Glimpses of Three Coasts Part 14

There is an endless fascination in going from house to house, in their old wynds and closes, now. A price has to be paid for it,--bad smells, filth underfoot, and, very likely, volleys of ribald abuse from gin-loosened tongues right and left and high up overhead; but all this only emphasizes the picture, and makes one's mental processions of earls and countesses all the livelier and more vivid.

Some of these wynds are so narrow and dark that one hesitates about plunging into them. They seem little more than rifts between dungeons: seven, eight, and nine stories high, the black walls stretch up. If there is a tiny courtyard, it is like the bottom of a foul well; and looking to the hand's-breadth of sky visible above, it seems so far up and so dark blue, one half expects to see its stars glimmering at noonday. A single narrow winding stone stair is the only means of going up and down; and each floor being swarming full of wretched human beings, each room a tenement house in itself, of course this common stairway becomes a highway of contentions, the very battle-ground of the house. Progress up or down can be stopped at a second's notice; a single pair of elbows is a blockade. How sedan chairs were managed in these corkscrew crevices is a puzzle; yet we read that the ladies of quality went always in sedan chairs to b.a.l.l.s and a.s.semblies.

In the Stamp Office Close, now the refuge of soot-venders, old-clothes dealers, and hucksters of lowest degree, tramps, beggars, and skulkers of all sorts, still is locked tight every night a big carved door, at foot of the stair down which used to come stately Lady Eglintoune, the third, with her seven daughters, in fine array. It was one of the sights of the town to see the procession of their eight sedan chairs on the way to a dance. The countess herself was six feet tall, and her daughters not much below her; all strikingly handsome, and of such fine bearing that it went into the traditions of the century as the "Eglintoune air." There also went into the traditions of the century some details of the earl's wooing, which might better have been kept a secret between him and his father-in-law. The second Lady Eglintoune was ailing, and like to die, when Sir Archibald Kennedy arrived in Edinburgh, with his stalwart but beautiful daughter Susanna. She was much sought immediately; and Sir Archibald, in his perplexity among the many suitors, one day consulted his old friend Eglintoune. "Bide a wee, Sir Archy," replied the earl,--"bide a wee; my wife's very sickly." And so, by waiting, the fair Susanna became Countess of Eglintoune. It would seem as if Nature had some intent to punish the earl's impatient faithlessness to his sickly wife; for, year after year, seven years running, came a daughter, and no son, to the house of Eglintoune. At last the earl, with a readiness to ignore marital obligations at which his third countess need not have been surprised, bluntly threatened to divorce her if she bore him no heir. Promptly the spirited Susanna replied that nothing would please her better, provided he would give her back all she brought him. "Every penny of it, and welcome!" retorted the earl, supposing she referred to her fortune. "Na, na, my lord," replied the lady, "that winna do. Return me my youth, beauty, and virginity, and dismiss me when you please;"

upon which the matter dropped. In the end, the earl fared better than he deserved, three sons being given him within the next five years.

For half a century Lady Eglintoune was a prominent figure in Scottish social life. Her comings and goings and doings were all chronicled, and handed down. It is even told that when Johnson and Boswell visited her at her country-place, she was so delighted with Johnson's conversation that she kissed him on parting,--from which we can argue her ladys.h.i.+p's liking for long words. She lived to be ninety-one, and amused herself in her last days by taming rats, of which she had a dozen or more in such subjection that at a tap on the oak wainscoting of her dining-room they came forth, joined her at her meal, and at a word of command retired again into the wainscot.

When twenty-first-century travellers go speiring among the dingy ruins of cities which are gay and fine now, they will not find relics and traces of such individualities as these. The eighteenth century left a most entertaining budget, which we of to-day are too busy and too well educated to equal. No chiel among us all has the time to take gossip notes of this century; and even if he did, they would be dull enough in comparison with those of the last.

Groping and rummaging in Hyndford's Close, one day, for recognizable traces of Lady Maxwell's house, we had the good fortune to encounter a thrifty housewife, of the better cla.s.s, living there. She was coming home, with her market-basket on her arm. Seeing our eager scenting of the old carvings on lintels and sills, and overhearing our mention of the name of the d.u.c.h.ess of Gordon, she made bold to address us.

