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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Margaret Ogilvy, by J. M. Barrie
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Margaret Ogilvy
by her son
Author: J. M. Barrie
Release Date: October 21, 2010 [eBook #342]
First Posted: October 23, 1995
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGARET OGILVY***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1897 Chatto & Windus edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p0ab.jpg">
<img alt=
"Picture of Margaret Ogilvy"
title=
"Picture of Margaret Ogilvy"
src="images/p0as.jpg" />
</a></p>
<h1>MARGARET OGILVY</h1>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">by her
son</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">J. M. BARRIE</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p0bb.jpg">
<img alt=
"Graphic"
title=
"Graphic"
src="images/p0bs.jpg" />
</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><i>Second Edition</i><br />
<i>Completing Twentieth Thousand</i></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span
class="smcap">london</span><br />
HODDER AND STOUGHTON<br />
27 paternoster row<br />
1897</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">to</span><br />
<span class="smcap">the memory of</span><br />
<span class="smcap">my sister</span><br />
<span class="smcap">Jane Ann</span></p>
<h2>CHAPTER I—HOW MY MOTHER GOT HER SOFT FACE</h2>
<p>On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and
in our little house it was an event, the first great victory in a
woman’s long campaign; how they had been laboured for, the
pound-note and the thirty threepenny-bits they cost, what anxiety
there was about the purchase, the show they made in possession of
the west room, my father’s unnatural coolness when he
brought them in (but his face was white)—I so often heard
the tale afterwards, and shared as boy and man in so many similar
triumphs, that the coming of the chairs seems to be something I
remember, as if I had jumped out of bed on that first day, and
run ben to see how they looked. I am sure my mother’s
feet were ettling to be ben long before they could be trusted,
and that the moment after she was left alone with me she was
discovered barefooted in the west room, doctoring a scar (which
she had been the first to detect) on one of the chairs, or
sitting on them regally, or withdrawing and re-opening the door
suddenly to take the six by surprise. And then, I think, a
shawl was flung over her (it is strange to me to think it was not
I who ran after her with the shawl), and she was escorted sternly
back to bed and reminded that she had promised not to budge, to
which her reply was probably that she had been gone but an
instant, and the implication that therefore she had not been gone
at all. Thus was one little bit of her revealed to me at
once: I wonder if I took note of it. Neighbours came in to
see the boy and the chairs. I wonder if she deceived me
when she affected to think that there were others like us, or
whether I saw through her from the first, she was so easily seen
through. When she seemed to agree with them that it would
be impossible to give me a college education, was I so easily
taken in, or did I know already what ambitions burned behind that
dear face? when they spoke of the chairs as the goal quickly
reached, was I such a newcomer that her timid lips must say
‘They are but a beginning’ before I heard the
words? And when we were left together, did I laugh at the
great things that were in her mind, or had she to whisper them to
me first, and then did I put my arm round her and tell her that I
would help? Thus it was for such a long time: it is strange
to me to feel that it was not so from the beginning.</p>
<p>It is all guess-work for six years, and she whom I see in them
is the woman who came suddenly into view when they were at an
end. Her timid lips I have said, but they were not timid
then, and when I knew her the timid lips had come. The soft
face—they say the face was not so soft then. The
shawl that was flung over her—we had not begun to hunt her
with a shawl, nor to make our bodies a screen between her and the
draughts, nor to creep into her room a score of times in the
night to stand looking at her as she slept. We did not see
her becoming little then, nor sharply turn our heads when she
said wonderingly how small her arms had grown. In her
happiest moments—and never was a happier woman—her
mouth did not of a sudden begin to twitch, and tears to lie on
the mute blue eyes in which I have read all I know and would ever
care to write. For when you looked into my mother’s
eyes you knew, as if He had told you, why God sent her into the
world—it was to open the minds of all who looked to
beautiful thoughts. And that is the beginning and end of
literature. Those eyes that I cannot see until I was six
years old have guided me through life, and I pray God they may
remain my only earthly judge to the last. They were never
more my guide than when I helped to put her to earth, not
whimpering because my mother had been taken away after
seventy-six glorious years of life, but exulting in her even at
the grave.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>She had a son who was far away at school. I remember
very little about him, only that he was a merry-faced boy who ran
like a squirrel up a tree and shook the cherries into my
lap. When he was thirteen and I was half his age the
terrible news came, and I have been told the face of my mother
was awful in its calmness as she set off to get between Death and
her boy. We trooped with her down the brae to the wooden
station, and I think I was envying her the journey in the
mysterious wagons; I know we played around her, proud of our
right to be there, but I do not recall it, I only speak from
hearsay. Her ticket was taken, she had bidden us good-bye
with that fighting face which I cannot see, and then my father
came out of the telegraph-office and said huskily,
‘He’s gone!’ Then we turned very quietly
and went home again up the little brae. But I speak from
hearsay no longer; I knew my mother for ever now.</p>
<p>That is how she got her soft face and her pathetic ways and
her large charity, and why other mothers ran to her when they had
lost a child. ‘Dinna greet, poor Janet,’ she
would say to them; and they would answer, ‘Ah, Margaret,
but you’re greeting yoursel.’ Margaret Ogilvy
had been her maiden name, and after the Scotch custom she was
still Margaret Ogilvy to her old friends. Margaret Ogilvy I
loved to name her. Often when I was a boy, ‘Margaret
Ogilvy, are you there?’ I would call up the
stair.</p>
<p>She was always delicate from that hour, and for many months
she was very ill. I have heard that the first thing she
expressed a wish to see was the christening robe, and she looked
long at it and then turned her face to the wall. That was
what made me as a boy think of it always as the robe in which he
was christened, but I knew later that we had all been christened
in it, from the oldest of the family to the youngest, between
whom stood twenty years. Hundreds of other children were
christened in it also, such robes being then a rare possession,
and the lending of ours among my mother’s glories. It
was carried carefully from house to house, as if it were itself a
child; my mother made much of it, smoothed it out, petted it,
smiled to it before putting it into the arms of those to whom it
was being lent; she was in our pew to see it borne magnificently
(something inside it now) down the aisle to the pulpit-side, when
a stir of expectancy went through the church and we kicked each
other’s feet beneath the book-board but were reverent in
the face; and however the child might behave, laughing brazenly
or skirling to its mother’s shame, and whatever the father
as he held it up might do, look doited probably and bow at the
wrong time, the christening robe of long experience helped them
through. And when it was brought back to her she took it in
her arms as softly as if it might be asleep, and unconsciously
pressed it to her breast: there was never anything in the house
that spoke to her quite so eloquently as that little white robe;
it was the one of her children that always remained a baby.
And she had not made it herself, which was the most wonderful
thing about it to me, for she seemed to have made all other
things. All the clothes in the house were of her making,
and you don’t know her in the least if you think they were
out of the fashion; she turned them and made them new again, she
beat them and made them new again, and then she coaxed them into
being new again just for the last time, she let them out and took
them in and put on new braid, and added a piece up the back, and
thus they passed from one member of the family to another until
they reached the youngest, and even when we were done with them
they reappeared as something else. In the fashion! I
must come back to this. Never was a woman with such an eye
for it. She had no fashion-plates; she did not need
them. The minister’s wife (a cloak), the
banker’s daughters (the new sleeve)—they had but to
pass our window once, and the scalp, so to speak, was in my
mother’s hands. Observe her rushing, scissors in
hand, thread in mouth, to the drawers where her daughters’
Sabbath clothes were kept. Or go to church next Sunday, and
watch a certain family filing in, the boy lifting his legs high
to show off his new boots, but all the others demure, especially
the timid, unobservant-looking little woman in the rear of
them. If you were the minister’s wife that day or the
banker’s daughters you would have got a shock. But
she bought the christening robe, and when I used to ask why, she
would beam and look conscious, and say she wanted to be
extravagant once. And she told me, still smiling, that the
more a woman was given to stitching and making things for
herself, the greater was her passionate desire now and again to
rush to the shops and ‘be foolish.’ The
christening robe with its pathetic frills is over half a century
old now, and has begun to droop a little, like a daisy whose time
is past; but it is as fondly kept together as ever: I saw it in
use again only the other day.</p>
<p>My mother lay in bed with the christening robe beside her, and
I peeped in many times at the door and then went to the stair and
sat on it and sobbed. I know not if it was that first day,
or many days afterwards, that there came to me, my sister, the
daughter my mother loved the best; yes, more I am sure even than
she loved me, whose great glory she has been since I was six
years old. This sister, who was then passing out of her
‘teens, came to me with a very anxious face and wringing
her hands, and she told me to go ben to my mother and say to her
that she still had another boy. I went ben excitedly, but
the room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound
come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I
suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, for after
a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless
before say, ‘Is that you?’ I think the tone
hurt me, for I made no answer, and then the voice said more
anxiously ‘Is that you?’ again. I thought it
was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little
lonely voice, ‘No, it’s no him, it’s just
me.’ Then I heard a cry, and my mother turned in bed,
and though it was dark I knew that she was holding out her
arms.</p>
<p>After that I sat a great deal in her bed trying to make her
forget him, which was my crafty way of playing physician, and if
I saw any one out of doors do something that made the others
laugh I immediately hastened to that dark room and did it before
her. I suppose I was an odd little figure; I have been told
that my anxiety to brighten her gave my face a strained look and
put a tremor into the joke (I would stand on my head in the bed,
my feet against the wall, and then cry excitedly, ‘Are you
laughing, mother?’)—and perhaps what made her laugh
was something I was unconscious of, but she did laugh suddenly
now and then, whereupon I screamed exultantly to that dear
sister, who was ever in waiting, to come and see the sight, but
by the time she came the soft face was wet again. Thus I
was deprived of some of my glory, and I remember once only making
her laugh before witnesses. I kept a record of her laughs
on a piece of paper, a stroke for each, and it was my custom to
show this proudly to the doctor every morning. There were
five strokes the first time I slipped it into his hand, and when
their meaning was explained to him he laughed so boisterously,
that I cried, ‘I wish that was one of hers!’
Then he was sympathetic, and asked me if my mother had seen the
paper yet, and when I shook my head he said that if I showed it
to her now and told her that these were her five laughs he
thought I might win another. I had less confidence, but he
was the mysterious man whom you ran for in the dead of night (you
flung sand at his window to waken him, and if it was only
toothache he extracted the tooth through the open window, but
when it was something sterner he was with you in the dark square
at once, like a man who slept in his topcoat), so I did as he
bade me, and not only did she laugh then but again when I put the
laugh down, so that though it was really one laugh with a tear in
the middle I counted it as two.</p>
<p>It was doubtless that same sister who told me not to sulk when
my mother lay thinking of him, but to try instead to get her to
talk about him. I did not see how this could make her the
merry mother she used to be, but I was told that if I could not
do it nobody could, and this made me eager to begin. At
first, they say, I was often jealous, stopping her fond memories
with the cry, ‘Do you mind nothing about me?’ but
that did not last; its place was taken by an intense desire
(again, I think, my sister must have breathed it into life) to
become so like him that even my mother should not see the
difference, and many and artful were the questions I put to that
end. Then I practised in secret, but after a whole week had
passed I was still rather like myself. He had such a cheery
way of whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her
at her work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood
with his legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his
knickerbockers. I decided to trust to this, so one day
after I had learned his whistle (every boy of enterprise invents
a whistle of his own) from boys who had been his comrades, I
secretly put on a suit of his clothes, dark grey they were, with
little spots, and they fitted me many years afterwards, and thus
disguised I slipped, unknown to the others, into my
mother’s room. Quaking, I doubt not, yet so pleased,
I stood still until she saw me, and then—how it must have
hurt her! ‘Listen!’ I cried in a glow of
triumph, and I stretched my legs wide apart and plunged my hands
into the pockets of my knickerbockers, and began to whistle.</p>
<p>She lived twenty-nine years after his death, such active years
until toward the end, that you never knew where she was unless
you took hold of her, and though she was frail henceforth and
ever growing frailer, her housekeeping again became famous, so
that brides called as a matter of course to watch her
ca’ming and sanding and stitching: there are old people
still, one or two, to tell with wonder in their eyes how she
could bake twenty-four bannocks in the hour, and not a chip in
one of them. And how many she gave away, how much she gave
away of all she had, and what pretty ways she had of giving
it! Her face beamed and rippled with mirth as before, and
her laugh that I had tried so hard to force came running home
again. I have heard no such laugh as hers save from merry
children; the laughter of most of us ages, and wears out with the
body, but hers remained gleeful to the last, as if it were born
afresh every morning. There was always something of the
child in her, and her laugh was its voice, as eloquent of the
past to me as was the christening robe to her. But I had
not made her forget the bit of her that was dead; in those
nine-and-twenty years he was not removed one day farther from
her. Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and even
while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come
back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that
she started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said
slowly, ‘My David’s dead!’ or perhaps he
remained long enough to whisper why he must leave her now, and
then she lay silent with filmy eyes. When I became a man
and he was still a boy of thirteen, I wrote a little paper called
‘Dead this Twenty Years,’ which was about a similar
tragedy in another woman’s life, and it is the only thing I
have written that she never spoke about, not even to that
daughter she loved the best. No one ever spoke of it to
her, or asked her if she had read it: one does not ask a mother
if she knows that there is a little coffin in the house.
She read many times the book in which it is printed, but when she
came to that chapter she would put her hands to her heart or even
over her ears.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER II—WHAT SHE HAD BEEN</h2>
<p>What she had been, what I should be, these were the two great
subjects between us in my boyhood, and while we discussed the one
we were deciding the other, though neither of us knew it.</p>
<p>Before I reached my tenth year a giant entered my native place
in the night, and we woke to find him in possession. He
transformed it into a new town at a rate with which we boys only
could keep up, for as fast as he built dams we made rafts to sail
in them; he knocked down houses, and there we were crying
‘Pilly!’ among the ruins; he dug trenches, and we
jumped them; we had to be dragged by the legs from beneath his
engines, he sunk wells, and in we went. But though there
were never circumstances to which boys could not adapt themselves
in half an hour, older folk are slower in the uptake, and I am
sure they stood and gaped at the changes so suddenly being worked
in our midst, and scarce knew their way home now in the
dark. Where had been formerly but the click of the shuttle
was soon the roar of ‘power,’ handlooms were pushed
into a corner as a room is cleared for a dance; every morning at
half-past five the town was wakened with a yell, and from a
chimney-stack that rose high into our caller air the conqueror
waved for evermore his flag of smoke. Another era had
dawned, new customs, new fashions sprang into life, all as lusty
as if they had been born at twenty-one; as quickly as two people
may exchange seats, the daughter, till now but a knitter of
stockings, became the breadwinner, he who had been the
breadwinner sat down to the knitting of stockings: what had been
yesterday a nest of weavers was to-day a town of girls.</p>
<p>I am not of those who would fling stones at the change; it is
something, surely, that backs are no longer prematurely bent; you
may no more look through dim panes of glass at the aged poor
weaving tremulously for their little bit of ground in the
cemetery. Rather are their working years too few now, not
because they will it so but because it is with youth that the
power-looms must be fed. Well, this teaches them to make
provision, and they have the means as they never had
before. Not in batches are boys now sent to college; the
half-dozen a year have dwindled to one, doubtless because in
these days they can begin to draw wages as they step out of their
fourteenth year. Here assuredly there is loss, but all the
losses would be but a pebble in a sea of gain were it not for
this, that with so many of the family, young mothers among them,
working in the factories, home life is not so beautiful as it
was. So much of what is great in Scotland has sprung from
the closeness of the family ties; it is there I sometimes fear
that my country is being struck. That we are all being
reduced to one dead level, that character abounds no more and
life itself is less interesting, such things I have read, but I
do not believe them. I have even seen them given as my
reason for writing of a past time, and in that at least there is
no truth. In our little town, which is a sample of many,
life is as interesting, as pathetic, as joyous as ever it was; no
group of weavers was better to look at or think about than the
rivulet of winsome girls that overruns our streets every time the
sluice is raised, the comedy of summer evenings and winter
firesides is played with the old zest and every window-blind is
the curtain of a romance. Once the lights of a little town
are lit, who could ever hope to tell all its story, or the story
of a single wynd in it? And who looking at lighted windows
needs to turn to books? The reason my books deal with the
past instead of with the life I myself have known is simply this,
that I soon grow tired of writing tales unless I can see a little
girl, of whom my mother has told me, wandering confidently
through the pages. Such a grip has her memory of her
girlhood had upon me since I was a boy of six.</p>
<p>Those innumerable talks with her made her youth as vivid to me
as my own, and so much more quaint, for, to a child, the oddest
of things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his
mother was once a child also, and the contrast between what she
is and what she was is perhaps the source of all humour. My
mother’s father, the one hero of her life, died nine years
before I was born, and I remember this with bewilderment, so
familiarly does the weather-beaten mason’s figure rise
before me from the old chair on which I was nursed and now write
my books. On the surface he is as hard as the stone on
which he chiselled, and his face is dyed red by its dust, he is
rounded in the shoulders and a ‘hoast’ hunts him
ever; sooner or later that cough must carry him off, but until
then it shall not keep him from the quarry, nor shall his chapped
hands, as long as they can grasp the mell. It is a night of
rain or snow, and my mother, the little girl in a pinafore who is
already his housekeeper, has been many times to the door to look
for him. At last he draws nigh, hoasting. Or I see
him setting off to church, for he was a great ‘stoop’
of the Auld Licht kirk, and his mouth is very firm now as if
there were a case of discipline to face, but on his way home he
is bowed with pity. Perhaps his little daughter who saw him
so stern an hour ago does not understand why he wrestles so long
in prayer to-night, or why when he rises from his knees he
presses her to him with unwonted tenderness. Or he is in
this chair repeating to her his favourite poem, ‘The
Cameronian’s Dream,’ and at the first lines so
solemnly uttered,</p>
<blockquote><p>‘In a dream of the night I was wafted
away,’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>she screams with excitement, just as I screamed long
afterwards when she repeated them in his voice to me. Or I
watch, as from a window, while she sets off through the long
parks to the distant place where he is at work, in her hand a
flagon which contains his dinner. She is singing to herself
and gleefully swinging the flagon, she jumps the burn and proudly
measures the jump with her eye, but she never dallies unless she
meets a baby, for she was so fond of babies that she must hug
each one she met, but while she hugged them she also noted how
their robes were cut, and afterwards made paper patterns, which
she concealed jealously, and in the fulness of time her first
robe for her eldest born was fashioned from one of these
patterns, made when she was in her twelfth year.</p>
<p>She was eight when her mother’s death made her mistress
of the house and mother to her little brother, and from that time
she scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed, and argued with the
flesher about the quarter pound of beef and penny bone which
provided dinner for two days (but if you think that this was
poverty you don’t know the meaning of the word), and she
carried the water from the pump, and had her washing-days and her
ironings and a stocking always on the wire for odd moments, and
gossiped like a matron with the other women, and humoured the men
with a tolerant smile—all these things she did as a matter
of course, leaping joyful from bed in the morning because there
was so much to do, doing it as thoroughly and sedately as if the
brides were already due for a lesson, and then rushing out in a
fit of childishness to play dumps or palaulays with others of her
age. I see her frocks lengthening, though they were never
very short, and the games given reluctantly up. The horror of my
boyhood was that I knew a time would come when I also must give
up the games, and how it was to be done I saw not (this agony
still returns to me in dreams, when I catch myself playing
marbles, and look on with cold displeasure); I felt that I must
continue playing in secret, and I took this shadow to her, when
she told me her own experience, which convinced us both that we
were very like each other inside. She had discovered that
work is the best fun after all, and I learned it in time, but
have my lapses, and so had she.</p>
<p>I know what was her favourite costume when she was at the age
that they make heroines of: it was a pale blue with a pale blue
bonnet, the white ribbons of which tied aggravatingly beneath the
chin, and when questioned about this garb she never admitted that
she looked pretty in it, but she did say, with blushes too, that
blue was her colour, and then she might smile, as at some memory,
and begin to tell us about a man who—but it ended there
with another smile which was longer in departing. She never
said, indeed she denied strenuously, that she had led the men a
dance, but again the smile returned, and came between us and full
belief. Yes, she had her little vanities; when she got the
Mizpah ring she did carry that finger in such a way that the most
reluctant must see. She was very particular about her
gloves, and hid her boots so that no other should put them on,
and then she forgot their hiding-place, and had suspicions of the
one who found them. A good way of enraging her was to say
that her last year’s bonnet would do for this year without
alteration, or that it would defy the face of clay to count the
number of her shawls. In one of my books there is a mother
who is setting off with her son for the town to which he had been
called as minister, and she pauses on the threshold to ask him
anxiously if he thinks her bonnet ‘sets’ her. A
reviewer said she acted thus, not because she cared how she
looked, but for the sake of her son. This, I remember,
amused my mother very much.</p>
<p>I have seen many weary on-dings of snow, but the one I seem to
recollect best occurred nearly twenty years before I was
born. It was at the time of my mother’s marriage to
one who proved a most loving as he was always a well-loved
husband, a man I am very proud to be able to call my
father. I know not for how many days the snow had been
falling, but a day came when the people lost heart and would make
no more gullies through it, and by next morning to do so was
impossible, they could not fling the snow high enough. Its
back was against every door when Sunday came, and none ventured
out save a valiant few, who buffeted their way into my
mother’s home to discuss her predicament, for unless she
was ‘cried’ in the church that day she might not be
married for another week, and how could she be cried with the
minister a field away and the church buried to the waist?
