MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the
first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are
more often agreeably exciting. Misery—or at least misery unrelieved—is
confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the “dreadful
looking-for” of departure; when the old life is running to an end, and
the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun: and to the pain of
an imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious
pre-existence. The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of
semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the
thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field—what a
sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar
circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems
to him, but from without. I was proud and glad to go to school; had I
been let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but there was around
me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: “Poor little boy,
he is going away—unkind little boy, he is going to leave us”; so the
unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach. And
at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a place
where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn and
generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I saw—the long
empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon the hill, the
woody hillside garden—a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart
died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of miserable
sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with consolations—we
two were alone in all that was visible of the London Road: two poor waifs
who had each tasted sorrow—and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled
for his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly eyes.
For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the story of
my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and the
reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It was
judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway, some change of
scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was
visiting the harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided he should
take me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first
professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man,
without the help of petticoats.
The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious
on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and
Tay. It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the
rest, from the windows of my father’s house) dying away into the distance
and the easterly _haar_ with one smoky seaside town beyond another, or in
winter printing on the gray heaven some glittering hill-tops. It has no
beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory;
trees very rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of
rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to the
eye. It is of the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden of Eden.
History broods over that part of the world like the easterly _haar_.
Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an
old and settled race. Of these little towns, posted along the shore as
close as sedges, each with its bit of harbour, its old weather-beaten
church or public building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying
fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose
royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the
blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith;
Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle
where the “bonny face was spoiled”; Burntisland where, when Paul Jones
was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between
tidemarks, and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his
voice and his broad lowland dialect; Kinghorn, where Alexander “brak’s
neckbane” and left Scotland to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the
witches once prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners
in the North Sea; Dysart, famous—well famous at least to me for the Dutch
ships that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers
and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one particular
Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop,
smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted
caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed
a night of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place,
sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall
figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr.
Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers
from Meerut clattered and cried “Deen Deen” along the streets of the
imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the
magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps
already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven,
Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town
of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So
on, the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader
will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and
Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where
Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to the
heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted elders
and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach
or the quiescence of the deep—the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front,
and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the
one hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off
yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb’s. And but a
little way round the corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea,
stands the gem of the province and the light of mediæval Scotland, St.
Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world,
and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox’s
jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this
day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the professor is not
hushed.
Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a bleak
easterly morning. There was a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I
recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes
raise their voices to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance,
that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an ineffectual seat of learning,
and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its
drowsy classrooms and confound the utterance of the professor, until
teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull
beats on the windows and the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages
of the open lecture. But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews
in general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang; who has
written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with his
incommunicable humour, and long ago in one of his best poems, with grace,
and local truth, and a note of unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all
about the romance, I say, and the educational advantages, but I doubt if
he had turned his attention to the harbour lights; and it may be news
even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. Hanging
about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no
doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy
of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more
important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: “It is
the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of
this kind with any of the keepers, and when I come to the Light House,
instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbation and
welcome their Family, it is distressing when one-is obliged to put on a
most angry countenance and demeanour.” This painful obligation has been
hereditary in my race. I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and
unauthorised inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper
on the question of storm-panes; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach,
when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin for his
infant child; and then regained my equanimity with the thought that I had
done the man a service, and when the proper inspector came, he would be
readier with his panes. The human race is perhaps credited with more
duplicity than it deserves. The visitation of a lighthouse at least is a
business of the most transparent nature. As soon as the boat grates on
the shore, and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the
very slouch of the fellows’ shoulders tells their story, and the engineer
may begin at once to assume his “angry countenance.” Certainly the brass
of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate,
certainly all will be to match—the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp
unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a light is not rather
more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in
literature) appears to be unattainable by man. But of course the
unfortunate of St. Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the
Service, he had no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his
trade and stood (in the mediæval phrase) quite out of the danger of my
father; but he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired
extremely.
From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir. My father had announced we
were “to post,” and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of
top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson’s _Dance of Death_; but it was
only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a
thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of
Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that drive.
It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do
I remember any single trait. The fact has not been suffered to encroach
on the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred
years ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate’s
carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in pursuit,
Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has
ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that
questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of
the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the
live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe’s ’bacco-box, thus clearly
indicating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because, as it was after
all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and
afforded a grateful relief from _Ministering Children_ or the _Memoirs of
Mrs. Kathatine Winslowe_. The figure that always fixed my attention is
that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak about
his mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly,
revolving privately a case of conscience. He would take no hand in the
deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and “that
action” must be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive; on the
other hand, “that action,” in itself, was highly justified, he had cast
in his lot with “the actors,” and he must stay there, inactive but
publicly sharing the responsibility. “You are a gentleman—you will
protect me!” cried the wounded old man, crawling towards him. “I will
never lay a hand on you,” said Hackston, and put his cloak about his
mouth. It is an old temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and see
the face—to open that bosom and to read the heart. With incomplete
romances about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered. I read
him up in every printed book that I could lay my hands on. I even dug
among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the very room where
my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly conscious of
my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more gifted
students. All was vain: that he had passed a riotous nonage, that he was
a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared with his grotesque
companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution and even of military
common sense, and that he figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir,
so much and no more could I make out. But whenever I cast my eyes
backward, it is to see him like a landmark on the plains of history,
sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How small a thing
creates an immortality! I do not think he can have been a man entirely
commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or had the
witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not thus have haunted
the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would scarce delay me for a
paragraph. An incident, at once romantic and dramatic, which at once
awakes the judgment and makes a picture for the eye, how little do we
realise its perdurable power! Perhaps no one does so but the author,
just as none but he appreciates the influence of jingling words; so that
he looks on upon life, with something of a covert smile, seeing people
led by what they fancy to be thoughts and what are really the accustomed
artifices of his own trade, or roused by what they take to be principles
and are really picturesque effects. In a pleasant book about a
school-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote.
