In Edinburgh, for a considerable time, Fleeming’s
family, to three generations, was united: Mr. and Mrs. Austin at
Hailes, Captain and Mrs. Jenkin in the suburb of Merchiston,
Fleeming himself in the city. It is not every family that
could risk with safety such close interdomestic dealings; but in
this also Fleeming was particularly favoured. Even the two
extremes, Mr. Austin and the Captain, drew together. It is
pleasant to find that each of the old gentlemen set a high value
on the good looks of the other, doubtless also on his own; and a
fine picture they made as they walked the green terrace at
Hailes, conversing by the hour. What they talked of is
still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr. Austin always
declared that on these occasions he learned much. To both
of these families of elders, due service was paid of attention;
to both, Fleeming’s easy circumstances had brought joy; and
the eyes of all were on the grandchildren. In
Fleeming’s scheme of duties, those of the family stood
first; a man was first of all a child, nor did he cease to be so,
but only took on added obligations, when he became in turn a
father. The care of his parents was always a first thought
with him, and their gratification his delight. And the care
of his sons, as it was always a grave subject of study with him,
and an affair never neglected, so it brought him a thousand
satisfactions. ‘Hard work they are,’ as he once
wrote, ‘but what fit work!’ And again:
‘O, it’s a cold house where a dog is the only
representative of a child!’ Not that dogs were
despised; we shall drop across the name of Jack, the harum-scarum
Irish terrier ere we have done; his own dog Plato went up with
him daily to his lectures, and still (like other friends) feels
the loss and looks visibly for the reappearance of his master;
and Martin, the cat, Fleeming has himself immortalised, to the
delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the columns of the
Spectator. Indeed there was nothing in which men
take interest, in which he took not some; and yet always most in
the strong human bonds, ancient as the race and woven of delights
and duties.
He was even an anxious father; perhaps that is the part where
optimism is hardest tested. He was eager for his sons;
eager for their health, whether of mind or body; eager for their
education; in that, I should have thought, too eager. But
he kept a pleasant face upon all things, believed in play, loved
it himself, shared boyishly in theirs, and knew how to put a face
of entertainment upon business and a spirit of education into
entertainment. If he was to test the progress of the three
boys, this advertisement would appear in their little manuscript
paper:—‘Notice: The Professor of Engineering in the
University of Edinburgh intends at the close of the scholastic
year to hold examinations in the following subjects: (1)
For boys in the fourth class of the Academy—Geometry and
Algebra; (2) For boys at Mr. Henderson’s
school—Dictation and Recitation; (3) For boys taught
exclusively by their mothers—Arithmetic and
Reading.’ Prizes were given; but what prize would be
so conciliatory as this boyish little joke? It may read
thin here; it would smack racily in the playroom. Whenever
his sons ‘started a new fad’ (as one of them writes
to me) they ‘had only to tell him about it, and he was at
once interested and keen to help.’ He would
discourage them in nothing unless it was hopelessly too hard for
them; only, if there was any principle of science involved, they
must understand the principle; and whatever was attempted, that
was to be done thoroughly. If it was but play, if it was
but a puppetshow they were to build, he set them the example of
being no sluggard in play. When Frewen, the second son,
embarked on the ambitious design to make an engine for a toy
steamboat, Fleeming made him begin with a proper
drawing—doubtless to the disgust of the young engineer; but
once that foundation laid, helped in the work with unflagging
gusto, ‘tinkering away,’ for hours, and assisted at
the final trial ‘in the big bath’ with no less
excitement than the boy. ‘He would take any amount of
trouble to help us,’ writes my correspondent.
‘We never felt an affair was complete till we had called
him to see, and he would come at any time, in the middle of any
work.’ There was indeed one recognised playhour,
immediately after the despatch of the day’s letters; and
the boys were to be seen waiting on the stairs until the mail
should be ready and the fun could begin. But at no other
time did this busy man suffer his work to interfere with that
first duty to his children; and there is a pleasant tale of the
inventive Master Frewen, engaged at the time upon a toy crane,
bringing to the study where his father sat at work a half-wound
reel that formed some part of his design, and observing,
‘Papa, you might finiss windin’ this for me; I am so
very busy to-day.’
