MARGARET OGILVY





CHAPTER I - HOW MY MOTHER GOT HER SOFT FACE


On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in 
our little house it was an event, the first great victory in a 
woman's long campaign; how they had been laboured for, the pound-
note and the thirty threepenny-bits they cost, what anxiety there 
was about the purchase, the show they made in possession of the 
west room, my father's unnatural coolness when he brought them in 
(but his face was white) - I so often heard the tale afterwards, 
and shared as boy and man in so many similar triumphs, that the 
coming of the chairs seems to be something I remember, as if I had 
jumped out of bed on that first day, and run ben to see how they 
looked.  I am sure my mother's feet were ettling to be ben long 
before they could be trusted, and that the moment after she was 
left alone with me she was discovered barefooted in the west room, 
doctoring a scar (which she had been the first to detect) on one of 
the chairs, or sitting on them regally, or withdrawing and re-
opening the door suddenly to take the six by surprise.  And then, I 
think, a shawl was flung over her (it is strange to me to think it 
was not I who ran after her with the shawl), and she was escorted 
sternly back to bed and reminded that she had promised not to 
budge, to which her reply was probably that she had been gone but 
an instant, and the implication that therefore she had not been 
gone at all.  Thus was one little bit of her revealed to me at 
once: I wonder if I took note of it.  Neighbours came in to see the 
boy and the chairs.  I wonder if she deceived me when she affected 
to think that there were others like us, or whether I saw through 
her from the first, she was so easily seen through.  When she 
seemed to agree with them that it would be impossible to give me a 
college education, was I so easily taken in, or did I know already 
what ambitions burned behind that dear face? when they spoke of the 
chairs as the goal quickly reached, was I such a newcomer that her 
timid lips must say 'They are but a beginning' before I heard the 
words?  And when we were left together, did I laugh at the great 
things that were in her mind, or had she to whisper them to me 
first, and then did I put my arm round her and tell her that I 
would help?  Thus it was for such a long time: it is strange to me 
to feel that it was not so from the beginning.

It is all guess-work for six years, and she whom I see in them is 
the woman who came suddenly into view when they were at an end.  
Her timid lips I have said, but they were not timid then, and when 
I knew her the timid lips had come.  The soft face - they say the 
face was not so soft then.  The shawl that was flung over her - we 
had not begun to hunt her with a shawl, nor to make our bodies a 
screen between her and the draughts, nor to creep into her room a 
score of times in the night to stand looking at her as she slept.  
We did not see her becoming little then, nor sharply turn our heads 
when she said wonderingly how small her arms had grown.  In her 
happiest moments - and never was a happier woman - her mouth did 
not of a sudden begin to twitch, and tears to lie on the mute blue 
eyes in which I have read all I know and would ever care to write.  
For when you looked into my mother's eyes you knew, as if He had 
told you, why God sent her into the world - it was to open the 
minds of all who looked to beautiful thoughts.  And that is the 
beginning and end of literature.  Those eyes that I cannot see 
until I was six years old have guided me through life, and I pray 
God they may remain my only earthly judge to the last.  They were 
never more my guide than when I helped to put her to earth, not 
whimpering because my mother had been taken away after seventy-six 
glorious years of life, but exulting in her even at the grave.


She had a son who was far away at school.  I remember very little 
about him, only that he was a merry-faced boy who ran like a 
squirrel up a tree and shook the cherries into my lap.  When he was 
thirteen and I was half his age the terrible news came, and I have 
been told the face of my mother was awful in its calmness as she 
set off to get between Death and her boy.  We trooped with her down 
the brae to the wooden station, and I think I was envying her the 
journey in the mysterious wagons; I know we played around her, 
proud of our right to be there, but I do not recall it, I only 
speak from hearsay.  Her ticket was taken, she had bidden us 
goodbye with that fighting face which I cannot see, and then my 
father came out of the telegraph-office and said huskily, 'He's 
gone!'  Then we turned very quietly and went home again up the 
little brae.  But I speak from hearsay no longer; I knew my mother 
for ever now.

That is how she got her soft face and her pathetic ways and her 
large charity, and why other mothers ran to her when they had lost 
a child.  'Dinna greet, poor Janet,' she would say to them; and 
they would answer, 'Ah, Margaret, but you're greeting yoursel.'  
Margaret Ogilvy had been her maiden name, and after the Scotch 
custom she was still Margaret Ogilvy to her old friends.  Margaret 
Ogilvy I loved to name her.  Often when I was a boy, 'Margaret 
Ogilvy, are you there?'  I would call up the stair.

She was always delicate from that hour, and for many months she was 
very ill.  I have heard that the first thing she expressed a wish 
to see was the christening robe, and she looked long at it and then 
turned her face to the wall.  That was what made me as a boy think 
of it always as the robe in which he was christened, but I knew 
later that we had all been christened in it, from the oldest of the 
family to the youngest, between whom stood twenty years.  Hundreds 
of other children were christened in it also, such robes being then 
a rare possession, and the lending of ours among my mother's 
glories.  It was carried carefully from house to house, as if it 
were itself a child; my mother made much of it, smoothed it out, 
petted it, smiled to it before putting it into the arms of those to 
whom it was being lent; she was in our pew to see it borne 
magnificently (something inside it now) down the aisle to the 
pulpit-side, when a stir of expectancy went through the church and 
we kicked each other's feet beneath the book-board but were 
reverent in the face; and however the child might behave, laughing 
brazenly or skirling to its mother's shame, and whatever the father 
as he held it up might do, look doited probably and bow at the 
wrong time, the christening robe of long experience helped them 
through.  And when it was brought back to her she took it in her 
arms as softly as if it might be asleep, and unconsciously pressed 
it to her breast: there was never anything in the house that spoke 
to her quite so eloquently as that little white robe; it was the 
one of her children that always remained a baby.  And she had not 
made it herself, which was the most wonderful thing about it to me, 
for she seemed to have made all other things.  All the clothes in 
the house were of her making, and you don't know her in the least 
if you think they were out of the fashion; she turned them and made 
them new again, she beat them and made them new again, and then she 
coaxed them into being new again just for the last time, she let 
them out and took them in and put on new braid, and added a piece 
up the back, and thus they passed from one member of the family to 
another until they reached the youngest, and even when we were done 
with them they reappeared as something else.  In the fashion!  I 
must come back to this.  Never was a woman with such an eye for it.  
She had no fashion-plates; she did not need them.  The minister's 
wife (a cloak), the banker's daughters (the new sleeve) - they had 
but to pass our window once, and the scalp, so to speak, was in my 
mother's hands.  Observe her rushing, scissors in hand, thread in 
mouth, to the drawers where her daughters' Sabbath clothes were 
kept.  Or go to church next Sunday, and watch a certain family 
filing in, the boy lifting his legs high to show off his new boots, 
but all the others demure, especially the timid, unobservant-
looking little woman in the rear of them.  If you were the 
minister's wife that day or the banker's daughters you would have 
got a shock.  But she bought the christening robe, and when I used 
to ask why, she would beam and look conscious, and say she wanted 
to be extravagant once.  And she told me, still smiling, that the 
more a woman was given to stitching and making things for herself, 
the greater was her passionate desire now and again to rush to the 
shops and 'be foolish.'  The christening robe with its pathetic 
frills is over half a century old now, and has begun to droop a 
little, like a daisy whose time is past; but it is as fondly kept 
together as ever: I saw it in use again only the other day.

My mother lay in bed with the christening robe beside her, and I 
peeped in many times at the door and then went to the stair and sat 
on it and sobbed.  I know not if it was that first day, or many 
days afterwards, that there came to me, my sister, the daughter my 
mother loved the best; yes, more I am sure even than she loved me, 
whose great glory she has been since I was six years old.  This 
sister, who was then passing out of her 'teens, came to me with a 
very anxious face and wringing her hands, and she told me to go ben 
to my mother and say to her that she still had another boy.  I went 
ben excitedly, but the room was dark, and when I heard the door 
shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood 
still.  I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, 
for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been 
listless before say, 'Is that you?'  I think the tone hurt me, for 
I made no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously 'Is that 
you?' again.  I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, 
and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's no him, it's just 
me.'  Then I heard a cry, and my mother turned in bed, and though 
it was dark I knew that she was holding out her arms.

After that I sat a great deal in her bed trying to make her forget 
him, which was my crafty way of playing physician, and if I saw any 
one out of doors do something that made the others laugh I 
immediately hastened to that dark room and did it before her.  I 
suppose I was an odd little figure; I have been told that my 
anxiety to brighten her gave my face a strained look and put a 
tremor into the joke (I would stand on my head in the bed, my feet 
against the wall, and then cry excitedly, 'Are you laughing, 
mother?') - and perhaps what made her laugh was something I was 
unconscious of, but she did laugh suddenly now and then, whereupon 
I screamed exultantly to that dear sister, who was ever in waiting, 
to come and see the sight, but by the time she came the soft face 
was wet again.  Thus I was deprived of some of my glory, and I 
remember once only making her laugh before witnesses.  I kept a 
record of her laughs on a piece of paper, a stroke for each, and it 
was my custom to show this proudly to the doctor every morning.  
There were five strokes the first time I slipped it into his hand, 
and when their meaning was explained to him he laughed so 
boisterously, that I cried, 'I wish that was one of hers!'  Then he 
was sympathetic, and asked me if my mother had seen the paper yet, 
and when I shook my head he said that if I showed it to her now and 
told her that these were her five laughs he thought I might win 
another.  I had less confidence, but he was the mysterious man whom 
you ran for in the dead of night (you flung sand at his window to 
waken him, and if it was only toothache he extracted the tooth 
through the open window, but when it was something sterner he was 
with you in the dark square at once, like a man who slept in his 
topcoat), so I did as he bade me, and not only did she laugh then 
but again when I put the laugh down, so that though it was really 
one laugh with a tear in the middle I counted it as two.

It was doubtless that same sister who told me not to sulk when my 
mother lay thinking of him, but to try instead to get her to talk 
about him.  I did not see how this could make her the merry mother 
she used to be, but I was told that if I could not do it nobody 
could, and this made me eager to begin.  At first, they say, I was 
often jealous, stopping her fond memories with the cry, 'Do you 
mind nothing about me?' but that did not last; its place was taken 
by an intense desire (again, I think, my sister must have breathed 
it into life) to become so like him that even my mother should not 
see the difference, and many and artful were the questions I put to 
that end.  Then I practised in secret, but after a whole week had 
passed I was still rather like myself.  He had such a cheery way of 
whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her at her 
work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with his 
legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers.  I 
decided to trust to this, so one day after I had learned his 
whistle (every boy of enterprise invents a whistle of his own) from 
boys who had been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his 
clothes, dark grey they were, with little spots, and they fitted me 
many years afterwards, and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the 
others, into my mother's room.  Quaking, I doubt not, yet so 
pleased, I stood still until she saw me, and then - how it must 
have hurt her!  'Listen!' I cried in a glow of triumph, and I 
stretched my legs wide apart and plunged my hands into the pockets 
of my knickerbockers, and began to whistle.

She lived twenty-nine years after his death, such active years 
until toward the end, that you never knew where she was unless you 
took hold of her, and though she was frail henceforth and ever 
growing frailer, her housekeeping again became famous, so that 
brides called as a matter of course to watch her ca'ming and 
sanding and stitching: there are old people still, one or two, to 
tell with wonder in their eyes how she could bake twenty-four 
bannocks in the hour, and not a chip in one of them.  And how many 
she gave away, how much she gave away of all she had, and what 
pretty ways she had of giving it!  Her face beamed and rippled with 
mirth as before, and her laugh that I had tried so hard to force 
came running home again.  I have heard no such laugh as hers save 
from merry children; the laughter of most of us ages, and wears out 
with the body, but hers remained gleeful to the last, as if it were 
born afresh every morning.  There was always something of the child 
in her, and her laugh was its voice, as eloquent of the past to me 
as was the christening robe to her.  But I had not made her forget 
the bit of her that was dead; in those nine-and-twenty years he was 
not removed one day farther from her.  Many a time she fell asleep 
speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she 
smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might 
vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about 
her, and then said slowly, 'My David's dead!' or perhaps he 
remained long enough to whisper why he must leave her now, and then 
she lay silent with filmy eyes.  When I became a man and he was 
still a boy of thirteen, I wrote a little paper called 'Dead this 
Twenty Years,' which was about a similar tragedy in another woman's 
life, and it is the only thing I have written that she never spoke 
about, not even to that daughter she loved the best.  No one ever 
spoke of it to her, or asked her if she had read it: one does not 
ask a mother if she knows that there is a little coffin in the 
house.  She read many times the book in which it is printed, but 
when she came to that chapter she would put her hands to her heart 
or even over her ears.




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.




CHAPTER III - WHAT I SHOULD BE


My mother was a great reader, and with ten minutes to spare before 
the starch was ready would begin the 'Decline and Fall' - and 
finish it, too, that winter.  Foreign words in the text annoyed her 
and made her bemoan her want of a classical education - she had 
only attended a Dame's school during some easy months - but she 
never passed the foreign words by until their meaning was explained 
to her, and when next she and they met it was as acquaintances, 
which I think was clever of her.  One of her delights was to learn 
from me scraps of Horace, and then bring them into her conversation 
with 'colleged men.'  I have come upon her in lonely places, such 
as the stair-head or the east room, muttering these quotations 
aloud to herself, and I well remember how she would say to the 
visitors, 'Ay, ay, it's very true, Doctor, but as you know, "Eheu 
fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni,"' or 'Sal, Mr. So-and-so, 
my lassie is thriving well, but would it no' be more to the point 
to say, "O matra pulchra filia pulchrior"?' which astounded them 
very much if she managed to reach the end without being flung, but 
usually she had a fit of laughing in the middle, and so they found 
her out.

Biography and exploration were her favourite reading, for choice 
the biography of men who had been good to their mothers, and she 
liked the explorers to be alive so that she could shudder at the 
thought of their venturing forth again; but though she expressed a 
hope that they would have the sense to stay at home henceforth, she 
gleamed with admiration when they disappointed her.  In later days 
I had a friend who was an African explorer, and she was in two 
minds about him; he was one of the most engrossing of mortals to 
her, she admired him prodigiously, pictured him at the head of his 
caravan, now attacked by savages, now by wild beasts, and adored 
him for the uneasy hours he gave her, but she was also afraid that 
he wanted to take me with him, and then she thought he should be 
put down by law.  Explorers' mothers also interested her very much; 
the books might tell her nothing about them, but she could create 
them for herself and wring her hands in sympathy with them when 
they had got no news of him for six months.  Yet there were times 
when she grudged him to them - as the day when he returned 
victorious.  Then what was before her eyes was not the son coming 
marching home again but an old woman peering for him round the 
window curtain and trying not to look uplifted.  The newspaper 
reports would be about the son, but my mother's comment was 'She's 
a proud woman this night.'

