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Sir Gibbie

G >> George MacDonald >> Sir Gibbie




The woman had a genuine regard for Galbraith. Neither the character
nor fate of one of the rest gave her a moment's trouble; but in her
secret mind she deplored that George should drink so inordinately,
and so utterly neglect his child as to let him spend his life in the
streets. She comforted herself, however, with the reflection, that
seeing he would drink, he drank with no bad companions--drank at all
events where what natural wickedness might be in them, was
suppressed by the sternness of her rule. Were he to leave her
fold--for a fold in very truth, and not a sty, it appeared to
her--and wander away to Jock Thamson's or Jeemie Deuk's, he would be
drawn into loud and indecorous talk, probably into quarrel and
uproar.

In a few minutes George returned, an odd contrast visible between
the upper and lower halves of his face. Hearing his approach she
met him at the door.

"Noo, Sir George," she said, "jist gang up to my room an' hae a
wash, an' pit on the sark ye'll see lyin' upo' the bed; syne come
doon an' hae yer tum'ler comfortable."

George's whole soul was bent upon his drink, but he obeyed as if she
had been twice his mother. By the time he had finished his toilet,
the usual company was assembled, and he appeared amongst them in all
the respectability of a clean shirt and what purity besides the
general adhesiveness of his trade-material would yield to a single
ablution long delayed. They welcomed him all, with nod, or grin, or
merry word, in individual fashion, as each sat measuring out his
whisky, or pounding at the slow-dissolving sugar, or tasting the
mixture with critical soul seated between tongue and palate.

The conversation was for some time very dull, with a strong tendency
to the censorious. For in their circle, not only were the claims of
respectability silently admitted, but the conduct of this and that
man of their acquaintance, or of public note, was pronounced upon
with understood reference to those claims--now with smile of
incredulity or pity, now with headshake regretful or
condemnatory--and this all the time that each was doing his best to
reduce himself to a condition in which the word conduct could no
longer have meaning in reference to him.

All of them, as did their hostess, addressed Galbraith as Sir
George, and he accepted the title with a certain unassuming dignity.
For, if it was not universally known in the city, it was known to
the best lawyers in it, that he was a baronet by direct derivation
from the hand of King James the Sixth.

The fire burned cheerfully, and the kettle making many journeys
between it and the table, things gradually grew more lively.
Stories were told, often without any point, but not therefore
without effect; reminiscences, sorely pulpy and broken at the edges,
were offered and accepted with a laughter in which sober ears might
have detected a strangely alien sound; and adventures were related
in which truth was no necessary element to reception. In the case
of the postman, for instance, who had been dismissed for losing a
bag of letters the week before, not one of those present believed a
word he said; yet as he happened to be endowed with a small stock of
genuine humour, his stories were regarded with much the same favour
as if they had been authentic. But the revival scarcely reached Sir
George. He said little or nothing, but, between his slow gulps of
toddy, sat looking vacantly into his glass. It is true he smiled
absently now and then when the others laughed, but that was only for
manners. Doubtless he was seeing somewhere the saddest of all
visions--the things that might have been. The wretched craving of
the lower organs stilled, and something spared for his brain, I
believe the chief joy his drink gave him lay in the power once more
to feel himself a gentleman. The washed hands, the shaven face, the
clean shirt, had something to do with it, no doubt, but the
necromantic whisky had far more.

What faded ghosts of ancestral dignity and worth and story the evil
potion called up in the mind of Sir George!--who himself hung ready
to fall, the last, or all but the last, mildewed fruit of the tree
of Galbraith! Ah! if this one and that of his ancestors had but
lived to his conscience, and with some thought of those that were to
come after him, he would not have transmitted to poor Sir George, in
horrible addition to moral weakness, that physical proclivity which
had now grown to such a hideous craving. To the miserable wretch
himself it seemed that he could no more keep from drinking whisky
than he could from breathing air.




CHAPTER V.

GIBBIE'S CALLING.

