When I go home on summer visitations, old friends, with the most generous desire to aid one in an eccentric and indeed half-daft and wholly disreputable way of living, come to me covertly in reckless moments “for auld lang syne,” and remind me of native characters ancient or modern. They themselves are (if they only knew it) characters the most superb for any of my purposes, but, wholly unsuspecting, they narrate the whims and oddities, the follies and conceits of others, lamenting always that the race of characters is rapidly running done. “When Jiah, and Jocka, and Old Split-a-dale are gone,” say they, “we’ll can take to reading your own bits of stories, for there’ll be nothing better left to do, and not a ploy from Martinmas to Whitsunday and back again.”
I know better, of course. I know that unconventional characters—fantastic, whimsical, bombastic, awkward, crazed—will come to the surface there and elsewhere as constant as the bracken comes upon the braes in spring.
But age, undoubtedly, whether it matures an oddity or not, endears him to you if yours be the proper sympathetic soul for such caprices of the stars. What in a droll “going-about body” of thirty seems a rogue’s impertinence will appear to some one else, thirty years after this, or even to yourself perhaps, a quaint wit, and his sayings and doings will be the cause of merriment over all the countryside. So it is that even I am sometimes constrained to think the old characters dead and gone will never have such brilliant successors.
I had that thought yesterday as I walked past Copenhagen’s school. Alas! not Copenhagen’s school, for Copenhagen wields no earthly ferrule, and lies with many of his pupils under grass in Kilmailie, and the little thatched academy, where we drowsed in summer, and choked in winter in the smoke of our own individual peats, is but a huddle of stones, hidden by nettles, humbled in the shade of the birch-tree from which old Copenhagen culled the pliant and sibilant switch for our more noisy than unpleasant castigation. But there, persistent as are the roads old hunters made upon the hills of long ago, as are the ways our fathers went to market through glens for years untenanted, was the path we youngsters made between the highway and old Copenhagen’s school!
Is it conceivable, I ask my old companions of that hillside seminary, that Copenhagen should be dead? That a time should come when his thin, long, bent figure, carried on one of his own legs and one (as went our tradition) cut from an ash in the wood of Achnatra, should dart about the little school no more, and his tales of Nelson and the sea be all concluded?
He had been twenty years in the Navy, and had seen but a single engagement—the one that gave him his byname, and cost him his leg. He came home with a pension, and settled in his native parish. He was elderly; he was—as we should think it now—ill-educated; he was without wife or child of his own; he had at times the habit of ran-dan, as we call a convivial rollicking. Heaven plainly meant him for a Highland school, and so he opened one—this same, so lowly to-day among the nettles. Of the various things he taught, the most I can remember (besides reading, which came, I fear, more by nature than by Copenhagen’s teaching) was the geography of the Baltic, the graphic fact that Horatio Nelson nearly always wore a grey surtout, three ways of tying knots, and a song of epic character called “The Plains of Waterloo.” What would perhaps be called a “special subject” nowadays was the art he taught us of keeping birds from cherry-trees. The cherry-trees grew up the front of Copenhagen’s bachelor dwelling-house, half a mile from the school. When the fruit reddened, every scholar in the school (we numbered twelve or fourteen) rose at dawn for days and sat below the cherry-trees chanting a Gaelic incantation that never failed to keep away the predatory thrush. The odd thing was that Copenhagen, in spite of these precautions, never got a single cherry, and did not seem to care. We ate the cherries as they ripened, relieving each other alternately of the incantation; he came out to praise us for our industry, and never cast a glance aloft.
The fees for Copenhagen’s college were uncertain—not only in payment, but in amount. When our parents asked him what was to pay for Bob or Sandy, the antique pensioner blew his nose with noisy demonstration, and invariably answered, “We don’t know what we’ll need till we see what we’ll require.” His requirements were manifestly few, for three-fourths of the pupils contributed nothing to the upkeep of the school but a diurnal peat in winter, and the others had their fees wholly expended on pens and paper for themselves when the flying stationer came round twice a year.
