Auld Licht Idyls by J.M. Barrie
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J.M. Barrie >> Auld Licht Idyls
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AULD LICHT IDYLS
BY
J.M. BARRIE
TO
FREDERICK GREENWOOD
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE SCHOOL-HOUSE
II. THRUMS
III. THE AULD LICHT KIRK
IV. LADS AND LASSES
V. THE AULD LICHTS IN ARMS
VI. THE OLD DOMINIE
VII. CREE QUEERY AND MYSY DROLLY
VIII. THE COURTING OF T'NOWHEAD'S BELL
IX. DAVIT LUNAN'S POLITICAL REMINISCENCES
X. A VERY OLD FAMILY
XI. LITTLE RATHIE'S "BURAL"
XII. A LITERARY CLUB
AULD LICHT IDYLS.
CHAPTER I.
THE SCHOOL-HOUSE.
Early this morning I opened a window in my school-house in the glen
of Quharity, awakened by the shivering of a starving sparrow against
the frosted glass. As the snowy sash creaked in my hand, he made off
to the waterspout that suspends its "tangles" of ice over a gaping
tank, and, rebounding from that, with a quiver of his little black
breast, bobbed through the network of wire and joined a few of his
fellows in a forlorn hop round the henhouse in search of food. Two
days ago my hilarious bantam-cock, saucy to the last, my cheeriest
companion, was found frozen in his own water-trough, the corn-saucer
in three pieces by his side. Since then I have taken the hens into
the house. At meal-times they litter the hearth with each other's
feathers; but for the most part they give little trouble, roosting
on the rafters of the low-roofed kitchen among staves and fishing-rods.
Another white blanket has been spread upon the glen since I looked
out last night; for over the same wilderness of snow that has met my
gaze for a week, I see the steading of Waster Lunny sunk deeper into
the waste. The school-house, I suppose, serves similarly as a snow-mark
for the people at the farm. Unless that is Waster Lunny's grieve
foddering the cattle in the snow, not a living thing is visible. The
ghostlike hills that pen in the glen have ceased to echo to the sharp
crack of the sportsman's gun (so clear in the frosty air as to be a
warning to every rabbit and partridge in the valley); and only giant
Catlaw shows here and there a black ridge, rearing his head at the
entrance to the glen and struggling ineffectually to cast off his
shroud. Most wintry sign of all I think, as I close the window hastily,
is the open farm-stile, its poles lying embedded in the snow where they
were last flung by Waster Lunny's herd. Through the still air comes
from a distance a vibration as of a tuning-fork: a robin, perhaps,
alighting on the wire of a broken fence.
In the warm kitchen, where I dawdle over my breakfast, the widowed
bantam-hen has perched on the back of my drowsy cat. It is needless
to go through the form of opening the school to-day; for, with the
exception of Waster Lunny's girl, I have had no scholars for nine
days. Yesterday she announced that there would be no more schooling
till it was fresh, "as she wasna comin';" and indeed, though the
smoke from the farm chimneys is a pretty prospect for a snowed-up
school-master, the trudge between the two houses must be weary work
for a bairn. As for the other children, who have to come from all
parts of the hills and glen, I may not see them for weeks. Last year
the school was practically deserted for a month. A pleasant outlook,
with the March examinations staring me in the face, and an inspector
fresh from Oxford. I wonder what he would say if he saw me to-day
digging myself out of the school-house with the spade I now keep for
the purpose in my bedroom.
The kail grows brittle from the snow in my dank and cheerless
garden. A crust of bread gathers timid pheasants round me. The
robins, I see, have made the coal-house their home. Waster Lunny's
dog never barks without rousing my sluggish cat to a joyful response.
It is Dutch courage with the birds and beasts of the glen, hard
driven for food; but I look attentively for them in these long
forenoons, and they have begun to regard me as one of themselves. My
breath freezes, despite my pipe, as I peer from the door: and with a
fortnight-old newspaper I retire to the ingle-nook. The friendliest
thing I have seen to-day is the well-smoked ham suspended, from my
kitchen rafters. It was a gift from the farm of Tullin, with a load
of peats, the day before the snow began to fall. I doubt if I have
seen a cart since.