For hours they talked, and at last some men started for the
church, which was several hundred yards distant. Three of
them found a window, and forcing a passage through it, cried the
pair, and that is how it came about that my father and mother
were married on the first of March.</p>
<p>That would be the end, I suppose, if it were a story, but to
my mother it was only another beginning, and not the last.
I see her bending over the cradle of her first-born, college for
him already in her eye (and my father not less ambitious), and
anon it is a girl who is in the cradle, and then another
girl—already a tragic figure to those who know the
end. I wonder if any instinct told my mother that the great
day of her life was when she bore this child; what I am sure of
is that from the first the child followed her with the most
wistful eyes and saw how she needed help and longed to rise and
give it. For of physical strength my mother had never very
much; it was her spirit that got through the work, and in those
days she was often so ill that the sand rained on the
doctor’s window, and men ran to and fro with leeches, and
‘she is in life, we can say no more’ was the
information for those who came knocking at the door.
‘I am sorrow to say,’ her father writes in an old
letter now before me, ‘that Margaret is in a state that she
was never so bad before in this world. Till Wednesday night
she was in as poor a condition as you could think of to be
alive. However, after bleeding, leeching, etc., the Dr.
says this morning that he is better hoped now, but at present we
can say no more but only she is alive and in the hands of Him in
whose hands all our lives are. I can give you no adequate
view of what my feelings are, indeed they are a burden too heavy
for me and I cannot describe them. I look on my right and
left hand and find no comfort, and if it were not for the rock
that is higher than I my spirit would utterly fall, but blessed
be His name who can comfort those that are cast down. O for
more faith in His supporting grace in this hour of
trial.’</p>
<p>Then she is ‘on the mend,’ she may ‘thole
thro’’ if they take great care of her, ‘which
we will be forward to do.’ The fourth child dies when
but a few weeks old, and the next at two years. She was her
grandfather’s companion, and thus he wrote of her death,
this stern, self-educated Auld Licht with the chapped
hands:—</p>
<blockquote><p>‘I hope you received my last in which I
spoke of Dear little Lydia being unwell. Now with deep
sorrow I must tell you that yesterday I assisted in laying her
dear remains in the lonely grave. She died at 7
o’clock on Wednesday evening, I suppose by the time you had
got the letter. The Dr. did not think it was croup till
late on Tuesday night, and all that Medical aid could prescribe
was done, but the Dr. had no hope after he saw that the croup was
confirmed, and hard indeed would the heart have been that would
not have melted at seeing what the dear little creature suffered
all Wednesday until the feeble frame was quite worn out.
She was quite sensible till within 2 hours of her death, and then
she sunk quite low till the vital spark fled, and all medicine
that she got she took with the greatest readiness, as if
apprehensive they would make her well. I cannot well
describe my feelings on the occasion. I thought that the
fountain-head of my tears had now been dried up, but I have been
mistaken, for I must confess that the briny rivulets descended
fast on my furrowed cheeks, she was such a winning Child, and had
such a regard for me and always came and told me all her little
things, and as she was now speaking, some of her little prattle
was very taking, and the lively images of these things intrude
themselves more into my mind than they should do, but there is
allowance for moderate grief on such occasions. But when I
am telling you of my own grief and sorrow, I know not what to say
of the bereaved Mother, she hath not met with anything in this
world before that hath gone so near the quick with her. She
had no handling of the last one as she was not able at the time,
for she only had her once in her arms, and her affections had not
time to be so fairly entwined around her. I am much afraid
that she will not soon if ever get over this trial.
Although she was weakly before, yet she was pretty well
recovered, but this hath not only affected her mind, but her body
is so much affected that she is not well able to sit so long as
her bed is making and hath scarcely tasted meat [i.e. food] since
Monday night, and till some time is elapsed we cannot say how she
may be. There is none that is not a Parent themselves that
can fully sympathise with one in such a state. David is
much affected also, but it is not so well known on him, and the
younger branches of the family are affected but it will be only
momentary. But alas in all this vast ado, there is only the
sorrow of the world which worketh death. O how gladdening
would it be if we were in as great bitterness for sin as for the
loss of a first-born. O how unfitted persons or families is
for trials who knows not the divine art of casting all their
cares upon the Lord, and what multitudes are there that when
earthly comforts is taken away, may well say What have I more?
all their delight is placed in some one thing or another in the
world, and who can blame them for unwillingly parting with what
they esteem their chief good? O that we were wise to lay up
treasure for the time of need, for it is truly a solemn affair to
enter the lists with the king of terrors. It is strange
that the living lay the things so little to heart until they have
to engage in that war where there is no discharge. O that
my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears that I
might weep day and night for my own and others’ stupidity
in this great matter. O for grace to do every day work in
its proper time and to live above the tempting cheating train of
earthly things. The rest of the family are moderately
well. I have been for some days worse than I have been for
8 months past, but I may soon get better. I am in the same
way I have often been in before, but there is no security for it
always being so, for I know that it cannot be far from the time
when I will be one of those that once were. I have no other
news to send you, and as little heart for them. I hope you
will take the earliest opportunity of writing that you can, and
be particular as regards Margaret, for she requires
consolation.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He died exactly a week after writing this letter, but my
mother was to live for another forty-four years. And joys
of a kind never shared in by him were to come to her so
abundantly, so long drawn out that, strange as it would have
seemed to him to know it, her fuller life had scarce yet
begun. And with the joys were to come their sweet,
frightened comrades pain and grief; again she was to be touched
to the quick, again and again to be so ill that ‘she is in
life, we can say no more,’ but still she had attendants
very ‘forward’ to help her, some of them unborn in
her father’s time.</p>
<p>She told me everything, and so my memories of our little red
town are coloured by her memories. I knew it as it had been
for generations, and suddenly I saw it change, and the
transformation could not fail to strike a boy, for these first
years are the most impressionable (nothing that happens after we
are twelve matters very much); they are also the most vivid years
when we look back, and more vivid the farther we have to look,
until, at the end, what lies between bends like a hoop, and the
extremes meet. But though the new town is to me a glass
through which I look at the old, the people I see passing up and
down these wynds, sitting, nightcapped, on their barrow-shafts,
hobbling in their blacks to church on Sunday, are less those I
saw in my childhood than their fathers and mothers who did these
things in the same way when my mother was young. I cannot
picture the place without seeing her, as a little girl, come to
the door of a certain house and beat her bass against the
gav’le-end, or there is a wedding to-night, and the
carriage with the white-eared horse is sent for a maiden in pale
blue, whose bonnet-strings tie beneath the chin.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER III—WHAT I SHOULD BE</h2>
<p>My mother was a great reader, and with ten minutes to spare
before the starch was ready would begin the ‘Decline and
Fall’—and finish it, too, that winter. Foreign
words in the text annoyed her and made her bemoan her want of a
classical education—she had only attended a Dame’s
school during some easy months—but she never passed the
foreign words by until their meaning was explained to her, and
when next she and they met it was as acquaintances, which I think
was clever of her. One of her delights was to learn from me
scraps of Horace, and then bring them into her conversation with
‘colleged men.’ I have come upon her in lonely
places, such as the stair-head or the east room, muttering these
quotations aloud to herself, and I well remember how she would
say to the visitors, ‘Ay, ay, it’s very true, Doctor,
but as you know, “Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur
anni,”’ or ‘Sal, Mr. So-and-so, my lassie is
thriving well, but would it no’ be more to the point to
say, “O matra pulchra filia pulchrior”?’ which
astounded them very much if she managed to reach the end without
being flung, but usually she had a fit of laughing in the middle,
and so they found her out.</p>
<p>Biography and exploration were her favourite reading, for
choice the biography of men who had been good to their mothers,
and she liked the explorers to be alive so that she could shudder
at the thought of their venturing forth again; but though she
expressed a hope that they would have the sense to stay at home
henceforth, she gleamed with admiration when they disappointed
her. In later days I had a friend who was an African
explorer, and she was in two minds about him; he was one of the
most engrossing of mortals to her, she admired him prodigiously,
pictured him at the head of his caravan, now attacked by savages,
now by wild beasts, and adored him for the uneasy hours he gave
her, but she was also afraid that he wanted to take me with him,
and then she thought he should be put down by law.
Explorers’ mothers also interested her very much; the books
might tell her nothing about them, but she could create them for
herself and wring her hands in sympathy with them when they had
got no news of him for six months. Yet there were times
when she grudged him to them—as the day when he returned
victorious. Then what was before her eyes was not the son
coming marching home again but an old woman peering for him round
the window curtain and trying not to look uplifted. The
newspaper reports would be about the son, but my mother’s
comment was ‘She’s a proud woman this
night.’</p>
<p>We read many books together when I was a boy, ‘Robinson
Crusoe’ being the first (and the second), and the
‘Arabian Nights’ should have been the next, for we
got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on
discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we
sent that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever
since. ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ we had in
the house (it was as common a possession as a dresser-head), and
so enamoured of it was I that I turned our garden into sloughs of
Despond, with pea-sticks to represent Christian on his travels
and a buffet-stool for his burden, but when I dragged my mother
out to see my handiwork she was scared, and I felt for days, with
a certain elation, that I had been a dark character.
Besides reading every book we could hire or borrow I also bought
one now and again, and while buying (it was the occupation of
weeks) I read, standing at the counter, most of the other books
in the shop, which is perhaps the most exquisite way of
reading. And I took in a magazine called
‘Sunshine,’ the most delicious periodical, I am sure,
of any day. It cost a halfpenny or a penny a month, and
always, as I fondly remember, had a continued tale about the
dearest girl, who sold water-cress, which is a dainty not grown
and I suppose never seen in my native town. This romantic
little creature took such hold of my imagination that I cannot
eat water-cress even now without emotion. I lay in bed
wondering what she would be up to in the next number; I have lost
trout because when they nibbled my mind was wandering with her;
my early life was embittered by her not arriving regularly on the
first of the month. I know not whether it was owing to her
loitering on the way one month to an extent flesh and blood could
not bear, or because we had exhausted the penny library, but on a
day I conceived a glorious idea, or it was put into my head by my
mother, then desirous of making progress with her new clouty
hearthrug. The notion was nothing short of this, why should
I not write the tales myself? I did write them—in the
garret—but they by no means helped her to get on with her
work, for when I finished a chapter I bounded downstairs to read
it to her, and so short were the chapters, so ready was the pen,
that I was back with new manuscript before another clout had been
added to the rug. Authorship seemed, like her
bannock-baking, to consist of running between two points.
They were all tales of adventure (happiest is he who writes of
adventure), no characters were allowed within if I knew their
like in the flesh, the scene lay in unknown parts, desert
islands, enchanted gardens, with knights (none of your nights) on
black chargers, and round the first corner a lady selling
water-cress.</p>
<p>At twelve or thereabout I put the literary calling to bed for
a time, having gone to a school where cricket and football were
more esteemed, but during the year before I went to the
university, it woke up and I wrote great part of a three-volume
novel. The publisher replied that the sum for which he
would print it was a hundred and—however, that was not the
important point (I had sixpence): where he stabbed us both was in
writing that he considered me a ‘clever lady.’
I replied stiffly that I was a gentleman, and since then I have
kept that manuscript concealed. I looked through it lately,
and, oh, but it is dull! I defy any one to read it.</p>
<p>The malignancy of publishers, however, could not turn me
back. From the day on which I first tasted blood in the
garret my mind was made up; there could be no hum-dreadful-drum
profession for me; literature was my game. It was not
highly thought of by those who wished me well. I remember
being asked by two maiden ladies, about the time I left the
university, what I was to be, and when I replied brazenly,
‘An author,’ they flung up their hands, and one
exclaimed reproachfully, ‘And you an M.A.!’ My
mother’s views at first were not dissimilar; for long she
took mine jestingly as something I would grow out of, and
afterwards they hurt her so that I tried to give them up.
