The Daft Days

CHAPTER I

The town’s bell rang through the dark of the winter morning with queer little jolts and pauses, as if Wanton Wully Oliver, the ringer, had been jovial the night before. A blithe New-Year-time bell; a droll, daft, scatter-brained bell; it gave no horrid alarums, no solemn reminders that commonly toll from steeples and make good-fellows melancholy to think upon things undone, the brevity of days and years, the parting of good company, but a cheery ditty – “boom, boom, ding-a-dong boom, boom ding, hic, ding-dong,” infecting whoever heard it with a kind of foolish gaiety. The burgh town turned on its pillows, drew up its feet from the bed-bottles, last night hot, now turned to chilly stone, rubbed its eyes, and knew by that bell it was the daftest of the daft days come. It cast a merry spell on the community; it tickled them even in their cosy beds. “Wanton Wully’s on the ran-dan!” said the folk, and rose quickly, and ran to pull aside screens and blinds to look out in the dark on window-ledges cushioned deep in snow. The children hugged themselves under the blankets, and told each other in whispers it was not a porridge morning, no, nor Sunday, but a breakfast of shortbread, ham and eggs; and behold! a beautiful loud drum, careless as ’twere a reveille of hot wild youths, began to beat in a distant lane. Behind the house of Dyce the lawyer, a cock that must have been young and hearty crew like to burst; and at the stables of the post-office the man who housed his horses after bringing the morning mail through night and storm from a distant railway station sang a song, —

“Mercy on us! six o’clock!” cried Miss Dyce, with a startled jump from her dreams to the floor of her bedroom. “Six o’clock on the New Year’s morning, and I’ll warrant that randy Kate is sound asleep yet,” she said, and quickly clad herself and went to the head of the stair and cried, “Kate, Kate! are ye up yet, Kate? Are ye hearing me, Kate MacNeill?”

From the cavern dark of the lower storey there came back no answer.

She stood with a curious twirly wooden candlestick in her hand in the midst of a house that was dead dumb and desperate dark, and smelled deliciously of things to eat. Even herself, who had been at the making of most of them the day before, and had, by God’s grace, still much of a child’s appetite, could not but sniff with a childish satisfaction at this air of a celestial grocery – of plum-puddings and currant-buns, apples and oranges, cordials and spices, toffee and the angelic treacly sweet we call Black Man, – her face lit rosily by the candle lowe, a woman small and soft and sappy, with the most wanton reddish hair, and a briskness of body that showed no sign as yet of her accomplished years. What they were I will never tell you; but this I’ll say, that even if they had been eighty she was the kind to cheerily dance quadrille. The daft bell, so plainly in the jovial mood of Wanton Wully Oliver, infected her: she smiled to herself in a way she had when remembering droll things or just for simple jollity, and whoever saw Bell Dyce smile to herself had never the least doubt after that she was a darling. Over the tenements of the town the song of the bell went rollicking, and in its hiccupping pauses went wonderfully another sound far, far removed in spirit and suggestion – the clang of wild geese calling: the “honk, honk” of the ganders and the challenge of their ladies come down adrift in the snow from the bitter north.

But there was no answer from the maid in the kitchen. She had rolled less deliberately than was usual from her blankets to the summons of the six o’clock bell, and already, with the kitchen window open, her bounteous form surged over the two sashes that were always so conveniently low and handy for a gossip with any friendly passer-by on the pavement. She drank the air of the clean chill morning dark, a heady thing like old Tom Watson’s autumn ale, full of the sentiment of the daft days. She tilted an ear to catch the tune of the mail-boy’s song that now was echoing mellow from the cobwebbed gloom of the stable stalls, and making a snowball from the drift of the window-ledge she threw it, womanwise, aimlessly into the street with a pretence at combat. The chill of the snow stung sweet in the hot palm of her, for she was young and strong.

“Kate, you wretch!” cried a voice behind her. She drew in her head, to find her mistress in the kitchen with the candlestick in her hand.

“Oh, m’em,” cried the maid, no way abashed, banging up the window and hurriedly crushing her more ample parts under the final hooks and eyes of her morning wrapper – “oh, m’em, what a start you gave me! I’m all in a p-p-palpitation. I was just takin’ one mouthful of air and thinkin’ to myself yonder in the Gaelic that it was time for me to be comin’ in and risin’ right.”

