by Unknown
Snecky never allowed himself to degenerate into a mere machine. His proclamations were provided by those who employed him, but his soul was his own. Having cried a potato roup he would sometimes add a word of warning, such as, “I wudna advise ye, lads, to hae onything to do wi’ thae tatties; they’re diseased.” Once, just before the cattle market, he was sent round by a local laird to announce that any drover found taking the short cut to the hill through the grounds of Muckle Plowy would be prosecuted to the utmost limits of the law. The people were aghast. “Hoots, lads,” Snecky said; “dinna fash yoursels. It’s juist a haver o’ the grieve’s.” One of Hobart’s ways of striking terror into evildoers was to announce, when crying a crime, that he himself knew perfectly well who the culprit was. “I see him brawly,” he would say, “standing afore me, an’ if he disna instantly mak retribution, I am determined this very day to mak a public example of him.”
Before the time of the Burke and Hare murders Snecky’s father was sent round Thrums to proclaim the startling news that a grave in the kirkyard had been tampered with. The “resurrectionist” scare was at its height then, and the patriarch, who was one of the men in Thrums paid to watch new graves in the night-time, has often told the story. The town was in a ferment as the news spread, and there were fierce suspicious men among Hobart’s hearers who already had the rifler of graves in their eye.
He was a man who worked for the farmers when they required an extra hand, and loafed about the square when they could do without him. No one had a good word for him, and lately he had been flush of money. That was sufficient. There was a rush of angry men through the “pend” that led to his habitation, and he was dragged, panting and terrified, to the kirkyard before he understood what it all meant. To the grave they hurried him, and almost without a word handed him a spade. The whole town gathered round the spot — a sullen crowd, the women only breaking the silence with their sobs, and te children clinging to their gowns. The suspected resurrectionist understood what was wanted of him, and, flinging off his jacket, began to reopen the grave. Presently the spade struck upon wood, and by and by part of the coffin came in view. That was nothing, for the resurrectionists had a way of breaking the coffin at one end and drawing out the body with tongs. The digger knew this. He broke the boards with the spade and revealed an arm. The people convinced, he dropped the arm savagely, leapt out of the grave and went his way, leaving them to shovel back the earth themselves. There was humour in the old family as well as in their lodger. I found this out slowly. They used to gather round their peat fire in the evening, after the poultry had gone to sleep on the kitchen rafters, and take off their neighbours. None of them ever laughed; but their neighbours did afford them subject for gossip, and the old man was very sarcastic over other people’s old-fashioned ways. When one of the family wanted to go out he did it gradually. He would be sitting “into the fire” browning his corduroy trousers, and he would get up slowly. Then he gazed solemnly before him for a time, and after that, if you watched him narrowly, you would see that he was really moving to the door. Another member of the family took the vacant seat with the same precautions. Will’um, the eldest, has a gun, which customarily stands behind the old eight-day clock; and he takes it with him to the garden to shoot the blackbirds. Long before Will’um is ready to let fly, the blackbirds have gone away; and so the gun is never, never fired: but there is a determined look on Will’um’s face when he returns from the garden.
In the stormy days of his youth the old man had been a “Black Nib.” The Black Nibs were the persons who agitated against the French war; and the public feeling against them ran strong and deep. In Thrums the local Black Nibs were burned in effigy, and whenever they put their heads out of doors they risked being stoned. Even where the authorities were unprejudiced they were helpless to interfere; and as a rule they were as bitter against the Black Nibs as the populace themselves. Once the patriarch was running through the street with a score of the enemy at his heels, and the bailie, opening his window, shouted to them, “Stane the Black Nib oot o’ the toon!”
