Here was Dick Dobie with a new blade to put into his shilling knife. A shilling knife, Jacob assured him, is not fitted for cutting down fishing rods. It is however, excellent as a saw when used on smaller timber. Next came Peter Cheesemonger, who was in waiting with a model schooner, the rising of which had met with an accident. And there hurrying down from the cottage on the Brae, was one of the younger Allan lasses with her mother's "wag-at-the-wa'" clock. The pendulum had wagged to such purpose that it had swung itself out of its right mind.
After I had left behind me this vision of old Jacob Irving seated on the wall of the boys' playground at the village school, I fell into a muse upon the narrowness of the line which in our Scottish parishes, divides the "Do-Everythings" from the "Do-Nothings."
I could give myself the more completely to this train of thought that I had finished my rounds for the day, and had now nothing to do except to look forward to seeing Nance, and to the excellent dinner for which the shrewd airs of the moorland were providing internal accommodation of quite a superior character.
The conditions of Scottish life are generally so strenuous, and the compulsions of "He that will not work, neither shall he eat" so absolute that we cannot afford more than one local Do-Nothing in a village or rural community. Equally certainly, however, one is necessary. The business of the commonwealth could not be carried on without him. Besides, he is needed to point the indispensable moral.
"There's that guid-for-naething Jacob Irvin' sittin' wi' a' the misleared boys o' the neighbourhood aboot him!" I can hear a douce goodwife say to her gossip. "Guid peety his puir wife and bairns! Guidman, lay ye doon that paper an awa' to your wark, or ye'll sune be nae better—wi' your Gledstane and your speeches and your smokin'! Think shame o' yersel', guidman."
As the community grows larger, however, there is less and less room for the amiable Do-Nothing. He is, indeed, only seen to perfection in a village or rural parish. In Cairn Edward, for instance which thinks itself quite a town, he does not attain the general esteem and almost affectionate reprobation which, in my native Whinnyliggate, follow Jacob Irving about like his shadow.
In a town like Cairn Edward a local Do-Nothing is apt to attach himself to a livery stable, and there to acquire a fine coppery nose and a permanent "dither" about the knees. He is spoken of curtly and even disrespectfully as "that waister Jock Bell." In cities he becomes a mere matter for the police, and the facetious reporter chronicles his two-hundredth appearance before the magistrate.
But in Whinnyliggate, in Dullarg, in Crosspatrick, and in the surrounding parishes, the conditions for the growth of the Do-Nothing approach as near perfection as anything merely mundane can be expected to do. Jacob Irving is hardly a typical specimen, for he has a trade. The genuine Do-Nothing should have none. It is true that Jacob's children might reply, like the boy when asked if his father were a Christian, "Yes, but he does not work at it much!"
Jacob is a shoe-maker—or rather shoe-mender. For I have never yet been able to trace an entire pair of Jacob's foot-gear on any human extremities. It does not fit his humour to be so utilitarian. He has, however, made an excellent toy pair for the feet of little Jessie Lockhart's doll, with soles, heels, uppers, tongues, and lacing gear all complete. He spent, to my personal knowledge, an entire morning in showing her (on the front step of her father's manse) how to take them off and put them on again. And in the future he will never meet Jessie on the King's highway without stopping and gravely asking her if any repairs are yet requisite. When such are necessary they will, without doubt, receive his best attention.
I had not, however, made a study of Jacob Irving for any considerable period without exploding the vulgar opinion that the parish Do-Nothing is an idle or a lazy man. Nay, to repeat my initial paradox, the Do-Nothing is the only genuine Do-Everything.