To be a minister—that she thought was among the fairest
prospects, but she was a very ambitious woman, and sometimes she
would add, half scared at her appetite, that there were ministers
who had become professors, ‘but it was not canny to think
of such things.’</p>
<p>I had one person only on my side, an old tailor, one of the
fullest men I have known, and quite the best talker. He was
a bachelor (he told me all that is to be known about woman), a
lean man, pallid of face, his legs drawn up when he walked as if
he was ever carrying something in his lap; his walks were of the
shortest, from the tea-pot on the hob to the board on which he
stitched, from the board to the hob, and so to bed. He
might have gone out had the idea struck him, but in the years I
knew him, the last of his brave life, I think he was only in the
open twice, when he ‘flitted’—changed his room
for another hard by. I did not see him make these journeys,
but I seem to see him now, and he is somewhat dizzy in the odd
atmosphere; in one hand he carries a box-iron, he raises the
other, wondering what this is on his head, it is a hat; a faint
smell of singed cloth goes by with him. This man had heard
of my set of photographs of the poets and asked for a sight of
them, which led to our first meeting. I remember how he
spread them out on his board, and after looking long at them,
turned his gaze on me and said solemnly,</p>
<blockquote><p>What can I do to be for ever known,<br />
And make the age to come my own?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lines of Cowley were new to me, but the sentiment was
not new, and I marvelled how the old tailor could see through me
so well. So it was strange to me to discover presently that
he had not been thinking of me at all, but of his own young days,
when that couplet sang in his head, and he, too, had thirsted to
set off for Grub Street, but was afraid, and while he hesitated
old age came, and then Death, and found him grasping a
box-iron.</p>
<p>I hurried home with the mouthful, but neighbours had dropped
in, and this was for her ears only, so I drew her to the stair,
and said imperiously,</p>
<blockquote><p>What can I do to be for ever known,<br />
And make the age to come my own?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was an odd request for which to draw her from a tea-table,
and she must have been surprised, but I think she did not laugh,
and in after years she would repeat the lines fondly, with a
flush on her soft face. ‘That is the kind you would
like to be yourself!’ we would say in jest to her, and she
would reply almost passionately, ‘No, but I would be windy
of being his mother.’ It is possible that she could
have been his mother had that other son lived, he might have
managed it from sheer love of her, but for my part I can smile at
one of those two figures on the stair now, having long given up
the dream of being for ever known, and seeing myself more akin to
my friend, the tailor, for as he was found at the end on his
board, so I hope shall I be found at my handloom, doing honestly
the work that suits me best. Who should know so well as I
that it is but a handloom compared to the great guns that
reverberate through the age to come? But she who stood with
me on the stair that day was a very simple woman, accustomed all
her life to making the most of small things, and I weaved
sufficiently well to please her, which has been my only steadfast
ambition since I was a little boy.</p>
<p>Not less than mine became her desire that I should have my
way—but, ah, the iron seats in that park of horrible
repute, and that bare room at the top of many flights of
stairs! While I was away at college she drained all
available libraries for books about those who go to London to
live by the pen, and they all told the same shuddering
tale. London, which she never saw, was to her a monster
that licked up country youths as they stepped from the train;
there were the garrets in which they sat abject, and the park
seats where they passed the night. Those park seats were
the monster’s glaring eyes to her, and as I go by them now
she is nearer to me than when I am in any other part of
London. I daresay that when night comes, this Hyde Park
which is so gay by day, is haunted by the ghosts of many mothers,
who run, wild-eyed, from seat to seat, looking for their
sons.</p>
<p>But if we could dodge those dreary seats she longed to see me
try my luck, and I sought to exclude them from the picture by
drawing maps of London with Hyde Park left out. London was
as strange to me as to her, but long before I was shot upon it I
knew it by maps, and drew them more accurately than I could draw
them now. Many a time she and I took our jaunt together
through the map, and were most gleeful, popping into telegraph
offices to wire my father and sister that we should not be home
till late, winking to my books in lordly shop-windows, lunching
at restaurants (and remembering not to call it dinner), saying,
‘How do?’ to Mr. Alfred Tennyson when we passed him
in Regent Street, calling at publishers’ offices for
cheque, when ‘Will you take care of it, or shall I?’
I asked gaily, and she would be certain to reply,
‘I’m thinking we’d better take it to the bank
and get the money,’ for she always felt surer of money than
of cheques; so to the bank we went (‘Two tens, and the rest
in gold’), and thence straightway (by cab) to the place
where you buy sealskin coats for middling old ladies. But
ere the laugh was done the park would come through the map like a
blot.</p>
<p>‘If you could only be sure of as much as would keep body
and soul together,’ my mother would say with a sigh.</p>
<p>‘With something over, mother, to send to you.’</p>
<p>‘You couldna expect that at the start.’</p>
<p>The wench I should have been courting now was journalism, that
grisette of literature who has a smile and a hand for all
beginners, welcoming them at the threshold, teaching them so much
that is worth knowing, introducing them to the other lady whom
they have worshipped from afar, showing them even how to woo her,
and then bidding them a bright God-speed—he were an ingrate
who, having had her joyous companionship, no longer flings her a
kiss as they pass. But though she bears no ill-will when
she is jilted, you must serve faithfully while you are hers, and
you must seek her out and make much of her, and, until you can
rely on her good-nature (note this), not a word about the other
lady. When at last she took me in I grew so fond of her
that I called her by the other’s name, and even now I think
at times that there was more fun in the little sister, but I
began by wooing her with contributions that were all
misfits. In an old book I find columns of notes about works
projected at this time, nearly all to consist of essays on deeply
uninteresting subjects; the lightest was to be a volume on the
older satirists, beginning with Skelton and Tom Nash—the
half of that manuscript still lies in a dusty chest—the
only story was about Mary Queen of Scots, who was also the
subject of many unwritten papers. Queen Mary seems to have
been luring me to my undoing ever since I saw Holyrood, and I
have a horrid fear that I may write that novel yet. That
anything could be written about my native place never struck
me. We had read somewhere that a novelist is better
equipped than most of his trade if he knows himself and one
woman, and my mother said, ‘You know yourself, for
everybody must know himself’ (there never was a woman who
knew less about herself than she), and she would add dolefully,
‘But I doubt I’m the only woman you know
well.’</p>
<p>‘Then I must make you my heroine,’ I said
lightly.</p>
<p>‘A gey auld-farrant-like heroine!’ she said, and
we both laughed at the notion—so little did we read the
future.</p>
<p>Thus it is obvious what were my qualifications when I was
rashly engaged as a leader-writer (it was my sister who saw the
advertisement) on an English provincial paper. At the
moment I was as uplifted as the others, for the chance had come
at last, with what we all regarded as a prodigious salary, but I
was wanted in the beginning of the week, and it suddenly struck
me that the leaders were the one thing I had always
skipped. Leaders! How were they written? what were
they about? My mother was already sitting triumphant among
my socks, and I durst not let her see me quaking. I retired
to ponder, and presently she came to me with the daily
paper. Which were the leaders? she wanted to know, so
evidently I could get no help from her. Had she any more
newspapers? I asked, and after rummaging, she produced a
few with which her boxes had been lined. Others, very
dusty, came from beneath carpets, and lastly a sooty bundle was
dragged down the chimney. Surrounded by these I sat down,
and studied how to become a journalist.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER IV—AN EDITOR</h2>
<p>A devout lady, to whom some friend had presented one of my
books, used to say when asked how she was getting on with it,
‘Sal, it’s dreary, weary, uphill work, but I’ve
wrastled through with tougher jobs in my time, and, please God,
I’ll wrastle through with this one.’ It was in
this spirit, I fear, though she never told me so, that my mother
wrestled for the next year or more with my leaders, and indeed I
was always genuinely sorry for the people I saw reading
them. In my spare hours I was trying journalism of another
kind and sending it to London, but nearly eighteen months elapsed
before there came to me, as unlooked for as a telegram, the
thought that there was something quaint about my native
place. A boy who found that a knife had been put into his
pocket in the night could not have been more surprised. A
few days afterwards I sent my mother a London evening paper with
an article entitled ‘An Auld Licht Community,’ and
they told me that when she saw the heading she laughed, because
there was something droll to her in the sight of the words Auld
Licht in print. For her, as for me, that newspaper was soon
to have the face of a friend. To this day I never pass its
placards in the street without shaking it by the hand, and she
used to sew its pages together as lovingly as though they were a
child’s frock; but let the truth be told, when she read
that first article she became alarmed, and fearing the talk of
the town, hid the paper from all eyes. For some time
afterwards, while I proudly pictured her showing this and similar
articles to all who felt an interest in me, she was really
concealing them fearfully in a bandbox on the garret stair.
And she wanted to know by return of post whether I was paid for
these articles as much as I was paid for real articles; when she
heard that I was paid better, she laughed again and had them out
of the bandbox for re-reading, and it cannot be denied that she
thought the London editor a fine fellow but slightly soft.</p>
<p>When I sent off that first sketch I thought I had exhausted
the subject, but our editor wrote that he would like something
more of the same, so I sent him a marriage, and he took it, and
then I tried him with a funeral, and he took it, and really it
began to look as if we had him. Now my mother might have
been discovered, in answer to certain excited letters, flinging
the bundle of undarned socks from her lap, and ‘going in
for literature’; she was racking her brains, by request,
for memories I might convert into articles, and they came to me
in letters which she dictated to my sisters. How well I
could hear her sayings between the lines: ‘But the
editor-man will never stand that, it’s perfect
blethers’—‘By this post it must go, I tell you;
we must take the editor when he’s hungry—we canna be
blamed for it, can we? he prints them of his free will, so the
wite is his’—‘But I’m near
terrified.—If London folk reads them we’re done
for.’ And I was sounded as to the advisability of
sending him a present of a lippie of shortbread, which was to be
her crafty way of getting round him. By this time, though
my mother and I were hundreds of miles apart, you may picture us
waving our hands to each other across country, and shouting
‘Hurrah!’ You may also picture the editor in
his office thinking he was behaving like a shrewd man of
business, and unconscious that up in the north there was an
elderly lady chuckling so much at him that she could scarcely
scrape the potatoes.</p>
<p>I was now able to see my mother again, and the park seats no
longer loomed so prominent in our map of London. Still,
there they were, and it was with an effort that she summoned up
courage to let me go. She feared changes, and who could
tell that the editor would continue to be kind? Perhaps
when he saw me—</p>
<p>She seemed to be very much afraid of his seeing me, and this,
I would point out, was a reflection on my appearance or my
manner.</p>
<p>No, what she meant was that I looked so young, and—and
that would take him aback, for had I not written as an aged
man?</p>
<p>‘But he knows my age, mother.’</p>
<p>‘I’m glad of that, but maybe he wouldna like you
when he saw you.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, it is my manner, then!’</p>
<p>‘I dinna say that, but—’</p>
<p>Here my sister would break in: ‘The short and the long
of it is just this, she thinks nobody has such manners as
herself. Can you deny it, you vain woman?’ My
mother would deny it vigorously.</p>
<p>‘You stand there,’ my sister would say with
affected scorn, ‘and tell me you don’t think you
could get the better of that man quicker than any of
us?’</p>
<p>‘Sal, I’m thinking I could manage him,’ says
my mother, with a chuckle.</p>
<p>‘How would you set about it?’</p>
<p>Then my mother would begin to laugh. ‘I would find
out first if he had a family, and then I would say they were the
finest family in London.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, that is just what you would do, you cunning
woman! But if he has no family?’</p>
<p>‘I would say what great men editors are!’</p>
<p>‘He would see through you.’</p>
<p>‘Not he!’</p>
<p>‘You don’t understand that what imposes on common
folk would never hoodwink an editor.’</p>
<p>‘That’s where you are wrong. Gentle or
simple, stupid or clever, the men are all alike in the hands of a
woman that flatters them.’</p>
<p>‘Ah, I’m sure there are better ways of getting
round an editor than that.’</p>
<p>‘I daresay there are,’ my mother would say with
conviction, ‘but if you try that plan you will never need
to try another.’</p>
<p>‘How artful you are, mother—you with your soft
face! Do you not think shame?’</p>
<p>‘Pooh!’ says my mother brazenly.</p>
<p>‘I can see the reason why you are so popular with
men.’</p>
<p>‘Ay, you can see it, but they never will.’</p>
<p>‘Well, how would you dress yourself if you were going to
that editor’s office?’</p>
<p>‘Of course I would wear my silk and my Sabbath
bonnet.’</p>
<p>‘It is you who are shortsighted now, mother. I
tell you, you would manage him better if you just put on your old
grey shawl and one of your bonny white mutches, and went in half
smiling and half timid and said, “I am the mother of him
that writes about the Auld Lichts, and I want you to promise that
he will never have to sleep in the open air.”’</p>
<p>But my mother would shake her head at this, and reply almost
hotly, ‘I tell you if I ever go into that man’s
office, I go in silk.’</p>
<p>I wrote and asked the editor if I should come to London, and
he said No, so I went, laden with charges from my mother to walk
in the middle of the street (they jump out on you as you are
turning a corner), never to venture forth after sunset, and
always to lock up everything (I who could never lock up anything,
except my heart in company). Thanks to this editor, for the
others would have nothing to say to me though I battered on all
their doors, she was soon able to sleep at nights without the
dread that I should be waking presently with the iron-work of
certain seats figured on my person, and what relieved her very
much was that I had begun to write as if Auld Lichts were not the
only people I knew of. So long as I confined myself to them
she had a haunting fear that, even though the editor remained
blind to his best interests, something would one day go crack
within me (as the mainspring of a watch breaks) and my pen refuse
to write for evermore. ‘Ay, I like the article
brawly,’ she would say timidly, ‘but I’m
doubting it’s the last—I always have a sort of terror
the new one may be the last,’ and if many days elapsed
before the arrival of another article her face would say
mournfully, ‘The blow has fallen—he can think of
nothing more to write about.’ If I ever shared her
fears I never told her so, and the articles that were not Scotch
grew in number until there were hundreds of them, all carefully
preserved by her: they were the only thing in the house that,
having served one purpose, she did not convert into something
else, yet they could give her uneasy moments. This was
because I nearly always assumed a character when I wrote; I must
be a country squire, or an undergraduate, or a butler, or a
member of the House of Lords, or a dowager, or a lady called
Sweet Seventeen, or an engineer in India, else was my pen
clogged, and though this gave my mother certain fearful joys,
causing her to laugh unexpectedly (so far as my articles were
concerned she nearly always laughed in the wrong place), it also
scared her. Much to her amusement the editor continued to
prefer the Auld Licht papers, however, as was proved (to those
who knew him) by his way of thinking that the others would pass
as they were, while he sent these back and asked me to make them
better. Here again she came to my aid. I had said
that the row of stockings were hung on a string by the fire,
which was a recollection of my own, but she could tell me whether
they were hung upside down. She became quite skilful at
sending or giving me (for now I could be with her half the year)
the right details, but still she smiled at the editor, and in her
gay moods she would say, ‘I was fifteen when I got my first
pair of elastic-sided boots. Tell him my charge for this
important news is two pounds ten.’</p>
<p>‘Ay, but though we’re doing well, it’s
no’ the same as if they were a book with your name on
it.’ So the ambitious woman would say with a sigh,
and I did my best to turn the Auld Licht sketches into a book
with my name on it. Then perhaps we understood most fully
how good a friend our editor had been, for just as I had been
able to find no well-known magazine—and I think I tried
all—which would print any article or story about the poor
of my native land, so now the publishers, Scotch and English,
refused to accept the book as a gift. I was willing to
present it to them, but they would have it in no guise; there
seemed to be a blight on everything that was Scotch. I
daresay we sighed, but never were collaborators more prepared for
rejection, and though my mother might look wistfully at the
scorned manuscript at times and murmur, ‘You poor cold
little crittur shut away in a drawer, are you dead or just
sleeping?’ she had still her editor to say grace
over. And at last publishers, sufficiently daring and far
more than sufficiently generous, were found for us by a dear
friend, who made one woman very ‘uplifted.’ He
also was an editor, and had as large a part in making me a writer
of books as the other in determining what the books should be
about.</p>
<p>Now that I was an author I must get into a club. But you
should have heard my mother on clubs! She knew of none save
those to which you subscribe a pittance weekly in anticipation of
rainy days, and the London clubs were her scorn. Often I
heard her on them—she raised her voice to make me hear,
whichever room I might be in, and it was when she was sarcastic
that I skulked the most: ‘Thirty pounds is what he will
have to pay the first year, and ten pounds a year after
that. You think it’s a lot o’ siller? Oh
no, you’re mista’en—it’s nothing
ava. For the third part of thirty pounds you could rent a
four-roomed house, but what is a four-roomed house, what is
thirty pounds, compared to the glory of being a member of a
club? Where does the glory come in? Sal, you needna
ask me, I’m just a doited auld stock that never set foot in
a club, so it’s little I ken about glory. But I may
tell you if you bide in London and canna become member of a club,
the best you can do is to tie a rope round your neck and slip out
of the world. What use are they? Oh, they’re
terrible useful. You see it doesna do for a man in London
to eat his dinner in his lodgings. Other men shake their
heads at him. He maun away to his club if he is to be
respected. Does he get good dinners at the club? Oh,
they cow! You get no common beef at clubs; there is a manzy
of different things all sauced up to be unlike themsels.
