chapter iv
legends
the character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its associations. an event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has happened amongst congenial surroundings. ugly actions, above all in ugly places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property of their scene. to a man like scott, the different appearances of nature seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the lady of the lake for ben venue, the heart of midlothian for edinburgh, and the pirate, so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the north. the common run of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as delicate as that of scott; but where he created new things, they only forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest, a body of tradition becomes a work of art. so, in the low dens and high-flying garrets of edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages in the town’s adventures, and chill their marrow with winter’s tales about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic, not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror, when the wind pipes around the tall lands, and hoots adown arched passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering and flaring in the gusts.
here, it is the tale of begbie the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the crowded high street. there, people hush their voices over burke and hare; over drugs and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering their victims with their knees. here, again, the fame of deacon brodie is kept piously fresh. a great man in his day was the deacon; well seen in good society, crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song with taste. many a citizen was proud to welcome the deacon to supper, and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his visitor returned. many stories are told of this redoubtable edinburgh burglar, but the one i have in my mind most vividly gives the key of all the rest. a friend of brodie’s, nested some way towards heaven in one of these great lands, had told him of a projected visit to the country, and afterwards, detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the night in town. the good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in the small hours by the tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a jar, a faint light. softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a thieves’ lantern, was his good friend the deacon in a mask. it is characteristic of the town and the town’s manners that this little episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a bow street runner, a cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in amsterdam, and a last step into the air off his own greatly-improved gallows drop, brought the career of deacon william brodie to an end. but still, by the mind’s eye, he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking from a magistrate’s supper-room to a thieves’ ken, and pickeering among the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.
or where the deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the memory of man. for in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp and sudden, and what we now call ‘stamping out contagion’ was carried on with deadly rigour. the officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white st. andrew’s cross on back and breast, and a white cloth carried before them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man’s justice to the fear of god’s visitation. the dead they buried on the borough muir; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if they were women, in the quarry holes, and if they were men, were hanged and gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had passed, furniture was destroyed and houses closed. and the most bogeyish part of the story is about such houses. two generations back they still stood dark and empty; people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest schoolboy only shouted through the keyhole and made off; for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. what a terrible next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! a rat scampering within would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own neglect.
and then we have major weir; for although even his house is now demolished, old edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. he and his sister lived together in an odour of sour piety. she was a marvellous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known among devout admirers by the name of angelical thomas. ‘he was a tall, black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim countenance, and a big nose. his garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he never went without his staff.’ how it came about that angelical thomas was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our intention. at least, it is suitable enough that out of this superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. and at least the facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of myths. it would appear that the major’s staff went upon his errands, and even ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. gigantic females, ‘stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter’ at unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus of his abode. his house fell under such a load of infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until municipal improvement levelled the structure to the ground. and my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil’s coach, drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at night into the west bow, and belated people might see the dead major through the glasses.
another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. a legend i am afraid it may be, in the most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps something worse — a mere yesterday’s fiction. but it is a story of some vitality, and is worthy of a place in the edinburgh kalendar. this pair inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions: but when all is said, it was a single room. here our two spinsters fell out — on some point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that day forward. you would have thought they would separate: but no; whether from lack of means, or the scottish fear of scandal, they continued to keep house together where they were. a chalk line drawn upon the floor separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace, so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating the territory of the other. so, for years, they coexisted in a hateful silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could hear the breathing of her enemy. never did four walls look down upon an uglier spectacle than these sisters rivalling in unsisterliness. here is a canvas for hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture — he had a puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this puritanic horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great bibles, or praying aloud for each other’s penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be overstepped for ever.
alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race — the most perverse and melancholy in man’s annals — this will seem only a figure of much that is typical of scotland and her high-seated capital above the forth — a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for a caricature. we are wonderful patient haters for conscience sake up here in the north. i spoke, in the first of these papers, of the parliaments of the established and free churches, and how they can hear each other singing psalms across the street. there is but a street between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle; and yet there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other’s growth in grace. it would be well if there were no more than two; but the sects in scotland form a large family of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private homes. edinburgh is a city of churches, as though it were a place of pilgrimage. you will see four within a stone-cast at the head of the west bow. some are crowded to the doors; some are empty like monuments; and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. hence that surprising clamour of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the sabbath morning from trinity and the sea-skirts to morningside on the borders of the hills. i have heard the chimes of oxford playing their symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. but in edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one swelling, brutal babblement of noise. now one overtakes another, and now lags behind it; now five or six all strike on the pained tympanum at the same punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired to hold their peace. indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than that of the sabbath bells in edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against ‘right-hand extremes and left-hand defections.’ and surely there are few worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable defections than this disloyalty to christian love. shakespeare wrote a comedy of ‘much ado about nothing.’ the scottish nation made a fantastic tragedy on the same subject. and it is for the success of this remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every sabbath morning on the hills above the forth. how many of them might rest silent in the steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demolished and turned once more into useful building material, if people who think almost exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend to worship god under the same roof! but there are the chalk lines. and which is to pocket pride, and speak the foremost word?
