Читать книгу The Crest of the Broken Wave - James William Barke - Страница 6

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The roads were deeply rutted and pot-holed. The two carts juddered and creaked and lumbered on their journey. The light Galloway ponies sweated and snorted. The carter, holding the bridle of the leading horse, encouraged it with soft reassuring words. He too sweated; and sometimes he groaned, for it was his third rake that day and he had tramped close on twenty miles. It was four miles from his farm at Ellisland to the Closeburn lime kilns.

His throat was raw and dry. His eyes were red from shovelling the lime into the carts—especially in the high wind.

He had crossed the bridge spanning the river Nith at Auldgirth and was on his last mile home when a carriage approached. He drew the beasts into the side of the road and halted them. The road was too narrow to do otherwise; and the carriage had the right of way.

He took the opportunity to wipe the sweat from his face: he was too tired to bother about the occupants of the carriage.

But Captain Robert Riddell, the owner and occupant of the carriage, had more leisure to be observant. When he had slowly passed the stationary carts he turned to his wife and said: “That—or I be mistaken—was Robert Burns.”

“Carting lime?”

“He’s building a new farm-house—as he told us.”

“Must he do his own carting?”

“Must—or he wouldna be doing it.”

Mrs. Riddell shrugged the subject into dismissal and pressed the back of one kid-gloved hand into the palm of the other. Morning and night her husband’s breath smelled abominably of alcohol.

The Friars Carse carriage gathered some speed once it had passed the lime carts. The Bard jogged his leading horse forward with a grunt of irritation. Carriages ... The gentry...

His irritation was momentary. He was driving on with his farm work. He had need to drive. He must urge the builders to finish his new Ellisland home before the rigours of winter set in. He must get Jean down from Machlin...

Rain came blustering across from the bare Dunscore hills. It was a cold drenching autumnal rain. It squalled over them...

Soon the wind died; but the rain descended mercilessly, soaking man and beast. The roads were running gutters and the pot-holes became dirty dubs of rain and glaur.

The Galloway ponies plodded forward stoically and maybe with a sense of relief. Maybe there was some relief in the rain running down their steaming sweaty hides. The Bard was as stoical as his horses. It was his last journey for the day. Against the morrow his sodden clothes would have to be dried before the fire. This meant more reek filling David Cullie’s spence where he lodged. But he had been reared to stoicism. Many a hundred days and a hundred again, year in and year out, he had laboured and trachled in bog and mire.

Aye; and if but lately he had trodden the plainstanes and the causeways of Auld Reekie as the wonder of all the gay world—that had been but an aside from the tenor of his rustic ways.

After two years of enforced idleness in Edinburgh he was back where he had first come to adolescent consciousness: in Mount Oliphant. The scene had changed; but the routine was the same. He was thirled to beasts and ploughs, carts and harrows; to sowing and reaping and all the endless drudgery of barn and byre, crops and weather, infield and outfield.

Less than at any time in his life did he feel like the tasks that lay before him. Less than at any time in his young life was he fitted for his heavy manual labour. His hands had blistered and burst and healed and blistered again. His fine white hands and immaculate nails from his Edinburgh days were calloused and the nails were broken...

More than his nails were broken. But he did not at the moment allow himself the luxury of indulgent introspection. Maybe to-night, when he would be lying down in the smoke-spewn spence of David Cullie, damp and draughty, he might allow himself some measure of introspection. But at the moment he was stoical. There was a job to be done. Rain, however incessant, had to be accepted. The lime had to be unloaded near the site of his farm-house-to-be. Then he might hand over the Galloway ponies to be groomed down with a bunch of straw and given their bite. Or maybe he would be better to do the job himself. Hired labour was not always to be trusted; and he did not want to run the risk of his ponies going down with a chill.

Afterwards he could see about his own miserable bite. Then he would throw off his wet seeping lime-impregnated clothes. Then he might, if he had any energy left, write an odd letter or two or read some of his correspondence or even peruse a passage from a favourite author...

Maybe... But the carts had to be brought round by the Isle and up the rough-cobbled road by the banks of the river Nith...

