The Daft Days

CHAPTER XVI

“I canna be bothered with that Shakespeare,” Kate cried hopelessly, after many days of him; “the man’s a mournin’ thing! Could he not give us something cheery, with ‘Come, all ye boys!’ in it, the same as the trawlers sing in Colonsay? There was far more fun last week in the penny Horner.”

So Bud dipped in the bottomless well of knowledge again and scooped up Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ and splashed her favourite lyrics at the servant’s feet. Kate could not stand the ‘Golden Treasury’ either; the songs were nearly all so lamentable they would make a body greet. Bud assured her on the best authority that the sweetest songs were those that told of saddest thought, but Kate said that might be right enough for gentry who had no real troubles of their own, but they weren’t the thing at all for working folk. What working folk required were songs with tunes to them, and choruses that you could tramp time to with your feet. History, too, was as little to her taste; it was all incredible, – the country could never have kept up so many kings and queens. But she liked geography, for the map enabled her to keep an eye on Charles as he went from port to port, where letters in her name, but still the work of Lennox, would be waiting for him.

The scheme of education was maintained so long because the town had come upon its melancholy days and Bud began to feel depression, so that playing teacher was her only joy. The strangers had gone south with the swallows; the steamer no longer called each day to make the pavement noisy in the afternoon with the skliff of city feet, so different from the customary tread of tackety boots; the coachman’s horn, departing, no longer sounded down the valley like a brassy challenge from the wide, wide world. Peace came to the burgh like a swoon, and all its days were pensive. Folk went about their tasks reluctant, the very smoke of the chimneys loitered lazily round the ridges where the starlings chattered, and a haze was almost ever over the hills. When it rose, sometimes, Bud, from her attic window, could see the road that wound through the distant glen. The road! – the road! – ah, that began to have a meaning and a kind of cry, and wishfully she looked at it and thought upon its other end, where the life she had left and read about was loudly humming and marvellous things were being done. Charles Maclean of Oronsay, second mate, whom she loved unto destruction, now that he was writing regularly, fairly daft himself to get such charming curious letters as he thought from Kate, had been adjusted by the doctor, and was once again on the heaving main. It would be Cardiff or Fleetwood, Hamburg, Santander, or Bilbao, whose very name is like a story, and his tarry pen, infected by the child’s example, induced to emulation, always bravely sought to give some picture of the varied world through which he wandered. Of noisy ports did he communicate, crowded with ships, of streets and lofty warehouses, and places where men sang, and sometimes of the playhouse, where the villain was a bad one and the women were so braw.

“What is braw?” asked Bud.

“It’s fine clothes,” said Kate; “but what’s fine clothes if you are not pure in heart and have a figure?” and she surveyed with satisfaction her own plump arms.

But the child guessed at a wider meaning for the word as Charles used it, and thought upon the beauteous clever women of the plays that she had seen herself in far Chicago, and since her vicarious lover would have thought them braw and plainly interesting, she longed to emulate them, at least to see them again. And, oh! to see the places that he wrote of, and hear the thundering wheels and jangling bells! And there was also Auntie Ailie’s constant stimulus to thoughts and aspirations that could meet no satisfaction in this little town. Bell dwelt continually within the narrow walls of her immediate duty, content, like many, thank the Lord! doing her daily turns as best she could, dreaming of nothing nobler. Dan had ranged wider in his time, and knew the world a great deal better, and had seen so much of it was illusion, its prizes “Will-o’-the-wisp,” that now his wild geese were come home. He could see the world in the looking-glass in which he shaved, and there was much to be amused at. But Ailie’s geese were still flying far across the firmament, knowing no place of rest. The child had bewitched her! it was often the distant view for her now, the region unattainable; and though apparently she had long ago surrendered to her circumstances, she now would sometimes silently irk at her prisoning here, in sleep-town, where we let things slide until to-morrow, while the wild birds of her inclination flew around the habitable wakeful world. Unwittingly – no, not unwittingly always – she charged the child with curiosity unsatisfiable, and secret discontent at little things and narrow, with longings for spacious arenas and ecstatic crowded hours. To be clever, to be brave and daring, to venture and make a glorious name! – how her face would glow and all her flesh would quiver picturing lives she would have liked to live if only she had had the chance! How many women are like that! silent by the hearth, seemingly placid and content as they darn and mend and wait on the whim and call of dullards.