Even the potatoes daurna look like potatoes. If the food in
a club looks like what it is, the members run about, flinging up
their hands and crying, “Woe is me!” Then this
is another thing, you get your letters sent to the club instead
of to your lodgings. You see you would get them sooner at
your lodgings, and you may have to trudge weary miles to the club
for them, but that’s a great advantage, and cheap at thirty
pounds, is it no’? I wonder they can do it at the
price.’</p>
<p>My wisest policy was to remain downstairs when these withering
blasts were blowing, but probably I went up in self-defence.</p>
<p>‘I never saw you so pugnacious before,
mother.’</p>
<p>‘Oh,’ she would reply promptly, ‘you canna
expect me to be sharp in the uptake when I am no’ a member
of a club.’</p>
<p>‘But the difficulty is in becoming a member. They
are very particular about whom they elect, and I daresay I shall
not get in.’</p>
<p>‘Well, I’m but a poor crittur (not being member of
a club), but I think I can tell you to make your mind easy on
that head. You’ll get in, I’se uphaud—and
your thirty pounds will get in, too.’</p>
<p>‘If I get in it will be because the editor is supporting
me.’</p>
<p>‘It’s the first ill thing I ever heard of
him.’</p>
<p>‘You don’t think he is to get any of the thirty
pounds, do you?’</p>
<p>‘’Deed if I did I should be better pleased, for he
has been a good friend to us, but what maddens me is that every
penny of it should go to those bare-faced scoundrels.’</p>
<p>‘What bare-faced scoundrels?’</p>
<p>‘Them that have the club.’</p>
<p>‘But all the members have the club between
them.’</p>
<p>‘Havers! I’m no’ to be catched with
chaff.’</p>
<p>‘But don’t you believe me?’</p>
<p>‘I believe they’ve filled your head with their
stories till you swallow whatever they tell you. If the
place belongs to the members, why do they have to pay thirty
pounds?’</p>
<p>‘To keep it going.’</p>
<p>‘They dinna have to pay for their dinners,
then?’</p>
<p>‘Oh yes, they have to pay extra for dinner.’</p>
<p>‘And a gey black price, I’m thinking.’</p>
<p>‘Well, five or six shillings.’</p>
<p>‘Is that all? Losh, it’s nothing, I wonder
they dinna raise the price.’</p>
<p>Nevertheless my mother was of a sex that scorned prejudice,
and, dropping sarcasm, she would at times cross-examine me as if
her mind was not yet made up. ‘Tell me this, if you
were to fall ill, would you be paid a weekly allowance out of the
club?’</p>
<p>No, it was not that kind of club.</p>
<p>‘I see. Well, I am just trying to find out what
kind of club it is. Do you get anything out of it for
accidents?’</p>
<p>Not a penny.</p>
<p>‘Anything at New Year’s time?’</p>
<p>Not so much as a goose.</p>
<p>‘Is there any one mortal thing you get free out of that
club?’</p>
<p>There was not one mortal thing.</p>
<p>‘And thirty pounds is what you pay for this?’</p>
<p>If the committee elected me.</p>
<p>‘How many are in the committee?’</p>
<p>About a dozen, I thought.</p>
<p>‘A dozen! Ay, ay, that makes two pound ten
apiece.’</p>
<p>When I was elected I thought it wisdom to send my sister
upstairs with the news. My mother was ironing, and made no
comment, unless with the iron, which I could hear rattling more
violently in its box. Presently I heard her
laughing—at me undoubtedly, but she had recovered control
over her face before she came downstairs to congratulate me
sarcastically. This was grand news, she said without a
twinkle, and I must write and thank the committee, the noble
critturs. I saw behind her mask, and maintained a dignified
silence, but she would have another shot at me. ‘And
tell them,’ she said from the door, ‘you were
doubtful of being elected, but your auld mother had aye a mighty
confidence they would snick you in.’ I heard her
laughing softly as she went up the stair, but though I had
provided her with a joke I knew she was burning to tell the
committee what she thought of them.</p>
<p>Money, you see, meant so much to her, though even at her
poorest she was the most cheerful giver. In the old days,
when the article arrived, she did not read it at once, she first
counted the lines to discover what we should get for it—she
and the daughter who was so dear to her had calculated the
payment per line, and I remember once overhearing a discussion
between them about whether that sub-title meant another
sixpence. Yes, she knew the value of money; she had always
in the end got the things she wanted, but now she could get them
more easily, and it turned her simple life into a fairy
tale. So often in those days she went down suddenly upon
her knees; we would come upon her thus, and go away
noiselessly. After her death I found that she had preserved
in a little box, with a photograph of me as a child, the
envelopes which had contained my first cheques. There was a
little ribbon round them.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER V—A DAY OF HER LIFE</h2>
<p>I should like to call back a day of her life as it was at this
time, when her spirit was as bright as ever and her hand as
eager, but she was no longer able to do much work. It
should not be difficult, for she repeated herself from day to day
and yet did it with a quaint unreasonableness that was ever
yielding fresh delight. Our love for her was such that we
could easily tell what she would do in given circumstances, but
she had always a new way of doing it.</p>
<p>Well, with break of day she wakes and sits up in bed and is
standing in the middle of the room. So nimble was she in
the mornings (one of our troubles with her) that these three
actions must be considered as one; she is on the floor before you
have time to count them. She has strict orders not to rise
until her fire is lit, and having broken them there is a demure
elation on her face. The question is what to do before she
is caught and hurried to bed again. Her fingers are
tingling to prepare the breakfast; she would dearly love to
black-lead the grate, but that might rouse her daughter from
whose side she has slipped so cunningly. She catches sight
of the screen at the foot of the bed, and immediately her soft
face becomes very determined. To guard her from draughts
the screen had been brought here from the lordly east room, where
it was of no use whatever. But in her opinion it was too
beautiful for use; it belonged to the east room, where she could
take pleasant peeps at it; she had objected to its removal, even
become low-spirited. Now is her opportunity. The
screen is an unwieldy thing, but still as a mouse she carries it,
and they are well under weigh when it strikes against the
gas-bracket in the passage. Next moment a reproachful hand
arrests her. She is challenged with being out of bed, she
denies it—standing in the passage. Meekly or
stubbornly she returns to bed, and it is no satisfaction to you
that you can say, ‘Well, well, of all the women!’ and
so on, or ‘Surely you knew that the screen was brought here
to protect you,’ for she will reply scornfully, ‘Who
was touching the screen?’</p>
<p>By this time I have wakened (I am through the wall) and join
them anxiously: so often has my mother been taken ill in the
night that the slightest sound from her room rouses the
house. She is in bed again, looking as if she had never
been out of it, but I know her and listen sternly to the tale of
her misdoings. She is not contrite. Yes, maybe she
did promise not to venture forth on the cold floors of daybreak,
but she had risen for a moment only, and we just t’neaded
her with our talk about draughts—there were no such things
as draughts in her young days—and it is more than she can
do (here she again attempts to rise but we hold her down) to lie
there and watch that beautiful screen being spoilt. I reply
that the beauty of the screen has ever been its miserable defect:
ho, there! for a knife with which to spoil its beauty and make
the bedroom its fitting home. As there is no knife handy,
my foot will do; I raise my foot, and then—she sees that it
is bare, she cries to me excitedly to go back to bed lest I catch
cold. For though, ever careless of herself, she will wander
the house unshod, and tell us not to talk havers when we chide
her, the sight of one of us similarly negligent rouses her
anxiety at once. She is willing now to sign any vow if only
I will take my bare feet back to bed, but probably she is soon
after me in hers to make sure that I am nicely covered up.</p>
<p>It is scarcely six o’clock, and we have all promised to
sleep for another hour, but in ten minutes she is sure that eight
has struck (house disgraced), or that if it has not, something is
wrong with the clock. Next moment she is captured on her
way downstairs to wind up the clock. So evidently we must
be up and doing, and as we have no servant, my sister disappears
into the kitchen, having first asked me to see that ‘that
woman’ lies still, and ‘that woman’ calls out
that she always does lie still, so what are we blethering
about?</p>
<p>She is up now, and dressed in her thick maroon wrapper; over
her shoulders (lest she should stray despite our watchfulness) is
a shawl, not placed there by her own hands, and on her head a
delicious mutch. O that I could sing the pæan of the
white mutch (and the dirge of the elaborate black cap) from the
day when she called witchcraft to her aid and made it out of
snow-flakes, and the dear worn hands that washed it tenderly in a
basin, and the starching of it, and the finger-iron for its
exquisite frills that looked like curls of sugar, and the sweet
bands with which it tied beneath the chin! The honoured
snowy mutch, how I love to see it smiling to me from the doors
and windows of the poor; it is always smiling—sometimes
maybe a wavering wistful smile, as if a tear-drop lay hidden
among, the frills. A hundred times I have taken the
characterless cap from my mother’s head and put the mutch
in its place and tied the bands beneath her chin, while she
protested but was well pleased. For in her heart she knew
what suited her best and would admit it, beaming, when I put a
mirror into her hands and told her to look; but nevertheless the
cap cost no less than so-and-so, whereas—Was that a knock
at the door? She is gone, to put on her cap!</p>
<p>She begins the day by the fireside with the New Testament in
her hands, an old volume with its loose pages beautifully
refixed, and its covers sewn and resewn by her, so that you would
say it can never fall to pieces. It is mine now, and to me
the black threads with which she stitched it are as part of the
contents. Other books she read in the ordinary manner, but
this one differently, her lips moving with each word as if she
were reading aloud, and her face very solemn. The Testament
lies open on her lap long after she has ceased to read, and the
expression of her face has not changed.</p>
<p>I have seen her reading other books early in the day but never
without a guilty look on her face, for she thought reading was
scarce respectable until night had come. She spends the
forenoon in what she calls doing nothing, which may consist in
stitching so hard that you would swear she was an over-worked
seamstress at it for her life, or you will find her on a table
with nails in her mouth, and anon she has to be chased from the
garret (she has suddenly decided to change her curtains), or she
is under the bed searching for band-boxes and asking sternly
where we have put that bonnet. On the whole she is behaving
in a most exemplary way to-day (not once have we caught her
trying to go out into the washing-house), and we compliment her
at dinner-time, partly because she deserves it, and partly to
make her think herself so good that she will eat something, just
to maintain her new character. I question whether one hour
of all her life was given to thoughts of food; in her great days
to eat seemed to her to be waste of time, and afterwards she only
ate to boast of it, as something she had done to please us.
She seldom remembered whether she had dined, but always presumed
she had, and while she was telling me in all good faith what the
meal consisted of, it might be brought in. When in London I
had to hear daily what she was eating, and perhaps she had
refused all dishes until they produced the pen and ink.
These were flourished before her, and then she would say with a
sigh, ‘Tell him I am to eat an egg.’ But they
were not so easily deceived; they waited, pen in hand, until the
egg was eaten.</p>
<p>She never ‘went for a walk’ in her life.
Many long trudges she had as a girl when she carried her
father’s dinner in a flagon to the country place where he
was at work, but to walk with no end save the good of your health
seemed a very droll proceeding to her. In her young days,
she was positive, no one had ever gone for a walk, and she never
lost the belief that it was an absurdity introduced by a new
generation with too much time on their hands. That they
enjoyed it she could not believe; it was merely a form of showing
off, and as they passed her window she would remark to herself
with blasting satire, ‘Ay, Jeames, are you off for your
walk?’ and add fervently, ‘Rather you than
me!’ I was one of those who walked, and though she
smiled, and might drop a sarcastic word when she saw me putting
on my boots, it was she who had heated them in preparation for my
going. The arrangement between us was that she should lie
down until my return, and to ensure its being carried out I saw
her in bed before I started, but with the bang of the door she
would be at the window to watch me go: there is one spot on the
road where a thousand times I have turned to wave my stick to
her, while she nodded and smiled and kissed her hand to me.
That kissing of the hand was the one English custom she had
learned.</p>
<p>In an hour or so I return, and perhaps find her in bed,
according to promise, but still I am suspicious. The way to
her detection is circuitous.</p>
<p>‘I’ll need to be rising now,’ she says, with
a yawn that may be genuine.</p>
<p>‘How long have you been in bed?’</p>
<p>‘You saw me go.’</p>
<p>‘And then I saw you at the window. Did you go
straight back to bed?’</p>
<p>‘Surely I had that much sense.’</p>
<p>‘The truth!’</p>
<p>‘I might have taken a look at the clock
first.’</p>
<p>‘It is a terrible thing to have a mother who
prevaricates. Have you been lying down ever since I
left?’</p>
<p>‘Thereabout.’</p>
<p>‘What does that mean exactly?’</p>
<p>‘Off and on.’</p>
<p>‘Have you been to the garret?’</p>
<p>‘What should I do in the garret?’</p>
<p>‘But have you?’</p>
<p>‘I might just have looked up the garret
stair.’</p>
<p>‘You have been redding up the garret again!’</p>
<p>‘Not what you could call a redd up.’</p>
<p>‘O, woman, woman, I believe you have not been in bed at
all!’</p>
<p>‘You see me in it.’</p>
<p>‘My opinion is that you jumped into bed when you heard
me open the door.’</p>
<p>‘Havers.’</p>
<p>‘Did you?’</p>
<p>‘No.’</p>
<p>‘Well, then, when you heard me at the gate?’</p>
<p>‘It might have been when I heard you at the
gate.’</p>
<p>As daylight goes she follows it with her sewing to the window,
and gets another needleful out of it, as one may run after a
departed visitor for a last word, but now the gas is lit, and no
longer is it shameful to sit down to literature. If the
book be a story by George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourites
(and mine) among women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we
move softly, she will read, entranced, for hours. Her
delight in Carlyle was so well known that various good people
would send her books that contained a page about him; she could
place her finger on any passage wanted in the biography as
promptly as though she were looking for some article in her own
drawer, and given a date she was often able to tell you what they
were doing in Cheyne Row that day. Carlyle, she decided,
was not so much an ill man to live with as one who needed a deal
of managing, but when I asked if she thought she could have
managed him she only replied with a modest smile that meant
‘Oh no!’ but had the face of ‘Sal, I would have
liked to try.’</p>
<p>One lady lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have
never been published, and crabbed was the writing, but though my
mother liked to have our letters read aloud to her, she read
every one of these herself, and would quote from them in her
talk. Side by side with the Carlyle letters, which show him
in his most gracious light, were many from his wife to a friend,
and in one of these a romantic adventure is described—I
quote from memory, and it is a poor memory compared to my
mother’s, which registered everything by a method of her
own: ‘What might be the age of Bell Tibbits? Well,
she was born the week I bought the boiler, so she’ll be
one-and-fifty (no less!) come Martinmas.’ Mrs.
Carlyle had got into the train at a London station and was
feeling very lonely, for the journey to Scotland lay before her
and no one had come to see her off. Then, just as the train
was starting, a man jumped into the carriage, to her regret until
she saw his face, when, behold, they were old friends, and the
last time they met (I forget how many years before) he had asked
her to be his wife. He was very nice, and if I remember
aright, saw her to her journey’s end, though he had
intended to alight at some half-way place. I call this an
adventure, and I am sure it seemed to my mother to be the most
touching and memorable adventure that can come into a
woman’s life. ‘You see he hadna forgot,’
she would say proudly, as if this was a compliment in which all
her sex could share, and on her old tender face shone some of the
elation with which Mrs. Carlyle wrote that letter.</p>
<p>But there were times, she held, when Carlyle must have made
his wife a glorious woman. ‘As when?’ I might
inquire.</p>
<p>‘When she keeked in at his study door and said to
herself, “The whole world is ringing with his fame, and he
is my man!”’</p>
<p>‘And then,’ I might point out, ‘he would
roar to her to shut the door.’</p>
<p>‘Pooh!’ said my mother, ‘a man’s roar
is neither here nor there.’ But her verdict as a
whole was, ‘I would rather have been his mother than his
wife.’</p>
<p>So we have got her into her chair with the Carlyles, and all
is well. Furthermore, ‘to mak siccar,’ my
father has taken the opposite side of the fireplace and is deep
in the latest five columns of Gladstone, who is his
Carlyle. He is to see that she does not slip away fired by
a conviction, which suddenly overrides her pages, that the
kitchen is going to rack and ruin for want of her, and she is to
recall him to himself should he put his foot in the fire and keep
it there, forgetful of all save his hero’s eloquence.
(We were a family who needed a deal of watching.) She is
not interested in what Mr. Gladstone has to say; indeed she could
never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern for
grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and she
gratefully gave up reading ‘leaders’ the day I ceased
to write them. But like want of reasonableness, a love for
having the last word, want of humour and the like, politics were
in her opinion a mannish attribute to be tolerated, and Gladstone
was the name of the something which makes all our sex such queer
characters. She had a profound faith in him as an aid to
conversation, and if there were silent men in the company would
give him to them to talk about, precisely as she divided a cake
among children. And then, with a motherly smile, she would
leave them to gorge on him. But in the idolising of
Gladstone she recognised, nevertheless, a certain inevitability,
and would no more have tried to contend with it than to sweep a
shadow off the floor. Gladstone was, and there was an end
of it in her practical philosophy. Nor did she accept him
coldly; like a true woman she sympathised with those who suffered
severely, and they knew it and took counsel of her in the hour of
need. I remember one ardent Gladstonian who, as a general
election drew near, was in sore straits indeed, for he
disbelieved in Home Rule, and yet how could he vote against
‘Gladstone’s man’? His distress was so
real that it gave him a hang-dog appearance. He put his
case gloomily before her, and until the day of the election she
riddled him with sarcasm; I think he only went to her because he
found a mournful enjoyment in seeing a false Gladstonian
tortured.</p>
<p>It was all such plain-sailing for him, she pointed out; he did
not like this Home Rule, and therefore he must vote against
it.</p>
<p>She put it pitiful clear, he replied with a groan.</p>
<p>But she was like another woman to him when he appeared before
her on his way to the polling-booth.</p>
<p>‘This is a watery Sabbath to you, I’m
thinking,’ she said sympathetically, but without dropping
her wires—for Home Rule or no Home Rule that stocking-foot
must be turned before twelve o’clock.</p>
<p>A watery Sabbath means a doleful day, and ‘A watery
Sabbath it is,’ he replied with feeling. A silence
followed, broken only by the click of the wires. Now and
again he would mutter, ‘Ay, well, I’ll be going to
vote—little did I think the day would come,’ and so
on, but if he rose it was only to sit down again, and at last she
crossed over to him and said softly, (no sarcasm in her voice
now), ‘Away with you, and vote for Gladstone’s
man!’ He jumped up and made off without a word, but
from the east window we watched him strutting down the
brae. I laughed, but she said, ‘I’m no sure
that it’s a laughing matter,’ and afterwards,
‘I would have liked fine to be that Gladstone’s
mother.’</p>
<p>It is nine o’clock now, a quarter-past nine, half-past
nine—all the same moment to me, for I am at a sentence that
will not write. I know, though I can’t hear, what my
sister has gone upstairs to say to my mother:—</p>
<p>‘I was in at him at nine, and he said, “In five
minutes,” so I put the steak on the brander, but I’ve
been in thrice since then, and every time he says, “In five
minutes,” and when I try to take the table-cover off, he
presses his elbows hard on it, and growls. His supper will
be completely spoilt.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, that weary writing!’</p>
<p>‘I can do no more, mother, so you must come down and
stop him.’</p>
<p>‘I have no power over him,’ my mother says, but
she rises smiling, and presently she is opening my door.</p>
<p>‘In five minutes!’ I cry, but when I see that it
is she I rise and put my arm round her. ‘What a full
basket!’ she says, looking at the waste-paper basket, which
contains most of my work of the night and with a dear gesture she
lifts up a torn page and kisses it. ‘Poor
thing,’ she says to it, ‘and you would have liked so
fine to be printed!’ and she puts her hand over my desk to
prevent my writing more.</p>
<p>‘In the last five minutes,’ I begin, ‘one
can often do more than in the first hour.’</p>
<p>‘Many a time I’ve said it in my young days,’
she says slowly.</p>
<p>‘And proved it, too!’ cries a voice from the door,
the voice of one who was prouder of her even than I; it is true,
and yet almost unbelievable, that any one could have been prouder
of her than I.</p>
<p>‘But those days are gone,’ my mother says
solemnly, ‘gone to come back no more. You’ll
put by your work now, man, and have your supper, and then
you’ll come up and sit beside your mother for a whiley, for
soon you’ll be putting her away in the
kirk-yard.’</p>
<p>I hear such a little cry from near the door.</p>
<p>So my mother and I go up the stair together. ‘We
have changed places,’ she says; ‘that was just how I
used to help you up, but I’m the bairn now.’</p>
<p>She brings out the Testament again; it was always lying within
reach; it is the lock of hair she left me when she died.