“A Happy New Year to you, Kate MacNeill,” said the mistress, taking her hand.

“Just that, just that! and the same to you yourself, Miss Dyce. I’m feeling fine; I’m that glad with everything,” said the maid, in some confusion at this unusual relation with her mistress. She shook the proffered hand rapidly from side to side as if it were an egg-switch.

“And see and get the fires on quick now, like a good lass. It would never do to be starting the New Year late, – it would be unlucky. I was crying to you yonder from the stair-head, and wondering if you were ill, that you did not answer me so quickly as you do for ordinar’.”

“Ill, Miss Dyce!” cried the maid astounded. “Do you think I’m daft to be ill on a New Year’s day?”

“After yon – after yon shortbread you ate yesterday I would not have wondered much if you were,” said Miss Dyce, shaking her head solemnly. “I’m not complaining, but, dear me! it was an awful lump; and I thought it would be a bonny-like thing too, if our first-foot had to be the doctor.”

“Doctor! I declare to goodness I never had need of a doctor to me since Dr Macphee in Colonsay put me in order with oil and things after I had the measles,” exclaimed the maid, as if mankind were like wag-at-the-wa’ clocks and could be guaranteed to go right for years if you blew through them with a pair of bellows, or touched their works with an oily feather.

“Never mind about the measles just now, Kate,” said Miss Dyce, with a meaning look at the blackout fire.

“Neither I was mindin’ them, m’em, – I don’t care a spittle for them; it’s so long ago I would not know them if I saw them; I was just – ”

“But get your fire on. You know we have a lot to do to-day to get everything nice and ready for my nephew who comes from America with the four o’clock coach.”

“America!” cried the maid, dropping a saucepan lid on the floor in her astonishment. “My stars! Did I not think it was from Chickagoo?”

“And Chicago is in America, Kate,” said her mistress.

“Is it? is it? Mercy on me, how was Kate to know? I only got part of my education, – up to the place where you carry one and add ten. America! Dear me, just fancy! The very place that I’m so keen to go to. If I had the money, and was in America – ”

It was a familiar theme; Kate had not got fully started on it when her mistress fled from the kitchen and set briskly about her morning affairs.

And gradually the household of Dyce the lawyer awoke wholly to a day of unaccustomed stillness and sound, for the deep snow piled in the street and hushed the traffic of wheel, and hoof, and shoe, but otherwise the morning was cheerful with New Year’s day noise. For the bell-ringing of Wanton Wully was scarcely done, died down in a kind of brazen chuckle, and the “honk, honk” of the wild geese sped seaward over gardens and back lanes, strange wild music of the north, far-fetched and undomestic, – when the fife band shrilly tootled through the town to the tune of “Hey, Johnny Cope, are ye waukin’ yet?” Ah, they were the proud, proud men, their heads dizzy with glory and last night’s wine, their tread on air. John Taggart drummed – a mighty drummer, drunk or sober, who so loved his instrument he sometimes went to bed with it still fastened to his neck, and banged to-day like Banagher, who banged furiously, never minding the tune much, but happy if so be that he made noise enough. And the fifers were not long gone down the town, all with the wrong step but Johnny Vicar, as his mother thought, when the snow was trampled under the feet of playing children, and women ran out of their houses, and crossed the street, some of them, I declare, to kiss each other, for ’tis a fashion lately come, and most genteel, grown wonderfully common in Scotland. Right down the middle of the town, with two small flags in his hat and holly in the lapel of his coat, went old Divine the hawker, with a great barrow of pure gold, crying “Fine Venetian oranges! wha’ll buy sweet Venetian oranges? Nane o’ your foreign trash. Oranges! Oranges! – rale New Year oranges, three a penny; bloods, a bawbee each!”

The shops opened just for an hour for fear anybody might want anything, and many there were, you may be sure, who did, for they had eaten and drunken everything provided the night before – which we call Hogmanay, – and now there were currant-loaves and sweety biscuits to buy; shortcake, sugar and lemons, ginger cordial for the boys and girls and United Presbyterians, boiled ham for country cousins who might come unexpected, and P. & A. MacGlashan’s threepenny mutton-pies (twopence if you brought the ashet back), ordinarily only to be had on fair-days and on Saturdays, and far renowned for value.