This afternoon I was the not altogether passive spectator of a
curious scene in natural history. My feet encased in stout "tackety"
boots, I had waded down two of Waster Lunny's fields to the glen
burn: in summer the never-failing larder from which, with wriggling
worm or garish fly, I can any morning whip a savory breakfast; in
the winter time the only thing in the valley that defies the ice-king's
chloroform. I watched the water twisting black and solemn through the
snow, the ragged ice on its edge proof of the toughness of the struggle
with the frost, from which it has, after all, crept only half
victorious. A bare wild rose-bush on the farther bank was violently
agitated, and then there ran from its root a black-headed rat with
wings. Such was the general effect. I was not less interested when my
startled eyes divided this phenomenon into its component parts, and
recognized in the disturbance on the opposite bank only another fierce
struggle among the hungry animals for existence: they need no professor
to teach them the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. A weasel had
gripped a water-hen (whit-tit and beltie they are called In these
parts) cowering at the root of the rose-bush, and was being dragged
down the bank by the terrified bird, which made for the water as its
only chance of escape. In less disadvantageous circumstances the weasel
would have made short work of his victim; but as he only had the bird
by the tail, the prospects of the combatants were equalized. It was the
tug-of-war being played with a life as the stakes. "If I do not reach
the water," was the argument that went on in the heaving little breast
of the one, "I am a dead bird." "If this water-hen," reasoned the
other, "reaches the burn, my supper vanishes with her." Down the
sloping bank the hen had distinctly the best of it, but after that
came a yard, of level snow, and here she tugged and screamed in vain.
I had so far been an unobserved spectator; but my sympathies were with
the beltie, and, thinking it high time to interfere, I jumped into the
water. The water-hen gave one mighty final tug and toppled into the
burn; while the weasel viciously showed me his teeth, and then stole
slowly up the bank to the rose-bush, whence, "girning," he watched me
lift his exhausted victim from the water, and set off with her for the
school-house. Except for her draggled tail, she already looks
wonderfully composed, and so long as the frost holds I shall have little
difficulty in keeping her with me. On Sunday I found a frozen sparrow,
whose heart had almost ceased to beat, in the disused pigsty, and put
him for warmth into my breast-pocket. The ungrateful little scrub bolted
without a word of thanks about ten minutes afterward, to the alarm of my
cat, which had not known his whereabouts.
I am alone in the school-house. On just such an evening as this last
year my desolation drove me to Waster Lunny, where I was storm-stayed
for the night. The recollection decides me to court my own warm
hearth, to challenge my right hand again to a game at the "dambrod"
against my left. I do not lock the school-house door at nights; for
even a highwayman (there is no such luck) would be received with open
arms, and I doubt if there be a barred door in all the glen. But it
is cosier to put on the shutters. The road to Thrums has lost itself
miles down the valley. I wonder what they are doing out in the world.
Though I am the Free Church precentor in Thrums (ten pounds a year,
and the little town is five miles away), they have not seen me for
three weeks. A packman whom I thawed yesterday at my kitchen fire
tells me that last Sabbath only the Auld Lichts held service. Other
people realized that they were snowed up. Far up the glen, after it
twists out of view, a manse and half a dozen thatched cottages that
are there may still show a candle-light, and the crumbling gravestones
keep cold vigil round the gray old kirk. Heavy shadows fade into the
sky to the north. A flake trembles against the window; but it is too
cold for much snow to-night. The shutter bars the outer world from
the school-house.
CHAPTER II.
THRUMS.
Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled
together in a cup, which is the town nearest the school-house. Until
twenty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing
the rafters overhead, had a hand-loom, and hundreds of weavers lived
and died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it. In those days
the cup overflowed and left several houses on the top of the hill,
where their cold skeletons still stand. The road that climbs from the
square, which is Thrums' heart, to the north is so steep and straight,
that in a sharp frost children hunker at the top and are blown down
with a roar and a rush on rails of ice. At such times, when viewed
from the cemetery where the traveller from the school-house gets his
first glimpse of the little town. Thrums is but two church-steeples
and a dozen red-stone patches standing out of a snow-heap. One of the
steeples belongs to the new Free Kirk, and the other to the parish
church, both of which the first Auld Licht minister I knew ran past
when he had not time to avoid them by taking a back wynd. He was but
a pocket edition of a man, who grew two inches after he was called;
but he was so full of the cure of souls, that he usually scudded to
it with his coat-tails quarrelling behind him. His successor, whom I
knew better, was a greater scholar, and said, "Let us see what this
is in the original Greek," as an ordinary man might invite a friend
to dinner; but he never wrestled as Mr. Dishart, his successor, did
with the pulpit cushions, nor flung himself at the pulpit door. Nor
was he so "hard on the Book," as Lang Tammas, the precentor, expressed
it, meaning that he did not bang the Bible with his fist as much as
might have been wished.