We grew to like and to respect old Copenhagen, knowing nothing of his ran-dans, that were confined to the town six miles away, and never were allowed to interfere with his duty to his pupils. He made no brilliant scholars, but he gave us a thousand pleasant, droll, and kindly memories that go far as a substitute for a superficial knowledge of Greek. I would myself have learned the cutlass from him, being the oldest of the pupils and the likeliest to make a good practitioner of that noble marine weapon; but, unhappily, I left the school and started my career in town the very day he had unearthed the sword and brought it forth for my first lesson.
It was there I learned that Copenhagen was the church precentor, and had his little vices, whereof our folks at home, with wisdom and delicacy, had never given us a hint. He used to come down to town each Sunday in a pair of tightly-strapped breeches, a black surtout, and what we called a three-storey hat. The preacher chose the psalm, but it was Copenhagen chose the tune. He had but half a dozen airs in all his repertory—Selma, Dundee, Martyrdom, Coleshill, and Dunfermline, and what he called “yon one of my own.” I have sometimes been to the opera since; I fear, from knowledge gained by that experience, that the old man was not highly gifted for vocalism. Invariably he started on too high a key, and found that he had done so only when a bar or two was finished. With imperturbability unfailing, he just stopped short, and, leaning over his desk, said to the congregation, “We’ll have another try at it, lads!” The service was an English one, but this touching confidence was in Gaelic, and addressed particularly to the men who, married or single, sat apart from the women.
While Copenhagen still led the praise to Coleshill and “yon one of his own,” a pestilent innovator came to the place who knew music, and, unhappily, introduced a band of enterprising youths to the mysteries of harmony. He taught them bass and alto, and showed them how the melody of Dundee and Coleshill could be embellished and improved by those. The first Sunday these vocalists started to display their new art in the church, Copenhagen stopped in the middle of a verse to make a protest.“I’ll have none of your boom-boom singing here to put me all reel-rall,” said he, “nor praising of the Lord with such theatricals,” then baffled them by changing the air to “yon one of his own.”
A bachelor by prejudice and conviction, he liked to hear of marriages, and when the “cries” were read he had for long—until a new incumbent made a protest—a cheerful, harmless habit of crying at the end of the announcement, “I have no objections to’t whatever.”
The new incumbent was less tolerant than his predecessor; to him was due the old man’s retirement from the office of conductor of the psalmody. He would not countenance the ran-dans, nor consent to the perpetuation of Copenhagen’s ancient manners in the precentor’s desk. First of all he claimed the right of intimating the tunes as well as the psalms to be sung to them, and sought thereby to put an end to the unseemly “yon one of my own”; but Copenhagen started what air he pleased, no matter what was intimated, and more often than before it was his own creation. Then were thrust upon the old man wooden boards with the names of half a dozen psalm tunes printed on them. They were to be displayed in front of the desk as required, and thus save all necessity for any verbal intimation. But Copenhagen generally showed them upside down, and still maintained his vested rights to start what airs he chose. “I think we agreed on Martyrdom in the vestry,” said the minister once, exasperated into a protest in front of the congregation when Copenhagen started “yon one.” “So we did, so we did—I mind fine; but I shifted my mind,” said Copenhagen, looking up, and cleared his throat to start again. “Upon my word,” said he to sympathisers in the afternoon, “upon my word the man’s a fair torment!”
