Читать книгу Memory Hold-the-Door - John Buchan - Страница 6

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As a child I must have differed in other things besides sanctity from the good Bernard of Clairvaux, who we are told, could walk all day by the Lake of Geneva and never see the lake. My earliest recollections are not of myself, but of my environment. It is only reflection that fits my small presence into the picture.

When a few months old I was brought by my parents to a little grey manse on the Fife coast. It was a square, stone house standing in a big garden, with a railway behind it, and in front, across a muddy by-road, a linoleum factory, a coal-pit and a rope-walk, with a bleaching-works somewhere in the rear. To-day industry no longer hems it in, but has submerged it, and a vast factory has obliterated house and garden. The place smelt at all times of the making of wax-cloth; not unpleasantly, though in spring the searching odour was apt to over-power the wafts of lilac and hawthorn.

To the north, beyond the narrow tarnished strip, lay deep country. Two streams converged through “dens” to a junction below the rope-walk. Both were of small volume, and one was foul with the discards of the bleaching-works. There must have been a time when sea-trout in a spate ran up them from the Firth, but now in their lower courses they were like sewers, and finished their degraded life in a drain in the town harbour. There was no beauty in those perverted little valleys, except in spring, when the discoloured and malodorous waters flowed through a mist of blue hyacinths.

Above the bleaching-works and the rope-walk the “dens” became woodland. At first the trees were all beeches and oaks whose roots corrugated the path. But presently these gave place to fir and pine with a carpet of bracken. The “dens” were cut at right-angles by a highway, beyond which lay the policies of an old country house. The highway was the end of one stream, which had its source in a pond; but the other had a longer course, coming from some distant spring through a big wood of close-set young spruces, where notices warned against trespass. Beyond that in turn was a wide grassy loaning where tinkers camped, and the well-tilled haughs of central Fife, and the twin nipples of the Lomonds.

Those woods, when the other day I revisited them, seemed slender copses with fields of roots and grain within a stone’s throw. But to a child they were illimitable forests. The “dens” of the two streams I thought of as the White Woods, for they had sunlight and open spaces; but that beyond the highway was the Black Wood, to enter which was an adventure. As I grew older a passion for birds’ eggs took me into its recesses, and in spring and summer it had no mystery. Moreover, at those seasons holidays were always in my mind, when I should go south to the Border hills, and except that they were the home of birds the woods had little charm for me. But in autumn and winter they recovered the spell which they laid on my earliest childhood.

They smelt differently from the clean Borderland, where the woods were only tiny plantings of fir and birch among the heather. To me as a child, autumn meant the thick, close odour of rotting leaves, varied by scents from the harvested stubble; glimpses of uncanny scarlet toadstools, which I believed to be the work of Lapland witches; acres of spongy ground which miraculously dried up at the first frosts. Winter meant vistas of frozen branches with cold blue lights between, tracks which had to be rediscovered among snowdrifts, and everywhere great pits of darkness. In winter especially I had an authentic forest to explore, which to me was a far more real world than the bustling town behind me, or the wide spaces of sea and open country.

Looking back I realise that the woodlands dominated and coloured my childish outlook. We were a noted household of fairy tales. My father had a great collection of them, including some of the ancient Scottish ones like The Red Etin of Ireland, and when we entered the woods we felt ourselves stepping into the veritable world of faery, especially in winter, when the snow made a forest of what in summer was only a coppice. My memory is full of snowstorms, when no postman arrived or milkman from the farm, and we had to dig ourselves out like hibernating bears. In such weather a walk of a hundred yards was an enterprise, and even in lesser falls the woods lost all their homely landmarks for us, and became a terra incognita peopled from the story-books. Witches and warlocks, bears and wolf-packs, stolen princesses and robber lords lurked in corners which at other times were too bare and familiar for the mind to play with. Also I had found in the library a book of Norse mythology which strongly captured my fancy. Norns and Valkyries got into the gales that blew up the Firth, and blasting from a distant quarry was the thud of Thor’s hammer.

