Ranald Bannerman\'s Boyhood - George MacDonald
RANALD BANNERMAN'S BOYHOOD
By
George MacDonald
1871
CONTENTS
Chap.
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. THE GLIMMER OF TWILIGHT
III. MY FATHER
IV. KIRSTY
V. I BEGIN LIFE
VI. NO FATHER
VII. MRS. MITCHELL IS DEFEATED
VIII. A NEW SCHOOLMISTRESS
IX. WE LEARN OTHER THINGS
X. SIR WORM WYMBLE
XI. THE KELPIE
XII. ANOTHER KELPIE
XIII. WANDERING WILLIE
XIV. ELSIE DUFF
XV. A NEW COMPANION
XVI. I GO DOWN HILL
XVII. THE TROUBLE GROWS
XVIII. LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS
XIX. FORGIVENESS
XX. I HAVE A FALL AND A DREAM
XXI. THE BEES' NEST
XXII. VAIN INTERCESSION
XXIII. KNIGHT-ERRANTRY
XXIV. FAILURE
XXV. TURKEY PLOTS
XXVI. OLD JOHN JAMIESON
XXVII. TURKEY'S TRICK
XXVIII. I SCHEME TOO
XXIX. A DOUBLE EXPOSURE
XXX. TRIBULATION
XXXI. A WINTER'S RIDE
XXXII. THE PEAT-STACK
XXXIII. A SOLITARY CHAPTER
XXXIV. AN EVENING VISIT
XXXV. A BREAK IN MY STORY
XXXVI. I LEARN THAT I AM NOT A MAN
COLOURED PLATES
THE BILBERRY PICKERS
THE BABY BROTHER
THE DRESSING OF LITTLE DAVIE
MY ESCAPE
TURKEY LIGHTS A FIRE
I GO INTO THE FIELDS
MAKING THE SNOWBALL
READING TO ELSIE AND TURKEY
A SUDDEN STOP
HELPING ELSIE
A READING LESSON
I RETURN HOME
_Coloured Illustrations by A.V. Wheelhouse: and Other 36
Black-and-White Illustrations by Arthur Hughes_.
CHAPTER I
Introductory
I do not intend to carry my story one month beyond the hour when I saw
that my boyhood was gone and my youth arrived; a period determined to
some by the first tail-coat, to me by a different sign. My reason for
wishing to tell this first portion of my history is, that when I look
back upon it, it seems to me not only so pleasant, but so full of
meaning, that, if I can only tell it right, it must prove rather
pleasant and not quite unmeaning to those who will read it. It will
prove a very poor story to such as care only for stirring adventures,
and like them all the better for a pretty strong infusion of the
impossible; but those to whom their own history is interesting--to
whom, young as they may be, it is a pleasant thing to be in the
world--will not, I think, find the experience of a boy born in a very
different position from that of most of them, yet as much a boy as any
of them, wearisome because ordinary.
If I did not mention that I, Ranald Bannerman, am a Scotchman, I
should be found out before long by the kind of thing I have to tell;
for although England and Scotland are in all essentials one, there are
such differences between them that one could tell at once, on opening
his eyes, if he had been carried out of the one into the other during
the night. I do not mean he might not be puzzled, but except there was
an intention to puzzle him by a skilful selection of place, the very
air, the very colours would tell him; or if he kept his eyes shut, his
ears would tell him without his eyes. But I will not offend fastidious
ears with any syllable of my rougher tongue. I will tell my story in
English, and neither part of the country will like it the worse for
that.
I will clear the way for it by mentioning that my father was the
clergyman of a country parish in the north of Scotland--a humble
position, involving plain living and plain ways altogether. There was
a glebe or church-farm attached to the manse or clergyman's house, and
my father rented a small farm besides, for he needed all he could make
by farming to supplement the smallness of the living. My mother was an
invalid as far back as I can remember. We were four boys, and had no
sister. But I must begin at the beginning, that is, as far back as it
is possible for me to begin.