"It waur a strange place for the n.o.beelity to be livin' in, to be sure," she said. "I'm livin' mysil in ane o' the best of 'im, an' it's na mair s.p.a.ce to 't than ud turn a cat. Ye're welcome to walk up, if ye like to see what their dwellin's waur like in the auld time. It's a self-contained stair ye see," she added with pride, as she marshalled us up a twisting stone stairway, so narrow that even one person, going alone, must go cautiously to avoid grazing elbows and s.h.i.+ns on the stone walls, at every turn. "I couldna abide the place but for the self-contained stair: there's not many has them," she continued. "Mind yer heads! mind yer heads! There's a stoop!" she cried; but it was too late. We had reached, unwarned, a point in the winding stair where it was necessary to go bent half double; only a little child could have stood upright. With heads dizzy from the blow and eyes half blinded by the sudden darkness, we stumbled on, and brought out in a pa.s.sage-way, perhaps three feet wide and ten long, from which opened four rooms: one the kitchen, a totally dark closet, not over six feet square; a tiny grate, a chair, table, and a bunk in the wall, where the servant slept, were all its furniture. The woman lighted a candle to show us how convenient was this bunk for the maid "to lie."

Standing in the middle of the narrow pa.s.sage, one could reach his head into kitchen, parlor, and both bedrooms without changing his position.

The four rooms together would hardly have made one good-sized chamber.

Nothing but its exquisite neatness and order saved the place from being insupportable! Even those would not save it when herring suppers should be broiling in the closet surnamed kitchen. Up a still smaller, narrower crevice in the wall led a second "self-contained stair," dark as midnight, and so low roofed there was no standing upright in it, even at the beginning. This led to what the landlady called the "lodgers' flairt." We had not courage to venture up, though she was exceedingly anxious to show us her seven good bedrooms, three double and four single, which were nightly filled with lodgers, at a s.h.i.+lling a night.

Only the "verra rayspectable," she said, came to lodge with her. Her husband was "verra pairticular." Trades-people from the country were the chief of their customers, "an' the same a-comin' for seven year, noo." No doubt she has as lively a pride, and gets as many satisfactions between these narrow walls, as did the lords and ladies of 1700. Evidently not the least of her satisfactions was the fact that those lords and ladies had lived there before her.

Nowhere are Auld Reekie's ant.i.theses of new and old more emphasized than in the Cowgate. In 1530 it was an elegant suburb. The city walls even then extended to enclose it, and it was eloquently described, in an old divine's writings, as the place "ubi nihil est humile aut rustic.u.m, sed omnia magnifica."

In one of its gra.s.sy lanes the Earl of Galloway built a mansion. His countess often went to pay visits to her neighbors, in great state, driving six horses; and it not infrequently happened that when her ladys.h.i.+p stepped into her coach, the leaders were standing opposite the door at which she intended to alight.

Here dwelt, in 1617, the famous "Tam o' the Cowgate," Earl of Haddington, boon companion of King James, who came often to dine with him, and gave him the familiar nickname of Tam. Tam was so rich he was vulgarly believed to have the philosopher's stone; but he himself once gave a more probable explanation of his wealth, saying that his only secret lay in two rules,--"never to put off till to-morrow that which could be done to-day," and "never to trust to another what his own hand could execute."

To-day there is not in all the world, outside the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, so loathly wretched a street as this same Cowgate. Even at high noon it is not always safe to walk through it; and there are many of its wynds into which no man would go without protection of the police.

Simply to drive through it is harrowing. The place is indescribable.

It seems a perpetual and insatiable carnival of vice and misery. The misery alone would be terrible enough to see; but the leering, juggling, insolent vice added makes it indeed h.e.l.lish. Every curbstone, door-sill, alley mouth, window, swarms with faces out of which has gone every trace of self-respect or decency; babies' faces as bad as the worst, and the most aged faces worst of all. To pause on the sidewalk is to be surrounded, in a moment, by a dangerous crowd of half-naked boys and girls, whining, begging, elbowing, cursing, and fighting. Giving of an alms is like pouring oil on a fire. The whole gang is ablaze with envy and attack: the fierce and unscrupulous pillage of the seventeenth century is re-enacted in miniature in the Cowgate every day, when an injudicious stranger, pa.s.sing through, throws a handful of pennies to the beggars. The general look of hopeless degradation in the spot is heightened by the great number of old-clothes shops along the whole line of the street. In the days when the Cowgate was an elegant suburb, the citizens were permitted by law to extend their upper stories seven feet into the street, provided they would build them of wood cut in the Borough Forest, a forest that harbored robbers dangerous to the town. These projecting upper stories are invaluable now to the old-clothes venders, who hang from them their hideous wares, in double and treble lines, fluttering over the heads and in the faces of pa.s.sers-by; the wood of the Borough Forest thus, by a strange irony of fate, still continuing to harbor dangers to public welfare. If these close-packed tiers of dangling rags in the Cowgate were run out in a straight single line, they would be miles long; a sad beggars' arras to behold. The preponderance of tattered finery in it adds to its melancholy: shreds of damask; dirty lace; theatrical costumes; artificial flowers so crumpled, broken, and soiled that they would seem to have been trodden in gutters,--there was an indefinable horror in the thought that there could be even in the Cowgate a woman creature who could think herself adorned by such mockeries of blossoms. But I saw more than one poor soul look at them with longing eyes, finger them, haggle at the price, and walk away disappointed that she could not buy.

