Mr. George Cranston of Edinburgh, late of the year 1873, addresses the assembled Cranston family of today.
A note before the lights go down. What follows is an entertainment, and an act of affection — not a record. Every fact, every opinion, every turn of phrase in this address is drawn from a single real document: the twenty-page letter Mr. George Cranston of 43 Prince’s Street, Edinburgh, wrote to Miss Josephine P. Cranston of Ohio in May of 1873, and which she kept until her death.
We have simply imagined the man stepping out of that letter and into a room full of the descendants he was writing toward without ever knowing their faces.
He speaks only of what he knew in his own day.
He does not know us.
That is rather the point.
The Host’s Introduction
Cousins. Kinsmen and kinswomen.
Cranstons all — by blood, by marriage, by the long patience of sitting through a family dinner and answering to the name.
We are gathered tonight for something none of us will see twice.
A great while ago — a hundred and fifty years and more — a gentleman in Edinburgh sat down at a writing desk on Prince’s Street and tried, with everything he had, to find out whether his family and ours were one family. He wrote and wrote. He pressed his cousin into service. He chased down rectors and bone-setters and gas-fitters. He copied out, by hand, the whole noble line of the Lords Cranston, going back to a man who witnessed a charter when the year still began with two ones and a seven. And then he folded it all into an envelope and sent it across the ocean to a woman he had never met, and never would.
That woman was Josephine Park Cranston.
She kept his letter.
She kept everything.
And because she kept it, he is here.
So set down your glass. Hold the applause until he’s found his feet — he’s come a long way, and not the usual way.
It is my very great honour to present to you a gentleman of Edinburgh, a lover of newspapers and boat races and the poetry of his people, our correspondent, our kinsman, and, tonight, our storyteller — Mr. George Cranston.
He comes forward. He is dressed for 1873 and seems unbothered by it.
He looks at the small black instrument before him, leans toward it, and startles at the sound of his own voice filling the room.
I. In Which He Discovers the Wonderful Machine
Mercy. Did you all hear that?
I scarcely raised my voice above the pitch of ordinary conversation, and the whole room had it at once — the far wall as plainly as the front bench.
I have addressed a parlour or two in my time, and always with the labour of a man rolling a barrel uphill, the back rows cupping their ears and the front rows wincing.
And here is this little black contrivance that gathers up a man’s words and hands them round the hall like a plate of cake.
I shall try not to fall in love with it. But I make no promises.
And — forgive me — one thing more, and then I’ll have done marvelling and get to my business.
There is not a candle in this room. Not one.
And yet I can see every face turned up at me, clear to the corners. I have read of such things. I had not stood inside one. I will say no more about it; a guest who gapes at his host’s house is no guest at all. But you will allow a man from my century one good long look.
There. I am composed. More or less.
II. In Which He Makes Himself Known
My name is George Cranston.
I keep house, when I am at home, at number forty-three Prince’s Street, in the city of Edinburgh — which is, to my settled and entirely impartial conviction, the handsomest city in the kingdom, and I will hear argument from no man on the point, least of all a Glasgow man.
Speaking of which: I went west to Glasgow once these eighteen months past — my only visit in all that while, and I bore it manfully — and while I was there I did a thing I had long promised. I sat for a photograph, the whole cabinet of us together: my father, my sister, my brother, and myself. Kate is the youngest of the three of us children. Stuart is fifteen months her elder. And I am fifteen months elder still — which, by my reckoning, makes me exactly old enough to be obeyed and not one month older.
I sent a photograph across the water to my correspondent in America, by way of returning a compliment. For she had sent me hers — her likeness, and others besides, little cards of the family — and I distributed them among our relatives here, and they were welcomely received by all. They thank her. They thanked her then and I daresay, wherever good manners are kept, they thank her yet.
III. The Errand That Brought Me
Now I must tell you what set me to all this labour, for I am not by nature a man who writes twenty pages when two will serve. The post office charges by the weight, and I am a careful man.
There came to me, from across the Atlantic, a letter from a lady of our name — Miss Josephine Cranston, of Ohio, by way of Ohio. And her letter carried a question in it, under all the courtesies, the way a current runs under the smooth top of a river. The question was this: Are we one family? Your Cranstons and mine — the Scottish stock and the American — do they spring from the one root, or only happen to share the one name?
It is a fair question. It is, I have come to think, the fairest question a person can ask, and the hardest to answer honestly.
And I resolved to answer it honestly, whatever it cost my pride — and I will tell you straight away, it cost my pride a good deal.
So I set to work. And the first thing a man does, when he sets to work on his own name, is go looking for everybody else who wears it.