Thrums had been known to me for years before I succeeded the
captious dominie at the school-house in the glen. The dear old soul
who originally induced me to enter the Auld Licht kirk by lamenting
the "want of Christ" in the minister's discourses was my first
landlady. For the last ten years of her life she was bedridden, and
only her interest in the kirk kept her alive. Her case against the
minister was that he did not call to denounce her sufficiently often
for her sins, her pleasure being to hear him bewailing her on his
knees as one who was probably past praying for. She was as sweet and
pure a woman as I ever knew, and had her wishes been horses, she
would have sold them and kept (and looked after) a minister herself.
There are few Auld Licht communities in Scotland nowadays--perhaps
because people are now so well off, for the most devout Auld Lichts
were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim
struggle with the workhouse. Many a heavy-eyed, back-bent weaver has
won his Waterloo in Thrums fighting on his stumps. There are a score
or two of them left still, for, though there are now two factories
in the town, the clatter of the hand-loom can yet be heard, and they
have been starving themselves of late until they have saved up
enough money to get another minister.
The square is packed away in the centre of Thrums, and irregularly
built little houses squeeze close to it like chickens clustering
round a hen. Once the Auld Lichts held property in the square, but
other denominations have bought them out of it, and now few of them
are even to be found in the main streets that make for the rim of
the cup. They live in the kirk wynd, or in retiring little houses,
the builder of which does not seem to have remembered that it is a
good plan to have a road leading to houses until after they were
finished. Narrow paths straggling round gardens, some of them with
stunted gates, which it is commoner to step over than, to open, have
been formed to reach these dwellings, but in winter they are running
streams, and then the best way to reach a house such as that of
Tammy Mealmaker the wright, pronounced wir-icht, is over a broken
dyke and a pig-sty. Tammy, who died a bachelor, had been soured in
his youth by a disappointment in love, of which he spoke but seldom.
She lived far away in a town which he had wandered in the days when
his blood ran hot, and they became engaged. Unfortunately, however,
Tammy forgot her name, and he never knew the address; so there the
affair ended, to his silent grief. He admitted himself, over his
snuff-mull of an evening, that he was a very ordinary character, but
a certain halo of horror was cast over the whole family by their
connection with little Joey Sutie, who was pointed at in Thrums as
the laddie that whistled when he went past the minister. Joey became
a pedler, and was found dead one raw morning dangling over a high
wall within a few miles of Thrums. When climbing the dyke his pack
had slipped back, the strap round his neck, and choked him.
You could generally tell an Auld Licht in Thrums when you passed
him, his dull, vacant face wrinkled over a heavy wob. He wore tags
of yarn round his trousers beneath the knee, that looked like
ostentatious garters, and frequently his jacket of corduroy was put
on beneath his waistcoat. If he was too old to carry his load on his
back, he wheeled it on a creaking barrow, and when he met a friend
they said, "Ay, Jeames," and "Ay, Davit," and then could think of
nothing else. At long intervals they passed through the square,
disappearing or coming into sight round the town-house which stands
on the south side of it, and guards the entrance to a steep brae
that leads down and then twists up on its lonely way to the county
town. I like to linger over the square, for it was from an upper
window in it that I got to know Thrums. On Saturday nights, when the
Auld Licht young men came into the square dressed and washed to look
at the young women errand-going, and to laugh some time afterward to
each other, it presented a glare of light; and here even came the
cheap jacks and the Fair Circassian, and the showman, who, besides
playing "The Mountain Maid and the Shepherd's Bride," exhibited part
of the tall of Balaam's ass, the helm of Noah's ark, and the tartan
plaid in which Flora McDonald wrapped Prince Charlie. More select
entertainment, such as Shuffle Kitty's wax-work, whose motto was, "A
rag to pay, and in you go," were given in a hall whose approach was
by an outside stair. On the Muckle Friday, the fair for which
children storing their pocket-money would accumulate sevenpence
halfpenny in less than six months, the square was crammed with
gingerbread stalls, bag-pipers, fiddlers, and monstrosities who were
gifted with second-sight. There was a bearded man, who had neither
legs nor arms, and was drawn through the streets in a small cart by
four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clock-work inside,
as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a
string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle
carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of
the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives
or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house
within walls of butter on cabbage-leaves, eggs and chickens. Toward
evening the voice of the buckie-man shook the square, and rival
fish-cadgers, terrible characters who ran races on horseback, screamed
libels at each other over a fruiterer's barrow. Then it was time for
douce Auld Lichts to go home, draw their stools near the fire, spread
their red handkerchiefs over their legs to prevent their trousers
getting singed, and read their "Pilgrim's Progress."