CHAPTER II
The Glimmer of Twilight
I cannot tell any better than most of my readers how and when I began
to come awake, or what it was that wakened me. I mean, I cannot
remember when I began to remember, or what first got set down in my
memory as worth remembering. Sometimes I fancy it must have been a
tremendous flood that first made me wonder, and so made me begin to
remember. At all events, I do remember one flood that seems about as
far off as anything--the rain pouring so thick that I put out my hand
in front of me to try whether I could see it through the veil of the
falling water. The river, which in general was to be seen only in
glimpses from the house--for it ran at the bottom of a hollow--was
outspread like a sea in front, and stretched away far on either
hand. It was a little stream, but it fills so much of my memory with
its regular recurrence of autumnal floods, that I can have no
confidence that one of these is in reality the oldest thing I
remember. Indeed, I have a suspicion that my oldest memories are of
dreams,--where or when dreamed, the good One who made me only knows.
They are very vague to me now, but were almost all made up of bright
things. One only I can recall, and it I will relate, or more properly
describe, for there was hardly anything done in it. I dreamed it
often. It was of the room I slept in, only it was narrower in the
dream, and loftier, and the window was gone. But the ceiling was a
ceiling indeed; for the sun, moon, and stars lived there. The sun was
not a scientific sun at all, but one such as you see in penny
picture-books--a round, jolly, jocund man's face, with flashes of
yellow frilling it all about, just what a grand sunflower would look
if you set a countenance where the black seeds are. And the moon was
just such a one as you may see the cow jumping over in the pictured
nursery rhyme. She was a crescent, of course, that she might have a
face drawn in the hollow, and turned towards the sun, who seemed to be
her husband. He looked merrily at her, and she looked trustfully at
him, and I knew that they got on very well together. The stars were
their children, of course, and they seemed to run about the ceiling
just as they pleased; but the sun and the moon had regular
motions--rose and set at the proper times, for they were steady old
folks. I do not, however, remember ever seeing them rise or set; they
were always up and near the centre before the dream dawned on me. It
would always come in one way: I thought I awoke in the middle of the
night, and lo! there was the room with the sun and the moon and the
stars at their pranks and revels in the ceiling--Mr. Sun nodding and
smiling across the intervening space to Mrs. Moon, and she nodding
back to him with a knowing look, and the corners of her mouth drawn
down. I have vague memories of having heard them talk. At times I feel
as if I could yet recall something of what they said, but it vanishes
the moment I try to catch it. It was very queer talk, indeed--about
me, I fancied--but a thread of strong sense ran through it all. When
the dream had been very vivid, I would sometimes think of it in the
middle of the next day, and look up to the sun, saying to myself: He's
up there now, busy enough. I wonder what he is seeing to talk to his
wife about when he comes down at night? I think it sometimes made me a
little more careful of my conduct. When the sun set, I thought he was
going in the back way; and when the moon rose, I thought she was going
out for a little stroll until I should go to sleep, when they might
come and talk about me again. It was odd that, although I never
fancied it of the sun, I thought I could make the moon follow me as I
pleased. I remember once my eldest brother giving me great offence by
bursting into laughter, when I offered, in all seriousness, to bring
her to the other side of the house where they wanted light to go on
with something they were about. But I must return to my dream; for the
most remarkable thing in it I have not yet told you. In one corner of
the ceiling there was a hole, and through that hole came down a ladder
of sun-rays--very bright and lovely. Where it came from I never
thought, but of course it could not come from the sun, because there
he was, with his bright coat off, playing the father of his family in
the most homely Old-English-gentleman fashion possible. That it was a
ladder of rays there could, however, be no doubt: if only I could
climb upon it! I often tried, but fast as I lifted my feet to climb,
down they came again upon the boards of the floor. At length I did
succeed, but this time the dream had a setting.
