Jacob’s characters are often ‘marginal’ figures within communities, like Phemie Moir in ‘The Fiddler’, or Annie Cargill, ‘just a lassie’ to the men who dismiss her memory, her grave bearing ‘no date, no text, not the baldest record’. These women have sad fates, though others survive, like Jessie-Mary, the orphan in ‘The Debatable Land’, who escapes into the free ‘no-man’s land’, departing at the end with a passing tinker. Such figures, anticipatory of Jessie Kesson’s outsiders or ‘ootlins’, tend to be sympathetically represented, even if not all (Janet Robb in ‘Thievie’, for instance) are wholly likeable, and some, like the sheepstealer in ‘The Watch-Tower’, are lawbreakers. Their plight is human, and touching. ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’ is moving especially because the focus is on a couple whose lives – and love – are not the stuff of conventional romance. These small Angus communities themselves might seem odd or unimportant if viewed from a distant perspective, like that of the visiting Englishman in ‘The Fiddler’, but are rendered significant by a writer dwelling on their particularities.
There are reminders of a larger context, though any assumption of its superiority is undermined. In ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’, Hedderwick’s son Robert ‘who was apprenticed to a watch-maker in Dundee, came home at intervals to spend Sunday with his father and to impress the parish with that knowledge of men and matters which he believed to be the exclusive possession of dwellers in manufacturing towns’. But wealth, if not wisdom, does tend to exist elsewhere; like Lewis Grassic Gibbon writing a little later, Jacob notes the diaspora of poor rural folk to Canada and America. Fortunes earned by those who have lighted out for ‘the colonies’ are key to the plots of ‘Auntie Thompson’ and ‘Thievie’. And those who lead wandering lives are contrasted in Jacob’s fiction with narrower, staider folk, like Malvina Birse (in ‘The Figurehead’) or genteel Christina Mills, of whom we learn that the sea-captain and the gipsy woman ‘touched some sleeping thing in her mind which feared to be awakened’. Freedom and constraint are recurring concerns.
The boundaries of human life themselves are not absolute. Just as Jacob’s poetry hints at a liminal realm where the living and the dead meet, so does her short fiction allude to ‘those fringes of spiritual life that surround humanity’ (‘A Middle-Aged Drama’). As in many ballads and folk tales, figures from beyond the grave visit the human world: Annie Cargill appears to an elderly man who once abandoned her; a yellow dog (unlike the faithful cur in Flemington) may be a supernatural being presaging, perhaps bringing, death. This concern with the supernatural links Jacob’s short stories with those of Scott and Hogg, Margaret Oliphant, Stevenson and her contemporary, John Buchan. like several of these Scottish writers she uses Scots powerfully, and is able to create a sense of ambiguity and the presence of something like evil.
There is a toughness and vigour to Jacob’s shorter fiction, which is at its best both symbolic and realist. In ‘Thievie’ the stormy elements parallel a woman’s desperation and growing anger, while the story also offers a sharp analysis of her social and economic entrapment. In a telling scene in ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’ a woman sees from the church window ‘a shambling figure that moved among the graves’; it appears her past is returning to haunt her, ‘a long-buried tragedy … being revived’, but here death paradoxically brings new life. Although many of these stories deal with death, violence, sometimes madness, melodrama is counterbalanced by glimmers of hope and love, and by Jacob’s characteristically understated prose.
Satirical observation especially of socially aspiring and snobbish characters runs throughout Jacob’s work; the come-uppance of Isa MacAndrew and her family in ‘The Disgracefulness of Auntie Thompson’ is one enjoyable example. The reverse side of romance is exposed, too, attitudes to marriage revealed with dry irony; in ‘The Lum Hat’, we learn of Uncle Halket, who has remarried after his wife’s death, that ‘he had no ill-will at Isabella but he had liked her predecessor better’, while the sea-captain Baird ‘did not want a wife with a vivid personality who might be likely to get into mischief whilst he was at sea’. The portrait of Christina Mills is presented by a cool, detached narrator, but ‘The Lum Hat’ itself is not lacking in vigour. It is, like much of Jacob’s fiction, notable for a relative frankness about sex. Women can be lusty: ‘“Baird’s the lad I’d take”’ declares’a woman over eighty’, though Christina, well-read in the ‘decorous books of her day’, shrinks from the advances of the strongly physical sea-captain. There are many memorable and suggestive visual images: a church tower Christina imagines falling on her when she meets Baird, a woman selling brooms, the brawny ship’s figurehead of a ship called Sirius after the Greek-named ‘hot and scorching’ dog-star.
Christina receives from her other suitor, Aeneas, a picture of St Cecilia playing a musical instrument; it is unstated, yet significant, that St Cecilia is patron saint also of the blind:
She [Christina] strolled between town and sea. On her right hand the tall, beautiful steeple of the parish kirk held its flying buttresses against the sky and over the roofs crowded below it. The sun was near the horizon and the smoke from many chimneys, the varied skyline with its slopes and steepnesses and angles, caught the smouldering sundown and became welded into one vision of romance like the embodiment of the soul of a town. Christina saw nothing of these things.
This strongly visual passage is brilliantly undercut by that last sentence, summing up Christina’s fatal limitation. A sensitivity to the visual is often a mark of the imaginative or idealistic character in Jacob’s work; Tom Falconer in ‘The Figurehead’, for instance, like Archie in Flemington, sees ‘in pictures’. Poor Christina is found wanting. Yet we can feel compassion for her, for ironically – and chillingly – it is a visual image which finally turns her from making what might have been a happier second marriage: the sight of the tall man’s hat worn by her father, so richly emblematic of the forces of class, convention and gender, which gives this remarkable tale its title.
Jacob’s own fiction is strongly pictorial, as might be expected of a writer who was also a gifted painter (a few of her attractive paintings and sketches of Angus can be seen at the House of Dun and in Montrose Museum: cottages at Ferryden, a man resting in a cornfield, the steeples and roofs of Montrose against the sky). But description is spare and rarely present merely for its own sake; the colour and shadow at the opening of ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’, for example, foreshadow the story’s dramatic concerns. Jacob’s fiction has a range of effects; it is sometimes poignant, sometimes lyrical, often humorous. There is gusto in the creation of the marvellous Auntie Thompson, and a gentler touch in the handling of young Anderson and his kindly friend the horseman. Joy is granted to unlikely people, like the cantankerous old man who longs to see and hear the ‘Fifty-eight wild swans’. Yet Jacob’s portrayal of humanity is rarely mawkish, because of the narrative economy of her work, a tendency to avoid direct narrative comment or judgement, and her abrupt, sometimes ambiguous endings.
The short story has a long and robust history in Scotland, and one that looks increasingly interesting, as new writers emerge, and older ones are rediscovered. Now that Jacob’s short fiction is again in print, we can begin to appreciate her distinctive contribution to the form and to Scottish tradition.