The Cowgate Lodging

by Robert Louis Stevenson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

There is a kind of Edinburgh man who is buried twice: once by his minister and once by his man of business; and of the two interments the second is much the more thorough. Mr. James Pitcairn, Writer to the Signet, had performed it upon some forty clients in the course of a long and blameless practice, and he went about it in the case of the late Mr. Adam Torrance with the same dry contentment with which another man sits down after supper to a game of patience.

Mr. Torrance had been cashier of the Lothian Bank for twenty-two years and an elder of the Free Kirk for nineteen. He was found on the second Sunday of October at the foot of his own stair in Heriot Row, in his nightshirt, with his temple broken on the newel-post; and Dr. Lauder, who had dined with him on the Thursday, wrote that he had risen in the night, missed his footing in the dark, and fallen. Nobody thought otherwise. Mr. Torrance was a man who had been missing his footing, in a small and decorous way, for some years: he was stout, he was short in the sight, and he would not carry a candle on his own stair, from a principle of economy which his friends admired and his housemaid deplored.

The study looked out upon the gardens, which in November are a pit of black branches and wet gravel. Mr. Pitcairn had the gas lit by three in the afternoon. He had the bank-books out of the bureau, the feu-charters out of the tin box, the letters out of their pigeon-holes, and he went through them with his lips pursed as though he were whistling a tune too slow for anybody to hear. Here was a life that had been lived in ink, and in very good ink. The sermons of Dr. Chalmers stood on the shelves with their spines uncracked. The household book was kept to the farthing. Coals, candles, the seat-rent at the kirk, a guinea to the Destitute Sick Society at each New Year; Miss Euphemia's allowance, paid in advance on the first of every month; a new hat, once, in 1871, and a note in the margin against it: Unnecessary.

It was in this book, which no other eye was ever meant to see, that Mr. Pitcairn found the first of the entries. It stood under Candlemas: To M. K., for the room. 15s. He turned the pages back. It stood under Whitsunday, and Lammas, and Martinmas, and Candlemas again, every quarter, in the same neat hand, for eleven years. Fifteen shillings is not a great sum. It would not keep a mistress; it would scarcely keep a dog. But there was no room in the house of Heriot Row that Mr. Torrance paid for by the quarter, and Mr. Pitcairn, who had a professional dislike of anything he could not put a name to, sat back in his chair and looked at the four words for a long time.

He found the key ten minutes later, when he lifted the leather blotter to square it with the edge of the desk. It lay flat underneath, as a pressed flower lies in a Bible: a big black iron key, five inches in the shank, of the sort that is made by the dozen for common doors, and the bow of it worn bright and smooth by a thumb.

Now Mr. Pitcairn was a methodical man, and he did a thing which a man less methodical would have thought foolish. He rang for the housemaid and her candle, and he went through that house from the cellar to the attic and tried the key in every lock it had. He tried it in the front door and in the area gate, in the press under the stair, in the wine-cellar, in the bureau, in the linen-chest, in the door of Miss Euphemia's sitting-room, while Miss Euphemia herself sat by the fire and watched him with her hands folded in her lap. It fitted nothing. It was a key to some door that was not in Heriot Row.

"Your brother had a room elsewhere," he said, when the girl had gone. "He paid fifteen shillings a quarter for it. Had you any knowledge of that, Miss Torrance?"

Miss Euphemia was a lean woman of sixty with a face like a closed purse. "Adam had no secrets," she said. "He hadna the gift for them."

"No doubt. Yet the payment is in his own hand."

"Then it was some charity. He had a great many charities, Mr. Pitcairn. He did not speak of them; he was not a Pharisee." She smoothed her skirt. "I would be obliged if the papers were settled before the term. I have no wish to be reading about my brother's affairs in the Scotsman."

"Did he go out of an evening?" said the lawyer.

"On a Saturday he walked. For his liver. He was home by midnight, or a little after. I would hear the door." She raised her eyes to him, and for a moment there was something in them which he could not read, a kind of flinching. "I am a light sleeper," she said, "and the door was heavy."

Mr. Pitcairn bowed and said nothing. But he went down the steps into Heriot Row that night with the key in his waistcoat pocket, where he could feel it against his ribs; and when he came to his own door in Queen Street he found he had walked past it, and had to turn back.

