Jeems The Doorkeeper

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Title:     Jeems The Doorkeeper
Author: John Brown [More Titles by Brown]

When my father was in Broughton Place Church, we had a doorkeeper called Jeems, and a formidable little man and doorkeeper he was; of unknown age and name, for he existed to us, and indeed still exists to me--though he has been in his grave these sixteen years--as Jeems, absolute and per se, no more needing a surname than did or do Abraham or Isaac, Samson or Nebuchadnezzar. We young people of the congregation believed that he was out in the '45, and had his drum shot through and quenched at Culloden; and as for any indication on his huge and grey visage, of his ever having been young, he might safely have been Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or that excellent, ingenious, and "wise-hearted" Bezaleel, the son of Uri, whom Jeems regarded as one of the greatest of men and of weavers, and whose "ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, each of them with fifty loops on the edge of the selvedge in the coupling, with their fifty taches of gold," he, in confidential moments, gave it to be understood were the sacred triumphs of his craft; for, as you may infer, my friend was a man of the treddles and the shuttle, as well as the more renowned grandson of Hur.

Jeems's face was so extensive, and met you so formidably and at once, that it mainly composed his whole; and such a face! Sydney Smith used to say of a certain quarrelsome man, "His very face is a breach of the peace." Had he seen our friend's, he would have said he was the imperative mood on two (very small) legs, out on business in a blue greatcoat. It was in the nose and the keen small eye that his strength lay. Such a nose of power, so undeniable, I never saw, except in what was said to be a bust from the antique, of Rhadamanthus, the well-known Justice-Clerk of the Pagan Court of Session! Indeed, when I was in the Rector's class, and watched Jeems turning interlopers out of the church seats, by merely presenting before them this tremendous organ, it struck me that if Rhadamanthus had still been here, and out of employment, he would have taken kindly to Jeems's work,--and that possibly he was that potentate in a U. P. disguise.

Nature having fashioned the huge face, and laid out much material and idea upon it, had finished off the rest of Jeems somewhat scrimply, as if she had run out of means; his legs especially were of the shortest, and, as his usual dress was a very long blue greatcoat, made for a much taller man, its tails resting upon the ground, and its large hind buttons in a totally preposterous position, gave him the look of being planted, or rather after the manner of Milton's beasts at the creation, in the act of emerging painfully from his mother earth.

Now, you may think this was a very ludicrous old object. If you had seen him, you would not have said so; and not only was he a man of weight and authority,--he was likewise a genuine, indeed a deeply spiritual Christian, well read in his Bible, in his own heart, and in human nature and life, knowing both its warp and woof; more peremptory in making himself obey his Master, than in getting himself obeyed, and this is saying a good deal; and, like all complete men, he had a genuine love and gift of humour,[42] kindly and uncouth, lurking in those small, deep-set grey eyes, shrewd and keen, which, like two sharpest of shooters, enfiladed that massive and redoubtable bulwark, the nose.

[Footnote 42: On one occasion a descendant of Nabal having put a crown piece into "the plate" instead of a penny, and staring at its white and precious face, asked to have it back, and was refused--"In once, in for ever." "A weel, a weel," grunted he, "I'll get credit for it in heaven." "Na, na," said Jeems, "ye'll get credit only for the penny!"]

One day two strangers made themselves over to Jeems to be furnished with seats. Motioning them to follow, he walked majestically to the farthest in corner, where he had decreed they should sit. The couple found seats near the door, and stepped into them, leaving Jeems to march through the passages alone, the whole congregation watching him with some relish and alarm. He gets to his destination, opens the door, and stands aside; nobody appears. He looks sharply round, and then gives a look of general wrath "at lairge." No one doubted his victory. His nose and eye fell, or seemed to fall, on the two culprits, and pulled them out instantly, hurrying them to their appointed place; Jeems snibbed them slowly in, and gave them a parting look they were not likely to misunderstand or forget.

