The Daft Days

CHAPTER XXIV

For only a day or two the world (in a fur-lined collar) dwelt among us, but momentous was its advent to the household Molyneux came visiting. It was as if a high tide had swept the dwelling, Bell remarked when he was gone. You might see no outward difference; the furniture might still be as it was, and in the same position as Miss Bell had found it when her mother died, but none the less there was an unseen doleful wreckage. This unco man Molyneux changed the vital thing, the atmosphere, and the house with the brass knocker was never to be altogether just the same again. It is no discovery of mine that what may seem the smallest trifles play tremendous parts in destiny.

Even the town itself was some ways altered for a little by the whim that took the American actor to it. That he should be American and actor too foredoomed the greatness of his influence, since the combination stood for much that was mysterious, half fearful, half sublime, in our simple notions of the larger world. To have been the first alone would have endowed him with the charm of wonder and romance for most of us, who, at the very sight of the name America, even if it be only on a reaper or a can of beef, have some sense of a mightiness that the roar of London cannot rouse. But to be an actor too! earning easy bread by mimicry, and in enormous theatres, before light-headed folk that have made money – God knows how! – and prospered. Sinful a little, we allow, for there are doubts if the play-actor, having to paint his face and work late hours in gas-light, finally shall obtain salvation; sinful, and yet – and yet – so queer and clever a way of making out a living! It is no wonder if we looked on Mr Molyneux with that regard which by cities is reserved for shahs of a hundred wives, and royal vagabonds. Besides, consider how the way had been prepared for him by Bud! – a child, but a child who had shown already how wonderful must be the land that had swallowed up clever men like William Dyce and the brother of P. & A. MacGlashan. Had she not, by a single object-lesson in the Pilgrim widow’s warehouse, upset the local ways of commerce, so that now, in all the shops, the people were constantly buying things of which they had no earthly need; and the Pilgrim widow herself was put to the weekly trouble of washing her windows, so wasting time that might have been devoted to the Mission? Had she not shown that titled ladies were but human after all, and would not bite you if you cracked a joke politely with them? Had she not put an end to all the gallivanting of the maid of Colonsay, and given her an education that made her fit to court a captain? And, finally, had she not, by force of sheer example, made dumb and stammering bashfulness in her fellow pupils at the Sunday-school look stupid, and by her daily walk and conversation roused in them a new spirit of inquiry and independence that pleased their parents not so badly, and only the little twin teachers of the Pigeon Seminary could mistake for the kind of rebellion that calls for the application of the tawse?

Mr Molyneux might have no idea of it, but he was a lion for those few days of sequestration in what he thought the wilds. Miss Minto dressed her windows specially for his critical eye, and on the tickets of her autumn sales gave the name of “waist” to what had hitherto been a blouse or a garibaldi; P. & A. MacGlashan made the front of his shop like a wharf with piles of empty packing-cases to indicate a prosperous foreign and colonial trade; one morning Wanton Wully rang the bell at half-past five instead of six to prove how very wide-awake we were; and the band paraded once with a new tune, “Off to Philadelphia,” to show that when it came to gaiety we were not, though small, so very far behind New York.

But Jim Molyneux, going up and down the street with Lennox and the dog for cicerones, peered from under the rim of his hat, and summed all up to himself in the words, “Rube town” and “Cobwebopolis.”

Bell took warmly to him from the outset, so much was in his favour. For one thing he was spick and span, though not a jackanapes, with no long hair about him as she had expected, and with an honest eye and a good complexion that, for simple country ladies, readily pass as the guarantee of a being clean within. She forgave the disreputable part in him – the actor, since William had been one, and yet had taught his child her prayers; and she was willing to overlook the American, seeing William’s wife had suffered from the same misfortune. But, oh the blow she got when she unpacked what he called his grip, and found the main thing wanting!

“Where’s your Bible, Mr Molyneux?” she asked solemnly. “It’s not in your portmanteau?”

Again it was in his favour that he reddened, though the excuse he had to make was feeble.

“Dear me!” she said, shaking her head, with a sad sort of smile, “and you to be so regularly travelling! If I was your wife I would take you in hand! But perhaps in America there’s no need for a lamp to the feet and a light to the path.”

It was after their first supper, for which the patriot Bell had made a haggis, that her brother, for Molyneux’s information, said was thought to be composed of bagpipes boiled; Bud was gone to bed in the attic, and Molyneux was telling how he simply had to come.

“It’s my first time in Scotland,” said he, “and when ‘The Iron Hand’ lost its clutch on old Edina’s fancy, and the scenery was arrested, I wasn’t so sore about it as I might have been, since it gave me the opportunity of coming up here to see girly-girly. ‘I’ll skiddoo from the gang for a day or two,’ I said to the manager, when we found ourselves side-tracked, and he said that was all right, he’d wire me when he’d fixed a settlement; so I skiddid, and worked my way here with the aid of the American language, and a little Scotch – by absorption.”

“We have only one fault with your coming – that it was not sooner,” said Mr Dyce.

