The Spell of Scotland Part 13

The square tower of St. Regulus, a pre-Norman bit of architecture, perhaps Culdee, stands southeast of the cathedral. Dr. Johnson was indignant with Boswell that he missed it. This with the many other towers of church and college make St. Andrews a towered town.

There is an air, an atmosphere, in St. Andrews; it is an academic town, serene, certain of itself, quiet, with wide streets and gray stone buildings. It is full of dignity, full of repose, as a northern Oxford combined with a northern Canterbury should be. There is a spell of ancientry over the gray old walls, but it is unbroken ancientry; if there is a bar sinister, the present generation has forgotten it.

And, of course--oh, not of course, but primarily--there is golf. There is golf everywhere in Scotland. The golf ball and not the thistle is the symbol of Scotland to-day, and from the Tee at St. Andrews the Golf Ball has been driven round the world. James VI, careful Scot, recognized golf as an industry, and granted letters patent in 1618 for the manufacture of golf b.a.l.l.s--the old leather, feather-stuffed sphere--to James Melville and William Berwick.

Edinburgh is ringed about with golf courses, public and private. So is Scotland. The Firth of Forth is continuous with them, from North Berwick where the fleeting traveler is as certain to see golf b.a.l.l.s as he is to see the Ba.s.s, up to St. Andrews. The Links of Leith are the most historic, for it was on these that Charles I was playing when news came of the Irish rebellion--and all that it led to. And here, his son, later James II, played against two English n.o.blemen who had declared they could beat him, and James, cannily--true Scot!--chose the best player in Scotland, one Paterson an Edinburgh cobbler--and gave him the wager, and doubled it, out of which Paterson built for himself Golfer's _Land_ in the Canongate. The Links of the Forth are not a golf course, although there may be some who a.s.sert that they were once an ancient course, say, for King Arthur and his Knights.

Sealand, sh.o.r.eland, it seems, makes the ideal golf course, the soil growing with short crisp gra.s.s that makes a springy and slippery turf, and makes a keen game; the inlander, of course, and the American inlander, may not understand that golf can never quite be golf, certainly never be the true Scottish rite, unless it is played near the sea, with the tang of the sea and of golf entering into one's blood--and, preferably at St. Andrews.

At St. Andrews golf is a business, a sublimated business; or better, an education. Degrees are taken in it quite as high and requiring as thorough a training as at the University. It is to St. Andrews that the good golfer goes when he dies. And he aspires to go there before.

Or, rather at St. Andrews golf is a religion. Half the stories told of golf are, as might be expected of a game which came to its flowering in Scotland, religious, or irreligious. And one of the best of them is told in Stewart d.i.c.k's book on "The Forth." A Scots minister was playing and playing rather badly, and expressing himself in words if not in strokes.

(Only those of you who have read "Sentimental Tommy" will understand that unconsciously I have played on the word "stroke!") The minister exclaimed bitterly as he emerged from his unholy battle with the bunker--is Bunker Hill, perhaps a hazard in golf?--"Ah maun gie it up!

ah maun gie it up!" "What!" cried his partner alarmed, "gie up gowf?"

"Naw, naw," returned the minister, "gie up the meenistry."

Perhaps to amend again, golf at St. Andrews is life. And in their death they are not divided. The graveyard near the Abbey, with stones h.o.a.ry from the sixteenth century, is renowned to-day because it contains the graves of good golfers, Allan Robertson, old Tom Morris, and young Tom Morris, the greatest golfer since Paterson, dead at the pathetic age of 24; after that comes a man's best golfing years, that is, for his pleasure. Young Tom's grave is marked by an elaborate monument with an inscription that befits a king.

CHAPTER VI

TO THE NORTH

One leaves Edinburgh for the North--the haunted North--as in a royal progress. The train moves out of the Waverley station, and through the Gardens, under the very shadow of Castle Rock.

And it moves through the scant few miles of country, richly cultivated, suburban fairly, yet there are level wheatlands, and country cottages and orchards; it is southern, English, these few miles down to the Forth.

