After an outpouring about difficulties at home.
_Edinburgh, Tuesday, September 16, 1873._
... I must be very strong to have all this vexation and still to be
well. I was weighed the other day, and the gross weight of my large
person was eight stone six! Does it not seem surprising that I can keep
the lamp alight, through all this gusty weather, in so frail a lantern?
And yet it burns cheerily.
My mother is leaving for the country this morning, and my father and I
will be alone for the best part of the week in this house. Then on
Friday I go south to Dumfries till Monday. I must write small, or I
shall have a tremendous budget by then.
7.20 _p.m._--I must tell you a thing I saw to-day. I was going down to
Portobello in the train, when there came into the next compartment
(third class) an artisan, strongly marked with smallpox, and with
sunken, heavy eyes--a face hard and unkind, and without anything lovely.
There was a woman on the platform seeing him off. At first sight, with
her one eye blind and the whole cast of her features strongly plebeian,
and even vicious, she seemed as unpleasant as the man; but there was
something beautifully soft, a sort of light of tenderness, as on some
Dutch Madonna, that came over her face when she looked at the man. They
talked for a while together through the window; the man seemed to have
been asking money. "Ye ken the last time," she said, "I gave ye two
shillin's for your ludgin', and ye said----" it died off into whisper.
Plainly Falstaff and Dame Quickly over again. The man laughed
unpleasantly, even cruelly, and said something; and the woman turned
her back on the carriage and stood a long while so, and, do what I
might, I could catch no glimpse of her expression, although I thought I
saw the heave of a sob in her shoulders. At last, after the train was
already in motion, she turned round and put two shillings into his hand.
I saw her stand and look after us with a perfect heaven of love on her
face--this poor one-eyed Madonna--until the train was out of sight; but
the man, sordidly happy with his gains, did not put himself to the
inconvenience of one glance to thank her for her ill-deserved kindness.
I have been up at the Spec. and looked out a reference I wanted. The
whole town is drowned in white, wet vapour off the sea. Everything drips
and soaks. The very statues seem wet to the skin. I cannot pretend to be
very cheerful; I did not see one contented face in the streets; and the
poor did look so helplessly chill and dripping, without a stitch to
change, or so much as a fire to dry themselves at, or perhaps money to
buy a meal, or perhaps even a bed. My heart shivers for them.
_Dumfries, Friday._--All my thirst for a little warmth, a little sun, a
little corner of blue sky avails nothing. Without, the rain falls with a
long drawn _swish_, and the night is as dark as a vault. There is no
wind indeed, and that is a blessed change after the unruly, bedlamite
gusts that have been charging against one round street corners and
utterly abolishing and destroying all that is peaceful in life. Nothing
sours my temper like these coarse termagant winds. I hate practical
joking; and your vulgarest practical joker is your flaw of wind.
I have tried to write some verses; but I find I have nothing to say that
has not been already perfectly said and perfectly sung in _Adelaide_. I
have so perfect an idea out of that song! The great Alps, a wonder in
the star-light--the river, strong from the hills, and turbulent, and
loudly audible at night--the country, a scented _Fruehlingsgarten_ of
orchards and deep wood where the nightingales harbour--a sort of German
flavour over all--and this love-drunken man, wandering on by sleeping
village and silent town, pours out of his full heart, _Einst, O Wunder,
einst_, etc. I wonder if I am wrong about this being the most beautiful
and perfect thing in the world--the only marriage of really accordant
words and music--both drunk with the same poignant, unutterable
sentiment.
To-day in Glasgow my father went off on some business, and my mother and
I wandered about for two hours. We had lunch together, and were very
merry over what the people at the restaurant would think of us--mother
and son they could not suppose us to be.
_Saturday._--And to-day it came--warmth, sunlight, and a strong, hearty
living wind among the trees. I found myself a new being. My father and I
went off a long walk, through a country most beautifully wooded and
various, under a range of hills. You should have seen one place where
the wood suddenly fell away in front of us down a long, steep hill
between a double row of trees, with one small fair-haired child framed
in shadow in the foreground; and when we got to the foot there was the
little kirk and kirkyard of Irongray, among broken fields and woods by
the side of the bright, rapid river. In the kirkyard there was a
wonderful congregation of tombstones, upright and recumbent on four legs
(after our Scotch fashion), and of flat-armed fir-trees. One gravestone
was erected by Scott (at a cost, I learn, of L70) to the poor woman who
served him as heroine in the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the inscription
in its stiff, Jedediah Cleishbotham fashion is not without something
touching.[7] We went up the stream a little further to where two
Covenanters lie buried in an oak-wood; the tombstone (as the custom is)
containing the details of their grim little tragedy in funnily bad
rhyme, one verse of which sticks in my memory:--
"We died, their furious rage to stay,
Near to the kirk of Iron-gray."
We then fetched a long compass round about through Holywood Kirk and
Lincluden ruins to Dumfries. But the walk came sadly to grief as a
pleasure excursion before our return....
_Sunday._--Another beautiful day. My father and I walked into Dumfries
to church. When the service was done I noted the two halberts laid
against the pillar of the churchyard gate; and as I had not seen the
little weekly pomp of civic dignitaries in our Scotch country towns for
some years, I made my father wait. You should have seen the provost and
three bailies going stately away down the sunlit street, and the two
town servants strutting in front of them, in red coats and cocked hats,
and with the halberts most conspicuously shouldered. We saw Burns's
house--a place that made me deeply sad--and spent the afternoon down the
banks of the Nith. I had not spent a day by a river since we lunched in
the meadows near Sudbury. The air was as pure and clear and sparkling as
spring water; beautiful, graceful outlines of hill and wood shut us in
on every side; and the swift, brown river fled smoothly away from before
our eyes, rippled over with oily eddies and dimples. White gulls had
come up from the sea to fish, and hovered and flew hither and thither
among the loops of the stream. By good fortune, too, it was a dead calm
between my father and me. Do you know, I find these rows harder on me
than ever. I get a funny swimming in the head when they come on that I
had not before--and the like when I think of them.