The quaint mottoes here and there in the grimy walls, built in when the Cowgate people were not only comfortable but pious, must serve often now to point bitter jests among the unG.o.dly. On one wretched, reeking tenement is: "Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. 1643." On another, "All my trist is in ye Lord."

A token I saw in the Cowgate of one life there not without hope and the capacity of enjoyment. It was in a small window, nine stories up from the ground, in a wynd so close that hands might be clasped from house to house across it. It was a tiny thing, but my eye fell on it with as much relief as on a rift of blue sky in a storm: it was a little green fern growing in a pot. Outside the window it stood, on a perilously narrow ledge. As I watched it I grew frightened, lest the wind should blow it down, or a vicious neighbor stone it off. It seemed the brave signal flying of a forlorn hope, of a dauntless, besieged soul that would never surrender; and I shall recollect it long after every other picture of the Cowgate scenes has grown dim.

The more respectable of the p.a.w.nbrokers' or second-hand-goods shops in Edinburgh are interesting places to rummage. If there were no other record of the slow decay and dwindling fortunes of the n.o.ble Scottish folk, it could be read in the great number of small dealers in relics of the olden time.

Old buckles and brooches and clan badges; chains, lockets, seals, rings; faded miniatures, on ivory or in mosaics, of women as far back as Mary's time, loved then as well as was ever Mary herself, but forgotten now as if they had never been; swords rusty, bent, battered, and stained; spoons with forgotten crests; punch-ladles worn smooth with the merry-makings of generations,--all these one may find in scores of little one-roomed shops, kept perhaps by aged dames with the very aroma of the antique Puritanism lingering about them still.

In such a room as this I found a Scotch pebble brooch with a quaint silver setting, reverently and cautiously locked in a gla.s.s case. On the back of it had been scratched, apparently with a pin, "Margret Fleming, from her brother." I bore it away with me triumphantly, sure that it had belonged to an ancestor of Pet Marjorie.

Almost as full of old-time atmosphere as the p.a.w.nbrokers' shops are the antiquarian bookstores. Here one may possess himself, if he likes, of well-thumbed volumes with heraldic crests on t.i.tlepages, dating back to the earliest reading done by n.o.ble earls and baronets in Scotland; even to the time when not to know how to read was no indelible disgrace. In one of these shops, on the day I bought Margret Fleming's brooch, I found an old torn copy of "Pet Marjorie." Speaking of Dr. Brown and Rab to the bookseller,--himself almost a relic of antiquity,--I was astonished and greatly amused to hear him reply: "It's a' a feection.... He can't write without it.... I knoo that darg.... A verra neece darg he was, but--a--a--a"--with a shake of the head--"it's a verra neece story, verra neece.... He wrote it up, up; not but that Rab was a verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."

Not a word of more definite disclaimer or contradiction could I win from the canny old Scot. But to have hastily called the whole story a lee, from beginning to end, would hardly have shaken one's confidence in it so much as did the thoughtful deliberation of his "He was a verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."

One of our "cawdies," during our stay in Edinburgh, was a remarkable fellow. After being for twenty years a gentleman's servant, he had turned his back on aristocracy, and betaken himself to the streets for a living; driving cabs, or piloting strangers around the city, as might be. But his earlier habits of good behavior were strong in him still, and came to the surface quickly in a.s.sociations which revived them. His conversation reminded us forcibly of somebody's excellent saying that Scotland would always be Scott-land. Not a line of Scott's novels which this vagabond cawdie did not seemingly know by heart.

Scottish history, too, he had at his tongue's end, and its most familiar episodes sounded new and entertaining as he phrased them.

Even the death of Queen Mary seemed freshly stated, as he put it, when, after summing up the cruelties she had experienced at the hands of Elizabeth, he wound up with, "And finally she beheaded her, and that was the last of her,"--a succinctness of close which some of Mary's historians would have done well to simulate.

