Margaret Ogilvy
CHAPTER II
WHAT SHE HAD BEEN
What she had been, what I should be, these were the two great
subjects between us in my boyhood, and while we discussed the one
we were deciding the other, though neither of us knew it.
Before I reached my tenth year a giant entered my native place
in the night, and we woke to find him in possession. He
transformed it into a new town at a rate with which we boys only
could keep up, for as fast as he built dams we made rafts to sail
in them; he knocked down houses, and there we were crying
‘Pilly!’ among the ruins; he dug trenches, and we
jumped them; we had to be dragged by the legs from beneath his
engines, he sunk wells, and in we went. But though there
were never circumstances to which boys could not adapt themselves
in half an hour, older folk are slower in the uptake, and I am
sure they stood and gaped at the changes so suddenly being worked
in our midst, and scarce knew their way home now in the
dark. Where had been formerly but the click of the shuttle
was soon the roar of ‘power,’ handlooms were pushed
into a corner as a room is cleared for a dance; every morning at
half-past five the town was wakened with a yell, and from a
chimney-stack that rose high into our caller air the conqueror
waved for evermore his flag of smoke. Another era had
dawned, new customs, new fashions sprang into life, all as lusty
as if they had been born at twenty-one; as quickly as two people
may exchange seats, the daughter, till now but a knitter of
stockings, became the breadwinner, he who had been the
breadwinner sat down to the knitting of stockings: what had been
yesterday a nest of weavers was to-day a town of girls.
I am not of those who would fling stones at the change; it is
something, surely, that backs are no longer prematurely bent; you
may no more look through dim panes of glass at the aged poor
weaving tremulously for their little bit of ground in the
cemetery. Rather are their working years too few now, not
because they will it so but because it is with youth that the
power-looms must be fed. Well, this teaches them to make
provision, and they have the means as they never had
before. Not in batches are boys now sent to college; the
half-dozen a year have dwindled to one, doubtless because in
these days they can begin to draw wages as they step out of their
fourteenth year. Here assuredly there is loss, but all the
losses would be but a pebble in a sea of gain were it not for
this, that with so many of the family, young mothers among them,
working in the factories, home life is not so beautiful as it
was. So much of what is great in Scotland has sprung from
the closeness of the family ties; it is there I sometimes fear
that my country is being struck. That we are all being
reduced to one dead level, that character abounds no more and
life itself is less interesting, such things I have read, but I
do not believe them. I have even seen them given as my
reason for writing of a past time, and in that at least there is
no truth. In our little town, which is a sample of many,
life is as interesting, as pathetic, as joyous as ever it was; no
group of weavers was better to look at or think about than the
rivulet of winsome girls that overruns our streets every time the
sluice is raised, the comedy of summer evenings and winter
firesides is played with the old zest and every window-blind is
the curtain of a romance. Once the lights of a little town
are lit, who could ever hope to tell all its story, or the story
of a single wynd in it? And who looking at lighted windows
needs to turn to books? The reason my books deal with the
past instead of with the life I myself have known is simply this,
that I soon grow tired of writing tales unless I can see a little
girl, of whom my mother has told me, wandering confidently
through the pages. Such a grip has her memory of her
girlhood had upon me since I was a boy of six.
Those innumerable talks with her made her youth as vivid to me
as my own, and so much more quaint, for, to a child, the oddest
of things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his
mother was once a child also, and the contrast between what she
is and what she was is perhaps the source of all humour. My
mother’s father, the one hero of her life, died nine years
before I was born, and I remember this with bewilderment, so
familiarly does the weather-beaten mason’s figure rise
before me from the old chair on which I was nursed and now write
my books. On the surface he is as hard as the stone on
which he chiselled, and his face is dyed red by its dust, he is
rounded in the shoulders and a ‘hoast’ hunts him
ever; sooner or later that cough must carry him off, but until
then it shall not keep him from the quarry, nor shall his chapped
hands, as long as they can grasp the mell. It is a night of
rain or snow, and my mother, the little girl in a pinafore who is
already his housekeeper, has been many times to the door to look
for him. At last he draws nigh, hoasting. Or I see
him setting off to church, for he was a great ‘stoop’
of the Auld Licht kirk, and his mouth is very firm now as if
there were a case of discipline to face, but on his way home he
is bowed with pity. Perhaps his little daughter who saw him
so stern an hour ago does not understand why he wrestles so long
in prayer to-night, or why when he rises from his knees he
presses her to him with unwonted tenderness. Or he is in
this chair repeating to her his favourite poem, ‘The
Cameronian’s Dream,’ and at the first lines so
solemnly uttered,
‘In a dream of the night I was wafted
away,’
she screams with excitement, just as I screamed long
afterwards when she repeated them in his voice to me. Or I
watch, as from a window, while she sets off through the long
parks to the distant place where he is at work, in her hand a
flagon which contains his dinner. She is singing to herself
and gleefully swinging the flagon, she jumps the burn and proudly
measures the jump with her eye, but she never dallies unless she
meets a baby, for she was so fond of babies that she must hug
each one she met, but while she hugged them she also noted how
their robes were cut, and afterwards made paper patterns, which
she concealed jealously, and in the fulness of time her first
robe for her eldest born was fashioned from one of these
patterns, made when she was in her twelfth year.
