Читать книгу Coloured Spectacles - Frederick Niven - Страница 6

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What age was I then? Well, the doo-cot had been taken down. I no longer kept pigeons but I still made my calls at the bird-fanciers' in Candleriggs, St. Enoch Square and Howard Street to observe the fantails, black and white, the common pigeons—"blue baurs"—the pouters and tumblers, the nuns, the ruffs, and the rest. I had gone upon some stages of youth. Peeries and girrs (spinning-tops and hoops) were of the past. The lit windows of the Deadwood Dick and Jack Harkaway and Ching-Ching shop under the roar of the Caledonian Railway Bridge and the small vivid cave of the Papeterie were also in my past. I went in at other doors. I had the urge—it was in the air—to "get wisdom, get understanding."

The Holmes bookshop in Dunlop Street, with its stranger treasures, had the major portion of my pocket-money and Stephen Mitchell my gratitude for dreaming, over his tobacco, to give us the freedom of that library situated, then, in Miller Street. In that street, in an earlier library, it used to please me to remember, my grandfather, William Waterston Niven, had been librarian. Before taking over that post he was in business with his father as a printer which, in those days, meant publishing also. I have a nice specimen of their work an arm's length from me now, with the imprint on a finely-spaced title-page:

Glasgow

John Niven And Son, Printers

MDCCCXXXII

Cheek by jowl with that is a volume of essays—doctrinal, experimental, and prophetical—by my maternal grandfather, George Barclay:

Printed For the Author

and sold by Waugh and Innes, and W.

Oliphant, Edinburgh; M. Ogle and W.

Collins, Glasgow; Wightman and Cramp,

London; and Maxwell Dick, Irvine,

1828.

I came honestly, evidently, by my interest in printers' ink. But my father, though a great reader, and that in two or three languages, had been, to begin his restless life, a manufacturer—of sewed muslin.

In my mother's family, as volumes that have descended to us testify, there have been many scholars. Inside several of their books were labels upon them to such effect as: Literis Græcis in Academia Glasguensi . . . or Glasgow College . . . Diligentiæ et Virtutis. . . . I wanted to be a painter; I wanted—we had had no Great War then—to be a war-correspondent. Pen and ink drawings enthralled me. I went on the quest of reproductions of pen-and-inks in the Mitchell Library and elsewhere, pored over examples, among others, of Edwin Abbey, of Blum and Birch, of Sterner, of Pennell, with delightful discoveries of how their desired effects were achieved, how they rendered what they saw, and after an introduction to Mariano Fortuny (of which you shall hear) was led, by reason of his nationality and friendships, to Vierge and Simonetti.

My folks, sensibly enough, pointed out to me the extremely precarious existence of a painter—even of a war-correspondent—and compromised: How about an applied art? Or how would it be if, to begin with, I went to the Glasgow School of Art in the evenings, on trial, to see if I had the stuff in me, and was apprenticed to the manufacturing business? Designers were required in that business. I recalled that Alexander Smith had been a pattern-designer—which helped to make me amenable to parental reason, and dutiful. But my mother, I believed, regretted that I had not followed in the footsteps of her folk, alumni of the old Glasgow College, never entered its university. I broke a tradition of her family then—when we humoured each other. That's life.

Art classes were conducted in various schools in Glasgow. Alex Miller, who sent me, the other day, a photograph of his Atalanta that he carved in limewood, was then studying at one of these. With a scholarship from Hutchesons' Grammar School I went to the Glasgow School of Art, a scholarship that granted me two years of evening classes.

Tremendously though manufacturers interested me, and warehousemen, and packers, and weavers, I was not enthusiastic about manufacturing. The intention was for me to pass through the various departments and learn the business. I began with winceys and it was Charlie Maclean, head of the wincey department, who informed me, gazing at me solemnly one day, "Freddy, the plain fact is that ye dinna gie a spittle for your work." He used, tolerantly, to seek occasions to get me out of the warehouse. "Here's a letter for you to take out," he would say, "in a hurry. And you can tak' your time coming back." I used to scamper like a harrier to Mann, Byars', Stewart and MacDonald's, J. and W. Campbells', or whoever it might be, and then plunge into the old library in Miller Street, spend a while there (or dive into that bookshop in Dunlop Street and buy another volume of the Canterbury Series or the Scott Library, if I had the price), then dash back to the ware'us like a harrier again. Once a month Charlie would send me out on a private errand: "Ye micht gang doon tae the Papeterie, Freddy, and get me ma copy of The Celtic Monthly." Old Charlie Maclean and I, I used to feel, had a quiet understanding about this and that. Well, he's gone—he's gone over thirty years ago.

