Our Sandy

by Robert Louis Stevenson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Kinbrae is a small grey burgh on the Fife shore, a mile or two east of Pittenweem. It has a harbour that dries at low water, a tolbooth with a weathercock on it, three curing-yards, and a kirk with a short square tower like a man with his hat pulled down against the wind. The east wind carries the smell of the herring inland as far as the Cupar road, and the west wind brings it back again. It had in those days a provost and two bailies, a minister and a dominie, some four hundred souls, and Sandy Imrie.

We were proud of Sandy, in our way. When a stranger came off the Anstruther coach we showed him the harbour, and the old stone in the kirkyard that nobody could read, and then, if it was a Saturday night, we took him up to the cross to see Sandy. He was a cooper. From the Monday to the Friday he made herring barrels in a shed at the head of the Shore Wynd, and he made them tighter than any man between Largo and Fife Ness, so that the curers put up with him. On the Saturday he was paid, and by eight o'clock he was at the cross: a big black-bearded man with his bonnet in his fist, telling the whole burgh, in a voice that could be heard on the pier, what he thought of it. He thought very ill of it. He had fought the excisemen, and the Crail fishers, and once, on a fair-day, the precentor. He swore in English and in a Scots so old that the dominie said some of it was not in Jamieson. He had not been inside the kirk since his mother's burial. On the Sabbath morning he slept under an upturned boat on the beach, and in the afternoon the bairns were walked past at a safe distance, to look at him.

He was of great use to us. When the bairns were wild their mothers told them Sandy Imrie would get them, and they were good. When a man came home late from the Ship his wife would say what she had to say, and then she would say, "Weel, ye're no' Sandy Imrie, at ony rate"; and the thing was over, and they went to their bed. When Mr. Rintoul preached upon the sin of drunkenness, which he did at every term, he would lift his eyes at the hardest passages to the end pew of the east gallery, where nobody sat, and we all knew whose place it was not. When a school window was broken, or a net cut, or Bailie Lumsden's hens let out on the Sabbath, the Bailie said, "That'll be Imrie"; and it was put down to Sandy, who could seldom remember whether it had been him or no, and paid for it to save argument. And when the Isabella Moncrieff went down off the May in the October gale of 'sixty-nine, with four Kinbrae men in her, there were women on the pier who could tell you that Sandy had been cursing at the harbour mouth the morning she sailed. It did not bring the men back; but it was a comfort to know.

That was how things stood the winter the American preachers were in Edinburgh. We did not go to hear them, Kinbrae being a sound place and doubtful of organs. But in the January one of their young men came along the coast holding meetings, a thin lad from Glasgow with a cold in his head and a little American organ that he carried about in a cart, and he took Mrs. Doig's net-loft over the Ship for three nights. On the second night Sandy went up the outside stair, fou, to break up the meeting, and half the town went up after him to see it done.

Those of us who were there have never agreed about what happened. The loft was full, and the lamps smoked, and the nets were hung back along the rafters to make room, so that the whole place smelt of tar and wet cork. Sandy stood in the door and roared. The lad stopped playing and looked at him over the top of the organ. Some say he said a text and some say he only said, "Come in out of the cold, man"; Mrs. Doig, who was nearest, says he said nothing whatever. But Sandy came in. He sat down on a herring box at the back, and put his two hands over his face, and sat there with his shoulders going up and down until the meeting was done and the lamps were out. Then he walked the lad back to his lodging and carried the organ for him.

We gave it a week. We gave it, after the week, a month. On the Saturday he was not at the cross. On the Monday he went into the Ship at nine in the morning, when there was nobody there, and paid his slate, which Mrs. Doig had kept in chalk on the back of the cellar door for eleven years, every penny of it, in sixpences and coppers out of a stocking. On the Sabbath he came to the kirk. He did not go up to the east gallery. He sat on the bench at the back under the stair, where the poor folk and the strangers sit, in a coat that had been his father's and was green at the seams; and when the precentor gave out the line he did not sing, for he could read only a little, but followed the words along in the psalm-book with his big cracked finger, with his lips moving, a line behind the rest of us.

It was a sour spring in Kinbrae. Nobody could have said why.

In the March somebody put a stone through the school window, and the Bailie said, "That'll be Imrie," as he had said it these twenty years. But Mr. Fairgrieve the dominie, who was a just man and had nothing else to do in the evenings, pointed out that Imrie had been at the prayer-meeting in the net-loft, before thirty witnesses, from seven until ten. So the dominie made inquiry, and in two days he had it out of the bairns that the stone had been thrown by Wattie Lumsden, the Bailie's own son. The Bailie paid for the glass and thrashed the boy, and he did not speak to Sandy again that year; and we could not altogether blame him, for it was a hard thing for a man in his position.

Peter Gowans came home from the Ship one night in April with his wages short and his hat gone. His wife said what she had to say, and when she came to the end of it there was nothing to say after it; so she went on. She went on, they tell us, until two in the morning, and said a great many things that she had been keeping by her for twenty years, in a voice the neighbours could hear through the gable. Peter slept three nights in his boat. The Gowanses were civil to each other at the kirk door after that, and no more.