I put together here a few brief extracts from Fleeming’s
letters, none very important in itself, but all together building
up a pleasant picture of the father with his sons.
‘Jan. 15th, 1875.—Frewen
contemplates suspending soap bubbles by silk threads for
experimental purposes. I don’t think he will manage
that. Bernard’ [the youngest] ‘volunteered to
blow the bubbles with enthusiasm.’
‘Jan. 17th.—I am learning a great
deal of electrostatics in consequence of the perpetual
cross-examination to which I am subjected. I long for you
on many grounds, but one is that I may not be obliged to deliver
a running lecture on abstract points of science, subject to
cross-examination by two acute students. Bernie does not
cross-examine much; but if anyone gets discomfited, he laughs a
sort of little silver-whistle giggle, which is trying to the
unhappy blunderer.’
‘May 9th.—Frewen is deep in
parachutes. I beg him not to drop from the top landing in
one of his own making.’
‘June 6th, 1876.—Frewen’s
crank axle is a failure just at present—but he bears
up.’
‘June 14th.—The boys enjoy their
riding. It gets them whole funds of adventures. One
of their caps falling off is matter for delightful reminiscences;
and when a horse breaks his step, the occurrence becomes a rear,
a shy, or a plunge as they talk it over. Austin, with quiet
confidence, speaks of the greater pleasure in riding a spirited
horse, even if he does give a little trouble. It is the
stolid brute that he dislikes. (N.B. You can still see six
inches between him and the saddle when his pony trots.) I
listen and sympathise and throw out no hint that their
achievements are not really great.’
‘June 18th.—Bernard is much
impressed by the fact that I can be useful to Frewen about the
steamboat’ [which the latter irrepressible inventor was
making]. ‘He says quite with awe, “He would not
have got on nearly so well if you had not helped
him.”’
‘June 27th.—I do not see what I
could do without Austin. He talks so pleasantly and is so
truly good all through.’
‘June 27th.—My chief difficulty with
Austin is to get him measured for a pair of trousers.
Hitherto I have failed, but I keep a stout heart and mean to
succeed. Frewen the observer, in describing the paces of
two horses, says, “Polly takes twenty-seven steps to get
round the school. I couldn’t count Sophy, but she
takes more than a hundred.”’
‘Feb. 18th, 1877.—We all feel very
lonely without you. Frewen had to come up and sit in my
room for company last night and I actually kissed him, a thing
that has not occurred for years. Jack, poor fellow, bears
it as well as he can, and has taken the opportunity of having a
fester on his foot, so he is lame and has it bathed, and this
occupies his thoughts a good deal.’
‘Feb. 19th.—As to Mill, Austin has
not got the list yet. I think it will prejudice him very
much against Mill—but that is not my affair.
Education of that kind! . . . I would as soon cram my boys with
food and boast of the pounds they had eaten, as cram them with
literature.’
But if Fleeming was an anxious father, he did not suffer his
anxiety to prevent the boys from any manly or even dangerous
pursuit. Whatever it might occur to them to try, he would
carefully show them how to do it, explain the risks, and then
either share the danger himself or, if that were not possible,
stand aside and wait the event with that unhappy courage of the
looker-on. He was a good swimmer, and taught them to
swim. He thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during
their holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and
encouraged them to excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to
fish, to walk, to pull an oar, to hand, reef and steer, and to
run a steam launch. In all of these, and in all parts of
Highland life, he shared delightedly. He was well on to
forty when he took once more to shooting, he was forty-three when
he killed his first salmon, but no boy could have more
single-mindedly rejoiced in these pursuits. His growing
love for the Highland character, perhaps also a sense of the
difficulty of the task, led him to take up at forty-one the study
of Gaelic; in which he made some shadow of progress, but not
much: the fastnesses of that elusive speech retaining to the last
their independence. At the house of his friend Mrs.
