit, would "fall on some
of the posterity of John Knox; and no great matter!" There are massive
walls. There is no roof between us and the sky, which, after all, does
shelter the true faith, and if one misses the chanting of the monks
echoing through these arches, under this roofless space, there is the
moan of the sea, sobbing at the foot of the crag, the sea which is of no
faith and never keeps faith. And if one misses the scarlet robes of
Cardinal Beaton as he swept through these aisles in splendid procession
with all the gorgeous trappings of his retinue, there are mosses and
wild flowers to give glows of colour--one must content himself. Those
were evil days, whatever the faith; there was not much division in
matters of conduct; there may have been in matters of morals.
[Illustration: ST. ANDREWS CASTLE.]
The castle stands stalwart on the rock promontory washed by the ocean,
and the ocean breaks angrily at its base like a creature robbed over
long of its prey. It is not the castle in which the Cardinal lived, but
it was built soon after, and wrecked so thoroughly, and looks so very
ancient, that one would fain believe; and the guide will tell, unless
you prevent him, that it was at these windows that the Cardinal sat at
his ease and witnessed the entertainment of the auto da fe of the
non-conformist, George Wishart, burned alive on March 28, 1542; about
the time Philip the Second was burning heretics in the Old Plaza at
Madrid, and a little before Queen Mary spouse to Philip, was burning
them in England. And it was only two months later, May 29, when workmen
were strengthening the castle at the orders of the Cardinal against this
very thing that happened, that the reformers made their way in, killed
the Cardinal, and hung him "by the tane arm and the tane foot," from the
very balcony where he had sat to enjoy Wishart's burning. A very
barbarous time. As Wishart had lain in the Bottle Dungeon months before
his burning, so Beaton lay in the dungeon in salt, seven months before
his burial.
John Knox joined the reformers, holding the town until it was taken by
the French fleet--"defended their castle against Scotland, France, and
Ireland all three"--surrendering to Strozzi, Prior of Capua, a Knight of
Rhodes; so was the great world made small in those days by errant
knights and captains and hired mercenaries. The French captain entered,
"and spoiled the castle very rigorously," lest it should be "a
receptacle for rebels." All this in the time of the Regency of Mary of
Lorraine.
Knox was taken and sent to the galleys for a year. Then he returned, and
was frequently in St. Andrews, preaching in the town kirk, founded,
perhaps, by the confessor of Saint Margaret, preaching here some of his
last sermons. "I saw him everie day of his doctrine go hulie and fear,"
wrote James Melville, "with a furrning of martriks about his neck, a
staff in the an hand," and lifted up to the pulpit "whar he behovite to
lean at his first entrie; bot or he had done with his sermont, he was so
active and vigorus, that he lyk to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out
of it." The pulpit held. And so did the doctrine of Knox.
The square tower of St. Regulus, a pre-Norman bit of architecture,
perhaps Culdee, stands southeast of the cathedral. Dr. Johnson was
indignant with Boswell that he missed it. This with the many other
towers of church and college make St. Andrews a towered town.
There is an air, an atmosphere, in St. Andrews; it is an academic town,
serene, certain of itself, quiet, with wide streets and gray stone
buildings. It is full of dignity, full of repose, as a northern Oxford
combined with a northern Canterbury should be. There is a spell of
ancientry over the gray old walls, but it is unbroken ancientry; if
there is a bar sinister, the present generation has forgotten it.
And, of course--oh, not of course, but primarily--there is golf. There
is golf everywhere in Scotland. The golf ball and not the thistle is the
symbol of Scotland to-day, and from the Tee at St. Andrews the Golf Ball
has been driven round the world. James VI, careful Scot, recognized golf
as an industry, and granted letters patent in 1618 for the manufacture
of golf balls--the old leather, feather-stuffed sphere--to James
Melville and William Berwick.
Edinburgh is ringed about with golf courses, public and private. So is
Scotland. The Firth of Forth is continuous with them, from North
Berwick where the fleeting traveler is as certain to see golf balls as
he is to see the Bass, up to St. Andrews. The Links of Leith are the
most historic, for it was on these that Charles I was playing when news
came of the Irish rebellion--and all that it led to. And here, his son,
later James II, played against two English noblemen who had declared
they could beat him, and James, cannily--true Scot!--chose the best
player in Scotland, one Paterson an Edinburgh cobbler--and gave him the
wager, and doubled it, out of which Paterson built for himself Golfer's
_Land_ in the Canongate. The Links of the Forth are not a golf course,
although there may be some who assert that they were once an ancient
course, say, for King Arthur and his Knights.
Sealand, shoreland, it seems, makes the ideal golf course, the soil
growing with short crisp grass that makes a springy and slippery turf,
and makes a keen game; the inlander, of course, and the American
inlander, may not understand that golf can never quite be golf,
certainly never be the true Scottish rite, unless it is played near the
sea, with the tang of the sea and of golf entering into one's
blood--and, preferably at St. Andrews.
At St. Andrews golf is a business, a sublimated business; or better, an
education. Degrees are taken in it quite as high and requiring as
thorough a training as at the University. It is to St. Andrews that the
good golfer goes when he dies. And he aspires to go there before.
Or, rather at St. Andrews golf is a religion. Half the stories told of
golf are, as might be expected of a game which came to its flowering in
Scotland, religious, or irreligious. And one of the best of them is told
in Stewart Dick's book on "The Forth." A Scots minister was playing and
playing rather badly, and expressing himself in words if not in strokes.
(Only those of you who have read "Sentimental Tommy" will understand
that unconsciously I have played on the word "stroke!") The minister
exclaimed bitterly as he emerged from his unholy battle with the
bunker--is Bunker Hill, perhaps a hazard in golf?--"Ah maun gie it up!
ah maun gie it up!" "What!" cried his partner alarmed, "gie up gowf?"
"Naw, naw," returned the minister, "gie up the meenistry."
Perhaps to amend again, golf at St. Andrews is life. And in their death
they are not divided. The graveyard near the Abbey, with stones hoary
from the sixteenth century, is renowned to-day because it contains the
graves of good golfers, Allan Robertson, old Tom Morris, and young Tom
Morris, the greatest golfer since Paterson, dead at the pathetic age of
24; after that comes a man's best golfing years, that is, for his
pleasure. Young Tom's grave is marked by an elaborate monument with an
inscription that befits a king.