At that time the crowds and the imperfect ventilation made fainting a common occurrence in Broughton Place, especially among "thae young hizzies," as Jeems called the servant girls. He generally came to me, "the young Doctor," on these occasions with a look of great relish. I had indoctrinated him in the philosophy of syncopes, especially as to the propriety of laying the "hizzies" quite flat on the floor of the lobby, with the head as low as the rest of the body; and as many of these cases were owing to what Jeems called "that bitter yerkin" of their boddices, he and I had much satisfaction in relieving them, and giving them a moral lesson, by cutting their stay-laces, which ran before the knife, and cracked "like a bowstring," as my coadjutor said. One day a young lady was our care. She was lying out, and slowly coming to. Jeems, with that huge terrific visage, came round to me with his open gully in his hand, whispering, "Wull oo ripp 'er up noo?" It happened not to be a case for ripping up. The gully was a great sanitary institution, and made a decided inroad upon the yerking system--Jeems having, thanks to this and Dr. Coombe, every year fewer opportunities of displaying and enjoying its powers.

He was sober in other things besides drink, could be generous on occasion, but was careful of his siller; sensitive to fierceness ("we're uncommon zeelyous the day," was a favourite phrase when any church matter was stirring) for the honour of his church and minister, and to his too often worthless neighbours a perpetual moral protest and lesson--a living epistle. He dwelt at the head of big Lochend's Close in the Canongate, at the top of a long stair--ninety-six steps, as I well know--where he had dwelt, all by himself, for five-and-thirty years, and where, in the midst of all sorts of flittings and changes, not a day opened or closed without the well-known sound of Jeems at his prayers,--his "exercise,"--at "the Books." His clear, fearless, honest voice in psalm and chapter, and strong prayer, came sounding through that wide "land," like that of one crying in the wilderness.

Jeems and I got great friends; he called me John, as if he was my grandfather; and though as plain in speech as in feature, he was never rude. I owe him much in many ways. His absolute downrightness and yaefauldness; his energetic, unflinching fulfilment of his work; his rugged, sudden tenderness; his look of sturdy age, as the thick silver-white hair lay on his serious and weatherworn face, like moonlight on a stout old tower; his quaint Old Testament exegetics, his lonely and contented life, his simple godliness,--it was no small privilege to see much of all this.

But I must stop. I forget that you didn't know him; that he is not your Jeems. If it had been so, you would not soon have wearied of telling or of being told of the life and conversation of this "fell body." He was not communicative about his early life. He would sometimes speak to me about "her," as if I knew who and where she was, and always with a gentleness and solemnity unlike his usual gruff ways. I found out that he had been married when young, and that "she" (he never named her) and their child died on the same day,--the day of its birth. The only indication of married life in his room, was an old and strong cradle, which he had cut down so as to rock no more, and which he made the depository of his books--a queer collection.

I have said that he had what he called, with a grave smile, family worship, morning and evening, never failing. He not only sang his psalm, but gave out or chanted the line in great style; and on seeing me one morning surprised at this, he said, "Ye see John, oo," meaning himself and his wife, "began that way." He had a firm, true voice, and a genuine though roughish gift of singing, and being methodical in all things, he did what I never heard of in any one else,--he had seven fixed tunes, one of which he sang on its own set day. Sabbath morning it was French, which he went through with great birr. Monday, Scarborough, which, he said, was like my father cantering. Tuesday, Coleshill, that soft exquisite air,--monotonous and melancholy, soothing and vague, like the sea. This day, Tuesday, was the day of the week on which his wife and child died, and he always sang more verses then than on any other. Wednesday was Irish; Thursday, Old Hundred; Friday, Bangor; and Saturday, Blackburn, that humdrummest of tunes, "as long, and lank, and lean, as is the ribbed sea-sand." He could not defend it, but had some secret reason for sticking to it. As to the evenings, they were just the same tunes in reversed order, only that on Tuesday night he sang Coleshill again, thus dropping Blackburn for evening work. The children could tell the day of the week by Jeems's tune, and would have been as much astonished at hearing Bangor on Monday, as at finding St. Giles's half-way down the Canongate.