---

It was among the receipts, the next morning, that he found the rest of the name. Mr. Torrance had kept every receipt he was ever given, tied in bundles by the year with red tape; and in the bundle for 1874 there was one that was not on a printed form, but on the back of a pawn-ticket, in a large and wandering hand: Recd. of Mr. Adam the sum of fifteen shillings for the room. Marion Kerr, Hasty's Close, Cowgate.

Mr. Adam. Mr. Pitcairn read the two words over several times, and found that his heart was beating as a boy's heart beats on the way to an orchard. It was the most unprofessional sensation he had felt in thirty years, and he did not like it. He put on his hat.

There are two cities in Edinburgh, and the stranger supposes they lie side by side, the New Town to the north and the Old to the south, with the valley of the gardens between them. He is wrong. They lie one on top of the other. The South Bridge and George IV Bridge carry the decent traffic of the town from the High Street to the College and the Meadows, in the open air, with shops on either hand; and if a man stops in the middle of either and looks over the parapet, he will see beneath him another street altogether, sunk in a trench of tall black houses, with washing hung across it on poles and smoke lying in it like water in a ditch. That is the Cowgate. Ten thousand respectable feet pass over it every day and never touch it. It is the cellar of the town; and like most cellars it is where the town keeps what it does not wish to look at, and cannot do without.

Mr. Pitcairn went down to it by a stair at the side of the bridge, a long wet stair that turns upon itself three times in the dark, like a man going down a well. He came out at the bottom among barrows and Irish voices and the smell of a brewery. A child with no shoes ran into his legs and away again before he could feel for his watch. The great arch of the bridge stood up over his head, and through it he could see a strip of grey sky and a cab going across it, very small, like a thing in another country.

Hasty's Close was a slit between two houses, six feet wide, paved with cobbles that sloped to a gutter in the middle; and Mrs. Kerr kept a shop at the foot of it that sold bread, tea, tallow candles and, from a back room, other things. She was a large, slow woman with an Irish tongue, and she took him at first for a sheriff-officer and would tell him nothing. When he had explained himself, and said that Mr. Adam was dead, she sat down on a sack of meal as though her knees had been cut.

"Dead," she said. "And him the strongest man in the close. Was it the drink?"

"It was a fall."

"It would be," said Mrs. Kerr, and looked at him oddly. "God rest him. You'll be wanting to see the room."

He followed her up a turnpike stair whose steps were worn into hollows like old spoons. On the third landing she stopped before a door, and he took the key out of his pocket and put it into the lock, and it turned as sweet as if it had been oiled the day before.

It was a small room with a window on the close and a box-bed in the wall. There was a deal table and one chair. On a nail behind the door hung a coat of coarse blue pilot-cloth, such as the carters wear, and under it a pair of heavy boots with the laces knotted together. On the table were a pewter tankard, a clay pipe, a pack of cards gone soft and grey with handling, and a tin box with a few shillings and a great many coppers in it. On the window-sill, by itself, lay a little hand-glass, of the kind a man shaves by, laid face down upon the wood.

Mr. Pitcairn touched nothing. He stood in the middle of the floor with his hat in his hand, as he would have stood in a kirk. The room smelt of tobacco and whisky and of the sweat of a big body; and it came over him slowly, as a cold comes over a man in a wet field, that he was standing inside Adam Torrance as no one in Heriot Row had ever stood, and that the smell was the smell of him.

"He would come of a Saturday," said Mrs. Kerr from the door. "Six o'clock, or seven. He came in a gentleman, with his good hat and his umbrella, and went up the stair; and he came down Mr. Adam. And at twelve he would go up again and come down the gentleman, and go off over the bridge. Eleven years. I never asked him his name, and he never asked me my business."

"And what did he do," said the lawyer, "as Mr. Adam?"

Mrs. Kerr considered him. "He played at the cards in Dolan's back shop, and he played well, and he cheated when he was losing and laughed when he was caught. He drank what was put before him and paid for more. He sang. Lord, the man could sing. He carried Peggy Rae's bairn to the Infirmary on his back the night of the croup, and sat with it till morning, and was off before the doctor came round, so nobody could thank him." She paused. "And he would fight."

"Fight?"

"For the pleasure of it, sir. As another man would take a dram. You'll ask Rab Gilchrist at the smiddy. He has the mark."

