ANSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the Muse; she inspired (really to a
considerable extent) Tennant’s vernacular poem _Anst’er Fair_; and I have
there waited upon her myself with much devotion. This was when I came as
a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the
breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had
already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of
words and the appearances of life; and _travellers_, and _headers_, and
_rubble_, and _polished ashlar_, and _pierres perdues_, and even the
thrilling question of the _string-course_, interested me only (if they
interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words
to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is the compensation
of years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days, though I haunted the
breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the sunshine,
the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green
glimmer of the divers’ helmets far below, and the musical chinking of the
masons, my one genuine preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry
was in the hours when I was not on duty. I lodged with a certain Bailie
Brown, a carpenter by trade; and there, as soon as dinner was despatched,
in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the table
and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such
intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with
wonder. Then it was that I wrote _Voces Fidelium_, a series of dramatic
monologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of a covenanting
novel—like so many others, never finished. Late I sat into the night,
toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a
memory behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside the curtain of the years,
to hail that poor feverish idiot, to bid him go to bed and clap _Voces
Fidelium_ on the fire before he goes; so clear does he appear before me,
sitting there between his candles in the rose-scented room and the late
night; so ridiculous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the fool
present! But he was driven to his bed at last without miraculous
intervention; and the manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this
eminently youthful business. The weather was then so warm that I must
keep the windows open; the night without was populous with moths. As the
late darkness deepened, my literary tapers beaconed forth more brightly;
thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers, to gyrate for one
brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies upon my paper.
Flesh and blood could not endure the spectacle; to capture immortality
was doubtless a noble enterprise, but not to capture it at such a cost of
suffering; and out would go the candles, and off would I go to bed in the
darkness raging to think that the blow might fall on the morrow, and
there was _Voces Fidelium_ still incomplete. Well, the moths are—all
gone, and _Voces Fidelium_ along with them; only the fool is still on
hand and practises new follies.
Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that was
the diving, an experience I burned to taste of. But this was not to be,
at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a change of scene to the
sub-arctic town of Wick. You can never have dwelt in a country more
unsightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly swelling, faintly
falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by single slate
stones set upon their edge, the wind always singing in your ears and
(down the long road that led nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires.
Only as you approached the coast was there anything to stir the heart.
The plateau broke down to the North Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall
out-stacks rose like pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were
over-brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds screamed, the wind sang
in the thyme on the cliff’s edge; here and there, small ancient castles
toppled on the brim; here and there, it was possible to dip into a dell
of shelter, where you might lie and tell yourself you were a little warm,
and hear (near at hand) the whin-pods bursting in the afternoon sun, and
(farther off) the rumour of the turbulent sea. As for Wick itself, it is
one of the meanest of man’s towns, and situate certainly on the baldest
of God’s bays. It lives for herring, and a strange sight it is to see
(of an afternoon) the heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking
fishers, as when a city crowds to a review—or, as when bees have swarmed,
the ground is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and
a beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon, the
sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one after
another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk. This mass of
fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all proportion to the town
itself; and the oars are manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from
the Long Island (as we call the outer Hebrides), who come for that season
only, and depart again, if “the take” be poor, leaving debts behind them.
In a bad year, the end of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting
time; fights are common, riots often possible; an apple knocked from a
child’s hand was once the signal for something like a war; and even when
I was there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities. To
contrary interests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is here
added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caithness has adopted English;
an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen by
descent. I remember seeing one of the strongest instances of this
division: a thing like a Punch-and-Judy box erected on the flat
grave-stones of the churchyard; from the hutch or proscenium—I know not
what to call it—an eldritch-looking preacher laying down the law in
Gaelic about some one of the name of _Powl_, whom I at last divined to be
the apostle to the Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews men very
devoutly listening; and on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town’s
children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely
playing tigg. The same descent, the same country, the same narrow sect
of the same religion, and all these bonds made very largely nugatory by
an accidental difference of dialect!
Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished
breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like frames of
churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, the divers
toiling unseen on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the
assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between wind
and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time, a
mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder.
Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at Wick was in the year of
_Voces Fidelium_ and the rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown’s; and already I
did not care two straws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhaps
requires an atmosphere of roses; and the more rugged excitant of Wick
east winds had made another boy of me. To go down in the diving-dress,
that was my absorbing fancy; and with the countenance of a certain
handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.
It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out
in the open there were “skipper’s daughters,” when I found myself at last
on the diver’s platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and my
whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One
moment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head; the next,
I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As that
intolerable burthern was laid upon me, I could have found it in my heart
(only for shame’s sake) to cry off from the whole enterprise. But it was
too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the air to
whistle through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window of the
vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing there
in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature deaf and
dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of his own.
Except that I could move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a
catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation; the
weights were hung upon my back and breast, the signal rope was thrust
into my unresisting hand; and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the
ladder, I began ponderously to descend.
Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw
a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around,
except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green
gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds
lower, I stepped off on the _pierres perdues_ of the foundation; a dumb
helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of
encouragement; and looking in at the creature’s window, I beheld the face
of Bain. There we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) eye to
eye; and either might have burst himself with shouting, and not a whisper
come to his companion’s hearing. Each, in his own little world of air,
stood incommunicably separate.
Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes’ drama at the
bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He
was down with another, settling a stone of the sea-wall. They had it
well adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone
set home; and it was time to turn to something else. But still his
companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or only
raised himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs unknown to
the vocabulary of the diver. There, then, these two stood for awhile,
like the dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate thought into
Bob’s mind, and he stooped, peered through the window of that other
world, and beheld the face of its inhabitant wet with streaming tears.
Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob, glancing downward, saw what was the
trouble: the block had been lowered on the foot of that unfortunate—he
was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under fifteen tons of rock.
That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the
scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert. These must bear in mind
the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising results of
transplantation to that medium. To understand a little what these are,
and how a man’s weight, so far from being an encumbrance, is the very
ground of his agility, was the chief lesson of my submarine experience.
The knowledge came upon me by degrees. As I began to go forward with the
hand of my estranged companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible,
pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging: overhead, a flat roof of
green: a little in front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart. And
presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a stone; I
looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only signed to me
the more imperiously. Now the block stood six feet high; it would have
been quite a leap to me unencumbered; with the breast and back weights,
and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and the staggering load of the
helmet, the thing was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb; and to
prove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes.
Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As high as to
the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight. Even
when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued
their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must
be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and
propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow. Yet a little
higher on the foundation, and we began to be affected by the bottom of
the swell, running there like a strong breeze of wind. Or so I must
suppose; for, safe in my cushion of air, I was conscious of no impact;
only swayed idly like a weed, and was now borne helplessly abroad, and
now swiftly—and yet with dream-like gentleness—impelled against my guide.
So does a child’s balloon divagate upon the currents of the air, and
touch, and slide off again from every obstacle. So must have
ineffectually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those light crowds
that followed the Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices in the land
beyond Cocytus.
There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely
wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return to
infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your
feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied
to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes
and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown
so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons-although
I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed,
and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here
and there about me, swift as humming-birds—yet I fancy I was rather
relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and
signed to me to mount. And there was one more experience before me even
then. Of a sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell.
Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine
light—the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of
crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a
Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, and a whistling wind.
Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I
desired. It was one of the best things I got from my education as an
engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with
sympathy. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about
harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to
wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it
supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his
ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one)
for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries
him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet
thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a
memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining
pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of
drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive
figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of
genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for
the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.
Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it was to
hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain among the
roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat coiling a wet rope and
shouting orders—not always very wise—than to be warm and dry, and dull,
and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself had in
those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it
much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate
times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone
from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women tending
their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse
potations; and where, in winter gales, the surf would beleaguer them
closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller to-day upon the Thurso
coach would scarce observe a little cloud of smoke among the moorlands,
and be told, quite openly, it marked a private still. He would not
indeed make that journey, for there is now no Thurso coach. And even if
he could, one little thing that happened to me could never happen to him,
or not with the same trenchancy of contrast.
We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top was crowded with
Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in my
ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moorish country very
northern to behold. Latish at night, though it was still broad day in
our subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores of the roaring
Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet
Head ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white town of Castleton,
its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands,
the great deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. And here, in
the last imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish voices and a
chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the coach with its
load of Hebridean fishers—as they had pursued _vetturini_ up the passes
of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil’s tomb—two
little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen
years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of white
mice. The coach passed on, and their small Italian chatter died in the
distance; and I was left to marvel how they had wandered into that
country, and how they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when
(if ever) they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the
olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres.
Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost.
For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find some alien
camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican half-blood, the
negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and far among the
mountains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country such as mine, the
days of immigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was at
that time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hard upon the
shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a land of moors where
no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an
antiquary to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians
struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather
or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to
their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on
the Fair Isle.
VII
THE LANTERN-BEARERS
I
THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly
fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of
existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion
of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of,
them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the
kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little
gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and
fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial
smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners; shops
with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks
(that remarkable cigar) and the _London Journal_, dear to me for its
startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names:
such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town.
These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and
sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to lodge in with their
subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a
haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray islets: to
the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes,
alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of
seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and
ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between—now charmed into
sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting
surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and
southernwood, the air at the cliff’s edge brisk and clean and pungent of
the sea—in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful
bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its
summit like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard
was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye of fancy,
still flew the colours of King James; and in the ear of fancy the arches
of Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands
of Bell-the-Cat.
There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that
part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you wanted;
but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in
the Lady’s Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by
the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side
with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for
life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even
common for the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single
penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew
the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing
parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of little
anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other’s heads, to the to the
much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill
recrimination—shrill as the geese themselves. Indeed, had that been all,
you might have done this often; but though fishing be a fine pastime, the
podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a
point of honour that a boy should eat all that he had taken. Or again,
you might climb the Law, where the whale’s jawbone stood landmark in the
buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke and
spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships. You might bathe,
now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer,
now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide, your
clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, the froth
of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees.
Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs,
when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following
my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the
wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the
sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide and the
menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word
that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house
under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and
cooking apples there—if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose
the merchant must have played us off with some inferior and quite local
fruit capable of resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand
and smoke and iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on
sandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the
crumbling turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans {141} (the
worst, I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that
had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east
wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among its
bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.
There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of
the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and
of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and
beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound
in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody—horror!—the
fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts,
and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged
in the little old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died
there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been
tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard that,
after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on
her cart in the scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a
certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark old woman
continued to dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old woman
conceived a hatred to myself and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour
of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window
in that house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a
marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins
that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall
with a more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation,
the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of
rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour
mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any
east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head,
where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and husband and
sons—their whole wealth and their whole family—engulfed under their eyes;
and (what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an
unfortunate homeward, and she squalling and battling in their midst, a
figure scarcely human, a tragic Mænad.
These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory dwells
upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a sport
peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months’
holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys
and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so
that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun
and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the
Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may still flourish in
its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to
introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm being
quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.