[Illustration]
I have said that we were four boys; but at this time we were
five--there was a little baby. He was very ill, however, and I knew he
was not expected to live. I remember looking out of my bed one night
and seeing my mother bending over him in her lap;--it is one of the
few things in which I do remember my mother. I fell asleep, but by and
by woke and looked out again. No one was there. Not only were mother
and baby gone, but the cradle was gone too. I knew that my little
brother was dead. I did not cry: I was too young and ignorant to cry
about it. I went to sleep again, and seemed to wake once more; but it
was into my dream this time. There were the sun and the moon and the
stars. But the sun and the moon had got close together and were
talking very earnestly, and all the stars had gathered round them. I
could not hear a word they said, but I concluded that they were
talking about my little brother. "I suppose I ought to be sorry," I
said to myself; and I tried hard, but I could not feel sorry. Meantime
I observed a curious motion in the heavenly host. They kept looking at
me, and then at the corner where the ladder stood, and talking on, for
I saw their lips moving very fast; and I thought by the motion of them
that they were saying something about the ladder. I got out of bed and
went to it. If I could only get up it! I would try once more. To my
delight I found it would bear me. I climbed and climbed, and the sun
and the moon and the stars looked more and more pleased as I got up
nearer to them, till at last the sun's face was in a broad smile. But
they did not move from their places, and my head rose above them, and
got out at the hole where the ladder came in. What I saw there, I
cannot tell. I only know that a wind such as had never blown upon me
in my waking hours, blew upon me now. I did not care much for kisses
then, for I had not learned how good they are; but somehow I fancied
afterwards that the wind was made of my baby brother's kisses, and I
began to love the little man who had lived only long enough to be our
brother and get up above the sun and the moon and the stars by the
ladder of sun-rays. But this, I say, I thought afterwards. Now all
that I can remember of my dream is that I began to weep for very
delight of something I have forgotten, and that I fell down the ladder
into the room again and awoke, as one always does with a fall in a
dream. Sun, moon, and stars were gone; the ladder of light had
vanished; and I lay sobbing on my pillow.
I have taken up a great deal of room with this story of a dream, but
it clung to me, and would often return. And then the time of life to
which this chapter refers is all so like one, that a dream comes in
well enough in it. There is a twilight of the mind, when all things
are strange, and when the memory is only beginning to know that it has
got a notebook, and must put things down in it.
It was not long after this before my mother died, and I was sorrier
for my father than for myself--he looked so sad. I have said that as
far back as I can remember, she was an invalid. Hence she was unable
to be much with us. She is very beautiful in my memory, but during the
last months of her life we seldom saw her, and the desire to keep the
house quiet for her sake must have been the beginning of that freedom
which we enjoyed during the whole of our boyhood. So we were out every
day and all day long, finding our meals when we pleased, and that, as
I shall explain, without going home for them. I remember her death
clearly, but I will not dwell upon that. It is too sad to write much
about, though she was happy, and the least troubled of us all. Her
sole concern was at leaving her husband and children. But the will of
God was a better thing to her than to live with them. My sorrow at
least was soon over, for God makes children so that grief cannot
cleave to them. They must not begin life with a burden of loss. He
knows it is only for a time. When I see my mother again, she will not
reproach me that my tears were so soon dried. "Little one," I think I
hear her saying, "how could you go on crying for your poor mother when
God was mothering you all the time, and breathing life into you, and
making the world a blessed place for you? You will tell me all about
it some day." Yes, and we shall tell our mothers--shall we not?--how
sorry we are that we ever gave them any trouble. Sometimes we were
very naughty, and sometimes we did not know better. My mother was very
good, but I cannot remember a single one of the many kisses she must
have given me. I remember her holding my head to her bosom when she
was dying--that is all.
CHAPTER III
My Father
My father was a tall, staid, solemn man, who walked slowly with long
strides. He spoke very little, and generally looked as if he were
pondering next Sunday's sermon. His head was grey, and a little bent,
as if he were gathering truth from the ground. Once I came upon him in
the garden, standing with his face up to heaven, and I thought he was
seeing something in the clouds; but when I came nearer, I saw that his
eyes were closed, and it made me feel very solemn. I crept away as if
I had been peeping where I ought not. He did not talk much to us. What
he said was very gentle, and it seemed to me it was his solemnity that
made him gentle. I have seen him look very angry. He used to walk much
about his fields, especially of a summer morning before the sun was
up. This was after my mother's death. I presume he felt nearer to her
in the fields than in the house. There was a kind of grandeur about
him, I am sure; for I never saw one of his parishioners salute him in
the road, without a look of my father himself passing like a solemn
cloud over the face of the man or woman. For us, we feared and loved
him both at once. I do not remember ever being punished by him, but
Kirsty (of whom I shall have to speak by and by) has told me that he
did punish us when we were very small children. Neither did he teach
us much himself, except on the occasions I am about to mention; and I
cannot say that I learned much from his sermons. These gave entire
satisfaction to those of his parishioners whom I happened to hear
speak of them; but, although I loved the sound of his voice, and liked
to look at his face as he stood up there in the ancient pulpit clad in
his gown and bands, I never cared much about what he said. Of course
it was all right, and a better sermon than any other clergyman
whatever could have preached, but what it was all about was of no
consequence to me. I may as well confess at once that I never had the
least doubt that my father was the best man in the world. Nay, to this
very hour I am of the same opinion, notwithstanding that the son of
the village tailor once gave me a tremendous thrashing for saying so,
on the ground that I was altogether wrong, seeing _his_ father was the
best man in the world--at least I have learned to modify the assertion
only to this extent--that my father was the best man I have ever
known.
