But for the great majority life is other and sterner. As Milton lamenting his blindness, the stranger student mourns wisdom and life “at one entrance quite shut out.” The influence of women, sweeter than that of the Pleiades, is absent, save in the shape of seamy-faced grim-mouthed landladies, or, in a favourable case, which was ours (or might have been), our red-cheeked, frank-tongued, oncoming wench in the milk-house at Echobank, and the baker’s daughter across the way.
The first result of this is a great outbreak of sentimentality among the callowlings. They have pictures (oh, such caricatures!) to carry in breast-pockets—or locks of hair, like mine. Their hearts are inflammable as those of the flaxen-haired youths I met afterwards in the universities of Germany, only living on oatmeal, without sausages, and less florid with beer. Yet on the whole, the aforesaid empty purse aiding, we were filled with not dishonest sentiment, keen as sleuth-hounds on the track of knowledge, and disputatious as only lads of Calvinistic training can be.
Our landladies were much alike, our rooms furnished with the same Spartan plainness. Only in Mistress Craven I happened on a good one, and abode with her all the days of my stay at College, till the way opened out for me to wider horizons and a humaner life.
But I can see the room yet, and the narrow passage which led to it. Here, close to the door, was a clock with a striking apparatus of surprising shrillness to warn us of the flight of the half-hours. “Ting!” another gone! Then, as the hour drew near, this academic clock cleared its decks for real action—almost it might be said that it cleared its throat, such a roopy gasping crow did it emit. This was technically called “the warning.”
And three times a day at the sound of it we rose, gathered our books and fled fleetfoot for the college. The clock at Mistress Craven’s was set ten minutes fast, so as to leave us time to flee down the Pleasance, dodge through a side alley, cut Simon’s Square diagonally, debouch upon Drummond Street (shunning Rutherford’s change-house, with its “kittle” step down into the cellar), and lo! there, big, barren, grey, grave, cauldrife as a Scots winter, was the College of King James—with the bell, unheard in the side-streets, fairly “gollying” at us—an appalling volume of sound—yet one which, on the whole, we minded less than the skirl and rasp of Mistress Craven’s family clock.
I have been speaking for myself. Fred Esquillant was always in time, easy, quiet, letting nothing interfere with his duty. But for me I was not built so. I watched for adventure and followed it. The dog I had met yesterday looked not in vain for a pat. A girl waved a kerchief to the student passing with the books under his arm. She did not know me, nor I her. But in the general interests of my class I had to wave back—without prejudice, be it said, to the black lock behind the miniature in my pocket.
We came back, as we had occasion, from our classes to the crowded stair of our “land”—with its greasy handrail, and the faint whiff of humanity clinging about the numbered doorways. Our key grated in the lock. Mrs. Craven opened the kitchen door with a cry that our dinners would be ready in a jiffey. We were done with the world for the day. Henceforth four walls contained us. Many books lay tumbled about, or had to be heaped on the floor whenever the half of the table was laid for a meal.
I sat farthest from the fire, but facing it. Above and directly before my eyes was a full-rigged ship, sailing among furious painted billows directly against the lofty cliffs of a lea-shore, the captain on the bridge regarding this manœuvre with the utmost complaisance. Beneath was a china shepherdess without the head—opposite a parrot with a bunch of waxen cherries in its beak.
When we took the room, the backs of the chairs had been covered with newly-washed embroidery in raspy woollens and starched linen thread. There had also been a tablecloth, and upon it (neatly arranged by Mrs. Craven’s daughter Amelia) a selection of the family “good books”—to wit, the Holy Bible containing entries of the Craven family, with the dates of birth altered or erased, Josephus with steel pictures, the Saint’s Rest and some others. These had at once been removed, according to agreement made before taking possession, and now, wrapped in the tablecloth, reposed in a cupboard.
Only The Cloud of Witnesses and Fox’s Martyrs were spared at my special request. As for Freddie, he needed no other literature than his text-books, and set himself to win medals like one who had been fitted by machinery for that purpose.