IV. The Living Namesakes; or, The Roll of the Curious
And there are more of us about than you would credit.
There is, in the public prints, a Mr. James Cranstoun — with the old Scots spelling, the “o-u,” which some of the family keep and some have worn away — a Master of Arts, the rector of Dumfries Academy, and a scholar of such parts that his own college lately laid upon him the honorary doctorate, the L.L.D., in consideration of his translations of Catullus and Tibullus. Roman poets, those, and not for the nursery. A learned man, our namesake. I wrote to him last Christmas. I shall come back to what he wrote me, by and by. Or rather — I shall come back to what he did not.
Then there is Miss M. Cranstoun, and her brother, Mr. Loudon Cranstoun, who is by his trade a bone-setter — which is to say, when a man of Edinburgh comes down wrong off a ladder, it is a Cranston who puts him to rights.
I find a certain satisfaction in that. Wherever the family has got to, it is still in the business of holding things together.
There is a Mr. D. G. Cranston, of Gateshead, a gas-fitter by trade. And — I came on this only lately, in the patent columns of a paper called The Engineer — a Mr. John Grey Cranston, of the same town, who has to do with some machine for the drilling of rock and stone. I rather think he and the gas-fitter are the one man, risen in the world. A Cranston with a machine for boring through solid rock.
I confess the family has always had a gift for getting through hard places, but I had not known we had patented it.
And there is a friend of mine away in the far west of your own continent — a place called Luverne, in Minnesota — a Mr. MacKay, who knew I was corresponding with a Cranston in America and asked might he have her address, for he hoped to be in Ohio in the summer. So you see the web of us runs further than any one man can hold in his hand. That, as it happens, is the moral of my whole evening, though I’ll not spoil it by saying so this early.
V. The Old Book, and the Bussie Week
A friend of mine in town had got hold of an old volume, and I begged the loan of it, thinking it would settle everything. It is called — and I have the title by heart, for I stared at it long enough — The Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles, printed at Edinburgh in the year sixteen hundred and sixty-two, by a writer who hides himself behind the two letters “I.M.”
I had been led to expect a great deal of it. It gave me one passage. In the whole book, in all its chronicle of kings and battles and the long quarrel of the Borders, the name Cranston is mentioned but once. Here is the once.
It tells how, after the Queen — that is Elizabeth of England — was dead, the Borderers fell at once to their old trade of raiding, on both sides of the line, in a season the book calls “the bussie week.” A busy week indeed, if your trade is robbery.
And the King — that is James the Sixth of Scotland, the First of England, the man who joined the two crowns — sent down the Lord Hume to sweep the Borders clean of, and I quote, “disordered and insolent persons that had lived upon robbery.”
And then comes our man. The Earl of Dunbar, being made lieutenant of the middle shires, “made choise of my Lord Cranston to be Captain of the Guard.” And this Cranston did so much, the book says, “by his care and vigilance,” that a great number of outlaws were brought to the place of execution, where, after lawful trial, “they had a reward of their forepast follies.”
“A reward of their forepast follies.” I have always thought that a beautiful way to describe a hanging.
The old writers had a gift. And because my Lord Cranston had paved the way so well for the men who came after him, he was “dignified with the title of Baron, and one of the King’s Privy Council.”
So there is one Cranston, fixed in print, four hundred years gone: a keeper of the peace on a lawless frontier, rewarded with a barony. Hold that man in your mind. We shall meet his whole family presently — because at this point in my labours, I did a thing both wise and a little desperate.
I called in my cousin Robert.
VI. Cousin Robert, and the Long March of the Barons
Cousin Robert has a fair hand and an obliging disposition — a dangerous combination in a relative, for it means he can be set to copying. And I set him to copying. Out of a great folio volume called the Douglas Peerage, printed in 1764, he copied for me the entire descent of the Lords Cranston, from the first of the name down to the present day. The whole pedigree, in his own patient hand, with all the little notes in the margin telling which dusty charter each fact was dug from. I shall not read you every word of it — we should all of us be barons ourselves before I finished, and several of you would be asleep. But let me walk you down the line, and you will see what a family you have got behind you.
The first of us — the very first the records know — is one Elric de Cranston, who in the year eleven hundred and seventy stood witness to an agreement between a nobleman and the abbey of Newbottle. Eleven seventy. There was no Edinburgh Castle as you would know it. There was scarcely a Scotland as we know it. And there is a Cranston, signing his name to a piece of business, the way Cranstons have been signing their names to pieces of business ever since.