Watson, the cashier in the office, was another of the salt of the earth, a painter in water-colours on summer evenings and on his annual vacation. His voice was high and husky and when he saw anything he liked in the way of tones of the day on Ingram Street walls he would huskily whisper, "Did ye see yon licht on the chimney-tops the day?"

There were always pranks in the place. If any one handed another a letter there, not at the usual time for letters, it was advisable to stoop and peer at the underside before accepting it, to see that it had not been smeared with gum. If any one called another by an opprobrious epithet and then ran away it was also advisable, if pursuing, to be wary, chasing from one department to another, for probably round a corner some pieces of flannelette or wincey had been placed in a low stack—to be leapt over by the pursued and to bring the pursuer down, hurdies ower heid. That side of the life of a manufacturer I took to like a duck to water.

By day I was at least ostensibly forging ahead towards being a worthy burgess in the warehouse of Ingram Street (less, I think, an idle apprentice than one lacking high seriousness in his decreed vocation) and by night I was studying at the School of Art, a happy callant. Then, abruptly, another door opening, I jumped out of the ware'us into a library—which was no doubt in order if heredity was to be considered—and in my new sphere no one ever told me that I didna gie a spittle for my work. The only trouble was that sometimes I would be lost in a book when I ought to have been attending to a subscriber.

Well do I recall the evening on which Francis Newbery, head of the Art School in those days, set me a task for the next night and I asked if I might postpone it till the night after, explaining that on the night which he was arranging for me I had to read a paper on Keats to a literary society. He stared at me and, "Who was Keats?" he asked with a gravity mitigated by a twinkle he could not wholly obliterate. "Was he a painter? What I mean," he continued, "is that the sooner you decide whether you are going to draw or write, the better." He was a great instructor. "I am not here," he would at times remind us, "to put art into you, only to bring it out if it is in you." He also taught me to see.

There was stimulation in the smoky air then. There was diversity of excitement to suit all moods, tastes, temperaments, mentalities. Religious revivalists, both of the preaching and singing sort, filled churches and halls in which "penitent forms" were ranged below the platforms in preparation for those who, saved, would silently testify by advancing at least so far and sitting thereon. After a further gale of prayer it might be that they would come up on the platform to be seen of all men. I attended one or two of these tense gatherings, in the desire to miss nothing, but my heart, truth to tell, was elsewhere with other excitements, other affirmations.

Secular lectures drew large audiences eager for expert information on the planets, or on literature, or on attempts to reach the poles and penguins. I think it was on the New Woman that Richard Le Gallienne lectured. I had a ticket for the course in which he appeared but was abed in the down-beaten soot and fog with bronchitis when he visited the second city. Israel Zangwill I heard, on Ghettos, in the Athenæum hall. Jerome K. Jerome spoke on humour (the New Humour, I think) in a church and his opening remark was to the effect that he felt perturbed, "never having been in a church before—I mean this part of it." In another church Sir Robert Ball lectured on astronomy. I can recall vividly the scenes at the doors and on the pavement when that lecture was over, everybody making exit with head cast back and eyes gazing up into the darkness above the street-lamps with a new wonder and curiosity.

There were also heady private gatherings around polished tables in some favoured howff, devoted to clamant discussion of life, literature, art, the sense of belonging to Glasgow—or of Glasgow belonging to us, as in Will Fyffe's song, and that Glasgow would flourish, lively in the back of our minds.

We must have loved our city. In retrospect the stickiness of the streets in winter and the smoke-laden atmosphere, pernicious to the bronchial tubes, seem as part of its charm. And that is no sentimental saying. Did not smoke and grime make more couthie the interiors for our for-gatherings?