We read many books together when I was a boy, 'Robinson Crusoe' 
being the first (and the second), and the 'Arabian Nights' should 
have been the next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for 
three days), but on discovering that they were nights when we had 
paid for knights we sent that volume packing, and I have curled my 
lips at it ever since.  'The Pilgrim's Progress' we had in the 
house (it was as common a possession as a dresser-head), and so 
enamoured of it was I that I turned our garden into sloughs of 
Despond, with pea-sticks to represent Christian on his travels and 
a buffet-stool for his burden, but when I dragged my mother out to 
see my handiwork she was scared, and I felt for days, with a 
certain elation, that I had been a dark character.  Besides reading 
every book we could hire or borrow I also bought one now and again, 
and while buying (it was the occupation of weeks) I read, standing 
at the counter, most of the other books in the shop, which is 
perhaps the most exquisite way of reading.  And I took in a 
magazine called 'Sunshine,' the most delicious periodical, I am 
sure, of any day.  It cost a halfpenny or a penny a month, and 
always, as I fondly remember, had a continued tale about the 
dearest girl, who sold water-cress, which is a dainty not grown and 
I suppose never seen in my native town.  This romantic little 
creature took such hold of my imagination that I cannot eat water-
cress even now without emotion.  I lay in bed wondering what she 
would be up to in the next number; I have lost trout because when 
they nibbled my mind was wandering with her; my early life was 
embittered by her not arriving regularly on the first of the month.  
I know not whether it was owing to her loitering on the way one 
month to an extent flesh and blood could not bear, or because we 
had exhausted the penny library, but on a day I conceived a 
glorious idea, or it was put into my head by my mother, then 
desirous of making progress with her new clouty hearthrug.  The 
notion was nothing short of this, why should I not write the tales 
myself?  I did write them - in the garret - but they by no means 
helped her to get on with her work, for when I finished a chapter I 
bounded downstairs to read it to her, and so short were the 
chapters, so ready was the pen, that I was back with new manuscript 
before another clout had been added to the rug.  Authorship seemed, 
like her bannock-baking, to consist of running between two points.  
They were all tales of adventure (happiest is he who writes of 
adventure), no characters were allowed within if I knew their like 
in the flesh, the scene lay in unknown parts, desert islands, 
enchanted gardens, with knights (none of your nights) on black 
chargers, and round the first corner a lady selling water-cress.

At twelve or thereabout I put the literary calling to bed for a 
time, having gone to a school where cricket and football were more 
esteemed, but during the year before I went to the university, it 
woke up and I wrote great part of a three-volume novel.  The 
publisher replied that the sum for which he would print it was a 
hundred and - however, that was not the important point (I had 
sixpence): where he stabbed us both was in writing that he 
considered me a 'clever lady.'  I replied stiffly that I was a 
gentleman, and since then I have kept that manuscript concealed.  I 
looked through it lately, and, oh, but it is dull!  I defy any one 
to read it.

The malignancy of publishers, however, could not turn me back.  
From the day on which I first tasted blood in the garret my mind 
was made up; there could be no hum-dreadful-drum profession for me; 
literature was my game.  It was not highly thought of by those who 
wished me well.  I remember being asked by two maiden ladies, about 
the time I left the university, what I was to be, and when I 
replied brazenly, 'An author,' they flung up their hands, and one 
exclaimed reproachfully, 'And you an M.A.!'  My mother's views at 
first were not dissimilar; for long she took mine jestingly as 
something I would grow out of, and afterwards they hurt her so that 
I tried to give them up.  To be a minister - that she thought was 
among the fairest prospects, but she was a very ambitious woman, 
and sometimes she would add, half scared at her appetite, that 
there were ministers who had become professors, 'but it was not 
canny to think of such things.'

I had one person only on my side, an old tailor, one of the fullest 
men I have known, and quite the best talker.  He was a bachelor (he 
told me all that is to be known about woman), a lean man, pallid of 
face, his legs drawn up when he walked as if he was ever carrying 
something in his lap; his walks were of the shortest, from the tea-
pot on the hob to the board on which he stitched, from the board to 
the hob, and so to bed.  He might have gone out had the idea struck 
him, but in the years I knew him, the last of his brave life, I 
think he was only in the open twice, when he 'flitted' - changed 
his room for another hard by.  I did not see him make these 
journeys, but I seem to see him now, and he is somewhat dizzy in 
the odd atmosphere; in one hand he carries a box-iron, he raises 
the other, wondering what this is on his head, it is a hat; a faint 
smell of singed cloth goes by with him.  This man had heard of my 
set of photographs of the poets and asked for a sight of them, 
which led to our first meeting.  I remember how he spread them out 
on his board, and after looking long at them, turned his gaze on me 
and said solemnly,


What can I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come my own?


These lines of Cowley were new to me, but the sentiment was not 
new, and I marvelled how the old tailor could see through me so 
well.  So it was strange to me to discover presently that he had 
not been thinking of me at all, but of his own young days, when 
that couplet sang in his head, and he, too, had thirsted to set off 
for Grub Street, but was afraid, and while he hesitated old age 
came, and then Death, and found him grasping a box-iron.

I hurried home with the mouthful, but neighbours had dropped in, 
and this was for her ears only, so I drew her to the stair, and 
said imperiously,


What can I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come my own?


It was an odd request for which to draw her from a tea-table, and 
she must have been surprised, but I think she did not laugh, and in 
after years she would repeat the lines fondly, with a flush on her 
soft face.  'That is the kind you would like to be yourself!' we 
would say in jest to her, and she would reply almost passionately, 
'No, but I would be windy of being his mother.'  It is possible 
that she could have been his mother had that other son lived, he 
might have managed it from sheer love of her, but for my part I can 
smile at one of those two figures on the stair now, having long 
given up the dream of being for ever known, and seeing myself more 
akin to my friend, the tailor, for as he was found at the end on 
his board, so I hope shall I be found at my handloom, doing 
honestly the work that suits me best.  Who should know so well as I 
that it is but a handloom compared to the great guns that 
reverberate through the age to come?  But she who stood with me on 
the stair that day was a very simple woman, accustomed all her life 
to making the most of small things, and I weaved sufficiently well 
to please her, which has been my only steadfast ambition since I 
was a little boy.

Not less than mine became her desire that I should have my way - 
but, ah, the iron seats in that park of horrible repute, and that 
bare room at the top of many flights of stairs!  While I was away 
at college she drained all available libraries for books about 
those who go to London to live by the pen, and they all told the 
same shuddering tale.  London, which she never saw, was to her a 
monster that licked up country youths as they stepped from the 
train; there were the garrets in which they sat abject, and the 
park seats where they passed the night.  Those park seats were the 
monster's glaring eyes to her, and as I go by them now she is 
nearer to me than when I am in any other part of London.  I daresay 
that when night comes, this Hyde Park which is so gay by day, is 
haunted by the ghosts of many mothers, who run, wild-eyed, from 
seat to seat, looking for their sons.

But if we could dodge those dreary seats she longed to see me try 
my luck, and I sought to exclude them from the picture by drawing 
maps of London with Hyde Park left out.  London was as strange to 
me as to her, but long before I was shot upon it I knew it by maps, 
and drew them more accurately than I could draw them now.  Many a 
time she and I took our jaunt together through the map, and were 
most gleeful, popping into telegraph offices to wire my father and 
sister that we should not be home till late, winking to my books in 
lordly shop-windows, lunching at restaurants (and remembering not 
to call it dinner), saying, 'How do?' to Mr. Alfred Tennyson when 
we passed him in Regent Street, calling at publishers' offices for 
cheque, when 'Will you take care of it, or shall I?' I asked gaily, 
and she would be certain to reply, 'I'm thinking we'd better take 
it to the bank and get the money,' for she always felt surer of 
money than of cheques; so to the bank we went ('Two tens, and the 
rest in gold'), and thence straightway (by cab) to the place where 
you buy sealskin coats for middling old ladies.  But ere the laugh 
was done the park would come through the map like a blot.

'If you could only be sure of as much as would keep body and soul 
together,' my mother would say with a sigh.

'With something over, mother, to send to you.'

'You couldna expect that at the start.'

The wench I should have been courting now was journalism, that 
grisette of literature who has a smile and a hand for all 
beginners, welcoming them at the threshold, teaching them so much 
that is worth knowing, introducing them to the other lady whom they 
have worshipped from afar, showing them even how to woo her, and 
then bidding them a bright God-speed - he were an ingrate who, 
having had her joyous companionship, no longer flings her a kiss as 
they pass.  But though she bears no ill-will when she is jilted, 
you must serve faithfully while you are hers, and you must seek her 
out and make much of her, and, until you can rely on her good-
nature (note this), not a word about the other lady.  When at last 
she took me in I grew so fond of her that I called her by the 
other's name, and even now I think at times that there was more fun 
in the little sister, but I began by wooing her with contributions 
that were all misfits.  In an old book I find columns of notes 
about works projected at this time, nearly all to consist of essays 
on deeply uninteresting subjects; the lightest was to be a volume 
on the older satirists, beginning with Skelton and Tom Nash - the 
half of that manuscript still lies in a dusty chest - the only 
story was about Mary Queen of Scots, who was also the subject of 
many unwritten papers.  Queen Mary seems to have been luring me to 
my undoing ever since I saw Holyrood, and I have a horrid fear that 
I may write that novel yet.  That anything could be written about 
my native place never struck me.  We had read somewhere that a 
novelist is better equipped than most of his trade if he knows 
himself and one woman, and my mother said, 'You know yourself, for 
everybody must know himself' (there never was a woman who knew less 
about herself than she), and she would add dolefully, 'But I doubt 
I'm the only woman you know well.'

'Then I must make you my heroine,' I said lightly.

'A gey auld-farrant-like heroine!' she said, and we both laughed at 
the notion - so little did we read the future.

Thus it is obvious what were my qualifications when I was rashly 
engaged as a leader-writer (it was my sister who saw the 
advertisement) on an English provincial paper.  At the moment I was 
as uplifted as the others, for the chance had come at last, with 
what we all regarded as a prodigious salary, but I was wanted in 
the beginning of the week, and it suddenly struck me that the 
leaders were the one thing I had always skipped.  Leaders!  How 
were they written? what were they about?  My mother was already 
sitting triumphant among my socks, and I durst not let her see me 
quaking.  I retired to ponder, and presently she came to me with 
the daily paper.  Which were the leaders? she wanted to know, so 
evidently I could get no help from her.  Had she any more 
newspapers?  I asked, and after rummaging, she produced a few with 
which her boxes had been lined.  Others, very dusty, came from 
beneath carpets, and lastly a sooty bundle was dragged down the 
chimney.  Surrounded by these I sat down, and studied how to become 
a journalist.




CHAPTER IV - AN EDITOR


A devout lady, to whom some friend had presented one of my books, 
used to say when asked how she was getting on with it, 'Sal, it's 
dreary, weary, uphill work, but I've wrastled through with tougher 
jobs in my time, and, please God, I'll wrastle through with this 
one.'  It was in this spirit, I fear, though she never told me so, 
that my mother wrestled for the next year or more with my leaders, 
and indeed I was always genuinely sorry for the people I saw 
reading them.  In my spare hours I was trying journalism of another 
kind and sending it to London, but nearly eighteen months elapsed 
before there came to me, as unlooked for as a telegram, the thought 
that there was something quaint about my native place.  A boy who 
found that a knife had been put into his pocket in the night could 
not have been more surprised.  A few days afterwards I sent my 
mother a London evening paper with an article entitled 'An Auld 
Licht Community,' and they told me that when she saw the heading 
she laughed, because there was something droll to her in the sight 
of the words Auld Licht in print.  For her, as for me, that 
newspaper was soon to have the face of a friend.  To this day I 
never pass its placards in the street without shaking it by the 
hand, and she used to sew its pages together as lovingly as though 
they were a child's frock; but let the truth be told, when she read 
that first article she became alarmed, and fearing the talk of the 
town, hid the paper from all eyes.  For some time afterwards, while 
I proudly pictured her showing this and similar articles to all who 
felt an interest in me, she was really concealing them fearfully in 
a bandbox on the garret stair.  And she wanted to know by return of 
post whether I was paid for these articles as much as I was paid 
for real articles; when she heard that I was paid better, she 
laughed again and had them out of the bandbox for re-reading, and 
it cannot be denied that she thought the London editor a fine 
fellow but slightly soft.

When I sent off that first sketch I thought I had exhausted the 
subject, but our editor wrote that he would like something more of 
the same, so I sent him a marriage, and he took it, and then I 
tried him with a funeral, and he took it, and really it began to 
look as if we had him.  Now my mother might have been discovered, 
in answer to certain excited letters, flinging the bundle of 
undarned socks from her lap, and 'going in for literature'; she was 
racking her brains, by request, for memories I might convert into 
articles, and they came to me in letters which she dictated to my 
sisters.  How well I could hear her sayings between the lines: 'But 
the editor-man will never stand that, it's perfect blethers' -  'By 
this post it must go, I tell you; we must take the editor when he's 
hungry - we canna be blamed for it, can we? he prints them of his 
free will, so the wite is his' - 'But I'm near terrified. - If 
London folk reads them we're done for.'  And I was sounded as to 
the advisability of sending him a present of a lippie of 
shortbread, which was to be her crafty way of getting round him.  
By this time, though my mother and I were hundreds of miles apart, 
you may picture us waving our hands to each other across country, 
and shouting 'Hurrah!'  You may also picture the editor in his 
office thinking he was behaving like a shrewd man of business, and 
unconscious that up in the north there was an elderly lady 
chuckling so much at him that she could scarcely scrape the 
potatoes.

I was now able to see my mother again, and the park seats no longer 
loomed so prominent in our map of London.  Still, there they were, 
and it was with an effort that she summoned up courage to let me 
go.  She feared changes, and who could tell that the editor would 
continue to be kind?  Perhaps when he saw me -

She seemed to be very much afraid of his seeing me, and this, I 
would point out, was a reflection on my appearance or my manner.

No, what she meant was that I looked so young, and - and that would 
take him aback, for had I not written as an aged man?

'But he knows my age, mother.'

'I'm glad of that, but maybe he wouldna like you when he saw you.'

'Oh, it is my manner, then!'

'I dinna say that, but - '

Here my sister would break in: 'The short and the long of it is 
just this, she thinks nobody has such manners as herself.  Can you 
deny it, you vain woman?'  My mother would deny it vigorously.

'You stand there,' my sister would say with affected scorn, 'and 
tell me you don't think you could get the better of that man 
quicker than any of us?'

'Sal, I'm thinking I could manage him,' says my mother, with a 
chuckle.

'How would you set about it?'

Then my mother would begin to laugh.  'I would find out first if he 
had a family, and then I would say they were the finest family in 
London.'

'Yes, that is just what you would do, you cunning woman!  But if he 
has no family?'

'I would say what great men editors are!'

'He would see through you.'

'Not he!'

'You don't understand that what imposes on common folk would never 
hoodwink an editor.'

'That's where you are wrong.  Gentle or simple, stupid or clever, 
the men are all alike in the hands of a woman that flatters them.'

'Ah, I'm sure there are better ways of getting round an editor than 
that.'

'I daresay there are,' my mother would say with conviction, 'but if 
you try that plan you will never need to try another.'

'How artful you are, mother - you with your soft face!  Do you not 
think shame?'

'Pooh!' says my mother brazenly.

'I can see the reason why you are so popular with men.'

'Ay, you can see it, but they never will.'

