XIV THE SCOT BY ADOPTION

I have been told that there are two kinds of Scotchmen, and that it would be a mistake to confound them, or to suggest that they have any characteristics in common. One kind, and the best kind, I am assured, is the Highlander. The other—and the more disreputable kind—is the Scotchman of the Lowlands. I have met both sorts, and I have not been able to discover that there is much to choose between them. For all practical purposes the blood is identical. It may at one time have been of two distinct strains, but these appear to have become in a great measure fused, and the blend is not beautiful. I think it was Dr. Cunninghame Graham who said of a certain Scotch peddler that he[187] looked like a cross between a low-class Indian and an ourang-outang that had somehow got itself baptised. This, no doubt, is a little severe. But a Scotchman does certainly make one feel that underneath his unsatisfactory and obviously imperfect civilisation the hairy simian sits and grins. Rouse him, thwart him, disappoint him, rally him, and suddenly your cross-eyed, sandy-haired, bandy-legged, but withal sleek, smug, moralising man suddenly “bleezes,” and you perceive in him the ten thousand devils of an ancient and arboreal barbarity. Whether he be Highlander or Lowlander or mongrel, as he mostly is, it is just the same. He is Scotch and compounded for the most part of savage. Like the converted Kroo-boy, he may at any time revert into his immemorial primalism and you can never be sure of him. Whether he hail from the Isles or from the Lothians, the Scot is just the Scot, and there is nothing more to be said for him.

There is, however, a kind of Scot who,[188] while not of Scotch blood, has adopted the manners and habits of Caledonia, and is rather flattered if you take him for a true-born Scotchman. This type of creature usually owes his retrogression to the fact that he has married a Scotch wife. Of Scotchwomen as a body, I do not wish to say anything that will be considered ungallant. If one passes over their abnormal capacity for thrift, I suppose they are pretty much the same as other women. So far as I am aware I have not met more than a dozen Scotchwomen in my life. Two of them I have known intimately, and I have always thanked my stars that I was not married to either of them. But to return to our Scotchman by adoption. Usually, as I say, he is married to a Scotchwoman. Before you arrive at a knowledge of this circumstance, you are inclined to wonder what is the matter with him. His style and proclivities have induced you to set him down for a Scotchman, yet you find that his Doric is bad, that he eats his porridge with sugar and takes his whiskey[189] with soda, and that he was born in Gloucestershire. Also, he tells you frankly that his parents were not Scotch, and he adds, with a look of supreme satisfaction, “but my wife is.” And straightway he plunges into tender reminiscences of the days of his courtship, touches modestly upon the wealth and importance of his wife’s relations, hints at the fearful expense to which he was put by his many journeys North when he went a-wooing, and gurgles with a sickly smile that it was worth the trouble, and that he does not know “what he would do without her.” All of which is mightily interesting. If you pursue your investigations further, you will find that the man is perhaps a little more to pity than to blame. He has been compelled to become as Scotch as he knows how, willy-nilly. At the head of his table sits the daughter of Scotia—ruddy, chapped, and sharp of tongue; she looks down on things English, her husband included; her children are taught to remember that their grandfather is a provost and magnificent in the[190] jute line; she keeps her house in the Scotch manner, her servants are Scotch, her household linens are Scotch, her beef is Scotch, and her whiskey is Scotch; her little boys wear tartan; tripe is the great dish for supper, and her husband must eat oatmeal to the verge of scrofula. Abroad, too, this man must be as Scotch as the best of them. In his place of business, Scotchmen protégés of his wife’s relations are the only ware: he loathes them, and they laugh at him behind his back, but he has to put up with them. On Saturdays they instruct him in the mysteries of “gowf”; on Mondays they tell one another what a “damned foozler” he is. His holidays are always spent in the Western Highlands; he is everlastingly seeing his wife off to Aberdeen; he banks at the Bank of Scotland; he smokes the tobacco which has been so ably pushed into fame by Dr. J. M. Barrie; he believes that the Glasgow bailies know what they are about; his money, which has been scraped together on the Scotch principle, is doucely put away in Scotch ventures; and[191] altogether Scotland does very well out of him. The fact that he is a mean little man does not worry him. The practice and view of life which the lady of his affections has forced upon him is bringing him a due share of this world’s gear, and in that fact he takes consolation for his attenuated honesty, his lost manhood, and his lost nationality. This is one side of the picture and the brightest.

On the other side it were well for us not to look too closely. The Englishman who has been appropriated by a Scotch wife does not always succeed in profiting by the worldly wisdom with which his spouse would imbue him. Then there is trouble. For a Scotchwoman who cannot report to her kindred in Scotland that her husband is “getting on” feels that she has been robbed of the prime joy of existence. Her contempt for the man who cannot win and grip siller eats into her soul, until she has no other sentiment left. Bit by bit she develops into a scold and a curtain-lecturer; the man who found her so fair by the Birks of Aberfeldey becomes a[192] furtive wanderer from her side, and it all ends in too much whiskey, recrimination, and execration. I know an Englishman of parts who has never earned enough money to be under the necessity of paying income tax. He is a man of small stature and limp, and he has a great fear in his eyes. He is one of those men who might have done things and have omitted to do them. The gossip about him is that he is badly married. Once I saw his wife. She was a big, raw-boned Scotchwoman, with a heavy accent on her. It was New Year’s Eve, and she had evidently been “tasting.” At sight of me, out of the bigness of her Scotch hospitality, she proposed a “nep,” and half filled three glasses from a stone bottle. Then, with hand on hip, glass uplifted, and a blaze on her face, she cried: “Here’s tae us and to hell with the English.” We drank the toast in something of a silence. Later, when I was about to leave, my limp friend would have accompanied me to the door. But the mistress of his heart would have none of it. “Ye’ll awa’,” she said,[193] then, “to yer bed; yer friend is no’ that fou but he can find his ain way oot.” So that we shook hands and parted on the stair. The man had had twenty years of it. I understand him.

The idiot who takes to wearing kilts and speaking with an accent for the mere sake of it is scarcely worth notice. But there are such people even outside Colney Hatch. What they see in the Scotch to admire to the point of spuriousness I cannot for the life of me make out. The garb of old Gaul is, no doubt, very fetching from the point of view of the weak-minded, but of its effeminacy there can be no doubt. Really, it is a costume for small and pretty boys who are too young to be breeched. In view of its associations and of its innate childishness,—not to say immodesty,—it is a great pity that any Englishman should go out of his way to wear it.