I am not sure that his father's neglect was not on the whole better
for Gibbie than would have been the kindness of such a father
persistently embodying itself. But the picture of Sir George, by
the help of whisky and the mild hatching oven of Mistress Croale's
parlour, softly breaking from the shell of the cobbler, and floating
a mild gentleman in the air of his lukewarm imagination, and poor
wee Gibbie trotting outside in the frosty dark of the autumn night,
through which the moon keeps staring down, vague and disconsolate,
is hardly therefore the less pathetic. Under the window of the
parlour where the light of revel shone radiant through a red
curtain, he would stand listening for a moment, then, darting off a
few yards suddenly and swiftly like a scared bird, fall at once into
his own steady trot--up the lane and down, till he reached the
window again, where again he would stand and listen. Whether he
made this departure and return twenty or a hundred times in a night,
he nor any one else could have told. Sometimes he would for a
change extend his trot along the Widdiehill, sometimes along the
parallel Vennel, but never far from Jink Lane and its glowing
window. Never moth haunted lamp so persistently. Ever as he ran,
up this pavement and down that, on the soft-sounding soles of his
bare feet, the smile on the boy's face grew more and more sleepy,
but still he smiled and still he trotted, still paused at the
window, and still started afresh.

He was not so much to be pitied as my reader may think. Never in
his life had he yet pitied himself. The thought of hardship or
wrong had not occurred to him. It would have been
difficult--impossible, I believe--to get the idea into his head that
existence bore to him any other shape than it ought. Things were
with him as they had always been, and whence was he to take a fresh
start, and question what had been from the beginning? Had any
authority interfered, with a decree that Gibbie should no more scour
the midnight streets, no more pass and repass that far-shining
splendour of red, then indeed would bitter, though inarticulate,
complaint have burst from his bosom. But there was no evil power to
issue such a command, and Gibbie's peace was not invaded.

It was now late, and those streets were empty; neither carriage nor
cart, wheelbarrow nor truck, went any more bumping and clattering
over their stones. They were well lighted with gas, but most of the
bordering houses were dark. Now and then a single foot-farer passed
with loud, hollow-sounding boots along the pavement; or two girls
would come laughing along, their merriment echoing rude in the wide
stillness. A cold wind, a small, forsaken, solitary wind, moist
with a thin fog, seemed, as well as wee Gibbie, to be roaming the
night, for it met him at various corners, and from all directions.
But it had nothing to do, and nowhere to go, and there it was not
like Gibbie, the business of whose life was even now upon him, the
mightiest hope of whose conscious being was now awake.

All he expected, or ever desired to discover, by listening at the
window, was simply whether there were yet signs of the company's
breaking up; and his conclusions on that point were never mistaken:
how he arrived at them it would be hard to say. Seldom had he there
heard the voice of his father, still seldomer anything beyond its
tone. This night, however, as the time drew near when they must go,
lest the Sabbath should be broken in Mistress Croale's decent house,
and Gibbie stood once more on tiptoe, with his head just on the
level of the windowsill, he heard his father utter two words: "Up
Daurside" came to him through the window, in the voice he loved,
plain and distinct. The words conveyed to him nothing at all; the
mere hearing of them made them memorable. For the time, however, he
forgot them, for, by indications best known to himself, he perceived
that the company was on the point of separating, and from that
moment did not take his eyes off the door until he heard the first
sounds of its opening. As, however, it was always hard for Gibbie
to stand still, and especially hard on a midnight so cold that his
feet threatened to grow indistinguishable from the slabs of the
pavement, he was driven, in order not to lose sight of it, to
practise the art, already cultivated by him to a crab-like
perfection, of running first backwards, then forwards with scarcely
superior speed. But it was not long ere the much expected sound of
Mistress Croale's voice heralded the hour for patience to blossom
into possession. The voice was neither loud nor harsh, but clear
and firm; the noise that followed was both loud and strident.
Voices had a part in it, but the movement of chairs and feet and
the sudden contact of different portions of the body with walls and
tables, had a larger. The guests were obeying the voice of their
hostess all in one like a flock of sheep, but it was poor
shepherd-work to turn them out of the fold at midnight. Gibbie
bounded up and stood still as a statue at the very door-cheek, until
he heard Mistress Croale's hand upon the lock, when he bolted,
trembling with eagerness, into the entry of a court a few houses
nearer to the Widdiehill.

