JOHN GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE, VISCOUNT DUNDEE.JOHN GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE, VISCOUNT DUNDEE.
Another century, and James III is king. This least royal of the Stewarts, jealous of his more royal brother, locked the Duke of Albany in the castle, and felt secure. But the Duke had friends. A French clipper came into Leith. It brought wine to Albany, and the wine cask contained a rope. Inviting his guardians to sup with him, he plied them with heated wine, perhaps drugged wine, then, the dagger. Albany's servant insisted on going down the rope first. It was short, he fell the rest of the distance. Albany hurried back for the sheets from his bed, made his safe way down. He carried the servant man all the way to Leith—he had just "whingered" the guard—found the boat, and safety, and France.
Up the Rock, in Covenanting days, stole Claverhouse, the Bonnie Dundee, to a secret conference with the Duke of Gordon, hoping to win him away to Stewart loyalty and the North.
I cannot remember that any of Scott's characters went this way. He thought it "scant footing for a cat." But Stevenson knew the way. Perhaps not actually, but he sent morethan one of his characters up or down the Rock—St. Ives with a rope that was long enough to reach.
Perhaps the best view of Edinburgh—only perhaps, for each view differs, and you have not seen the whole city unless you have seen it from the various vantage points—is that from the Calton Hill. For a very good reason. The Hill itself is negligible enough, although it is impossible to understand Edinburgh, to understand Scotland, unless you have looked on the architectural remnants on this Hill, and considered them philosophically. But, as Stevenson said—"Of all places for a view, the Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you can see the castle, which you lose from the castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat." An excellent reason, which also places the castle and Arthur's Seat.
Calton Hill does not tower so high over the city as these other two points; one may still look up to Arthur's Seat, one may look across to the castle. Yet, the city lies near. Yet, the country rolls out to the Firth, and out to the Pentlands. Perhaps a gray-sea haze dulls thefar edge of the far Kingdom of Fife. Perhaps a blue haze hangs over the Pentlands. Perhaps a smoke-cloud makes a nearer sky for the town itself, this Auld Reekie. Not only perhaps, but very probably. There are clear days in Edinburgh. They are to be treasured. There is no air more stimulating in all the world. October sometimes slips into the other months of the year, fills the air with wine, clears the air of filament. But, not often, not often for the tourist from beyond seas who makes Edinburgh in the summer. But still it is possible from Calton Hill to catch the farthest glory of the encircling hills, and the near glory of the ever glorious city.
The Hill itself is a place of monuments, and a very pretentious place. Also, very absurd. I suppose it is possible to be of two minds about the remnant of the Parthenon which stands so conspicuously on the highest plateau, a construction dating back to that royal time when George the Fourth came to this northern capital, and was—alas!—received as though he were Bonnie Prince Charlie himself; and was received—again alas!—by Sir Walter clad in a Campbell plaid, and as loyal to the Regent, the florid Florizel, as he had been to Prince Charles in the "Waverleys." Because of allthese loyalties this never finished monument, with its twelve columns and architrave spread above, looks sufficiently pathetic, and sufficiently absurd. "A very suitable monument to certain national characteristics," said a later Scots writer, who perhaps never ceased being a Jacobite.
There are monuments; one to Dugald Stewart, and the visitor not philosophical is apt to ask, Who was Dugald Stewart? There is a memorial to Burns whose friend Willie that brewed a peck o' malt lies in the Old Calton burying ground near by. Hume lies there, too, and Dr. John Brown, and Stevenson's dead.
"There on the sunny frontage of a hill,Hard by the House of Kings, repose the dead,My dead, the ready and the strong of word.Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;The sea bombards their founded towers; the nightThrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificersOne after one, here in this grated cell,Where the rain erases and the dust consumes,Fell upon lasting silence."
There is a monument to Lord Nelson. And looking as though he belonged there is a bronze figure of Abraham Lincoln.
All this lies about, with casual sheep cropping the grass.
But, there lies the city. And there lies the country.
To the south rises Arthur's Seat, the lion. The much castellated jail, is beneath you, another absurd elaborate building, a castle after castle-days. Farther a-city lies Holyrood, with the ruined abbey, the Queen Mary wing, and the scarlet patch of the sentinel moving to and fro and guarding all this vanished greatness. Nothing more appeals than this sentinel-watch of the ghosts of the past.
Turn but a little and the Old Town lies before you, the castle splendid, still the guardian, the long ridge of the High Street with its jagged buildings that from here rise almost to the purple edge of the hilly Pentland background, with the spire of the Tolbooth and the crown of St. Giles breaking against the sky. And down at the foot of the vantage Hill stretches Princes Street with the Scott monument rising athwart the haze of city and sky.
From the north edge of Calton there is a more empty panorama, but still significant. Now it is bound in with tenements high and thick, but in the golden days it was a steep hillside leading down to a jousting ground. Tradition has it that Bothwell launched his horse down its almost-precipice, and so entered the tiltingground, while ladies' bright eyes rained influence and gave the prize; but most glowing were the eyes of Mary.
