Chapter Sixteen.
Sunny Memories of the Border-Land.
“Pipe of Northumbria, sound;
War pipe of Alnwicke,
Wake the wild hills around;
Percy at Paynim war.
Fenwicke stand foremost;
Scots in array from far
Swell wide their war-host.
“Come clad in your steel jack,
Your war gear in order,
And down hew or drive back
The Scots o’er the border.”
Old Ballad.
“I tell you what it is, my boy,” said a well-known London editor to me one day, shortly before I started on my long tour in the Wanderer,—“I tell you what it is, you’ll never do it.”
He was standing a little way off my caravan as he spoke, so as to be able to take her all in, optically, and his head was cocked a-trifle to one side, consideringly. “Never do what?”
“Never reach Scotland.”
“Why?”
“Why? First, because a two-ton caravan is too much for even two such horses as you have, considering the hills you will have to encounter; and, secondly,” he added with a sly smile, “because Scotchman never ‘gang back.’”
I seized that little world-wise editor just above the elbow. He looked beseechingly up at me.
“Let go?” he cried; “your fingers are made of iron fencing; my arm isn’t.”
“Can you for one moment imagine,” I said, “what the condition of this England of yours would be were all the Scotchmen to be suddenly taken out of it; suddenly to disappear from great cities like Manchester and Liverpool, from posts of highest duty in London itself, from the Navy, from the Army, from the Volunteers? Is the bare idea not calculated to induce a more dreadful nightmare than even a lobster salad?”
“I think,” said the editor, quietly, as I released him, “we might manage to meet the difficulty.”
But despite the dark forebodings of my neighbours and the insinuations of this editor, here I am in bonnie Scotland.
“My foot in on my native heath,
And my name is—”
Well, the reader knows what my name is.
I have pleasant recollections of my last day or two’s drive in Northumberland north, just before entering my native land.
Say from the Blue Bell Hotel at Belford. What a stir there was in that pretty little town, to be sure! We were well out of it, because I got the Wanderer brought to anchor in an immensely large stackyard. There was the sound of the circus’s brass band coming from a field some distance off, the occasional whoop-la! of the merry-go-rounds and patent-swing folks, and the bang-banging of rifles at the itinerant shooting galleries; but that was all there was to disturb us.
I couldn’t help thinking that I never saw brawnier, wirier men than those young farmers who met Earl P— at his political meeting.
I remember being somewhat annoyed at having to start in a procession of gipsy vans, but glad when we got up the hill, and when Pea-blossom and Corn-flower gave them all the slip.
Then the splendid country we passed through; the blue sea away on our right; away to the left the everlasting hills! The long low shores of the Holy Isle flanked by its square-towered castle. It is high water while we pass, and Lindisfarne is wholly an island.
“Stay, coachman, stay; let us think; let us dream; let us imagine ourselves back in the days of long, long ago. Yonder island, my Jehu John, which is now so peacefully slumbering ’neath the midday sun, half shrouded in the blue mist of distance, its lordly castle only a shape, its priory now hidden from our view—
“‘The castle with its battled walls,
The ancient monastery’s halls,
Yon solemn, huge, and dark-red pile,
Placed on the margin of the isle.’
”—Have a history, my gentle Jehu, far more worthy of being listened to than any romance that has ever been conceived or penned.
“Aidan the Christian lived and laboured yonder; from his home in that lone, surf-beaten island scintillated, as from a star, the primitive rays of our religion of love.”
Jehu John (speaks): “Excuse me, sir, but that is all a kind o’ Greek to me.”
“Knowest thou not, my gentle John, that more than a thousand years ago that monastery was built there, that—
“‘In Saxon strength that abbey frowned
With massive arches broad and round,
That rose alternate row and row
On pond’rous columns short and low,
Built ere the art was known,
By pointed aisle and shafted stalk
The arcades of an alleyed walk
To emulate in stone.
On those deep walls the heathen Dane
Had poured his impious rage in vain.’
“Hast never heard of Saint Cuthbert?”
“No, sir; can’t say as ever I has.”
“John! John! John! But that wondrous, that ‘mutable and unreasonable saint’ dwelt yonder, nor after death did he rest, John, but was seen by many in divers places and at divers times in this kingdom of Britain the Great! Have you never heard the legend that he sailed down the Tweed in a huge stone coffin?”
“Ha! ha! I can’t quite swallow that, sir.”
“That his figure may even until this day be seen, that—
“‘On a rock by Lindisfarne
Saint Cuthbert sits and toils to frame
The sea-born beads that bear his name.
Such tales had Whitby’s fishers told,
And said they might his shape behold,
And hear his anvil sound:
A deadened clang—a huge dim form
Seen but, and heard, when gathering storm
And night were closing round.’”
“It makes me a kind of eerie, sir, to hear you talk like that.”
“I can’t help it, John; the poetry of the Great Wizard of the North seems still to hang around these shores. I hear it in the leaves that whisper to the winds, in the wild scream of the sea-birds, and in the surf that comes murmuring across that stretch of sand, or goes hissing round the weed-clad rocks.
“But, John, you’ve heard of Grace Darling?”
“Ah! there I do feel at home.”
“Then you know the story. At the Longstone Lighthouse out yonder she lived. You see the castle of Bamburgh, with its square tower, there. We noticed it all day yesterday while coming to Belford; first we took it for a lighthouse, then for a church, but finally a bright stream of sunshine fell on it from behind a cloud—on it, and on it alone, and suddenly we knew it. Well, in the churchyard there the lassie sleeps.”
“Indeed, sir!”
“Shall we drop a tear to her memory, my gentle Jehu?”
“Don’t think I could screw one out, sir.”
“Then drive on, John.”