---

Rab Gilchrist was a farrier, a red man with forearms like hams and one ear split and not yet well healed, so that it stood out from his head in two pieces. He would not stop his work; he talked with a horse's hoof between his knees and the nails in his mouth, and took them out one at a time to make his points.

"Mr. Adam and me had a difference," he said. "About a card. I'll no' say who was in the right of it. He gave me this"—he touched the ear—"and I gave him as good. On the side of the head, wi' my fist, and him down on the stones." He drove a nail. "And he got up, sir. He got up wi' the blood in his eye, and he laughed. He laughed fit to burst, and shook my hand, and went away up the close laughing. I never saw a man so happy in my life."

"When was this?" said Mr. Pitcairn.

The farrier thought. "Saturday was a month. The Saturday I sold the grey mare to the brewery; I can show you the paper."

He could, and did: a bill of sale for one grey mare, eleven pounds, with the date on it in a brewery clerk's copperplate. Mr. Pitcairn took out his pocket-book. On a page near the front, in his own small hand, he had written the date on which Dr. Lauder's certificate was signed, and the date of the Sunday morning before it; and he now wrote the date of the bill of sale beneath them. Then he looked at the three lines for some time, and put the pocket-book away, and gave the farrier half a crown, which the farrier looked at with suspicion.

"There's no man in the close would have sworn against him," said Gilchrist, as the lawyer turned to go. "You'll mind that, if there's any trouble."

"There will be no trouble," said Mr. Pitcairn.

---

He went up the long stair again and came out upon the bridge, into the noise of the cabs and the lamps just lighting, and the first thing he saw was a tall gentleman in a silk hat whom he knew, a Lord of Session, walking with his daughter towards the College. Mr. Pitcairn raised his hat, and the judge raised his; and the lawyer, when they had passed, turned and watched the silk hat out of sight, which he had never in his life done before.

He called that evening in Heriot Row. Miss Euphemia received him in the drawing-room, by one candle.

"I have found the room," he said. "It was as you supposed. A small charity: a lodging which your brother kept for a poor person in the Old Town. The person has no further need of it. I have settled the account."

Miss Euphemia looked at him a long while. "That is all?"

"That is all."

"Then I am obliged to you," she said; and he saw her hands, which were folded in her lap, let go of one another. "He was a good man, Mr. Pitcairn."

"He was a man of very regular habits," said the lawyer; and he took the receipt on the back of the pawn-ticket out of his pocket, before her face, and put it in the fire, where it went up in a small brown flame and was gone. The key he did not take out. He had meant to; he had walked down from the bridge with the plain intention of laying it on her table and saying a word about locksmiths. But his hand had gone into his pocket and closed on it, and stayed closed; and when he rose to go, it was still there.

He walked home by the Water of Leith, which was a long way round, and he stood some time on the Dean Bridge with his hand in his pocket, looking down into the black water a hundred feet below, which a man might throw anything into and never see it again. He did not throw anything. When he came at last to his own house in Queen Street, he let himself in quietly, and went up the stair without a candle.

---

The Martinmas term fell upon a Monday that year, with rain. Mrs. Kerr, coming out of her back shop, found the lawyer from the New Town standing at her counter with his umbrella dripping on her floor.

"You'll be wanting the room cleared," she said. "I've a family of Donegal folk asking for it."

"I am wanting it kept," said Mr. Pitcairn. He counted fifteen shillings on to the counter, in silver, one coin at a time, and his hand was perfectly steady. "The quarter in advance, if you please. And the things are to stay as they are."

Mrs. Kerr looked at the money, and then at him, for a long moment; and something in her heavy face altered, but she did not say what. She swept the coins into her palm.

"And whose name will I put on the receipt?"

"Mr. James," said the lawyer.

On the Saturday following he dined early, and told his housekeeper that he would walk. He went over the South Bridge at a little before seven, a stooping gentleman in a good hat, and down the stair at the side of it, and up the turnpike in Hasty's Close to the third landing. He let himself in with the key. He hung his hat on the nail behind the door, beside the blue pilot-coat, and stood his umbrella in the corner, and took off his own coat and folded it over the back of the chair, as neatly as he did everything.

Then he went to the window, where the noise of the close came up through the glass, and lifted the little hand-glass from the sill, and turned it over.

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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