Bell might be content and busy with small affairs, but she had a quick, shrewd eye, and saw the child’s unrest. It brought her real distress, for so had the roving spirit started in her brother William. Sometimes she softly scolded Lennox, and even had contemplated turning her into some other room from the attic that had the only window in the house from which the highroad could be seen, but Ailie told her that would be to make the road more interesting for the child. “And I don’t know,” she added, “that it should worry us if she does indulge herself in dreams about the great big world and its possibilities. I suppose she’ll have to take the road some day.”

“Take the road!” cried Bell, almost weeping. “Are you daft, Ailie Dyce? What need she take the road for? There’s plenty to do here, and I’m sure she’ll never be better off anywhere else. A lot of nonsense! I hope you are not putting notions in her head; we had plenty of trouble with her father.”

“It would break my heart to lose her, I assure you,” said Aunt Ailie softly; “but – ” and she ended with a sigh.

“I’m sure you’re content enough yourself?” said Bell; “and you’re not by any means a diffy.”

“Indeed I am content,” admitted Ailie; “at least – at least I’m not complaining. But there is a discontent that’s almost holy, a roving mood that’s the salvation of the race. There were, you mind, the Pilgrim Fathers – ”

“I wish to the Lord they had bided at home!” cried Bell. “There’s never been happy homes in this Christian land since they started emigration.” And at that Miss Ailie smiled and Dan began to chuckle.

“Does it not occur to you, Bell,” said he, “that but for the Pilgrim Fathers there would never have been Bud?”

“I declare neither there would!” she said, smiling. “Perhaps it was as well they went, poor things! And, of course, there must be many an honest decent body in America.”

“Quite a number!” said Ailie. “You would not expect this burgh to hold them all, or even Scotland: America’s glad to get the overflow.”

“Ah, you’re trying to make me laugh, the pair of you, and forget my argument,” said Bell; “but I’ll not be carried away this time. I’m feared for the bairn, and that’s telling you. Oh, Ailie, mind what her mother was – poor girl! poor dear girl! playacting for her living, roving from place to place, with nothing you could call a home; laughing and greeting and posturing before lights for the diversion of the world – ”

“We might do worse than give the world diversion,” said Ailie soberly.

“Yes, yes; but with a painted face and all a vain profession – that is different, is it not? I love a jovial heart like Dan’s, but to make the body just a kind of fiddle! It’s only in the body we can be ourselves – it is our only home; think of furnishing it with shams, and lighting every room that should be private, and leaving up the blinds that the world may look in at a penny a-head! How often have I thought of William, weeping for a living, as he had to do sometimes, no doubt, and wondered what was left for him to do to ease his grief when Mary died. Oh, curb the child, Ailie! curb the dear wee lassie, – it’s you it all depends on; she worships you; the making of her ’s in your hands. Keep her humble. Keep her from thinking of worldly glories. Teach her to number her days, that she may apply her heart unto wisdom. Her mind’s too often out of here and wandering elsewhere: it was so with William, – it was once the same with you.”

Indeed it was no wonder that Bud’s mind should wander elsewhere, since the life about her had grown so suddenly dull. In these days Wanton Wully often let his morning sleep too long possess him, and hurrying through the deserted dawn with his breeches scarcely on, would ring the bell in a hasty fury half an hour behind the proper time. But a little lateness did not matter in a town that really never woke. Men went to work in what we call a dover – that is, half asleep; shopkeepers came blinking drowsily down and took their shutters off, and went back to breakfast, or, I fear sometimes, to bed, and when the day was aired and decency demanded that they should make some pretence at business, they stood by the hour at their shop doors looking at the sparrows, wagtails, and blue-bonnets pecking in the street, or at the gulls that quarrelled in the syver sand. Nothing doing. Two or three times a-day a cart from the country rumbled down the town, breaking the Sabbath calm; and on one memorable afternoon there came a dark Italian with an organ who must have thought that this at last was Eldorado, so great was his reward from a community sick of looking at each other. But otherwise nothing doing, not a thing! As in the dark of the fabled underland the men who are blind are kings, George Jordon, the silly man, who never had a purpose, and carried about with him an enviable eternal dream, seemed in that listless world the only wide-awake, for he at least kept moving, slouching somewhere, sure there was work for him to do if only he could get at it. Bairns dawdled to the schools, dogs slept in the track where once was summer traffic; Kate, melancholy, billowed from the kitchen window, and into the street quite shamelessly sang sad old Gaelic songs which Mr Dyce would say would have been excellent if only they were put to music, and her voice was like a lullaby.

