The Stickit Minister's Wooing and Other Galloway Stories

The Stickit Minister's Wooing and Other Galloway Stories
Samuel Crockett

The Stickit Minister's Wooing and Other Galloway Stories

Eight years ago "The Stickit Minister" stood friendless without the door of letters. He knew no one within, and feared greatly lest no hand of welcome should be held out to him from those already within, so that, being encouraged, he too might pluck up heart of grace to enter.

Yet when the time came, the Stickit One found not one, but two right hands outstretched to greet him, which, after all, is as many as any man may grasp at once. One was reached out to me from far-away Samoa. The other belonged to a man whom, at that time, I knew only as one of the most thoughtful, sympathetic, and brilliant of London journalists, but who has since become my friend, and at whose instance, indeed, this Second Series of "The Stickit Minister" stories has been written. To these two men, the London man of letters and the Samoan exile, I owe the first and greatest of an author's literary debts – that of a first encouragement.

They were both men I had never seen; and neither was under any obligation to help me. Concerning the former, still strenuously and gallantly at work among us, I will in this place say nothing further. But, after having kept silence for eight years lest I should appear as one that vaunted himself, I may be permitted a word of that other who sleeps under the green tangle of Vaea Mountain.

Mr. Stevenson and I had been in occasional communication since about the year 1886, when, in a small volume of verse issued during the early part of that year, the fragment of a "Transcript from the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," chanced to attract his attention. He wrote immediately, with that beautiful natural generosity of appreciation of his, to ask the author to finish his translation in verse, and to proceed to other dramatic passages, some of which, chiefly from Isaiah and Job, he specified. I remember that "When the morning stars sang together" was one of those indicated, and "O, thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted," another. "I have tried my hand at them myself," he added kindly; "but they were not so good as your Shulamite."

After this he made me more than once the channel of his practical charity to certain poor miner folk, whom disaster had rendered homeless and penniless on the outskirts of his beloved Glencorse.

A year or two afterwards, having in the intervals of other work written down certain countryside stories, which managed to struggle into print in rather obscure corners, I collected these into a volume, under the title of "The Stickit Minister and Some Common Men." Then after the volume was through the press, in a sudden gulp of venturesomeness I penned a dedication.

TO

Robert Louis Stevenson

OF SCOTLAND AND SAMOA,

I DEDICATE THESE STORIES OF THAT

GREY GALLOWAY LAND

WHERE

ABOUT THE GRAVES OF THE MARTYRS

THE WHAUPS ARE CRYING —

HIS HEART REMEMBERS HOW

Still much fearing and trembling, how needlessly I guessed not then, I packed up and despatched a copy to Samoa. Whereupon, after due interval, there came back to these shores a letter – the sense of which reached me deviously – not to myself but to his friend, Mr. Sidney Colvin. "If I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather, and a table tombstone like the martyrs; 'where the whaups and plovers are crying!' Did you see a man who wrote 'The Stickit Minister,' and dedicated it to me, in words that brought the tears to my eyes every time I looked at them? 'Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying – his heart remembers how.' Ah, by God, it does! Singular that I should fulfil the Scots destiny throughout, and live a voluntary exile and have my head filled with the blessed, beastly place all the time!"

To another friend he added some criticism of the book. "Some of the tales seem to me a trifle light, and one, at least, is too slender and fantastic – qualities that rarely mingle well." (How oft in the stilly night have I wondered which one he meant!) "But the whole book breathes admirably of the soil. 'The Stickit Minister,' 'The Heather Lintie,' are two that appeal to me particularly. They are drowned in Scotland. They have refreshed me like a visit home. 'Cleg Kelly' also is a delightful fellow. I have enjoyed his acquaintance particularly."

Curiously enough, it was not from Samoa, but from Honolulu, that I first received tidings that my little volume had not miscarried. It was quite characteristic of Mr. Stevenson not to answer at once: "I let my letters accumulate till I am leaving a place," he said to me more than once; "then I lock myself in with them, and my cries of penitence can be heard a mile!"

In a San Francisco paper there appeared a report of a speech he had made to some kindly Scots who entertained him in Honolulu, In it he spoke affectionately of "The Stickit Minister." I have, alas! lost the reference now, but at the time it took me by the throat. I could not get over the sheer kindness of the thing.

Then came a letter and a poem, both very precious to me:

"Thank you from my heart, and see with what dull pedantry I have been tempted to extend your beautiful phrase of prose into three indifferent stanzas:

"Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying;
Blows the wind on the moors to-day, and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying —
My heart remembers how!