One after one the pitiable company issued from its paradise, and
each stumbled away, too far gone for leave-taking. Most of them
passed Gibbie where he stood, but he took no heed; his father was
always the last--and the least capable. But, often as he left her
door, never did it close behind him until with her own eyes Mistress
Croale had seen Gibbie dart like an imp out of the court--to take
him in charge, and, all the weary way home, hover, not very like a
guardian angel, but not the less one in truth, around the unstable
equilibrium of his father's tall and swaying form. And thereupon
commenced a series of marvellous gymnastics on the part of wee
Gibbie. Imagine a small boy with a gigantic top, which, six times
his own size, he keeps erect on its peg, not by whipping it round,
but by running round it himself, unfailingly applying, at the very
spot and at the very moment, the precise measure of impact necessary
to counterbalance its perpetual tendency to fall in one direction or
another, so that the two have all the air of a single
invention--such an invention as one might meet with in an ancient
clock, contrived when men had time to mingle play with earnest--and
you will have in your mind's eye a real likeness of Sir George
attended, any midnight in the week, by his son Gilbert. Home the
big one staggered, reeled, gyrated, and tumbled; round and round him
went the little one, now behind, now before, now on this side, now
on that, his feet never more than touching the ground but dancing
about like those of a prize-fighter, his little arms up and his
hands well forward, like flying buttresses. And such indeed they
were--buttresses which flew and flew all about a universally leaning
tower. They propped it here, they propped it there; with wonderful
judgment and skill and graduation of force they applied themselves,
and with perfect success. Not once, for the last year and a half,
during which time wee Gibbie had been the nightly guide of Sir
George's homeward steps, had the self-disabled mass fallen prostrate
in the gutter, there to snore out the night.

The first special difficulty, that of turning the corner of Jink
Lane and the Widdiehill, successfully overcome, the twain went
reeling and revolving along the street, much like a whirlwind that
had half forgotten the laws of gyration, until at length it spun
into the court, and up to the foot of the outside stair over the
baronet's workshop. Then commenced the real struggle of the evening
for Gibbie--and for his father too, though the latter was aware of
it only in the momentary and evanescent flashes of such
enlightenment as made him just capable of yielding to the pushes and
pulls of the former. All up the outside and the two inside stairs,
his waking and sleeping were as the alternate tictac of a pendulum;
but Gibbie stuck to his business like a man, and his resolution and
perseverance were at length, as always, crowned with victory.

The house in which lords and ladies had often reposed was now filled
with very humble folk, who were all asleep when Gibbie and his
father entered; but the noise they made in ascending caused no great
disturbance of their rest; for, if any of them were roused for a
moment, it was but to recognize at once the cause of the tumult, and
with the remark, "It's only wee Gibbie luggin' hame Sir George," to
turn on the other side and fall asleep again.

Arrived at last at the garret door, which stood wide open, Gibbie
had small need of light in the nearly pitch darkness of the place,
for there was positively nothing to stumble over or against between
the door and the ancient four-post bed, which was all of his
father's house that remained to Sir George. With heavy shuffling
feet the drunkard lumbered laboriously bedward; and the bare posts
and crazy frame groaned and creaked as he fell upon the oat-chaff
that lay waiting him in place of the vanished luxury of feathers.
Wee Gibbie flew at his legs, nor rested until, the one after the
other, he had got them on the bed; if then they were not very
comfortably deposited, he knew that, in his first turn, their owner
would get them all right.

And now rose the culmen of Gibbie's day! its cycle, rounded through
regions of banishment, returned to its nodus of bliss. In triumph
he spread over his sleeping father his dead mother's old plaid of
Gordon tartan, all the bedding they had, and without a moment's
further delay--no shoes even to put off--crept under it, and nestled
close upon the bosom of his unconscious parent. A victory more!
another day ended with success! his father safe, and all his own!
the canopy of the darkness and the plaid over them, as if they were
the one only two in the universe! his father unable to leave
him--his for whole dark hours to come! It was Gibbie's paradise
now! His heaven was his father's bosom, to which he clung as no
infant yet ever clung to his mother's. He never thought to pity
himself that the embrace was all on his side, that no answering
pressure came back from the prostrate form. He never said to
himself, "My father is a drunkard, but I must make the best of it;
he is all I have!" He clung to his one possession--only clung: this
was his father--all in all to him. What must be the bliss of such a
heart--of any heart, when it comes to know that there is a father of
fathers, yea, a father of fatherhood! a father who never slumbers
nor sleeps, but holds all the sleeping in his ever waking bosom--a
bosom whose wakefulness is the sole fountain of their slumber!