'Well, how would you dress yourself if you were going to that 
editor's office?'

'Of course I would wear my silk and my Sabbath bonnet.'

'It is you who are shortsighted now, mother.  I tell you, you would 
manage him better if you just put on your old grey shawl and one of 
your bonny white mutches, and went in half smiling and half timid 
and said, "I am the mother of him that writes about the Auld 
Lichts, and I want you to promise that he will never have to sleep 
in the open air."'

But my mother would shake her head at this, and reply almost hotly, 
'I tell you if I ever go into that man's office, I go in silk.'

I wrote and asked the editor if I should come to London, and he 
said No, so I went, laden with charges from my mother to walk in 
the middle of the street (they jump out on you as you are turning a 
corner), never to venture forth after sunset, and always to lock up 
everything (I who could never lock up anything, except my heart in 
company).  Thanks to this editor, for the others would have nothing 
to say to me though I battered on all their doors, she was soon 
able to sleep at nights without the dread that I should be waking 
presently with the iron-work of certain seats figured on my person, 
and what relieved her very much was that I had begun to write as if 
Auld Lichts were not the only people I knew of.  So long as I 
confined myself to them she had a haunting fear that, even though 
the editor remained blind to his best interests, something would 
one day go crack within me (as the mainspring of a watch breaks) 
and my pen refuse to write for evermore.  'Ay, I like the article 
brawly,' she would say timidly, 'but I'm doubting it's the last - I 
always have a sort of terror the new one may be the last,' and if 
many days elapsed before the arrival of another article her face 
would say mournfully, 'The blow has fallen - he can think of 
nothing more to write about.'  If I ever shared her fears I never 
told her so, and the articles that were not Scotch grew in number 
until there were hundreds of them, all carefully preserved by her: 
they were the only thing in the house that, having served one 
purpose, she did not convert into something else, yet they could 
give her uneasy moments.  This was because I nearly always assumed 
a character when I wrote; I must be a country squire, or an 
undergraduate, or a butler, or a member of the House of Lords, or a 
dowager, or a lady called Sweet Seventeen, or an engineer in India, 
else was my pen clogged, and though this gave my mother certain 
fearful joys, causing her to laugh unexpectedly (so far as my 
articles were concerned she nearly always laughed in the wrong 
place), it also scared her.  Much to her amusement the editor 
continued to prefer the Auld Licht papers, however, as was proved 
(to those who knew him) by his way of thinking that the others 
would pass as they were, while he sent these back and asked me to 
make them better.  Here again she came to my aid.  I had said that 
the row of stockings were hung on a string by the fire, which was a 
recollection of my own, but she could tell me whether they were 
hung upside down.  She became quite skilful at sending or giving me 
(for now I could be with her half the year) the right details, but 
still she smiled at the editor, and in her gay moods she would say, 
'I was fifteen when I got my first pair of elastic-sided boots.  
Tell him my charge for this important news is two pounds ten.'

'Ay, but though we're doing well, it's no' the same as if they were 
a book with your name on it.'  So the ambitious woman would say 
with a sigh, and I did my best to turn the Auld Licht sketches into 
a book with my name on it.  Then perhaps we understood most fully 
how good a friend our editor had been, for just as I had been able 
to find no well-known magazine - and I think I tried all - which 
would print any article or story about the poor of my native land, 
so now the publishers, Scotch and English, refused to accept the 
book as a gift.  I was willing to present it to them, but they 
would have it in no guise; there seemed to be a blight on 
everything that was Scotch.  I daresay we sighed, but never were 
collaborators more prepared for rejection, and though my mother 
might look wistfully at the scorned manuscript at times and murmur, 
'You poor cold little crittur shut away in a drawer, are you dead 
or just sleeping?' she had still her editor to say grace over.  And 
at last publishers, sufficiently daring and far more than 
sufficiently generous, were found for us by a dear friend, who made 
one woman very 'uplifted.'  He also was an editor, and had as large 
a part in making me a writer of books as the other in determining 
what the books should be about.

Now that I was an author I must get into a club.  But you should 
have heard my mother on clubs!  She knew of none save those to 
which you subscribe a pittance weekly in anticipation of rainy 
days, and the London clubs were her scorn.  Often I heard her on 
them - she raised her voice to make me hear, whichever room I might 
be in, and it was when she was sarcastic that I skulked the most: 
'Thirty pounds is what he will have to pay the first year, and ten 
pounds a year after that.  You think it's a lot o' siller?  Oh no, 
you're mista'en - it's nothing ava.  For the third part of thirty 
pounds you could rent a four-roomed house, but what is a four-
roomed house, what is thirty pounds, compared to the glory of being 
a member of a club?  Where does the glory come in?  Sal, you needna 
ask me, I'm just a doited auld stock that never set foot in a club, 
so it's little I ken about glory.  But I may tell you if you bide 
in London and canna become member of a club, the best you can do is 
to tie a rope round your neck and slip out of the world.  What use 
are they?  Oh, they're terrible useful.  You see it doesna do for a 
man in London to eat his dinner in his lodgings.  Other men shake 
their heads at him.  He maun away to his club if he is to be 
respected.  Does he get good dinners at the club?  Oh, they cow!  
You get no common beef at clubs; there is a manzy of different 
things all sauced up to be unlike themsels.  Even the potatoes 
daurna look like potatoes.  If the food in a club looks like what 
it is, the members run about, flinging up their hands and crying, 
"Woe is me!"  Then this is another thing, you get your letters sent 
to the club instead of to your lodgings.  You see you would get 
them sooner at your lodgings, and you may have to trudge weary 
miles to the club for them, but that's a great advantage, and cheap 
at thirty pounds, is it no'?  I wonder they can do it at the 
price.'

My wisest policy was to remain downstairs when these withering 
blasts were blowing, but probably I went up in self-defence.

'I never saw you so pugnacious before, mother.'

'Oh,' she would reply promptly, 'you canna expect me to be sharp in 
the uptake when I am no' a member of a club.'

'But the difficulty is in becoming a member.  They are very 
particular about whom they elect, and I daresay I shall not get 
in.'

'Well, I'm but a poor crittur (not being member of a club), but I 
think I can tell you to make your mind easy on that head.  You'll 
get in, I'se uphaud - and your thirty pounds will get in, too.'

'If I get in it will be because the editor is supporting me.'

'It's the first ill thing I ever heard of him.'

'You don't think he is to get any of the thirty pounds, do you?'

''Deed if I did I should be better pleased, for he has been a good 
friend to us, but what maddens me is that every penny of it should 
go to those bare-faced scoundrels.'

'What bare-faced scoundrels?'

'Them that have the club.'

'But all the members have the club between them.'

'Havers!  I'm no' to be catched with chaff.'

'But don't you believe me?'

'I believe they've filled your head with their stories till you 
swallow whatever they tell you.  If the place belongs to the 
members, why do they have to pay thirty pounds?'

'To keep it going.'

'They dinna have to pay for their dinners, then?'

'Oh yes, they have to pay extra for dinner.'

'And a gey black price, I'm thinking.'

'Well, five or six shillings.'

'Is that all?  Losh, it's nothing, I wonder they dinna raise the 
price.'

Nevertheless my mother was of a sex that scorned prejudice, and, 
dropping sarcasm, she would at times cross-examine me as if her 
mind was not yet made up.  'Tell me this, if you were to fall ill, 
would you be paid a weekly allowance out of the club?'

No, it was not that kind of club.

'I see.  Well, I am just trying to find out what kind of club it 
is.  Do you get anything out of it for accidents?'

Not a penny.

'Anything at New Year's time?'

Not so much as a goose.

'Is there any one mortal thing you get free out of that club?'

There was not one mortal thing.

'And thirty pounds is what you pay for this?'

If the committee elected me.

'How many are in the committee?'

About a dozen, I thought.

'A dozen!  Ay, ay, that makes two pound ten apiece.'

When I was elected I thought it wisdom to send my sister upstairs 
with the news.  My mother was ironing, and made no comment, unless 
with the iron, which I could hear rattling more violently in its 
box.  Presently I heard her laughing - at me undoubtedly, but she 
had recovered control over her face before she came downstairs to 
congratulate me sarcastically.  This was grand news, she said 
without a twinkle, and I must write and thank the committee, the 
noble critturs.  I saw behind her mask, and maintained a dignified 
silence, but she would have another shot at me.  'And tell them,' 
she said from the door, 'you were doubtful of being elected, but 
your auld mother had aye a mighty confidence they would snick you 
in.'  I heard her laughing softly as she went up the stair, but 
though I had provided her with a joke I knew she was burning to 
tell the committee what she thought of them.

Money, you see, meant so much to her, though even at her poorest 
she was the most cheerful giver.  In the old days, when the article 
arrived, she did not read it at once, she first counted the lines 
to discover what we should get for it - she and the daughter who 
was so dear to her had calculated the payment per line, and I 
remember once overhearing a discussion between them about whether 
that sub-title meant another sixpence.  Yes, she knew the value of 
money; she had always in the end got the things she wanted, but now 
she could get them more easily, and it turned her simple life into 
a fairy tale.  So often in those days she went down suddenly upon 
her knees; we would come upon her thus, and go away noiselessly.  
After her death I found that she had preserved in a little box, 
with a photograph of me as a child, the envelopes which had 
contained my first cheques.  There was a little ribbon round them.




CHAPTER V - A DAY OF HER LIFE


I should like to call back a day of her life as it was at this 
time, when her spirit was as bright as ever and her hand as eager, 
but she was no longer able to do much work.  It should not be 
difficult, for she repeated herself from day to day and yet did it 
with a quaint unreasonableness that was ever yielding fresh 
delight.  Our love for her was such that we could easily tell what 
she would do in given circumstances, but she had always a new way 
of doing it.

Well, with break of day she wakes and sits up in bed and is 
standing in the middle of the room.  So nimble was she in the 
mornings (one of our troubles with her) that these three actions 
must be considered as one; she is on the floor before you have time 
to count them.  She has strict orders not to rise until her fire is 
lit, and having broken them there is a demure elation on her face.  
The question is what to do before she is caught and hurried to bed 
again.  Her fingers are tingling to prepare the breakfast; she 
would dearly love to black-lead the grate, but that might rouse her 
daughter from whose side she has slipped so cunningly.  She catches 
sight of the screen at the foot of the bed, and immediately her 
soft face becomes very determined.  To guard her from draughts the 
screen had been brought here from the lordly east room, where it 
was of no use whatever.  But in her opinion it was too beautiful 
for use; it belonged to the east room, where she could take 
pleasant peeps at it; she had objected to its removal, even become 
low-spirited.  Now is her opportunity.  The screen is an unwieldy 
thing, but still as a mouse she carries it, and they are well under 
weigh when it strikes against the gas-bracket in the passage.  Next 
moment a reproachful hand arrests her.  She is challenged with 
being out of bed, she denies it - standing in the passage.  Meekly 
or stubbornly she returns to bed, and it is no satisfaction to you 
that you can say, 'Well, well, of all the women!' and so on, or 
'Surely you knew that the screen was brought here to protect you,' 
for she will reply scornfully, 'Who was touching the screen?'

By this time I have wakened (I am through the wall) and join them 
anxiously: so often has my mother been taken ill in the night that 
the slightest sound from her room rouses the house.  She is in bed 
again, looking as if she had never been out of it, but I know her 
and listen sternly to the tale of her misdoings.  She is not 
contrite.  Yes, maybe she did promise not to venture forth on the 
cold floors of daybreak, but she had risen for a moment only, and 
we just t'neaded her with our talk about draughts - there were no 
such things as draughts in her young days - and it is more than she 
can do (here she again attempts to rise but we hold her down) to 
lie there and watch that beautiful screen being spoilt.  I reply 
that the beauty of the screen has ever been its miserable defect: 
ho, there! for a knife with which to spoil its beauty and make the 
bedroom its fitting home.  As there is no knife handy, my foot will 
do; I raise my foot, and then - she sees that it is bare, she cries 
to me excitedly to go back to bed lest I catch cold.  For though, 
ever careless of herself, she will wander the house unshod, and 
tell us not to talk havers when we chide her, the sight of one of 
us similarly negligent rouses her anxiety at once.  She is willing 
now to sign any vow if only I will take my bare feet back to bed, 
but probably she is soon after me in hers to make sure that I am 
nicely covered up.

It is scarcely six o'clock, and we have all promised to sleep for 
another hour, but in ten minutes she is sure that eight has struck 
(house disgraced), or that if it has not, something is wrong with 
the clock.  Next moment she is captured on her way downstairs to 
wind up the clock.  So evidently we must be up and doing, and as we 
have no servant, my sister disappears into the kitchen, having 
first asked me to see that 'that woman' lies still, and 'that 
woman' calls out that she always does lie still, so what are we 
blethering about?

She is up now, and dressed in her thick maroon wrapper; over her 
shoulders (lest she should stray despite our watchfulness) is a 
shawl, not placed there by her own hands, and on her head a 
delicious mutch.  O that I could sing the paean of the white mutch 
(and the dirge of the elaborate black cap) from the day when she 
called witchcraft to her aid and made it out of snow-flakes, and 
the dear worn hands that washed it tenderly in a basin, and the 
starching of it, and the finger-iron for its exquisite frills that 
looked like curls of sugar, and the sweet bands with which it tied 
beneath the chin!  The honoured snowy mutch, how I love to see it 
smiling to me from the doors and windows of the poor; it is always 
smiling - sometimes maybe a wavering wistful smile, as if a tear-
drop lay hidden among, the frills.  A hundred times I have taken 
the characterless cap from my mother's head and put the mutch in 
its place and tied the bands beneath her chin, while she protested 
but was well pleased.  For in her heart she knew what suited her 
best and would admit it, beaming, when I put a mirror into her 
hands and told her to look; but nevertheless the cap cost no less 
than so-and-so, whereas - Was that a knock at the door?  She is 
gone, to put on her cap!

She begins the day by the fireside with the New Testament in her 
hands, an old volume with its loose pages beautifully refixed, and 
its covers sewn and resewn by her, so that you would say it can 
never fall to pieces.  It is mine now, and to me the black threads 
with which she stitched it are as part of the contents.  Other 
books she read in the ordinary manner, but this one differently, 
her lips moving with each word as if she were reading aloud, and 
her face very solemn.  The Testament lies open on her lap long 
after she has ceased to read, and the expression of her face has 
not changed.

I have seen her reading other books early in the day but never 
without a guilty look on her face, for she thought reading was 
scarce respectable until night had come.  She spends the forenoon 
in what she calls doing nothing, which may consist in stitching so 
hard that you would swear she was an over-worked seamstress at it 
for her life, or you will find her on a table with nails in her 
mouth, and anon she has to be chased from the garret (she has 
suddenly decided to change her curtains), or she is under the bed 
searching for band-boxes and asking sternly where we have put that 
bonnet.  On the whole she is behaving in a most exemplary way to-
day (not once have we caught her trying to go out into the washing-
house), and we compliment her at dinner-time, partly because she 
deserves it, and partly to make her think herself so good that she 
will eat something, just to maintain her new character.  I question 
whether one hour of all her life was given to thoughts of food; in 
her great days to eat seemed to her to be waste of time, and 
afterwards she only ate to boast of it, as something she had done 
to please us.  She seldom remembered whether she had dined, but 
always presumed she had, and while she was telling me in all good 
faith what the meal consisted of, it might be brought in.  When in 
London I had to hear daily what she was eating, and perhaps she had 
refused all dishes until they produced the pen and ink.  These were 
flourished before her, and then she would say with a sigh, 'Tell 
him I am to eat an egg.'  But they were not so easily deceived; 
they waited, pen in hand, until the egg was eaten.