As he turned left from the Dumfries-Kilmarnock road into the Isle, he found the wind (which had risen again) in his back and was able to raise his head from the muddy road and look forward. But there was nothing to see but the waves of grey rain sweeping ahead of him and ever the wet boggy road filled with ruts and holes and wretched puddles. Visibility was little more than twenty grey yards...

Against the stoicism with which he faced the daily task was a deep-seated, deep-rooted melancholy.

Robert Burns had known fear and despair from his earliest youth. Often enough, when his growing body was sadly under-nourished and overtaxed, he had been a prey to deepest melancholy, amounting at times to the nervous disease of melancholia.

Now in his twenty-eighth year and alone on his farm of Ellisland—at the elbow of existence—he experienced deeper fears than he had ever known; and his melancholy became more all-engulfing.

Sometimes his loneliness and isolation were hardly to be endured; and sometimes, when endurance was beyond him, he saddled Jenny Geddes and rode the four miles to John Bacon’s inn near Closeburn, where he endeavoured to banish the gloom of his mind and mitigate the terrible cancer-gnawing worry that writhed within his belly.

He drank; and for the first time in his life not for social mirth and fun but from want of them.

The farm of Ellisland lay on the Nith boundary of the Parish of Dunscore. It was a parish of many small hills, some titbits of romantic scenery (of which Ellisland was one), much dreary boggy and barren hill grazings, bad and infrequent roads, miserable road-houses, wretched whisky and a rough, uncultured, unlettered and inhospitable Nithsdale peasantry ... and farmers.

There was little to choose between the parish of Dunscore and the adjoining parish of Glencairn—or any other adjoining parish.

But lately he had been the toast of Edinburgh and had known the acclaim of many shires as Scotland’s Bard. Little more than a year ago he had been fêted by the Dumfries magistrates and made an honoured freeman. Dumfries was but six miles away; and yet here he was an utter stranger and regarded as something of an alien, an unwelcome interloper.

Not that he was entirely friendless. Willie Stewart, the factor of Closeburn estate, had gone out of his way to help him and to press on him the friendship of his table and the comfort of his fire-side. Willie’s sister, Mary, who was wife to landlord John Bacon, had ever a friendly word for him when he visited the Brownhill inn. John MacMurdo, chamberlain to the Duke of Queensberry’s many acres at Drumlanrig, had not stinted his friendship either. But Closeburn was almost five miles away; and Drumlanrig lay some three miles beyond Closeburn...

The western boundary of Ellisland marched with the estate of Captain Robert Riddell of Glenriddell. First and last Riddell, who was still in his sunny thirties, was a gentleman and a country squire. After that he was many things: an amateur musician and composer; an antiquary who had contributed antiquarian papers to learned antiquarian journals; a great trencherman and a heavy and boastful drinker. A massive man with the voice of a bull and fists like hams.

Robert Riddell had held out a hand of gentlemanly friendship towards the Bard. True, Robert Burns was but a tenant-farmer of neighbouring Patrick Miller, Esquire, of Dalswinton. But was he not also Scotland’s Bard? Had he not been taken up by the titled nobility of Scotland and shaken by the hand; had not my lords and ladies of Gordon, Glencairn and Atholl given him an honoured place at their tables?

Elizabeth Kennedy, English wife to Robert Riddell, did not think she should be asked to sit beside a working tenant-farmer who did his own carting and ploughing—especially when he was a neighbour. But certainly if the Duchess of Gordon could have him to dinner...

So the Bard had been invited to Friars Carse; and Mrs. Riddell and her mother-in-law had to agree that his conversation and his manners were beyond reproach. Obviously his contacts with the great had put considerable polish to his rusticity. It was agreed that though he might not drop in at the Carse he might, on occasion, be invited to do so.

Riddell, in a gust of generosity, gave him a key to the damp rectangular hutlet which he had named the Hermitage, that the Bard might have access to this secluded corner of the estate. There, in an inspired moment, the squire hoped that either a ballad or a song might be forthcoming extolling the virtues of the Riddells and the beauties of the Carse. The Bard of Scotland could hardly be expected to do less in repayment of the patronage of Squire Riddell.

