Francesca was miserably envious that she had not thought of tartans first. “You may consider yourself ‘geyan fine,’ all covered over with Scotch plaid, but I wouldn’t be so ‘kenspeckle’ for worlds!” she said, using expressions borrowed from Mrs. M’Collop; “and as for disguising your nationality, do not flatter yourself that you look like anything but an American. I forgot to tell you the conversation I overheard in the tram this morning, between a mother and daughter, who were talking about us, I dare say. ‘Have they any proper frocks for so large a party, Bella?’ asked the mother.
“‘I thought I explained in the beginning, mamma, that they are Americans.’
“‘Still, you know they are only travelling,—just passing through, as it were; they may not be familiar with our customs, and we do want our party to be a smart one.’
“‘Wait until you see them, mamma, and you will probably feel like hiding your diminished head! It is my belief that if an American lady takes a half-hour journey in a tram she carries full evening dress and a diamond necklace, in case anything should happen on the way. I am not in the least nervous about their appearance. I only hope that they will not be too exuberant; American girls are so frightfully vivacious and informal, I always feel as if I were being taken by the throat!’”
“A picturesque, though rather vigorous expression; however, it does no harm to be perfectly dressed,” said Salemina consciously, putting a steel embroidered slipper on the fender and settling the holly in the silver folds of her gown; “then when they discover that we are all well bred, and that one of us is intelligent, it will be the more credit to the country that gave us birth.”
“Of course it is impossible to tell what country did give YOU birth,” retorted Francesca, “but that will only be to your advantage—away from home!”
Francesca is inflexibly, almost aggressively American, but Salemina is a citizen of the world. If the United States should be involved in a war, I am confident that Salemina would be in front with the other Gatling guns, for in that case a principle would be at stake; but in all lesser matters she is extremely unprejudiced. She prefers German music, Italian climate, French dressmakers, English tailors, Japanese manners, and American—American something—I have forgotten just what; it is either the ice-cream soda or the form of government,—I can’t remember which.
“I wonder why they named it ‘Fotheringay’ Crescent,” mused Francesca. “Some association with Mary Stuart, of course. Poor, poor, pretty lady! A free queen only six years, and think of the number of beds she slept in, and the number of trees she planted; we have already seen, I am afraid to say how many. When did she govern, when did she scheme, above all when did she flirt, with all this racing and chasing over the country? Mrs. M’Collop calls Anne of Denmark a ‘sad scattercash’ and Mary an ‘awfu’ gadabout,’ and I am inclined to agree with her. By the way, when she was making my bed this morning, she told me that her mother claimed descent from the Stewarts of Appin, whoever they may be. She apologised for Queen Mary’s defects as if she were a distant family connection. If so, then the famous Stuart charm has been lost somewhere, for Mrs M’Collop certainly possesses no alluring curves of temperament.”
“I am going to select some distinguished ancestors this very minute, before I go to my first Edinburgh dinner,” said I decidedly. “It seems hard that ancestors should have everything to do with settling our nationality and our position in life, and we not have a word to say. How nice it would be to select one’s own after one had arrived at years of discretion, or to adopt different ones according to the country one chanced to be visiting! I am going to do it; it is unusual, but there must be a pioneer in every good movement. Let me think: do help me, Salemina! I am a Hamilton to begin with; I might be descended from the logical Sir William himself, and thus become the idol of the university set!”
“He died only about thirty years ago, and you would have to be his daughter: that would never do,” said Salemina. “Why don’t you take Thomas Hamilton, Earl of Melrose and Haddington? He was Secretary of State, King’s Advocate, Lord President of the Court of Session, and all sorts of fine things. He was the one King James used to call ‘Tam o’ the Cowgate’!”
“Perfectly delightful! I don’t care so much about his other titles, but ‘Tam o’ the Cowgate’ is irresistible. I will take him. He was my—what was he?”
“He was at least your great-great-great-great-grandfather; that is a safe distance. Then there’s that famous Jenny Geddes, who flung her fauld-stule at the Dean in St. Giles’,—she was a Hamilton too, if you fancy her!”
“Yes, I’ll take her with pleasure,” I responded thankfully. “Of course I don’t know why she flung the stool,—it may have been very reprehensible; but there is always good stuff in stool-flingers; it’s the sort of spirit one likes to inherit in diluted form. Now, whom will you take?”
“I haven’t even a peg on which to hang a Scottish ancestor,” said Salemina disconsolately.
“Oh, nonsense! think harder. Anybody will do as a starting-point; only you must be honourable and really show relationship, as I did with Jenny and Tam.”
