Robert suffered most of all for his father whose consumption was obviously killing him. He acutely admired the old man, who, despite his illness, was showing such indomitable spirit by resisting the bitter and unwarranted claims of an unscrupulous landlord.
I’ve notic’d, on our Laird’s count-day
An’ mony a time my heart’s been wae, (vexed)
Poor tenant-bodies, scant o’ cash,
How they maun thole a factor’s snash; (sneers)
He’ll stamp an’ threaten, curse an’ swear,
He’ll apprehend them, poind their gear, (impound their stock)
While they maun stand, wi’ aspect humble,
An’ hear it a’, an’ fear an’ tremble!
When their father’s affairs grew near to crisis, the two brothers, Robert and Gilbert, secretly acquired the farm of Mossgiel from Robert’s friend and lawyer, Gavin Hamilton, as an asylum for the family in case of the worst. All the family’s savings were invested in stocking it and so it was a joint concern. The allowance of the two brothers was seven pounds per annum each and smaller wages were paid to the other members of the family.
Too soon their plan had to be put into practice. The consumption defeated William Burns’ fight for life. Only Robert and his young sister Isabel were in the room at the time, and seeing the girl sobbing bitterly at the thought of parting with her father, William tried to murmur a few words of comfort and managed to add, ‘Walk in virtue’s path and shun every vice’. Then after a pause to gather enough strength again, he said, ‘There’s only one member of this family whose future conduct I fear.’
Robert, who had been hovering in silent anguish nearby came up to the bed and asked, ‘Oh father, is it me you mean?’
The old man had no hesitation in saying it was and Robert turned away to the window, tears streaming down his cheeks, chest heaving as if it would burst in his efforts to restrain his distress.
Later he wrote the poem that was inscribed on his father’s tombstone.
Here lie the loving Husband’s dear remains,
The tender Father, and the gen’rous Friend.
The pitying Heart that felt for human Woe,
The dauntless Heart that fear’s no human Pride,
The Friend of Man, to vice alone a foe;
For ev’n his failings lean’d to Virtue’s side.
His father’s death sent Robert’s mind darting back to the past. He could not bear to dwell on any of the disappointment or worry he might have caused his father. Instead past scenes with his mother swam back to him and with his mother’s old relative, Betty Davidson, who used to come and stay at the farm and help the family. His mother used to sing as she worked. Many of her songs reflected the coarse and robust attitudes of the peasantry – although he didn’t believe his mother understood some of the bawdy songs she sang. He remembered one of her favourites, and his too, was an old ballad about sexual intercourse.
Kissin’ is the key o’ love,
An’ clappin’ is the lock
An’ makin’ O’s the best thing
That e’er a young thing got.
The only times he remembered his mother being displeased to the point of anger with him was in his attitudes towards predestination. Most people like herself believed that they were damned and destined for Hell. On one occasion she’d been visiting a neighbour whose child was on the point of death. She’s said to him when she’d returned, ‘You should have been there, Robert. You never heard such a prayer as James Lee gave beside the poor child.’
Robert replied, ‘Oh, Mother! Can you or Jamie Lee be so daft as to think that his prayer can be of any service to the dying bairn, or keep the devil at a distance? Would God send a child into the world to damn it?’
In a fury she lifted her fire tongs and tried to strike him but he dodged out of the way.
Betty Davidson, his mother’s old relation, had filled his mind with the biggest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons and other trumpery. He never ceased to be amazed at the old woman’s ignorance, credulity and superstition. Yet even to this day, her stories had such a strong effect on his imagination that if he was walking at night, he felt compelled to keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places.
After his father’s death, Robert and the family moved to the farm at Mossgiel but before the move, Robert had started a Commonplace Book or journal, the writing of which gave him some relief or escape from the turbulent period he was living through and all the traumas going on around him. He expressed thoughts on people and life in general and also ‘… how a farmer or farm labourer thinks, and feels, under the pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety and Grief, with the like cares and passions, which however diversified by the Modes and Manners of life, operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all Species’.
He was fascinated by people and liked nothing more than to keenly observe them and he wrote, ‘I have often observed, in the course of my experience of human life, that every man, even the worst, have something good about them …’ He went into some detail about his reasons for this observation and ended with, ‘… I can say any man who can thus think, will scan the failings, nay the faults and crimes of mankind around him, with a brother’s eye.’
He also expressed these sentiments in a poem called ‘Address to the Unco Guid’ or ‘The Rigidly Righteous’.
Then gently scan your brother Man
Still gentler sister Woman;
Tho’ they may gang a kennin’ wrang,
To step aside is human;
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it …
He found relief too in concocting in his imagination some verses headed ‘The Death and Dying Words o’ Poor Mailie – my ain pet ewe’. Mailie had not in fact died. He had rescued her from where she had been lying in a ditch in distress at becoming entangled in her tether. He comforted the animal, and set it to rights, and after returning home from the plough in the evening, he had recited the poem to Gilbert.