When the patriarch was a young man he was a follower of pleasure. This is the one thing about him that his family have never been able to understand. A solemn stroll through the kirkyard was not sufficient relaxation in those riotous times, after a hard day at the loom; and he rarely lost a chance of going to see a man hanged. There was a good deal of hanging in those days; and yet the authorities had an ugly way of reprieving condemned men on whom the sightseers had been counting. An air of gloom would gather on my old friend’s countenance when he told how he and his contemporaries in Thrums trudged every Saturday for six weeks to the county town, many miles distant, to witness the execution of some criminal in whom they had a local interest, and who, after disappointing them again and again, was said to have been bought off by a friend. His crime had been stolen entrance into a house in Thrums by the chimney, with intent to rob; and, though this old-fashioned family did not see it, not the least noticeable incident in the scrimmage that followed was the prudence of the canny housewife. When she saw the legs coming down the lum, she rushed to the kail-pot which was on the fire and put on the lid. She confessed that this was not done to prevent the visitor’s scalding himself, but to save the broth.
The old man was repeated in his three sons. They told his stories precisely as he did himself, taking as long in the telling, and making the points in exactly the same way. By and by they will come to think that they themselves were of those past times. Already the young ones look like contemporaries of their father.
CHAPTER XI
LITTLE RATHIE’S “BURAL”
Devout-under-difficulties would have been the name of Lang Tammas had he been of Covenanting times. So I thought one wintry afternoon, years before I went to the schoolhouse, when he dropped in to ask the pleasure of my company to the farmer of Little Rathie’s “bural.” As a good Auld Licht, Tammas reserved his swallow-tail coat and “lum hat” (chimney pot) for the kirk and funerals; but the coat would have flapped villainously, to Tammas’s eternal ignominy, had he for one rash moment relaxed his hold on the bottom button, and it was only by walking sideways, as horses sometimes try to do, that the hat could be kept at the angle of decorum. Let it not be thought that Tammas had asked me to Little Rathie’s funeral on his own responsibility. Burals were among the few events to break the monotony of an Auld Licht winter, and invitations were as much sought after as cards to my lady’s dances in the south. This had been a fair average season for Tammas, though of his four burials one had been a bairn’s — a mere bagatelle; but had it not been for the death of Little Rathie I would probably not have been out that year at all.
The small farm of Little Rathie lies two miles from Thrums, and Tammas and I trudged manfully through the snow, adding to our numbers as we went. The dress of none differed materially from the precentor’s, and the general effect was of septuagenarians in each other’s best clothes, though living in low-roofed houses had bent most of them before their time. By a rearrangement of garments, such as making Tammas change coat, hat, and trousers with Cragiebuckle, Silva McQueen, and Sam’l Wilkie respectively, a dexterous tailor might perhaps have supplied each with a “fit.” The talk was chiefly of Little Rathie, and sometimes threatened to become animated, when another mourner would fall in and restore the more fitting gloom.
“Ay, ay,” the new comer would say, by way of responding to the sober salutation, “Ay, Johnny.” Then there was silence, but for the “gluck” with which we lifted our feet from the slush.
“So Little Rathie’s been ta’en awa’,” Johnny would venture to say, by and by.
“He’s gone, Johnny; ay, man, he is so.”
“Death must come to all,” some one would waken up to murmur.
“Ay,” Lang Tammas would reply, putting on the coping-stone, “in the morning we are strong, and in the evening we are cut down.”
“We are so, Tammas; ou ay, we are so; we’re here the wan day an’ gone the neist.�
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“Little Rathie wasna a crittur I took till; no, I canna say he was,” said Bowie Haggart, so called because his legs described a parabola, “but he maks a very creeditable corp (corpse). I will say that for him. It’s wonderfu’ hoo death improves a body. Ye cudna hae said as Little Rathie was a weelfaured man when he was i’ the flesh.”
Bowie was the wright, and attended burials in his official capacity. He had the gift of words to an uncommon degree, and I do not forget his crushing blow at the reputation of the poet Burns, as delivered under the auspices of the Thrums Literary Society. “I am of opeenion,” said Bowie, “that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion.”
“He was a queer stock, Little Rathie, michty queer,” said Tammas Haggart, Bowie’s brother, who was a queer stock himself, but was not aware of it; “but, ou, I’m thinkin’ the wife had something to do wi’t. She was ill to manage, an’ Little Rathie hadna the way o’ the women. He hadna the knack o’ managin’ them ‘s ye micht say — no, Little Rathie hadna the knack.”