The church was a very old one--had seen candles burning, heard the
little bell ringing, and smelt the incense of the old Catholic
service. It was so old, that it seemed settling down again into the
earth, especially on one side, where great buttresses had been built
to keep it up. It leaned against them like a weary old thing that
wanted to go to sleep. It had a short square tower, like so many of
the churches in England; and although there was but one old cracked
bell in it, although there was no organ to give out its glorious
sounds, although there was neither chanting nor responses, I assure my
English readers that the awe and reverence which fell upon me as I
crossed its worn threshold were nowise inferior, as far as I can
judge, to the awe and respect they feel when they enter the more
beautiful churches of their country. There was a hush in it which
demanded a refraining of the foot, a treading softly as upon holy
ground; and the church was inseparably associated with my father.
The pew we sat in was a square one, with a table in the middle of it
for our books. My brother David generally used it for laying his head
upon, that he might go to sleep comfortably. My brother Tom put his
feet on the cross-bar of it, leaned back in his corner--for you see we
had a corner apiece--put his hands in his trousers pockets, and stared
hard at my father--for Tom's corner was well in front of the pulpit.
My brother Allister, whose back was to the pulpit, used to learn the
_paraphrases_ all the time of the sermon. I, happiest of all in my
position, could look up at my father, if I pleased, a little sideways;
or, if I preferred, which I confess I often did, study--a rare sight
in Scotch churches--the figure of an armed knight, carved in stone,
which lay on the top of the tomb of Sir Worm Wymble--at least that is
the nearest I can come to the spelling of the name they gave him. The
tomb was close by the side of the pew, with only a flagged passage
between. It stood in a hollow in the wall, and the knight lay under
the arch of the recess, so silent, so patient, with folded palms, as
if praying for some help which he could not name. From the presence of
this labour of the sculptor came a certain element into the feeling of
the place, which it could not otherwise have possessed: organ and
chant were not altogether needful while that carved knight lay there
with face upturned, as if looking to heaven.
[Illustration]
But from gazing at the knight I began to regard the wall about him,
and the arch over him; and from the arch my eye would seek the roof,
and descending, rest on the pillars, or wander about the windows,
searching the building of the place, discovering the points of its
strength, and how it was upheld. So that while my father was talking
of the church as a company of believers, and describing how it was
held together by faith, I was trying to understand how the stone and
lime of the old place was kept from falling asunder, and thus
beginning to follow what has become my profession since; for I am an
architect.
But the church has led me away from my father. He always spoke in
rather a low voice, but so earnestly that every eye, as it seemed to
me, but mine and those of two of my brothers, was fixed upon him. I
think, however, that it was in part the fault of certain teaching of
his own, better fitted for our understanding, that we paid so little
heed. Even Tom, with all his staring, knew as little about the sermon
as any of us. But my father did not question us much concerning it; he
did what was far better. On Sunday afternoons, in the warm, peaceful
sunlight of summer, with the honeysuckle filling the air of the little
arbour in which we sat, and his one glass of wine set on the table in
the middle, he would sit for an hour talking away to us in his gentle,
slow, deep voice, telling us story after story out of the New
Testament, and explaining them in a way I have seldom heard equalled.
