and of the mother of so many, dead or living, of whom our Walter (who, of course, ought not to have been born at all) was to write nearly forty years later that she “is, I am glad to say, perfectly well.”
May there not be something to be said after all for the old gallant ignorant days? The days before we were so very sure that consumptives ought not be allowed to marry, or women to stake the risks of pregnancy, or a straightened income, against the gain of a child’s life, and—in short, that we should always accept defeat without battle, unless we are quite sure of victory, and that we shall take no wound?
However that be, Walter lives, by whatever precedent folly, for which we may unite to be thankful. The year was young when they brought him to Sandy-Knowe, and as the summer came, and he lay through the long hours under the moorland sky, the curiosities of childhood, and of an exceptionally alert and adventurous mind, joined the vitalising influences of sun and wind, in the unhurried impulses by which he crawled, and then stood uncertainly on the shrunken limb, and then began to run upon it with an increasing freedom.
When the young woman of the scissors had brought him to Sandy-Knowe, it had been hard to rouse him to any activity. One of his first recollections was of his grandfather, with the jockey-cap on his short grey hair, still alert and active, though very near to his life’s end, wrapping him in the skin of a just killed sheep, which was supposed to impart some mysterious vitality. And there was another old man there whose portrait was to be fixed indelibly on the child’s abnormally retentive mind. Sir George MacDougall of Mackerstone his grandfather’s cousin, once Colonel of the Greys, in “a small cocked hat, deeply laced, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, and light coloured coat, with milk-white locks tied in a military fashion.” So he knelt, not guessing that he was winning for himself a curious immortality as he dragged his watch along the floor, and the boy struggled to follow the bright attraction, beneath the weight of the heavy skin.
The boy who would have grown up a crippled invalid in the city streets, gradually found it possible to engage in many robust activities. He would be able to ride well: to take long walks, though his progress might not be rapid. Determination can overcome much. Later, at Edinburgh High School, the difficulty of fighting on equal terms would be overcome in the same spirit, when he would chastise an enemy with the legs of both of them tied beneath the bench on which they fought. It is an arrangement which might well be considered by the promoters of boxing contests in our own day, with a view to prolonging their exhibitions of professional heavyweights, whose passion for the horizontal so often brings them to abrupt conclusion.
Walter who, by the attraction of his own loving and generous nature, was throughout his life to have very many and loyal friends, owed much to Janet Scott during the years that followed.
He had been about two years at Sandy-Knowe when someone suggested to his parents that the waters of Bath would be of benefit to the shrunken limb. The idea proved to be of no value, and the change was probably detrimental if weighed in a purely physical scale, but it seemed to the family to be a chance worth trying, though it was a more portentous and relatively expensive enterprise than it would be today. Coaches were slow. Roads were bad, and sometimes dangerous. Janet volunteered She was not young, as a woman’s youth was reckoned at that period. She was over thirty. But it was a time when even mature women did not readily adventure such expeditions, with no company but that of a young child.
Walter, watching with a child’s comprehending silence, and storing everything in a memory the range and accuracy of which have been rarely equalled, thought that she was reluctant to face the ordeal. But, if it were so, her affection for him was strong enough to dominate her weaker fears, or her private plans. Indeed, it is hard to see who else could have gone, unless it had been a younger aunt in Edinburgh, Christian Rutherford, for which, had she been willing, there might have been a score of difficulties which can only be guessed today. Rather than that he should miss an opportunity of being healed, or pass into the charge of strangers, Janet said she would take him.
It is an illuminating comment on the state of the Northern roads that it was considered safest to go to London by sea, and then complete the journey by the famous age-old thoroughfare of the Bath road.
So Janet, with her three-year-old charge, faced the primitive conditions of a voyage in the small sailing-vessels that traded between Leith and London at that period, and made an eventless passage in the Duchess of Buccleuch—a name which suggests that some members of the Scott family may have been among its owners—leaving us no record either of hindering storm or the sight of a pirate’s sails, and landed safely in London, where they delayed their journey sufficiently to visit its most famous buildings, and other places of interest. Walter records that when he inspected the Abbey and the Tower of London twenty-five years later, he was surprised to find how accurately he had remembered them through the intervening years, and that this experience increased his confidence in other infant memories which could not be checked in the same way.
They remained at Bath for about a year, Walter going through the routines of the pump-room without any apparent benefit, and attending for three months at a dame’s school which was near their lodging, where he learned to read.
He owed his most vivid memory of this period to Janet’s sailor brother, Captain Robert Scott, (for though the first had jibbed, the second Robert, like the third, had been sent to sea, as though in propitiation of Auld Beardie’s still-indignant ghost!) He visited Bath while they were there, and took them to a performance of As You Like It. It was Walter’s first experience of the theatre; an intoxication of poetic pageantry which he could never forget.
To Captain Robert he owed a debt of another kind. He was already voracious in demand of tale and legend, and with an imagination which preferred such as were of a sombre horror or tragic magnificance. To his temperament, coming from the moorland scenes which were all that his memory knew, it is not very surprising that the sight of carved statuary, particularly such as portrayed the human form in grotesque or distorted shapes, impressed his childhood’s imagination as a sinister and dreadful thing. Even the angels of Jacob’s ladder, sculptured at the Abbey church, were a spectacle from which he drew back in horror.
Learning of this imaginative fear, his uncle patiently introduced him to a statue of Neptune, till he could approach it without dread, and by this familiarity enabled him to overcome what might have remained as a permanent obsession. We see here, as we shall see many times again, that he was very fortunate in his friends, and not least in those who were of a kindred blood.
Beyond these, his after-memories of Bath were no more than disconnected visions—of a toy-shop near the Orange Grove, and of looking across the Avon to cattle lowing upon the opposite hill.
He returned from Bath to a brief stay in Edinburgh in his parents’ home, and then back with Janet to Sandy-Knowe, where he lived almost continuously for the next three or four years.
CHAPTER V.
In considering these early years of the town-born child we may observe a curious duplication of experience, such as can rarely be paralleled.
Scott’s ancestry on all sides are of farming, cattle-raising, border stock: they are of the land, not the city. But his immediate parents have changed their environment, though they have not diluted their blood. Their experiences are those of the city schools, and the city streets. Walter begins on the land, as his race began. He looks up to a country sky, his infant hands pull the fleeces of living sheep, his infant ears hear the country legends) the country songs. But this is not the environment in which he completes his development. He will go also to the life of city schools and streets, and be informed by the same duality of experience which had been overlaid to form him before he was born.
This duplication of duality is of a vital significance. The breadth and sanity of the country-side is to become articulate, and not merely in self-interpretation. Its spirit is to inform and to interpret