“And I’m pretty glad I came, if it was only to see what a credit Bud is to a Scottish training. Chicago’s the finest city on earth – in spots; America’s what our Fourth of July orators succinctly designate God’s Own, and since Joan of Arc there hasn’t been any woman better or braver than Mrs Molyneux. But we weren’t situated to give Bud a show like what she’d get in a settled home. We did our best, but we didn’t dwell, as you might say, on Michigan Avenue, and Mrs Molyneux’s a dear good girl, but she isn’t demonstratively domesticated. We suspected from what Bud’s father was, the healthiest place she could be was where he came from, and though we skipped some sleep, both of us, to think of losing her, now that I’m here and see her, I’m glad of it, for my wife and I are pretty much on the drift most the time in England as we were in the United States.”

“Yours is an exacting calling, Mr Molyneux,” said Mr Dyce. “It’s very much the same in all countries, I suppose?”

“It’s not so bad as stone-breaking, nor so much of a cinch as being a statesman,” said Mr Molyneux cheerfully, “but a man’s pretty old at it before he gives up hope of breaking out into a very large gun. I’ve still the idea myself that if I’m not likely to be a Booth or Henry Irving, I could make a pile at management. With a millionaire at my back for a mascot, and one strong star, I fancy I could cut a pretty wide gash through the English dramatic stage. You know our Mr Emerson said, ‘Hitch your waggon to a star.’ I guess if I got a good star bridled, I’d hitch a private parlour-car and a steam yacht on to her before she flicked an ear. Who wants a waggon, anyway?”

“A waggon’s fairly safe to travel in,” suggested Mr Dyce, twinkling through his glasses.

“So’s a hearse,” said Mr Molyneux quickly. “Nobody that ever travelled in a hearse complained of getting his funny-bone jolted or his feelings jarred, but it’s a mighty slow conveyance for live folks. That’s the only thing that seems to me to be wrong with this ’cute little British Kingdom: it’s pretty, and it’s what the school-marm on the coach would call redolent of the dear dead days beyond recall; and it’s plucky, – but it keeps the brakes on most the time, and don’t give its star a chance to amble. I guess it’s a fine, friendly, and crowded country to be born rich in, and a pretty peaceful and lonesome country to die poor in; but take a tenpenny car-ride out from Charing Cross and you’re in Lullaby Land, and the birds are building nests and carolling in your whiskers. Life’s short; it only gives a man time to wear through one pair of eyes, two sets of teeth, and a reputation, and I want to live every hour of it that I’m not conspicuously dead.”

They were silent in the parlour of the old house that had for generations sheltered very different ideals, and over the town went the call of the wild geese. The room, low-roofed, small-windowed, papered in dull green, curtained against the noises of the street, and furnished with the strong mahogany of Grandma Buntain, dead for sixty years, had ever to those who knew it best a soul of peace that is not sometimes found in a cathedral. They felt in it a sanctuary safe from the fret and tempest, the alarums and disillusions of the life out-bye. In the light of the shaded lamp hung over the table, it showed itself to its inmates in the way our most familiar surroundings will at certain crises – in an aspect fonder than ever it had revealed before. To Bell, resenting the spirit of this actor’s gospel, it seemed as if the room cried out against the sacrilege: even Ailie, sharing in her heart, if less ecstatically, the fervour for life at its busiest this stranger showed, experienced some inharmony. To Dan it was for a moment as if he heard a man sell cuckoo clocks by auction with a tombstone for his rostrum.

“Mr Molyneux,” said he, “you remind me, in what you say, of Maggie White’s husband. Before he died he kept the public-house, and on winter nights when my old friend Colin Cleland and his cronies would be sitting in the back room with a good light, a roaring fire, and an argument about Effectual Calling, so lively that it stopped the effectual and profitable call for Johnny’s toddy, he would come in chittering as it were with cold, and his coat-collar up on his neck, to say, ‘An awfu’ nicht outside! As dark as the inside o’ a cow, and as cauld as charity! They’re lucky that have fires to sit by.’ And he would impress them so much with the good fortune of their situation at the time that they would order in another round and put off their going all the longer, though the night outside, in truth, was no way out of the ordinary. I feel like that about this place I was born in, and its old fashions and its lack of hurry, when I hear you – with none of Johnny White’s stratagem – tell us, not how dark and cold is the world outside, but what to me, at the age of fifty-five, at any rate is just as unattractive. You’ll excuse me if, in a manner of speaking, I ring the bell for another round. Life’s short, as you say, but I don’t think it makes it look any the longer to run through the hours of it instead of leisurely daundering – if you happen to know what daundering is, Mr Molyneux – and now and then resting on the roadside with a friend and watching the others pass.”

“At fifty-five,” said Mr Molyneux agreeably, “I’ll perhaps think so too, but I can only look at it from the point of view of thirty-two. We’ve all got to move, at first, Mr Dyce. That reminds me of a little talk I had with Bud to-day. That child’s grown, Mr Dyce, – grown a heap of ways: she’s hardly a child any longer.”

“Tuts! She’s nothing else!” exclaimed Miss Bell, with some misgiving. “When I was her age I was still at my sampler in Barbara Mushet’s.”