And when she has read for a long time she ‘gives me a
look,’ as we say in the north, and I go out, to leave her
alone with God. She had been but a child when her mother
died, and so she fell early into the way of saying her prayers
with no earthly listener. Often and often I have found her
on her knees, but I always went softly away, closing the
door. I never heard her pray, but I know very well how she
prayed, and that, when that door was shut, there was not a day in
God’s sight between the worn woman and the little
child.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VI—HER MAID OF ALL WORK</h2>
<p>And sometimes I was her maid of all work.</p>
<p>It is early morn, and my mother has come noiselessly into my
room. I know it is she, though my eyes are shut, and I am
only half awake. Perhaps I was dreaming of her, for I
accept her presence without surprise, as if in the awakening I
had but seen her go out at one door to come in at another.
But she is speaking to herself.</p>
<p>‘I’m sweer to waken him—I doubt he was
working late—oh, that weary writing—no, I maunna
waken him.’</p>
<p>I start up. She is wringing her hands. ‘What
is wrong?’ I cry, but I know before she answers. My
sister is down with one of the headaches against which even she
cannot fight, and my mother, who bears physical pain as if it
were a comrade, is most woebegone when her daughter is the
sufferer. ‘And she winna let me go down the stair to
make a cup of tea for her,’ she groans.</p>
<p>‘I will soon make the tea, mother.’</p>
<p>‘Will you?’ she says eagerly. It is what she
has come to me for, but ‘It is a pity to rouse you,’
she says.</p>
<p>‘And I will take charge of the house to-day, and light
the fires and wash the dishes—’</p>
<p>‘Na, oh no; no, I couldna ask that of you, and you an
author.’</p>
<p>‘It won’t be the first time, mother, since I was
an author.’</p>
<p>‘More like the fiftieth!’ she says almost
gleefully, so I have begun well, for to keep up her spirits is
the great thing to-day.</p>
<p>Knock at the door. It is the baker. I take in the
bread, looking so sternly at him that he dare not smile.</p>
<p>Knock at the door. It is the postman. (I hope he did not
see that I had the lid of the kettle in my other hand.)</p>
<p>Furious knocking in a remote part. This means that the
author is in the coal cellar.</p>
<p>Anon I carry two breakfasts upstairs in triumph. I enter
the bedroom like no mere humdrum son, but after the manner of the
Glasgow waiter. I must say more about him. He had
been my mother’s one waiter, the only manservant she ever
came in contact with, and they had met in a Glasgow hotel which
she was eager to see, having heard of the monstrous things, and
conceived them to resemble country inns with another twelve
bedrooms. I remember how she beamed—yet tried to look
as if it was quite an ordinary experience—when we alighted
at the hotel door, but though she said nothing I soon read
disappointment in her face. She knew how I was exulting in
having her there, so would not say a word to damp me, but I
craftily drew it out of her. No, she was very comfortable,
and the house was grand beyond speech, but—but—where
was he? he had not been very hearty. ‘He’ was
the landlord; she had expected him to receive us at the door and
ask if we were in good health and how we had left the others, and
then she would have asked him if his wife was well and how many
children they had, after which we should all have sat down
together to dinner. Two chambermaids came into her room and
prepared it without a single word to her about her journey or on
any other subject, and when they had gone, ‘They are two
haughty misses,’ said my mother with spirit. But what
she most resented was the waiter with his swagger black suit and
short quick steps and the ‘towel’ over his arm.
Without so much as a ‘Welcome to Glasgow!’ he showed
us to our seats, not the smallest acknowledgment of our kindness
in giving such munificent orders did we draw from him, he hovered
around the table as if it would be unsafe to leave us with his
knives and forks (he should have seen her knives and forks), when
we spoke to each other he affected not to hear, we might laugh
but this uppish fellow would not join in. We retired,
crushed, and he had the final impudence to open the door for
us. But though this hurt my mother at the time, the humour
of our experiences filled her on reflection, and in her own house
she would describe them with unction, sometimes to those who had
been in many hotels, often to others who had been in none, and
whoever were her listeners she made them laugh, though not always
at the same thing.</p>
<p>So now when I enter the bedroom with the tray, on my arm is
that badge of pride, the towel; and I approach with prim steps to
inform Madam that breakfast is ready, and she puts on the society
manner and addresses me as ‘Sir,’ and asks with cruel
sarcasm for what purpose (except to boast) I carry the towel, and
I say ‘Is there anything more I can do for Madam?’
and Madam replies that there is one more thing I can do, and that
is, eat her breakfast for her. But of this I take no
notice, for my object is to fire her with the spirit of the game,
so that she eats unwittingly.</p>
<p>Now that I have washed up the breakfast things I should be at
my writing, and I am anxious to be at it, as I have an idea in my
head, which, if it is of any value, has almost certainly been put
there by her. But dare I venture? I know that the
house has not been properly set going yet, there are beds to
make, the exterior of the teapot is fair, but suppose some one
were to look inside? What a pity I knocked over the
flour-barrel! Can I hope that for once my mother will
forget to inquire into these matters? Is my sister willing
to let disorder reign until to-morrow? I determine to risk
it. Perhaps I have been at work for half an hour when I
hear movements overhead. One or other of them is wondering
why the house is so quiet. I rattle the tongs, but even
this does not satisfy them, so back into the desk go my papers,
and now what you hear is not the scrape of a pen but the rinsing
of pots and pans, or I am making beds, and making them
thoroughly, because after I am gone my mother will come (I know
her) and look suspiciously beneath the coverlet.</p>
<p>The kitchen is now speckless, not an unwashed platter in
sight, unless you look beneath the table. I feel that I
have earned time for an hour’s writing at last, and at it I
go with vigour. One page, two pages, really I am making
progress, when—was that a door opening? But I have my
mother’s light step on the brain, so I ‘yoke’
again, and next moment she is beside me. She has not
exactly left her room, she gives me to understand; but suddenly a
conviction had come to her that I was writing without a warm mat
at my feet. She carries one in her hands. Now that
she is here she remains for a time, and though she is in the
arm-chair by the fire, where she sits bolt upright (she loved to
have cushions on the unused chairs, but detested putting her back
against them), and I am bent low over my desk, I know that
contentment and pity are struggling for possession of her face:
contentment wins when she surveys her room, pity when she looks
at me. Every article of furniture, from the chairs that
came into the world with me and have worn so much better, though
I was new and they were second-hand, to the mantle-border of
fashionable design which she sewed in her seventieth year, having
picked up the stitch in half a lesson, has its story of fight and
attainment for her, hence her satisfaction; but she sighs at
sight of her son, dipping and tearing, and chewing the loathly
pen.</p>
<p>‘Oh, that weary writing!’</p>
<p>In vain do I tell her that writing is as pleasant to me as
ever was the prospect of a tremendous day’s ironing to her;
that (to some, though not to me) new chapters are as easy to turn
out as new bannocks. No, she maintains, for one bannock is
the marrows of another, while chapters—and then, perhaps,
her eyes twinkle, and says she saucily, ‘But, sal, you may
be right, for sometimes your bannocks are as alike as
mine!’</p>
<p>Or I may be roused from my writing by her cry that I am making
strange faces again. It is my contemptible weakness that if
I say a character smiled vacuously, I must smile vacuously; if he
frowns or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or given to
contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have to stop
writing to undo the knot. I bow with him, eat with him, and
gnaw my moustache with him. If the character be a lady with
an exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing
exquisitely. One reads of the astounding versatility of an
actor who is stout and lean on the same evening, but what is he
to the novelist who is a dozen persons within the hour?
Morally, I fear, we must deteriorate—but this is a subject
I may wisely edge away from.</p>
<p>We always spoke to each other in broad Scotch (I think in it
still), but now and again she would use a word that was new to
me, or I might hear one of her contemporaries use it. Now
is my opportunity to angle for its meaning. If I ask,
boldly, what was chat word she used just now, something like
‘bilbie’ or ‘silvendy’? she blushes, and
says she never said anything so common, or hoots! it is some
auld-farrant word about which she can tell me nothing. But
if in the course of conversation I remark casually, ‘Did he
find bilbie?’ or ‘Was that quite silvendy?’
(though the sense of the question is vague to me) she falls into
the trap, and the words explain themselves in her replies.
Or maybe to-day she sees whither I am leading her, and such is
her sensitiveness that she is quite hurt. The humour goes
out of her face (to find bilbie in some more silvendy spot), and
her reproachful eyes—but now I am on the arm of her chair,
and we have made it up. Nevertheless, I shall get no more
old-world Scotch out of her this forenoon, she weeds her talk
determinedly, and it is as great a falling away as when the mutch
gives place to the cap.</p>
<p>I am off for my afternoon walk, and she has promised to bar
the door behind me and open it to none. When I
return,—well, the door is still barred, but she is looking
both furtive and elated. I should say that she is burning
to tell me something, but cannot tell it without exposing
herself. Has she opened the door, and if so, why? I
don’t ask, but I watch. It is she who is sly now.</p>
<p>‘Have you been in the east room since you came
in?’ she asks, with apparent indifference.</p>
<p>‘No; why do you ask?’</p>
<p>‘Oh, I just thought you might have looked in.’</p>
<p>‘Is there anything new there?’</p>
<p>‘I dinna say there is, but—but just go and
see.’</p>
<p>‘There can’t be anything new if you kept the door
barred,’ I say cleverly.</p>
<p>This crushes her for a moment; but her eagerness that I should
see is greater than her fear. I set off for the east room,
and she follows, affecting humility, but with triumph in her
eye. How often those little scenes took place! I was
never told of the new purchase, I was lured into its presence,
and then she waited timidly for my start of surprise.</p>
<p>‘Do you see it?’ she says anxiously, and I see it,
and hear it, for this time it is a bran-new wicker chair, of the
kind that whisper to themselves for the first six months.</p>
<p>‘A going-about body was selling them in a cart,’
my mother begins, and what followed presents itself to my eyes
before she can utter another word. Ten minutes at the least
did she stand at the door argy-bargying with that man. But
it would be cruelty to scold a woman so uplifted.</p>
<p>‘Fifteen shillings he wanted,’ she cries,
‘but what do you think I beat him down to?’</p>
<p>‘Seven and sixpence?’</p>
<p>She claps her hands with delight. ‘Four shillings,
as I’m a living woman!’ she crows: never was a woman
fonder of a bargain.</p>
<p>I gaze at the purchase with the amazement expected of me, and
the chair itself crinkles and shudders to hear what it went for
(or is it merely chuckling at her?). ‘And the man
said it cost himself five shillings,’ my mother continues
exultantly. You would have thought her the hardest person
had not a knock on the wall summoned us about this time to my
sister’s side. Though in bed she has been listening,
and this is what she has to say, in a voice that makes my mother
very indignant, ‘You drive a bargain! I’m
thinking ten shillings was nearer what you paid.’</p>
<p>‘Four shillings to a penny!’ says my mother.</p>
<p>‘I daresay,’ says my sister; ‘but after you
paid him the money I heard you in the little bedroom press.
What were you doing there?’</p>
<p>My mother winces. ‘I may have given him a present
of an old topcoat,’ she falters. ‘He looked
ill-happit. But that was after I made the
bargain.’</p>
<p>‘Were there bairns in the cart?’</p>
<p>‘There might have been a bit lassie in the
cart.’</p>
<p>‘I thought as much. What did you give her? I
heard you in the pantry.’</p>
<p>‘Four shillings was what I got that chair for,’
replies my mother firmly. If I don’t interfere there
will be a coldness between them for at least a minute.
‘There is blood on your finger,’ I say to my
mother.</p>
<p>‘So there is,’ she says, concealing her hand.</p>
<p>‘Blood!’ exclaims my sister anxiously, and then
with a cry of triumph, ‘I warrant it’s jelly.
You gave that lassie one of the jelly cans!’</p>
<p>The Glasgow waiter brings up tea, and presently my sister is
able to rise, and after a sharp fight I am expelled from the
kitchen. The last thing I do as maid of all work is to lug
upstairs the clothes-basket which has just arrived with the
mangling. Now there is delicious linen for my mother to
finger; there was always rapture on her face when the
clothes-basket came in; it never failed to make her once more the
active genius of the house. I may leave her now with her
sheets and collars and napkins and fronts. Indeed, she
probably orders me to go. A son is all very well, but
suppose he were to tread on that counterpane!</p>
<p>My sister is but and I am ben—I mean she is in the east
end and I am in the west—tuts, tuts! let us get at the
English of this by striving: she is in the kitchen and I am at my
desk in the parlour. I hope I may not be disturbed, for
to-night I must make my hero say ‘Darling,’ and it
needs both privacy and concentration. In a word, let me
admit (though I should like to beat about the bush) that I have
sat down to a love-chapter. Too long has it been avoided,
Albert has called Marion ‘dear’ only as yet (between
you and me these are not their real names), but though the public
will probably read the word without blinking, it went off in my
hands with a bang. They tell me—the Sassenach tell
me—that in time I shall be able without a blush to make
Albert say ‘darling,’ and even gather her up in his
arms, but I begin to doubt it; the moment sees me as shy as ever;
I still find it advisable to lock the door, and then—no
witness save the dog—I ‘do’ it dourly with my
teeth clenched, while the dog retreats into the far corner and
moans. The bolder Englishman (I am told) will write a
love-chapter and then go out, quite coolly, to dinner, but such
goings on are contrary to the Scotch nature; even the great
novelists dared not. Conceive Mr. Stevenson left alone with
a hero, a heroine, and a proposal impending (he does not know
where to look). Sir Walter in the same circumstances gets
out of the room by making his love-scenes take place between the
end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, but he could
afford to do anything, and the small fry must e’en to their
task, moan the dog as he may. So I have yoked to mine when,
enter my mother, looking wistful.</p>
<p>‘I suppose you are terrible thrang,’ she says.</p>
<p>‘Well, I am rather busy, but—what is it you want
me to do?’</p>
<p>‘It would be a shame to ask you.’</p>
<p>‘Still, ask me.’</p>
<p>‘I am so terrified they may be filed.’</p>
<p>‘You want me to—?’</p>
<p>‘If you would just come up, and help me to fold the
sheets!’</p>
<p>The sheets are folded and I return to Albert. I lock the
door, and at last I am bringing my hero forward nicely (my knee
in the small of his back), when this startling question is shot
by my sister through the key-hole—</p>
<p>‘Where did you put the carrot-grater?’</p>
<p>It will all have to be done over again if I let Albert go for
a moment, so, gripping him hard, I shout indignantly that I have
not seen the carrot-grater.</p>
<p>‘Then what did you grate the carrots on?’ asks the
voice, and the door-handle is shaken just as I shake Albert.</p>
<p>‘On a broken cup,’ I reply with surprising
readiness, and I get to work again but am less engrossed, for a
conviction grows on me that I put the carrot-grater in the drawer
of the sewing-machine.</p>
<p>I am wondering whether I should confess or brazen it out, when
I hear my sister going hurriedly upstairs. I have a
presentiment that she has gone to talk about me, and I basely
open my door and listen.</p>
<p>‘Just look at that, mother!’</p>
<p>‘Is it a dish-cloth?’</p>
<p>‘That’s what it is now.’</p>
<p>‘Losh behears! it’s one of the new
table-napkins.’</p>
<p>‘That’s what it was. He has been polishing
the kitchen grate with it!’</p>
<p>(I remember!)</p>
<p>‘Woe’s me! That is what comes of his not
letting me budge from this room. O, it is a watery Sabbath
when men take to doing women’s work!’</p>
<p>‘It defies the face of clay, mother, to fathom what
makes him so senseless.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, it’s that weary writing.’</p>
<p>‘And the worst of it is he will talk to-morrow as if he
had done wonders.’</p>
<p>‘That’s the way with the whole clanjam-fray of
them.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, but as usual you will humour him,
mother.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, well, it pleases him, you see,’ says my
mother, ‘and we can have our laugh when his door’s
shut.’</p>
<p>‘He is most terribly handless.’</p>
<p>‘He is all that, but, poor soul, he does his
best.’</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VII—R. L. S.</h2>
<p>These familiar initials are, I suppose, the best beloved in
recent literature, certainly they are the sweetest to me, but
there was a time when my mother could not abide them. She
said ‘That Stevenson man’ with a sneer, and, it was
never easy to her to sneer. At thought of him her face
would become almost hard, which seems incredible, and she would
knit her lips and fold her arms, and reply with a stiff
‘oh’ if you mentioned his aggravating name. In
the novels we have a way of writing of our heroine, ‘she
drew herself up haughtily,’ and when mine draw themselves
up haughtily I see my mother thinking of Robert Louis
Stevenson. He knew her opinion of him, and would write,
‘My ears tingled yesterday; I sair doubt she has been
miscalling me again.’ But the more she miscalled him
the more he delighted in her, and she was informed of this, and
at once said, ‘The scoundrel!’ If you would
know what was his unpardonable crime, it was this: he wrote
better books than mine.</p>
<p>I remember the day she found it out, which was not, however,
the day she admitted it. That day, when I should have been
at my work, she came upon me in the kitchen, ‘The Master of
Ballantrae’ beside me, but I was not reading: my head lay
heavy on the table, and to her anxious eyes, I doubt not, I was
the picture of woe. ‘Not writing!’ I echoed,
no, I was not writing, I saw no use in ever trying to write
again. And down, I suppose, went my head once more.