Yet he was a cut above most country squires. He did have interests apart from over-eating, over-drinking and over-wenching. The man did have a love for his country, its history, its songs and ballads and folk-lore. And he did have some music in his soul and on the tips of his fiddle-fingers. But such were his social prejudices that he could not offer the Bard one of his many spare bedrooms, but allowed him to return, from a late visit, to the damp spence of David Cullie at the Isle.

The Bard had no illusions about Robert Riddell—or John Bacon. Bacon was an illiterate landlord greedy for the money his customers placed in his grasping paw: Riddell was a gentleman and in no way to be blamed for his inability to step outside the convention of his gentlemanly code. Far from spurning his patronage, the Bard was grateful for the measure of company it gave him, and indeed was developing something of affection and regard for the man.

But fear still gnawed at his vitals. He feared that Ellisland might not prove successful; he feared that he had neither the strength of body nor the energy of will to make it a success.

Yet he toiled early and late and did not spare himself. He ploughed, he bigged dykes, he dug drains ... he showed every possible example of good and energetic husbandry to his workers. But fear remained with him and his nights were becoming unbearably lonely. It was late autumn and the mists of autumn and of melancholy gathered about him.

He knew that his melancholy was inevitable. Ellisland was a doubtful bargain. Apart from his generous loan to Gilbert he had sunk all the money from his Edinburgh edition into it. By the time he had brought it into such a state of productivity as would enable it to pay its rent, what would he be left with?

Ah, but with Jean by his side what was to prevent him from succeeding? Why shouldn’t he fulfil the vision of himself as a contented farmer surrounded by prosperous acres, a growing family of bounding healthy bairns and the fire-side companionship of as fine a guidwife as ever blessed man?

The vision tugged sorely at his heart-strings. With Jean at his side he felt there was little or nothing he could not accomplish. His family would grow up ... Jean and he would grow old together. But by then his sons would be able to relieve him of the farm drudgery. He would be able to devote more of his time to Coila, his Muse... He might even be able to write poetic drama; he might even essay guid prose plays dealing with Scottish life and character. But there was really no end to what he might not do—provided...

Ever and always there was this eternal question of the ways and means of life, the damned petty cash of daily existence. Nothing in life could be secured without cash. The very gift of life itself was cankered at the core because of it.

Aye: it was stupid, senseless, meaningless and monstrous; but there was no overcoming it, no getting round it or past it. It seemed that just as his father had died for lack of cash; just as his mother and Gilbert and his sisters were all harassed to death for want of it; just as all his young life had been blighted for want of it, so now that he was embarked on a wife and family and a farm he was to be persecuted and enslaved for want of it.

If that damned scoundrel Creech had settled his money with him when it had been due; if he hadn’t had to kick his heels for that last winter in Edinburgh...

But even honest anger could not disperse the fogs of melancholy. Only company and drink could do that.

Had he reached the crest of the wave in Edinburgh—in his first winter? But he’d known even then that the wave would break under him; that he would be cast into the trough. And, by certes, he was in the trough now. Bogged. Not even a glow-worm glimmer to guide him out of his dismal despond.

God’s curse on the weary drink and Bacon’s ingle-neuk! He had neither stomach nor head for it so that its after-effects were as draughts of hell...

And yet the ingle-neuk drew him. There was fire and warmth and comfort, the smell of honest food cooking and ever the chance of company. John MacMurdo or Willie Stewart; and travellers, men passing north or south with news of the outside world. News of Glasgow or Edinburgh, London or Carlisle. Sometimes there were womenfolks travelling in company. It was fine to see a new feminine face and to hear feminine conversation...

Yet not every autumn day in the year of 1788 was melancholy or wet with grey rain. There came a fine autumn evening and Robert Burns, tired with his day’s heavy labour, rested on the high bank of the river Nith and gazed with dreamy far-away eyes across the grain-golden holms of Dalswinton estate to the faint blue hills of Kirkmichael parish lying beyond the foreground parish of Kirkmahoe.