Blackburn, who plays the part of a Highland lady as to the manner
born, he learned the delightful custom of kitchen dances, which
became the rule at his own house and brought him into yet nearer
contact with his neighbours. And thus at forty-two, he
began to learn the reel; a study, to which he brought his usual
smiling earnestness; and the steps, diagrammatically represented
by his own hand, are before me as I write.
It was in 1879 that a new feature was added to the Highland
life: a steam launch, called the Purgle, the Styrian
corruption of Walpurga, after a friend to be hereafter
mentioned. ‘The steam launch goes,’ Fleeming
wrote. ‘I wish you had been present to describe two
scenes of which she has been the occasion already: one during
which the population of Ullapool, to a baby, was harnessed to her
hurrahing—and the other in which the same population sat
with its legs over a little pier, watching Frewen and Bernie
getting up steam for the first time.’ The
Purgle was got with educational intent; and it served its
purpose so well, and the boys knew their business so practically,
that when the summer was at an end, Fleeming, Mrs. Jenkin, Frewen
the engineer, Bernard the stoker, and Kenneth Robertson a
Highland seaman, set forth in her to make the passage
south. The first morning they got from Loch Broom into
Gruinard bay, where they lunched upon an island; but the wind
blowing up in the afternoon, with sheets of rain, it was found
impossible to beat to sea; and very much in the situation of
castaways upon an unknown coast, the party landed at the mouth of
Gruinard river. A shooting lodge was spied among the trees;
there Fleeming went; and though the master, Mr. Murray, was from
home, though the two Jenkin boys were of course as black as
colliers, and all the castaways so wetted through that, as they
stood in the passage, pools formed about their feet and ran
before them into the house, yet Mrs. Murray kindly entertained
them for the night. On the morrow, however, visitors were
to arrive; there would be no room and, in so out-of-the-way a
spot, most probably no food for the crew of the Purgle;
and on the morrow about noon, with the bay white with spindrift
and the wind so strong that one could scarcely stand against it,
they got up steam and skulked under the land as far as Sanda
Bay. Here they crept into a seaside cave, and cooked some
food; but the weather now freshening to a gale, it was plain they
must moor the launch where she was, and find their way overland
to some place of shelter. Even to get their baggage from on
board was no light business; for the dingy was blown so far to
leeward every trip, that they must carry her back by hand along
the beach. But this once managed, and a cart procured in
the neighbourhood, they were able to spend the night in a
pot-house on Ault Bea. Next day, the sea was
unapproachable; but the next they had a pleasant passage to
Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell bursting close by
them in the gullies, and the black scarts that sat like ornaments
on the top of every stack and pinnacle, looking down into the
Purgle as she passed. The climate of Scotland had
not done with them yet: for three days they lay storm-stayed in
Poolewe, and when they put to sea on the morning of the fourth,
the sailors prayed them for God’s sake not to attempt the
passage. Their setting out was indeed merely tentative; but
presently they had gone too far to return, and found themselves
committed to double Rhu Reay with a foul wind and a cross
sea. From half-past eleven in the morning until half-past
five at night, they were in immediate and unceasing danger.
Upon the least mishap, the Purgle must either have been
swamped by the seas or bulged upon the cliffs of that rude
headland. Fleeming and Robertson took turns baling and
steering; Mrs. Jenkin, so violent was the commotion of the boat,
held on with both hands; Frewen, by Robertson’s direction,
ran the engine, slacking and pressing her to meet the seas; and
Bernard, only twelve years old, deadly sea-sick, and continually
thrown against the boiler, so that he was found next day to be
covered with burns, yet kept an even fire. It was a very
thankful party that sat down that evening to meat in the Hotel at
Gairloch. And perhaps, although the thing was new in the
family, no one was much surprised when Fleeming said grace over
that meal. Thenceforward he continued to observe the form,
so that there was kept alive in his house a grateful memory of
peril and deliverance. But there was nothing of the muff in
Fleeming; he thought it a good thing to escape death, but a
becoming and a healthful thing to run the risk of it; and what is
rarer, that which he thought for himself, he thought for his
family also. In spite of the terrors of Rhu Reay, the
cruise was persevered in and brought to an end under happier
conditions.