Of Jeanie Deans and Dumbiedikes he spoke as of old acquaintances. He pointed out a spot in the misty blue distance where was Dumbiedikes'

house, where Jeanie's sweetheart dwelt, and where the road lay on which Jeanie went to London.

"It was there the old road to London lay; and wouldn't you think it more natural, sir, that it was that way she went, and it was there she met Dumbiedikes, and he gave her the purse? I'll always maintain, sir, that it was there she got it."

Of the two women, Jeanie Deans and Mary Queen of Scots, Jeanie was evidently the vivider and more real in his thoughts.

The second day of our stay in Edinburgh was a gay day in the castle.

The 71st Highlanders had just returned from a twelvemonth's stay at Gibraltar. It was people's day. Everywhere the bronzed, tired, happy-looking fellows, in their smartened uniforms, were to be encountered, strolling, lounging, sitting with sweethearts or wives,--more of the former than the latter. It struck me also that the women were less good-looking than the men; but they were all beautified by happiness, and the merry sounds of their laughter, and the rumble of skittles playing filled all the place. Inside the castle, the room in which the regalia were on exhibition was thronged with country people, gazing reverently on its splendors.

"Keep yer eye on't, as ye walk by, an' mark the changes o' 't," I heard one old lady say to her husband, whose wandering gaze seemed to her neglectful of the opportunity.

A few gay-dressed women, escorted by officers, held themselves apart from the soldiers' sweethearting, and were disposed, I thought, to look a little scornfully on it. The soldiers did not seem to mind the affront, if they saw it; no doubt, they thought their own sweethearts far the better looking, and if they had ever heard of it would have quoted with hearty good-will the old ballad,--

"The la.s.sies o' the Cannongate, Oh, they are wondrous nice: They winna gie a single kiss, But for a double price.

"Gar hang them, gar hang them, Hie upon a tree; For we'll get better up the gate, For a bawbee!"

Most picturesque of all the figures to be seen in Edinburgh are the Newhaven fishwives. With short, full blue cloth petticoats, reaching barely to their ankles; white blouses and gay kerchiefs; big, long-sleeved cloaks of the same blue cloth, fastened at the throat, but flying loose, sleeves and all, as if thrown on in haste; the girls bareheaded; the married women with white caps, standing up stiff and straight in a point on the top of the head; two big wickerwork creels, one above the other, full of fish, packed securely, on their broad shoulders, and held in place by a stout leather strap pa.s.sing round their foreheads, they pull along at a steady, striding gait, up hill and down, carrying weights that it taxes a man's strength merely to lift. In fact, it is a fishwife's boast that she will run with a weight which it takes two men to put on her back. By reason of this great strength on the part of the women, and their immemorial habit of exercising it; perhaps also from other causes far back in the early days of Jutland, where these curious Newhaven fis.h.i.+ng-folk are said to have originated,--it has come about that the Newhaven men are a singularly docile and submissive race. The wives keep all the money which they receive for the fish, and the husbands take what is given them,--a singular reversion of the situation in most communities. I did not believe this when it was told me; so I stopped three fishwives one day, and without mincing matters put the question direct to them.

Two of them were young, one old. The young women laughed saucily, and the old woman smiled; but they all replied unhesitatingly, that they had the spending of all the money.

"It's a' spent i' the hoos," said one, anxious not to be thought too selfish,--"it's a' spent i' the hoos. The men, they cam home an' tak their sleep, an' then they'll be aff agen."

"It 'ud never do for the husbands to stoop in tha city, an' be spendin' a' the money," added the old woman, with severe emphasis.

I learned afterward that on the present system of buying and selling the fish, the fishermen do receive from their labor an income independent of their wives. They are the first sellers of the fish,--selling them in quant.i.ty to the wholesale dealers, who sell in turn at auction to the "retail trade," represented by the wives. This seems an unjust system, and is much resented by both husbands and wives; but it has been established by law, and there is no help for it. It came in with the introduction of the steam trawlers. "They're the deestrooction o' the place," said one of the fish women. "A mon canna go oot wi' his lines an' mak a livin' noo. They just drag everything; they tak a' the broods; they're dooin' a worrld o' harrm.

There's somethin' a dooin' aboot it in the House o' Commons, noo, but a canna till hoo it wull go. They ull be the deestrooction o' this place, if they're na pit stop to." And she shook her fist vindictively at a puffing trawler which had just pushed away from the wharf.

