_Edinburgh [Sunday, November 1874]._
Here is my long story: yesterday night, after having supped, I grew so
restless that I was obliged to go out in search of some excitement.
There was a half-moon lying over on its back, and incredibly bright in
the midst of a faint grey sky set with faint stars: a very inartistic
moon, that would have damned a picture.
At the most populous place of the city I found a little boy, three years
old perhaps, half frantic with terror, and crying to every one for his
"Mammy." This was about eleven, mark you. People stopped and spoke to
him, and then went on, leaving him more frightened than before. But I
and a good-humoured mechanic came up together; and I instantly developed
a latent faculty for setting the hearts of children at rest. Master
Tommy Murphy (such was his name) soon stopped crying, and allowed me to
take him up and carry him; and the mechanic and I trudged away along
Princes Street to find his parents. I was soon so tired that I had to
ask the mechanic to carry the bairn; and you should have seen the
puzzled contempt with which he looked at me, for knocking in so soon. He
was a good fellow, however, although very impracticable and sentimental;
and he soon bethought him that Master Murphy might catch cold after his
excitement, so we wrapped him up in my greatcoat. "Tobauga (Tobago)
Street" was the address he gave us; and we deposited him in a little
grocer's shop and went through all the houses in the street without
being able to find any one of the name of Murphy. Then I set off to the
head police office, leaving my greatcoat in pawn about Master Murphy's
person. As I went down one of the lowest streets in the town, I saw a
little bit of life that struck me. It was now half-past twelve, a little
shop stood still half-open, and a boy of four or five years old was
walking up and down before it imitating cockcrow. He was the only living
creature within sight.
At the police offices no word of Master Murphy's parents; so I went back
empty-handed. The good groceress, who had kept her shop open all this
time, could keep the child no longer; her father, bad with bronchitis,
said he must forth. So I got a large scone with currants in it, wrapped
my coat about Tommy, got him up on my arm, and away to the police office
with him: not very easy in my mind, for the poor child, young as he
was--he could scarce speak--was full of terror for the "office," as he
called it. He was now very grave and quiet and communicative with me;
told me how his father thrashed him, and divers household matters.
Whenever he saw a woman on our way he looked after her over my shoulder
and then gave his judgment: "That's no _her_," adding sometimes, "She
has a wean wi' her." Meantime I was telling him how I was going to take
him to a gentleman who would find out his mother for him quicker than
ever I could, and how he must not be afraid of him, but be brave, as he
had been with me. We had just arrived at our destination--we were just
under the lamp--when he looked me in the face and said appealingly,
"He'll no put me in the office?" And I had to assure him that he would
not, even as I pushed open the door and took him in.
The serjeant was very nice, and I got Tommy comfortably seated on a
bench, and spirited him up with good words and the scone with the
currants in it; and then, telling him I was just going out to look for
Mammy, I got my greatcoat and slipped away.
Poor little boy! he was not called for, I learn, until ten this morning.
This is very ill written, and I've missed half that was picturesque in
it; but to say truth, I am very tired and sleepy: it was two before I
got to bed. However, you see, I had my excitement.
_Monday._--I have written nothing all morning; I cannot settle to it.
Yes--I _will_ though.
10.45.--And I did. I want to say something more to you about the three
women. I wonder so much why they should have been _women_, and halt
between two opinions in the matter. Sometimes I think it is because they
were made by a man for men; sometimes, again, I think there is an
abstract reason for it, and there is something more substantive about a
woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great
mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some
lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a
Hercules, I ask after Iole or Dejanira. I cannot think him a man without
women. But I can think of these three deep-breasted women, living out
all their days on remote hilltops, seeing the white dawn and the purple
even, and the world outspread before them for ever, and no more to them
for ever than a sight of the eyes, a hearing of the ears, a far-away
interest of the inflexible heart, not pausing, not pitying, but austere
with a holy austerity, rigid with a calm and passionless rigidity; and I
find them none the less women to the end.
And think, if one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow
pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not
be a small thing to die? Not that there is not a passion of a quite
other sort, much less epic, far more dramatic and intimate, that comes
out of the very frailty of perishable women; out of the lines of
suffering that we see written about their eyes, and that we may wipe out
if it were but for a moment; out of the thin hands, wrought and tempered
in agony to a fineness of perception, that the indifferent or the merely
happy cannot know; out of the tragedy that lies about such a love, and
the pathetic incompleteness. This is another thing, and perhaps it is a
higher. I look over my shoulder at the three great headless Madonnas,
and they look back at me and do not move; see me, and through and over
me, the foul life of the city dying to its embers already as the night
draws on; and over miles and miles of silent country, set here and there
with lit towns, thundered through here and there with night expresses
scattering fire and smoke; and away to the ends of the earth, and the
furthest star, and the blank regions of nothing; and they are not moved.
My quiet, great-kneed, deep-breasted, well-draped ladies of Necessity, I
give my heart to you!