Beyond, the suburbs fill in the two miles that stretch to Leith, and to the Firth, glittering out to the far sea.
At night, if you have no fear of hobgoblins or of hooligans, Calton Hill is an experience. It is a still place, the silence the greater because the city lies so near, and looks so busy with its twinkling lights. A gulf of gloom lies between. The night is velvet black, a drop curtain against which is thrown the star-pricked map of the city. One can well believe how the young Stevenson, in those romantic days when he carried a lantern under his jacket, used to climb this hill venturesomely, and with the dog in "Chanticler," exclaim, "I shall never forget the first night I lapped up the stars." It is something to lap stars from the black pool which is Edinburgh by night.
If you have, happily, lived in a high city, Boston, Seattle, Duluth, Denver, St. Paul, San Francisco, with water and land combined, you, too, have lingered upon a heaven-kissed hill on such a night as this, and Edinburgh seems native.
Scott, of course, must have known CaltonHill, although Salisbury Crags under Arthur's Seat, with its more feasible promenade, better appealed to him when he was writing the "Waverleys." There is an American who has written of the Hill, a young inland American whom the gods loved to an early death. I remember hearing Arthur Upson talk of days and nights on the Calton, and his sonnet catches the note—
"High and alone I stood on Calton HillAbove the scene that was so dear to himWhose exile dreams of it made exile dim.October wooed the folded valleys tillIn mist they blurred, even as our eye upfillUnder a too-sweet memory; spires did swim,And gables, rust-red, on the gray sea's brim—But on these heights the air was soft and still,Yet, not all still; an alien breeze will turnHere, as from bournes in aromatic seas,As round old shrines a new-freed soul might yearnWith incense of rich earthly reveries.Vanish the isles: Mist, exile, searching pain,But the brave soul is freed, is home again."
F
rom Edinburgh as I looked out on the Forth from every vantage point, I was conscious of the hills of Fife ever backing in the prospect. And I kept repeating to myself the old rhyme of the witches—
"The Thane of Fife had a wife,Ah, where is she now!"
I determined to set sail and find not the wife, but the kingdom.
It is a continuing splendour, this name—the Kingdom of Fife. Than the thing nothing could be less royal, more democratic. For Fifeshire is given over to farm lands and coal fields and treeless stretches, and the fringe of Fife is made up of fishing villages "a hodden gray plaid wi' a gowden fringe," said a King Jamie. It lies there, separate from Scotland, although very Scottish, between the firths of the Forth and the Tay, with the Ochil hills a barrier on the landside. The separating firths are nowconnected with Scotland by great bridges, over which the trains pass with reluctance. And the wind is always blowing in Fife, a cold, stern, relentless, Calvinistic wind, off the North Sea. Not by every wind of doctrine but by a disciplining Calvinistic wind is this Kingdom swept into conformity.
There is no end of castles and of historic memories lying like pebbles upon the seashore of the Firth. Pick up any sea shell—I do not remember seeing any, so combed have these beaches been from the memory of man—and it will whisper a tale in your ear.
But there is for me but one pilgrimage to be made in Fifeshire, to Kirkcaldy; to the place, not of Ravenscraig Castle, nor because Adam Smith and political economy were here born twins, nor because Carlyle taught here for two years, nor because Edward Irving preached here; their dwellings and schools and graves can be seen. But because Marjorie Fleming was born here, passed to and fro, from Granton to Burntisland, in those brief beautiful nine years that were granted to her, and to us, and lies buried in the old kirkyard of Abbotshall.
Perhaps you do not know Marjorie. She was the friend, the intimate friend of Sir Walter Scott. And I can but think how large andvoid the world was a century ago, in that Charles Lamb was living in London when Marjorie was living in Kirkcaldy, and was dreaming of his "Dream Children," when he might have known this most precious child, fit to be the friend of Lamb as she was of Sir Walter.
Other men who have loved her with a tenderness which can belong but to the living child, immortally living, are Dr. John Brown who wrote the wonder book about her fifty years ago, through which most of us have claimed Marjorie as our own, and Mark Twain, who only a month before he died—and joined her—wrote as tenderly and whimsically of her as he ever wrote of any child or any maid. Among such august company we almost hesitate to enter, but surely at this distance of time we may lay our love beside that of the great men who found Pet Marjorie one of the most precious human treasures the world has ever held.
She was but a little girl, and only nine years all told, when the last day came to her a hundred and more years ago, December 19, 1811. The first six years she lived in Kirkcaldy, "my native town which though dirty is clene in the country," Marjorie wrote this from Edinburgh a little patronizingly, and Marjorie was never strong on spelling. The next three years shelived with her aunt in the Scottish capital, where she wrote those journals and letters which have kept her memory warm to this day. In July of 1811 she returned to the town by the North Sea, and in December she was gone.
In the morning of the day on which I made my pilgrimage I went up to the Parliament buildings in the Old Town, looked them about, saw the lawyers pacing to and fro, as Stevenson had paced, but not for long—the absurdity of it!—and then down the hill in the shadow of three men.
