"KEEPING OFF."
In secluded townships like Cunningsburgh where life's round has much of the monotony of fashionable society, and involves a still recurring succession of similar duties, the minister is indeed a power. If he is a man of broad and enlightened mind, his influence for good is incalculable. The Kirk-Session is a permanent Court of Justice, taking cognisance of minor matters of morality, and enforcing its decisions by religious sanctions. To be barred from participating in the communion rites might not seem a very alarming punishment to the easy-going Lowlander; but to a Shetland peasant, being keepit off, as it is technically called, is a terrible and humiliating penalty. A crofter came to the manse to complain about his wife's unruly and satirical tongue. "But what can I do to her?" said the minister, "she's your wife, and you must assert your authority." "I've tried everything," said the man, "but she still continues to be a troubler in Israel." The minister professed his inability to interfere. "I can do nothing at all," he said. "Yes you can," said the crofter, with a wink and a fearful whisper, "You can keep her off!"
THE INDIGNANT ELDER.
Since the Reformation the people have lived and thriven under the jurisdiction of the Session. In the records of the Session one finds a chronicle of the sins, eccentricities, and merriments of the people for the last two or three centuries. Several incidents based on these minutes will make what I say abundantly clear. The Quarrel of the Elder and the Minister's Housekeeper, for example, convulsed a still remoter parish in much the same overmastering way as the Dreyfus Trial agitated Paris. Herodotus is the only author I can think of who could have done justice to this northern affaire. Let me briefly summarise it. Between the minister's garden and that of one of his elders ran what was termed a hedge. The shrubs which formed the base of this hedge were so ill-grown that the minister's fowls could easily go, clucking and scraping, from one garden into the other. Evidence was given to prove that the cabbages and pot-herbs in the elder's plot were torn and spoiled in parts. Every morning he stood at a gap in the hedge and sang aloud like a skipper in a storm or Achilles at the trench of the Greeks: "I am being ruined and brought to poverty by the minister's hens." This cry grated upon the ears of the manse housekeeper, who by and by thought it her duty to go out and reason with the elder. "It's no' the minister's hens ava that's to blame, it's the craws o' the firmament." "It's the hens." "No, the craws." "Hens I declare!" "You're a deceitful impostor!" said the housekeeper. Now, no self-respecting elder could stand that. Boiling with wrath as he was, he remembered his ecclesiastical status, merely remarking that there was work for the Session at last. By nightfall he had been in every croft within the Session's jurisdiction, laying off his tale in each, and as he got practice and more vehemence with constant repetition, he attained extreme fluency and impressiveness before the day was done. An unspeakable joy came over the community at the prospect of a delicious scandal. To avoid the breach being healed by an apology, many of the crofters sought to envenom the quarrel by refusing to believe that the elder was altogether right. "Crows," they said, "had been known to play havoc with cabbage. Elders were but human, and so, hasty in laying charges on insufficient evidence. The case was certainly one for the Church courts. The housekeeper must have a good defence to make, and would no doubt make it at the proper time and in the proper place. We must hear both sides." One may see by this that the spirit which animates a great nation (the desire, namely, to divert itself with the contentions of those who come before the public eye), animates also the smallest communities in the realm. The great passion-stirring process, Hens versus Crows, lasted for some seven months. Over and over again the hedge was examined. Now the elder thought he had the best of it, only to be damped by a revulsion of feeling in favour of the housekeeper. The finding of the Session was adverse to the lady. The fact that she had practically called the elder a son of Belial could not be got over. The minister, holding the scales of justice, was forced, in spite of himself, to declare against her. Considering her position, some mildness was shown in pronouncing her condemnation and the penalty. Having regard to the dignity of the offended man, nothing less than the sentence of keeping off could meet the ends of ecclesiastical law. But one "keeping off" was deemed adequate. The elder was avenged. At the ensuing communion, he was seen to smile and rub his hands diabolically, as he glanced towards the back of the church, where sat, outside the pale of the privileged elect, the unhappy and vanquished housekeeper, who had called him an impostor.