Old Copenhagen’s most notable ran-dans were after he had demitted office as musician, out of patience at last with the “torment.” They were such guileless, easily induced excesses, so marked by an incongruous propriety, that I hesitate to speak of them as more than innocent exhilarations. ’Twas then his surtout was most spick and span, his manner most urbane and engaging. The poorest gangrel who addressed him on the highway then was “sir” to Copenhagen, and a boy had but to look at him to be assured of a halfpenny. His timber leg went tapping over the causeways then with an illusive haste, for it was Copenhagen’s wish to be thought a man immersed profoundly in affairs. He spoke in his finest English (reserved for moments of importance) of the Admiralty, and he never entered the inn without having in his hand a large packet of blue envelopes tied with a boot-lace, to suggest important and delicate negotiations with some messenger from the First Lord. Once, I remember, he came out of the inn with a suspicious-looking bulge in the tail-pocket of his surtout. As he passed the Beenickie and Jock Scott and me standing at the factor’s corner, and punctiliously returned the naval salute he always looked for from his own old pupils, a “Glenorchy pint” (as it was called) fell out of his pocket in the street, without suffering any damage. He never paused a moment or looked round, and the Beenickie cried after him, “You have dropped something, Mr Bain.” “It is just a trifle, lads,” he answered without looking back; “I will get it when I return,” and pursued his way to his house, six miles away. He was ashamed, I suppose, of the exposure.
Another time—on the night of St John’s, when the local Freemasons had their flambeau march, and every boy who carried a torch got threepence on production of its stump the following day (which induced some to cut their stumps in two, and so get sixpence)—I saw old Copenhagen falling down an outside stair. I hastened to his assistance, suffering sincere alarm and pity for my ancient dominie. He was, luckily, little the worse. “I was coming down in any case, John,” said he benignly. “Man! I am always vexed I never learned you the fencing with the cutlass, for you were a promising lad.” “I am sorry too, Mr Bain,” said I, though indeed I could not see that a clerk in a law office would find the accomplishment in question of much use to him. “I knew your Uncle Jamie,” he added. “Him and me was pretty chief. You will say nothing about my bit of a glide, John: I was coming down at any rate, I assure you.”
I should like my last reminiscence of old Copenhagen to be more reputable, for his own last words in gossiping of any one, no matter how foolish or vile, were always generous. And I recall a day when he came from his distant seminary through deep drifts of snow to the town to post a letter that he wished me to revise first. The ‘Courier’ of the week was full of tales of misery among our troops in the Crimean trenches, and Copenhagen’s sympathies were fired. His letter was a suggestion to the Admiralty that in these times of stress it might help my Lords a little if they were relieved of the payment of the pension of Archibald Bain, late of H.M.S. Elephant. He was very old, and frail, and tremulous in these days; his hand of write would have sorely puzzled any one but me, who knew so well its eccentricities. His folly touched me to the core; I knew his object, but for the life of me I could not read his letter.
“I think it would be a mistake to send it, Mr Bain,” I said, when he explained.
“Havers!” said he. “What I want you to tell me is if it is shipshape and Bristol fashion, eh? and not likely to give offence. Read it, man, read it!”
“Read it out to me yourself, Mr Bain,” I stammered, “the thing’s beyond me.”
He put on his spectacles and looked closely at his own scrawl. “I declare to you,” he said in a little, laughingly, “I declare to you I cannot read a word of her myself. But no matter, John, we’ll just let her go as she stands; they’re better scholars in London than what we are.”
The letter went, but I never heard that the British Admiralty availed itself of an offer so unusual and kind.
I thought of these things yesterday as I passed the ruins of Copenhagen’s school. How far, since then, have travelled the feet that trod there; how far, how weary, how humbled, how elate, how prosperous, how shamefully down at heel? Dear lads, dear girls, wherever you be, my old companions, were we not here in this poor place, among the hazel and the fern, most fortunate and happy? Has the wide world we travel through for fame or fortune—or, better still, content—added aught to us of joy we did not have (at least in memory) in those irrecoverable, enduring, summer days? Now it is mist for ever on the hill, and the rain-rot in the wood, and clouds and cares chasing each other across our heavens, and flowers that flame from bud to blossom and smoulder into dust almost before we have caught their perfume; then, old friends, we pricked our days out leisurely upon a golden calendar: the scent of the morning hay-fields seemed eternal.