From Elric it comes down, son to son, like a stone passed hand to hand. Thomas, who gave lands to a monastery for the good of his soul. Andrew, the first of us styled “lord of that same place” — dominus de eodem, the lawyers wrote, which is Latin for “he owns the very ground he is named after,” the proudest thing a Border family could say. There is a Hugh who, in twelve hundred and ninety-six, swore fealty to Edward of England — we will pass over that quickly, as the family always has.
There is an Andrew who “made a great figure in the reign of King Robert the Bruce” and “never deserted his interest in his greatest distress” — and I will pause on that one, for of all the lines in all the pages my cousin copied, that is the one I should most like said of me. Not that he was rich. Not that he was titled. That he did not desert his friend in the friend’s worst hour. Put that on a man’s stone and you may leave the rest off.
On it marches. A Thomas sent as the King’s own ambassador to treat for peace with the Kings of Denmark and Norway and Sweden, all three. A Sir Thomas who held the lands of Denholm and Stobs — names that will mean nothing to you and were the whole world to him. A Sir William made coroner of the shire of Roxburgh when he was scarcely more than a boy, an office that stayed in the family so long it might as well have been the furniture.
And then — and here I must slow down, for here is a turn worth the telling — the line comes to a Sir John who had no son to follow him. A son, yes, and a grandson — but both died before the old man did, and left him standing at the end of his life looking down a road with no one on it. And what did he do? He gathered up the whole estate, the lands and the tower and the ancient name, and he settled the entire inheritance upon his daughter. Upon Sarah. “Sarah,” the old book says, “who carried on the line of this family.”
A daughter carried the line. In an age that counted only sons, the whole of us turned, at the hinge, upon a woman. I find I am not surprised. I have been corresponding with a woman in Ohio who has done more to keep this family’s memory than any ten men I could name, and I begin to think it is simply the Cranston way — that when the men have marched off and got themselves hanged or knighted or lost, it is some patient daughter who keeps the book and carries the name across the gap.
Sarah married a cousin of her own name, and through her the line ran on, up through the Sir William who was Captain of the Guard to King James — our man from the old chronicle, you will remember him — and who, for his services in quelling the riots and pacifying the Borders, was at last, in the year sixteen hundred and eleven, “raised to the dignity of the peerage by the title of Lord Cranston.”
And from him the Lords Cranston come down in their order, first, second, third, and on. There is a third Lord who kept faith with his King all through the Civil War, attended Charles the Second to the field at Worcester, had the misfortune to be taken prisoner, was carried to the Tower of London, had his estate seized, and was — this is my favourite of his distinctions — “particularly excepted out of Cromwell’s act of indemnity.” Do you know what that means? It means that when Cromwell drew up his great list of Scotsmen he was prepared to forgive, he went to the trouble of writing, beside the name of Cranston, a special note to the effect of: not him. We were not merely on the wrong side. We were singled out, by name, as not worth pardoning. I cannot tell you how proud the family is of this.
VII. Of Cranes, and a Stone, and What We Promise
Now. Every old family is known by its arms — the painted shield, the badge a man wore so his neighbours would know whose horse had just trampled their barley. And ours are worth a moment, for they tell you, in pictures, exactly the sort of people you come from.
The shield: three cranes, silver, on a red field. Tall birds, watchful birds. So far, so stately.
But it is the crest above the shield that I love. The crest is a single crane — and this crane is asleep. Its head is tucked under its wing. And it is standing on one leg, because with the other foot it is holding up a stone.
Now, you may well ask — as I asked — why a sleeping bird should be clutching a rock. And the answer is the oldest soldier’s trick in the world. The story goes that cranes, when they post a sentry over the sleeping flock, give the sentry a stone to hold in his lifted foot. For if the sentry drifts off to sleep at his post, the foot relaxes, the stone drops, the stone strikes the ground — and the noise wakes the bird before the fox is upon them. There is your Cranston crest: a creature asleep and on guard at the very same instant. Watchful even in its rest. I have known the feeling. I expect, by the look of some of you after dinner, that you have too.
And on the one side of the shield, holding it up, there is a lady richly dressed, offering out a bunch of strawberries to a stag. What the strawberries are in aid of, the heralds do not say, and I have given up asking; the heralds never tell you the good part.
And then there is the motto. Every family has its motto, its three or four words of brag or prayer cut under the shield. Ours is four words, and I have turned them over in my mind a great many times, for they are a strange thing for a family to choose. The motto is this:
“Thou shalt want ere I want.”
“Want,” in the old speech, means to lack — to go without. So read it again: thou shalt go without before I go without. You shall be in need before ever I let myself be in need. Now, a hard man would read that as pure selfishness — me first, and the devil take you. But I have come to read it the other way about, and I think the other way is the true one. I think it is a vow a hard people made on a hard frontier: that whatever was coming — the famine, the raid, the long winter — the head of the house would see to it that he was the last to go hungry, and everyone under his roof was fed before him. Thou shalt want ere I want. You will not lack while I have anything left to give. Hold that thought, too. I am gathering up my threads now, and that is one of them.
