But, after all, that first plunge into city-life had had something of the excitement of novelty; it was the settling down thereafter to the dull monotonous round of labour, in this lonely lodging, with the melancholy gray world of mist surrounding him and shutting him in, that was to test the strength of his resolve. The first day was not so bad; for now and again he would relieve the slow tedium of the hours by doing a little carpentering about the room; and the sharp sound of hammer and nail served to break in upon that hushed, slumberous murmur of the great city without that seemed a mournful, distant, oppressive thing. But the next day of this solitary life (for it was not until the end of the week he was to see Mr. Weems) was dreadful. The dull, silent gray hours would not go by. Wrestling with Ewart's Agricultural Assistant, or Balfour's Elements of Botany, or with distressing problems in land-surveying or timber-measuring, he would think the time had passed; and then, going to the window for a moment's relief to eye and brain, he would see by the clock of the railway station that barely half an hour had elapsed since last he had looked at the obdurate hands. How he envied the porters, the cab-drivers, the men who were loading and unloading the waggons; they seemed all so busy and contented; they were getting through with their work; they had something to show for their labour; they had companions to talk to and joke with; sometimes he thought he could hear them laughing. And ah, how much more he envied the traveller who drove up and got leisurely out of the cab, and had his luggage carried into the station, himself following and disappearing from view! Whither was he going, then, away from this great, melancholy city, with its slow hours, and wan skies, and dull, continuous, stupefying murmur? Whither, indeed!—away by the silver links of Forth, perhaps, with the castled rock of Stirling rising into the windy blue and white; away by the wooded banks of Allan Water and the bonny Braes of Doune; by Strathyre, and Glenogle, and Glenorchy; and past the towering peaks of Ben Cruachan, and out to the far-glancing waters of the western seas. Indeed it is a sore pity that Miss Carry Hodson, in a fit of temper, had crushed together and thrust into the bottom of the boat the newspaper containing an estimate of Ronald's little Highland poem; if only she had handed it on to him, he would have learned that the sentiment of nostalgia is too slender and fallacious a thing for any sensible person to bother his head about; and, instead of wasting his time in gazing at the front of a railway station, he would have gone resolutely back to Strachan's Agricultural Tables and the measuring and mapping of surface areas.
On the third day he grew desperate.
'In God's name let us see if there's not a bit of blue sky anywhere!' he said to himself; and he flung his books aside, and put on his Glengarry cap, and took a stick in his hand, and went out.
Alas! that there were no light pattering steps following him down the stone stair; the faithful Harry had had to be left behind, under charge of Mr. Murray of the inn. And indeed Ronald found it so strange to be going out without some companion of the kind that when he passed into the wide, dull thoroughfare, he looked up and down everywhere to see if he could not find some homeless wandering cur that he could induce to go with him. But there was no sign of dog-life visible; for the matter of that there was little sign of any other kind of life; there was nothing before him but the wide, empty, dull-hued street, apparently terminating in a great wilderness of india-rubber works and oil-works and the like, all of them busily engaged in pouring volumes of smoke through tall chimneys into the already sufficiently murky sky.
But when he got farther north, he found that there were lanes and alleys permeating this mass of public works; and eventually he reached a canal, and crossed that, deeming that if he kept straight on he must reach the open country somewhere. As yet he could make out no distance; blocks of melancholy soot-begrimed houses, timber-yards, and blank stone walls shut in the view on every hand; moreover there was a brisk north wind blowing that was sharply pungent with chemical fumes and also gritty with dust; so that he pushed on quickly, anxious to get some clean air into his lungs, and anxious, if that were possible, to get a glimpse of green fields and blue skies. For, of course, he could not always be at his books; and this, as he judged, must be the nearest way out into the country; and he could not do better than gain some knowledge of his surroundings, and perchance discover some more or less secluded sylvan retreat, where, in idle time, he might pass an hour or so with his pencil and his verses and his memories of the moors and hills.