"The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean, We bowled along a road that curved its spine Superbly sinuous and serpentine Thro' silent symphonies of summer green, Sudden the Forth came on us--sad of mien, No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line; A sheet of dark dull gla.s.s, without a sign Of life or death, two beams of sand between, Water and sky merged blank in mist together, The Fort loomed spectral, and the Guards.h.i.+p's spars Traced vague, black shadows on the s.h.i.+mmery glaze: We felt the dim, strange years, the gray, strange weather, The still, strange land, unvexed of sun or stars, Where Lancelot rides clanking thro' the haze."

To every one comes this sense of strange years and a strange land, even at Queensferry, even to Henley.

The inn, where we have all put up in imagination, with Scott, and again with Stevenson, lies under the bridge, as though it would escape the quick curious gaze from these iron girders so high above what Scott ever dreamed or Davy Balfour. And then, the train creeps out over this modern audacity, this very ugly iron spanning of the river. Fortunately we are upon it and cannot see its practical, monstrous being, "that monster of utility," as Lord Rosebery called it. He should know its phrase, since it is ever present in the view from his Dalmeny Park, lying east of the Bridge and south of the Forth.

This is precisely where Queen Margaret was ferried to and fro a thousand years ago. The monks who had charge of the ferry took from the toll every fourth and every fortieth penny--a delightful bit of geometric finance. Who could calculate and who would dispute the calculation, of fourth and fortieth?

_Dunfermline_

"The King sits in Dunfermline toun Drinking the blude-red wine."

Because of such lines as these I would cross far seas, merely to have been, if far lonely destructive centuries after, in the very place of their being.

For Dunfermline is surely a very kingly name for a king's town, and "blude-red" wine is of such a difference from mere red, or blood-red wine. What wonder that Alexander III, of whom it is written, went to his death over at Kinghorn in such a tragic way!

But the king who forever sits in Dunfermline is that Malcolm of the eleventh century who brings. .h.i.ther something more than legend yet something as thrilling, as "authentic" as legend. Malcolm is the son of Duncan, in Shakespeare's play, and in history.

"The son of Duncan From whom this tyrant holds the due of birth, Lives in the English court; and is received Of the most pious Edward with such grace That the malevolence of fortune nothing Takes from his high respect."

Malcolm, after "the deep d.a.m.nation of his taking off," fled from the red wrath of Macbeth and into the far prophecy of Banquo, to the court of Edward the Confessor. There perhaps he met Margaret; or perhaps not, since she was grand-niece to the Confessor, and Malcolm was a middle-aged man when this first royal Scottish romance occurs. When he returned he built himself a castle here on the safe north side of the Forth; if ever any place were safe in that eleventh century. He waited here the coming of Margaret, and she came, the first Margaret of England.

It was the first year after the Conquest, and Princess Margaret with her brother and sister were fleeing to her mother's people in Bohemia. They were wrecked far north in the Firth of Forth--which thereby becomes part of the legendary coast of Bohemia. She landed at St. Margaret's Hope, the first bay to the west of North Queensferry. Malcolm saw her from his high tower--and they were married--and they lived happily ever after, and richly for a quarter of a century; and they live immortally now.

Their history is certain, but it reads like a romance. It may be read, very exquisitely set forth, in "The Tides of Spring," a one-act drama by Arthur Upson, the young American poet whose sonnet on Calton Hill I have just quoted; a poet who went to his death so tragically and so beautifully in Lake Bemidji in Minnesota, a few years ago.

The story in the play, of Malcolm and Margaret, is all apple blossoms and spring tides; it is very lovely. Margaret has met Malcolm before, and destiny brings her to Scotland and to the king. It is a beautiful beginning to a long enduring love story that through all the reality of history shows a tender devotion from this stern northern king to the saintly queen from the Saxon South.

They safeguarded themselves and their royal flock in Edinburgh, but they lived in Dunfermline. Margaret knew a richer and a more religious life than Malcolm, and she it was who laid the foundations of the kingdom, in court and church. "Whatever she refused, he refused also; whatever pleased her, he also loved, for the love of her," says her confessor.

English Margaret, unlike the later English Margaret of Alexander III, did not find the North "a sad and solitary place"; and unlike the English Margaret of James IV she was saintly, a white pearl in this wild red time.

Malcolm and Margaret became the father and mother of a royal brood, four kings of Scotland, and of Queen Matilda of England--surely Banquo saw clearly on that terrible night; his prophecy began with a royal rush.