“They’re kittle cattle, the women,” said the farmer of Craigiebuckle — son of the Craigiebuckle mentioned elsewhere — a little gloomily. “I’ve often thocht maiterimony is no onlike the lucky bags th’ auld wines has at the muckly. There’s prizes an’ blanks baith inside, but, losh, ye’re far frae sure what ye’ll draw oot when ye put in yer han’.”
“Ou, weel,” said Tammas, complacently, “there’s truth in what ye say, but the women can be managed if we have the knack.”
“Some o’ them,” said Cragiebuckle, woefully.
“Ye had yer wark wi’ the wife yersel, Tammas, so ye had,” observed Lang Tammas, unbending to suit his company.
“Ye’re speakin’ aboot the bit wife’s bural,” said Tammas Haggart, with a chuckle, “ay, ay, that brocht her to reason.”
Without much pressure Haggart retold a story known to the majority of his hearers. He had not the “knack” of managing women apparently when he married, for he and his gipsy wife “agreed ill thegither” at first. Once Chirsty left him and took up her abode in a house just across the wynd. Instead of routing her out, Tammas, without taking any one into his confidence, determined to treat Chirsty as dead, and celebrate her decease in a “lyke wake” — a last wake. These wakes were very general in Thrums in the old days, though they had ceased to be common by the date of Little Rathie’s death. For three days before the burial the friends and neighbours of the mourners were invited into the house to partake of food and drink by the side of the corpse. The dead lay on chairs covered with a white sheet. Dirges were sung, and the deceased was extolled, but when night came the lights were extinguished, and the corpse was left alone. On the morning of the funeral tables were spread with a white cloth outside the house, and food and drink were placed upon them. No neighbour could pass the tables without paying his respects to the dead; and even when the house was in a busy, narrow thoroughfare, this part of the ceremony was never omitted. Tammas did not give Chirsty a wake inside the house; but one Friday morning — it was market-day, and the square was consequently full — it went through the town that the tables were spread before his door. Young and old collected, wandering round the house, and Tammas stood at the tables in his blacks inviting every one to eat and drink. He was pressed to tell what it meant; but nothing could be got from him except that his wife was dead. At times he pressed his hands to his heart, and then he would make wry faces, trying hard to cry. Chirsty watched from a window across the street, until she perhaps began to fear that she really was dead. Unable to stand it any longer, she rushed out into her husband’s arms, and shortly afterwards she could have been seen dismantling the tables.
“She’s gone this fower year,” Tammas said, when he had finished his story, “but up to the end I had no more trouble wi’ Chirsty. No, I had the knack o’ her.”
“I’ve heard tell, though,” said the sceptical Craigiebuckle, “as Chirsty only cam back to ye because she cudna bear to see the fowk makkin’ sae free wi’ the whisky.”
“I mind hoo she bottled it up at ance, and drove the laddies awa’,” said Bowie, “an’ I hae seen her after that, Tammas, giein’ ye up yer fut an’ you no sayin’ a word.”
“Ou, ay,” said the wife-tamer, in the tone of a man who could afford to be generous in trifles, “women maun talk, an’ a man hasna aye time to conterdick them, but frae that day I had the knack o’ Chirsty.”
“Donal Elshioner’s was a very seemilar case,” broke in Snecky Hobart, shrilly. “Maist o’ ye’ll mind ‘at Donal was michty plague’t wi’ a drucken wife. Ay, weel, wan day Bowie’s man was carryin’ a coffin past Donal’s door, and Donal an’ the wife was there. Says Donal, ‘Put doon yer coffin, my man, an’ tell’s wha it’s for.’ The laddie rests the coffin on its end, an’ says he, ‘It’s for Davie Fairbrother’s guidwife.’ ‘Ay, then,’ says Donal, ‘tak it awa’, tak it awa’ to Davie, an’ tell ‘im as ye kin a man wi’ a wife ‘at wid be glad to neifer (exchange) wi’ him.’ Man, that terrified Donal’s wife; it did so.”
As we delved up the twisting road between two fields, that leads to the farm of Little Rathie, the talk became less general, and another mourner who joined us there was told that the farmer was gone.
“We must all fade as a leaf,” said Lang Tammas.