"One November afternoon in 1810"—(the year in which the "Lady of the Lake" was published) "three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like school boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet." They were Lord Erskine, William Clerk—and the third we all know; what service of romance has he not performed for us! As the snow blattered in his face he muttered, "how it raves and drifts! On-ding o' snaw—aye, that's the word, on-ding." And so he approached his own door, Castle Street, No. 39. There, over the door, looking forth on the world, is his face to-day, looking up Young Street.
Then, as he grew restless and would awa, I followed him through Young Street up to No. 1, North Charlotte Street. It is a substantial building, still of dignified and fair estate; neighbourhoods are not transformed in a Scots century as they are in America. But it carries no tablet to tell the world that here Marjorie lived. It was here that at the age of six she wrote her first letter to Isa Keith. It was here that Marjorie saw "regency bonnets" and with eyes of envy; as indeed she envied and desired with the passionate depths of her nature all lovely and strange things. Here she read the Newgate calendar, and found it a fascinating affair—Marjorie less than nine! And here that Isabel Keith, her adored cousin, would not permit the little bookworm to read much of lovers or to talk of them. Marjorie says very gravely, "a great many authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally," but Isa was never able quite to cure Marjorie of her interest in love.
That evening Sir Walter carried her, through the "on-ding o' snaw," in a shepherd's plaid, over to Castle Street. I walked through the narrow stone-lined thoroughfare on a hot July morning—and I could feel the cold and snow of that winter a century back, and see the strong,lame, great man, carrying the wee wifie in the neuk of his plaid, to the warm firelight of his castle. Marjorie and he would romp there the evening long. She would hear him say his lessons, "Ziccoty, diccoty, dock," or "Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven," while Marjorie "grew quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidness."
Then they would read ballads together; and then "he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in King John till he swayed to and fro sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature, like one possessed, repeating—
"'For I am sick, and capable of fears,Oppressed with wrongs, and therefore full of fears;A widow, husbandless, subject to fears;A woman, naturally born to fears.'"
I walked out through what used to be fields, and is now much suburban dwelling, toward Braehead.—"I am going to-morrow to a delightful place, Braehead by name, where there is ducks, cocks, bubblyjocks, 2 dogs, 2 cats and swine which is delightful"—to Ravelston—"I am at Ravelston enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing sweetly, the calf doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face."
Ravelston is still a place of delight, with itsgreat cliffs breaking the surface of the park and a deep-lying lake with dark woodlands. I wish Marjorie might have known the ballad by Sydney Dobell; it has the magic quality she would have felt.
"Ravelston, Ravelston,The merry path that leadsDown the golden morning hill,And through the silver meads;"She sang her song, she kept her kine,She sat beneath the thorn,When Andrew Keith of RavelstonRode thro' the Monday morn."Year after year, where Andrew came,Comes evening down the glade,And still there sits a moonshine ghostWhere sat the sunshine maid."She makes her immemorial moan,She keeps her shadowy kine;O Keith of RavelstonThe sorrows of thy line!"
In the late afternoon I took tram for Leith, changing of course at Pilrig, because Leith remains haughtily aloof from Edinburgh and emphasizes it through this break at the boundary. "When we came to Leith," says Boswell, "I talked perhaps with too boasting an air, how pretty the Frith of Forth looked; as indeed,after the prospect from Constantinople, of which I have been told, and that from Naples, which I have seen, I believe the view of the Frith and its environs from the Castle-hill of Edinburgh is the finest prospect in Europe, 'Aye,' replied Dr. Johnson, 'that is the state of the world. Water is the same everywhere.'"
And so, down to the pier, stopping on the way to look at a New Haven fishwife in her picturesque costume, which she has worn ever since the Danes came over. Yes, and looking for a suitable piece of earth for Queen Magdalene to kiss, "Scottis eard!" Well, if not here, there is Scottis eard worthy elsewhere.
I asked for the ferry to Burnt-is-land. The conductor of the tram looked, yes, and laughed. Burnt-island, he dared,daredto repeat. And so, I took ferry from Granton to—Burnt-island.
It is a long journey across the Firth. Far down the waters rises the bold rock of the Bass, around which I had sailed a day before, looking for a landing for some one more ponderous than solan geese or kittie wake, and not finding it; although I was told that from Canty bay—excellent Scots name—the innkeeper will row you o'er, and you may walk where James I was waiting for the boat which should carry him to safety in France, and getting instead theboat which carried him to prison in England. Still I like to remember that Henry IV declared in explanation that he "could speak very good French" himself, if that were what they were sending Scottish Jamie o'er the water for; Henry who had years of the Hundred Years' War behind him.
TANTALLON CASTLE.TANTALLON CASTLE.
The rock is rent by a cavern running clean through. It's quite a terrific place, and seven acres of benty grass must have seemed small refuge for the Covenanters who were lodged here numerously in Killing Time.
On the mainshore, the Lothian, rises Tantallon Castle, where Marmion dared to beard Angus Bell-the-Cat. It still looks pretty tremendous, and still stands, like the Coliseum. "Ding doon Tantallon? Build a brig to the Bass!" runs the proud proverb.