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing Stones on the vacant, wine-red moor;
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds austere and pure!

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home! and to hear again the call —
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-wees crying,
And hear no more at all."

To me, in the all too brief days that remained to him, he wrote letter after letter of criticism, encouragement, and praise (in which last, as was his wont, he let his kind heart run far ahead of his judgment). It goes to my heart now not to quote from these, for they are in some wise my poor patent of nobility. But, perhaps with more wisdom, I keep them by me, to hearten myself withal when the days of darkness grow too many and too dark.

So much for bush to this second draught of countryside vintage – the more easily forgiven that it tells of the generosity of a dead man whom I loved. But and if in any fields Elysian or grey twilight of shades, I chance to meet with Robert Louis Stevenson, I know that I shall find him in act to help over some ghostly stile, the halt, the maimed, and the faint of heart – even as in these late earthly years he did for me – and for many another.

S. R. CROCKETT.

THE STICKIT MINISTER'S WOOING[1 - These stories have been edited chiefly from manuscripts supplied to me by my friend Mr. Alexander McQuhirr, M.D., of Cairn Edward in Galloway, of whose personal adventures I treated in the volume called "Lad's Love," I have let my friend tell his tale in his own way in almost every case.]

It was in the second year of my college life thai I came home to find Robert Fraser, whom a whole country-side called the "Stickit Minister," distinctly worse, and indeed, set down upon his great chair in the corner as on a place from which he would never rise.

A dour, grippy back-end it was, the soil stubborn and untoward with early frost. And a strange sound it was to hear as I (Alexander McQuhirr) came down the Lang Brae, the channel stones droning and dinnelling on the ice by the third of November; a thing which had not happened in our parts since that fell year of the Sixteen Drifty Days, which has been so greatly talked about.

I walked over to the Dullarg the very night I arrived from Edinburgh. I had a new volume of Tennyson with me, which I had bought with the thought that he would be pleased with it. For I loved Robert Fraser, and I will not deny that my heart beat with expectation as I went up the little loaning with the rough stone dyke upon either side – aye, as if it had been the way to Nether Neuk, and I going to see my sweetheart.

"Come your ways in, Alec, man," his voice came from the inner room, as he heard me pause to exchange banter of a rural sort with the servant lasses in the kitchen; "I have been waitin' for ye. I kenned ye wad come the nicht!"

I went in. And there by the little peat fire, drowsing red and looking strangely out of place behind the ribs of the black-leaded "register" grate, I saw the Stickit Minister with a black-and-white check plaid about his knees. He smiled a strange sweet smile, at once wistful and distant, as I entered – like one who waves farewell through a mist of tears as the pier slides back and the sundering water seethes and widens about the ship.

"You are better, Robert!" I said, smiling too. Dully, and yet with dogged cheerfulness, I said it, as men lie to the dying – and are not believed.

He stretched out his thin hand, the ploughman's horn clean gone from it, and the veins blue and convex upon the shrunk wrist.

"Ave atque vale, Alec, lad!" he answered. "That is what it has come to with Robert Fraser. But how are all at Drumquhat? Ye will be on your road ower to the Nether Neuk?"

This he said, though he knew different.

"I have brought you this from Edinburgh," I said, giving him the little, thin, green volume of Tennyson. I had cut it to save him trouble, and written his name on the blank page before the title.

I shall never forget the way he looked at it. He opened it as a woman unfolds a new and costly garment, with a lingering caress of the wasted finger-tips through which I could almost see the white of the paper, and a slow soft intake of the breath, like a lover's sigh.

His eyes, of old blue and clear, had now a kind of glaze over them, a veiling Indian summer mist through which, however, still shone, all undimmed and fearless, the light of the simplest and manfulest spirit I have ever known. He turned the leaves and read a verse here and there with evident pleasure. He had a way of reading anything he loved as it listening inly to the cadences – a little half-turn of the head aside, and a still contented smile hovering about the lips, like one who catches the first returning fall of beloved footsteps.

But all at once Robert Fraser shut the book and let his hands sink wearily down upon his knee. He did not look at me, but kept his eyes on the red peat ash in the "register" grate.

"It's bonnie," he murmured softly; "and it was a kind thing for you to think on me. But it's gane frae me, Alec – it's a' clean gane. Tak' you the book, Alec. The birdies will never sing again in ony spring for me to hear. I'm back upon the Word, Alec. There's nocht but That for me noo!"

He laid his hand on a Bible that was open beside him on the stand which held his medicine bottles, and a stocking at which his wearied fingers occasionally knitted for a moment or two at a time.