The conscious bliss of the child was of short duration, for in a few
minutes he was fast asleep; but for the gain of those few minutes
only, the day had been well spent.




CHAPTER VI.

A SUNDAY AT HOME.

Such were the events of every night, and such had they been since
Gibbie first assumed this office of guardian--a time so long in
proportion to his life that it seemed to him as one of the laws of
existence that fathers got drunk and Gibbies took care of them. But
Saturday night was always one of special bliss; for then the joy to
come spread its arms beneath and around the present delight: all
Sunday his father would be his. On that happiest day of all the
week, he never set his foot out of doors, except to run twice to
Mistress Croale's, once to fetch the dinner which she supplied from
her own table, and for which Sir George regularly paid in advance on
Saturday before commencing his potations.

But indeed the streets were not attractive to the child on Sundays:
there were no shops open, and the people in their Sunday clothes,
many of them with their faces studiously settled into masks intended
to express righteousness, were far less interesting, because less
alive, than the same people in their work-day attire, in their
shops, or seated at their stalls, or driving their carts, and
looking thoroughly human. As to going to church himself, such an
idea had never entered his head. He had not once for a moment
imagined that anybody would like him to go to church, that such as
he ever went to church, that church was at all a place to which
Gibbies with fathers to look after should have any desire to go. As
to what church, going meant, he had not the vaguest idea; it had not
even waked the glimmer of a question in his mind. All he knew was
that people went to church on Sundays. It was another of the laws
of existence, the reason of which he knew no more than why his
father went every night to Jink Lane and got drunk. George,
however, although he had taught his son nothing, was not without
religion, and had notions of duty in respect of the Sabbath. Not
even with the prize of whisky in view, would he have consented to
earn a sovereign on that day by the lightest of work.

Gibbie was awake some time before his father, and lay revelling in
love's bliss of proximity. At length Sir George, the merest bubble
of nature, awoke, and pushed him from him.

The child got up at once, but only to stand by the bed-side. He
said no word, did not even think an impatient thought, yet his
father seemed to feel that he was waiting for him. After two or
three huge yawns, he spread out his arms, but, unable to stretch
himself, yawned again, rolled himself off the bed, and crept feebly
across the room to an empty chest that stood under the skylight.
There he seated himself, and for half an hour sat motionless, a
perfect type of dilapidation, moral and physical, while a little way
off stood Gibbie, looking on, like one awaiting a resurrection. At
length he seemed to come to himself--the expected sign of which was
that he reached down his hand towards the meeting of roof and floor,
and took up a tiny last with a half-made boot upon it. At sight of
it in his father's hands, Gibbie clapped his with delight--an old
delight, renewed every Sunday since he could remember. That boot
was for him! and this being the second, the pair would be finished
before night! By slow degrees of revival, with many pauses between,
George got to work. He wanted no breakfast, and made no inquiry of
Gibbie whether he had had any. But what cared Gibbie about
breakfast! With his father all to himself, and that father working
away at a new boot for him--for him who had never had a pair of any
sort upon his feet since the woollen ones he wore in his mother's
lap, breakfast or no breakfast was much the same to him. It could
never have occurred to him that it was his father's part to provide
him with breakfast. If he was to have none, it was Sunday that was
to blame: there was no use in going to look for any when the shops
were all shut, and everybody either at church, or closed in domestic
penetralia, or out for a walk. More than contented, therefore,
while busily his father wedded welt and sole with stitches
infrangible, Gibbie sat on the floor, preparing waxed ends,
carefully sticking in the hog's bristle, and rolling the
combination, with quite professional aptitude, between the flat of
his hand and what of trouser-leg he had left, gazing eagerly between
at the advancing masterpiece. Occasionally the triumph of
expectation would exceed his control, when he would spring from the
floor, and caper and strut about like a pigeon--soft as a shadow,
for he knew his father could not bear noise in the morning--or
behind his back execute a pantomimic dumb show of delight, in which
he seemed with difficulty to restrain himself from jumping upon him,
and hugging him in his ecstasy. Oh, best of parents! working thus
even on a Sunday for his Gibbie, when everybody else was at church
enjoying himself! But Gibbie never dared hug his father except when
he was drunk--why, he could hardly have told. Relieved by his dumb
show, he would return, quite as an aged grimalkin, and again deposit
himself on the floor near his father where he could see his busy
hands.