It wasn’t long after the move to Mossgiel that Robert discovered that the new farm was little better than Lochlie in many respects. It lay very high and mostly on a cold, wet bottom. As he walked around Mossgiel, struggling not to feel too depressed, the rain battered down across the bleak landscape. Heavy droplets coursed down his face, pausing for a second on his heavy brows before pooling and trickling down over his eyes. He felt the rain slowly seep through his heavy jacket, insidious streams of it gradually finding their way down his spine. Mud coated and weighted his boots and he felt the water slosh around his toes and chaff against the pack of his boots.
There had previously been exceptionally long and hard frosts. Snow lay till April, followed in May by a piercing cold wind. Then there was continuous heavy rain. Ten days of hot weather in July preceded more torrential rain, making August as cold as February. In August a hurricane struck central Scotland and devastated standing wheat. There were then a few weeks of good weather, but too soon, more winds came, then hard frosts again. As a result any cereal crop which had survived could not be harvested until late November. However, severe frosts and deep snow were so intense that the mill-lades froze. All this caused the seed available for sowing to be of very poor quality, resulting in the terrible problems that he and Gilbert had to contend with.
Robert found some solace in an affair he was having with a young woman who had been a maid to his mother at Lochlie. She had not moved with them to Mossgiel but gone instead to work on another farm. He had not made any promises to Elizabeth, or Betsy Paton, and as she herself admitted, always treated her kindly. But when Betsy became pregnant, his mother was very keen that he should marry her. He might have done so because he admired the girl. She was an honest, independent creature
and a great favourite of his mother’s. Gilbert and his sisters, however, were very much against any idea of marriage. They said she was rude and uncivilised with a thorough contempt for any kind of refinement. They insisted that her faults of character would soon have disgusted him.
They could not stop Robert though from being fined a guinea by the Tarbolton Kirk Session and also made to do a penance for fornication. This gave Robert the inspiration for a poem called ‘Fornication’ in which he outrageously dismissed this fine as ‘buttock hire’ and also described the punishment in church as exposing him to further temptation.
… Before the Congregation wide
I pass’d the muster fairly,
My handsome Betsy by my side,
We gat our ditty rarely;
But my downcast eye by chance did spy
What made my lips to water,
Those limbs so clean where I, between,
Commenced a Fornicator.
He found himself composing more verses now than he’d ever done before. Even during threshing, his mind was feverishly occupied with his creative thoughts. Gilbert and the other workers complained that he worked so erratically, with such varied alternations from slow to quick, that he made it dangerous and even impossible for them to keep up with him. Then in an hour or two he was so exhausted, he gave in altogether.
Workers and friends alike had to be careful too about how they treated animals. Burns could not abide any form of cruelty to them. He had a soft spot for horses, dogs and sheep. Pet sheep, dogs and hens enjoyed perfect freedom to parade through the house whenever and as often as they wanted. One day he was walking with a friend, who had a whip in his hand and gave a slight touch of it to a sparrow, depriving it of some of its feathers. This immediately sparked Burns to anger and he accused his friend of committing an act of unnecessary barbarity.
Despite the heat of his creativity, Burns felt more and more driven by his physical labours to the point of exhaustion and depression. He began taking fainting turns at night and his aches and pains and palpitations returned. In an effort to deal with the fainting and the palpitations, he forced himself to brave the accepted cure of plunging into a barrel of icy water which he was instructed to keep near his bedside. He slowly slid down into the tub of glacial water. The cold burned his skin as it gradually enveloped his body. Firstly he burned from neck to toe, then the numbness set in. He gritted his teeth, struggling to endure the torture, muscles in his jaw clenched till they cramped, to still his chattering teeth. Finally, unable to take any more, he struggled out of the tub and flopped like some half dead creature dragged from the depths. The coarse woollen blanket that his clumsy fingers pulled around him felt like sinful luxury after his ordeal.
The whole procedure was enough to put anyone against doctors. One of these days, he vowed each time he had to gather courage to plunge into the icy water yet again, I’ll write about them.
7
The carriage rattled and bumped and swayed as it sped along at a wild and dangerous pace. It jarred and shuddered as it struggled over potholes and boulders. The horses strained their muscles, their hooves and manes flying. The driver cracked his whip high in the air.
Susanna gripped the edge of the seat, stiff with excitement and terror. Beside her, Alexander, to all appearances completely relaxed, leaned back, making his three-cornered hat tip forward. One of his hands rested on his gold-topped cane, the other lay easily on his lap. Susanna marvelled at his elegant sang froid. It was all very thrilling, but she was thankful when the journey was over and they were at last in Edinburgh.
The sloping High Street where her grandmother lived extended from the Palace right up to the Castle in the air. It was the backbone of the city. Here, in the past, was the battlefield of Scotland where private feuds, jealousies between nobles and burghers, even between the Crown and the people, were settled at the point of a sword. Steep narrow closes and wynds diverged at each side of the street. Some lofty buildings, which in Edinburgh were called ‘lands’, were fifteen storeys high and were like vertical streets. Some had timber facades and projecting lofty gables. Tier after tier thrust out beyond the lower storey. Below were covered piazzas and darkened entrances to the secretive-looking shops. Alleys also had overhanging gables and projecting timbers, and were narrow and shadowy and steep, sometimes with flights of stairs to lessen the abruptness of the deep descent. These side streets were called closes, vennels and wynds and were so narrow you could lay a hand on either wall.
