opened out. Colzean plantations lay all along the steep shore, and there
was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the trees made a sort of
shadowy etching over the snow. The road went down and up, and past a
blacksmith's cottage that made fine music in the valley. Three
compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a cart. They were all drunk, and
asked me jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. I told them it was;
and my answer was received with unfeigned merriment. One gentleman was
so much tickled he nearly fell out of the cart; indeed, he was only
saved by a companion, who either had not so fine a sense of humour or
had drunken less.
"The toune of Mayboll," says the inimitable Abercrummie,[41] "stands
upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south.
It hath one principall street, with houses upon both sides, built of
freestone, and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles, one
at each end of this street. That on the east belongs to the Erle of
Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, which belonged sometime to the
laird of Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is adorned with a
pyremide [conical roof], and a row of ballesters round it raised from
the top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a fyne clock.
There be four lanes which pass from the principall street; one is called
the Back Vennel, which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads
to a lower street, which is far larger than the high chiefe street, and
it runs from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which there have been
many pretty buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the
countrey, who were wont to resort thither in winter, and divert
themselves in converse together at their owne houses. It was once the
principall street of the town; but many of these houses of the gentry
having been decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its ancient beautie.
Just opposite to this vennel, there is another that leads north-west,
from the chiefe street to the green, which is a pleasant plott of
ground, enclosed round with an earthen wall, wherein they were wont to
play football, but now at the Gowff and byasse-bowls. The houses of this
towne, on both sides of the street, have their several gardens belonging
to them; and in the lower street there be some pretty orchards, that
yield store of good fruit." As Patterson says, this description is near
enough even to-day, and is mighty nicely written to boot. I am bound to
add, of my own experience, that Maybole is tumble-down and dreary.
Prosperous enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and though the
population has increased, a roofless house every here and there seems to
protest the contrary. The women are more than well-favoured, and the men
fine tall fellows; but they look slipshod and dissipated. As they
slouched at street corners, or stood about gossiping in the snow, it
seemed they would have been more at home in the slums of a large city
than here in a country place betwixt a village and a town. I heard a
great deal about drinking, and a great deal about religious revivals:
two things in which the Scottish character is emphatic and most
unlovely. In particular, I heard of clergymen who were employing their
time in explaining to a delighted audience the physics of the Second
Coming. It is not very likely any of us will be asked to help. If we
were, it is likely we should receive instructions for the occasion, and
that on more reliable authority. And so I can only figure to myself a
congregation truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as one
of veteran and accomplished saints, who have fought the good fight to an
end and outlived all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as
a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect company on
earth. And yet I saw some young fellows about the smoking-room who
seemed, in the eyes of one who cannot count himself strait-laced, in
need of some more practical sort of teaching. They seemed only eager to
get drunk, and to do so speedily. It was not much more than a week after
the New Year; and to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto
unspeakable was not altogether pleasing. Here is one snatch of talk, for
the accuracy of which I can vouch--
"Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?"
"We had that!"
"I wasna able to be oot o' my bed. Man, I was awful bad on Wednesday."
"Ay, ye were gey bad."
And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual accents!
They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort of rational
pride. Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are not more boastful;
a cock does not plume himself with a more unmingled satisfaction as he
paces forth among his harem; and yet these were grown men, and by no
means short of wit. It was hard to suppose they were very eager about
the Second Coming: it seemed as if some elementary notions of temperance
for the men and seemliness for the women would have gone nearer the
mark. And yet, as it seemed to me typical of much that is evil in
Scotland, Maybole is also typical of much that is best. Some of the
factories, which have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy,
were originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the
sterling, stout old breed--fellows who made some little bit of an
invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then, step by
step, in courage, thrift, and industry, fought their way upward to an
assured position.
Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of
spelling, this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious to
withhold: "This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a Frenchman,
the 6th November 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors of the parish of
Maiyboll." The Castle deserves more notice. It is a large and shapely
tower, plain from the ground upward, but with a zone of ornamentation
running about the top. In a general way this adornment is perched on the
very summit of the chimney-stacks; but there is one corner more
elaborate than the rest. A very heavy string-course runs round the upper
story, and just above this, facing up the street, the tower carries a
small oriel window, fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone
heads. It is so ornate it has somewhat the air of a shrine. And it was,
indeed, the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it
gives light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old ballad of
"Johnnie Faa"--she who, at the call of the gipsies' songs, "came
tripping down the stair, and all her maids before her." Some people say
the ballad has no basis in fact, and have written, I believe,
unanswerable papers to the proof. But in the face of all that, the very
look of that high oriel window convinces the imagination, and we enter
into all the sorrows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive the burthen of
the long, lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick head against the
mullions, and saw the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the
children at play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray. We
conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her some
snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her eyes
overflowed at the memory of the past. And even if the tale be not true
of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is true in the
essence of all men and women: for all of us, some time or other, hear
the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour cast. Some resist and
sit resolutely by the fire. Most go and are brought back again, like
Lady Cassilis. A few, of the tribe of Waring, go and are seen no more;
only now and again, at springtime, when the gipsies' song is afloat in
the amethyst evening, we can catch their voices in the glee.
By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the day.
Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon battled the
other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying silver; the town
came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables, bestridden by smooth
white roofs, and spangled here and there with lighted windows. At either
end the snow stood high up in the darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth
and among the chimneys of the Castle. As the moon flashed a bull's-eye
glitter across the town between the racing clouds, the white roofs
leaped into relief over the gables and the chimney-stacks, and their
shadows over the white roofs. In the town itself the lit face of the
clock peered down the street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli's
bell, and from behind the red curtains of a public-house some one
trolled out--a compatriot of Burns, again!--"The saut tear blin's my
e'e."
Next morning there were sun and a flapping wind. From the street-corners
of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields. The road
underfoot was wet and heavy--part ice, part snow, part water; and any
one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with "A fine thowe" (thaw).
My way lay among rather bleak hills, and past bleak ponds and
dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the Highland-looking village of
Kirkoswald. It has little claim to notice save that Burns came there to
study surveying in the summer of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard,
the original of Tam o' Shanter sleeps his last sleep. It is worth
noticing, however, that this was the first place I thought
"Highland-looking." Over the hill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to
the coast. As I came down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed
strangely different from the day before. The cold fogs were all blown
away; and there was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and
deformed, of the Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain tops
of Arran, veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low,
blue land of Cantyre. Cottony clouds stood, in a great castle, over the
top of Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south. The sea was
bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down the Firth,
lay over at different angles in the wind. On Shanter they were ploughing
lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself, capered and whinnied as if
the spring were in him.
The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sandhills
and by wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here and there a few cottages
stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd feature, not easy to
describe in words: a triangular porch projected from above the door,
supported at the apex by a single upright post; a secondary door was
hinged to the post, and could be hasped on either cheek of the real
entrance; so, whether the wind was north or south, the cotter could make
himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish
a pipe with comfort. There is one objection to this device: for, as the
post stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head. So far as I am
aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about Girvan. And
that corner is noticeable for more reasons: it is certainly one of the
most characteristic districts in Scotland. It has this movable porch by
way of architecture; it has, as we shall see, a sort of remnant of
provincial costume, and it has the handsomest population in the
Lowlands....
FOOTNOTE:
[41] William Abercrombie. See _Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae_, under
"Maybole" (Part iii.).
VIII
FOREST NOTES
(1875-6)
ON THE PLAIN
Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of the
Gatinais, where they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here
and there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun
themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees stand together on a knoll.
The quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into
the distance; the strips blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies
forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees
or faint church-spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in
spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more
solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
it were into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow
smoking behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his
wife in their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain; these
people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as they stoop
over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time against
the golden sky.
These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of present
times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the
peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in
Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows. These very people now
weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his wife,
it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is they who
have been their country's scape-goat for long ages; they who, generation
after generation, have sowed and not reaped, reaped and another has
garnered; and who have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their
good things in their turn. For the days are gone by when the Seigneur
ruled and profited. "Le Seigneur," says the old formula, "enferme ses
manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre. Tout est a lui,
foret chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, bete au buisson,
l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule." Such was his old
state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a mere king. And now you
may ask yourself where he is, and look round for vestiges of my late
lord, and in all the country-side there is no trace of him but his
forlorn and fallen mansion. At the end of a long avenue, now sown with
grain, in the midst of a close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and
crowing chanticleers and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red
chimneys and peaked roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There
is a glad spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in
flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade; but no
spring shall revive the honour of the place. Old women of the people,
little children of the people, saunter and gambol in the walled court or
feed the ducks in the neglected moat. Plough-horses, mighty of limb,
browse in the long stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits for some
better hour. Out on the plain, where hot sweat trickles into men's eyes,
and the spade goes in deep and comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may
feel a movement of joy at his heart when he thinks that these spacious
chimneys are now cold, which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay
folk at supper, while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through
the night with empty bellies and cold feet. And perhaps, as he raises
his head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along
the sea-like level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no
unsimilar place in his affections.