Miss Minto’s Millinery and Manteau Emporium was discovered at daylight to have magically outlined its doors and windows during the night with garlands and festoons of spruce and holly, whereon the white rose bloomed in snow; and Miss Minto herself, in a splendid crimson cloak down to the heels, and cheeks like cherries, was standing with mittens and her five finger-rings on, in the middle door, saying in beautiful gentle English “A Happy New Year” to every one who passed – even to George Jordon, the common cowherd, who was always a little funny in his intellects, and, because his trousers were bell-mouthed and hid his feet, could never remember whether he was going to his work or coming from it, unless he consulted the Schoolmaster. “The same to you, m’em, excuse my hands,” said poor George, just touching the tips of her fingers. Then, because he had been stopped and slewed a little from his course, he just went back the way he had come.

Too late got up the red-faced sun, too late to laugh at Wanton Wully’s jovial bell, too late for Taggart’s mighty drumming, but a jolly winter sun, – ’twas all that was wanted among the chimneys to make the day complete.

First of all to rise in Dyce’s house, after the mistress and the maid, was the master, Daniel Dyce himself.

And now I will tell you all about Daniel Dyce: it is that behind his back he was known as Cheery Dan.

“Your bath is ready, Dan,” his sister had cried, and he rose and went with chittering teeth to it, looked at it a moment, and put a hand in the water. It was as cold as ice, because that water, drinking which, men never age, comes from high mountain bens.

“That for ye to-day!” said he to the bath, snapping his fingers. “I’ll see ye far enough first!” And contented himself with a slighter wash than usual, and shaving. As he shaved he hummed all the time, as was his habit, an ancient air of his boyhood; to-day it was

with not much tone but a great conviction, – a tall, lean, clean-shaven man of over fifty, with a fine long nose, a ruddy cheek, keen grey eyes, and plenty of room in his clothes, the pockets of him so large and open it was no wonder so many people tried, as it were, to put their hands into them. And when he was dressed he did a droll thing, for from one of his pockets he took what hereabouts we call a pea-sling, that to the rest of the world is a catapult, and having shut one eye, and aimed with the weapon, and snapped the rubber several times with amazing gravity, he went upstairs into an attic and laid it on a table at the window with a pencilled note, in which he wrote —

He looked round the little room that seemed very bright and cheerful, for its window gazed over the garden to the east and to the valley where was seen the King’s highway. “Wonderful! wonderful!” he said to himself. “They have made an extraordinary job of it. Very nice indeed, but just a shade ladylike. A stirring boy would prefer fewer fal-lals.”

There was little indeed to suggest the occupation of a stirring boy in that attic, with its draped dressing-table in lilac print, its looking-glass flounced in muslin and pink lover’s-knots, its bower-like bed canopied and curtained with green lawn, its shy scent of pot-pourri and lavender. A framed text in crimson wools, the work of Bell Dyce when she was in Miss Mushet’s seminary, hung over the mantelpiece enjoining all beholders to

Mr Dyce put both hands into his trousers pockets, bent a little, and heaved in a sort of chirruping laughter. “Man’s whole duty, according to Bell Dyce,” he said, “‘Watch and Pray’; but they do not need to have the lesson before them continually yonder in Chicago, I’ll warrant. Yon’s the place for watching, by all accounts, however it may be about the prayer. ‘Watch and Pray’ – h’m! It should be Watch or Pray – it clearly cannot be both at once with the world the way it is; you might as well expect a man to eat pease-meal and whistle strathspeys at the same time.”

He was humming “Star of Peace” – for the tune he started the morning with usually lasted him all day, – and standing in the middle of the floor contemplating with amusement the ladylike adornment of the room prepared for his Chicago nephew, when a light step fell on the attic stairs, and a woman’s voice cried, “Dan! Dan Dyce! Coo-ee!”

He did not answer.

She cried again after coming up a step or two more, but still he did not answer. He slid behind one of the bed-curtains.