She never 'went for a walk' in her life.  Many long trudges she had 
as a girl when she carried her father's dinner in a flagon to the 
country place where he was at work, but to walk with no end save 
the good of your health seemed a very droll proceeding to her.  In 
her young days, she was positive, no one had ever gone for a walk, 
and she never lost the belief that it was an absurdity introduced 
by a new generation with too much time on their hands.  That they 
enjoyed it she could not believe; it was merely a form of showing 
off, and as they passed her window she would remark to herself with 
blasting satire, 'Ay, Jeames, are you off for your walk?' and add 
fervently, 'Rather you than me!'  I was one of those who walked, 
and though she smiled, and might drop a sarcastic word when she saw 
me putting on my boots, it was she who had heated them in 
preparation for my going.  The arrangement between us was that she 
should lie down until my return, and to ensure its being carried 
out I saw her in bed before I started, but with the bang of the 
door she would be at the window to watch me go: there is one spot 
on the road where a thousand times I have turned to wave my stick 
to her, while she nodded and smiled and kissed her hand to me.  
That kissing of the hand was the one English custom she had 
learned.

In an hour or so I return, and perhaps find her in bed, according 
to promise, but still I am suspicious.  The way to her detection is 
circuitous.

'I'll need to be rising now,' she says, with a yawn that may be 
genuine.

'How long have you been in bed?'

'You saw me go.'

'And then I saw you at the window.  Did you go straight back to 
bed?'

'Surely I had that much sense.'

'The truth!'

'I might have taken a look at the clock first.'

'It is a terrible thing to have a mother who prevaricates.  Have 
you been lying down ever since I left?'

'Thereabout.'

'What does that mean exactly?'

'Off and on.'

'Have you been to the garret?'

'What should I do in the garret?'

'But have you?'

'I might just have looked up the garret stair.'

'You have been redding up the garret again!'

'Not what you could call a redd up.'

'O, woman, woman, I believe you have not been in bed at all!'

'You see me in it.'

'My opinion is that you jumped into bed when you heard me open the 
door.'

'Havers.'

'Did you?'

'No.'

'Well, then, when you heard me at the gate?'

'It might have been when I heard you at the gate.'

As daylight goes she follows it with her sewing to the window, and 
gets another needleful out of it, as one may run after a departed 
visitor for a last word, but now the gas is lit, and no longer is 
it shameful to sit down to literature.  If the book be a story by 
George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourites (and mine) among 
women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we move softly, she 
will read, entranced, for hours.  Her delight in Carlyle was so 
well known that various good people would send her books that 
contained a page about him; she could place her finger on any 
passage wanted in the biography as promptly as though she were 
looking for some article in her own drawer, and given a date she 
was often able to tell you what they were doing in Cheyne Row that 
day.  Carlyle, she decided, was not so much an ill man to live with 
as one who needed a deal of managing, but when I asked if she 
thought she could have managed him she only replied with a modest 
smile that meant 'Oh no!' but had the face of 'Sal, I would have 
liked to try.'

One lady lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have never 
been published, and crabbed was the writing, but though my mother 
liked to have our letters read aloud to her, she read every one of 
these herself, and would quote from them in her talk.  Side by side 
with the Carlyle letters, which show him in his most gracious 
light, were many from his wife to a friend, and in one of these a 
romantic adventure is described - I quote from memory, and it is a 
poor memory compared to my mother's, which registered everything by 
a method of her own: 'What might be the age of Bell Tibbits?  Well, 
she was born the week I bought the boiler, so she'll be one-and-
fifty (no less!) come Martinmas.'  Mrs. Carlyle had got into the 
train at a London station and was feeling very lonely, for the 
journey to Scotland lay before her and no one had come to see her 
off.  Then, just as the train was starting, a man jumped into the 
carriage, to her regret until she saw his face, when, behold, they 
were old friends, and the last time they met (I forget how many 
years before) he had asked her to be his wife.  He was very nice, 
and if I remember aright, saw her to her journey's end, though he 
had intended to alight at some half-way place.  I call this an 
adventure, and I am sure it seemed to my mother to be the most 
touching and memorable adventure that can come into a woman's life.  
'You see he hadna forgot,' she would say proudly, as if this was a 
compliment in which all her sex could share, and on her old tender 
face shone some of the elation with which Mrs. Carlyle wrote that 
letter.

But there were times, she held, when Carlyle must have made his 
wife a glorious woman.  'As when?' I might inquire.

'When she keeked in at his study door and said to herself, "The 
whole world is ringing with his fame, and he is my man!"'

'And then,' I might point out, 'he would roar to her to shut the 
door.'

'Pooh!' said my mother, 'a man's roar is neither here nor there.'  
But her verdict as a whole was, 'I would rather have been his 
mother than his wife.'

So we have got her into her chair with the Carlyles, and all is 
well.  Furthermore, 'to mak siccar,' my father has taken the 
opposite side of the fireplace and is deep in the latest five 
columns of Gladstone, who is his Carlyle.  He is to see that she 
does not slip away fired by a conviction, which suddenly overrides 
her pages, that the kitchen is going to rack and ruin for want of 
her, and she is to recall him to himself should he put his foot in 
the fire and keep it there, forgetful of all save his hero's 
eloquence.  (We were a family who needed a deal of watching.)  She 
is not interested in what Mr. Gladstone has to say; indeed she 
could never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern 
for grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and 
she gratefully gave up reading 'leaders' the day I ceased to write 
them.  But like want of reasonableness, a love for having the last 
word, want of humour and the like, politics were in her opinion a 
mannish attribute to be tolerated, and Gladstone was the name of 
the something which makes all our sex such queer characters.  She 
had a profound faith in him as an aid to conversation, and if there 
were silent men in the company would give him to them to talk 
about, precisely as she divided a cake among children.  And then, 
with a motherly smile, she would leave them to gorge on him.  But 
in the idolising of Gladstone she recognised, nevertheless, a 
certain inevitability, and would no more have tried to contend with 
it than to sweep a shadow off the floor.  Gladstone was, and there 
was an end of it in her practical philosophy.  Nor did she accept 
him coldly; like a true woman she sympathised with those who 
suffered severely, and they knew it and took counsel of her in the 
hour of need.  I remember one ardent Gladstonian who, as a general 
election drew near, was in sore straits indeed, for he disbelieved 
in Home Rule, and yet how could he vote against 'Gladstone's man'?  
His distress was so real that it gave him a hang-dog appearance.  
He put his case gloomily before her, and until the day of the 
election she riddled him with sarcasm; I think he only went to her 
because he found a mournful enjoyment in seeing a false Gladstonian 
tortured.

It was all such plain-sailing for him, she pointed out; he did not 
like this Home Rule, and therefore he must vote against it.

She put it pitiful clear, he replied with a groan.

But she was like another woman to him when he appeared before her 
on his way to the polling-booth.

'This is a watery Sabbath to you, I'm thinking,' she said 
sympathetically, but without dropping her wires - for Home Rule or 
no Home Rule that stocking-foot must be turned before twelve 
o'clock.

A watery Sabbath means a doleful day, and 'A watery Sabbath it is,' 
he replied with feeling.  A silence followed, broken only by the 
click of the wires.  Now and again he would mutter, 'Ay, well, I'll 
be going to vote - little did I think the day would come,' and so 
on, but if he rose it was only to sit down again, and at last she 
crossed over to him and said softly, (no sarcasm in her voice now), 
'Away with you, and vote for Gladstone's man!'  He jumped up and 
made off without a word, but from the east window we watched him 
strutting down the brae.  I laughed, but she said, 'I'm no sure 
that it's a laughing matter,' and afterwards, 'I would have liked 
fine to be that Gladstone's mother.'

It is nine o'clock now, a quarter-past nine, half-past nine - all 
the same moment to me, for I am at a sentence that will not write.  
I know, though I can't hear, what my sister has gone upstairs to 
say to my mother:-

'I was in at him at nine, and he said, "In five minutes," so I put 
the steak on the brander, but I've been in thrice since then, and 
every time he says, "In five minutes," and when I try to take the 
table-cover off, he presses his elbows hard on it, and growls.  His 
supper will be completely spoilt.'

'Oh, that weary writing!'

'I can do no more, mother, so you must come down and stop him.'

'I have no power over him,' my mother says, but she rises smiling, 
and presently she is opening my door.

'In five minutes!' I cry, but when I see that it is she I rise and 
put my arm round her.  'What a full basket!' she says, looking at 
the waste-paper basket, which contains most of my work of the night 
and with a dear gesture she lifts up a torn page and kisses it.  
'Poor thing,' she says to it, 'and you would have liked so fine to 
be printed!' and she puts her hand over my desk to prevent my 
writing more.

'In the last five minutes,' I begin, 'one can often do more than in 
the first hour.'

'Many a time I've said it in my young days,' she says slowly.

'And proved it, too!' cries a voice from the door, the voice of one 
who was prouder of her even than I; it is true, and yet almost 
unbelievable, that any one could have been prouder of her than I.

'But those days are gone,' my mother says solemnly, 'gone to come 
back no more.  You'll put by your work now, man, and have your 
supper, and then you'll come up and sit beside your mother for a 
whiley, for soon you'll be putting her away in the kirk-yard.'

I hear such a little cry from near the door.

So my mother and I go up the stair together.  'We have changed 
places,' she says; 'that was just how I used to help you up, but 
I'm the bairn now.'

She brings out the Testament again; it was always lying within 
reach; it is the lock of hair she left me when she died.  And when 
she has read for a long time she 'gives me a look,' as we say in 
the north, and I go out, to leave her alone with God.  She had been 
but a child when her mother died, and so she fell early into the 
way of saying her prayers with no earthly listener.  Often and 
often I have found her on her knees, but I always went softly away, 
closing the door.  I never heard her pray, but I know very well how 
she prayed, and that, when that door was shut, there was not a day 
in God's sight between the worn woman and the little child.




CHAPTER VI - HER MAID OF ALL WORK


And sometimes I was her maid of all work.

It is early morn, and my mother has come noiselessly into my room.  
I know it is she, though my eyes are shut, and I am only half 
awake.  Perhaps I was dreaming of her, for I accept her presence 
without surprise, as if in the awakening I had but seen her go out 
at one door to come in at another.  But she is speaking to herself.

'I'm sweer to waken him - I doubt he was working late - oh, that 
weary writing - no, I maunna waken him.'

I start up.  She is wringing her hands.  'What is wrong?' I cry, 
but I know before she answers.  My sister is down with one of the 
headaches against which even she cannot fight, and my mother, who 
bears physical pain as if it were a comrade, is most woebegone when 
her daughter is the sufferer.  'And she winna let me go down the 
stair to make a cup of tea for her,' she groans.

'I will soon make the tea, mother.'

'Will you?' she says eagerly.  It is what she has come to me for, 
but 'It is a pity to rouse you,' she says.

'And I will take charge of the house to-day, and light the fires 
and wash the dishes - '

'Na, oh no; no, I couldna ask that of you, and you an author.'

'It won't be the first time, mother, since I was an author.'

'More like the fiftieth!' she says almost gleefully, so I have 
begun well, for to keep up her spirits is the great thing to-day.

Knock at the door.  It is the baker.  I take in the bread, looking 
so sternly at him that he dare not smile.

Knock at the door.  It is the postman. (I hope he did not see that 
I had the lid of the kettle in my other hand.)

Furious knocking in a remote part.  This means that the author is 
in the coal cellar.

Anon I carry two breakfasts upstairs in triumph.  I enter the 
bedroom like no mere humdrum son, but after the manner of the 
Glasgow waiter.  I must say more about him.  He had been my 
mother's one waiter, the only manservant she ever came in contact 
with, and they had met in a Glasgow hotel which she was eager to 
see, having heard of the monstrous things, and conceived them to 
resemble country inns with another twelve bedrooms.  I remember how 
she beamed - yet tried to look as if it was quite an ordinary 
experience - when we alighted at the hotel door, but though she 
said nothing I soon read disappointment in her face.  She knew how 
I was exulting in having her there, so would not say a word to damp 
me, but I craftily drew it out of her.  No, she was very 
comfortable, and the house was grand beyond speech, but - but - 
where was he? he had not been very hearty.  'He' was the landlord; 
she had expected him to receive us at the door and ask if we were 
in good health and how we had left the others, and then she would 
have asked him if his wife was well and how many children they had, 
after which we should all have sat down together to dinner.  Two 
chambermaids came into her room and prepared it without a single 
word to her about her journey or on any other subject, and when 
they had gone, 'They are two haughty misses,' said my mother with 
spirit.  But what she most resented was the waiter with his swagger 
black suit and short quick steps and the 'towel' over his arm.  
Without so much as a 'Welcome to Glasgow!' he showed us to our 
seats, not the smallest acknowledgment of our kindness in giving 
such munificent orders did we draw from him, he hovered around the 
table as if it would be unsafe to leave us with his knives and 
forks (he should have seen her knives and forks), when we spoke to 
each other he affected not to hear, we might laugh but this uppish 
fellow would not join in.  We retired, crushed, and he had the 
final impudence to open the door for us.  But though this hurt my 
mother at the time, the humour of our experiences filled her on 
reflection, and in her own house she would describe them with 
unction, sometimes to those who had been in many hotels, often to 
others who had been in none, and whoever were her listeners she 
made them laugh, though not always at the same thing.

So now when I enter the bedroom with the tray, on my arm is that 
badge of pride, the towel; and I approach with prim steps to inform 
Madam that breakfast is ready, and she puts on the society manner 
and addresses me as 'Sir,' and asks with cruel sarcasm for what 
purpose (except to boast) I carry the towel, and I say 'Is there 
anything more I can do for Madam?' and Madam replies that there is 
one more thing I can do, and that is, eat her breakfast for her.  
But of this I take no notice, for my object is to fire her with the 
spirit of the game, so that she eats unwittingly.

Now that I have washed up the breakfast things I should be at my 
writing, and I am anxious to be at it, as I have an idea in my 
head, which, if it is of any value, has almost certainly been put 
there by her.  But dare I venture?  I know that the house has not 
been properly set going yet, there are beds to make, the exterior 
of the teapot is fair, but suppose some one were to look inside?  
What a pity I knocked over the flour-barrel!  Can I hope that for 
once my mother will forget to inquire into these matters?  Is my 
sister willing to let disorder reign until to-morrow?  I determine 
to risk it.  Perhaps I have been at work for half an hour when I 
hear movements overhead.  One or other of them is wondering why the 
house is so quiet.  I rattle the tongs, but even this does not 
satisfy them, so back into the desk go my papers, and now what you 
hear is not the scrape of a pen but the rinsing of pots and pans, 
or I am making beds, and making them thoroughly, because after I am 
gone my mother will come (I know her) and look suspiciously beneath 
the coverlet.