But we are on our way across the Firth. There was a certain magic about it on my day of pilgrimage. The north shore lay sparkling in the late afternoon sun, blue shimmering land against a clear blue sky, the thin rim of the continent playing here and there with opalescent colour where man had builded village or castle, or where man had not destroyed the ancient green. The south shore lay vague and gray, and growing darker, against the fallingafternoon, while the Lammermuirs stood up in paler dusk in the background, and the sun blazed behind them. And all about the Firth glittered like an inland lake, a Great Lake. I thought of how the Roman galleys and Norse fleets had come this way, and looked and departed. And how kings had brought their armies here, and looked, perhaps besieged, and departed. And how time and time and time again, French fleets had sailed in here to help their continuing ally, Scotland. And how kings had sailed out from here to France, and how Scots knights had sailed out from here for France, the Crusades, anywhere that promised adventure. And here Saxon Margaret had sailed in to be Scotland's queen. And here Scottish Mary had sailed in to be Scotland's queen, and not to be. Far out in the offing the sun shone golden upon the brown sails of a single fishing boat, tacking to catch a homing wind, a ghost where once had sailed the war and merchant fleets of nations.
At Burntisland I did not pause to visit Rossend Castle where Mary is supposed to have had her affair with Chastelard; certainly not. Nor at Kinghorn, where Alexander III, within a few months after he had married in haunted Kelso, and within a few hours perhaps after hehad drunk the blude red wine in Dunfermline, came galloping by this way, the horse stumbled, the king fell, and
"Quhen Alysandyr oure King was dedeThat Scotland led in luve and le ...Succoure Scotland and remedeThat stands in perplexite."
If Kirkcaldy was a "lang toun" in the olden days, it is longer to-day, stretching from Linktown to Dysart, and broadening inland to Gallatown, where they make the famous Wemyss pottery. To-day Kirkcaldy makes linoleum and jute and engineering works, and it is the center of a string of fishing villages, a "metropolitan borough system," hundreds of boats fishing the North Sea with KY marked as their home port, when their sailor men make home in any of these picturesque and smelling villages, St. Monan, Pittenweem, Cellardyke, Crail where Mary of Lorraine landed, Largo where Sir Andrew Wood the admiral lived, and where Alexander Selkirk lived what time he did not live as Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, and Anstruther—
"Wha wad na be in loveWi' bonny Maggie Lauder,A piper met her gaen to FifeAnd speired what wast they ca'd her....I've lived in FifeBaith maid and wifeThese ten years and a quarter,Gin ye should come to Anster FairSpeir ye for Maggie Lauder."
There is also some castellated splendour, Ravenscraig, and Wemyss on the site of the castle of MacDuff, then of Fife, this Wemyss being the ill-fated place where Mary first met Darnley.
Abbotshall kirkyard is at the right of the railway station as the train pulls in to Kirkcaldy. In his book of Scotch pilgrimages when William Winter was on his way to St. Andrews, past Kirkcaldy, he wrote "gazing as I pass at its quaint church among the graves." I suppose he did not know what grave.
But first I would find where she had lived. Kirkcaldy is close set against the sea. Here on winding High Street, I found the house in which she had lived, standing much as it did no doubt a hundred years ago, except for a new coat of tan on the stone. From those upper windows Marjorie looked out on the coach going away toward Edinburgh. The ground floor is occupied by a book store, where I could buy no book about Marjorie. Under a window you enter the archway and find yourself in a little green-grassed court, which is all that is left of Marjorie's garden. The house proper fronted the garden in that comfortable excluding way which British people still prefer for their places of habitation. It is still occupied as a dwelling, and the nursery still looks as it did in Marjorie's day, and the drawing-room, where she wrote that letter to Isa Keith—"I now sit down on my botom to answer all your kind and beloved letters." The door of the nursery was open. I remembered those last days, when lying ill, her mother asked Marjorie if there was anything she wished. "Oh, yes, if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the Leal,' and I will lie still and think and enjoy myself."
"I'm wearin' awa', Jean,Like snaw wreaths in thaw, Jean,I'm wearin' awa',To the Land o' the Leal."
The kirkyard lies on the outskirts of the town. It was a beautiful place as the Scotch sun sank behind the Fife hills and the Firth. The organist was playing and the music drifted out through the narrow lancet windows when I found the little white cross marked "Pet Marjorie," and the old gray tombstone with its simple token, "M. F. 1811."
For a hundred years then she has been lying there. But Marjorie has become one of the immortal dream children of the world. I laid my fresh flowers beside another's which had withered, and went my ways into the dusk.
Past Kirkcaldy the road leaves the sea and runs northward through meadows between fields which have the look of centuries-old cultivation, at peace like the fields and villages of the English Midland, to St. Andrews.
