Across the Plains (eBook)

CHAPTER VII - THE LANTERN-BEARERS

I

THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly  fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of  existence.  The place was created seemingly on purpose for the  diversion of young gentlemen.  A street or two of houses, mostly  red and many of, them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about  the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a  shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with  flowers; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward  parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of  blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with golf-balls and  bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that  remarkable cigar) and the LONDON JOURNAL, dear to me for its  startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive  names:  such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of  the town.  These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two  sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to  lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough)  to cocknify the scene:  a haven in the rocks in front:  in front of  that, a file of gray islets:  to the left, endless links and sand  wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits  and soaring gulls:  to the right, a range of seaward crags, one  rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient  fortress on the brink of one; coves between - now charmed into  sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting  surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and  southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and  pungent of the sea - in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward  like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan- geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke.   This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker;  and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King  James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang  with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in  that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure.  You might golf if  you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed.  You might  secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of  elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted  here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold  homes of anchorites.  To fit themselves for life, and with a  special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for  the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny  pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew  the glen with these apprentices.  Again, you might join our fishing  parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of  little anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to  the to the much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and  consequent shrill recrimination - shrill as the geese themselves.   Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but  though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be  regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honour  that a boy should eat all that he had taken.  Or again, you might  climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the  buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke  and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships.  You  might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically  call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging  your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their  guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you  headlong ere it had drowned your knees.  Or you might explore the  tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots  of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader  from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck  of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the  sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide  and the menaced line of your retreat.  And then you might go  Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air:   digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a  fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there - if they were truly  apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us  off with some inferior and quite local fruit capable of resolving,  in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine;  or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and  visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling  turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans (the worst, I  must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that  had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of  east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign  among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an  adventure in itself.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were  joyous.  Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat  at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top  of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a  cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and  the bandage all bloody - horror! - the fisher-wife herself, who  continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as  I recall the scene) darkens daylight.  She was lodged in the little  old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there,  with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired.  She had been  tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard  that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still  pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory.  Nor shall I  readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor  died, and a dark old woman continued to dwell alone with the dead  body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one  of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were  clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house of  mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice  of language.  It was a pair of very colourless urchins that fled  down the lane from this remarkable experience!  But I recall with a  more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the  coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of  rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour  mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had  any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the  pier-head, where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and  husband and sons - their whole wealth and their whole family -  engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of  neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squalling  and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic  Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory  dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding.  It  was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of  our two months' holiday there.  Maybe it still flourishes in its  native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic  forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in  their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless  art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the  rise of the United States.  It may still flourish in its native  spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to  introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm  being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

The idle manner of it was this:-

Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and  the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our- respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.   The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce  of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to  garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary.  We  wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them,  such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat.  They smelled  noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they  would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure  of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his  top-coat asked for nothing more.  The fishermen used lanterns about  their boats, and it was from...