A MAGNUM OPUS
Two Bibles, a volume of sermons by the learned Dr. Isaac Barrow, a few
numbers of the _Cheap Magazine_, that had strayed from Dunfermline, and
a "Pilgrim's Progress," were the works that lay conspicuous ben in the
room. Hendry had also a copy of Burns, whom he always quoted in the
complete poem, and a collection of legends in song and prose, that
Leeby kept out of sight in a drawer.
The weight of my box of books was a subject Hendry was very willing to
shake his head over, but he never showed any desire to take off the
lid. Jess, however, was more curious; indeed, she would have been an
omnivorous devourer of books had it not been for her conviction that
reading was idling. Until I found her out she never allowed to me that
Leeby brought her my books one at a time. Some of them were novels,
and Jess took about ten minutes to each. She confessed that what she
read was only the last chapter, owing to a consuming curiosity to know
whether "she got him."
She read all the London part, however, of "The Heart of Midlothian,"
because London was where Jamie lived, and she and I had a discussion
about it which ended in her remembering that Thrums once had an author
of its own.
"Bring oot the book," she said to Leeby; "it was put awa i' the bottom
drawer ben i' the room sax year syne, an' I sepad it's there yet."
Leeby came but with a faded little book, the title already rubbed from
its shabby brown covers. I opened it, and then all at once I saw
before me again the man who wrote and printed it and died. He came
hobbling up the brae, so bent that his body was almost at right angles
to his legs, and his broken silk hat was carefully brushed as in the
days when Janet, his sister, lived. There he stood at the top of the
brae, panting.
I was but a boy when Jimsy Duthie turned the corner of the brae for the
last time, with a score of mourners behind him. While I knew him there
was no Janet to run to the door to see if he was coming. So occupied
was Jimsy with the great affair of his life, which was brewing for
thirty years, that his neighbours saw how he missed his sister better
than he realized it himself. Only his hat was no longer carefully
brushed, and his coat hung awry, and there was sometimes little reason
why he should go home to dinner. It is for the sake of Janet who
adored him that we should remember Jimsy in the days before she died.
Jimsy was a poet, and for the space of thirty years he lived in a great
epic on the Millennium. This is the book presented to me by Jess, that
lies so quietly on my topmost shelf now. Open it, however, and you
will find that the work is entitled "The Millennium: an Epic Poem, in
Twelve Books: by James Duthie." In the little hole in his wall where
Jimsy kept his books there was, I have no doubt--for his effects were
rouped before I knew him except by name--a well-read copy of "Paradise
Lost." Some people would smile, perhaps, if they read the two epics
side by side, and others might sigh, for there is a great deal in "The
Millennium" that Milton could take credit for. Jimsy had educated
himself, after the idea of writing something that the world would not
willingly let die came to him, and he began his book before his
education was complete. So far as I know, he never wrote a line that
had not to do with "The Millennium." He was ever a man sparing of his
plural tenses, and "The Millennium" says "has" for "have"; a vain word,
indeed, which Thrums would only have permitted as a poetical licence.
The one original character in the poem is the devil, of whom Jimsy
gives a picture that is startling and graphic, and received the
approval of the Auld Licht minister.
By trade Jimsy was a printer, a master-printer with no one under him,
and he printed and bound his book, ten copies in all, as well as wrote
it. To print the poem took him, I dare say, nearly as long as to write
it, and he set up the pages as they were written, one by one. The book
is only printed on one side of the leaf, and each page was produced
separately like a little hand-bill. Those who may pick up the
book--but who will care to do so?--will think that the author or his
printer could not spell--but they would not do Jimsy that injustice if
they knew the circumstances in which it was produced. He had but a
small stock of type, and on many occasions he ran out of a letter. The
letter e tried him sorely. Those who knew him best said that he tried
to think of words without an e in them, but when he was baffled he had
to use a little a or an o instead. He could print correctly, but in
the book there are a good many capital letters in the middle of words,
and sometimes there is a note of interrogation after "alas" or "Woes
me," because all the notes of exclamation had been used up.
Jimsy never cared to speak about his great poem even to his closest
friends, but Janet told how he read it out to her, and that his whole
body trembled with excitement while he raised his eyes to heaven as if
asking for inspiration that would enable his voice to do justice to his
writing. So grand it was, said Janet, that her stocking would slip
from her fingers as he read--and Janet's stockings, that she was always
knitting when not otherwise engaged, did not slip from her hands
readily. After her death he was heard by his neighbours reciting the
poem to himself, generally with his door locked. He is said to have
declaimed part of it one still evening from the top of the commonty
like one addressing a multitude, and the idlers who had crept up to
jeer at him fell back when they saw his face. He walked through them,
they told, with his old body straight once more, and a queer light
playing on his face. His lips are moving as I see him turning the
corner of the brae. So he passed from youth to old age, and all his
life seemed a dream, except that part of it in which he was writing, or
printing, or stitching, or binding "The Millennium." At last the work
was completed.
"It is finished," he printed at the end of the last book. "The task of
thirty years is over."
It is indeed over. No one ever read "The Millennium." I am not going
to sentimentalize over my copy, for how much of it have I read? But
neither shall I say that it was written to no end.
You may care to know the last of Jimsy, though in one sense he was
blotted out when the last copy was bound. He had saved one hundred
pounds by that time, and being now neither able to work nor to live
alone, his friends cast about for a home for his remaining years. He
was very spent and feeble, yet he had the fear that he might be still
alive when all his money was gone. After that was the workhouse. He
covered sheets of paper with calculations about how long the hundred
pounds would last if he gave away for board and lodgings ten shillings,
nine shillings, seven and sixpence a week. At last, with sore
misgivings, he went to live with a family who took him for eight
shillings. Less than a month afterwards he died.