The kitchen is now speckless, not an unwashed platter in sight, 
unless you look beneath the table.  I feel that I have earned time 
for an hour's writing at last, and at it I go with vigour.  One 
page, two pages, really I am making progress, when - was that a 
door opening?  But I have my mother's light step on the brain, so I 
'yoke' again, and next moment she is beside me.  She has not 
exactly left her room, she gives me to understand; but suddenly a 
conviction had come to her that I was writing without a warm mat at 
my feet.  She carries one in her hands.  Now that she is here she 
remains for a time, and though she is in the arm-chair by the fire, 
where she sits bolt upright (she loved to have cushions on the 
unused chairs, but detested putting her back against them), and I 
am bent low over my desk, I know that contentment and pity are 
struggling for possession of her face: contentment wins when she 
surveys her room, pity when she looks at me.  Every article of 
furniture, from the chairs that came into the world with me and 
have worn so much better, though I was new and they were second-
hand, to the mantle-border of fashionable design which she sewed in 
her seventieth year, having picked up the stitch in half a lesson, 
has its story of fight and attainment for her, hence her 
satisfaction; but she sighs at sight of her son, dipping and 
tearing, and chewing the loathly pen.

'Oh, that weary writing!'

In vain do I tell her that writing is as pleasant to me as ever was 
the prospect of a tremendous day's ironing to her; that (to some, 
though not to me) new chapters are as easy to turn out as new 
bannocks.  No, she maintains, for one bannock is the marrows of 
another, while chapters - and then, perhaps, her eyes twinkle, and 
says she saucily, 'But, sal, you may be right, for sometimes your 
bannocks are as alike as mine!'

Or I may be roused from my writing by her cry that I am making 
strange faces again.  It is my contemptible weakness that if I say 
a character smiled vacuously, I must smile vacuously; if he frowns 
or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or given to 
contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have to stop 
writing to undo the knot.  I bow with him, eat with him, and gnaw 
my moustache with him.  If the character be a lady with an 
exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing exquisitely.  
One reads of the astounding versatility of an actor who is stout 
and lean on the same evening, but what is he to the novelist who is 
a dozen persons within the hour?  Morally, I fear, we must 
deteriorate - but this is a subject I may wisely edge away from.

We always spoke to each other in broad Scotch (I think in it 
still), but now and again she would use a word that was new to me, 
or I might hear one of her contemporaries use it.  Now is my 
opportunity to angle for its meaning.  If I ask, boldly, what was 
chat word she used just now, something like 'bilbie' or 'silvendy'? 
she blushes, and says she never said anything so common, or hoots! 
it is some auld-farrant word about which she can tell me nothing.  
But if in the course of conversation I remark casually, 'Did he 
find bilbie?' or 'Was that quite silvendy?' (though the sense of 
the question is vague to me) she falls into the trap, and the words 
explain themselves in her replies.  Or maybe to-day she sees 
whither I am leading her, and such is her sensitiveness that she is 
quite hurt.  The humour goes out of her face (to find bilbie in 
some more silvendy spot), and her reproachful eyes - but now I am 
on the arm of her chair, and we have made it up.  Nevertheless, I 
shall get no more old-world Scotch out of her this forenoon, she 
weeds her talk determinedly, and it is as great a falling away as 
when the mutch gives place to the cap.

I am off for my afternoon walk, and she has promised to bar the 
door behind me and open it to none.  When I return, - well, the 
door is still barred, but she is looking both furtive and elated.  
I should say that she is burning to tell me something, but cannot 
tell it without exposing herself.  Has she opened the door, and if 
so, why?  I don't ask, but I watch.  It is she who is sly now.

'Have you been in the east room since you came in?' she asks, with 
apparent indifference.

'No; why do you ask?'

'Oh, I just thought you might have looked in.'

'Is there anything new there?'

'I dinna say there is, but - but just go and see.'

'There can't be anything new if you kept the door barred,' I say 
cleverly.

This crushes her for a moment; but her eagerness that I should see 
is greater than her fear.  I set off for the east room, and she 
follows, affecting humility, but with triumph in her eye.  How 
often those little scenes took place!  I was never told of the new 
purchase, I was lured into its presence, and then she waited 
timidly for my start of surprise.

'Do you see it?' she says anxiously, and I see it, and hear it, for 
this time it is a bran-new wicker chair, of the kind that whisper 
to themselves for the first six months.

'A going-about body was selling them in a cart,' my mother begins, 
and what followed presents itself to my eyes before she can utter 
another word.  Ten minutes at the least did she stand at the door 
argy-bargying with that man.  But it would be cruelty to scold a 
woman so uplifted.

'Fifteen shillings he wanted,' she cries, 'but what do you think I 
beat him down to?'

'Seven and sixpence?'

She claps her hands with delight.  'Four shillings, as I'm a living 
woman!' she crows: never was a woman fonder of a bargain.

I gaze at the purchase with the amazement expected of me, and the 
chair itself crinkles and shudders to hear what it went for (or is 
it merely chuckling at her?).  'And the man said it cost himself 
five shillings,' my mother continues exultantly.  You would have 
thought her the hardest person had not a knock on the wall summoned 
us about this time to my sister's side.  Though in bed she has been 
listening, and this is what she has to say, in a voice that makes 
my mother very indignant, 'You drive a bargain!  I'm thinking ten 
shillings was nearer what you paid.'

'Four shillings to a penny!' says my mother.

'I daresay,' says my sister; 'but after you paid him the money I 
heard you in the little bedroom press.  What were you doing there?'

My mother winces.  'I may have given him a present of an old 
topcoat,' she falters.  'He looked ill-happit.  But that was after 
I made the bargain.'

'Were there bairns in the cart?'

'There might have been a bit lassie in the cart.'

'I thought as much.  What did you give her?  I heard you in the 
pantry.'

'Four shillings was what I got that chair for,' replies my mother 
firmly.  If I don't interfere there will be a coldness between them 
for at least a minute.  'There is blood on your finger,' I say to 
my mother.

'So there is,' she says, concealing her hand.

'Blood!' exclaims my sister anxiously, and then with a cry of 
triumph, 'I warrant it's jelly.  You gave that lassie one of the 
jelly cans!'

The Glasgow waiter brings up tea, and presently my sister is able 
to rise, and after a sharp fight I am expelled from the kitchen.  
The last thing I do as maid of all work is to lug upstairs the 
clothes-basket which has just arrived with the mangling.  Now there 
is delicious linen for my mother to finger; there was always 
rapture on her face when the clothes-basket came in; it never 
failed to make her once more the active genius of the house.  I may 
leave her now with her sheets and collars and napkins and fronts.  
Indeed, she probably orders me to go.  A son is all very well, but 
suppose he were to tread on that counterpane!

My sister is but and I am ben - I mean she is in the east end and I 
am in the west  - tuts, tuts! let us get at the English of this by 
striving: she is in the kitchen and I am at my desk in the parlour.  
I hope I may not be disturbed, for to-night I must make my hero say 
'Darling,' and it needs both privacy and concentration.  In a word, 
let me admit (though I should like to beat about the bush) that I 
have sat down to a love-chapter.  Too long has it been avoided, 
Albert has called Marion 'dear' only as yet (between you and me 
these are not their real names), but though the public will 
probably read the word without blinking, it went off in my hands 
with a bang.  They tell me - the Sassenach tell me - that in time I 
shall be able without a blush to make Albert say 'darling,' and 
even gather her up in his arms, but I begin to doubt it; the moment 
sees me as shy as ever; I still find it advisable to lock the door, 
and then - no witness save the dog - I 'do' it dourly with my teeth 
clenched, while the dog retreats into the far corner and moans.  
The bolder Englishman (I am told) will write a love-chapter and 
then go out, quite coolly, to dinner, but such goings on are 
contrary to the Scotch nature; even the great novelists dared not.  
Conceive Mr. Stevenson left alone with a hero, a heroine, and a 
proposal impending (he does not know where to look).  Sir Walter in 
the same circumstances gets out of the room by making his love-
scenes take place between the end of one chapter and the beginning 
of the next, but he could afford to do anything, and the small fry 
must e'en to their task, moan the dog as he may.  So I have yoked 
to mine when, enter my mother, looking wistful.

'I suppose you are terrible thrang,' she says.

'Well, I am rather busy, but - what is it you want me to do?'

'It would be a shame to ask you.'

'Still, ask me.'

'I am so terrified they may be filed.'

'You want me to - ?'

'If you would just come up, and help me to fold the sheets!'

The sheets are folded and I return to Albert.  I lock the door, and 
at last I am bringing my hero forward nicely (my knee in the small 
of his back), when this startling question is shot by my sister 
through the key-hole-

'Where did you put the carrot-grater?'

It will all have to be done over again if I let Albert go for a 
moment, so, gripping him hard, I shout indignantly that I have not 
seen the carrot-grater.

'Then what did you grate the carrots on?' asks the voice, and the 
door-handle is shaken just as I shake Albert.

'On a broken cup,' I reply with surprising readiness, and I get to 
work again but am less engrossed, for a conviction grows on me that 
I put the carrot-grater in the drawer of the sewing-machine.

I am wondering whether I should confess or brazen it out, when I 
hear my sister going hurriedly upstairs.  I have a presentiment 
that she has gone to talk about me, and I basely open my door and 
listen.

'Just look at that, mother!'

'Is it a dish-cloth?'

'That's what it is now.'

'Losh behears! it's one of the new table-napkins.'

'That's what it was.  He has been polishing the kitchen grate with 
it!'

(I remember!)

'Woe's me!  That is what comes of his not letting me budge from 
this room.  O, it is a watery Sabbath when men take to doing 
women's work!'

'It defies the face of clay, mother, to fathom what makes him so 
senseless.'

'Oh, it's that weary writing.'

'And the worst of it is he will talk to-morrow as if he had done 
wonders.'

'That's the way with the whole clanjam-fray of them.'

'Yes, but as usual you will humour him, mother.'

'Oh, well, it pleases him, you see,' says my mother, 'and we can 
have our laugh when his door's shut.'

'He is most terribly handless.'

'He is all that, but, poor soul, he does his best.'




CHAPTER VII - R. L. S.


These familiar initials are, I suppose, the best beloved in recent 
literature, certainly they are the sweetest to me, but there was a 
time when my mother could not abide them.  She said 'That Stevenson 
man' with a sneer, and, it was never easy to her to sneer.  At 
thought of him her face would become almost hard, which seems 
incredible, and she would knit her lips and fold her arms, and 
reply with a stiff 'oh' if you mentioned his aggravating name.  In 
the novels we have a way of writing of our heroine, 'she drew 
herself up haughtily,' and when mine draw themselves up haughtily I 
see my mother thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson.  He knew her 
opinion of him, and would write, 'My ears tingled yesterday; I sair 
doubt she has been miscalling me again.'  But the more she 
miscalled him the more he delighted in her, and she was informed of 
this, and at once said, 'The scoundrel!'  If you would know what 
was his unpardonable crime, it was this: he wrote better books than 
mine.

I remember the day she found it out, which was not, however, the 
day she admitted it.  That day, when I should have been at my work, 
she came upon me in the kitchen, 'The Master of Ballantrae' beside 
me, but I was not reading: my head lay heavy on the table, and to 
her anxious eyes, I doubt not, I was the picture of woe.  'Not 
writing!' I echoed, no, I was not writing, I saw no use in ever 
trying to write again.  And down, I suppose, went my head once 
more.  She misunderstood, and thought the blow had fallen; I had 
awakened to the discovery, always dreaded by her, that I had 
written myself dry; I was no better than an empty ink-bottle.  She 
wrung her hands, but indignation came to her with my explanation, 
which was that while R. L. S. was at it we others were only 
'prentices cutting our fingers on his tools.  'I could never thole 
his books,' said my mother immediately, and indeed vindictively.

'You have not read any of them,' I reminded her.

'And never will,' said she with spirit.

And I have no doubt that she called him a dark character that very 
day.  For weeks too, if not for months, she adhered to her 
determination not to read him, though I, having come to my senses 
and seen that there is a place for the 'prentice, was taking a 
pleasure, almost malicious, in putting 'The Master of Ballantrae' 
in her way.  I would place it on her table so that it said good-
morning to her when she rose.  She would frown, and carrying it 
downstairs, as if she had it in the tongs, replace it on its book-
shelf.  I would wrap it up in the cover she had made for the latest 
Carlyle: she would skin it contemptuously and again bring it down.  
I would hide her spectacles in it, and lay it on top of the 
clothes-basket and prop it up invitingly open against her tea-pot.  
And at last I got her, though I forget by which of many 
contrivances.  What I recall vividly is a key-hole view, to which 
another member of the family invited me.  Then I saw my mother 
wrapped up in 'The Master of Ballantrae' and muttering the music to 
herself, nodding her head in approval, and taking a stealthy glance 
at the foot of each page before she began at the top.  Nevertheless 
she had an ear for the door, for when I bounced in she had been too 
clever for me; there was no book to be seen, only an apron on her 
lap and she was gazing out at the window.  Some such conversation 
as this followed:-

'You have been sitting very quietly, mother.'

'I always sit quietly, I never do anything, I'm just a finished 
stocking.'

'Have you been reading?'

'Do I ever read at this time of day?'

'What is that in your lap?'

'Just my apron.'

'Is that a book beneath the apron?'

'It might be a book.'

'Let me see.'

'Go away with you to your work.'

But I lifted the apron.  'Why, it's "The Master of Ballantrae!"'  I 
exclaimed, shocked.

'So it is!' said my mother, equally surprised.  But I looked 
sternly at her, and perhaps she blushed.

'Well what do you think: not nearly equal to mine?' said I with 
humour.

'Nothing like them,' she said determinedly.

'Not a bit,' said I, though whether with a smile or a groan is 
immaterial; they would have meant the same thing.  Should I put the 
book back on its shelf?  I asked, and she replied that I could put 
it wherever I liked for all she cared, so long as I took it out of 
her sight (the implication was that it had stolen on to her lap 
while she was looking out at the window).  My behaviour may seem 
small, but I gave her a last chance, for I said that some people 
found it a book there was no putting down until they reached the 
last page.

'I'm no that kind,' replied my mother.

Nevertheless our old game with the haver of a thing, as she called 
it, was continued, with this difference, that it was now she who 
carried the book covertly upstairs, and I who replaced it on the 
shelf, and several times we caught each other in the act, but not a 
word said either of us; we were grown self-conscious.  Much of the 
play no doubt I forget, but one incident I remember clearly.  She 
had come down to sit beside me while I wrote, and sometimes, when I 
looked up, her eye was not on me, but on the shelf where 'The 
Master of Ballantrae' stood inviting her.  Mr. Stevenson's books 
are not for the shelf, they are for the hand; even when you lay 
them down, let it be on the table for the next comer.  Being the 
most sociable that man has penned in our time, they feel very 
lonely up there in a stately row.  I think their eye is on you the 
moment you enter the room, and so you are drawn to look at them, 
and you take a volume down with the impulse that induces one to 
unchain the dog.  And the result is not dissimilar, for in another 
moment you two are at play.  Is there any other modern writer who 
gets round you in this way?  Well, he had given my mother the look 
which in the ball-room means, 'Ask me for this waltz,' and she 
ettled to do it, but felt that her more dutiful course was to sit 
out the dance with this other less entertaining partner.  I wrote 
on doggedly, but could hear the whispering.