It was all so different and so much more exciting than the sprawl of low-roofed houses and cottages that was the village of Tarbolton. Edinburgh was densely populated. It was a terrific crush of humanity, of rich and poor, lords and ladies, divines, legal men, paupers and beggars, as well as crowds of idiots who leered and giggled at no-one in particular, and leaped gleefully about.
It was quite late when the carriage drew up at Grandmother Wallace’s close and when they reached her upstairs house, they found she had a supper ready on the table and a couple of guests waiting to welcome them and share the meal. Soon glasses were clinking round the china punch bowl and the tapers were burning pale in the hot scarlet of the fire light. Susanna enjoyed the meal of roasted hens but found ‘healths’ and toasts a torment. Every glass of wine during dinner had to be dedicated to the health of someone. Then after the table was cleared, the after-dinner glasses were set down and it was necessary for each person to drink the health of every other person present. If there were ten persons present, therefore, it meant ninety ‘healths’ were drunk. Fortunately, Grandmother Wallace had only invited two people – a Mr and Mrs Logan. That was bad enough as far as Susanna’s stomach was concerned. However, she managed to only take a few sips at each ‘health’.
Afterwards the ladies retired to the drawing room and left the men to begin what they called ‘rounds’ of toasts when each gentleman named an absent lady.
‘I warned you,’ Alexander said when they were taking the air next day. ‘Drinking habits are just as bad here as anywhere else in Scotland. In fact, in one way, Edinburgh is even worse than anywhere else because here even the judges drink at the bench while they are trying a case.’
‘You are joking, Alexander.’
‘Not at all. Lord Newton said, “Drinking is my occupation, law my amusement.” It is the custom always to have wine and biscuits on the bench. In fact, I’ve seen it for myself when I went to view Grandfather at work. A black bottle of strong port was set down on the bench, along with a carafe of water, glasses and tumblers, and a plate of biscuits. Soon he was munching and quaffing and even when the bottle was nearly empty, you could hardly tell that he was intoxicated. Not from a distance at least. He was still crouched under his robes looking judicial enough.’
Susanna couldn’t help laughing. ‘One thing about the city – it’s never dull or boring, is it? There’s always something to fascinate me.’
As if to prove her words, there suddenly appeared before them no less a person than Neil Guthrie.
‘My dear lady,’ he said. ‘What a pleasant surprise. And you, sir – have you business in the capital?’
‘We are on one of our visits to our paternal grandparents,’ Alexander replied in a polite if somewhat cool voice.
‘May I know the address so that I can call and pay my respects?’
Before Alexander could reply, Susanna quickly furnished Guthrie with what he wanted, adding, ‘I’m sure my grandmother will be delighted to receive you, sir.’
‘I have to be out of town for a few days. Would a week today be convenient?’
‘I’m sure it will.’
‘Until next Thursday then.’
He bowed and moved away. Susanna was glad she was wearing her velvet cloak and a little brimmed hat trimmed with ribbons perched on top of her wig. She was sure she looked very fetching.
‘I can hardly wait to tell Grandmother.’ Her face was flushed and she was on tip toe with excitement.
‘You are far too impulsive for yo
ur own good, Susanna. Remember Grandmother is taking you to the Dancing Assembly in a couple of days. No doubt she will see that you meet plenty of interesting and suitable gentlemen there.’
Susanna had no doubt that Alexander’s calmness stood him in good stead in medical emergencies but in other situations he only succeeded in dampening her enthusiasms. Although it would take more than anything her brother could say or do to spoil her enthusiasm for Edinburgh.
‘I know, I know,’ she told him, ‘and I’m really looking forward to it.’
She continued strolling at Alexander’s side in a dignified and ladylike manner. What she longed to do was give way to a burst of energy and happiness by skipping wildly along the street like a mad thing. However, decorum won and she proceeded down the High Street past the City Guard House from which a few guards had emerged resplendent in their red coats trimmed with blue, red waistcoats, red breeches, long black gaiters, white belts and large cocked hats bound with white worsted ribbon. They had muskets and bayonets but, according to Grandfather Wallace, they seldom used them. Their usual weapon was the old Lochaber axe. Most of the City Guard were old, hard-featured, red-nosed veterans of wars fought mostly in Highland regiments.
Apart from their duties of keeping the peace in the city, however, one of them always stood at each side of a prisoner at the bar of the Court of Judiciary, his huge hat on his head, his drawn bayonet in his large gnarled hand.
At last Alexander and Susanna reached Grandmother’s close and, pushing roughly past some stinking beggars, they climbed the stairs. The smell was one thing Susanna found difficult to thole in Edinburgh. She understood very well why Grandmother’s house was upstairs, and not on the ground floor. At ten o’clock every evening, the day’s sewage was flung from every window on to the street below with only one warning cry to any pedestrian of ‘Gardyloo’.
A Darkening of the Heart Page 5