But who would not live a lovely and pleasant life in this well-placed royal burg, serene upon her hill? Rich green fields spread down to the Forth, the red network of the bridge lifts itself into view, far to the left sweeps the Firth out to North Berwick Law and the Ba.s.s, and Edinburgh swims in the haze against the leonine mountain that is ever her guard.

The Abbey gives the town its special dignity. There is nothing left of the church built by Queen Margaret--where she robbed the box of the money the king had just given at ma.s.s if she found the poor requiring more immediate help. But this ancient nave built by Margaret's son David is so very ancient that one could well spare the accurate historic knowledge that it is a generation too late for emotion. There are ponderous round pillars that could have sustained all the history we require of them, high cas.e.m.e.nts, a bare triforium, altogether a Davidic place, a simplicity, a truth about it, that we would not dispute.

The new church was built a century ago over the old, and the ancient nave is like an aisle in the new. Certain details, like the little Norman doorway, once walled-up in the time of Knox, reward us with their preserved beauty.

The tombs of Malcolm and Margaret are without the wall. Malcolm perhaps is there; they carried bodies far in those days of material resurrection, and would have brought Malcolm from Northumberland. But Margaret, canonized next century, was too precious to remain in Ultima Thule, so Spain carried her away--and who knows where she rests?

But within, before the high altar--or shall we say since this is a reformed place, before the pulpit?--rests the body of The Bruce. It is no doubt The Bruce. For Dunfermline was forgotten in rebellious times, and the tombs were undisturbed. Even in the North transept there rest the bones of eleven kings earlier than The Bruce.

Yes, it is very certain The Bruce, wrapped in gold cloth in the thirteenth century, his heart only missing and lying at Melrose. Scott who was everywhere and investigating everything saw the tomb opened and p.r.o.nounced--King Robert Bruce. One could wish the great letters about the modern tower looking like an electric sign, were "reformed." But here within the quiet, to stand at the very spot where is the dust of so mighty a man, mighty in valour, mighty in sovereignty--I find it a more substantial emotion than I have felt in the Invalides.

Ancientry preserves its unbroken descent outside the church. The mother of Wallace is buried here, and the thorn he planted to mark her grave still flourishes, to the ninth century after.

The people who sit in Dunfermline town have not too much concern for King Robert and King Alexander. Nor do they do much sitting, these busy industrious Dunfermliners. They are living their own lives, and making for themselves profit through the generosity of a later fellow citizen.

Dunfermline is a center of great coal fields, and center of the Scotch linen making. So the town is modern, looks modern, and the people move briskly. If they know you are a tourist on ancient errand bent, they look curiously. You come from so far to recapture ancient life, when you might have so much modern life in your own country.

They know what America means. For Andrew Carnegie is their fellow citizen, or would be had he not become an American. Seventy years ago he was born in a cottage toward which the Dunfermline folk look with the attention we show the Abbey. And Carnegie has not only given a library to Dunfermline--yes, a library--Malcolm could not read Margaret's books, but he had them richly bound and bejeweled and kissed them in reverence of her. But the Laird has given a technical school, and the Pittencrieff Glen, which is a lovely pleasure ground with the scant stones of Malcolm's palace above, and a trust of two million and a half dollars, which the wise town corporation is busy utilizing for the advancement of Dunfermline town.

_Loch Leven_

And on to Loch Leven. I cannot think that any one can come upon this castle without emotion. Or he should never come to Scotland.

It is a famous fis.h.i.+ng lake, a peculiar kind of trout are abundant, twenty-five thousand taken from it each year; rather I have given the round numbers, but an exact toll of the fish taken is required by law, and for the past year it was, with Scottish accuracy, something more or something less than twenty-five thousand. The lake is controlled altogether by an anglers a.s.sociation. No boat can row on it, no fisherman can cast his line, but by permission.

There is a small shop in Edinburgh where tickets and tackle can be taken, and much advice from the canny Scot who keeps the shop, and who would make your fis.h.i.+ng expedition a success. "I don't know what your scruples are," he ventured, "but if ye want the Loch Leven boatmen to be satisfied, I'd advise ye to take wi' a bit o' Scotch. A wee bit drappie goes a long wa."

"Just a wee deoch and doris!"

We remembered Harry Lauder, and wondered if we could say "It's a braw bricht moon licht nicht." Or would those redoutable boatmen ken that we were but pretending to Scotch and even suspect our "Scotch"?