Whoever would see the Newhaven fishwives at their best must be on the Newhaven wharf by seven o'clock in the morning, on a day when the trawlers come in and the fish is sold. The scene is a study for a painter.

The fish are in long, narrow boxes, on the wharf, ranged at the base of the sea wall; some sorted out, in piles, each kind by itself: skates, with their long tails, which look vicious, as if they could kick; hake, witches, brill, sole, flounders, huge catfish, crayfish, and herrings, by the ton. The wall is crowded with men, Edinburgh fishmongers, come to buy cheap on the spot. The wall is not over two feet wide; and here they stand, lean over, jostle, slip by to right and left of each other, and run up and down in their eager haste to catch the eye of one auctioneer, or to get first speech with another.

The wharf is crowded with women,--an army in blue, two hundred, three hundred, at a time; white caps bobbing, elbows thrusting, shrill voices crying, fiery blue eyes s.h.i.+ning, it is a sight worth going to Scotland for. If one has had an affection for Christie Johnstone, it is a delightful return of his old admiration for her. A dozen faces which might be Christie's own are flas.h.i.+ng up from the crowd; one understands on the instant how that best of good stories came to be written. A man with eyes in his head and a pen in his hand could not have done less. Such fire, such honesty, such splendor of vitality, kindle the women's faces. To spend a few days among them would be to see Christie Johnstone dramatized on all sides.

On the morning when I drove out from Edinburgh to see this scene, a Scotch mist was simmering down,--so warm that at first it seemed of no consequence whatever, so cold that all of a sudden one found himself pierced through and through with icy s.h.i.+vers. This is the universal quality of a Scotch mist or drizzle.

The Newhaven wharf is a narrow pier running out to sea. On one side lay the steam trawlers, which had just unloaded their freight; on the other side, on the narrow, rampart-like wall of stone, swarmed the fishmonger men. In this line I took my place, and the chances of the scramble. Immediately the jolly fishwives caught sight of me, and began to nod and smile. They knew very well I was there to "speir" at them.

"Ye'll tak cauld!" cried one motherly old soul, with her white hair blowing wildly about almost enough to lift the cap off her head. "Com doon! Ye'll tak cauld."

I smiled, and pointed to my water-proof cloak, down which, it must be admitted, the "mist" was trickling in streams, while the cloak itself flapped in the wind like a loose sail. She shook her head scornfully.

"It's a grat pla.s.s to tak cauld!" she cried. "Ye'll doo wull to com doon."

There were three auctioneers: one, a handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed young fellow, was plainly a favorite with the women. They flocked after him as he pa.s.sed from one to another of the different lots of fish. They crowded in close circles around him, three and four deep; pus.h.i.+ng, struggling, rising on tiptoes to look over each other's shoulders and get sight of the fish.

"What's offered for this lot o' fine herrings? One! One and sax!

Thrippence ha'! Going, going, gone!" rang above all the clatter and chatter of the women's tongues. It was so swift that it seemed over before it was fairly begun; and the surging circles had moved along to a new spot and a new trade. The eyes of the women were fixed on the auctioneer's eyes; they beckoned; they shook forefingers at him; now and then a tall, stalwart one, reaching over less able-bodied comrades, took him by the shoulder, and compelled him to turn her way; one, most fearless of all, literally gripped him by the ear and pulled his head around, shrieking out her bid. When the pressure got unbearable, the young fellow would shake himself like a Newfoundland dog, and, laughing good-naturedly, whirl his arms wide round to clear a breathing s.p.a.ce; the women would fall back a pace or two, but in a moment the rings would close up again, tighter than ever.

The efforts of those in the outer ring to break through or see over the inner ones were droll. Arms and hands and heads seemed fairly interlinked and interwoven. Sometimes a pair of hands would come into sight, pus.h.i.+ng their way between two bodies, low down,--just the two hands, nothing more, breaking way for themselves, as if in a thicket of underbrush; presently the arms followed; and then, with a quick thrust of the arms to right and left, the s.p.a.ce would be widened enough to let in the head, and when that was fairly through the victory was won. Straightening herself with a big leap, the woman bounded in front of the couple she had so skilfully separated, and a buzzing "bicker" of angry words would rise for a moment; but there was no time to waste in bad temper where bargains were to be made or lost in the twinkling of an eye.

An old sailor, who stood near me on the wall, twice saved me from going backwards into the sea, in my hasty efforts to better my standpoint. He also seemed to be there simply as a spectator, and I asked him how the women knew what they were buying; buying, as they did, by the pile or the box.