A letter from his Ayrshire patroness, Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, was clasped loosely in his hand. He wasn’t worrying much about his kind-hearted elderly patroness. She had written him from Moreham Mains, near Haddington, where she was staying with her son and awaiting the lying-in of his wife. She hadn’t been too well of late but was now recovered (the letter informed him) since she had “drunk two pounds of hempseed boiled in small beer.” Mrs. Dunlop was of noble family.

He had been reckoning his harvest and had used the back of her letter to note down the number of thraves he had gathered from his fields. In all, five hundred and forty-five thraves: Stookhill yielding a hundred and ten and the Corner Rig but seventeen.

It was a depressing account. But here he was but reaping what old Cullie had sown. At worst he was certain he could do much better than David Cullie.

And he had plans against the future. Two days ago he had written to Robert Graham of Fintry and had put his case before him. It had been a plain straightforward appeal to Fintry, in his capacity of Commissioner of the Excise, to use his influence with his fellow-commissioners on the Board to secure him the Excise Division in which Ellisland stood. Leonard Smith, the present Exciseman, had lately come into a considerable fortune; and the Bard saw no reason why Fintry shouldn’t arrange to have Smith transferred to some other division. Had Smith been a poor man, or had he been burdened in any way with local responsibilities, he would never have suggested that Smith be removed to make way for him. But he knew that Smith neither needed the job nor had much interest in it. Smith indeed longed for a change.

Though born of fear, it had taken courage to write to Graham of Fintry; and it would be some time yet before he could discuss the matter with Jean.

At the thought of her he put away Mrs. Dunlop’s letter and sought out his wife’s. He had read it a dozen times already. It was a plain honest letter; but it was the touching artless honesty of her love for him that moved him so deeply.

He took a blank sheet of paper from his pocket and in the evening light wrote:

My dear Love—I received your kind letter with a pleasure which no letter but one from you could have given me. I dreamed of you the whole night last; but alas! I fear it will be three weeks yet, ere I can hope for the happiness of seeing you. My harvest is going on. I have some to cut down still, but I put in two stacks to-day, so I am as tired as a dog...

I expect your new gowns will be very forward, or ready to make, against I be home to get the Baiveridge.

I have written my long-thought-on letter to Mr. Graham, the Commissioner of Excise; and have sent him a sheetful of poetry besides...

The westering sun was warm on his back and the clear cool waters of the Nith wimpled, splashed and gurgled over and among and about the smooth boulders and the shingle beds below him. The river, with its water music, was his greatest solace and his deepest joy at Ellisland...

If only he could have brought Jean down; if only he hadn’t to divide his time between Ellisland and Machlin... The prospect that he would be able to set-up house with Jean this winter was becoming every day more remote. Thomas Boyd, the Dumfries architect and building contractor, was proving provokingly dilatory. Yet he had carted lime and stones for the masons and done everything he could to speed the work.

There was so much more he could do if only Jean were with him. More and more he drew strength and inspiration from her. Here for once the fates had been kind to him—had blessed him indeed beyond his deserts. There wasn’t another woman he had ever known (and he had known many) who could hold a farthing taper to her. And now, more than at any other time in his life, he needed her—needed the warmth and comfort and strength of her love and companionship.

This harvest time had been the longest period of separation from her since he had officially declared his marriage; since Daddy Auld and the Machlin Session had formally recognised the marriage that had been consummated under the green thorn tree. The fact that the Session had been forced to recognise his first and only declaration of marriage had been a sweet victory for him.

It had been a victory, a supreme victory over his Machlin enemies—and the Kirk of Scotland. It had been a not-unwelcome triumph over the pride and insolence of the narrow-minded Armours. It had humbled creatures like Holy Willie and James Lamie into the dust. But best of all it had brought joy to his friends and consolation to Mossgiel. Viewed from any or every angle it had been a master-move. And it had been a move his heart had dictated.

He had been a married man since March. But his married life was far from satisfactory. For weeks on end he was separated from Jean; and some forty-six long dreary miles lay between them. From this very bank on the Nith he had written her that glorious honeymoon song Of a’ the Airts the Wind can blaw. But sweet beyond prose or verse or immortal harmony though these monthly reunions were, the partings were almost unbearably cruel; and his days and nights at Ellisland the more intensely lonely.