She was eight when her mother’s death made her mistress
of the house and mother to her little brother, and from that time
she scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed, and argued with the
flesher about the quarter pound of beef and penny bone which
provided dinner for two days (but if you think that this was
poverty you don’t know the meaning of the word), and she
carried the water from the pump, and had her washing-days and her
ironings and a stocking always on the wire for odd moments, and
gossiped like a matron with the other women, and humoured the men
with a tolerant smile—all these things she did as a matter
of course, leaping joyful from bed in the morning because there
was so much to do, doing it as thoroughly and sedately as if the
brides were already due for a lesson, and then rushing out in a
fit of childishness to play dumps or palaulays with others of her
age. I see her frocks lengthening, though they were never
very short, and the games given reluctantly up. The horror of my
boyhood was that I knew a time would come when I also must give
up the games, and how it was to be done I saw not (this agony
still returns to me in dreams, when I catch myself playing
marbles, and look on with cold displeasure); I felt that I must
continue playing in secret, and I took this shadow to her, when
she told me her own experience, which convinced us both that we
were very like each other inside. She had discovered that
work is the best fun after all, and I learned it in time, but
have my lapses, and so had she.
I know what was her favourite costume when she was at the age
that they make heroines of: it was a pale blue with a pale blue
bonnet, the white ribbons of which tied aggravatingly beneath the
chin, and when questioned about this garb she never admitted that
she looked pretty in it, but she did say, with blushes too, that
blue was her colour, and then she might smile, as at some memory,
and begin to tell us about a man who—but it ended there
with another smile which was longer in departing. She never
said, indeed she denied strenuously, that she had led the men a
dance, but again the smile returned, and came between us and full
belief. Yes, she had her little vanities; when she got the
Mizpah ring she did carry that finger in such a way that the most
reluctant must see. She was very particular about her
gloves, and hid her boots so that no other should put them on,
and then she forgot their hiding-place, and had suspicions of the
one who found them. A good way of enraging her was to say
that her last year’s bonnet would do for this year without
alteration, or that it would defy the face of clay to count the
number of her shawls. In one of my books there is a mother
who is setting off with her son for the town to which he had been
called as minister, and she pauses on the threshold to ask him
anxiously if he thinks her bonnet ‘sets’ her. A
reviewer said she acted thus, not because she cared how she
looked, but for the sake of her son. This, I remember,
amused my mother very much.
I have seen many weary on-dings of snow, but the one I seem to
recollect best occurred nearly twenty years before I was
born. It was at the time of my mother’s marriage to
one who proved a most loving as he was always a well-loved
husband, a man I am very proud to be able to call my
father. I know not for how many days the snow had been
falling, but a day came when the people lost heart and would make
no more gullies through it, and by next morning to do so was
impossible, they could not fling the snow high enough. Its
back was against every door when Sunday came, and none ventured
out save a valiant few, who buffeted their way into my
mother’s home to discuss her predicament, for unless she
was ‘cried’ in the church that day she might not be
married for another week, and how could she be cried with the
minister a field away and the church buried to the waist?
For hours they talked, and at last some men started for the
church, which was several hundred yards distant. Three of
them found a window, and forcing a passage through it, cried the
pair, and that is how it came about that my father and mother
were married on the first of March.
That would be the end, I suppose, if it were a story, but to
my mother it was only another beginning, and not the last.
I see her bending over the cradle of her first-born, college for
him already in her eye (and my father not less ambitious), and
anon it is a girl who is in the cradle, and then another
girl—already a tragic figure to those who know the
end. I wonder if any instinct told my mother that the great
day of her life was when she bore this child; what I am sure of
is that from the first the child followed her with the most
wistful eyes and saw how she needed help and longed to rise and
give it. For of physical strength my mother had never very
much; it was her spirit that got through the work, and in those
days she was often so ill that the sand rained on the
doctor’s window, and men ran to and fro with leeches, and
‘she is in life, we can say no more’ was the
information for those who came knocking at the door.
‘I am sorrow to say,’ her father writes in an old
letter now before me, ‘that Margaret is in a state that she
was never so bad before in this world. Till Wednesday night
she was in as poor a condition as you could think of to be
alive. However, after bleeding, leeching, etc., the Dr.
says this morning that he is better hoped now, but at present we
can say no more but only she is alive and in the hands of Him in
whose hands all our lives are. I can give you no adequate
view of what my feelings are, indeed they are a burden too heavy
for me and I cannot describe them. I look on my right and
left hand and find no comfort, and if it were not for the rock
that is higher than I my spirit would utterly fall, but blessed
be His name who can comfort those that are cast down. O for
more faith in His supporting grace in this hour of
trial.’