She misunderstood, and thought the blow had fallen; I had
awakened to the discovery, always dreaded by her, that I had
written myself dry; I was no better than an empty
ink-bottle. She wrung her hands, but indignation came to
her with my explanation, which was that while R. L. S. was at it
we others were only ‘prentices cutting our fingers on his
tools. ‘I could never thole his books,’ said my
mother immediately, and indeed vindictively.</p>
<p>‘You have not read any of them,’ I reminded
her.</p>
<p>‘And never will,’ said she with spirit.</p>
<p>And I have no doubt that she called him a dark character that
very day. For weeks too, if not for months, she adhered to
her determination not to read him, though I, having come to my
senses and seen that there is a place for the ‘prentice,
was taking a pleasure, almost malicious, in putting ‘The
Master of Ballantrae’ in her way. I would place it on
her table so that it said good-morning to her when she
rose. She would frown, and carrying it downstairs, as if
she had it in the tongs, replace it on its book-shelf. I
would wrap it up in the cover she had made for the latest
Carlyle: she would skin it contemptuously and again bring it
down. I would hide her spectacles in it, and lay it on top
of the clothes-basket and prop it up invitingly open against her
tea-pot. And at last I got her, though I forget by which of
many contrivances. What I recall vividly is a key-hole
view, to which another member of the family invited me.
Then I saw my mother wrapped up in ‘The Master of
Ballantrae’ and muttering the music to herself, nodding her
head in approval, and taking a stealthy glance at the foot of
each page before she began at the top. Nevertheless she had
an ear for the door, for when I bounced in she had been too
clever for me; there was no book to be seen, only an apron on her
lap and she was gazing out at the window. Some such
conversation as this followed:—</p>
<p>‘You have been sitting very quietly, mother.’</p>
<p>‘I always sit quietly, I never do anything, I’m
just a finished stocking.’</p>
<p>‘Have you been reading?’</p>
<p>‘Do I ever read at this time of day?’</p>
<p>‘What is that in your lap?’</p>
<p>‘Just my apron.’</p>
<p>‘Is that a book beneath the apron?’</p>
<p>‘It might be a book.’</p>
<p>‘Let me see.’</p>
<p>‘Go away with you to your work.’</p>
<p>But I lifted the apron. ‘Why, it’s
“The Master of Ballantrae!”’ I exclaimed,
shocked.</p>
<p>‘So it is!’ said my mother, equally
surprised. But I looked sternly at her, and perhaps she
blushed.</p>
<p>‘Well what do you think: not nearly equal to
mine?’ said I with humour.</p>
<p>‘Nothing like them,’ she said determinedly.</p>
<p>‘Not a bit,’ said I, though whether with a smile
or a groan is immaterial; they would have meant the same
thing. Should I put the book back on its shelf? I
asked, and she replied that I could put it wherever I liked for
all she cared, so long as I took it out of her sight (the
implication was that it had stolen on to her lap while she was
looking out at the window). My behaviour may seem small,
but I gave her a last chance, for I said that some people found
it a book there was no putting down until they reached the last
page.</p>
<p>‘I’m no that kind,’ replied my mother.</p>
<p>Nevertheless our old game with the haver of a thing, as she
called it, was continued, with this difference, that it was now
she who carried the book covertly upstairs, and I who replaced it
on the shelf, and several times we caught each other in the act,
but not a word said either of us; we were grown
self-conscious. Much of the play no doubt I forget, but one
incident I remember clearly. She had come down to sit
beside me while I wrote, and sometimes, when I looked up, her eye
was not on me, but on the shelf where ‘The Master of
Ballantrae’ stood inviting her. Mr. Stevenson’s
books are not for the shelf, they are for the hand; even when you
lay them down, let it be on the table for the next comer.
Being the most sociable that man has penned in our time, they
feel very lonely up there in a stately row. I think their
eye is on you the moment you enter the room, and so you are drawn
to look at them, and you take a volume down with the impulse that
induces one to unchain the dog. And the result is not
dissimilar, for in another moment you two are at play. Is
there any other modern writer who gets round you in this
way? Well, he had given my mother the look which in the
ball-room means, ‘Ask me for this waltz,’ and she
ettled to do it, but felt that her more dutiful course was to sit
out the dance with this other less entertaining partner. I
wrote on doggedly, but could hear the whispering.</p>
<p>‘Am I to be a wall-flower?’ asked James Durie
reproachfully. (It must have been leap-year.)</p>
<p>‘Speak lower,’ replied my mother, with an uneasy
look at me.</p>
<p>‘Pooh!’ said James contemptuously, ‘that
kail-runtle!’</p>
<p>‘I winna have him miscalled,’ said my mother,
frowning.</p>
<p>‘I am done with him,’ said James (wiping his cane
with his cambric handkerchief), and his sword clattered
deliciously (I cannot think this was accidental), which made my
mother sigh. Like the man he was, he followed up his
advantage with a comparison that made me dip viciously.</p>
<p>‘A prettier sound that,’ said he, clanking his
sword again, ‘than the clack-clack of your young
friend’s shuttle.’</p>
<p>‘Whist!’ cried my mother, who had seen me dip.</p>
<p>‘Then give me your arm,’ said James, lowering his
voice.</p>
<p>‘I dare not,’ answered my mother.
‘He’s so touchy about you.’</p>
<p>‘Come, come,’ he pressed her, ‘you are
certain to do it sooner or later, so why not now?’</p>
<p>‘Wait till he has gone for his walk,’ said my
mother; ‘and, forbye that, I’m ower old to dance with
you.’</p>
<p>‘How old are you?’ he inquired.</p>
<p>‘You’re gey an’ pert!’ cried my
mother.</p>
<p>‘Are you seventy?’</p>
<p>‘Off and on,’ she admitted.</p>
<p>‘Pooh,’ he said, ‘a mere girl!’</p>
<p>She replied instantly, ‘I’m no’ to be
catched with chaff’; but she smiled and rose as if he had
stretched out his hand and got her by the finger-tip.</p>
<p>After that they whispered so low (which they could do as they
were now much nearer each other) that I could catch only one
remark. It came from James, and seems to show the tenor of
their whisperings, for his words were, ‘Easily enough, if
you slip me beneath your shawl.’</p>
<p>That is what she did, and furthermore she left the room
guiltily, muttering something about redding up the drawers.
I suppose I smiled wanly to myself, or conscience must have been
nibbling at my mother, for in less than five minutes she was
back, carrying her accomplice openly, and she thrust him with
positive viciousness into the place where my Stevenson had lost a
tooth (as the writer whom he most resembled would have
said). And then like a good mother she took up one of her
son’s books and read it most determinedly. It had
become a touching incident to me, and I remember how we there and
then agreed upon a compromise she was to read the enticing thing
just to convince herself of its inferiority.</p>
<p>‘The Master of Ballantrae’ is not the best.
Conceive the glory, which was my mother’s, of knowing from
a trustworthy source that there are at least three better
awaiting you on the same shelf. She did not know Alan Breck
yet, and he was as anxious to step down as Mr. Bally
himself. John Silver was there, getting into his leg, so
that she should not have to wait a moment, and roaring,
‘I’ll lay to that!’ when she told me
consolingly that she could not thole pirate stories. Not to
know these gentlemen, what is it like? It is like never
having been in love. But they are in the house! That
is like knowing that you will fall in love to-morrow
morning. With one word, by drawing one mournful face, I
could have got my mother to abjure the jam-shelf—nay, I
might have managed it by merely saying that she had enjoyed
‘The Master of Ballantrae.’ For you must
remember that she only read it to persuade herself (and me) of
its unworthiness, and that the reason she wanted to read the
others was to get further proof. All this she made plain to
me, eyeing me a little anxiously the while, and of course I
accepted the explanation. Alan is the biggest child of them
all, and I doubt not that she thought so, but curiously enough
her views of him are among the things I have forgotten. But
how enamoured she was of ‘Treasure Island,’ and how
faithful she tried to be to me all the time she was reading
it! I had to put my hands over her eyes to let her know
that I had entered the room, and even then she might try to read
between my fingers, coming to herself presently, however, to say
‘It’s a haver of a book.’</p>
<p>‘Those pirate stories are so uninteresting,’ I
would reply without fear, for she was too engrossed to see
through me. ‘Do you think you will finish this
one?’</p>
<p>‘I may as well go on with it since I have begun
it,’ my mother says, so slyly that my sister and I shake
our heads at each other to imply, ‘Was there ever such a
woman!’</p>
<p>‘There are none of those one-legged scoundrels in my
books,’ I say.</p>
<p>‘Better without them,’ she replies promptly.</p>
<p>‘I wonder, mother, what it is about the man that so
infatuates the public?’</p>
<p>‘He takes no hold of me,’ she insists.
‘I would a hantle rather read your books.’</p>
<p>I offer obligingly to bring one of them to her, and now she
looks at me suspiciously. ‘You surely believe I like
yours best,’ she says with instant anxiety, and I soothe
her by assurances, and retire advising her to read on, just to
see if she can find out how he misleads the public.
‘Oh, I may take a look at it again by-and-by,’ she
says indifferently, but nevertheless the probability is that as
the door shuts the book opens, as if by some mechanical
contrivance. I remember how she read ‘Treasure
Island,’ holding it close to the ribs of the fire (because
she could not spare a moment to rise and light the gas), and how,
when bed-time came, and we coaxed, remonstrated, scolded, she
said quite fiercely, clinging to the book, ‘I dinna lay my
head on a pillow this night till I see how that laddie got out of
the barrel.’</p>
<p>After this, I think, he was as bewitching as the laddie in the
barrel to her—Was he not always a laddie in the barrel
himself, climbing in for apples while we all stood around, like
gamins, waiting for a bite? He was the spirit of boyhood
tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it
to come back and play. And I suppose my mother felt this,
as so many have felt it: like others she was a little scared at
first to find herself skipping again, with this masterful child
at the rope, but soon she gave him her hand and set off with him
for the meadow, not an apology between the two of them for the
author left behind. But near to the end did she admit (in
words) that he had a way with him which was beyond her son.
‘Silk and sacking, that is what we are,’ she was
informed, to which she would reply obstinately, ‘Well,
then, I prefer sacking.’</p>
<p>‘But if he had been your son?’</p>
<p>‘But he is not.’</p>
<p>‘You wish he were?’</p>
<p>‘I dinna deny but what I could have found room for
him.’</p>
<p>And still at times she would smear him with the name of black
(to his delight when he learned the reason). That was when
some podgy red-sealed blue-crossed letter arrived from Vailima,
inviting me to journey thither. (His directions were,
‘You take the boat at San Francisco, and then my place is
the second to the left.’) Even London seemed to her
to carry me so far away that I often took a week to the journey
(the first six days in getting her used to the idea), and these
letters terrified her. It was not the finger of Jim Hawkins
she now saw beckoning me across the seas, it was John Silver,
waving a crutch. Seldom, I believe, did I read straight
through one of these Vailima letters; when in the middle I
suddenly remembered who was upstairs and what she was probably
doing, and I ran to her, three steps at a jump, to find her, lips
pursed, hands folded, a picture of gloom.</p>
<p>‘I have a letter from—’</p>
<p>‘So I have heard.’</p>
<p>‘Would you like to hear it?’</p>
<p>‘No.’</p>
<p>‘Can you not abide him?’</p>
<p>‘I cauna thole him.’</p>
<p>‘Is he a black?’</p>
<p>‘He is all that.’</p>
<p>Well, Vailima was the one spot on earth I had any great
craving to visit, but I think she always knew I would never leave
her. Sometime, she said, she should like me to go, but not
until she was laid away. ‘And how small I have grown
this last winter. Look at my wrists. It canna be long
now.’ No, I never thought of going, was never absent
for a day from her without reluctance, and never walked so
quickly as when I was going back. In the meantime that
happened which put an end for ever to my scheme of travel.
I shall never go up the Road of Loving Hearts now, on ‘a
wonderful clear night of stars,’ to meet the man coming
toward me on a horse. It is still a wonderful clear night
of stars, but the road is empty. So I never saw the dear
king of us all. But before he had written books he was in
my part of the country with a fishing-wand in his hand, and I
like to think that I was the boy who met him that day by Queen
Margaret’s burn, where the rowans are, and busked a fly for
him, and stood watching, while his lithe figure rose and fell as
he cast and hinted back from the crystal waters of
Noran-side.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VIII—A PANIC IN THE HOUSE</h2>
<p>I was sitting at my desk in London when a telegram came
announcing that my mother was again dangerously ill, and I seized
my hat and hurried to the station. It is not a memory of
one night only. A score of times, I am sure, I was called
north thus suddenly, and reached our little town trembling, head
out at railway-carriage window for a glance at a known face which
would answer the question on mine. These illnesses came as
regularly as the backend of the year, but were less regular in
going, and through them all, by night and by day, I see my sister
moving so unwearyingly, so lovingly, though with failing
strength, that I bow my head in reverence for her. She was
wearing herself done. The doctor advised us to engage a
nurse, but the mere word frightened my mother, and we got between
her and the door as if the woman was already on the stair.
To have a strange woman in my mother’s room—you who
are used to them cannot conceive what it meant to us.</p>
<p>Then we must have a servant. This seemed only less
horrible. My father turned up his sleeves and clutched the
besom. I tossed aside my papers, and was ready to run the
errands. He answered the door, I kept the fires going, he
gave me a lesson in cooking, I showed him how to make beds, one
of us wore an apron. It was not for long. I was led
to my desk, the newspaper was put into my father’s
hand. ‘But a servant!’ we cried, and would have
fallen to again. ‘No servant, comes into this
house,’ said my sister quite fiercely, and, oh, but my
mother was relieved to hear her! There were many such
scenes, a year of them, I daresay, before we yielded.</p>
<p>I cannot say which of us felt it most. In London I was
used to servants, and in moments of irritation would ring for
them furiously, though doubtless my manner changed as they opened
the door. I have even held my own with gentlemen in plush,
giving one my hat, another my stick, and a third my coat, and all
done with little more trouble than I should have expended in
putting the three articles on the chair myself. But this
bold deed, and other big things of the kind, I did that I might
tell my mother of them afterwards, while I sat on the end of her
bed, and her face beamed with astonishment and mirth.</p>
<p>From my earliest days I had seen servants. The manse had
a servant, the bank had another; one of their uses was to pounce
upon, and carry away in stately manner, certain naughty boys who
played with me. The banker did not seem really great to me,
but his servant—oh yes. Her boots cheeped all the way
down the church aisle; it was common report that she had flesh
every day for her dinner; instead of meeting her lover at the
pump she walked him into the country, and he returned with wild
roses in his buttonhole, his hand up to hide them, and on his
face the troubled look of those who know that if they take this
lady they must give up drinking from the saucer for
evermore. For the lovers were really common men, until she
gave them that glance over the shoulder which, I have noticed, is
the fatal gift of servants.</p>
<p>According to legend we once had a servant—in my
childhood I could show the mark of it on my forehead, and even
point her out to other boys, though she was now merely a wife
with a house of her own. But even while I boasted I
doubted. Reduced to life-size she may have been but a woman
who came in to help. I shall say no more about her, lest
some one comes forward to prove that she went home at night.</p>
<p>Never shall I forget my first servant. I was eight or
nine, in velveteen, diamond socks (‘Cross your legs when
they look at you,’ my mother had said, ‘and put your
thumb in your pocket and leave the top of your handkerchief
showing’), and I had travelled by rail to visit a
relative. He had a servant, and as I was to be his guest
she must be my servant also for the time being—you may be
sure I had got my mother to put this plainly before me ere I set
off. My relative met me at the station, but I wasted no
time in hoping I found him well. I did not even cross my
legs for him, so eager was I to hear whether she was still
there. A sister greeted me at the door, but I chafed at
having to be kissed; at once I made for the kitchen, where, I
knew, they reside, and there she was, and I crossed my legs and
put one thumb in my pocket, and the handkerchief was
showing. Afterwards I stopped strangers on the highway with
an offer to show her to them through the kitchen window, and I
doubt not the first letter I ever wrote told my mother what they
are like when they are so near that you can put your fingers into
them.</p>
<p>But now when we could have servants for ourselves I shrank
from the thought. It would not be the same house; we should
have to dissemble; I saw myself speaking English the long day
through. You only know the shell of a Scot until you have
entered his home circle; in his office, in clubs, at social
gatherings where you and he seem to be getting on so well he is
really a house with all the shutters closed and the door
locked. He is not opaque of set purpose, often it is
against his will—it is certainly against mine, I try to
keep my shutters open and my foot in the door but they will bang
to. In many ways my mother was as reticent as myself,
though her manners were as gracious as mine were rough (in vain,
alas! all the honest oiling of them), and my sister was the most
reserved of us all; you might at times see a light through one of
my chinks: she was double-shuttered. Now, it seems to be a
law of nature that we must show our true selves at some time, and
as the Scot must do it at home, and squeeze a day into an hour,
what follows is that there he is self-revealing in the
superlative degree, the feelings so long dammed up overflow, and
thus a Scotch family are probably better acquainted with each
other, and more ignorant of the life outside their circle, than
any other family in the world. And as knowledge is
sympathy, the affection existing between them is almost painful
in its intensity; they have not more to give than their
neighbours, but it is bestowed upon a few instead of being
distributed among many; they are reputed niggardly, but for
family affection at least they pay in gold. In this, I
believe, we shall find the true explanation why Scotch
literature, since long before the days of Burns, has been so
often inspired by the domestic hearth, and has treated it with a
passionate understanding.</p>
<p>Must a woman come into our house and discover that I was not
such a dreary dog as I had the reputation of being? Was I
to be seen at last with the veil of dourness lifted? My
company voice is so low and unimpressive that my first remark is
merely an intimation that I am about to speak (like the whir of
the clock before it strikes): must it be revealed that I had
another voice, that there was one door I never opened without
leaving my reserve on the mat? Ah, that room, must its
secrets be disclosed? So joyous they were when my mother
was well, no wonder we were merry. Again and again she had
been given back to us; it was for the glorious to-day we thanked
God; in our hearts we knew and in our prayers confessed that the
fill of delight had been given us, whatever might befall.
