Memories and Portraits

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A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of
life, in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a
hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use,
vocal or written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the
skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited
experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a particular
thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of that
innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds. Thus
novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the gross mass of
mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of
manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal with
fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus
ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields
the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift
romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things
have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much
to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and
aboriginal taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in
the process of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an
eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an empire;
and those only are perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that
roused men in all epochs of the past. There is a certain critic,
not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set
before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a
percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in
caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a
pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries - his wife, that
accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard,
but he is often described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for
recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of
all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims
of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle
with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have
moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.

We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I
had one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. But yet I
think I owe my taste for that hillside business rather to the art
and interest of John Todd. He it was that made it live for me, as
the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple
strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant
scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-champ, was an affair that I
never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to
mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable
black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already
come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the
snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings
of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these
features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his
captain's eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a
spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is
thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of
the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish,
his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to
the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit
should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into
his easy, even conversation.

CHAPTER VII. THE MANSE

I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that
dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it
again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should
be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is
there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so
that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown
obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited
by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling
merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy
eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly
steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was
young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been
busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must
be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as
the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale
may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may
seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am
standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the season also,
so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the
songs of birds; - and the year of grace, so that when I turn to
leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants
unchanged.

It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into
provinces by a great hedge of beech, and over-looked by the church
and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick,
and after nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance at least by
children; flower-plots lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the
great yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the smell of
water rising from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills; the
sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills - the wheel and
the dam singing their alternate strain; the birds on every bush and
from every corner of the overhanging woods pealing out their notes
until the air throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the
manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish stature, as a
great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I
supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is
difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of
stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came
to man and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the
face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and
letters with outlandish stamps became familiar to the local
postman, and the walls of the little chambers brightened with the
wonders of the East. The dullest could see this was a house that
had a pair of hands in divers foreign places: a well-beloved house
- its image fondly dwelt on by many travellers.

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him,
judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as
a man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the
display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a
lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We children
admired him: partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for
none more than children are concerned for beauty and, above all,
for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we
beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the
pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy,
of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind
of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or
letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a
library of bloodless books - or so they seemed in those days,
although I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well
enough to read them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the
greater gloom for our imaginations. But the study had a redeeming
grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young
eyes. I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the greed
with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a
psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at
the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might
reward me with an Indian picture.

"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will
He slumber that thee keeps,"

it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model
to set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier,
and a task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must
suppose the old man thought so too, and was either touched or
amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most
unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly
sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we were clerk and
parson. I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise
that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of
those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon
reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should
strip himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts and reminders of
his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow
it upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that
to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod
in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young.
The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He
had over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the
end of his many days. He sat by the dining-room fire, with his
white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure;
and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine,
Dr. Gregory's powder. Now that remedy, as the work of a near
kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the
imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. The old
gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being
accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching
a "barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open
in her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered
at once. I had had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar
kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the
phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door - for such was our
unlordly fashion - I was taken for the last time from the presence
of my grandfather.

Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I
must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so
am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to
hear them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and
I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept
it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare,
whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my
Shakespeare also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I
own I never have been told so. He made embroidery, designing his
own patterns; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a
kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which
was as black as the chimney before I had done with it. He loved
port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better
with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He
had chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may
possibly inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble
presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the
reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write
the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and
sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being. In his
garden, as I played there, I learned the love of mills - or had I
an ancestor a miller? - and a kindness for the neighbourhood of
graves, as homely things not without their poetry - or had I an
ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played himself?
- for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me
played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the
green avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk,
which was still a country place, and sat on the High School
benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I
spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but we made holiday
parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and
cream near by at a gardener's. All this I had forgotten; only my
grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I have forgotten,
too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our first
Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of
Burns's Dr. Smith - "Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns
at first hand.

And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this HOMUNCULUS or
part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.
Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other HOMUNCULOS or
part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a
lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I
went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil
man taking down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron; - we
may have had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain
carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon
some holiday excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a
cottage in a flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his
shuttle. And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side;
and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn
father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by
to college. Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young
student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in
that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. It
would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the
lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural
metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a
grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed;
and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year
or two longer in the person of their child.

