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