I remember stopping at a queer old-fashioned Northumbrian inn for the midday halt. We just drew up at the other side of the road. It was a very lonely place. The inn, with its byres and stables, was perched on the top of a rocky hill, and men and horses had to climb like cats to get up to the doors.
By the way, my horses do climb in a wonderful way. Whenever any one now says to me, “There is a terrible hill a few miles on,” “Can a cat get up?” I inquire.
“Oh, yes, sir; a cat could go up,” is the answer.
“Then,” say I, “my horses will do it.”
At this inn was a very, very old man, and a very, very old woman, and their son Brad. Brad was waiter, ostler, everything, tall, slow, and canny-looking.
Brad, like most of the people hereabout, spoke as though he had swallowed a raw potato, and it had stuck in his throat.
Even the North Northumbrian girls talk as if they suffered from chronic tonsillitis, or their tongues were too broad at the base.
When the dinner had been discussed, the dishes washed, and I had had a rest, the horses staggered down the hill and were put in.
I said to Brad, “How much, my friend?”
“Whhateveh yew plhease, sirr; you’gh a ghentleman,” replied Brad, trying apparently to swallow his tongue. I gave him two shillings.
No sooner had it been put in his trousers pocket than the coin started off on a voyage of discovery down his leg, and soon popped out on to the road. Brad evidently had sprung a leak somewhere, and for a time the money kept dropping from him. Whenever he moved he “layed” a coin, so to speak, and the last I saw of Brad he was leaning lazily against a fence counting his money.
I remember that near the borders we climbed a long, long hill, and were so happy when we got to the top of it—the horses panting and foaming, and we all tired and thirsty.
The view of the long stretch of blue hills behind as was very beautiful.
Here on the hilltop was an inn, with its gable and a row of stables facing the road, and here on a bit of grass we drew up, and determined to take the horses out for the midday halt. But we reckoned without our host. The place was called the Cat Inn.
The landlady was in the kitchen, making a huge pie.
No, we could have no stabling. Their own horses would be home in half an hour.
She followed me out.
“Half an hour’s rest,” I said, “out of the sun will do my poor nags some good.”
“I tell ye, ye canna have it,” she snapped.
“Then we can have a bucket or two of water, I suppose?”
“Never a drop. We’ve barely enough for ourselves.”
I offered to pay for it I talked almost angrily.
“Never a drop. You’re no so ceevil.”
Talking of Northumbrian inns, I remember once having a good laugh.
A buxom young lassie, as fresh as a mountain-daisy, had served me, during a halt, with some ginger-ale.
After drinking and putting the glass down on the table, I was drying my long moustache with my handkerchief, and looking at the lassie thoughtfully—I trust not admiringly.
“Ah, sir,” she said, nodding her head and smiling, “ye need na be wiping your mouth; you’re no goin’ to get a kiss from me.”
But near Tweedmouth, in the fields of oats and wheat, we came upon whole gangs of girls cutting down thistles. Each was armed with a kind of reaping-hook at the end of a pole. Very picturesque they looked at a distance in their short dresses of green, grey, pink, or blue. But the remarkable thing about them was this. They all wore bonnets with an immense flap behind, and in front a wonderful contrivance called “an ugly”—a sunshade which quite protected even their noses. And this was not all, for they had the whole of the jaws, chin, and cheeks tied up with immense handkerchiefs, just as the jaws of the dead are sometimes bound up.
I could not make it out. Riding on with my tricycle some distance ahead of the Wanderer, I came upon a gang of them—twenty-one in all—having a noontide rest, sitting and reclining on the flowery sward.
I could not help stopping to look at them. From the little I could see of their faces some were really pretty. But all these “thistle lassies” had their “uglies” on and their jaws tied up.
I stopped and looked, and I could no more help making the following remark than a lark can help singing.
“By everything that’s mysterious,” I said, “why have you got your jaws tied up? You’re not dead, and you can’t all have the toothache.”
I shall never forget as long as I live the chorus of laughing, the shrieks of laughter, that greeted this innocent little speech of mine. They did laugh, to be sure, and laughed and laughed, and punched each other with open palms, and laughed again, and some had to lie down and roll and laugh. Oh! you just start a Northumbrian lassie laughing, and she will keep it up for a time, I can tell you.
But at last a young thing of maybe sweet seventeen let the handkerchief down-drop from her face, detached herself from the squad, and came towards me.
She put one little hand on the tricycle wheel, and looked into my face with a pair of eyes as blue and liquid as the sea out yonder.
“We tie our chins up,” she said, “to keep the sun off.”
“Oh-h-h!” I said; “and to save your beauty.”
She nodded, and I rode on.
But in speaking of my adventure with the thistle lassies to a man in Berwick—“Yes,” he said, “and those girls on a Sunday come out dressed like ladies in silks and satins.”
I remember that our first blink o’ bonnie Scotland was from the hill above Tweedmouth. And yonder below us lay Berwick, with its tall, tapering spires and vermilion-roofed houses. Away to the left, far as eye could reach, sleeping in the sunlight, was the broad and smiling valley of the Tweed. The sea to the right was bright blue in some places, and a slaty grey where cloud shadows fell. It was dotted with many a white sail, with here and there a steamboat, with a wreath of dark smoke, fathoms long, trailing behind it.
Berwick-on-Tweed, I have been told more than once, belongs neither to Scotland nor to England. It is neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. It is a county by itself. My royal mistress ought therefore to be called Queen of Great Britain, Berwick, and Ireland. But I will have it thus: Berwick is part and parcel of Scotland. Tell me not of English laws being in force in the pretty town; I maintain that the silvery Tweed is the natural dividing line ’twixt England and the land of mountain and flood.