In my school-house, however, I seem to see the square most readily
in the Scotch mist which so often filled it, loosening the stones
and choking the drains. There was then no rattle of rain against my
window-sill, nor dancing of diamond drops on the roofs, but blobs of
water grew on the panes of glass to reel heavily down them. Then the
sodden square would have shed abundant tears if you could have taken
it in your hands and wrung it like a dripping cloth. At such a time
the square would be empty but for one vegetable-cart left in the
care of a lean collie, which, tied to the wheel, whined and shivered
underneath. Pools of water gather in the coarse sacks that have been
spread over the potatoes and bundles of greens, which turn to manure
in their lidless barrels. The eyes of the whimpering dog never leave
a black close over which hangs the sign of the Bull, probably the
refuge of the hawker. At long intervals a farmer's gig rumbles over
the bumpy, ill-paved square, or a native, with his head buried in
his coat, peeps out of doors, skurries across the way, and vanishes.
Most of the leading shops are here, and the decorous draper ventures
a few yards from the pavement to scan the sky, or note the effect of
his new arrangement in scarves. Planted against his door is the
butcher, Henders Todd, white-aproned, and with a knife in his hand,
gazing interestedly at the draper, for a mere man may look at an
elder. The tinsmith brings out his steps, and, mounting them,
stealthily removes the saucepans and pepper-pots that dangle on a
wire above his sign-board. Pulling to his door he shuts out the
foggy light that showed in his solder-strewn workshop. The square is
deserted again. A bundle of sloppy parsley slips from the hawker's
cart and topples over the wheel in driblets. The puddles in the
sacks overflow and run together. The dog has twisted his chain round
a barrel and yelps sharply. As if in response comes a rush of other
dogs. A terrified fox-terrier tears across the square with half a
score of mongrels, the butcher's mastiff, and some collies at his
heels; he is doubtless a stranger, who has insulted them by his
glossy coat. For two seconds the square shakes to an invasion of
dogs, and then again there is only one dog in sight.
No one will admit the Scotch mist. It "looks saft." The tinsmith
"wudna wonder but what it was makkin' for rain." Tammas Haggart and
Pete Lunan dander into sight bareheaded, and have to stretch out
their hands to discover what the weather is like. By-and-bye they
come to a standstill to discuss the immortality of the soul, and
then they are looking silently at the Bull. Neither speaks, but they
begin to move toward the inn at the same time, and its door closes
on them before they know what they are doing. A few minutes
afterward Jinny Dundas, who is Pete's wife, runs straight for the
Bull in her short gown, which is tucked up very high, and emerges
with her husband soon afterward. Jinny is voluble, but Pete says
nothing. Tammas follows later, putting his head out at the door
first, and looking cautiously about him to see if any one is in
sight. Pete is a U.P., and may be left to his fate, but the Auld
Licht minister thinks that, though it be hard work, Tammas is worth
saving.
To the Auld Licht of the past there were three degrees of damnation--
auld kirk, playacting, chapel. Chapel was the name always given to the
English Church, of which I am too much an Auld Licht myself to care to
write even now. To belong to the chapel was, in Thrums, to be a Roman
Catholic, and the boy who flung a clod of earth at the English minister-
-who called the Sabbath Sunday--or dropped a "divet" down his chimney
was held to be in the right way. The only pleasant story Thrums could
tell of the chapel was that its steeple once fell. It is surprising that
an English church was ever suffered to be built in such a place; though
probably the county gentry had something to do with it. They travelled
about too much to be good men. Small though Thrums used to be, it had
four kirks in all before the disruption, and then another, which split
into two immediately afterward. The spire of the parish church, known as
the auld kirk, commands a view of the square, from which the entrance to
the kirk-yard would be visible, if it were not hidden by the town-house.