“Anyhow she’s grown. And it seems to me she’s about due for a little fresh experience. I suppose you’ll be thinking of sending her to one of those Edinburgh schools to have the last coat of shellac put on her education?”

“What put that in your head? Did she suggest it herself?” asked Mr Dyce quickly, with his head to one side in his cross-examination manner.

“Well, she did, – but she didn’t know it,” said Mr Molyneux. “I guess about the very last thing that child ’d suggest to anybody would be that she wanted to separate herself from folk she loves so much as you; but, if there’s one weakness about her, it is that she can’t conceal what she thinks, and I’d not been twenty minutes in her society before I found out she had the go-fever pretty bad. I suspect a predisposition to that complaint and a good heart was all her father and mother left her, and lolling around and dwelling on the past isn’t apt to be her foible. Two or three years in the boarding-school arena would put the cap sheaf on the making of that girl’s character, and I know, for there’s my wife, and she had only a year and a half. If she’d had longer I guess she’d have had more sense than marry me. Bud’s got almost every mortal thing a body wants here, I suppose, – love in lumps, a warm moist soil, and all the rest of it; but she wants to be hardened-off, and for hardening-off a human flower there’s nothing better than a three-course college, where the social breeze is cooler than it is at home.”

Miss Bell turned pale – the blow had come! Dan looked at her with a little pity, for he knew she had long been fearfully expecting it.

“Indeed!” said she, “and I do not see the need for any such thing for a long while yet. Do you, Ailie?” But Ailie had no answer, and that was enough to show what she thought.

“I know how it feels at first to think of her going away from home,” continued Mr Molyneux, eager to be on with a business he had no great heart for. “Bless you, I know how my wife felt about it, – she cried like the cherubim and seraphim. Said it was snatching all the sunshine out of her life, and when I said, ‘Millicent Molyneux, what about hubby?’ she just said ‘Scat!’ and threw a couple of agonised throes. Now, Edinburgh’s not so very far away that you’d feel desolated if Bud went to a school there.”

“An unhealthy hole, with haars and horrible east wind,” said Miss Bell.

“Well, it isn’t the Pacific Slope, if it comes to climate,” admitted Mr Molyneux.

“No, but it’s the most beautiful city in the wide world, for all that,” cried Miss Bell, with such spirit that it cleared the air, and made her sister and her brother smile, for Molyneux, without his knowing it, had touched her in the very heart’s core of her national pride.

“You’re sure you are not mistaken, and that she would wish to go to school?” asked Mr Dyce.

“Do you doubt it yourself?” asked Molyneux slyly.

“No,” said Mr Dyce, “I know it well enough, but – but I don’t believe it,” and he smiled at his own paradox.

“I have her own words for it.”

“Then she’ll go!” said the lawyer firmly, as if a load was off his mind; and, oddly, there were no objections from his sisters. “You’re not to imagine, Mr Molyneux,” he went on, “that we have not thought of this before. It has for months been never out of our minds, as might be seen from the fact that we never mentioned it, being loth to take a step that’s going to make considerable difference here. It’s not that we feared we should die of ennui in her absence, for we’re all philosophers and have plenty to engage our minds as well as our activities, and though you might think us rather rusty here we get a good deal of fun with ourselves. She’ll go – oh, yes, of course she’ll go, – Ailie went, and she’s no’ muckle the waur o’t, as we say. I spent some time in the south myself, and the only harm it seems to have done me was to make me think too much perhaps of my native north. Taste’s everything, Mr Molyneux, and you may retort if you please that I’m like the other Scotsman who preferred his apples small and hard and sour. I think there’s no divine instruction, is there, Bell, about apples? and judgments regarding different countries and different places in them is mostly a subjective thing, like the estimate of beauty apart from its utility – ”

“Oh! there you are at your metapheesics, Dan,” cried Miss Bell, “and it’s for me and Ailie to make ready the bairn for Edinburgh. She hasna got a stitch that’s fit to be put on.”

Molyneux stared at her – the tone displayed so little opposition to the project; and seeing him so much surprised, the three of them smiled.

“That’s us!” said Mr Dyce. “We’re dour and difficult to decide on anything involving change, and hide from ourselves as long as we can the need for it; but once our mind’s made up, it’s wonderful how we hurry!”

CHAPTER XXV

Bell liked the creature, as I say; not a little because she saw in him whence came some part of Bud’s jocosity, and most of the daft-like language (though kind of clever too, she must allow) in which it was expressed. It was a different kind of jocosity from Dan’s, whose fun, she used to say, partook of the nature of rowan jelly, being tart and sweet in such a cunning combination that it tickled every palate and held some natural virtue of the mountain tree. The fun of Molyneux had another flavour – it put her in mind of allspice, being foreign, having heat as well as savour. But in each of these droll men was the main thing, as she would aye consider it – no distrust of the Creator’s judgment, good intentions and ability, and a readiness to be laughed at as well as find laughter’s cause in others. She liked the man, but still-and-on was almost glad when the telegram came from Edinburgh and he went back to join his company. It was not any lack of hospitality made her feel relief, but the thought that now Bud’s going was determined on, there was so much to do in a house where men would only be a bother.