If the chateau was my lord's the forest was my lord the king's; neither
of them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his meagre way
of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or for a new
roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole department, from
the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a high-born lord, down
to the common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes
or bandolier by way of uniform. For the first offence, by the Salic law,
there was a fine of fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than
once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he
might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun,
and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where
Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to
market.
And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more hares and
rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to trample it down.
My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven francs in
decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting it with a silken leash
to hang about his shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage to the
shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, or some other
holy intercessor who has made a speciality of the health of
hunting-dogs. In the grey dawn the game was turned and the branch broken
by our best piqueur. A rare day's hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly
flourish, sound the _bien-aller_ with all your lungs. Jacques must stand
by, hat in hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across
his field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not
been. If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows but he
may fall in favour with my lord; who knows but his son may become the
last and least among the servants at his lordship's kennel--one of the
two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at night among the
hounds?[42]
For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming
him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble,
when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had
been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay
overseas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the
church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a
clump of spears and fluttering pennon drawing nigh across the plain,
these good folk gat them up, with all their household gods, into the
wood, whence, from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the
coming and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but an
unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide all
change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. Often there was
none left alive, when they returned, to show the old divisions of field
from field. And yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night
into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a
company of demons like himself, even in these caves and thickets there
were glad hearts and grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may have
served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble by
old association. These woods have rung to the horns of all the kings of
France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They have seen St. Louis
exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt; Francis I. go
a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train; and Peter of Russia
following his first stag. And so they are still haunted for the
imagination by royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with the faces
of memorable men of yore. And this distinction is not only in virtue of
the pastime of dead monarchs. Great events, great revolutions, great
cycles in the affairs of men, have here left their note, here taken
shape in some significant and dramatic situation. It was hence that
Guise and his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here,
booted and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met the
Pope beside a woodland cross. Here, on his way to Elba, not so long
after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words of
passionate farewell to his soldiers. And here, after Waterloo, rather
than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful regiments
burned that memorial of so much toil and glory on the Grand Master's
table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout priest consumes the
remnants of the Host.
IN THE SEASON
Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
_bornage_ stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain small
and very quiet village. There is but one street, and that, not long ago,
was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between the doorsteps. As you
go up this street, drawing ever nearer the beginning of the wood, you
will arrive at last before an inn where artists lodge. To the door (for
I imagine it to be six o'clock on some fine summer's even), half a
dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have brought out chairs, and now
sit sunning themselves and waiting the omnibus from Melun. If you go on
into the court you will find as many more, some in the billiard-room
over absinthe and a match of corks, some without over a last cigar and a
vermouth. The doves coo and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense is
drawing water from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court,
you can see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and
some idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes,
jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-manger.
"_Edmond, encore un vermouth_," cries a man in velveteen, adding in a
tone of apologetic after-thought, "_un double, s'il vous plait_." "Where
are you working?" asks one in pure white linen from top to toe. "At the
Garrefour de l'Epine," returns the other in corduroy (they are all
gaitered, by the way). "I couldn't do a thing to it. I ran out of white.
Where were you?" "I wasn't working. I was looking for motives." Here is
an outbreak of jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together about
some new-comer with outstretched hands; perhaps the "correspondence" has
come in and brought So-and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only
So-and-so who has walked over from Chailly to dinner.
"_A table, Messieurs!_" cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the
first tureen of soup. And immediately the company begins to settle down
about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round with sketches
of all degrees of merit and demerit. There's the big picture of the
huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his legs, and his
legs--well, his legs in stockings. And here is the little picture of a
raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a hole last summer with no
worse a missile than a plum from the dessert. And under all these works
of art so much eating goes forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering
in French and English, that it would do your heart good merely to peep
and listen at the door. One man is telling how they all went last year
to the fete at Fleury, and another how well So-and-so would sing of an
evening; and here are a third and fourth making plans for the whole
future of their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjuror making
faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most difficult and
admirable! A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and resigns
himself to digestion. A seventh has just dropped in, and calls for
soup. Number eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is once more
trampling the poor piano under powerful and uncertain fingers.