THE WHITE BELLES OF SCOTLAND
By MARGARET IRWIN
BUCHAN'S first cold spell of the year falls in the middle of February. It was a foolish choice to go to Scotland for it, so my friends told me, who one and all it seemed were going to the Riviera or the South of France or Italy or Madeira. They murmured apprehensively of "Caledonia stern and wild," muttered of chills and chest complaints and urged me to take " masses and masses of warm things" until I felt I was embarking on an Arctic exploration.
"Yet I have seen icicles a yard long in Italy, and the ornamental waters in the Casino gardens at Monte Carlo frozen solid," I retaliated. That, I was told, was quite different. You might get a sharp frost in that southern climate but the sun shone brightly all the same, whereas in Scotland there would be either snow, sleet, hail, or an cast wind haar, and a bleak mist with any or all of them.
At the height- (or depth) of Buchan's cold spell I was in an old fishing village on the East Coast, not far from St. Andrews. There was a thin coating of ice on the puddles, even as I had seen it at Monte Carlo. But that was not the only resemblance. The sun was glittering on a blue sea, there was no wind, and it was so hot that all the old men in the village were sitting and smoking their pipes on the seats round the harbour that had been erected for the summer visitors in August. In the tiny harbour itself, the fishing boats, which had brought in a good haul of fish before dawn that morning, were riding at anchor on the lazily lapping ripples, and the fishermen sat in them mending their nets.
There I 'sat on the harbour wall for in hour or more, bask- ing in as blissful a sense of warmth as any Riviera Rotter. Not necessary here was Chesterton's philosophy of content : "1 long to bask in sunny fields But when that hope is vain I go and bask in Baker Street All in the pouring rain."
Better than either, bask on the east coast of Scotland in mid- February.
Even the confused charm of a foreign language was not lacking. A long low-roofed old house clung to the cliff side, its garden tumbled away below it, ending in sharp grey rocks and the scurry and foam of the waves breaking against them at high tide. I asked one of the old men on the seat to tell me who was lucky enough to live in that lovely spot, and was told the Coastal Wrecker—or so I thought. It seemed such a convenient as well as suitably picturesque setting for what is now considered an obsolete old trade, that I didn't question it at the time. But my companion, joining me later, insisted that I had been misled by the accent of those parts, and finally it was translated to me as the City Councillor, or something of the sortr--I cannot remember now, for the Coastal Wrecker has remained firmly planted in my mind as a_ far more appro- priate function for a man who lives in a house on the r( looking out over the North Sea.
Here at its most northerly point I chewed the cud of my Arctic expedition. I had seen snowdrops the Sunday before, mingled with shiny yellow aconites, growing in sheets of soft white and polished gold among the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, rose-pink ruins of old reddish stone with rosy sunset clouds behind them, and on the river bank, surrounded by tall trees as bare as skeletons, one lone grey fisherman watching the stream—a small pear-shaped figure that looked in the twilit distance like a tiny old woman in a shawl, such an old woman as might have been stolen a few hundred years ago to be nurse to the Queen of Fairies, and had shrunk in the process. But the enchantment of sight was as deceptive as that of hearing ; the " Queen of Elfland's nourrice " vanished with the Coastal Wrecker, and I came near only to see a heron.
The snowdrops were tall, their white bells sprinkled thick as snow in the grass ; tho3: in the London parks were not nearly as far out as these of the "bleak north." " February Fair Maids" Tennyson called them, I hope with better authority than his own, and if so I suspect its source to be Scottish, for Scotland deals liberally in Fair Maids.
There is the Fair Maid of Perth, like most of Scott's heroines a dull lass enough in herself, but with the distinction of giving her name to what I still think in spite of the critics to be the most romantic of his novels.
And if the Fair Catherine is a sturdy burgher's wench of irreproachable propriety who could never have made anyone's heart beat the faster, the Fair Maids of France are believed to owe their name to that Queen betrayed by Scotland and beloved by her-ever after.
These are those white flowers that grow on their branches in close round clusters like snowballs, which are supposed to have been brought by Mary Queen of Scots when she cam: from France as a tall fair girl of 19 in her white widow's weeds, with her four Manes clustering round her. It is always by white flowers that she is remembered—the pear tree at the gate of Merchiston—the thorn tree she planted that now towers over the college porch at Saint Andrews—which for centuries_ have scattered a snow-cloud of white blossom over their branches every spring—always by white flowering trees, not by anything as lowly as lilies or snowdrops, those February Fair Maids that flourished so far more abundantly in Scotland this year than anywhere else.
The poets have lied as usual, but this time in dimming the colours ; "Caledonia stern and wild" should be struck out as a title for Scotland and replaced by the February Fair Maid of Europe.
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