I frequently breakfasted with him. He made capital porridge, and I wish I could get such butter-milk, or at least have such a relish for it, as in those days. Jeems is away--gone over to the majority; and I hope I may never forget to be grateful to the dear and queer old man. I think I see and hear him saying his grace over our bickers with their brats on, then taking his two books out of the cradle and reading, not without a certain homely majesty, the first verse of the 99th Psalm,

"Th' eternal Lord doth reign as king,
Let all the people quake;
He sits between the cherubims,
Let th' earth be mov'd and shake;"

then launching out into the noble depths of Irish. His chapters were long, and his prayers short, very scriptural, but by no means stereotyped, and wonderfully real, immediate, as if he was near Him whom he addressed. Any one hearing the sound and not the words, would say, "That man is speaking to some one who is with him--who is present,"--as he often said to me, "There's nae glide dune, John, till ye get to close grups."

Now, I dare say you are marvelling--first, Why I brought this grim, old Rhadamanthus, Belzaleel, U. P. Naso of a doorkeeper up before you; and secondly, How I am to get him down decorously in that ancient blue greatcoat, and get at my own proper text.

And first of the first. I thought it would do you young men--the hope of the world--no harm to let your affections go out toward this dear, old-world specimen of homespun worth. And as to the second, I am going to make it my excuse for what is to come. One day soon after I knew him, when I thought he was in a soft, confidential mood, I said: "Jeems, what kind of weaver are you?" "I'm in the fancical line, maister John," said he somewhat stiffly; "I like its leecence." So exit Jeems--impiger, iracundus, acer--torvus visu--placide quiescat!

Now, my dear friends, I am in the fancical line as well as Jeems, and in virtue of my leecence, I begin my exegetical remarks on the pursuit of truth. By the bye, I should have told Sir Henry that it was truth, not knowledge, I was to be after. Now all knowledge should be true, but it isn't; much of what is called knowledge is very little worth even when true, and much of the best truth is not in a strict sense knowable,--rather it is felt and believed.

Exegetical, you know, is the grand and fashionable word now-a-days for explanatory; it means bringing out of a passage all that is in it, and nothing more. For my part, being in Jeems's line, I am not so particular as to the nothing more. We fancical men are much given to make somethings of nothings; indeed, the noble Italians, call imagination and poetic fancy the little more; its very function is to embellish and intensify the actual and the common. Now you must not laugh at me, or it, when I announce the passage from which I mean to preach upon the pursuit of truth, and the possession of wisdom:--

"On Tintock tap there is a Mist,
And in the Mist there is a Kist,
And in the Kist there is a Cap;
Tak' up the Cap and sup the drap,
And set the Cap on Tintock tap."

And as to what Sir Henry[43] would call the context, we are saved all trouble, there being none, the passage being self-contained, and as destitute of relations as Melchisedec.

[Footnote 43: This was read to Sir Henry W. Moncreiff's Young Men's Association, November 1862.]

Tintock, you all know, or should know, is a big porphyritic hill in Lanarkshire, standing alone, and dominating like a king over the Upper Ward. Then we all understand what a mist is; and it is worth remembering that as it is more difficult to penetrate, to illuminate, and to see through mist than darkness, so it is easier to enlighten and overcome ignorance, than error, confusion, and mental mist. Then a kist is Scotch for chest, and a cap the same for cup, and drap for drop. Well, then, I draw out of these queer old lines--

First, That to gain real knowledge, to get it at firsthand, you must go up the Hill Difficulty--some Tintock, something you see from afar--and you must climb; you must energize, as Sir William Hamilton and Dr. Chalmers said and did; you must turn your back upon the plain, and you must mainly go alone, and on your own legs. Two boys may start together on going up Tinto, and meet at the top; but the journeys are separate, each takes his own line.

Secondly, You start for your Tintock top with a given object, to get into the mist and get the drop, and you do this chiefly because you have the truth-hunting instinct; you long to know what is hidden there, for there is a wild and urgent charm in the unknown; and you want to realize for yourself what others, it may have been ages ago, tell they have found there.

Thirdly, There is no road up; no omnibus to the top of Tinto; you must zigzag it in your own way, and as I have already said, most part of it alone.

Fourthly, This climbing, this exaltation, and buckling to of the mind, of itself does you good;[44] it is capital exercise, and you find out many a thing by the way. Your lungs play freely; your mouth fills with the sweet waters of keen action; the hill tries your wind and mettle, supples and hardens your joints and limbs; quickens and rejoices, while it tests your heart.

