“Noo, laddie,” he said, as I was off to the treasurer with cheques to be signed, “Hoo soon d’ye think ye can be back wi’ the signatures?”
I gave a close estimate, kept within it—and later discerned that my astute chief had made me set my own speed, below which it was quite inexpedient to fall.
The office work was light enough to permit of a few observations on the methods of what was then very high commerce indeed. Tea-tasting, I remember, was a subject of absorbing interest—perhaps it had something to do with the application for a clerkship on a Ceylon plantation.
There was almost sacramental gravity about old George’s preparations for testing the tasting and blending qualities of Oolong and Souchong. No home brew of these fantastic days is elaborated more carefully than the liquid bouquets in Madeira Court were compounded. With great respect to competent housewives, one may be allowed to remark that heating the pot before infusing the tea is not enough to bring to the human senses all the aromatic marvels of an artistic cup of tea. There is a delicate science of perfumery in the perfect production of the most cheering beverage. To induce a truly exquisite bouquet the cup must be heated before the tea is poured into it—and then, indeed, you have a liquid meet for the gods.
Less than a dollar a week, with railway and restaurant expenses to be paid out of it, though the hours were only from nine to six, could not long satisfy the son of the Thornliebank co-operative treasurer. After about nine months at Madeira Court the post of junior assistant to the Kennishead stationmaster fell vacant, and I was the successful applicant for the position. “Junior assistant to the stationmaster” is as big-sounding a title as one can think of for that post, after many years’ diplomatic strain in trying to find titles for railway officials whose deserts, occasionally, were in inverse ratio to their appraisals of them.
There may be more magnificent sensations than those of an Original Seceder five months short of his fourteenth birthday, selling tickets to Glasgow through a little wicket door; but if so, I know them not. The danger of giving too much change was not serious. We were only a short line, without through connections. As with other small systems, we made the most of our name. Something over thirty miles of route were called the Glasgow, Barrhead and Kilmarnock Railway. Most of the passenger traffic was to Glasgow, third-class fare, fourpence. Saturday was the busy day. The operatives used to leave the mills at five on Saturday afternoons, instead of the customary six o’clock. Jock and his wife, and sometimes a bairn or two, would go to the city for an evening’s shopping, and free gazes at the places they did not enter. To go to Glasgow and not get a drink of whiskey, fifty years ago, was like going to Niagara and shunning the Falls.
Business hours at Kennishead station were from before the first train in the morning till after the last train had come in from Glasgow at night, for which six shillings a week was the reward. Saturday nights one sometimes overtook groups walking home from their evening’s outing. Often one could hear Jock trying to walk straight, and Mary chiding him, sometimes under, and sometimes very much over, her breath. But, however uncertain the gait on Saturday night, there were dignity and poise in the approach to church next day—proof indeed of the difference between spirituous and spiritual walk and conversation.
The standard story which illustrates the commingling of the spiritual and the spirituous belongs to a locality near ours. The Scotsman who drank scientifically exhibited three stages of spirituous possession. The first was when, having first exalted his horn, he was in a meditative mood. The second stage saw him determined to discuss politics. When the saturation point was reached nothing but a religious argument would content his soaring mind.
When the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church were fused, those who rejected the union were called the Wee Frees. In a town further up the line the controversy between the Wee Frees and the U.P.’s painfully persisted. One night a believer in the union, who had been to Glasgow, was wiggling a waggly way homeward when he saw the manse. He rang the bell, and insisted that the maid take him to the minister, to whom he said he wanted to discuss the trouble with the Wee Frees, and to propound a settlement. The minister, seeing his condition, urged that as the hour was getting late, and his caller had to be up early in the morning, he had better come next evening, when they would fully discuss the great question.