VIII. An Honest Confession
And here I must be honest with you, because the whole worth of an evening like this rests on a man being honest, and I would rather disappoint you than deceive you.
For all my labour — the old book, the cousin, the great pedigree, the bone-setter and the gas-fitter and the rector — I could not close the circle. I could not prove the thing my correspondent most wished proved. I wrote to the learned rector of Dumfries, the doctor of Catullus and Tibullus, and he never answered me at all. Possibly, I told myself, he had not the spare time at his command. A man tells himself such things. I asked Miss Cranstoun, the bone-setter’s sister, and she could give me no more than I already had. I addressed two parties on my correspondent’s behalf, and I got an acceptable response from neither.
I will say to you what I said to her, plainly, in my own letter, for it is the truest line I ever wrote and I am not ashamed of it: “I fear I have made but a clumsy appeal on your behalf.”
A clumsy appeal. I had the noble line back to eleven hundred and seventy. I had the barons and the Lords and the man excepted out of Cromwell’s pardon. And I could not, for the life of me, build the one little bridge that mattered — the plank that would join that ancient Scottish line to the living woman in Ohio who was asking. I knew of no Cranston, in all my searching, who had crossed the ocean to your country. I had to write and tell her so. I had to tell her that for all the grandeur I could pile up behind us, I could not promise her she stood inside it. I told her she would likely do better writing direct to the various living Cranstons herself, than waiting on a clumsy go-between in Edinburgh.
It is no small thing, to spend yourself on an errand and come up short. I have carried that small failure a long while.
Here he pauses. He looks out over the room — the crowded, brightly lit, candle-less room, full of faces — as though he is about to say something, and cannot quite find why the sight of so many of us should move him. He does not know. He goes on.
IX. The Name in the Pillar
Let me leave you with one picture, before I go where it is I came from.
There is, in the heart of my city, the great Cathedral of St. Giles. And on one of its pillars — cut into the very stone, by some hand a long time dead — there is our name. Cranston. Cut into a pillar of the cathedral, holding up the roof these hundreds of years. I sent my correspondent a cutting from a newspaper that mentioned it, confirming what my own uncle had always told us: that the name is there, in the stone, where the whole city walks past it and never knows.
I have stood under that pillar. I have put my hand on the letters. And I will tell you what I thought, standing there: that a name cut in stone is a strange comfort. The stone does not know it carries the name. The thousands who pass do not look up. And yet the name is there, holding up its small share of the roof, whether anyone reads it or not — patient, like the sleeping crane, like the daughter who keeps the book, like the woman in Ohio folding my poor clumsy letter away into a drawer where, for all I knew, no one would ever read it again.
X. Farewell
And that, I find, is the thing I most want to say to you, though I have taken the long way round to it, as I take the long way round to everything; ask my cousin Robert.
I did not succeed in my errand. I never built the bridge. I sent my pages across the water like a man throwing a rope into the dark, with no notion whether there was a hand on the far side to catch it. I told the lady plainly that I had failed her, and I believed it, and I folded up the letter, and I signed it — with best respects, yours truly — and I let it go.
But here is a thing I have learned tonight, in this bright strange room, though I cannot for my life say how I have learned it.
The rope was caught. Somewhere, on some far shore I never lived to see, a hand closed on the end of it. The reaching was not wasted. It is never wasted. A man may fail to prove the thing he set out to prove, and find he has done a far better thing without meaning to — he has reached, and the reaching itself was the kinship. Not the pedigree. Not the barony. Not the name in the pillar. The reaching.
So I give you the old motto for the road — the four hard words of our hard people, that I have come at last to hear as a kindness and not a boast. Whoever you are, however near or far your branch runs from mine, whatever you can or cannot prove on paper: thou shalt want ere I want.
You shall not lack, while any Cranston anywhere has something left to give. We are watchful in our sleep. We carry the stone. We do not desert the friend in his worst hour. And we keep the book — oh, we keep the book — across whatever ocean, against whatever odds, until some bright candle-less night a long way off, a roomful of us we never met can sit and hear an old letter read aloud, and know they were the hand on the end of the rope.
It has been the honour of my life — and, it appears, of my afterlife — to address you.
With best respects. Yours truly.
Geo. Cranston.
He steps back from the little black instrument, gives it one last look of frank astonishment, bows once to the room — the whole crowded, shining, candle-less room of us — and is gone.