“My aunt Mary-Emma married a Lindsay,” ventured Salemina hesitatingly.
“That will do,” I answered delightedly.
“You can play that you are one of the famous ‘licht Lindsays,’ and you can look up the particular ancestor in your big book. Now, Francesca, it’s your turn!”
“I am American to the backbone,” she declared, with insufferable dignity. “I do not desire any foreign ancestors.”
“Francesca!” I expostulated. “Do you mean to tell me that you can dine with a lineal descendant of Sir Fitzroy Donald Maclean, Baronet, of Duart and Morven, and not make any effort to trace your genealogy back further than your parents?”
“If you goad me to desperation,” she answered, “I will wear an American flag in my hair, declare that my father is a Red Indian, or a pork-packer, and talk about the superiority of our checking system and hotels all the evening. I don’t want to go, any way. It is sure to be stiff and ceremonious, and the man who takes me in will ask me the population of Chicago and the amount of wheat we exported last year,—he always does.”
“I can’t see why he should,” said I. “I am sure you don’t look as if you knew.”
“My looks have thus far proved no protection,” she replied sadly. “Salemina is so flexible, and you are so dramatic, that you enter into all these experiences with zest. You already more than half believe in that Tam o’ the Cowgate story. But there’ll be nothing for me in Edinburgh society; it will be all clergymen—”
“Ministers” interjected Salemina,—“all ministers and professors. My Redfern gowns will be unappreciated, and my Worth evening frocks worse than wasted!”
“There are a few thousand medical students,” I said encouragingly, “and all the young advocates, and a sprinkling of military men—they know Worth frocks.”
“And,” continued Salemina bitingly, “there will always be, even in an intellectual city like Edinburgh, a few men who continue to escape all the developing influences about them, and remain commonplace, conventional manikins, devoted to dancing and flirting. Never fear, they will find you!”
This sounds harsh, but nobody minds Salemina, least of all Francesca, who well knows that she is the apple of that spinster’s eye. But at this moment Susanna opens the door (timorously, as if there might be a panther behind it) and announces the cab (in the same tone in which she would announce the beast); we pick up our draperies, and are whirled off by the lamiter to dine with the Scottish nobility.
Chapter VI. Edinburgh society, past and present
‘Wha last beside his chair shall fa’He is the king amang us three!’
It was the Princess Dashkoff who said, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, that of all the societies of men of talent she had met with in her travels, Edinburgh’s was the first in point of abilities.
One might make the same remark to-day, perhaps, and not depart widely from the truth. One does not find, however, as many noted names as are associated with the annals of the Cape and Poker Clubs or the Crochallan Fencibles, those famous groups of famous men who met for relaxation (and intoxication, I should think) at the old Isle of Man Arms or in Dawney’s Tavern in the Anchor Close. These groups included such shining lights as Robert Fergusson the poet, and Adam Ferguson the historian and philosopher, Gavin Wilson, Sir Henry Raeburn, David Hume, Erskine, Lords Newton, Gillies, Monboddo, Hailes, Kames, Henry Mackenzie, and the Ploughman Poet himself, who has kept alive the memory of the Crochallans in many a jovial verse like that in which he describes Smellie, the eccentric philosopher and printer:—
or in the characteristic picture of William Dunbar, a wit of the time, and the merriest of the Fencibles:—
or in the verses on Creech, Burns’s publisher, who left Edinburgh for a time in 1789. The ‘Willies,’ by the way, seem to be especially inspiring to the Scottish balladists.
I think perhaps the gatherings of the present time are neither quite as gay nor quite as brilliant as those of Burns’s day, when
but the ideal standard of those meetings seems to be voiced in the lines:—
As they sit in their chairs nowadays to the very end of the feast, there is doubtless joined with modern sobriety a soupcon of modern dulness and discretion.
To an American the great charm of Edinburgh is its leisurely atmosphere: ‘not the leisure of a village arising from the deficiency of ideas and motives, but the leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history; which has done its work, and does not require to weave its own clothing, to dig its own coals, or smelt its own iron.’
We were reminded of this more than once, and it never failed to depress us properly. If one had ever lived in Pittsburg, Fall River, or Kansas City, I should think it would be almost impossible to maintain self-respect in a place like Edinburgh, where the citizens ‘are released from the vulgarising dominion of the hour.’ Whenever one of Auld Reekie’s great men took this tone with me, I always felt as though I were the germ in a half-hatched egg, and he were an aged and lordly cock gazing at me pityingly through my shell. He, lucky creature, had lived through all the struggles which I was to undergo; he, indeed, was released from ‘the vulgarising dominion of the hour’; but I, poor thing, must grow and grow, and keep pecking at my shell, in order to achieve existence.