CHAPTER II

Alison Dyce came lightly up the rest of the stair, whistling blithely, in spite of her sister Bell’s old notion that whistling women and crowing hens are never canny. She swept into the room. People in the town – which has a forest of wood and deer behind it – used to say she had the tread and carriage of a young wild roe, and I can well assure you she was the girl to walk with on a winter day! She had in her hand a book of poems called ‘The Golden Treasury’ and a spray of the herb called Honesty, that thrives in poor men’s gardens. Having laid them down on the table without noticing her brother’s extraordinary Present for a Good Boy, she turned about and fondled things. She smoothed the bed-clothes as if they covered a child, she patted the chair-backs with an air of benediction, she took cushions to her breast like one that cuddled them, and when she touched the mantel-piece ornaments they could not help it but must start to chime. It was always a joy to see Alison Dyce redding-up, as we say; though in housewifery, like sewing, knitting, and cooking, she was only a poor second to her sister Bell. She tried, from duty, to like these occupations, but, oh dear! the task was beyond her: whatever she had learned from her schooling in Edinburgh and Brussels, it was not the darning of hose and the covering of rhubarb-tarts.

Her gift, said Bell, was management.

Tripping round the little attic, she came back by-and-by to the table at the window to take one last wee glimpse inside ‘The Golden Treasury,’ that was her own delight and her notion of happy half-hours for the ideal boy, and her eye fell for the first time on the pea-sling and the note beside it.

She read, and laughed, and upon my word, if laughter like Ailie Dyce’s could be bought in perforated rolls, there would be no demand for Chopin and Schumann on the pianolas. It was a laugh that even her brother could not resist: a paroxysm of coughing burst from behind the curtains, and he came out beside her chuckling.

“I reckoned without my hoast,” said he, gasping.

“I was sure you were upstairs,” said Alison. “You silly man! Upon my word! Where’s your dignity, Mr Dyce?”

Dan Dyce stood for a second a little bit abashed, rubbing his chin and blinking his eyes as if their fun was a thing to be kept from brimming over. “I’m a great wag!” said he. “If it’s dignity you’re after, just look at my velvet coat!” and so saying he caught the ends of his coat skirts with his fingers, held them out at arm’s-length, and turned round as he might do at a fit-on in his tailor’s, laughing till his hoast came on again. “Dignity, quo’ she, just look at my velvet coat!”

“Dan, Dan! will you never be wise?” said Ailie Dyce, a humorsome demoiselle herself, if you believe me.

“Not if I keep my health,” said he. “You have made a bonny-like show of the old garret, between the two of you. It’s as smart as a lass at her first ball.”

“I think it’s very nice; at least it might be worse,” interrupted Alison defensively, glancing round with satisfaction and an eye to the hang of the frame round “Watch and Pray.” Bell’s wool-work never agreed with her notions, but, as she knew that her tarts never agreed with Bell, she kept, on that point, aye discreetly dumb.

“Poor little Chicago!” said her brother. “I’m vexed for the wee fellow. Print chintz, or chint prints, or whatever it is; sampler texts, and scent, and poetry books – what in the world is the boy to break?”

“Oh, you have seen to that department, Dan!” said Ailie, taking the pea-sling again in her hand. “‘A New Year’s Day Present for a Good Boy from an Uncle who does not like Cats.’ I declare that is a delightful way of making the child feel quite at home at once.”

“Tuts! ’Tis just a diversion. I know it’ll cheer him wonderfully to find at the start that if there’s no young folk in the house there’s some of the eternal Prank. I suppose there are cats in Chicago. He cannot expect us to provide him with pigs, which are the usual domestic pets there, I believe. You let my pea-sling alone, Ailie; you’ll find it will please him more than all the poetry and pink bows. I was once a boy myself, and I know.”

“You were never anything else,” said Alison. “And never will be anything else. It is a pity to let the child see at the very start what an irresponsible person his uncle is; and besides, it’s cruel to throw stones at cats.”

“Not at all, not at all!” said her brother briskly, with his head quizzically to the side a little, in a way he had when debating in the Court. “I have been throwing stones for twenty years at those cats of Rodger’s that live in our garden and I never hit one yet. They’re all about six inches too short for genuine sport. If cats were Dachshund dogs, and I wasn’t so fond of dogs, I would be deadly. But my ado with cats is just one of the manly old British sports, like trout-fishing and curling. You take your fun out in anticipation, and the only difference is you never need to carry a flask. Still, I’m not without hope that my nephew from Chicago may have a better aim than I have.”

“You are an old – an old goose, Dan Dyce, and a Happy New Year to you!” said his sister, putting her arms suddenly round his neck and kissing him.