TORQUIL HALCROW.
Torquil Halcrow's case presents features of a different order. For some reason a fama spread abroad respecting him to the effect that his language and demeanour left much to be desired, and that not even the presence, or at least proximity, of women operated to mellow the strength of his vocabulary. Nothing definite was openly formulated against him, but Torquil became aware that in certain quarters his reputation was being slowly undermined. It is precisely this vague kind of aggression on a man's character that is the most difficult to combat. He took the bull by the horns in a most heroic way. He got up a public testimonial to himself, and went round canvassing for signatures. The testimonial ran thus:—"We, the undersigned women of the parish, have pleasure in bearing witness that we have known Torquil Halcrow for twenty years, and never have we known him do an unseemly act or utter an unworthy expression." Thereafter followed a list of forty names. Furnished with this document, he strode up to the manse, fluttered it in the minister's face with a gesture of triumph, laid it down on the study table, then turned on his heel and walked away. The minister, when he examined the paper minutely, found that Torquil, in the belief that the heading of the testimonial was not sufficiently strong, had added this further clause in his own handwriting: "but many a precious word of truth and gracious spiritual comfort have we heard proceeding from his lips."
I have already referred to the beautiful and pathetic saying of Mr. Barrie that every window-blind is the curtain of a tragedy. I thought of that dictum as the minister of Cunningsburgh pointed to one cot after another in the neighbourhood, and narrated the calamities that had fallen upon them within recent years. Here, an old widow was mourning the loss of a son who had gone to the deep-sea fishing and would never return: his bright young life had been swallowed up in the insatiable ocean, and she was left lamenting in her indigence. There, it was a father who had been engulfed in the roost; or again, the illness of a mother had cast a blight for years upon this other household. Sometimes I have seen two old people, all their sons dead, living a kind of stupefied half-life, automatically moving about, poor and wretchedly clad, unable to understand anything except the welcome heat of the sun and the animal comfort of a little food. There are many sad things in this world: none is more sad than the sight of two old people outliving their progeny and wandering about in decrepit second childhood with no more substance than a dream. The sea is mainly answerable for the great and deep tragedies of the Shetlands: it is like a pitiless monster, howling in anger at their doors and claiming its yearly prey. No native writer has as yet attempted to make vocal for us the immense dumb sorrows of these fisher folks in the way Loti has done for the seafarers of Brittany.
PHILOLOGY.
Jakobsen, the Danish philologist, spent some years recently in collecting the remains of the old Norwegian speech that still linger in the conversation and the place-names of the islanders. Perhaps the most interesting point brought out by Jakobsen is the prevalence in comparatively recent times of lucky words, which the fishermen used when at the deep-sea fishing, and only then. This practice is undoubtedly a relic of pagan ages when the sea-depths were regarded as the dominion of dread water spirits, who keenly watched those who intruded in their realms. The strange feature about this deep-sea speech is that its expressions were purely Norse, whereas the home idiom of the fishers was overwhelmingly English. The pagan beliefs respecting the hostile powers of the sea found expression in old words handed down from a pre-Christian epoch. These old words may have been originally liturgical or worship words, for the sea was an object of veneration and awe to the Norsemen who, in the conquering days, made their home on its angry waters. It was believed that the jealous powers of the ocean were vehemently hostile to Christianity, and hence the Shetland fishers, up till quite recently, carefully avoided any direct mention of church or minister when on the water: the haaf or lucky words being respectively benihoose (prayer-house) and upstander. Even the domestic animals had special haaf appellations. This conception of the sea as filled with weird mysterious beings of unspeakable malignity, ever ready to whelm the boat of an unwary intruder, carries the mind back to the old alliterative lay of Beowulf, the contest of that hero with the wallowing ocean-monsters, and the grim subterranean glow in the sea-home of Grendel's mother. The Shetlanders have only too much reason to brood over the cruelty of the sea. On July 20, 1881, during a terrific squall, sixty-three breadwinners were engulfed in the thwarting currents of the Sound of Yell.