"St. Andrews by the Northern Sea,A haunted town it is to me!A little city, worn and gray,The gray North Ocean girds it round;And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,The long sea-rollers surge and sound;And still the thin and biting sprayDrives down the melancholy street,And still endure, and still decay,Towers that the salt winds vainly beat.Ghost-like and shadowy they standDim mirrored in the wet sea-sands."St. Leonard's Chapel, long agoWe loitered idly where the tallFresh-budded mountain ashes blowWithin thy desecrated wall;The tough roots rent the tombs below,And April birds sang clamorous,We did not dream, we could not knowHow hardly Fate would deal with us!"O broken minster, looking forthBeyond the bay, above the town,O winter of the kindly North,O college of the scarlet gown!"
Small wonder St. Andrews is the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, and smaller wonder, remembering the Calvinistic wind, that here happened the brunt of the fight between the old faith and the new.
It is a clean and seemly town, with much historic memory and much present day dignity, a small gray town, "the essence of all the antiquity of Scotland in good clean condition," said Carlyle. Its ancient sights the cathedral and the castle; its living sight the university and the golf links.
The town stands on a promontory, three long streets converging on the cathedral and castle lying in ruins. The cathedral, a hundred years in the building, and very splendid in its wealthof detail, its vastness of space like that of York or Amiens, was dedicated in the days of The Bruce, with the king present to endow it with a hundred marks "for the mighty victory of the Scots at Bannockburn, by St. Andrew's, the guardian of the realm." For three hundred years its wax tapers lighted the old rites according to which The Bruce worshiped; he was not covenanted. Then the torch of the reformation was applied to it, the torch of the flaming tongue of John Knox.
To-day there are three towers left of the five—Dr. Johnson hoped that one which looked unstable on the day of his visit, would "fall on some of the posterity of John Knox; and no great matter!" There are massive walls. There is no roof between us and the sky, which, after all, does shelter the true faith, and if one misses the chanting of the monks echoing through these arches, under this roofless space, there is the moan of the sea, sobbing at the foot of the crag, the sea which is of no faith and never keeps faith. And if one misses the scarlet robes of Cardinal Beaton as he swept through these aisles in splendid procession with all the gorgeous trappings of his retinue, there are mosses and wild flowers to give glows of colour—one must content himself. Those wereevil days, whatever the faith; there was not much division in matters of conduct; there may have been in matters of morals.
ST. ANDREWS CASTLE.ST. ANDREWS CASTLE.
The castle stands stalwart on the rock promontory washed by the ocean, and the ocean breaks angrily at its base like a creature robbed over long of its prey. It is not the castle in which the Cardinal lived, but it was built soon after, and wrecked so thoroughly, and looks so very ancient, that one would fain believe; and the guide will tell, unless you prevent him, that it was at these windows that the Cardinal sat at his ease and witnessed the entertainment of the auto da fe of the non-conformist, George Wishart, burned alive on March 28, 1542; about the time Philip the Second was burning heretics in the Old Plaza at Madrid, and a little before Queen Mary spouse to Philip, was burning them in England. And it was only two months later, May 29, when workmen were strengthening the castle at the orders of the Cardinal against this very thing that happened, that the reformers made their way in, killed the Cardinal, and hung him "by the tane arm and the tane foot," from the very balcony where he had sat to enjoy Wishart's burning. A very barbarous time. As Wishart had lain in the Bottle Dungeon months before his burning, soBeaton lay in the dungeon in salt, seven months before his burial.
John Knox joined the reformers, holding the town until it was taken by the French fleet—"defended their castle against Scotland, France, and Ireland all three"—surrendering to Strozzi, Prior of Capua, a Knight of Rhodes; so was the great world made small in those days by errant knights and captains and hired mercenaries. The French captain entered, "and spoiled the castle very rigorously," lest it should be "a receptacle for rebels." All this in the time of the Regency of Mary of Lorraine.
Knox was taken and sent to the galleys for a year. Then he returned, and was frequently in St. Andrews, preaching in the town kirk, founded, perhaps, by the confessor of Saint Margaret, preaching here some of his last sermons. "I saw him everie day of his doctrine go hulie and fear," wrote James Melville, "with a furrning of martriks about his neck, a staff in the an hand," and lifted up to the pulpit "whar he behovite to lean at his first entrie; bot or he had done with his sermont, he was so active and vigorus, that he lyk to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out of it." The pulpit held. And so did the doctrine of Knox.
The square tower of St. Regulus, a pre-Norman bit of architecture, perhaps Culdee, stands southeast of the cathedral. Dr. Johnson was indignant with Boswell that he missed it. This with the many other towers of church and college make St. Andrews a towered town.
There is an air, an atmosphere, in St. Andrews; it is an academic town, serene, certain of itself, quiet, with wide streets and gray stone buildings. It is full of dignity, full of repose, as a northern Oxford combined with a northern Canterbury should be. There is a spell of ancientry over the gray old walls, but it is unbroken ancientry; if there is a bar sinister, the present generation has forgotten it.
And, of course—oh, not of course, but primarily—there is golf. There is golf everywhere in Scotland. The golf ball and not the thistle is the symbol of Scotland to-day, and from the Tee at St. Andrews the Golf Ball has been driven round the world. James VI, careful Scot, recognized golf as an industry, and granted letters patent in 1618 for the manufacture of golf balls—the old leather, feather-stuffed sphere—to James Melville and William Berwick.