We had not to wait till all was over to know its value; my mother
used to say, ‘We never understand how little we need in
this world until we know the loss of it,’ and there can be
few truer sayings, but during her last years we exulted daily in
the possession of her as much as we can exult in her
memory. No wonder, I say, that we were merry, but we liked
to show it to God alone, and to Him only our agony during those
many night-alarms, when lights flickered in the house and white
faces were round my mother’s bedside. Not for other
eyes those long vigils when, night about, we sat watching, nor
the awful nights when we stood together, teeth
clenched—waiting—it must be now. And it was not
then; her hand became cooler, her breathing more easy; she smiled
to us. Once more I could work by snatches, and was glad,
but what was the result to me compared to the joy of hearing that
voice from the other room? There lay all the work I was
ever proud of, the rest is but honest craftsmanship done to give
her coal and food and softer pillows. My thousand letters
that she so carefully preserved, always sleeping with the last
beneath the sheet, where one was found when she died—they
are the only writing of mine of which I shall ever boast. I
would not there had been one less though I could have written an
immortal book for it.</p>
<p>How my sister toiled—to prevent a stranger’s
getting any footing in the house! And how, with the same
object, my mother strove to ‘do for herself’ once
more. She pretended that she was always well now, and
concealed her ailments so craftily that we had to probe for
them:—</p>
<p>‘I think you are not feeling well to-day?’</p>
<p>‘I am perfectly well.’</p>
<p>‘Where is the pain?’</p>
<p>‘I have no pain to speak of.’</p>
<p>‘Is it at your heart?’</p>
<p>‘No.’</p>
<p>‘Is your breathing hurting you?’</p>
<p>‘Not it.’</p>
<p>‘Do you feel those stounds in your head
again?’</p>
<p>‘No, no, I tell you there is nothing the matter with
me.’</p>
<p>‘Have you a pain in your side?’</p>
<p>‘Really, it’s most provoking I canna put my hand
to my side without your thinking I have a pain there.’</p>
<p>‘You have a pain in your side!’</p>
<p>‘I might have a pain in my side.’</p>
<p>‘And you were trying to hide it! Is it very
painful?’</p>
<p>‘It’s—it’s no so bad but what I can
bear it.’</p>
<p>Which of these two gave in first I cannot tell, though to me
fell the duty of persuading them, for whichever she was she
rebelled as soon as the other showed signs of yielding, so that
sometimes I had two converts in the week but never both on the
same day. I would take them separately, and press the one
to yield for the sake of the other, but they saw so easily
through my artifice. My mother might go bravely to my
sister and say, ‘I have been thinking it over, and I
believe I would like a servant fine—once we got used to
her.’</p>
<p>‘Did he tell you to say that?’ asks my sister
sharply.</p>
<p>‘I say it of my own free will.’</p>
<p>‘He put you up to it, I am sure, and he told you not to
let on that you did it to lighten my work.’</p>
<p>‘Maybe he did, but I think we should get one.’</p>
<p>‘Not for my sake,’ says my sister obstinately, and
then my mother comes ben to me to say delightedly, ‘She
winna listen to reason!’</p>
<p>But at last a servant was engaged; we might be said to be at
the window, gloomily waiting for her now, and it was with such
words as these that we sought to comfort each other and
ourselves:—</p>
<p>‘She will go early to her bed.’</p>
<p>‘She needna often be seen upstairs.’</p>
<p>‘We’ll set her to the walking every
day.’</p>
<p>‘There will be a many errands for her to run.
We’ll tell her to take her time over them.’</p>
<p>‘Three times she shall go to the kirk every Sabbath, and
we’ll egg her on to attending the lectures in the
hall.’</p>
<p>‘She is sure to have friends in the town.
We’ll let her visit them often.’</p>
<p>‘If she dares to come into your room, mother!’</p>
<p>‘Mind this, every one of you, servant or no servant, I
fold all the linen mysel.’</p>
<p>‘She shall not get cleaning out the east
room.’</p>
<p>‘Nor putting my chest of drawers in order.’</p>
<p>‘Nor tidying up my manuscripts.’</p>
<p>‘I hope she’s a reader, though. You could
set her down with a book, and then close the door canny on
her.’</p>
<p>And so on. Was ever servant awaited so
apprehensively? And then she came—at an anxious time,
too, when her worth could be put to the proof at once—and
from first to last she was a treasure. I know not what we
should have done without her.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER IX—MY HEROINE.</h2>
<p>When it was known that I had begun another story my mother
might ask what it was to be about this time.</p>
<p>‘Fine we can guess who it is about,’ my sister
would say pointedly.</p>
<p>‘Maybe you can guess, but it is beyond me,’ says
my mother, with the meekness of one who knows that she is a dull
person.</p>
<p>My sister scorned her at such times. ‘What woman
is in all his books?’ she would demand.</p>
<p>‘I’m sure I canna say,’ replies my mother
determinedly. ‘I thought the women were different
every time.’</p>
<p>‘Mother, I wonder you can be so audacious! Fine
you know what woman I mean.’</p>
<p>‘How can I know? What woman is it? You
should bear in mind that I hinna your cleverness’ (they
were constantly giving each other little knocks).</p>
<p>‘I won’t give you the satisfaction of saying her
name. But this I will say, it is high time he was keeping
her out of his books.’</p>
<p>And then as usual my mother would give herself away
unconsciously. ‘That is what I tell him,’ she
says chuckling, ‘and he tries to keep me out, but he canna;
it’s more than he can do!’</p>
<p>On an evening after my mother had gone to bed, the first
chapter would be brought upstairs, and I read, sitting at the
foot of the bed, while my sister watched to make my mother behave
herself, and my father cried H’sh! when there were
interruptions. All would go well at the start, the
reflections were accepted with a little nod of the head, the
descriptions of scenery as ruts on the road that must be got over
at a walking pace (my mother did not care for scenery, and that
is why there is so little of it in my books). But now I am
reading too quickly, a little apprehensively, because I know that
the next paragraph begins with—let us say with,
‘Along this path came a woman’: I had intended to
rush on here in a loud bullying voice, but ‘Along this path
came a woman’ I read, and stop. Did I hear a faint
sound from the other end of the bed? Perhaps I did not; I
may only have been listening for it, but I falter and look
up. My sister and I look sternly at my mother. She
bites her under-lip and clutches the bed with both hands, really
she is doing her best for me, but first comes a smothered
gurgling sound, then her hold on herself relaxes and she shakes
with mirth.</p>
<p>‘That’s a way to behave!’ cries my
sister.</p>
<p>‘I cannot help it,’ my mother gasps.</p>
<p>‘And there’s nothing to laugh at.’</p>
<p>‘It’s that woman,’ my mother explains
unnecessarily.</p>
<p>‘Maybe she’s not the woman you think her,’ I
say, crushed.</p>
<p>‘Maybe not,’ says my mother doubtfully.
‘What was her name?’</p>
<p>‘Her name,’ I answer with triumph, ‘was not
Margaret’; but this makes her ripple again. ‘I
have so many names nowadays,’ she mutters.</p>
<p>‘H’sh!’ says my father, and the reading is
resumed.</p>
<p>Perhaps the woman who came along the path was of tall and
majestic figure, which should have shown my mother that I had
contrived to start my train without her this time. But it
did not.</p>
<p>‘What are you laughing at now?’ says my sister
severely. ‘Do you not hear that she was a tall,
majestic woman?’</p>
<p>‘It’s the first time I ever heard it said of
her,’ replies my mother.</p>
<p>‘But she is.’</p>
<p>‘Ke fy, havers!’</p>
<p>‘The book says it.’</p>
<p>‘There will be a many queer things in the book.
What was she wearing?’</p>
<p>I have not described her clothes. ‘That’s a
mistake,’ says my mother. ‘When I come upon a
woman in a book, the first thing I want to know about her is
whether she was good-looking, and the second, how she was put
on.’</p>
<p>The woman on the path was eighteen years of age, and of
remarkable beauty.</p>
<p>‘That settles you,’ says my sister.</p>
<p>‘I was no beauty at eighteen,’ my mother admits,
but here my father interferes unexpectedly. ‘There
wasna your like in this countryside at eighteen,’ says he
stoutly.</p>
<p>‘Pooh!’ says she, well pleased.</p>
<p>‘Were you plain, then?’ we ask.</p>
<p>‘Sal,’ she replies briskly, ‘I was far from
plain.’</p>
<p>‘H’sh!’</p>
<p>Perhaps in the next chapter this lady (or another) appears in
a carriage.</p>
<p>‘I assure you we’re mounting in the world,’
I hear my mother murmur, but I hurry on without looking up.
The lady lives in a house where there are footmen—but the
footmen have come on the scene too hurriedly. ‘This
is more than I can stand,’ gasps my mother, and just as she
is getting the better of a fit of laughter, ‘Footman, give
me a drink of water,’ she cries, and this sets her off
again. Often the readings had to end abruptly because her
mirth brought on violent fits of coughing.</p>
<p>Sometimes I read to my sister alone, and she assured me that
she could not see my mother among the women this time. This
she said to humour me. Presently she would slip upstairs to
announce triumphantly, ‘You are in again!’</p>
<p>Or in the small hours I might make a confidant of my father,
and when I had finished reading he would say thoughtfully,
‘That lassie is very natural. Some of the ways you
say she had—your mother had them just the same. Did
you ever notice what an extraordinary woman your mother
is?’</p>
<p>Then would I seek my mother for comfort. She was the
more ready to give it because of her profound conviction that if
I was found out—that is, if readers discovered how
frequently and in how many guises she appeared in my
books—the affair would become a public scandal.</p>
<p>‘You see Jess is not really you,’ I begin
inquiringly.</p>
<p>‘Oh no, she is another kind of woman altogether,’
my mother says, and then spoils the compliment by adding
naîvely, ‘She had but two rooms and I have
six.’</p>
<p>I sigh. ‘Without counting the pantry, and
it’s a great big pantry,’ she mutters.</p>
<p>This was not the sort of difference I could greatly plume
myself upon, and honesty would force me to say, ‘As far as
that goes, there was a time when you had but two rooms
yourself—’</p>
<p>‘That’s long since,’ she breaks in.
‘I began with an up-the-stair, but I always had it in my
mind—I never mentioned it, but there it was—to have
the down-the-stair as well. Ay, and I’ve had it this
many a year.’</p>
<p>‘Still, there is no denying that Jess had the same
ambition.’</p>
<p>‘She had, but to her two-roomed house she had to stick
all her born days. Was that like me?’</p>
<p>‘No, but she wanted—’</p>
<p>‘She wanted, and I wanted, but I got and she
didna. That’s the difference betwixt her and
me.’</p>
<p>‘If that is all the difference, it is little credit I
can claim for having created her.’</p>
<p>My mother sees that I need soothing. ‘That is far
from being all the difference,’ she would say
eagerly. ‘There’s my silk, for instance.
Though I say it mysel, there’s not a better silk in the
valley of Strathmore. Had Jess a silk of any kind—not
to speak of a silk like that?’</p>
<p>‘Well, she had no silk, but you remember how she got
that cloak with beads.’</p>
<p>‘An eleven and a bit! Hoots, what was that to
boast of! I tell you, every single yard of my silk
cost—’</p>
<p>‘Mother, that is the very way Jess spoke about her
cloak!’</p>
<p>She lets this pass, perhaps without hearing it, for solicitude
about her silk has hurried her to the wardrobe where it
hangs.</p>
<p>‘Ah, mother, I am afraid that was very like
Jess!’</p>
<p>‘How could it be like her when she didna even have a
wardrobe? I tell you what, if there had been a real Jess
and she had boasted to me about her cloak with beads, I would
have said to her in a careless sort of voice, “Step across
with me, Jess and I’ll let you see something that is
hanging in my wardrobe.” That would have lowered her
pride!’</p>
<p>‘I don’t believe that is what you would have done,
mother.’</p>
<p>Then a sweeter expression would come into her face.
‘No,’ she would say reflectively, ‘it’s
not.’</p>
<p>‘What would you have done? I think I
know.’</p>
<p>‘You canna know. But I’m thinking I would
have called to mind that she was a poor woman, and ailing, and
terrible windy about her cloak, and I would just have said it was
a beauty and that I wished I had one like it.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, I am certain that is what you would have
done. But oh, mother, that is just how Jess would have
acted if some poorer woman than she had shown her a new
shawl.’</p>
<p>‘Maybe, but though I hadna boasted about my silk I would
have wanted to do it.’</p>
<p>‘Just as Jess would have been fidgeting to show off her
eleven and a bit!’</p>
<p>It seems advisable to jump to another book; not to my first,
because—well, as it was my first there would naturally be
something of my mother in it, and not to the second, as it was my
first novel and not much esteemed even in our family. (But
the little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.) Let
us try the story about the minister.</p>
<p>My mother’s first remark is decidedly damping.
‘Many a time in my young days,’ she says, ‘I
played about the Auld Licht manse, but I little thought I should
live to be the mistress of it!’</p>
<p>‘But Margaret is not you.’</p>
<p>‘N-no, oh no. She had a very different life from
mine. I never let on to a soul that she is me!’</p>
<p>‘She was not meant to be you when I began. Mother,
what a way you have of coming creeping in!’</p>
<p>‘You should keep better watch on yourself.’</p>
<p>‘Perhaps if I had called Margaret by some other
name—’</p>
<p>‘I should have seen through her just the same. As
soon as I heard she was the mother I began to laugh. In
some ways, though, she’s no’ so very like me.
She was long in finding out about Babbie. I’se uphaud
I should have been quicker.’</p>
<p>‘Babbie, you see, kept close to the
garden-wall.’</p>
<p>‘It’s not the wall up at the manse that would have
hidden her from me.’</p>
<p>‘She came out in the dark.’</p>
<p>‘I’m thinking she would have found me looking for
her with a candle.’</p>
<p>‘And Gavin was secretive.’</p>
<p>‘That would have put me on my mettle.’</p>
<p>‘She never suspected anything.’</p>
<p>‘I wonder at her.’</p>
<p>But my new heroine is to be a child. What has madam to
say to that?</p>
<p>A child! Yes, she has something to say even to
that. ‘This beats all!’ are the words.</p>
<p>‘Come, come, mother, I see what you are thinking, but I
assure you that this time—’</p>
<p>‘Of course not,’ she says soothingly, ‘oh
no, she canna be me’; but anon her real thoughts are
revealed by the artless remark, ‘I doubt, though, this is a
tough job you have on hand—it is so long since I was a
bairn.’</p>
<p>We came very close to each other in those talks.
