THE OLD DOMINIE.
From the new cemetery, which is the highest point in Thrums, you just
fail to catch sight of the red school-house that nestles between two
bare trees, some five miles up the glen of Quharity. This was proved by
Davit Lunan, tinsmith, whom I have heard tell the story. It was in the
time when the cemetery gates were locked to keep the bodies of suicides
out, but men who cared to risk the consequences could get the coffin
over the high dyke and bury it themselves. Peter Lundy's coffin broke,
as one might say, into the church-yard in this way, Peter having hanged
himself in the Whunny wood when he saw that work he must. The general
feeling among the intimates of the deceased was expressed by Davit when
he said:
“It may do the crittur nae guid i' the tail o' the day, but he paid
for's bit o' ground, an' he's in's richt to occupy it.”
The custom was to push the coffin on to the wall up a plank, and then
let it drop less carefully into the cemetery. Some of the mourners were
dragging the plank over the wall, with Davit Lunan on the top directing
them, when they seem to have let go and sent the tinsmith suddenly into
the air. A week afterward it struck Davit, when in the act of soldering
a hole in Leeby Wheens' flagon (here he branched off to explain that he
had made the flagon years before, and that Leeby was sister to Tammas
Wheens, and married one Baker Robbie, who died of chicken-pox in his
forty-fourth year), that when “up there” he had a view of Quharity
school-house. Davit was as truthful as a man who tells the same story
more than once can be expected to be, and it is far from a suspicious
circumstance that he did not remember seeing the school-house all at
once. In Thrums things only struck them gradually. The new cemetery, for
instance, was only so called because it had been new once.
In this red stone school, full of the modern improvements that he
detested, the old dominie whom I succeeded taught, and sometimes slept,
during the last five years of his cantankerous life. It was in a little
thatched school, consisting of but one room, that he did his best work,
some five hundred yards away from the edifice that was reared in its
stead. Now dismally fallen into disrepute, often indeed a domicile for
cattle, the ragged academy of Glen Quharity, where he held despotic sway
for nearly half a century, is falling to pieces slowly in a howe that
conceals it from the high-road. Even in its best scholastic days, when
it sent barefooted lads to college who helped to hasten the Disruption,
it was but a pile of ungainly stones, such as Scott's Black Dwarf flung
together in a night, with holes in its broken roof of thatch where
the rain trickled through, and never with less than two of its knotted
little window-panes stopped with brown paper. The twelve or twenty
pupils of both sexes who constituted the attendance sat at the two loose
desks, which never fell unless you leaned on them, with an eye on the
corner of the earthen floor where the worms came out, and on cold days
they liked the wind to turn the peat smoke into the room. One boy, who
was supposed to wash it out, got his education free for keeping the
school-house dirty, and the others paid their way with peats, which they
brought in their hands, just as wealthier school-children carry books,
and with pence which the dominie collected regularly every Monday
morning. The attendance on Monday mornings was often small.
Once a year the dominie added to his income by holding cockfights in the
old school. This was at Yule, and the same practice held in the parish
school of Thrums. It must have been a strange sight. Every male scholar
was expected to bring a cock to the school, and to pay a shilling to the
dominie for the privilege of seeing it killed there. The dominie was the
master of the sports, assisted by the neighboring farmers, some of whom
might be elders of the church. Three rounds were fought. By the end
of the first round all the cocks had fought, and the victors were then
pitted against each other. The cocks that survived the second round were
eligible for the third, and the dominie, besides his shilling, got every
cock killed. Sometimes, if all stories be true, the spectators were
fighting with each other before the third round concluded.
The glen was but sparsely dotted with houses even in those days; a
number of them inhabited by farmer-weavers, who combined two trades and
just managed to live. One would have a plough, another a horse, and so
in Glen Quharity they helped each other. Without a loom in addition
many of them would have starved, and on Saturdays the big farmer and his
wife, driving home in a gig, would pass the little farmer carrying or
wheeling his wob to Thrums. When there was no longer a market for the
produce of the hand-loom these farms had to be given up, and thus it is
that the old school is not the only house in our weary glen around which
gooseberry and currant bushes, once tended by careful hands, now grow
wild.
In heavy spates the children were conveyed to the old school, as they
are still to the new one, in carts, and between it and the dominie's
whitewashed, dwelling-house swirled in winter a torrent of water that
often carried lumps of the land along with it. This burn he had at times
to ford on stilts.
Before the Education Act passed the dominie was not much troubled by the
school inspector, who appeared in great splendor every year at Thrums.
Fifteen years ago, however, Glen Quharity resolved itself into a School
Board, and marched down the glen, with the minister at its head, to
condemn the school. When the dominie, who had heard of their design, saw
the board approaching, he sent one of his scholars, who enjoyed making
a mess of himself, wading across the burn to bring over the stilts which
were lying on the other side. The board were thus unable to send across
a spokesman, and after they had harangued the dominie, who was in the
best of tempers, from the wrong side of the stream, the siege was raised
by their returning home, this time with the minister in the rear. So far
as is known, this was the only occasion on which the dominie ever lifted
his hat to the minister. He was the Established Church minister at the
top of the glen, but the dominie was an Auld Licht, and trudged into
Thrums to church nearly every Sunday with his daughter.
The farm of Little Tilly lay so close to the dominie's house that from
one window he could see through a telescope whether the farmer was going
to church, owing to Little Tilly's habit of never shaving except with
that intention, and of always doing it at a looking-glass which he hung
on a nail in his door. The farmer was Established Church, and when the
dominie saw him in his shirt-sleeves with a razor in his hand, he called
for his black clothes. If he did not see him it is undeniable that
the dominie sent his daughter to Thrums, but remained at home himself.