“So we maun, so we maun,” admitted the newcomer. “They say,” he added, solemnly, “as Little Rathie has left a full teapot.”
The reference was to the safe in which the old people in the district stored their gains.
“He was thrifty,” said Tammas Haggart, “an’ shrewd, too, was Little Rathie. I mind Mr. Dishart admonishin’ him for no attendin’ a special weather service i’ the kirk, when Finny an’ Lintool, the twa adjoinin’ farmers, baith attendit. ‘Ou,’ says Little Rathie, ‘I thocht to mysel, thinks I, if they get rain for prayin’ for’t on Finny an’ Lintool, we’re bound to get the benefit o’t on Little Rathie.’”
“Tod,” said Snecky, “there’s some sense in that; an’ what says the minister?”
“I d’na kin what he said,” admitted Haggart; “but he took Little Rathie up to the manse, an’ if ever I saw a man lookin’ sma’, it was Little Rathie when he cam oot.”
The deceased had left behind him a daughter (herself now known as Little Rathie), quite capable of attending to the ramshackle “but and ben”; and I remember how she nipped off Tammas’s consolations to go out and feed the hens. To the number of about twenty we assembled round the end of the house to escape the bitter wind, and here I lost the precentor, who, as an Auld Licht elder, joined the chief mourners inside. The post of distinction at a funeral is near the coffin; but it is not given to every one to be a relative of the deceased, and there is always much competition and genteelly concealed disappointment over the few open vacancies. The window of the room was decently veiled, but the mourners outside knew what was happening within, and that it was not all prayer, neither mourning. A few of the more reverent uncovered their heads at intervals; but it would be idle to deny that there was a feeling that Little Rathie’s daughter was favouring Tammas and others somewhat invidiously. Indeed, Robbie Gibruth did not scruple to remark that she had made “an inauspeecious beginning.” Tammas Haggart, who was melancholy when not sarcastic, though he brightened up wonderfully at funerals, reminded Robbie that disappointment is the lot of man on his earthly pilgrimage; but Haggart knew who were to be invited back after the burial to the farm, and was inclined to make much of his position. The secret would doubtless have been wormed from him had not public attention been directed into another channel. A prayer was certainly being offered up inside; but the voice was not the voice of the minister.
Lang Tammas told me afterwards that it had seemed at one time “very questionable” whether Little Rathie would be buried that day at all. The incomprehensible absence of Mr. Dishart (afterwards satisfactorily explained) had raised the unexpected question of the legality of a burial in a case
where the minister had not prayed over the “corp.” There had even been an indulgence in hot words, and the Reverend Alexander Kewans, a “stickit minister,” but not of the Auld Licht persuasion, had withdrawn in dudgeon on hearing Tammas asked to conduct the ceremony instead of himself. But, great as Tammas was on religious questions, a pillar of the Auld Licht kirk, the Shorter Catechism at his finger-ends, a sad want of words at the very time when he needed them most, incapacitated him for prayer in public, and it was providential that Bowie proved himself a man of parts. But Tammas tells me that the wright grossly abused his position, by praying at such length that Craigiebuckle fell asleep, and the mistress had to rise and hang the pot on the fire higher up the joist, lest its contents should burn before the return from the funeral. Loury grew the sky, and more and more anxious the face of Little Rathie’s daughter, and still Bowie prayed on. Had it not been for the impatience of the precentor and the grumbling of the mourners outside, there is no saying when the remains would have been lifted through the “bole,” or little window.
Hearses had hardly come in at this time and the coffin was carried by the mourners on long stakes. The straggling procession of pedestrians behind wound its slow way in the waning light to the kirkyard, showing startlingly black against the dazzling snow; and it was not until the earth rattled on the coffin-lid that Little Rathie’s nearest male relative seemed to remember his last mournful duty to the dead. Sidling up to the favoured mourners, he remarked casually and in the most emotionless tone he could assume: “They’re expec’in ye to stap doon the length o’ Little Rathie noo. Aye, aye, he’s gone. Na, na, nae refoosal, Da-avit; ye was aye a guid friend till him, an’ it’s onything a body can do for him noo.”