Sydney Smith says in one of his letters, ‘Never shall I forget the happy days passed there [in Edinburgh], amidst odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most enlightened and cultivated understandings.’ His only criticism of the conversation of that day (1797-1802) concerned itself with the prevalence of that form of Scotch humour which was called wut; and with the disputations and dialectics. We were more fortunate than Sydney Smith, because Edinburgh has outgrown its odious smells, barbarous sounds, and bad suppers and, wonderful to relate, has kept its excellent hearts and its enlightened and cultivated understandings. As for mingled wut and dialectics, where can one find a better foundation for dinner-table conversation?
The hospitable board itself presents no striking differences from our own, save the customs of serving sweets in soup-plates with dessert-spoons, of a smaller number of forks on parade, of the invariable fish-knife at each plate, of the prevalent ‘savoury’ and ‘cold shape,’ and the unusual grace and skill with which the hostess carves. Even at very large dinners one occasionally sees a lady of high degree severing the joints of chickens and birds most daintily, while her lord looks on in happy idleness, thinking, perhaps, how greatly times have changed for the better since the ages of strife and bloodshed, when Scottish nobles
The Scotch butler is not in the least like an English one. No man could be as respectable as he looks, not even an elder of the kirk, whom he resembles closely. He hands your plate as if it were a contribution-box, and in his moments of ease, when he stands behind the ‘maister,’ I am always expecting him to pronounce a benediction. The English butler, when he wishes to avoid the appearance of listening to the conversation, gazes with level eye into vacancy; the Scotch butler looks distinctly heavenward, as if he were brooding on the principle of co-ordinate jurisdiction with mutual subordination. It would be impossible for me to deny the key of the wine-cellar to a being so steeped in sanctity, but it has been done, I am told, in certain rare and isolated cases.
As for toilets, the men dress like all other men (alas, and alas, that we should say it, for we were continually hoping for a kilt!) though there seems to be no survival of the finical Lord Napier’s spirit. Perhaps you remember that Lord and Lady Napier arrived at Castlemilk in Lanarkshire with the intention of staying a week, but announced next morning that a circumstance had occurred which rendered it indispensable to return without delay to their seat in Selkirkshire. This was the only explanation given, but it was afterwards discovered that Lord Napier’s valet had committed the grievous mistake of packing up a set of neckcloths which did not correspond IN POINT OF DATE with the shirts they accompanied!
The ladies of the ‘smart set’ in Edinburgh wear French fripperies and chiffons, as do their sisters every where, but the other women of society dress a trifle more staidly than their cousins in London, Paris, or New York. The sobriety of taste and severity of style that characterise Scotswomen may be due, like Susanna Crum’s dubieties, to the haar, to the shorter catechism, or perhaps in some degree to the presence of three branches of the Presbyterian Church among them; the society that bears in its bosom three separate and antagonistic kinds of Presbyterianism at the same time must have its chilly moments.
In Lord Cockburn’s time the ‘dames of high and aristocratic breed’ must have been sufficiently awake to feminine frivolities to be both gorgeously and extravagantly arrayed. I do not know in all literature a more delicious and lifelike word-portrait than Lord Cockburn gives of Mrs. Rochead, the Lady of Inverleith, in the Memorials. It is quite worthy to hang beside a Raeburn canvas; one can scarce say more.
‘Except Mrs. Siddons in some of her displays of magnificent royalty, nobody could sit down like the Lady of Inverleith. She would sail like a ship from Tarshish, gorgeous in velvet or rustling silk, done up in all the accompaniments of fans, ear-rings, and finger-rings, falling sleeves, scent-bottle, embroidered bag, hoop, and train; managing all this seemingly heavy rigging with as much ease as a full-blown swan does its plumage. She would take possession of the centre of a large sofa, and at the same moment, without the slightest visible exertion, cover the whole of it with her bravery, the graceful folds seeming to lay themselves over it, like summer waves. The descent from her carriage, too, where she sat like a nautilus in its shell, was a display which no one in these days could accomplish or even fancy. The mulberry-coloured coach, apparently not too large for what it contained, though she alone was in it; the handsome, jolly coachman and his splendid hammer-cloth loaded with lace; the two respectful liveried footmen, one on each side of the richly carpeted step,—these were lost sight of amidst the slow majesty with which the Lady of Inverleith came down and touched the earth.’