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of
fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that
we can follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be
reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a
moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a
bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And
though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or
I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-
surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal
Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted
the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a
West India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol
Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I
was with my engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and
oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise
that gave us the PIRATE and the LORD OF THE ISLES; I was with him,
too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the SMEATON had drifted
from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized
upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his
tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the
Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the
tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading in his
Bible - or affecting to read - till one after another slunk back
with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes, parts of me
have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well.
And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up
can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of
ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly
preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the
legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on
Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that
fancy can see peering through the disparted branches? What sleeper
in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree?
Probably arboreal in his habits. . . .

And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about
with me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as
he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman,
there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his;
tree-top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his
mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably
Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and
chattered in the brain of the old divine.

CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET

THOSE who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of
their recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories
of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in
the attire of a buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or
murder to be done, on the playground of their youth. But the
memories are a fairy gift which cannot be worn out in using. After
a dozen services in various tales, the little sunbright pictures of
the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament
defaced, not a tint impaired. GLUCK UND UNGLUCK WIRD GESANG, if
Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the original re-
embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to wonder
at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to
fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used
one but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand,
where I once waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song
of the river on both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed
and at last upon an island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer's
day, hearkening to the shearers at work in riverside fields and to
the drums of the gray old garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And
this was, I think, done rightly: the place was rightly peopled -
and now belongs not to me but to my puppets - for a time at least.
In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow faint; the original memory
swim up instant as ever; and I shall once more lie in bed, and see
the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it is in nature, and the
child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; and wonder at
the instancy and virgin freshness of that memory; and be pricked
again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it into
art.

There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which
besieges me. I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and
later on, threw upon its shores, and condemned to several days of
rain and shellfish on its tumbled boulders, the hero of another.
The ink is not yet faded; the sound of the sentences is still in my
mind's ear; and I am under a spell to write of that island again.

I

The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner
of the Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which
you may see the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the
other, where you shall be able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the
breakers running white on many sunken rocks. I first saw it, or
first remembered seeing it, framed in the round bull's-eye of a
cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its shores like the waters
of a lake, the colourless clear light of the early morning making
plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood upon it, in
these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached by
a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it was then
summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws;
but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats
which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the
cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores
of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole,
sounding as we went; and having taken stock of all possible
accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of
operations. For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse
steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to
seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic
rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs. Here was a tower to be
built, and a star lighted, for the conduct of seamen. But as the
rock was small, and hard of access, and far from land, the work
would be one of years; and my father was now looking for a shore
station, where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men
live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor.

I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam
Bough and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our
baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold!
there was now a pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways,
travelling-cranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the
resident engineer, wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the
courses of the tower were put together experimentally, and behind
the settlement a great gash in the hillside where granite was
quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings. All day
long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools; and
even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and
fro in the dark settlement and could light the pipe of any midnight
muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday,
when the sound of the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet.
All about the green compound men would be sauntering in their
Sunday's best, walking with those lax joints of the reposing
toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the
stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of the gulls. And it was
strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they were, in one of
the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the
congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks;
and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the chapters," the
inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse
prayer.

In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was
observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of
preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen
from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay. Over
fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed
her way, trailing at her tail a brace of wallowing stone-lighters.
The open ocean widened upon either board, and the hills of the
mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her
unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its
black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its
spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their
arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An
ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of
shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for
a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the
Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled
with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a
dingy insect between a slater and a bug. No other life was there
but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a
mill-race, and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and
again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock
itself. Times were different upon Dhu-Heartach when it blew, and
the night fell dark, and the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and
Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in
their iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the
sprays. Fear sat with them in their sea-beleaguered dwelling; and
the colour changed in anxious faces when some greater billow struck
the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow.
It was then that the foreman builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see
before me still in his rock-habit of undecipherable rags, would get
his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of
the storm. But it was in sunshine only that I saw Dhu-Heartach;
and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that
the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an enchanted sea;
the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo, riding in her
wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she rose on the
long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.

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