Edinburgh is ringed about with golf courses, public and private. So is Scotland. TheFirth of Forth is continuous with them, from North Berwick where the fleeting traveler is as certain to see golf balls as he is to see the Bass, up to St. Andrews. The Links of Leith are the most historic, for it was on these that Charles I was playing when news came of the Irish rebellion—and all that it led to. And here, his son, later James II, played against two English noblemen who had declared they could beat him, and James, cannily—true Scot!—chose the best player in Scotland, one Paterson an Edinburgh cobbler—and gave him the wager, and doubled it, out of which Paterson built for himself Golfer'sLandin the Canongate. The Links of the Forth are not a golf course, although there may be some who assert that they were once an ancient course, say, for King Arthur and his Knights.
Sealand, shoreland, it seems, makes the ideal golf course, the soil growing with short crisp grass that makes a springy and slippery turf, and makes a keen game; the inlander, of course, and the American inlander, may not understand that golf can never quite be golf, certainly never be the true Scottish rite, unless it is played near the sea, with the tang of the sea and of golf entering into one's blood—and, preferably at St. Andrews.
At St. Andrews golf is a business, a sublimated business; or better, an education. Degrees are taken in it quite as high and requiring as thorough a training as at the University. It is to St. Andrews that the good golfer goes when he dies. And he aspires to go there before.
Or, rather at St. Andrews golf is a religion. Half the stories told of golf are, as might be expected of a game which came to its flowering in Scotland, religious, or irreligious. And one of the best of them is told in Stewart Dick's book on "The Forth." A Scots minister was playing and playing rather badly, and expressing himself in words if not in strokes. (Only those of you who have read "Sentimental Tommy" will understand that unconsciously I have played on the word "stroke!") The minister exclaimed bitterly as he emerged from his unholy battle with the bunker—is Bunker Hill, perhaps a hazard in golf?—"Ah maun gie it up! ah maun gie it up!" "What!" cried his partner alarmed, "gie up gowf?" "Naw, naw," returned the minister, "gie up the meenistry."
Perhaps to amend again, golf at St. Andrews is life. And in their death they are not divided. The graveyard near the Abbey, withstones hoary from the sixteenth century, is renowned to-day because it contains the graves of good golfers, Allan Robertson, old Tom Morris, and young Tom Morris, the greatest golfer since Paterson, dead at the pathetic age of 24; after that comes a man's best golfing years, that is, for his pleasure. Young Tom's grave is marked by an elaborate monument with an inscription that befits a king.
O
ne leaves Edinburgh for the North—the haunted North—as in a royal progress. The train moves out of the Waverley station, and through the Gardens, under the very shadow of Castle Rock.
And it moves through the scant few miles of country, richly cultivated, suburban fairly, yet there are level wheatlands, and country cottages and orchards; it is southern, English, these few miles down to the Forth.
"The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean,We bowled along a road that curved its spineSuperbly sinuous and serpentineThro' silent symphonies of summer green,Sudden the Forth came on us—sad of mien,No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line;A sheet of dark dull glass, without a signOf life or death, two beams of sand between,Water and sky merged blank in mist together,The Fort loomed spectral, and the Guardship's sparsTraced vague, black shadows on the shimmery glaze:We felt the dim, strange years, the gray, strange weather,The still, strange land, unvexed of sun or stars,Where Lancelot rides clanking thro' the haze."
To every one comes this sense of strange years and a strange land, even at Queensferry, even to Henley.
The inn, where we have all put up in imagination, with Scott, and again with Stevenson, lies under the bridge, as though it would escape the quick curious gaze from these iron girders so high above what Scott ever dreamed or Davy Balfour. And then, the train creeps out over this modern audacity, this very ugly iron spanning of the river. Fortunately we are upon it and cannot see its practical, monstrous being, "that monster of utility," as Lord Rosebery called it. He should know its phrase, since it is ever present in the view from his Dalmeny Park, lying east of the Bridge and south of the Forth.
This is precisely where Queen Margaret was ferried to and fro a thousand years ago. The monks who had charge of the ferry took from the toll every fourth and every fortieth penny—a delightful bit of geometric finance. Who could calculate and who would dispute the calculation, of fourth and fortieth?
"The King sits in Dunfermline tounDrinking the blude-red wine."
Because of such lines as these I would cross far seas, merely to have been, if far lonely destructive centuries after, in the very place of their being.
For Dunfermline is surely a very kingly name for a king's town, and "blude-red" wine is of such a difference from mere red, or blood-red wine. What wonder that Alexander III, of whom it is written, went to his death over at Kinghorn in such a tragic way!
But the king who forever sits in Dunfermline is that Malcolm of the eleventh century who brings hither something more than legend yet something as thrilling, as "authentic" as legend. Malcolm is the son of Duncan, in Shakespeare's play, and in history.
"The son of DuncanFrom whom this tyrant holds the due of birth,Lives in the English court; and is receivedOf the most pious Edward with such graceThat the malevolence of fortune nothingTakes from his high respect."