The kirk-yard has long been crammed, and is not now in use, but the
church is sufficiently large to hold nearly all the congregations in
Thrums. Just at the gate lived Pete Todd, the father of Sam'l, a man of
whom the Auld Lichts had reason to be proud. Pete was an every-day man
at ordinary times, and was even said, when his wife, who had been long
ill, died, to have clasped his hands and exclaimed, "Hip, hip, hurrah!"
adding only as an afterthought, "The Lord's will be done." But midsummer
was his great opportunity. Then took place the rouping of the seats in
the parish church. The scene was the kirk itself, and the seats being
put up to auction were knocked down to the highest bidder. This
sometimes led to the breaking of the peace. Every person was present who
was at all particular as to where he sat, and an auctioneer was engaged
for the day. He rouped the kirk-seats like potato-drills, beginning by
asking for a bid. Every seat was put up to auction separately; for some
were much more run after than others, and the men were instructed by
their wives what to bid for. Often the women joined in, and as they bid
excitedly against each other the church rang with opprobrious epithets.
A man would come to the roup late, and learn that the seat he wanted had
been knocked down. He maintained that he had been unfairly treated, or
denounced the local laird to whom the seat-rents went. If he did not get
the seat he would leave the kirk. Then the woman who had forestalled him
wanted to know what he meant by glaring at her so, and the auction was
interrupted. Another member would "thrip down the throat" of the
auctioneer that he had a right to his former seat if he continued to pay
the same price for it. The auctioneer was screamed at for favoring his
friends, and at times the group became so noisy that men and women had
to be forcibly ejected. Then was Pete's chance. Hovering at the gate, he
caught the angry people on their way home and took them into his
workshop by an outside stair. There he assisted them in denouncing the
parish kirk, with the view of getting them to forswear it. Pete made a
good many Auld Lichts in his time out of unpromising material.
Sights were to be witnessed in the parish church at times that could
not have been made more impressive by the Auld Lichts themselves.
Here sinful women were grimly taken to task by the minister, who,
having thundered for a time against adultery in general, called upon
one sinner in particular to stand forth. She had to step forward
into a pew near the pulpit, where, alone and friendless, and stared
at by the congregation, she cowered in tears beneath his
denunciations. In that seat she had to remain during the forenoon
service. She returned home alone, and had to come back alone to her
solitary seat in the afternoon. All day no one dared speak to her.
She was as much an object of contumely as the thieves and smugglers
who, in the end of last century, it was the privilege of Feudal
Bailie Wood (as he was called) to whip round the square.
It is nearly twenty years since the gardeners had their last "walk"
in Thrums, and they survived all the other benefit societies that
walked once every summer. There was a "weavers' walk" and five or
six others, the "women's walk" being the most picturesque. These
were processions of the members of benefit societies through the
square and wynds, and all the women walked in white, to the number
of a hundred or more, behind the Tillie-drum band, Thrums having in
those days no band of its own.
From the northwest corner of the square a narrow street sets off,
jerking this way and that, as if uncertain what point to make for.
Here lurks the post-office, which had once the reputation of being
as crooked in its ways as the street itself.
A railway line runs into Thrums now. The sensational days of the
post-office were when the letters were conveyed officially in a
creaking old cart from Tilliedrum. The "pony" had seen better days
than the cart, and always looked as if he were just on the point of
succeeding in running away from it. Hooky Crewe was driver--so
called because an iron hook was his substitute for a right arm.
Robbie Proctor, the blacksmith, made the hook and fixed it in. Crewe
suffered from rheumatism, and when he felt it coming on he stayed at
home. Sometimes his cart came undone in a snow-drift; when Hooky,
extricated from the fragments by some chance wayfarer, was deposited
with his mail-bag (of which he always kept a grip by the hook) in a
farmhouse. It was his boast that his letters always reached their
destination eventually. They might be a long time about it, but
"slow _and_ sure" was his motto. Hooky emphasized his "slow
_and_ sure" by taking a snuff. He was a godsend to the postmistress, for
to his failings or the infirmities of his gig were charged all delays.
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