VI
It was the old clerk, of whose services and devotion to our parish I have previously written, who gave the Biblical name to the little village that lies near the boundary of the great city that is steadily creeping towards us, and ever threatening to engulf us. Its own name is singularly pleasant to the ear and redolent of the sound of running waters, but it is unnecessary to burden the memory with it. Though it is now many years ago, I remember, as it were yesterday, the first time I heard the word on the old clerk's lips. I was sitting warming myself by the fire in the ticket-collector's office. The ticket-collector was ostensibly waiting to provide tickets, but as everybody in our parish has a season ticket, that part of his duty is almost a sinecure.
Thus it happens that the ticket-collector has leisure, just before the trains pass through, to give his friends the fruits of his researches in the realms of philosophy. That particular day he was speaking of the changes he had seen. "I was brought up," said he, closing his argument, "on the Shorter Catechism and porridge. I dinna haud any longer by the Catechism, but I havena lost my faith in porridge."
It was then that the clink of coppers was heard on the sill of the ticket window. In the aperture was framed the face of the clerk, with the trimmed grey beard and the small twinkling eyes. He held three pennies deftly in his thumbless hand. "Return, Sodom," said he. The ticket-collector pushed back his cap, stretched out his right hand as if he were beginning to speak, then thought better of it. Out of his case, without a word, he produced a return ticket for Sodom, clinked it in his machine, and passed it through the window. The old clerk received it with a grim chuckle.
Away below the bridge there came a rumble. "Train," said the ticket-collector, closing the aperture with a snap, and making for the door. And I have never forgotten the hoarse voice of the old clerk with an acid edge to it as he clinked his three coppers, saying "Return, Sodom."
It is an amazing thing how within the circuit of the same parish, removed by one mile from one another, there can live together two eras so remote from each other in the order of human development, as the world of the red-roofed houses on the slopes of the hills, and the village at their base where the gorge, worn by the little river through the travail of immemorial centuries, debouches on the great central plain that runs across Scotland.
Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the roofs of its houses. On the slopes there lies the world in which the fringes of life are embroidered—a world where men and women talk of books, pictures and plays. It is a world of hyphenated names. But in all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name. It is a refuse-heap of humanity. Many diverse races are crowded in it. The city fathers clean out slums without providing first for the slum-dwellers, and, swept before the broom of so-called social reformers, homeless men and women have drifted to the village, and there reconstituted their slum.
From the glens of the north broken Highlanders, driven out to make room for sheep, have drifted hither to work in the quarries, and the speech of their children's children still bears the trace of their ancient language pure and clean; over the sea Irishmen have come to reap the harvest fields of the Lothians, and they have been deposited by the tide in the village. Stray Poles have come hither and straggling Czechs; a man from Connemara neighbours a shaggy giant from Lewis; and a dour stone-cutter from Aberdeen is door by door with an Italian who sells what looks like a deadly mixture from a hand-cart.
Here you can see humanity in its primitive state, before it began to adorn the fringes of life, and make for itself sanctuaries of privacy. Between the slopes and the base of the hill there yawns an invisible chasm. Centuries separate them. Thus it comes that the slope-dweller passes on the top of the arches, scanning his newspaper, without so much as seeing the huddle of houses which constitute the village.