Then she is ‘on the mend,’ she may ‘thole
thro’’ if they take great care of her, ‘which
we will be forward to do.’ The fourth child dies when
but a few weeks old, and the next at two years. She was her
grandfather’s companion, and thus he wrote of her death,
this stern, self-educated Auld Licht with the chapped
hands:—
‘I hope you received my last in which I
spoke of Dear little Lydia being unwell. Now with deep
sorrow I must tell you that yesterday I assisted in laying her
dear remains in the lonely grave. She died at 7
o’clock on Wednesday evening, I suppose by the time you had
got the letter. The Dr. did not think it was croup till
late on Tuesday night, and all that Medical aid could prescribe
was done, but the Dr. had no hope after he saw that the croup was
confirmed, and hard indeed would the heart have been that would
not have melted at seeing what the dear little creature suffered
all Wednesday until the feeble frame was quite worn out.
She was quite sensible till within 2 hours of her death, and then
she sunk quite low till the vital spark fled, and all medicine
that she got she took with the greatest readiness, as if
apprehensive they would make her well. I cannot well
describe my feelings on the occasion. I thought that the
fountain-head of my tears had now been dried up, but I have been
mistaken, for I must confess that the briny rivulets descended
fast on my furrowed cheeks, she was such a winning Child, and had
such a regard for me and always came and told me all her little
things, and as she was now speaking, some of her little prattle
was very taking, and the lively images of these things intrude
themselves more into my mind than they should do, but there is
allowance for moderate grief on such occasions. But when I
am telling you of my own grief and sorrow, I know not what to say
of the bereaved Mother, she hath not met with anything in this
world before that hath gone so near the quick with her. She
had no handling of the last one as she was not able at the time,
for she only had her once in her arms, and her affections had not
time to be so fairly entwined around her. I am much afraid
that she will not soon if ever get over this trial.
Although she was weakly before, yet she was pretty well
recovered, but this hath not only affected her mind, but her body
is so much affected that she is not well able to sit so long as
her bed is making and hath scarcely tasted meat [i.e. food] since
Monday night, and till some time is elapsed we cannot say how she
may be. There is none that is not a Parent themselves that
can fully sympathise with one in such a state. David is
much affected also, but it is not so well known on him, and the
younger branches of the family are affected but it will be only
momentary. But alas in all this vast ado, there is only the
sorrow of the world which worketh death. O how gladdening
would it be if we were in as great bitterness for sin as for the
loss of a first-born. O how unfitted persons or families is
for trials who knows not the divine art of casting all their
cares upon the Lord, and what multitudes are there that when
earthly comforts is taken away, may well say What have I more?
all their delight is placed in some one thing or another in the
world, and who can blame them for unwillingly parting with what
they esteem their chief good? O that we were wise to lay up
treasure for the time of need, for it is truly a solemn affair to
enter the lists with the king of terrors. It is strange
that the living lay the things so little to heart until they have
to engage in that war where there is no discharge. O that
my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears that I
might weep day and night for my own and others’ stupidity
in this great matter. O for grace to do every day work in
its proper time and to live above the tempting cheating train of
earthly things. The rest of the family are moderately
well. I have been for some days worse than I have been for
8 months past, but I may soon get better. I am in the same
way I have often been in before, but there is no security for it
always being so, for I know that it cannot be far from the time
when I will be one of those that once were. I have no other
news to send you, and as little heart for them. I hope you
will take the earliest opportunity of writing that you can, and
be particular as regards Margaret, for she requires
consolation.’
He died exactly a week after writing this letter, but my
mother was to live for another forty-four years. And joys
of a kind never shared in by him were to come to her so
abundantly, so long drawn out that, strange as it would have
seemed to him to know it, her fuller life had scarce yet
begun. And with the joys were to come their sweet,
frightened comrades pain and grief; again she was to be touched
to the quick, again and again to be so ill that ‘she is in
life, we can say no more,’ but still she had attendants
very ‘forward’ to help her, some of them unborn in
her father’s time.
She told me everything, and so my memories of our little red
town are coloured by her memories. I knew it as it had been
for generations, and suddenly I saw it change, and the
transformation could not fail to strike a boy, for these first
years are the most impressionable (nothing that happens after we
are twelve matters very much); they are also the most vivid years
when we look back, and more vivid the farther we have to look,
until, at the end, what lies between bends like a hoop, and the
extremes meet. But though the new town is to me a glass
through which I look at the old, the people I see passing up and
down these wynds, sitting, nightcapped, on their barrow-shafts,
hobbling in their blacks to church on Sunday, are less those I
saw in my childhood than their fathers and mothers who did these
things in the same way when my mother was young. I cannot
picture the place without seeing her, as a little girl, come to
the door of a certain house and beat her bass against the
gav’le-end, or there is a wedding to-night, and the
carriage with the white-eared horse is sent for a maiden in pale
blue, whose bonnet-strings tie beneath the chin.