One year, instead of the Highlands, Alt Aussee, in the
Steiermark, was chosen for the holidays; and the place, the
people, and the life delighted Fleeming. He worked hard at
German, which he had much forgotten since he was a boy; and what
is highly characteristic, equally hard at the patois, in which he
learned to excel. He won a prize at a Schützen-fest;
and though he hunted chamois without much success, brought down
more interesting game in the shape of the Styrian peasants, and
in particular of his gillie, Joseph. This Joseph was much
of a character; and his appreciations of Fleeming have a fine
note of their own. The bringing up of the boys he deigned
to approve of: ‘fast so gut wie ein bauer,’
was his trenchant criticism. The attention and courtly
respect with which Fleeming surrounded his wife, was something of
a puzzle to the philosophic gillie; he announced in the village
that Mrs. Jenkin—die silberne Frau, as the folk had
prettily named her from some silver ornaments—was a
‘geborene Gräfin’ who had married beneath
her; and when Fleeming explained what he called the English
theory (though indeed it was quite his own) of married relations,
Joseph, admiring but unconvinced, avowed it was ‘gar
schön.’ Joseph’s cousin, Walpurga
Moser, to an orchestra of clarionet and zither, taught the family
the country dances, the Steierisch and the Ländler, and
gained their hearts during the lessons. Her sister Loys,
too, who was up at the Alp with the cattle, came down to church
on Sundays, made acquaintance with the Jenkins, and must have
them up to see the sunrise from her house upon the Loser, where
they had supper and all slept in the loft among the hay.
The Mosers were not lost sight of; Walpurga still corresponds
with Mrs. Jenkin, and it was a late pleasure of Fleeming’s
to choose and despatch a wedding present for his little mountain
friend. This visit was brought to an end by a ball in the
big inn parlour; the refreshments chosen, the list of guests
drawn up, by Joseph; the best music of the place in attendance;
and hosts and guests in their best clothes. The ball was
opened by Mrs. Jenkin dancing Steierisch with a lordly Bauer, in
gray and silver and with a plumed hat; and Fleeming followed with
Walpurga Moser.
There ran a principle through all these holiday
pleasures. In Styria as in the Highlands, the same course
was followed: Fleeming threw himself as fully as he could into
the life and occupations of the native people, studying
everywhere their dances and their language, and conforming,
always with pleasure, to their rustic etiquette. Just as
the ball at Alt Aussee was designed for the taste of Joseph, the
parting feast at Attadale was ordered in every particular to the
taste of Murdoch the Keeper. Fleeming was not one of the
common, so-called gentlemen, who take the tricks of their own
coterie to be eternal principles of taste. He was aware, on
the other hand, that rustic people dwelling in their own places,
follow ancient rules with fastidious precision, and are easily
shocked and embarrassed by what (if they used the word) they
would have to call the vulgarity of visitors from town. And
he, who was so cavalier with men of his own class, was sedulous
to shield the more tender feelings of the peasant; he, who could
be so trying in a drawing-room, was even punctilious in the
cottage. It was in all respects a happy virtue. It
renewed his life, during these holidays, in all
particulars. It often entertained him with the discovery of
strange survivals; as when, by the orders of Murdoch, Mrs. Jenkin
must publicly taste of every dish before it was set before her
guests. And thus to throw himself into a fresh life and a
new school of manners was a grateful exercise of Fleeming’s
mimetic instinct; and to the pleasures of the open air, of
hardships supported, of dexterities improved and displayed, and
of plain and elegant society, added a spice of drama.