Malcolm, after "the deep damnation of his taking off," fled from the red wrath of Macbeth and into the far prophecy of Banquo, to the court of Edward the Confessor. There perhaps he met Margaret; or perhaps not, since she was grand-niece to the Confessor, and Malcolm was a middle-aged man when this first royal Scottish romance occurs. When he returned he built himself a castle here on the safe north side of the Forth; if ever any place were safe in that eleventh century. He waited here the coming of Margaret, and she came, the first Margaret of England.
It was the first year after the Conquest, and Princess Margaret with her brother and sister were fleeing to her mother's people in Bohemia. They were wrecked far north in the Firth of Forth—which thereby becomes part of the legendary coast of Bohemia. She landed at St. Margaret's Hope, the first bay to the west of North Queensferry. Malcolm saw her from his high tower—and they were married—and they lived happily ever after, and richly for a quarter of a century; and they live immortally now.
Their history is certain, but it reads like a romance. It may be read, very exquisitely set forth, in "The Tides of Spring," a one-actdrama by Arthur Upson, the young American poet whose sonnet on Calton Hill I have just quoted; a poet who went to his death so tragically and so beautifully in Lake Bemidji in Minnesota, a few years ago.
The story in the play, of Malcolm and Margaret, is all apple blossoms and spring tides; it is very lovely. Margaret has met Malcolm before, and destiny brings her to Scotland and to the king. It is a beautiful beginning to a long enduring love story that through all the reality of history shows a tender devotion from this stern northern king to the saintly queen from the Saxon South.
They safeguarded themselves and their royal flock in Edinburgh, but they lived in Dunfermline. Margaret knew a richer and a more religious life than Malcolm, and she it was who laid the foundations of the kingdom, in court and church. "Whatever she refused, he refused also; whatever pleased her, he also loved, for the love of her," says her confessor. English Margaret, unlike the later English Margaret of Alexander III, did not find the North "a sad and solitary place"; and unlike the English Margaret of James IV she was saintly, a white pearl in this wild red time.
Malcolm and Margaret became the fatherand mother of a royal brood, four kings of Scotland, and of Queen Matilda of England—surely Banquo saw clearly on that terrible night; his prophecy began with a royal rush.
But who would not live a lovely and pleasant life in this well-placed royal burg, serene upon her hill? Rich green fields spread down to the Forth, the red network of the bridge lifts itself into view, far to the left sweeps the Firth out to North Berwick Law and the Bass, and Edinburgh swims in the haze against the leonine mountain that is ever her guard.
The Abbey gives the town its special dignity. There is nothing left of the church built by Queen Margaret—where she robbed the box of the money the king had just given at mass if she found the poor requiring more immediate help. But this ancient nave built by Margaret's son David is so very ancient that one could well spare the accurate historic knowledge that it is a generation too late for emotion. There are ponderous round pillars that could have sustained all the history we require of them, high casements, a bare triforium, altogether a Davidic place, a simplicity, a truth about it, that we would not dispute.
The new church was built a century ago over the old, and the ancient nave is like an aisle inthe new. Certain details, like the little Norman doorway, once walled-up in the time of Knox, reward us with their preserved beauty.
The tombs of Malcolm and Margaret are without the wall. Malcolm perhaps is there; they carried bodies far in those days of material resurrection, and would have brought Malcolm from Northumberland. But Margaret, canonized next century, was too precious to remain in Ultima Thule, so Spain carried her away—and who knows where she rests?
But within, before the high altar—or shall we say since this is a reformed place, before the pulpit?—rests the body of The Bruce. It is no doubt The Bruce. For Dunfermline was forgotten in rebellious times, and the tombs were undisturbed. Even in the North transept there rest the bones of eleven kings earlier than The Bruce.
Yes, it is very certain The Bruce, wrapped in gold cloth in the thirteenth century, his heart only missing and lying at Melrose. Scott who was everywhere and investigating everything saw the tomb opened and pronounced—King Robert Bruce. One could wish the great letters about the modern tower looking like an electric sign, were "reformed." But here within the quiet, to stand at the very spot whereis the dust of so mighty a man, mighty in valour, mighty in sovereignty—I find it a more substantial emotion than I have felt in the Invalides.
Ancientry preserves its unbroken descent outside the church. The mother of Wallace is buried here, and the thorn he planted to mark her grave still flourishes, to the ninth century after.
The people who sit in Dunfermline town have not too much concern for King Robert and King Alexander. Nor do they do much sitting, these busy industrious Dunfermliners. They are living their own lives, and making for themselves profit through the generosity of a later fellow citizen.
Dunfermline is a center of great coal fields, and center of the Scotch linen making. So the town is modern, looks modern, and the people move briskly. If they know you are a tourist on ancient errand bent, they look curiously. You come from so far to recapture ancient life, when you might have so much modern life in your own country.