‘It is a queer thing,’ she would say softly,
‘that near everything you write is about this bit
place. You little expected that when you began. I
mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than
mine, that you could write a page about our squares and
wynds. I wonder how it has come about?’</p>
<p>There was a time when I could not have answered that question,
but that time had long passed. ‘I suppose, mother, it
was because you were most at home in your own town, and there was
never much pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have
known you, nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor
of a country-side where you never carried your father’s
dinner in a flagon. There is scarce a house in all my books
where I have not seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over
the fireplace or winding up the clock.’</p>
<p>‘And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you
knew nobody you could make your women-folk out of! Do you
mind that, and how we both laughed at the notion of your having
to make them out of me?’</p>
<p>‘I remember.’</p>
<p>‘And now you’ve gone back to my father’s
time. It’s more than sixty years since I carried his
dinner in a flagon through the long parks of Kinnordy.’</p>
<p>‘I often go into the long parks, mother, and sit on the
stile at the edge of the wood till I fancy I see a little girl
coming toward me with a flagon in her hand.’</p>
<p>‘Jumping the burn (I was once so proud of my jumps!) and
swinging the flagon round so quick that what was inside hadna
time to fall out. I used to wear a magenta frock and a
white pinafore. Did I ever tell you that?’</p>
<p>‘Mother, the little girl in my story wears a magenta
frock and a white pinafore.’</p>
<p>‘You minded that! But I’m thinking it wasna
a lassie in a pinafore you saw in the long parks of Kinnordy, it
was just a gey done auld woman.’</p>
<p>‘It was a lassie in a pinafore, mother, when she was far
away, but when she came near it was a gey done auld
woman.’</p>
<p>‘And a fell ugly one!’</p>
<p>‘The most beautiful one I shall ever see.’</p>
<p>‘I wonder to hear you say it. Look at my wrinkled
auld face.’</p>
<p>‘It is the sweetest face in all the world.’</p>
<p>‘See how the rings drop off my poor wasted
finger.’</p>
<p>‘There will always be someone nigh, mother, to put them
on again.’</p>
<p>‘Ay, will there! Well I know it. Do you mind
how when you were but a bairn you used to say, “Wait till
I’m a man, and you’ll never have a reason for
greeting again?”’</p>
<p>I remembered.</p>
<p>‘You used to come running into the house to say,
“There’s a proud dame going down the Marywellbrae in
a cloak that is black on one side and white on the other; wait
till I’m a man, and you’ll have one the very
same.” And when I lay on gey hard beds you said,
“When I’m a man you’ll lie on
feathers.” You saw nothing bonny, you never heard of
my setting my heart on anything, but what you flung up your head
and cried, “Wait till I’m a man.” You
fair shamed me before the neighbours, and yet I was windy,
too. And now it has all come true like a dream. I can
call to mind not one little thing I ettled for in my lusty days
that hasna been put into my hands in my auld age; I sit here
useless, surrounded by the gratification of all my wishes and all
my ambitions, and at times I’m near terrified, for
it’s as if God had mista’en me for some other
woman.’</p>
<p>‘Your hopes and ambitions were so simple,’ I would
say, but she did not like that. ‘They werena that
simple,’ she would answer, flushing.</p>
<p>I am reluctant to leave those happy days, but the end must be
faced, and as I write I seem to see my mother growing smaller and
her face more wistful, and still she lingers with us, as if God
had said, ‘Child of mine, your time has come, be not
afraid.’ And she was not afraid, but still she
lingered, and He waited, smiling. I never read any of that
last book to her; when it was finished she was too heavy with
years to follow a story. To me this was as if my book must
go out cold into the world (like all that may come after it from
me), and my sister, who took more thought for others and less for
herself than any other human being I have known, saw this, and by
some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into being once
again the woman she had been. On a day but three weeks
before she died my father and I were called softly
upstairs. My mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved
to sit, in her old chair by the window, with a manuscript in her
hands. But she was looking about her without much
understanding. ‘Just to please him,’ my sister
whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my mother began to
read. I looked at my sister. Tears of woe were
stealing down her face. Soon the reading became very slow
and stopped. After a pause, ‘There was something you
were to say to him,’ my sister reminded her.
‘Luck,’ muttered a voice as from the dead,
‘luck.’ And then the old smile came running to
her face like a lamp-lighter, and she said to me, ‘I am
ower far gone to read, but I’m thinking I am in it
again!’ My father put her Testament in her hands, and
it fell open—as it always does—at the Fourteenth of
John. She made an effort to read but could not.
Suddenly she stooped and kissed the broad page. ‘Will
that do instead?’ she asked.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER X—ART THOU AFRAID HIS POWER SHALL FAIL?</h2>
<p>For years I had been trying to prepare myself for my
mother’s death, trying to foresee how she would die, seeing
myself when she was dead. Even then I knew it was a vain
thing I did, but I am sure there was no morbidness in it. I
hoped I should be with her at the end, not as the one she looked
at last but as him from whom she would turn only to look upon her
best-beloved, not my arm but my sister’s should be round
her when she died, not my hand but my sister’s should close
her eyes. I knew that I might reach her too late; I saw
myself open a door where there was none to greet me, and go up
the old stair into the old room. But what I did not foresee
was that which happened. I little thought it could come
about that I should climb the old stair, and pass the door beyond
which my mother lay dead, and enter another room first, and go on
my knees there.</p>
<p>My mother’s favourite paraphrase is one known in our
house as David’s because it was the last he learned to
repeat. It was also the last thing she read—</p>
<blockquote><p>Art thou afraid his power shall fail<br />
When comes thy evil day?<br />
And can an all-creating arm<br />
Grow weary or decay?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I heard her voice gain strength as she read it, I saw her
timid face take courage, but when came my evil day, then at the
dawning, alas for me, I was afraid.</p>
<p>In those last weeks, though we did not know it, my sister was
dying on her feet. For many years she had been giving her
life, a little bit at a time, for another year, another month,
latterly for another day, of her mother, and now she was worn
out. ‘I’ll never leave you,
mother.’—‘Fine I know you’ll never leave
me.’ I thought that cry so pathetic at the time, but
I was not to know its full significance until it was only the
echo of a cry. Looking at these two then it was to me as if
my mother had set out for the new country, and my sister held her
back. But I see with a clearer vision now. It is no
longer the mother but the daughter who is in front, and she
cries, ‘Mother, you are lingering so long at the end, I
have ill waiting for you.’</p>
<p>But she knew no more than we how it was to be; if she seemed
weary when we met her on the stair, she was still the brightest,
the most active figure in my mother’s room; she never
complained, save when she had to depart on that walk which
separated them for half an hour. How reluctantly she put on
her bonnet, how we had to press her to it, and how often, having
gone as far as the door, she came back to stand by my
mother’s side. Sometimes as we watched from the
window, I could not but laugh, and yet with a pain at my heart,
to see her hasting doggedly onward, not an eye for right or left,
nothing in her head but the return. There was always my
father in the house, than whom never was a more devoted husband,
and often there were others, one daughter in particular, but they
scarce dared tend my mother—this one snatched the cup
jealously from their hands. My mother liked it best from
her. We all knew this. ‘I like them fine, but I
canna do without you.’ My sister, so unselfish in all
other things, had an unwearying passion for parading it before
us. It was the rich reward of her life.</p>
<p>The others spoke among themselves of what must come soon, and
they had tears to help them, but this daughter would not speak of
it, and her tears were ever slow to come. I knew that night
and day she was trying to get ready for a world without her
mother in it, but she must remain dumb; none of us was so Scotch
as she, she must bear her agony alone, a tragic solitary
Scotchwoman. Even my mother, who spoke so calmly to us of
the coming time, could not mention it to her. These two,
the one in bed, and the other bending over her, could only look
long at each other, until slowly the tears came to my
sister’s eyes, and then my mother would turn away her wet
face. And still neither said a word, each knew so well what
was in the other’s thoughts, so eloquently they spoke in
silence, ‘Mother, I am loath to let you go,’ and
‘Oh my daughter, now that my time is near, I wish you
werena quite so fond of me.’ But when the daughter
had slipped away my mother would grip my hand and cry, ‘I
leave her to you; you see how she has sown, it will depend on you
how she is to reap.’ And I made promises, but I
suppose neither of us saw that she had already reaped.</p>
<p>In the night my mother might waken and sit up in bed, confused
by what she saw. While she slept, six decades or more had
rolled back and she was again in her girlhood; suddenly recalled
from it she was dizzy, as with the rush of the years. How
had she come into this room? When she went to bed last
night, after preparing her father’s supper, there had been
a dresser at the window: what had become of the salt-bucket, the
meal-tub, the hams that should be hanging from the rafters?
There were no rafters; it was a papered ceiling. She had
often heard of open beds, but how came she to be lying in
one? To fathom these things she would try to spring out of
bed and be startled to find it a labour, as if she had been taken
ill in the night. Hearing her move I might knock on the
wall that separated us, this being a sign, prearranged between
us, that I was near by, and so all was well, but sometimes the
knocking seemed to belong to the past, and she would cry,
‘That is my father chapping at the door, I maun rise and
let him in.’ She seemed to see him—and it was
one much younger than herself that she saw—covered with
snow, kicking clods of it from his boots, his hands swollen and
chapped with sand and wet. Then I would hear—it was a
common experience of the night—my sister soothing her
lovingly, and turning up the light to show her where she was,
helping her to the window to let her see that it was no night of
snow, even humouring her by going downstairs, and opening the
outer door, and calling into the darkness, ‘Is anybody
there?’ and if that was not sufficient, she would swaddle
my mother in wraps and take her through the rooms of the house,
lighting them one by one, pointing out familiar objects, and so
guiding her slowly through the sixty odd years she had jumped too
quickly. And perhaps the end of it was that my mother came
to my bedside and said wistfully, ‘Am I an auld
woman?’</p>
<p>But with daylight, even during the last week in which I saw
her, she would be up and doing, for though pitifully frail she no
longer suffered from any ailment. She seemed so well
comparatively that I, having still the remnants of an illness to
shake off, was to take a holiday in Switzerland, and then return
for her, when we were all to go to the much-loved manse of her
much-loved brother in the west country. So she had many
preparations on her mind, and the morning was the time when she
had any strength to carry them out. To leave her house had
always been a month’s work for her, it must be left in such
perfect order, every corner visited and cleaned out, every chest
probed to the bottom, the linen lifted out, examined and put back
lovingly as if to make it lie more easily in her absence, shelves
had to be re-papered, a strenuous week devoted to the
garret. Less exhaustively, but with much of the old
exultation in her house, this was done for the last time, and
then there was the bringing out of her own clothes, and the
spreading of them upon the bed and the pleased fingering of them,
and the consultations about which should be left behind.
Ah, beautiful dream! I clung to it every morning; I would not
look when my sister shook her head at it, but long before each
day was done I too knew that it could never be. It had come
true many times, but never again. We two knew it, but when
my mother, who must always be prepared so long beforehand, called
for her trunk and band-boxes we brought them to her, and we stood
silent, watching, while she packed.</p>
<p>The morning came when I was to go away. It had come a
hundred times, when I was a boy, when I was an undergraduate,
when I was a man, when she had seemed big and strong to me, when
she was grown so little and it was I who put my arms round
her. But always it was the same scene. I am not to
write about it, of the parting and the turning back on the stair,
and two people trying to smile, and the setting off again, and
the cry that brought me back. Nor shall I say more of the
silent figure in the background, always in the background, always
near my mother. The last I saw of these two was from the
gate. They were at the window which never passes from my
eyes. I could not see my dear sister’s face, for she
was bending over my mother, pointing me out to her, and telling
her to wave her hand and smile, because I liked it so. That
action was an epitome of my sister’s life.</p>
<p>I had been gone a fortnight when the telegram was put into my
hands. I had got a letter from my sister, a few hours
before, saying that all was well at home. The telegram said
in five words that she had died suddenly the previous
night. There was no mention of my mother, and I was three
days’ journey from home.</p>
<p>The news I got on reaching London was this: my mother did not
understand that her daughter was dead, and they were waiting for
me to tell her.</p>
<p>I need not have been such a coward. This is how these
two died—for, after all, I was too late by twelve hours to
see my mother alive.</p>
<p>Their last night was almost gleeful. In the old days
that hour before my mother’s gas was lowered had so often
been the happiest that my pen steals back to it again and again
as I write: it was the time when my mother lay smiling in bed and
we were gathered round her like children at play, our reticence
scattered on the floor or tossed in sport from hand to hand, the
author become so boisterous that in the pauses they were holding
him in check by force. Rather woful had been some attempts
latterly to renew those evenings, when my mother might be brought
to the verge of them, as if some familiar echo called her, but
where she was she did not clearly know, because the past was
roaring in her ears like a great sea. But this night was a
last gift to my sister. The joyousness of their voices drew
the others in the house upstairs, where for more than an hour my
mother was the centre of a merry party and so clear of mental eye
that they, who were at first cautious, abandoned themselves to
the sport, and whatever they said, by way of humorous rally, she
instantly capped as of old, turning their darts against
themselves until in self-defence they were three to one, and the
three hard pressed. How my sister must have been
rejoicing. Once again she could cry, ‘Was there ever
such a woman!’ They tell me that such a happiness was
on the daughter’s face that my mother commented on it, that
having risen to go they sat down again, fascinated by the
radiance of these two. And when eventually they went, the
last words they heard were, ‘They are gone, you see,
mother, but I am here, I will never leave you,’ and
‘Na, you winna leave me; fine I know that.’ For
some time afterwards their voices could be heard from downstairs,
but what they talked of is not known. And then came
silence. Had I been at home I should have been in the room
again several times, turning the handle of the door softly,
releasing it so that it did not creak, and standing looking at
them. It had been so a thousand times. But that
night, would I have slipped out again, mind at rest, or should I
have seen the change coming while they slept?</p>
<p>Let it be told in the fewest words. My sister awoke next
morning with a headache. She had always been a martyr to
headaches, but this one, like many another, seemed to be
unusually severe. Nevertheless she rose and lit my
mother’s fire and brought up her breakfast, and then had to
return to bed. She was not able to write her daily letter
to me, saying how my mother was, and almost the last thing she
did was to ask my father to write it, and not to let on that she
was ill, as it would distress me. The doctor was called,
but she rapidly became unconscious. In this state she was
removed from my mother’s bed to another. It was
discovered that she was suffering from an internal disease.
No one had guessed it. She herself never knew.
Nothing could be done. In this unconsciousness she passed
away, without knowing that she was leaving her mother. Had
I known, when I heard of her death, that she had been saved that
pain, surely I could have gone home more bravely with the
words,</p>
<blockquote><p>Art thou afraid His power fail<br />
When comes thy evil day?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ah, you would think so, I should have thought so, but I know
myself now. When I reached London I did hear how my sister
died, but still I was afraid. I saw myself in my
mother’s room telling her why the door of the next room was
locked, and I was afraid. God had done so much, and yet I
could not look confidently to Him for the little that was left to
do. ‘O ye of little faith!’ These are the
words I seem to hear my mother saying to me now, and she looks at
me so sorrowfully.</p>
<p>He did it very easily, and it has ceased to seem marvellous to
me because it was so plainly His doing. My timid mother saw
the one who was never to leave her carried unconscious from the
room, and she did not break down. She who used to wring her
hands if her daughter was gone for a moment never asked for her
again, they were afraid to mention her name; an awe fell upon
them. But I am sure they need not have been so
anxious. There are mysteries in life and death, but this
was not one of them. A child can understand what
happened. God said that my sister must come first, but He
put His hand on my mother’s eyes at that moment and she was
altered.</p>
<p>They told her that I was on my way home, and she said with a
confident smile, ‘He will come as quick as trains can bring
him.’ That is my reward, that is what I have got for
my books. Everything I could do for her in this life I have
done since I was a boy; I look back through the years and I
cannot see the smallest thing left undone.</p>
<p>They were buried together on my mother’s seventy-sixth
birthday, though there had been three days between their
deaths. On the last day, my mother insisted on rising from
bed and going through the house. The arms that had so often
helped her on that journey were now cold in death, but there were
others only less loving, and she went slowly from room to room
like one bidding good-bye, and in mine she said, ‘The
beautiful rows upon rows of books, ant he said every one of them
was mine, all mine!’ and in the east room, which was her
greatest triumph, she said caressingly, ‘My nain bonny
room!’ All this time there seemed to be something
that she wanted, but the one was dead who always knew what she
wanted, and they produced many things at which she shook her
head. They did not know then that she was dying, but they
followed her through the house in some apprehension, and after
she returned to bed they saw that she was becoming very
weak. Once she said eagerly, ‘Is that you,
David?’ and again she thought she heard her father knocking
the snow off his boots. Her desire for that which she could
not name came back to her, and at last they saw that what she
wanted was the old christening robe. It was brought to her,
and she unfolded it with trembling, exultant hands, and when she
had made sure that it was still of virgin fairness her old arms
went round it adoringly, and upon her face there was the
ineffable mysterious glow of motherhood. Suddenly she said,
‘Wha’s bairn’s dead? is a bairn of mine
dead?’ but those watching dared not speak, and then slowly
as if with an effort of memory she repeated our names aloud in
the order in which we were born. Only one, who should have
come third among the ten, did she omit, the one in the next room,
but at the end, after a pause, she said her name and repeated it
again and again and again, lingering over it as if it were the
most exquisite music and this her dying song. And yet it
was a very commonplace name.</p>
<p>They knew now that she was dying. She told them to fold
up the christening robe and almost sharply she watched them put
it away, and then for some time she talked of the long lovely
life that had been hers, and of Him to whom she owed it.
She said good-bye to them all, and at last turned her face to the
side where her best-beloved had lain, and for over an hour she
prayed. They only caught the words now and again, and the
last they heard were ‘God’ and
‘love.’ I think God was smiling when He took
her to Him, as He had so often smiled at her during those
seventy-six years.</p>
<p>I saw her lying dead, and her face was beautiful and
serene. But it was the other room I entered first, and it
was by my sister’s side that I fell upon my knees.
The rounded completeness of a woman’s life that was my
mother’s had not been for her. She would not have it
at the price. ‘I’ll never leave you,
mother.’—‘Fine I know you’ll never leave
me.’ The fierce joy of loving too much, it is a
terrible thing. My sister’s mouth was firmly closed,
as if she had got her way.</p>
<p>And now I am left without them, but I trust my memory will
ever go back to those happy days, not to rush through them, but
dallying here and there, even as my mother wanders through my
books. And if I also live to a time when age must dim my
mind and the past comes sweeping back like the shades of night
over the bare road of the present it will not, I believe, be my
youth I shall see but hers, not a boy clinging to his
mother’s skirt and crying, ‘Wait till I’m a
man, and you’ll lie on feathers,’ but a little girl
in a magenta frock and a white pinafore, who comes toward me
through the long parks, singing to herself, and carrying her
father’s dinner in a flagon.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">THE END</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<div class="gapshortline"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE<br
/>
Printers to Her Majesty</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGARET OGILVY***</p>
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