All this time Sir George never spoke a word. Incredible as it may
seem, however, he was continually, off and on, trying his hardest to
think of some Sunday lesson to give his child. Many of those that
knew the boy, regarded him as a sort of idiot, drawing the
conclusion from Gibbie's practical honesty and his too evident love
for his kind: it was incredible that a child should be poor,
unselfish, loving, and not deficient in intellect! His father knew
him better, yet he often quieted his conscience in regard to his
education, with the reflection that not much could be done for him.
Still, every now and then he would think perhaps he ought to do
something: who could tell but the child might be damned for not
understanding the plan of salvation? and brooding over the matter
this morning, as well as his headache would permit, he came to the
resolution, as he had often done before, to buy a Shorter Catechism;
the boy could not learn it, but he would keep reading it to him, and
something might stick. Even now perhaps he could begin the course
by recalling some of the questions and answers that had been the
plague of his life every Saturday at school. He set his
recollection to work, therefore, in the lumber-room of his memory,
and again and again sent it back to the task, but could find nothing
belonging to the catechism except the first question with its
answer, and a few incoherent fragments of others. Moreover, he
found his mind so confused and incapable of continuous or
concentrated effort, that he could not even keep "man's chief end"
and the rosined end between his fingers from twisting up together in
the most extraordinary manner. Yet if the child but "had the
question," he might get some good of it. The hour might come when
he would say, "My father taught me that!"--who could tell? And he
knew he had the words correct, wherever he had dropped their
meaning. For the sake of Gibbie's immortal part, therefore, he
would repeat the answer to that first, most momentous of questions,
over and over as he worked, in the hope of insinuating something--he
could not say what--into the small mental pocket of the innocent.
The first, therefore, and almost the only words which Gibbie heard
from his father's lips that morning, were these, dozens of times
repeated--"Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for
ever." But so far was Gibbie from perceiving in them any meaning,
that even with his father's pronunciation of chief end as chifenn,
they roused in his mind no sense or suspicion of obscurity. The
word stuck there, notwithstanding; but Gibbie was years a man before
he found out what a chifenn was. Where was the great matter? How
many who have learned their catechism and deplore the ignorance of
others, make the least effort to place their chief end even in the
direction of that of their creation? Is it not the constant
thwarting of their aims, the rendering of their desires futile, and
their ends a mockery, that alone prevents them and their lives from
proving an absolute failure? Sir George, with his inveterate,
consuming thirst for whisky, was but the type of all who would gain
their bliss after the scheme of their own fancies, instead of the
scheme of their existence; who would build their house after their
own childish wilfulness instead of the ground-plan of their being.
How was Sir George to glorify the God whom he could honestly thank
for nothing but whisky, the sole of his gifts that he prized? Over
and over that day he repeated the words, "Man's chief end is to
glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever," and all the time his
imagination, his desire, his hope, were centred on the bottle, which
with his very back he felt where it stood behind him, away on the
floor at the head of his bed. Nevertheless when he had gone over
them a score of times or so, and Gibbie had begun, by a merry look
and nodding of his head, to manifest that he knew what was coming
next, the father felt more content with himself than for years past;
and when he was satisfied that Gibbie knew all the words, though,
indeed, they were hardly more than sounds to him, he sent him, with
a great sense of relief, to fetch the broth and beef and potatoes
from Mistress Croale's.

Eating a real dinner in his father's house, though without a table
to set it upon, Gibbie felt himself a most privileged person. The
only thing that troubled him was that his father ate so little. Not
until the twilight began to show did Sir George really begin to
revive, but the darker it grew without, the brighter his spirit
burned. For, amongst not a few others, there was this strange
remnant of righteousness in the man, that he never would taste drink
before it was dark in winter, or in summer before the regular hour
for ceasing work had arrived; and to this rule he kept, and that
under far greater difficulties, on the Sunday as well. For Mistress
Croale would not sell a drop of drink, not even on the sly, on the
Sabbath-day: she would fain have some stake in the hidden kingdom;
and George, who had not a Sunday stomach he could assume for the day
any more than a Sunday coat, was thereby driven to provide his
whisky and that day drink it at home; when, with the bottle so near
him, and the sense that he had not to go out to find his relief, his
resolution was indeed sorely tried; but he felt that to yield would
be to cut his last cable and be swept on the lee-shore of utter
ruin.

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