They know what America means. For Andrew Carnegie is their fellow citizen, or would be had he not become an American. Seventy years ago he was born in a cottage towardwhich the Dunfermline folk look with the attention we show the Abbey. And Carnegie has not only given a library to Dunfermline—yes, a library—Malcolm could not read Margaret's books, but he had them richly bound and bejeweled and kissed them in reverence of her. But the Laird has given a technical school, and the Pittencrieff Glen, which is a lovely pleasure ground with the scant stones of Malcolm's palace above, and a trust of two million and a half dollars, which the wise town corporation is busy utilizing for the advancement of Dunfermline town.
And on to Loch Leven. I cannot think that any one can come upon this castle without emotion. Or he should never come to Scotland.
It is a famous fishing lake, a peculiar kind of trout are abundant, twenty-five thousand taken from it each year; rather I have given the round numbers, but an exact toll of the fish taken is required by law, and for the past year it was, with Scottish accuracy, something more or something less than twenty-five thousand. The lake is controlled altogether by an anglersassociation. No boat can row on it, no fisherman can cast his line, but by permission.
There is a small shop in Edinburgh where tickets and tackle can be taken, and much advice from the canny Scot who keeps the shop, and who would make your fishing expedition a success. "I don't know what your scruples are," he ventured, "but if ye want the Loch Leven boatmen to be satisfied, I'd advise ye to take wi' a bit o' Scotch. A wee bit drappie goes a long wa."
"Just a wee deoch and doris!"
We remembered Harry Lauder, and wondered if we could say "It's a braw bricht moon licht nicht." Or would those redoutable boatmen ken that we were but pretending to Scotch and even suspect our "Scotch"?
They did not.
The Green hotel is an excellent place to stay, kept by a Scotchman who knows that in America every one knows every one else. We slept in feather beds, and we inspected the collection of "stanes," one of the best I have ever seen in Scotland, a great variety, some of them natural boulders, some wood with iron weights—someday I must brave the rigours of a Scotch winter and see them curl on Duddingston or on Leven. And I should like to see Bob Dunbarof St. Paul, champion curler of America, measure his skill against the champion of Scotland.
And, of course, there was talk with the Scot host. "So ye're American. Well, maybe ye ken a mon that lives in Minn'apolis. He's twa sisters live here; and he's built a hoose for them." It happened that we did ken of this man, who came from Kinross to Minneapolis with only his Scotch canniness, and has built the Donaldson business into one of the great department stores of America.
And next day, after we had slept on feather beds, we had our fishing in Loch Leven, with thousands of wild swan disputing our possession; a big boat, with big oars, sweeps, one man to each oar, one a loquacious fellow with no dialect (he might as well have been English), and the other taciturn with a dialect thick as mud or as Lauder's. And we caught two of the twenty-five thousand odd which were credited to that year.
As the train came alongside Loch Leven on its way to Kinross station, suddenly I felt Mary as I never have realized her, before or since. There across the lake lay St. Serf's isle, and there rose the keep of the old castle. And over that water, as plainly—more plainly, than the fishing boats that lay at their ease—I saw hertake boat on a still evening, May 2, 1568, at half past seven o'clock from prison—to liberty—to prison!
I was not mistaken. She who was with me saw it, as distinctly, as vividly. Perhaps it was that all our lives this had been to us one of the great adventuring moments—for which we would exchange any moment of our lives. We were idolaters always, Mariolaters. And now we know that places are haunted, and that centuries are of no account; they will give up their ghosts to those who would live in them.
"Put off, put off, and row with speed,For now is the time and the hour of need,To oars, to oars, and trim the bark,Nor Scotland's queen be a warder's mark;Yon light that plays 'round the castle moat,Is only the warder's random shot;Put off, put off, and row with speed,For now is the time and the hour of need."Those pond'rous keys shall the kelpies keep,And lodge in their caverns, so dark and deep,Nor shall Loch Leven's tower and hallHold thee, our lovely lady, in thrall;Or be the haunts of traitors sold,While Scotland has hands and hearts so bold.Then onward, steersman, row with speed,For now is the time and the hour of need."Hark! the alarum bell has rung,The warder's voice has treason sung,The echoes to the falconets roar,Chime sweetly to the dashing shore;Let tower, hall, and battlement gleam,We steer by the light of the taper's gleam,For Scotland and Mary on with speed,Now, now, is the time and the hour of need!"
Because of that experience, because of the feeling I have for Queen Mary, I have never landed upon St. Serf's island. It has happened, quite without my making intentional pilgrimage, that I have been in many places where Queen Mary has been; and willingly I have made my accidental pilgrimages of loyalty. I have stood in the turret at Roscoff where she landed when only five, hurried from Scotland that she might escape sinister England; in the chapel in Notre Dame where she was married to the Dauphin; in the château at Orleans where she lived with him much of that brief happy French life she loved so dearly; in the two small garret chambers where she lodged in Coventry; in Hardwick Hall, where Bess of Hardwick was her stern jailer; at Fotheringay where nothing remains of that ensanguined block but a low heap of stones which the grass covers; in Peterborough where she found her first resting place; in Westminster her last final resting place; and in many and many a haunted place of this Scottish land.