But the farther out he got the more desolate and desolating became the scene around him. Here was neither town nor country; or rather, both were there; and both were dead. He came upon a bit of hawthorn-hedge; the stems were coal-black, the leaves begrimed out of all semblance to natural foliage. There were long straight roads, sometimes fronted by a stone wall and sometimes by a block of buildings—dwelling-houses, apparently, but of the most squalid and dingy description; the windows opaque with dirt; the 'closes' foul; the pavements in front unspeakable. But the most curious thing was the lifeless aspect of this dreary neighbourhood. Where were the people? Here or there two or three ragged children would be playing in the gutter; or perhaps, in a dismal little shop, an old woman might be seen, with some half-withered apples and potatoes on the counter. But where were the people who at one time or other must have inhabited these great, gaunt, gloomy tenements? He came to a dreadful place called Saracen Cross—a very picture of desolation and misery; the tall blue-black buildings showing hardly any sign of life in their upper flats; the shops below being for the most part tenantless, the windows rudely boarded over. It seemed as if some blight had fallen over the land, first obliterating the fields, and then laying its withering hand on the houses that had been built on them. And yet these melancholy-looking buildings were not wholly uninhabited; here or there a face was visible—but always of women or children; and perhaps the men-folk were away at work somewhere in a factory. Anyhow, under this dull gray sky, with a dull gray mist in the air, and with a strange silence everywhere around, the place seemed a City of the Dead; he could not understand how human beings could live in it at all.
At last, however, he came to some open spaces that still bore some half-decipherable marks of the country, and his spirits rose a little. He even tried to sing 'O say, will you marry me, Nelly Munro?'—to force himself into a kind of liveliness, as it were, and to prove to himself that things were not quite so bad after all. But the words stuck in his throat. His voice sounded strangely in this silent and sickly solitude. And at last he stood stock-still, to have a look round about him, and to make out what kind of a place this was that he had entered into.
Well, it was a very strange kind of place. It seemed to have been forgotten by somebody, when all the other land near was being ploughed through by railway-lines and heaped up into embankments. Undoubtedly there were traces of the country still remaining—and even of agriculture; here and there a line of trees, stunted and nipped by the poisonous air; a straggling hedge or two, withered and black; a patch of corn, of a pallid and hopeless colour; and a meadow with cattle feeding in it. But the road that led through these bucolic solitudes was quite new and made of cinders; in the distance it seemed to lose itself in a network of railway embankments; while the background of this strange simulacrum of a landscape—so far as that could be seen through the pall of mist and smoke—seemed to consist of further houses, ironworks, and tall chimney-stacks. Anything more depressing and disconsolate he had never witnessed; nay, he had had no idea that any such God-forsaken neighbourhood existed anywhere in the world; and he thought he would much rather be back at his books than wandering through this dead and spectral land. Moreover it was beginning to rain—a thin, pertinacious drizzle that seemed to hang in the thick and clammy air; and so he struck away to the right, in the direction of some houses, guessing that there he would find some way of getting back to the city other than that ghastly one he had come by.
By the time he had reached these houses—a suburb or village this seemed to be that led in a straggling fashion up to the crest of a small hill—it was raining heavily. Now ordinarily a gamekeeper in the Highlands is not only indifferent to rain, but apparently incapable of perceiving the existence of it. When was wet weather at Inver-Mudal ever known to interfere with the pursuits or occupations of anybody? Why, the lads there would as soon have thought of taking shelter from the rain as a terrier would. But it is one thing to be walking over wet heather in knickerbocker-stockings and shoes, the water quite clean, and the exercise keeping legs and feet warm enough, and it is entirely another thing to be walking through mud made of black cinders, with clammy trousers flapping coldly round one's ankles. Nay, so miserable was all this business that he took refuge in an entry leading into one of those 'lands' of houses; and there he stood, in the cold stone passage, with a chill wind blowing through it, looking out on the swimming pavements, and the black and muddy road, and the dull stone walls, and the mournful skies.
At length, the rain moderating somewhat, he issued out from this shelter, and set forth for the town. A tramway-car passed him, but he had no mind to be jammed in amongst a lot of elderly women, all damp and with dripping umbrellas. Nay, he was trying to convince himself that the very discomfort of this dreary march homeward—through mud and drizzle and fog—was a wholesome thing. After that glimpse of the kind of country that lay outside the town—in this direction at least—there would be less temptation for him to throw down his books and go off for idle strolls. He assured himself that he ought to be glad that he found no verdant meadows and purling brooks; that, on the contrary, the aspect of this suburban territory was sufficiently appalling to drive him back to his lodgings. All the same, when he did arrive there, he was somewhat disheartened and depressed; and he went up the stone staircase slowly; and when he entered that solitary, dull little room, and sate down, he felt limp and damp and tired—tired, after a few miles' walk! And then he took to his books again, with his mouth set hard.