The bairns were never so ill-behaved as they were that spring. You could not frighten them with Sandy any longer. They followed him down the Shore Wynd in a crowd at his dinner hour, to see what he would do; and he did nothing but eat his piece and read his Testament on an upturned barrel with his finger. They threw dulse at him, and he picked it off his coat.

Mrs. Doig's takings fell, though not by so very much, and she said in the shop to anyone who would listen that it was ower guid to last, and that she had known a man take the pledge in Leith and hang himself within the year. Mr. Rintoul preached upon drunkenness at Candlemas, as he had always done, and at the hard passage he lifted his eyes to the end of the east gallery; and then, as if he could not help it, he looked down at the bench under the stair, where Sandy sat with his finger on the line; and he lost his place, and had to turn back a whole page in his paper. The Sabbath following, he took for his text the Pharisee and the Publican, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are. It was a powerful sermon. It was felt very generally in the burgh, though nobody said so to Sandy, that it had been aimed at him, and not before time; for there is no pride like a convert's.

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The spring sacrament fell that year upon the third Sabbath of April. On the Thursday, which was the fast-day, Sandy came to the session-house after the afternoon sermon, to ask for a token.

The session sat round the table under the window: Mr. Rintoul in the chair, and Bailie Lumsden, and Mr. Fairgrieve, who kept the minutes, and old Thomas Birrell the curer, who was deaf. The little box of tokens stood open at the minister's elbow. They were lead, the size of a shilling, stamped with the name of the parish and the date when the kirk was built, and they had been handed across that table every spring and autumn for a hundred and forty years. Sandy stood inside the door with his bonnet going round and round in his hands.

"It is early days, Alexander," said the Bailie.

"Aye," said Sandy.

"Three months," said the Bailie, "against twenty years."

"We would not have you eat and drink unworthily," said Mr. Rintoul, more gently. "It is for your own sake, man. Let the summer prove you. There is the autumn sacrament."

Sandy looked at the box of tokens, and then at the four of them, one after the other, as if he were trying to make out the words on a stone. "Aye," he said again. "I see that." And he put on his bonnet and went out.

Mr. Fairgrieve minuted that the session, having heard the application of Alexander Imrie, cooper, judged it prudent to delay. When the thing got about, as everything in Kinbrae gets about, the prudence of the session was generally approved.

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There was a hard frost on the Saturday night. Sandy had a room over his shed, and he came down at six on the Sabbath morning to fetch water. He had not locked the shed door since the January; he said there was nothing in it now that anybody would want. On his bench, among the staves and the hoops, he found four bottles.

The one was a black quart bottle with the cork sealed down in green wax, the way Mrs. Doig seals the bottles that go out of the Ship. The second was a square-shouldered bottle of Hollands of the sort that comes in by the Leith boat a dozen to the case; and there are not many houses in Kinbrae that buy a dozen of anything. The third was a grey stone jar with a wicker handle, such as the men take to sea in the winter fishing, with a P scratched on the shoulder of it. The last was a little flat flask of French brandy, three parts full, with a druggist's label from St. Andrews pasted on it; the kind of thing that is kept on a high shelf in a press for sickness, in a house where nothing else is kept at all.

Where they came from nobody in Kinbrae has ever known.

Sandy did not open them. He carried them out one at a time and set them up in a row on the top of the dyke before his shed, where the Shore Wynd turns into the Kirk Wynd and every soul in the burgh must pass on the way to the sacrament. Then he went in and washed, and put on his father's coat.

The frost had made the coping of the dyke white, and the four bottles stood up on it very black and plain, like four people waiting to be spoken to. The bell began at ten. We came up out of the Shore Wynd and the Back Wynd and the Harbourhead in our blacks, with our Bibles under our arms and the tokens in our gloves, the bairns in front and the elders behind. Bailie Lumsden came with his wife on his arm, and Mrs. Doig, and the Gowanses a yard apart, and the manse folk last of all; and we went by the dyke, every one of us, and up the wynd to the kirk. The provost's lady remarked afterwards that she had not noticed anything on the wall. Nor had any of us.

Sandy sat on the bench under the stair. When the tables were fenced and the elders went down the kirk with the bread and the cup, they passed him at the end of the bench, close enough to touch. He sat with his hands on his knees and watched them go by, and he did not move, and he did not look away.

On the Monday morning there was the thanksgiving sermon at eleven, and those of us who went down early to the harbour, before it, found Sandy standing at the door of his shed with his sleeves rolled up and an adze in his hand. The frost had come down again in the night, harder than before. The bottles were gone. The coping of the dyke was white from end to end, all but four round dark places in the rime where they had stood; and Sandy said good morning, and we said good morning; and by the time the sun had come round the end of the wynd and got on to the wall, there was no telling those places from the rest.

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Rōbertō Lūdovīcō Stevensōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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