A “Philosophical Society” was formed by some Academy boys—among them,
Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew Wilson, the
Christian Buddhist and author of _The Abode of Snow_. Before these
learned pundits, one member laid the following ingenious problem: “What
would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in a pot of porter?”
“I should think there would be a number of interesting bi-products,” said
a smatterer at my elbow; but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and
stands as a type of much that is most human. For this inquirer who
conceived himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really
immersed in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his
own recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature.
Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t—that was his
idea, poor little boy! So with politics and that which excites men in
the present, so with history and that which rouses them in the past:
there lie at the root of what appears, most serious unsuspected elements.
The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke,
all three Royal Burghs—or two Royal Burghs and a less distinguished
suburb, I forget which—lies continuously along the seaside, and boasts of
either two or three separate parish churches, and either two or three
separate harbours. These ambiguities are painful; but the fact is
(although it argue me uncultured), I am but poorly posted upon
Cellardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers. A tricklet of a
stream divides them, spanned by a bridge; and over the bridge at the time
of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the west.
This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his fond
tenancy, he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I remember
rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and pictures, and snatches
of verse in the vein of _exegi monumentum_; shells and pebbles, artfully
contrasted and conjoined, had been his medium; and I like to think of him
standing back upon the bridge, when all was finished, drinking in the
general effect and (like Gibbon) already lamenting his employment.
The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century. Mr.
Thomson, the “curat” of Anstruther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious to
the devout: in the first place, because he was a “curat”; in the second
place, because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life; and in
the third place, because he was generally suspected of dealings with the
Enemy of Man. These three disqualifications, in the popular literature
of the time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing
quite by itself, and in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment. He had
been at a friend’s house in Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere, I
suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put the thing in our
cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of _delirium
tremens_. It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie came carrying a
lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they went down the street of
Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a bit in the child’s hand, the
barred lustre tossing up and down along the front of slumbering houses,
and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance)
easy in his mind. The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as
I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless fear and
looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister’s strange
behaviour, started also; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and for
the space of a moment the lights and the shadows would be all confounded.
Then it was that to the unhinged toper and the twittering child, a huge
bulk of blackness seemed to sweep down, to pass them close by as they
stood upon the bridge, and to vanish on the farther side in the general
darkness of the night. “Plainly the devil come for Mr. Thomson!” thought
the child. What Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no ground of
knowledge; but he fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge like a
man praying. On the rest of the journey to the manse, history is silent;
but when they came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lantern from
the child, looked upon her with so lost a countenance that her little
courage died within her, and she fled home screaming to her parents. Not
a soul would venture out; all that night, the minister dwelt alone with
his terrors in the manse; and when the day dawned, and men made bold to
go about the streets, they found the devil had come indeed for Mr.
Thomson.
This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful
association. It was early in the morning, about a century before the
days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out of bed to
welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, just landed in
the harbour underneath. But sure there was never seen a more decayed
grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a stranger place of
exile. Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there lies a certain isle;
on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other the North Sea, bombard its
pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and their
families herd in its few huts; in the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood
stand for monuments; there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot.
_Belle-Isle-en-Mer_—Fair-Isle-at-Sea—that is a name that has always rung
in my mind’s ear like music; but the only “Fair Isle” on which I ever set
my foot, was this unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine sierras.
Here, when his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here
for long months he and certain of his men were harboured; and it was from
this durance that he landed at last to be welcomed (as well as such a
papist deserved, no doubt) by the godly incumbent of Anstruther Easter;
and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city must that have appeared! and
after the island diet, what a hospitable spot the minister’s table! And
yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his outlandish hosts. For
to this day there still survives a relic of the long winter evenings when
the sailors of the great Armada crouched about the hearths of the
Fair-Islanders, the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps lighting up
the scene, and the gale and the surf that beat about the coast
contributing their melancholy voices. All the folk of the north isles
are great artificers of knitting: the Fair-Islanders alone dye their
fabrics in the Spanish manner. To this day, gloves and nightcaps,
innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in the Shetland warehouse at
Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself in the catechist’s house; and to
this day, they tell the story of the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s adventure.
It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for “persons of
quality.” When I landed there myself, an elderly gentleman, unshaved,
poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, was seen walking to and
fro, with a book in his hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to our
arrival, which we thought a strange thing in itself; but when one of the
officers of the _Pharos_, passing narrowly by him, observed his book to
be a Greek Testament, our wonder and interest took a higher flight. The
catechist was cross-examined; he said the gentleman had been put across
some time before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh’s schooner, the only link
between the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he held
services and was doing “good.” So much came glibly enough; but when
pressed a little farther, the catechist displayed embarrassment. A
singular diffidence appeared upon his face: “They tell me,” said he, in
low tones, “that he’s a lord.” And a lord he was; a peer of the realm
pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek Testament, and his plaid
about his shoulders, set upon doing good, as he understood it, worthy
man! And his grandson, a good-looking little boy, much better dressed
than the lordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken English accent
very foreign to the scene, accompanied me for a while in my exploration
of the island. I suppose this little fellow is now my lord, and wonder
how much he remembers of the Fair Isle. Perhaps not much; for he seemed
to accept very quietly his savage situation; and under such guidance, it
is like that this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.
VI
RANDOM MEMORIES