[Footnote 44: "In this pursuit, whether we take or whether we lose our game, the chase is certainly of service."--BURKE.]

Fifthly, You have many a fall, many a false step; you slip back, you tumble into a moss-hagg; you stumble over the baffling stones; you break your shins and lose your temper, and the finding of it makes you keep it better the next time; you get more patient, and yet more eager, and not unoften you come to a stand-still; run yourself up against, or to the edge of, some impossible precipice, some insoluble problem, and have to turn for your life; and you may find yourself over head in a treacherous wellee, whose soft inviting cushion of green has decoyed many a one before you.

Sixthly, You are for ever mistaking the top; thinking you are at it, when, behold! there it is, as if farther off than ever, and you may have to humble yourself in a hidden valley before reascending; and so on you go, at times flinging yourself down on the elastic heather, stretched panting with your face to the sky, or gazing far away athwart the widening horizon.

Seventhly, As you get up, you may see how the world below lessens and reveals itself, comes up to you as a whole, with its just proportions and relations; how small the village you live in looks, and the house in which you were born; how the plan of the place comes out; there is the quiet churchyard, and a lamb is nibbling at that infant's grave; there, close to the little church, your mother rests till the great day; and there far off you may trace the river winding through the plain, coming like human life, from darkness to darkness,--from its source in some wild, upland solitude to its eternity, the sea. But you have rested long enough, so, up and away! take the hill once again! Every effort is a victory and joy--new skill and power and relish--takes you farther from the world below, nearer the clouds and heavens; and you may note that the more you move up towards the pure blue depths of the sky--the more lucid and the more unsearchable--the farther off, the more withdrawn into their own clear infinity do they seem. Well, then, you get to the upper story, and you find it less difficult, less steep than lower down; often so plain and level that you can run off in an ecstasy to the crowning cairn, to the sacred mist--within whose cloudy shrine rests the unknown secret; some great truth of God and of your own soul; something that is not to be gotten for gold down on the plain, but may be taken here; something that no man can give or take away; something that you must work for and learn yourself, and which, once yours, is safe beyond the chances of time.

Eighthly, You enter that luminous cloud, stooping and as a little child--as, indeed, all the best kingdoms are entered--and pressing on, you come in the shadowy light to the long-dreamt-of ark,--the chest. It is shut, it is locked; but if you are the man I take you to be, you have the key, put it gently in, steadily, and home. But what is the key? It is the love of truth; neither more nor less; no other key opens it; no false one, however cunning, can pick that lock; no assault of hammer, however stout, can force it open. But with its own key a little child may open it, often does open it, it goes so sweetly, so with a will. You lift the lid; you are all alone; the cloud is round you with a sort of tender light of its own, shutting out the outer world, filling you with an eerie joy, as if alone and yet not alone. You see the cup within, and in it the one crystalline, unimaginable, inestimable drop; glowing and tremulous, as if alive. You take up the cup, you sup the drop; it enters into, and becomes of the essence of yourself; and so, in humble gratitude and love, "in sober certainty of waking bliss," you gently replace the cup. It will gather again,--it is for ever gathering; no man, woman, or child ever opened that chest, and found no drop in the cup. It might not be the very drop expected; it will serve their purpose none the worse, often much the better.

And now, bending down, you shut the lid, which you hear locking itself afresh against all but the sacred key. You leave the now hallowed mist. You look out on the old familiar world again, which somehow looks both new and old. You descend, making your observations over again, throwing the light of the present on the past; and past and present set against the boundless future. You hear coming up to you the homely sounds--the sheepdog's bark, "the cock's shrill clarion"--from the farm at the hill-foot; you hear the ring of the blacksmith's study, you see the smoke of his forge; your mother's grave has the long shadows of evening lying across it, the sunlight falling on the letters of her name, and on the number of her years; the lamb is asleep in the bield of the infant's grave. Speedily you are at your own door. You enter with wearied feet, and thankful heart; you shut the door, and you kneel down and pray to your Father in heaven, the Father of lights, your reconciled Father, the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and our God and Father in and through him. And as you lie down on your own delightful bed, before you fall asleep, you think over again your ascent of the Hill Difficulty,--its baffling heights, its reaches of dreary moorland, its shifting gravel, its precipices, its quagmires, its little wells of living waters near the top, and all its "dread magnificence;" its calm, restful summit, the hush of silence there, the all-aloneness of the place and hour; its peace, its sacredness, its divineness. You see again the mist, the ark, the cup, the gleaming drop, and recalling the sight of the world below, the earth and all its fulness, you say to yourself,--

"These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almighty, thine this universal frame,
Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then!
Unspeakable, who sitt'st above these heavens."

