CHAPTER VII - THE LANTERN-BEARERS
I
THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly
fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of
existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the
diversion of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly
red and many of, them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about
the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a
shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with
flowers; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward
parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of
blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with golf-balls and
bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that
remarkable cigar) and the LONDON JOURNAL, dear to me for its
startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive
names: such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of
the town. These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two
sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to
lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough)
to cocknify the scene: a haven in the rocks in front: in front of
that, a file of gray islets: to the left, endless links and sand
wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits
and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of seaward crags, one
rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient
fortress on the brink of one; coves between - now charmed into
sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting
surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and
southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and
pungent of the sea - in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward
like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-
geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke.
This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker;
and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King
James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang
with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.
There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in
that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if
you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might
secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of
elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted
here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold
homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a
special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for
the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny
pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew
the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing
parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of
little anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to
the to the much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and
consequent shrill recrimination - shrill as the geese themselves.
Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but
though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be
regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honour
that a boy should eat all that he had taken. Or again, you might
climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the
buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke
and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships. You
might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically
call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging
your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their
guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you
headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the
tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots
of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader
from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck
of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the
sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide
and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go
Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air:
digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a
fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there - if they were truly
apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us
off with some inferior and quite local fruit capable of resolving,
in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine;
or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and
visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling
turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans (the worst, I
must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that
had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of
east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign
among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an
adventure in itself.
There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were
joyous. Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat
at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top
of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a
cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and
the bandage all bloody - horror! - the fisher-wife herself, who
continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as
I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the little
old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there,
with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been
tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard
that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still
pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I
readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor
died, and a dark old woman continued to dwell alone with the dead
body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one
of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were
clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house of
mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice
of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins that fled
down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall with a
more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the
coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of
rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour
mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had
any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the
pier-head, where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and
husband and sons - their whole wealth and their whole family -
engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of
neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squalling
and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic
Maenad.
These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory
dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It
was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of
our two months' holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its
native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic
forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in
their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless
art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the
rise of the United States. It may still flourish in its native
spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to
introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm
being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.
The idle manner of it was this:-
Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and
the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our-
respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.
The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce
of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to
garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We
wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them,
such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled
noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they
would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure
of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his
top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about
their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the
hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at
being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we
had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be
policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting
thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns
were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found
them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the
pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a
bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.
When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you
got your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth,
and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory
contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the
polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the
belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them
- for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of
the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats
would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the
chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and
cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young
gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on
the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with
inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I may not give some specimens -
some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the
rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent,
they were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the talk, at
any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only
accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this
bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut,
the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your
footsteps or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness
in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your
fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to
exult and sing over the knowledge.