A second imaginative world overshadowed the woods, more potent even than that of the sagas and the fairy folk. Our household was ruled by the old Calvinistic discipline. That discipline can have had none of the harshness against which so many have revolted, for it did not dim the beauty and interest of the earth. My father was a man of wide culture, to whom, in the words of the Psalms, all things were full of the goodness of the Lord. But the regime made a solemn background to a child’s life. He was conscious of living in a world ruled by unalterable law under the direct eye of the Almighty. He was a miserable atom as compared with Omnipotence, but an atom, nevertheless, in which Omnipotence took an acute interest. The words of the Bible, from daily family prayers and long Sabbath sessions, were as familiar to him as the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. A child has a natural love of rhetoric, and the noble scriptural cadences had their own meaning for me, quite apart from their proper interpretation. The consequence was that I built up a Bible world of my own and placed it in the woods.

From it I excluded the more gracious pictures, the rejoicing “little hills,” the mountains that “clapped their hands,” Elam with its wells and palm trees, the “streams of water in the south” of the 126th Psalm. These belonged properly to the sunny Border. But for the rest, Israel warred in the woods, Israelitish prophets kenneled in the shale of the burns, backsliding Judah built altars to Baal on some knoll under the pines. I knew exactly what a heathenish “grove” was: it was a cluster of self-sown beeches on a certain “high place.” The imagery of the Psalms haunted every sylvan corner. More, as I struggled, a confused little mortal, with the first tangles of Calvinistic theology, I came to identify abstractions with special localities. The Soul, a shining cylindrical thing, was linked with a particular patch of bent and heather, and in that theatre its struggles took place, while Sin, a horrid substance like black salt, was intimately connected with a certain thicket of brambles and spotted toadstools. This odd habit long remained with me. When I began to read philosophy the processes of the Hegelian dialectic were associated with a homely Galloway heath, and the Socratic arguments with the upper Thames between Godstone and Eynsham.

Oddly enough, while as a child I hypostatised so many abstractions, I left out the Calvinistic Devil. He never worried me, for I could not take him seriously. The fatal influence of Robert Burns made me regard him as a rather humorous jovial figure; nay more, as something of a sportsman, dashing and debonair. I agreed with the old Scots lady who complained that “if we were a’ as eident in the pursuit o’ our special callings as the Deil, puir man, it would be better for us.” I would not have been afraid if he had risen suddenly out of the cabbage-garden at Hallowe’en. Sin was a horrid thing, but not the Arch-Sinner.

One other book disputed the claim of the Bible to people the woods—The Pilgrim’s Progress. On Sundays it was a rule that secular books were barred, but we children did not find the embargo much of a penance, for we discovered a fruity line in missionary adventure, we wallowed in martyrologies, we had The Bible in Spain, and above all we had Bunyan. From The Holy War I acquired my first interest in military operations, which cannot have been the intention of the author, while The Pilgrim’s Progress became my constant companion. Even to-day I think that, if the text were lost, I could restore most of it from memory. My delight in it came partly from the rhythms of its prose, which, save in King James’s Bible, have not been equalled in our literature; there are passages, such as the death of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, which all my life have made music in my ear. But its spell was largely due to its plain narrative, its picture of life as a pilgrimage over hill and dale, where surprising adventures lurked by the wayside, a hard road with now and then long views to cheer the traveller and a great brightness at the end of it. John Bunyan claimed our woods as his own. There was the Wicket-gate at the back of the colliery, where one entered them; the Hill Difficulty—more than one; the Slough of Despond—various specimens; the Plain called Ease; Doubting Castle—a disused gravel-pit; the Enchanted Land—a bog full of orchises; the Land of Beulah—a pleasant grassy place where tinkers made their fires. There was no River at the end, which was fortunate perhaps, for otherwise my brothers and I might have been drowned in trying to ford it.

The woods, oddly enough, were an invitation to books. In summer, especially in the Borders, I loathed the sight of the printed word, and my ambitions were for a career of devastating bodily adventure. But the winter woods had a quaint flavour of letters. Always in our scrambles among them there was the prospect of a bright fire, curtains drawn, and a long evening to read in. At such seasons I desired nothing better than a bookish life, as scholar or divine. My aim was to be a country parson in some place where the winters were long and snowy, and a man was forced to spend much of his days and all his evenings in a fire-lit library.

But presently spring came, bookishness went by the board, and the only volume I could think of was a fly-book.