'Am I to be a wall-flower?' asked James Durie reproachfully.  (It 
must have been leap-year.)

'Speak lower,' replied my mother, with an uneasy look at me.

'Pooh!' said James contemptuously, 'that kail-runtle!'

'I winna have him miscalled,' said my mother, frowning.

'I am done with him,' said James (wiping his cane with his cambric 
handkerchief), and his sword clattered deliciously (I cannot think 
this was accidental), which made my mother sigh.  Like the man he 
was, he followed up his advantage with a comparison that made me 
dip viciously.

'A prettier sound that,' said he, clanking his sword again, 'than 
the clack-clack of your young friend's shuttle.'

'Whist!' cried my mother, who had seen me dip.

'Then give me your arm,' said James, lowering his voice.

'I dare not,' answered my mother.  'He's so touchy about you.'

'Come, come,' he pressed her, 'you are certain to do it sooner or 
later, so why not now?'

'Wait till he has gone for his walk,' said my mother; 'and, forbye 
that, I'm ower old to dance with you.'

'How old are you?' he inquired.

'You're gey an' pert!' cried my mother.

'Are you seventy?'

'Off and on,' she admitted.

'Pooh,' he said, 'a mere girl!'

She replied instantly, 'I'm no' to be catched with chaff'; but she 
smiled and rose as if he had stretched out his hand and got her by 
the finger-tip.

After that they whispered so low (which they could do as they were 
now much nearer each other) that I could catch only one remark.  It 
came from James, and seems to show the tenor of their whisperings, 
for his words were, 'Easily enough, if you slip me beneath your 
shawl.'

That is what she did, and furthermore she left the room guiltily, 
muttering something about redding up the drawers.  I suppose I 
smiled wanly to myself, or conscience must have been nibbling at my 
mother, for in less than five minutes she was back, carrying her 
accomplice openly, and she thrust him with positive viciousness 
into the place where my Stevenson had lost a tooth (as the writer 
whom he most resembled would have said).  And then like a good 
mother she took up one of her son's books and read it most 
determinedly.  It had become a touching incident to me, and I 
remember how we there and then agreed upon a compromise: she was to 
read the enticing thing just to convince herself of its 
inferiority.

'The Master of Ballantrae' is not the best.  Conceive the glory, 
which was my mother's, of knowing from a trustworthy source that 
there are at least three better awaiting you on the same shelf.  
She did not know Alan Breck yet, and he was as anxious to step down 
as Mr. Bally himself.  John Silver was there, getting into his leg, 
so that she should not have to wait a moment, and roaring, 'I'll 
lay to that!' when she told me consolingly that she could not thole 
pirate stories.  Not to know these gentlemen, what is it like?  It 
is like never having been in love.  But they are in the house!  
That is like knowing that you will fall in love to-morrow morning.  
With one word, by drawing one mournful face, I could have got my 
mother to abjure the jam-shelf - nay, I might have managed it by 
merely saying that she had enjoyed 'The Master of Ballantrae.'  For 
you must remember that she only read it to persuade herself (and 
me) of its unworthiness, and that the reason she wanted to read the 
others was to get further proof.  All this she made plain to me, 
eyeing me a little anxiously the while, and of course I accepted 
the explanation.  Alan is the biggest child of them all, and I 
doubt not that she thought so, but curiously enough her views of 
him are among the things I have forgotten.  But how enamoured she 
was of 'Treasure Island,' and how faithful she tried to be to me 
all the time she was reading it!  I had to put my hands over her 
eyes to let her know that I had entered the room, and even then she 
might try to read between my fingers, coming to herself presently, 
however, to say 'It's a haver of a book.'

'Those pirate stories are so uninteresting,' I would reply without 
fear, for she was too engrossed to see through me.  'Do you think 
you will finish this one?'

'I may as well go on with it since I have begun it,' my mother 
says, so slyly that my sister and I shake our heads at each other 
to imply, 'Was there ever such a woman!'

'There are none of those one-legged scoundrels in my books,' I say.

'Better without them,' she replies promptly.

'I wonder, mother, what it is about the man that so infatuates the 
public?'

'He takes no hold of me,' she insists.  'I would a hantle rather 
read your books.'

 I offer obligingly to bring one of them to her, and now she looks 
at me suspiciously.  'You surely believe I like yours best,' she 
says with instant anxiety, and I soothe her by assurances, and 
retire advising her to read on, just to see if she can find out how 
he misleads the public.  'Oh, I may take a look at it again by-and-
by,' she says indifferently, but nevertheless the probability is 
that as the door shuts the book opens, as if by some mechanical 
contrivance.  I remember how she read 'Treasure Island,' holding it 
close to the ribs of the fire (because she could not spare a moment 
to rise and light the gas), and how, when bed-time came, and we 
coaxed, remonstrated, scolded, she said quite fiercely, clinging to 
the book, 'I dinna lay my head on a pillow this night till I see 
how that laddie got out of the barrel.'

After this, I think, he was as bewitching as the laddie in the 
barrel to her - Was he not always a laddie in the barrel himself, 
climbing in for apples while we all stood around, like gamins, 
waiting for a bite?  He was the spirit of boyhood tugging at the 
skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and 
play.  And I suppose my mother felt this, as so many have felt it: 
like others she was a little scared at first to find herself 
skipping again, with this masterful child at the rope, but soon she 
gave him her hand and set off with him for the meadow, not an 
apology between the two of them for the author left behind.  But 
near to the end did she admit (in words) that he had a way with him 
which was beyond her son.  'Silk and sacking, that is what we are,' 
she was informed, to which she would reply obstinately, 'Well, 
then, I prefer sacking.'

'But if he had been your son?'

'But he is not.'

'You wish he were?'

'I dinna deny but what I could have found room for him.'

And still at times she would smear him with the name of black (to 
his delight when he learned the reason).  That was when some podgy 
red-sealed blue-crossed letter arrived from Vailima, inviting me to 
journey thither.  (His directions were, 'You take the boat at San 
Francisco, and then my place is the second to the left.')  Even 
London seemed to her to carry me so far away that I often took a 
week to the journey (the first six days in getting her used to the 
idea), and these letters terrified her.  It was not the finger of 
Jim Hawkins she now saw beckoning me across the seas, it was John 
Silver, waving a crutch.  Seldom, I believe, did I read straight 
through one of these Vailima letters; when in the middle I suddenly 
remembered who was upstairs and what she was probably doing, and I 
ran to her, three steps at a jump, to find her, lips pursed, hands 
folded, a picture of gloom.

'I have a letter from - '

'So I have heard.'

'Would you like to hear it?'

'No.'

'Can you not abide him?'

'I cauna thole him.'

'Is he a black?'

'He is all that.'

Well, Vailima was the one spot on earth I had any great craving to 
visit, but I think she always knew I would never leave her.  
Sometime, she said, she should like me to go, but not until she was 
laid away.  'And how small I have grown this last winter.  Look at 
my wrists.  It canna be long now.'  No, I never thought of going, 
was never absent for a day from her without reluctance, and never 
walked so quickly as when I was going back.  In the meantime that 
happened which put an end for ever to my scheme of travel.  I shall 
never go up the Road of Loving Hearts now, on 'a wonderful clear 
night of stars,' to meet the man coming toward me on a horse.  It 
is still a wonderful clear night of stars, but the road is empty.  
So I never saw the dear king of us all.  But before he had written 
books he was in my part of the country with a fishing-wand in his 
hand, and I like to think that I was the boy who met him that day 
by Queen Margaret's burn, where the rowans are, and busked a fly 
for him, and stood watching, while his lithe figure rose and fell 
as he cast and hinted back from the crystal waters of Noran-side.




CHAPTER VIII - A PANIC IN THE HOUSE


I was sitting at my desk in London when a telegram came announcing 
that my mother was again dangerously ill, and I seized my hat and 
hurried to the station.  It is not a memory of one night only.  A 
score of times, I am sure, I was called north thus suddenly, and 
reached our little town trembling, head out at railway-carriage 
window for a glance at a known face which would answer the question 
on mine.  These illnesses came as regularly as the backend of the 
year, but were less regular in going, and through them all, by 
night and by day, I see my sister moving so unwearyingly, so 
lovingly, though with failing strength, that I bow my head in 
reverence for her.  She was wearing herself done.  The doctor 
advised us to engage a nurse, but the mere word frightened my 
mother, and we got between her and the door as if the woman was 
already on the stair.  To have a strange woman in my mother's room 
- you who are used to them cannot conceive what it meant to us.

Then we must have a servant.  This seemed only less horrible.  My 
father turned up his sleeves and clutched the besom.  I tossed 
aside my papers, and was ready to run the errands.  He answered the 
door, I kept the fires going, he gave me a lesson in cooking, I 
showed him how to make beds, one of us wore an apron.  It was not 
for long.  I was led to my desk, the newspaper was put into my 
father's hand.  'But a servant!' we cried, and would have fallen to 
again.  'No servant, comes into this house,' said my sister quite 
fiercely, and, oh, but my mother was relieved to hear her!  There 
were many such scenes, a year of them, I daresay, before we 
yielded.

I cannot say which of us felt it most.  In London I was used to 
servants, and in moments of irritation would ring for them 
furiously, though doubtless my manner changed as they opened the 
door.  I have even held my own with gentlemen in plush, giving one 
my hat, another my stick, and a third my coat, and all done with 
little more trouble than I should have expended in putting the 
three articles on the chair myself.  But this bold deed, and other 
big things of the kind, I did that I might tell my mother of them 
afterwards, while I sat on the end of her bed, and her face beamed 
with astonishment and mirth.

From my earliest days I had seen servants.  The manse had a 
servant, the bank had another; one of their uses was to pounce 
upon, and carry away in stately manner, certain naughty boys who 
played with me.  The banker did not seem really great to me, but 
his servant - oh yes.  Her boots cheeped all the way down the 
church aisle; it was common report that she had flesh every day for 
her dinner; instead of meeting her lover at the pump she walked him 
into the country, and he returned with wild roses in his 
buttonhole, his hand up to hide them, and on his face the troubled 
look of those who know that if they take this lady they must give 
up drinking from the saucer for evermore.  For the lovers were 
really common men, until she gave them that glance over the 
shoulder which, I have noticed, is the fatal gift of servants.

According to legend we once had a servant - in my childhood I could 
show the mark of it on my forehead, and even point her out to other 
boys, though she was now merely a wife with a house of her own.  
But even while I boasted I doubted.  Reduced to life-size she may 
have been but a woman who came in to help.  I shall say no more 
about her, lest some one comes forward to prove that she went home 
at night.

Never shall I forget my first servant.  I was eight or nine, in 
velveteen, diamond socks ('Cross your legs when they look at you,' 
my mother had said, 'and put your thumb in your pocket and leave 
the top of your handkerchief showing'), and I had travelled by rail 
to visit a relative.  He had a servant, and as I was to be his 
guest she must be my servant also for the time being - you may be 
sure I had got my mother to put this plainly before me ere I set 
off.  My relative met me at the station, but I wasted no time in 
hoping I found him well.  I did not even cross my legs for him, so 
eager was I to hear whether she was still there.  A sister greeted 
me at the door, but I chafed at having to be kissed; at once I made 
for the kitchen, where, I knew, they reside, and there she was, and 
I crossed my legs and put one thumb in my pocket, and the 
handkerchief was showing.  Afterwards I stopped strangers on the 
highway with an offer to show her to them through the kitchen 
window, and I doubt not the first letter I ever wrote told my 
mother what they are like when they are so near that you can put 
your fingers into them.

But now when we could have servants for ourselves I shrank from the 
thought.  It would not be the same house; we should have to 
dissemble; I saw myself speaking English the long day through.  You 
only know the shell of a Scot until you have entered his home 
circle; in his office, in clubs, at social gatherings where you and 
he seem to be getting on so well he is really a house with all the 
shutters closed and the door locked.  He is not opaque of set 
purpose, often it is against his will - it is certainly against 
mine, I try to keep my shutters open and my foot in the door but 
they will bang to.  In many ways my mother was as reticent as 
myself, though her manners were as gracious as mine were rough (in 
vain, alas! all the honest oiling of them), and my sister was the 
most reserved of us all; you might at times see a light through one 
of my chinks: she was double-shuttered.  Now, it seems to be a law 
of nature that we must show our true selves at some time, and as 
the Scot must do it at home, and squeeze a day into an hour, what 
follows is that there he is self-revealing in the superlative 
degree, the feelings so long dammed up overflow, and thus a Scotch 
family are probably better acquainted with each other, and more 
ignorant of the life outside their circle, than any other family in 
the world.  And as knowledge is sympathy, the affection existing 
between them is almost painful in its intensity; they have not more 
to give than their neighbours, but it is bestowed upon a few 
instead of being distributed among many; they are reputed 
niggardly, but for family affection at least they pay in gold.  In 
this, I believe, we shall find the true explanation why Scotch 
literature, since long before the days of Burns, has been so often 
inspired by the domestic hearth, and has treated it with a 
passionate understanding.

Must a woman come into our house and discover that I was not such a 
dreary dog as I had the reputation of being?  Was I to be seen at 
last with the veil of dourness lifted?  My company voice is so low 
and unimpressive that my first remark is merely an intimation that 
I am about to speak (like the whir of the clock before it strikes): 
must it be revealed that I had another voice, that there was one 
door I never opened without leaving my reserve on the mat?  Ah, 
that room, must its secrets be disclosed?  So joyous they were when 
my mother was well, no wonder we were merry.  Again and again she 
had been given back to us; it was for the glorious to-day we 
thanked God; in our hearts we knew and in our prayers confessed 
that the fill of delight had been given us, whatever might befall.  
We had not to wait till all was over to know its value; my mother 
used to say, 'We never understand how little we need in this world 
until we know the loss of it,' and there can be few truer sayings, 
but during her last years we exulted daily in the possession of her 
as much as we can exult in her memory.  No wonder, I say, that we 
were merry, but we liked to show it to God alone, and to Him only 
our agony during those many night-alarms, when lights flickered in 
the house and white faces were round my mother's bedside.  Not for 
other eyes those long vigils when, night about, we sat watching, 
nor the awful nights when we stood together, teeth clenched - 
waiting - it must be now.  And it was not then; her hand became 
cooler, her breathing more easy; she smiled to us.  Once more I 
could work by snatches, and was glad, but what was the result to me 
compared to the joy of hearing that voice from the other room?  
There lay all the work I was ever proud of, the rest is but honest 
craftsmanship done to give her coal and food and softer pillows.  
My thousand letters that she so carefully preserved, always 
sleeping with the last beneath the sheet, where one was found when 
she died - they are the only writing of mine of which I shall ever 
boast.  I would not there had been one less though I could have 
written an immortal book for it.

How my sister toiled - to prevent a stranger's getting any footing 
in the house!  And how, with the same object, my mother strove to 
'do for herself' once more.  She pretended that she was always well 
now, and concealed her ailments so craftily that we had to probe 
for them:-

'I think you are not feeling well to-day?'