Possibly, therefore, the dominie sometimes went to church, because
he did not want to give Little Tilly and the Established minister the
satisfaction of knowing that he was not devout today, and it is even
conceivable that had Little Tilly had a telescope and an intellect as
well as his neighbor, he would have spied on the dominie in return. He
sent the teacher a load of potatoes every year, and the recipient rated
him soundly if they did not turn out as well as the ones he had got the
autumn before. Little Tilly was rather in awe of the dominie, and had an
idea that he was a Freethinker, because he played the fiddle and wore a
black cap.
The dominie was a wizened-looking little man, with sharp eyes that
pierced you when they thought they were unobserved, and if any visitor
drew near who might be a member of the board, he disappeared into his
house much as a startled weasel makes for its hole. The most striking
thing about him was his walk, which to the casual observer seemed a
limp. The glen in our part is marshy, and to progress along it you have
to jump from one little island of grass or heather to another. Perhaps
it was this that made the dominie take the main road and even the
streets of Thrums in leaps, as if there were bowlders or puddles in the
way. It is, however, currently believed among those who knew him best
that he jerked himself along in that way when he applied for the vacancy
in Glen Quharity school, and that he was therefore chosen from among the
candidates by the committee of farmers, who saw that he was specially
constructed for the district.
In the spring the inspector was sent to report on the school, and, of
course, he said, with a wave of his hand, that this would never do. So
a new school was built, and the ramshackle little academy that had done
good service in its day was closed for the last time. For years it had
been without a lock; ever since a blatter of wind and rain drove the
door against the fire-place. After that it was the dominie's custom,
on seeing the room cleared, to send in a smart boy--a dux was always
chosen--who wedged a clod of earth or peat between doorpost and door.
Thus the school was locked up for the night. The boy came out by the
window, where he entered to open the door next morning. In time grass
hid the little path from view that led to the old school, and a dozen
years ago every particle of wood about the building, including the door
and the framework of the windows, had been burned by travelling tinkers.
The board would have liked to leave the dominie in his whitewashed
dwelling-house to enjoy his old age comfortably, and until he learned
that he had intended to retire. Then he changed his tactics and removed
his beard. Instead of railing at the new school, he began to approve of
it, and it soon came to the ears of the horrified Established minister,
who had a man (Established) in his eye for the appointment, that the
dominie was looking ten years younger. As he spurned a pension he had to
get the place, and then began a warfare of bickerings between the
board and him that lasted until within a few weeks of his death. In
his scholastic barn the dominie had thumped the Latin grammar into his
scholars till they became university bursars to escape him. In the new
school, with maps (which he hid in the hen-house) and every other modern
appliance for making teaching easy, he was the scandal of the glen. He
snapped at the clerk of the board's throat, and barred his door in the
minister's face. It was one of his favorite relaxations to peregrinate
the district, telling the farmers who were not on the board themselves,
but were given to gossiping with those who were, that though he could
slumber pleasantly in the school so long as the hum of the standards was
kept up, he immediately woke if it ceased.
Having settled himself in his new quarters, the dominie seems to have
read over the code and come at once to the conclusion that it would
be idle to think of straightforwardly fulfilling its requirements. The
inspector he regarded as a natural enemy, who was to be circumvented by
much guile. One year that admirable Oxford don arrived at the school, to
find that all the children, except two girls--one of whom had her face
tied up with red flannel--were away for the harvest. On another occasion
the dominie met the inspector's trap some distance from the school, and
explained that he would guide him by a short cut, leaving the driver to
take the dog-cart to a farm where it could be put up. The unsuspecting
inspector agreed, and they set off, the obsequious dominie carrying
his bag. He led his victim into another glen, the hills round which had
hidden their heads in mist, and then slyly remarked that he was
afraid they had lost their way. The minister, who liked to attend the
examination, reproved the dominie for providing no luncheon, but turned
pale when his enemy suggested that he should examine the boys in Latin.
For some reason that I could never discover, the dominie had all his
life refused to teach his scholars geography. The inspector and many
others asked him why there was no geography class, and his invariable
answer was to point to his pupils collectively, and reply in an
impressive whisper:
“They winna hae her.”
This story, too, seems to reflect against the dominie's views on
cleanliness. One examination day the minister attended to open the
inspection with prayer. Just as he was finishing, a scholar entered who
had a reputation for dirt.
“Michty!” cried a little pupil, as his opening eyes fell on the
apparition at the door, “there's Jocky Tamson wi' his face washed!”
When the dominie was a younger man he had first clashed with the
minister during Mr. Rattray's attempts to do away with some old customs
that were already dying by inches. One was the selection of a queen of
beauty from among the young women at the annual Thrums fair. The judges,
who were selected from the better-known farmers as a rule, sat at the
door of a tent that reeked of whiskey, and regarded the competitors
filing by much as they selected prize sheep, with a stolid stare. There
was much giggling and blushing on these occasions among the maidens, and
shouts from their relatives and friends to “Haud yer head up, Jean,” and
“Lat them see yer een, Jess.” The dominie enjoyed this, and was one time
chosen, a judge, when he insisted on the prize's being bestowed on
his own daughter, Marget. The other judges demurred, but the dominie
remained firm and won the day.
“She wasna the best-faured amon them,” he admitted afterward, “but a man
maun mak the maist o' his ain.”
The dominie, too, would not shake his head with Mr. Rattray over the
apple and loaf bread raffles in the smithy, nor even at the Daft Days,
the black week of glum debauch that ushered in the year, a period when
the whole countryside rumbled to the farmers' “kebec” laden cart.
For the great part of his career the dominie had not made forty pounds
a year, but he “died worth” about three hundred pounds. The moral of his
life came in just as he was leaving it, for he rose from his death-bed
to hide a whiskey-bottle from his wife.