He was alone on the banks of the Nith as he had never before been alone. There were times when he had been lonely in Edinburgh. But whatever the loneliness or the despair in Auld Reekie there had always been Jock Richmond or Willie Cruikshank or Willie Nicol to come home to in the evening.

It was now that he missed Edinburgh; now that he knew its worth; now that he missed his friends there and the happy hours he had known with them.

Gone, doubtless forever, were those happy Crochallan nights in Dawney Douglas’s with such sterling good fellows as Willie Nicol, Willie Smellie and Willie Dunbar; Nasmyth and Beugo; Sandy Cunningham and good kind-hearted Bob Cleghorn, the farmer from Saughton Mills.

Gone were his long talks with men like Lord Monboddo, Dean of the Faculty Henry Erskine, Bishop John Geddes, Professor Dugald Stewart, Professor James Gregory, the younger Tytler of Woodhouselea, and men like the Reverend William Greenfield.

Gone too, and that forever, the nights at the Theatre Royal and a bite and a drink afterwards with the ever-lamented Fergusson’s friend, Willie Woods, the actor...

Often enough he had discounted his Edinburgh acquaintances. Now he could think of them by the score and scarce a one but would have gladdened his heart to meet on a Nithsdale road. Lang Sandy Wood, the surgeon, who had saved his knee (or almost, since it still troubled him...); Louis Cauvin, his French teacher, stout and cheery and benevolently kind; old Schetky from Saint Cecilia’s Hall ... and a dozen more.

The lassies! Maybe he hadn’t fared so well with them. Clarinda? Ah, the sweet-curved Nancy had given him many a happy moment—and many a sore headache. She was bringing down the wrath of heaven and conjuring up the black curses of hell to blast him—if all that Ainslie wrote were true.

Hell knows no fury... And he couldn’t blame her, couldn’t think in any way unkindly of her. He was glad to have managed to escape from her devious toils. And now here was Jenny Clow, her servant, pregnant and serving out a writ against him, even as Peggy Cameron had done, in order to secure provision for her child yet to be born. He had sent her some money by Ainslie; but he would need to visit Auld Reekie sometime early in the coming winter and settle her claim in due legal form.

He could not feel any anger for Jenny Clow even as he had felt no lasting anger for Peggy Cameron. But neither could he feel, in any deep sense, emotionally involved in them or their future. What was done was done—and their eyes had never been shut to the possible consequences of their physical capitulations. Yet they had served their turn in their day and had never expressed any regrets. In their day and in their way they had given and received happiness and had known, as they might never have known otherwise, an intense measure of physical ecstasy...

How different it had been, how different it was even now, with Peggy Chalmers... Peggy could still catch at his heart for what might have been. He would never as long as he lived be able to forget those walks in the Edinburgh Meadows and through the evening shadows that lay across George Square; those days of singing and piano-playing at Doctor Blacklock’s and his dear guidwife, Sarah Johnston, once of Dumfries...

Most memorable of all, those autumn days and evenings—but a year past—on the banks of the winding Devon ... and the fire-side circle at Harviestoun House and always Peggy Chalmers or her cousin Charlotte Hamilton, the ministering angels...

And maybe he would never meet them in this world again...

The sun had gone down; and the suffused sky above the deep-purpling hills told of the dying day. A chill wind had sprung up; and in the gloaming the Nith’s song seemed to take on a deeper and more melancholy tone since the dancing light had vanished from the waters and they had turned cold and grey and black.

Something had died in Robert Burns. The past had died. What remained of his Edinburgh days and his Edinburgh friendships? He had but the words they wrote to him on a sheet of paper; and he had but words to write on a sheet of paper in reply. It was death compared to the days when they had rioted together in honest friendship.

There was only Jean now. And if Jean weighed them down in the scales of worth and attachment, her absence and his longing for her made the isolation, the melancholy and the loneliness, the more cruel.

The dew was falling; and now that the sun had gone from the sky a white autumnal mist began to gather about the river and the hollows of the land.

He rose from the bank stiff and sore and sad at heart. Tomorrow, if the weather held, he would bind all day behind his inadequate reapers. To-night he would dream of Jean...