'I am perfectly well.'

'Where is the pain?'

'I have no pain to speak of.'

'Is it at your heart?'

'No.'

'Is your breathing hurting you?'

'Not it.'

'Do you feel those stounds in your head again?'

'No, no, I tell you there is nothing the matter with me.'

'Have you a pain in your side?'

'Really, it's most provoking I canna put my hand to my side without 
your thinking I have a pain there.'

'You have a pain in your side!'

'I might have a pain in my side.'

'And you were trying to hide it!  Is it very painful?'

'It's - it's no so bad but what I can bear it.'

Which of these two gave in first I cannot tell, though to me fell 
the duty of persuading them, for whichever she was she rebelled as 
soon as the other showed signs of yielding, so that sometimes I had 
two converts in the week but never both on the same day.  I would 
take them separately, and press the one to yield for the sake of 
the other, but they saw so easily through my artifice.  My mother 
might go bravely to my sister and say, 'I have been thinking it 
over, and I believe I would like a servant fine - once we got used 
to her.'

'Did he tell you to say that?' asks my sister sharply.

'I say it of my own free will.'

'He put you up to it, I am sure, and he told you not to let on that 
you did it to lighten my work.'

'Maybe he did, but I think we should get one.'

'Not for my sake,' says my sister obstinately, and then my mother 
comes ben to me to say delightedly, 'She winna listen to reason!'

But at last a servant was engaged; we might be said to be at the 
window, gloomily waiting for her now, and it was with such words as 
these that we sought to comfort each other and ourselves:-

'She will go early to her bed.'

'She needna often be seen upstairs.'

'We'll set her to the walking every day.'

'There will be a many errands for her to run.  We'll tell her to 
take her time over them.'

'Three times she shall go to the kirk every Sabbath, and we'll egg 
her on to attending the lectures in the hall.'

'She is sure to have friends in the town.  We'll let her visit them 
often.'

'If she dares to come into your room, mother!'

'Mind this, every one of you, servant or no servant, I fold all the 
linen mysel.'

'She shall not get cleaning out the east room.'

'Nor putting my chest of drawers in order.'

'Nor tidying up my manuscripts.'

'I hope she's a reader, though.  You could set her down with a 
book, and then close the door canny on her.'

And so on.  Was ever servant awaited so apprehensively?  And then 
she came - at an anxious time, too, when her worth could be put to 
the proof at once - and from first to last she was a treasure.  I 
know not what we should have done without her.




CHAPTER IX - MY HEROINE.


When it was known that I had begun another story my mother might 
ask what it was to be about this time.

'Fine we can guess who it is about,' my sister would say pointedly.

'Maybe you can guess, but it is beyond me,' says my mother, with 
the meekness of one who knows that she is a dull person.

My sister scorned her at such times.  'What woman is in all his 
books?' she would demand.

'I'm sure I canna say,' replies my mother determinedly.  'I thought 
the women were different every time.'

'Mother, I wonder you can be so audacious!  Fine you know what 
woman I mean.'

'How can I know?  What woman is it?  You should bear in mind that I 
hinna your cleverness' (they were constantly giving each other 
little knocks).

'I won't give you the satisfaction of saying her name.  But this I 
will say, it is high time he was keeping her out of his books.'

And then as usual my mother would give herself away unconsciously.  
'That is what I tell him,' she says chuckling, 'and he tries to 
keep me out, but he canna; it's more than he can do!'

On an evening after my mother had gone to bed, the first chapter 
would be brought upstairs, and I read, sitting at the foot of the 
bed, while my sister watched to make my mother behave herself, and 
my father cried H'sh! when there were interruptions.  All would go 
well at the start, the reflections were accepted with a little nod 
of the head, the descriptions of scenery as ruts on the road that 
must be got over at a walking pace (my mother did not care for 
scenery, and that is why there is so little of it in my books).  
But now I am reading too quickly, a little apprehensively, because 
I know that the next paragraph begins with - let us say with, 
'Along this path came a woman': I had intended to rush on here in a 
loud bullying voice, but 'Along this path came a woman' I read, and 
stop.  Did I hear a faint sound from the other end of the bed?  
Perhaps I did not; I may only have been listening for it, but I 
falter and look up.  My sister and I look sternly at my mother.  
She bites her under-lip and clutches the bed with both hands, 
really she is doing her best for me, but first comes a smothered 
gurgling sound, then her hold on herself relaxes and she shakes 
with mirth.

'That's a way to behave!' cries my sister.

'I cannot help it,' my mother gasps.

'And there's nothing to laugh at.'

'It's that woman,' my mother explains unnecessarily.

'Maybe she's not the woman you think her,' I say, crushed.

'Maybe not,' says my mother doubtfully.  'What was her name?'

'Her name,' I answer with triumph, 'was not Margaret'; but this 
makes her ripple again.  'I have so many names nowadays,' she 
mutters.

'H'sh!' says my father, and the reading is resumed.

Perhaps the woman who came along the path was of tall and majestic 
figure, which should have shown my mother that I had contrived to 
start my train without her this time.  But it did not.

'What are you laughing at now?' says my sister severely.  'Do you 
not hear that she was a tall, majestic woman?'

'It's the first time I ever heard it said of her,' replies my 
mother.

'But she is.'

'Ke fy, havers!'

'The book says it.'

'There will be a many queer things in the book.  What was she 
wearing?'

I have not described her clothes.  'That's a mistake,' says my 
mother.  'When I come upon a woman in a book, the first thing I 
want to know about her is whether she was good-looking, and the 
second, how she was put on.'

The woman on the path was eighteen years of age, and of remarkable 
beauty.

'That settles you,' says my sister.

'I was no beauty at eighteen,' my mother admits, but here my father 
interferes unexpectedly.  'There wasna your like in this 
countryside at eighteen,' says he stoutly.

'Pooh!' says she, well pleased.

'Were you plain, then?' we ask.

'Sal,' she replies briskly, 'I was far from plain.'

'H'sh!'

Perhaps in the next chapter this lady (or another) appears in a 
carriage.

'I assure you we're mounting in the world,' I hear my mother 
murmur, but I hurry on without looking up.  The lady lives in a 
house where there are footmen - but the footmen have come on the 
scene too hurriedly.  'This is more than I can stand,' gasps my 
mother, and just as she is getting the better of a fit of laughter, 
'Footman, give me a drink of water,' she cries, and this sets her 
off again.  Often the readings had to end abruptly because her 
mirth brought on violent fits of coughing.

Sometimes I read to my sister alone, and she assured me that she 
could not see my mother among the women this time.  This she said 
to humour me.  Presently she would slip upstairs to announce 
triumphantly, 'You are in again!'

Or in the small hours I might make a confidant of my father, and 
when I had finished reading he would say thoughtfully, 'That lassie 
is very natural.  Some of the ways you say she had - your mother 
had them just the same.  Did you ever notice what an extraordinary 
woman your mother is?'

Then would I seek my mother for comfort.  She was the more ready to 
give it because of her profound conviction that if I was found out 
- that is, if readers discovered how frequently and in how many 
guises she appeared in my books - the affair would become a public 
scandal.

'You see Jess is not really you,' I begin inquiringly.

'Oh no, she is another kind of woman altogether,' my mother says, 
and then spoils the compliment by adding naively, 'She had but two 
rooms and I have six.'

I sigh.  'Without counting the pantry, and it's a great big 
pantry,' she mutters.

This was not the sort of difference I could greatly plume myself 
upon, and honesty would force me to say, 'As far as that goes, 
there was a time when you had but two rooms yourself - '

'That's long since,' she breaks in.  'I began with an up-the-stair, 
but I always had it in my mind - I never mentioned it, but there it 
was - to have the down-the-stair as well.  Ay, and I've had it this 
many a year.'

'Still, there is no denying that Jess had the same ambition.'

'She had, but to her two-roomed house she had to stick all her born 
days.  Was that like me?'

'No, but she wanted - '

'She wanted, and I wanted, but I got and she didna.  That's the 
difference betwixt her and me.'

'If that is all the difference, it is little credit I can claim for 
having created her.'

My mother sees that I need soothing.  'That is far from being all 
the difference,' she would say eagerly.  'There's my silk, for 
instance.  Though I say it mysel, there's not a better silk in the 
valley of Strathmore.  Had Jess a silk of any kind - not to speak 
of a silk like that?'

'Well, she had no silk, but you remember how she got that cloak 
with beads.'

'An eleven and a bit!  Hoots, what was that to boast of!  I tell 
you, every single yard of my silk cost - '

'Mother, that is the very way Jess spoke about her cloak!'

She lets this pass, perhaps without hearing it, for solicitude 
about her silk has hurried her to the wardrobe where it hangs.

'Ah, mother, I am afraid that was very like Jess!'

'How could it be like her when she didna even have a wardrobe?  I 
tell you what, if there had been a real Jess and she had boasted to 
me about her cloak with beads, I would have said to her in a 
careless sort of voice, "Step across with me, Jess and I'll let you 
see something that is hanging in my wardrobe."  That would have 
lowered her pride!'

'I don't believe that is what you would have done, mother.'

Then a sweeter expression would come into her face.  'No,' she 
would say reflectively, 'it's not.'

'What would you have done?  I think I know.'

'You canna know.  But I'm thinking I would have called to mind that 
she was a poor woman, and ailing, and terrible windy about her 
cloak, and I would just have said it was a beauty and that I wished 
I had one like it.'

'Yes, I am certain that is what you would have done.  But oh, 
mother, that is just how Jess would have acted if some poorer woman 
than she had shown her a new shawl.'

'Maybe, but though I hadna boasted about my silk I would have 
wanted to do it.'

'Just as Jess would have been fidgeting to show off her eleven and 
a bit!'

It seems advisable to jump to another book; not to my first, 
because - well, as it was my first there would naturally be 
something of my mother in it, and not to the second, as it was my 
first novel and not much esteemed even in our family.  (But the 
little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.)  Let us try the 
story about the minister.

My mother's first remark is decidedly damping.  'Many a time in my 
young days,' she says, 'I played about the Auld Licht manse, but I 
little thought I should live to be the mistress of it!'

'But Margaret is not you.'

'N-no, oh no.  She had a very different life from mine.  I never 
let on to a soul that she is me!'

'She was not meant to be you when I began.  Mother, what a way you 
have of coming creeping in!'

'You should keep better watch on yourself.'

'Perhaps if I had called Margaret by some other name  - '

'I should have seen through her just the same.  As soon as I heard 
she was the mother I began to laugh.  In some ways, though, she's 
no' so very like me.  She was long in finding out about Babbie.  
I'se uphaud I should have been quicker.'

'Babbie, you see, kept close to the garden-wall.'

'It's not the wall up at the manse that would have hidden her from 
me.'

'She came out in the dark.'

'I'm thinking she would have found me looking for her with a 
candle.'

'And Gavin was secretive.'

'That would have put me on my mettle.'

'She never suspected anything.'

'I wonder at her.'

But my new heroine is to be a child.  What has madam to say to 
that?

A child!  Yes, she has something to say even to that.  'This beats 
all!' are the words.

'Come, come, mother, I see what you are thinking, but I assure you 
that this time - '

'Of course not,' she says soothingly, 'oh no, she canna be me'; but 
anon her real thoughts are revealed by the artless remark, 'I 
doubt, though, this is a tough job you have on hand - it is so long 
since I was a bairn.'

We came very close to each other in those talks.  'It is a queer 
thing,' she would say softly, 'that near everything you write is 
about this bit place.  You little expected that when you began.  I 
mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than 
mine, that you could write a page about our squares and wynds.  I 
wonder how it has come about?'

There was a time when I could not have answered that question, but 
that time had long passed.  'I suppose, mother, it was because you 
were most at home in your own town, and there was never much 
pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have known you, 
nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor of a 
country-side where you never carried your father's dinner in a 
flagon.  There is scarce a house in all my books where I have not 
seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over the fireplace or 
winding up the clock.'

'And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you knew nobody 
you could make your women-folk out of!  Do you mind that, and how 
we both laughed at the notion of your having to make them out of 
me?'

'I remember.'

'And now you've gone back to my father's time.  It's more than 
sixty years since I carried his dinner in a flagon through the long 
parks of Kinnordy.'

'I often go into the long parks, mother, and sit on the stile at 
the edge of the wood till I fancy I see a little girl coming toward 
me with a flagon in her hand.'

'Jumping the burn (I was once so proud of my jumps!) and swinging 
the flagon round so quick that what was inside hadna time to fall 
out.  I used to wear a magenta frock and a white pinafore.  Did I 
ever tell you that?'

'Mother, the little girl in my story wears a magenta frock and a 
white pinafore.'

'You minded that!  But I'm thinking it wasna a lassie in a pinafore 
you saw in the long parks of Kinnordy, it was just a gey done auld 
woman.'

'It was a lassie in a pinafore, mother, when she was far away, but 
when she came near it was a gey done auld woman.'

'And a fell ugly one!'

'The most beautiful one I shall ever see.'

'I wonder to hear you say it.  Look at my wrinkled auld face.'

'It is the sweetest face in all the world.'

'See how the rings drop off my poor wasted finger.'

'There will always be someone nigh, mother, to put them on again.'

'Ay, will there!  Well I know it.  Do you mind how when you were 
but a bairn you used to say, "Wait till I'm a man, and you'll never 
have a reason for greeting again?"'

I remembered.

'You used to come running into the house to say, "There's a proud 
dame going down the Marywellbrae in a cloak that is black on one 
side and white on the other; wait till I'm a man, and you'll have 
one the very same."  And when I lay on gey hard beds you said, 
"When I'm a man you'll lie on feathers."  You saw nothing bonny, 
you never heard of my setting my heart on anything, but what you 
flung up your head and cried, "Wait till I'm a man."  You fair 
shamed me before the neighbours, and yet I was windy, too.  And now 
it has all come true like a dream.  I can call to mind not one 
little thing I ettled for in my lusty days that hasna been put into 
my hands in my auld age; I sit here useless, surrounded by the 
gratification of all my wishes and all my ambitions, and at times 
I'm near terrified, for it's as if God had mista'en me for some 
other woman.'

'Your hopes and ambitions were so simple,' I would say, but she did 
not like that.  'They werena that simple,' she would answer, 
flushing.

I am reluctant to leave those happy days, but the end must be 
faced, and as I write I seem to see my mother growing smaller and 
her face more wistful, and still she lingers with us, as if God had 
said, 'Child of mine, your time has come, be not afraid.'  And she 
was not afraid, but still she lingered, and He waited, smiling.  I 
never read any of that last book to her; when it was finished she 
was too heavy with years to follow a story.  To me this was as if 
my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come 
after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others 
and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw 
this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into 
being once again the woman she had been.  On a day but three weeks 
before she died my father and I were called softly upstairs.  My 
mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old 
chair by the window, with a manuscript in her hands.  But she was 
looking about her without much understanding.  'Just to please 
him,' my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my 
mother began to read.  I looked at my sister.  Tears of woe were 
stealing down her face.  Soon the reading became very slow and 
stopped.  After a pause, 'There was something you were to say to 
him,' my sister reminded her.  'Luck,' muttered a voice as from the 
dead, 'luck.'  And then the old smile came running to her face like 
a lamp-lighter, and she said to me, 'I am ower far gone to read, 
but I'm thinking I am in it again!'  My father put her Testament in 
her hands, and it fell open - as it always does - at the Fourteenth 
of John.  She made an effort to read but could not.  Suddenly she 
stooped and kissed the broad page.  'Will that do instead?' she 
asked.