“Tuts! the coming of that child’s ta’en your head,” said the brother, reddening, for sisters never kiss their own brothers in our part, – it’s so sentimental, it’s so like the penny stories. “A Good New Year to you, Ailie,” and “Tuts!” he said again, looking quite upset, till Ailie laughed and put her arm through his and drew him downstairs to the breakfast to which she had come to summon him.

The Chicago child’s bedroom, left to itself, chilly a bit like Highland weather, but honest and clean, looked more like a bower than ever: the morning sun, peeping over garden trees and the chimneys of the lanes, gazed particularly on the table where the pea-sling and the poetry book lay together.

And now the town was thronged like a fair-day, with such stirring things happening every moment in the street that the servant, Kate, had a constant head out at the window, “putting by the time,” as she explained to the passing inquirer, “till the Mustress would be ready for the breakfast.” That was Kate, – she had come from an island where they make the most of everything that may be news, even if it’s only brandy-sauce to pudding at the minister’s; and Miss Dyce could not start cutting a new bodice or sewing a button on her brother’s trousers but the maid billowed out upon the window-sash to tell the tidings to the first of her sex that passed.

Over the trodden snow she saw the people from the country crowd in their Sunday clothes, looking pretty early in the day for gaiety, all with scent on their handkerchiefs (which is the odour of festive days for a hundred miles round burgh towns); and town people, less splendid in attire, as folk that know the difference between a holiday and a Sabbath, and leave their religious hard hats at home on a New Year’s day; children, too, replete with bun already, and all succulent with the juice of Divine’s oranges. She heard the bell begin to peal again, for Wully Oliver – fie on Wully Oliver! – had been met by some boys who told him the six o’clock bell was not yet rung, and sent him back to perform an office he had done with hours before. He went to his bell dubiously, something in the dizzy abyss he called his mind that half convinced him he had rung it already.

“Let me pause and consider,” he said once or twice when being urged to the rope, scratching the hair behind his ears with both hands, his gesture of reflection. “Was there no’ a bairn – an auld-fashioned bairn – helped to ca’ the bell already, and wanted to gie me money for the chance? It runs in my mind there was a bairn, and that she had us aye boil-boiling away at eggs; but maybe I’m wrong, for I’ll admit I had a dram or two and lost the place. I don’t believe in dram-dram-dramming, but I aye say if you take a dram, take it in the morning and you get the good of it all day. It’s a tip I learned in the Crimea.” But at last they convinced him the bairn was just imagination, and Wanton Wully Oliver spat on his hands and grasped the rope, and so it happened that the morning bell on the New Year’s day on which my story opens was twice rung.

The Dyce handmaid heard it pealing as she hung over the window-sash with her cap agee on her head. She heard from every quarter – from lanes, closes, tavern rooms, high attics, and back-yards – fifes playing; it was as if she leaned over a magic grove of great big birds, each singing its own song – “Come to the Bower,” or “Monymusk,” or “The Girl I left Behind Me,” noble airs wherein the captain of the band looked for a certain perfection from his musicians before they marched out again at midday. “For,” said he often in rehearsals, “anything will do in the way of a tune in the dark, my sunny boys, but it must be the tiptop of skill, and no discordancy, when the eyes of the world are on us. One turn more at ‘Monymusk,’ sunny boys, and then we’ll have a skelp at yon tune of my own composure.”

Besides the sound of the bell and the universal practice of the fifes there were loud vocalists at the Cross, and such laughter in the street that Kate was in an ecstasy. Once, uplifted beyond all private decorum, she kilted her gown and gave a step of a reel in her kitchen solitude.

“Isn’t it cheery, the noise!” she exclaimed delightly to the letter-carrier who came to the window with the morning’s letters. “Oh, I am feeling beautiful! It is – it is – it is just like being inside a pair of bagpipes.”

He was a man who roared, the postman, being used to bawling up long common-stairs in the tenements for the people to come down to the foot themselves for their letters – a man with one roguish eye for the maiden and another at random. Passing in the letters one by one, he said in tones that on a quieter day might be heard half up the street, “Nothing for you, yourself, personally, Kate, but maybe there’ll be one to-morrow. Three big blue anes and seven wee anes for the man o’ business himsel’, twa for Miss Dyce (she’s the wonderfu’ correspondent!), and ane for Miss Alison wi’ the smell o’ scented perfume on’t – that’ll be frae the Miss Birds o’ Edinburgh. And I near forgot – here’s a post-caird for Miss Dyce: hearken to this —