One day Bud saw great bands of countless birds depart, passing above the highroad, and standing in the withering garden heard as it were without a breath of wind the dry rattle of dead leaves fall. It frightened her. She came quickly in to the tea-table, almost at her tears.

“Oh, it’s dre’ffle,” she said. “It’s Sunday all the time, without good clothes and the gigot of mutton for dinner. I declare I want to yell.”

“Dear me!” said Miss Bell cheerfully, “I was just thinking things were unusually lively for the time of year. There’s something startling every other day. Aggie Williams found her fine new kitchen-range too big for the accommodation, and she has covered it with cretonne and made it into a what-not for her parlour. Then there’s the cantata – I hear the U.P. choir is going to start to practise it whenever Duncan Gill, next door to the hall, is gone: he’s near his end, poor body! they’re waiting on, but he says he could never die a Christian death if he had to listen to them at their operatics through the wall.”

“It’s not a bit like this in Chicago,” said the child, and her uncle chuckled.

“I daresay not,” said he. “What a pity for Chicago! Are you wearying for Chicago, lassie?”

“No,” said Bud, deliberating. “It was pretty smelly, but my! I wish to goodness folk here had a little git-up-and-go to them!”

“Indeed, I daresay it’s not a bit like Chicago,” admitted Auntie Bell. “It pleases myself that it’s just like Bonnie Scotland.”

“It’s not a bit like Scotland either,” said Bud. “I calc’lated Scotland ’d be like a story-book all the time, chock-full of men-at-arms and Covenanters, and things father used to talk about, Sundays, when he was kind of mopish, and wanted to make me Scotch. I’ve searched the woods for Covenanters and can’t find one; they must have taken to the tall timber, and I haven’t seen any men-at-arms since I landed, ’cepting the empty ones up in the castle lobby.”

“What did you think Scotland would be like, dear?” asked Ailie.

“Between me and Winifred Wallace, we figured it would be a great place for chivalry and constant trouble among the crowned heads. I expected there’d be a lot of ‘battles long ago,’ same as in the Highland Reaper in the sweet, sweet G.T.”

“What’s G.T.?” asked Auntie Bell; and Bud laughed slyly, and looked at her smiling Auntie Ailie, and said: “We know, Auntie Ailie, don’t we? It’s GRAND! And if you want to know, Auntie Bell, it’s just Mister Lovely Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ That’s a book, my Lord! I expected there’d be battles every day – ”

“What a bloodthirsty child!” said Miss Ailie.

“I don’t mean truly truly battles,” Bud hurried to explain, “but the kind that’s the same as a sound of revelry off – no blood, but just a lot of bang. But I s’pose battles are gone out, like iron suits. Then I thought there’d be almost nothing but cataracts and ravines and – and – mountain-passes, and here and there a right smart Alick in short trunks and a feather in his hat, winding a hunting-horn. I used to think, when I was a little, wee, silly whitterick, that you wound a horn every Saturday night with a key, just like a clock; but I’ve known for years and years it’s just blowing. The way father said, and from the things I read, I calc’lated all the folk in Scotland ’d hate each other like poison, and start a clan, and go out chasing all the other clans with direful slogans and bagpipes skirling wildly in the genial breeze. And the place would be crowded with lovelorn maidens – that kind with the starched millstones round their necks, like Queen Mary always wore. My, it must have been rough on dear old Mary when she fell asleep in church! But it’s not a bit like that; it’s only like Scotland when I’m in bed, and the wind is loud, and I hear the geese. Then I think of the trees all standing out in the dark and wet, and the hills too, the way they’ve done for years and years, and the big lonely places with nobody in them, not a light even; and I get the croodles and the creeps, for that’s Scotland, full of bogies. I think Scotland’s stone-dead.”

“It’s no more dead than you are yourself,” said Miss Bell, determined ever to uphold her native land. “The cleverest people in the world come from Scotland.”

“So father used to say; but Jim, he said he guessed the cleverer they were the quicker they came. I’m not a bit surprised they make a dash from home when they feel so dead and mopish and think of things and see that road.”