And finding the burden too heavy even for these glorious lines, you take refuge in the Psalms--

"Praise ye the Lord.
Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise him in the heights.
Praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts.
Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light.
Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps;
Fire and hail; snow and vapour; stormy wind fulfilling his word:
Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars;
Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl:
Kings of the earth, and all people; princes and all judges of the earth:
Both young men and maidens; old men and children:
Let them praise the name of the Lord:
For his name alone is excellent; his glory is above the earth and heaven.
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.
Bless the Lord, O my soul!"

I need hardly draw the moral of this, our somewhat fancical exercitation and exegesis. You can all make it out, such as it is. It is the toil, and the joy, and the victory in the search of truth; not the taking on trust, or learning by rote, not by heart, what other men count or call true; but the vital appropriation, the assimilation of truth to ourselves, and of ourselves to truth. All truth is of value, but one truth differs from another in weight and in brightness, in worth; and you need not me to tell you that spiritual and eternal truth, the truth as it is in Jesus, is the best. And don't think that your own hand has gotten you the victory, and that you had no unseen, and it may be unfelt and unacknowledged hand guiding you up the hill. Unless the Lord had been at and on your side, all your labour would have been in vain, and worse. No two things are more inscrutable or less uncertain than man's spontaneity and man's helplessness,--Freedom and Grace as the two poles. It is His doing that you are led to the right hill and the right road, for there are other Tintocks, with other kists, and other drops. Work out, therefore, your own knowledge with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do, and to know of His good pleasure. There is no explaining and there is no disbelieving this.

And now, before bidding you good-bye, did you ever think of the spiritual meaning of the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night, as connected with our knowledge and our ignorance, our light and darkness, our gladness and our sorrow? The everyday use of this divine alternation to the wandering children of Israel, is plain enough. Darkness is best seen against light, and light against darkness; and its use, in a deeper sense of keeping for ever before them the immediate presence of God in the midst of them, is not less plain; but I sometimes think, that we who also are still in the wilderness, and coming up from our Egypt and its fleshpots, and on our way let us hope, through God's grace, to the celestial Canaan, may draw from these old-world signs and wonders, that, in the mid-day of knowledge, with daylight all about us, there is, if one could but look for it, that perpetual pillar of cloud--that sacred darkness which haunts all human knowledge, often the most at its highest noon; that "look that threatens the profane;" that something, and above all, that sense of Some One,--that Holy One, who inhabits eternity and its praises, who makes darkness His secret place, His pavilion round about, darkness and thick clouds of the sky.

And again, that in the deepest, thickest night of doubt, of fear, of sorrow, of despair; that then, and all the most then--if we will but look in the right airt, and with the seeing eye and the understanding heart--there may be seen that Pillar of fire, of light and of heat, to guide and quicken and cheer; knowledge and love, that everlasting love which we know to be the Lord's. And how much better off are we than the chosen people; their pillars were on earth, divine in their essence, but subject doubtless to earthly perturbations and interferences; but our guiding light is in the heavens, towards which we take earnest heed that we are journeying.

"Once on the raging seas I rode,
The storm was loud, the night was dark;
The ocean yawned, and rudely blowed
The wind that toss'd my foundering bark.

Deep horror then my vitals froze,
Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem,
When suddenly a star arose,
It was the Star of Bethlehem!

It was my guide, my light, my all,
It bade my dark foreboding cease;
And through the storm and danger's thrall
It led me to the port in peace.

Now safely moored, my perils o'er,
I'll sing first in night's diadem,
For ever and for evermore
The Star, the Star of Bethlehem!"

John Brown.

[The end]
John Brown's essay: Jeems The Doorkeeper

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