Or, in the cold winter nights, he would come into the room where I and
my two younger brothers slept--the nursery it was--and, sitting down
with Tom by his side before the fire that burned bright in the frosty
air, would open the great family Bible on the table, turn his face
towards the two beds where we three lay wide awake, and tell us story
after story out of the Old Testament, sometimes reading a few verses,
sometimes turning the bare facts into an expanded and illustrated
narrative of his own, which, in Shakspere fashion, he presented after
the modes and ways of our own country and time. I shall never forget
Joseph in Egypt hearing the pattering of the asses' hoofs in the
street, and throwing up the window, and looking out, and seeing all
his own brothers coming riding towards him; or the grand rush of the
sea waves over the bewildered hosts of the Egyptians. We lay and
listened with all the more enjoyment, that while the fire was burning
so brightly, and the presence of my father filling the room with
safety and peace, the wind was howling outside, and the snow drifting
up against the window. Sometimes I passed into the land of sleep with
his voice in my ears and his love in my heart; perhaps into the land
of visions--once certainly into a dream of the sun and moon and stars
making obeisance to the too-favoured son of Jacob.
CHAPTER IV
Kirsty
My father had a housekeeper, a trusty woman, he considered her. We
thought her _very_ old. I suppose she was about forty. She was not
pleasant, for she was grim-faced and censorious, with a very straight
back, and a very long upper lip. Indeed the distance from her nose to
her mouth was greater than the length of her nose. When I think of her
first, it is always as making some complaint to my father against
us. Perhaps she meant to speak the truth, or rather, perhaps took it
for granted that she always did speak the truth; but certainly she
would exaggerate things, and give them quite another look. The bones
of her story might be true, but she would put a skin over it after her
own fashion, which was not one of mildness and charity. The
consequence was that the older we grew, the more our minds were
alienated from her, and the more we came to regard her as our enemy.
If she really meant to be our friend after the best fashion she knew,
it was at least an uncomely kind of friendship, that showed itself in
constant opposition, fault-finding, and complaint. The real mistake
was that we were boys. There was something in her altogether
antagonistic to the boy-nature. You would have thought that to be a
boy was in her eyes to be something wrong to begin with; that boys
ought never to have been made; that they must always, by their very
nature, be about something amiss. I have occasionally wondered how she
would have behaved to a girl. On reflection, I think a little better;
but the girl would have been worse off, because she could not have
escaped from her as we did. My father would hear her complaints to the
end without putting in a word, except it were to ask her a question,
and when she had finished, would turn again to his book or his sermon,
saying--
"Very well, Mrs. Mitchell; I will speak to them about it."
My impression is that he did not believe the half she told him. At all
events, when he had sent for us, he would ask our version of the
affair, and listen to that as he had listened to hers. Then he would
set forth to us where we had been wrong, if we were wrong, and send us
away with an injunction not to provoke Mrs. Mitchell, who couldn't
help being short in her temper, poor thing! Somehow or other we got it
into our heads that the shortness of her temper was mysteriously
associated with the shortness of her nose.
She was saving even to stinginess. She would do her best to provide
what my father liked, but for us she thought almost anything good
enough. She would, for instance, give us the thinnest of milk--we said
she skimmed it three times before she thought it blue enough for us.
My two younger brothers did not mind it so much as I did, for I was
always rather delicate, and if I took a dislike to anything, would
rather go without than eat or drink of it. But I have told you enough
about her to make it plain that she could be no favourite with us; and
enough likewise to serve as a background to my description of Kirsty.
Kirsty was a Highland woman who had the charge of the house in which
the farm servants lived. She was a cheerful, gracious, kind woman--a
woman of God's making, one would say, were it not that, however
mysterious it may look, we cannot deny that he made Mrs. Mitchell too.
It is very puzzling, I confess. I remember once that my youngest
brother Davie, a very little fellow then, for he could not speak
plainly, came running in great distress to Kirsty, crying, "Fee, fee!"
by which he meant to indicate that a flea was rendering his life
miserable. Kirsty at once undressed him and entered on the pursuit.
After a successful search, while she was putting on his garments
again, little Davie, who had been looking very solemn and thoughtful
for some time, said, not in a questioning, but in a concluding tone--
"God didn't make the fees, Kirsty!"
"Oh yes, Davie! God made everything. God did make the fleas," said
Kirsty.
Davie was silent for a while. Then he opened his mouth and spake like
a discontented prophet of old:
"Why doesn't he give them something else to eat, then?"
"You must ask himself that," said Kirsty, with a wisdom I have since
learned to comprehend, though I remember it shocked me a little at the
time.
All this set me thinking. Before the dressing of little Davie was
over, I had _my_ question to put to Kirsty. It was, in fact, the same
question, only with a more important object in the eye of it.