CHAPTER X - ART THOU AFRAID HIS POWER SHALL FAIL?


For years I had been trying to prepare myself for my mother's 
death, trying to foresee how she would die, seeing myself when she 
was dead.  Even then I knew it was a vain thing I did, but I am 
sure there was no morbidness in it.  I hoped I should be with her 
at the end, not as the one she looked at last but as him from whom 
she would turn only to look upon her best-beloved, not my arm but 
my sister's should be round her when she died, not my hand but my 
sister's should close her eyes.  I knew that I might reach her too 
late; I saw myself open a door where there was none to greet me, 
and go up the old stair into the old room.  But what I did not 
foresee was that which happened.  I little thought it could come 
about that I should climb the old stair, and pass the door beyond 
which my mother lay dead, and enter another room first, and go on 
my knees there.

My mother's favourite paraphrase is one known in our house as 
David's because it was the last he learned to repeat.  It was also 
the last thing she read-


Art thou afraid his power shall fail
When comes thy evil day?
And can an all-creating arm
Grow weary or decay?


I heard her voice gain strength as she read it, I saw her timid 
face take courage, but when came my evil day, then at the dawning, 
alas for me, I was afraid.

In those last weeks, though we did not know it, my sister was dying 
on her feet.  For many years she had been giving her life, a little 
bit at a time, for another year, another month, latterly for 
another day, of her mother, and now she was worn out.  'I'll never 
leave you, mother.' - 'Fine I know you'll never leave me.'  I 
thought that cry so pathetic at the time, but I was not to know its 
full significance until it was only the echo of a cry.  Looking at 
these two then it was to me as if my mother had set out for the new 
country, and my sister held her back.  But I see with a clearer 
vision now.  It is no longer the mother but the daughter who is in 
front, and she cries, 'Mother, you are lingering so long at the 
end, I have ill waiting for you.'

But she knew no more than we how it was to be; if she seemed weary 
when we met her on the stair, she was still the brightest, the most 
active figure in my mother's room; she never complained, save when 
she had to depart on that walk which separated them for half an 
hour.  How reluctantly she put on her bonnet, how we had to press 
her to it, and how often, having gone as far as the door, she came 
back to stand by my mother's side.  Sometimes as we watched from 
the window, I could not but laugh, and yet with a pain at my heart, 
to see her hasting doggedly onward, not an eye for right or left, 
nothing in her head but the return.  There was always my father in 
the house, than whom never was a more devoted husband, and often 
there were others, one daughter in particular, but they scarce 
dared tend my mother - this one snatched the cup jealously from 
their hands.  My mother liked it best from her.  We all knew this.  
'I like them fine, but I canna do without you.'  My sister, so 
unselfish in all other things, had an unwearying passion for 
parading it before us.  It was the rich reward of her life.

The others spoke among themselves of what must come soon, and they 
had tears to help them, but this daughter would not speak of it, 
and her tears were ever slow to come.  I knew that night and day 
she was trying to get ready for a world without her mother in it, 
but she must remain dumb; none of us was so Scotch as she, she must 
bear her agony alone, a tragic solitary Scotchwoman.  Even my 
mother, who spoke so calmly to us of the coming time, could not 
mention it to her.  These two, the one in bed, and the other 
bending over her, could only look long at each other, until slowly 
the tears came to my sister's eyes, and then my mother would turn 
away her wet face.  And still neither said a word, each knew so 
well what was in the other's thoughts, so eloquently they spoke in 
silence, 'Mother, I am loath to let you go,' and 'Oh my daughter, 
now that my time is near, I wish you werena quite so fond of me.'  
But when the daughter had slipped away my mother would grip my hand 
and cry, 'I leave her to you; you see how she has sown, it will 
depend on you how she is to reap.'  And I made promises, but I 
suppose neither of us saw that she had already reaped.

In the night my mother might waken and sit up in bed, confused by 
what she saw.  While she slept, six decades or more had rolled back 
and she was again in her girlhood; suddenly recalled from it she 
was dizzy, as with the rush of the years.  How had she come into 
this room?  When she went to bed last night, after preparing her 
father's supper, there had been a dresser at the window: what had 
become of the salt-bucket, the meal-tub, the hams that should be 
hanging from the rafters?  There were no rafters; it was a papered 
ceiling.  She had often heard of open beds, but how came she to be 
lying in one?  To fathom these things she would try to spring out 
of bed and be startled to find it a labour, as if she had been 
taken ill in the night.  Hearing her move I might knock on the wall 
that separated us, this being a sign, prearranged between us, that 
I was near by, and so all was well, but sometimes the knocking 
seemed to belong to the past, and she would cry, 'That is my father 
chapping at the door, I maun rise and let him in.'  She seemed to 
see him - and it was one much younger than herself that she saw - 
covered with snow, kicking clods of it from his boots, his hands 
swollen and chapped with sand and wet.  Then I would hear - it was 
a common experience of the night - my sister soothing her lovingly, 
and turning up the light to show her where she was, helping her to 
the window to let her see that it was no night of snow, even 
humouring her by going downstairs, and opening the outer door, and 
calling into the darkness, 'Is anybody there?' and if that was not 
sufficient, she would swaddle my mother in wraps and take her 
through the rooms of the house, lighting them one by one, pointing 
out familiar objects, and so guiding her slowly through the sixty 
odd years she had jumped too quickly.  And perhaps the end of it 
was that my mother came to my bedside and said wistfully, 'Am I an 
auld woman?'

But with daylight, even during the last week in which I saw her, 
she would be up and doing, for though pitifully frail she no longer 
suffered from any ailment.  She seemed so well comparatively that 
I, having still the remnants of an illness to shake off, was to 
take a holiday in Switzerland, and then return for her, when we 
were all to go to the much-loved manse of her much-loved brother in 
the west country.  So she had many preparations on her mind, and 
the morning was the time when she had any strength to carry them 
out.  To leave her house had always been a month's work for her, it 
must be left in such perfect order, every corner visited and 
cleaned out, every chest probed to the bottom, the linen lifted 
out, examined and put back lovingly as if to make it lie more 
easily in her absence, shelves had to be re-papered, a strenuous 
week devoted to the garret.  Less exhaustively, but with much of 
the old exultation in her house, this was done for the last time, 
and then there was the bringing out of her own clothes, and the 
spreading of them upon the bed and the pleased fingering of them, 
and the consultations about which should be left behind.  Ah, 
beautiful dream! I clung to it every morning; I would not look when 
my sister shook her head at it, but long before each day was done I 
too knew that it could never be.  It had come true many times, but 
never again.  We two knew it, but when my mother, who must always 
be prepared so long beforehand, called for her trunk and band-boxes 
we brought them to her, and we stood silent, watching, while she 
packed.

The morning came when I was to go away.  It had come a hundred 
times, when I was a boy, when I was an undergraduate, when I was a 
man, when she had seemed big and strong to me, when she was grown 
so little and it was I who put my arms round her.  But always it 
was the same scene.  I am not to write about it, of the parting and 
the turning back on the stair, and two people trying to smile, and 
the setting off again, and the cry that brought me back.  Nor shall 
I say more of the silent figure in the background, always in the 
background, always near my mother.  The last I saw of these two was 
from the gate.  They were at the window which never passes from my 
eyes.  I could not see my dear sister's face, for she was bending 
over my mother, pointing me out to her, and telling her to wave her 
hand and smile, because I liked it so.  That action was an epitome 
of my sister's life.

I had been gone a fortnight when the telegram was put into my 
hands.  I had got a letter from my sister, a few hours before, 
saying that all was well at home.  The telegram said in five words 
that she had died suddenly the previous night.  There was no 
mention of my mother, and I was three days' journey from home.

The news I got on reaching London was this: my mother did not 
understand that her daughter was dead, and they were waiting for me 
to tell her.

I need not have been such a coward.  This is how these two died - 
for, after all, I was too late by twelve hours to see my mother 
alive.

Their last night was almost gleeful.  In the old days that hour 
before my mother's gas was lowered had so often been the happiest 
that my pen steals back to it again and again as I write: it was 
the time when my mother lay smiling in bed and we were gathered 
round her like children at play, our reticence scattered on the 
floor or tossed in sport from hand to hand, the author become so 
boisterous that in the pauses they were holding him in check by 
force.  Rather woful had been some attempts latterly to renew those 
evenings, when my mother might be brought to the verge of them, as 
if some familiar echo called her, but where she was she did not 
clearly know, because the past was roaring in her ears like a great 
sea.  But this night was a last gift to my sister.  The joyousness 
of their voices drew the others in the house upstairs, where for 
more than an hour my mother was the centre of a merry party and so 
clear of mental eye that they, who were at first cautious, 
abandoned themselves to the sport, and whatever they said, by way 
of humorous rally, she instantly capped as of old, turning their 
darts against themselves until in self-defence they were three to 
one, and the three hard pressed.  How my sister must have been 
rejoicing.  Once again she could cry, 'Was there ever such a 
woman!'  They tell me that such a happiness was on the daughter's 
face that my mother commented on it, that having risen to go they 
sat down again, fascinated by the radiance of these two.  And when 
eventually they went, the last words they heard were, 'They are 
gone, you see, mother, but I am here, I will never leave you,' and 
'Na, you winna leave me; fine I know that.'  For some time 
afterwards their voices could be heard from downstairs, but what 
they talked of is not known.  And then came silence.  Had I been at 
home I should have been in the room again several times, turning 
the handle of the door softly, releasing it so that it did not 
creak, and standing looking at them.  It had been so a thousand 
times.  But that night, would I have slipped out again, mind at 
rest, or should I have seen the change coming while they slept?

Let it be told in the fewest words.  My sister awoke next morning 
with a headache.  She had always been a martyr to headaches, but 
this one, like many another, seemed to be unusually severe.  
Nevertheless she rose and lit my mother's fire and brought up her 
breakfast, and then had to return to bed.  She was not able to 
write her daily letter to me, saying how my mother was, and almost 
the last thing she did was to ask my father to write it, and not to 
let on that she was ill, as it would distress me.  The doctor was 
called, but she rapidly became unconscious.  In this state she was 
removed from my mother's bed to another.  It was discovered that 
she was suffering from an internal disease.  No one had guessed it.  
She herself never knew.  Nothing could be done.  In this 
unconsciousness she passed away, without knowing that she was 
leaving her mother.  Had I known, when I heard of her death, that 
she had been saved that pain, surely I could have gone home more 
bravely with the words,


Art thou afraid His power fail
When comes thy evil day?


Ah, you would think so, I should have thought so, but I know myself 
now.  When I reached London I did hear how my sister died, but 
still I was afraid.  I saw myself in my mother's room telling her 
why the door of the next room was locked, and I was afraid.  God 
had done so much, and yet I could not look confidently to Him for 
the little that was left to do.  'O ye of little faith!'  These are 
the words I seem to hear my mother saying to me now, and she looks 
at me so sorrowfully.

He did it very easily, and it has ceased to seem marvellous to me 
because it was so plainly His doing.  My timid mother saw the one 
who was never to leave her carried unconscious from the room, and 
she did not break down.  She who used to wring her hands if her 
daughter was gone for a moment never asked for her again, they were 
afraid to mention her name; an awe fell upon them.  But I am sure 
they need not have been so anxious.  There are mysteries in life 
and death, but this was not one of them.  A child can understand 
what happened.  God said that my sister must come first, but He put 
His hand on my mother's eyes at that moment and she was altered.

They told her that I was on my way home, and she said with a 
confident smile, 'He will come as quick as trains can bring him.'  
That is my reward, that is what I have got for my books.  
Everything I could do for her in this life I have done since I was 
a boy; I look back through the years and I cannot see the smallest 
thing left undone.

They were buried together on my mother's seventy-sixth birthday, 
though there had been three days between their deaths.  On the last 
day, my mother insisted on rising from bed and going through the 
house.  The arms that had so often helped her on that journey were 
now cold in death, but there were others only less loving, and she 
went slowly from room to room like one bidding good-bye, and in 
mine she said, 'The beautiful rows upon rows of books, ant he said 
every one of them was mine, all mine!' and in the east room, which 
was her greatest triumph, she said caressingly, 'My nain bonny 
room!'  All this time there seemed to be something that she wanted, 
but the one was dead who always knew what she wanted, and they 
produced many things at which she shook her head.  They did not 
know then that she was dying, but they followed her through the 
house in some apprehension, and after she returned to bed they saw 
that she was becoming very weak.  Once she said eagerly, 'Is that 
you, David?' and again she thought she heard her father knocking 
the snow off his boots.  Her desire for that which she could not 
name came back to her, and at last they saw that what she wanted 
was the old christening robe.  It was brought to her, and she 
unfolded it with trembling, exultant hands, and when she had made 
sure that it was still of virgin fairness her old arms went round 
it adoringly, and upon her face there was the ineffable mysterious 
glow of motherhood.  Suddenly she said, 'Wha's bairn's dead? is a 
bairn of mine dead?' but those watching dared not speak, and then 
slowly as if with an effort of memory she repeated our names aloud 
in the order in which we were born.  Only one, who should have come 
third among the ten, did she omit, the one in the next room, but at 
the end, after a pause, she said her name and repeated it again and 
again and again, lingering over it as if it were the most exquisite 
music and this her dying song.  And yet it was a very commonplace 
name.

They knew now that she was dying.  She told them to fold up the 
christening robe and almost sharply she watched them put it away, 
and then for some time she talked of the long lovely life that had 
been hers, and of Him to whom she owed it.  She said good-bye to 
them all, and at last turned her face to the side where her best-
beloved had lain, and for over an hour she prayed.  They only 
caught the words now and again, and the last they heard were 'God' 
and 'love.'  I think God was smiling when He took her to Him, as He 
had so often smiled at her during those seventy-six years.

I saw her lying dead, and her face was beautiful and serene.  But 
it was the other room I entered first, and it was by my sister's 
side that I fell upon my knees.  The rounded completeness of a 
woman's life that was my mother's had not been for her.  She would 
not have it at the price.  'I'll never leave you, mother.' - 'Fine 
I know you'll never leave me.'  The fierce joy of loving too much, 
it is a terrible thing.  My sister's mouth was firmly closed, as if 
she had got her way.

And now I am left without them, but I trust my memory will ever go 
back to those happy days, not to rush through them, but dallying 
here and there, even as my mother wanders through my books.  And if 
I also live to a time when age must dim my mind and the past comes 
sweeping back like the shades of night over the bare road of the 
present it will not, I believe, be my youth I shall see but hers, 
not a boy clinging to his mother's skirt and crying, 'Wait till I'm 
a man, and you'll lie on feathers,' but a little girl in a magenta 
frock and a white pinafore, who comes toward me through the long 
parks, singing to herself, and carrying her father's dinner in a 
flagon.