The House With the Green Shutters

by George Douglas Brown

  "Ach, well, I'll try my luck," he muttered at last, "though Tam may guy me before the whole class for doing so little o't."

  The Professor, however (unlike the majority of Scottish professors), rated quality higher than quantity.

  "I have learned a great deal myself," he announced on the last day of the session—"I have learned a great deal myself from the papers sent in on the subject of an 'Arctic Night.'"

  "Hear, hear!" said an insolent student at the back.

  "Where, where?" said the Professor; "stand up, sir!"

  A gigantic Borderer rose blushing into view, and was greeted with howls of derision by his fellows. Tam eyed him, and he winced.

  "You will apologize in my private room at the end of the hour," said Aquinas, as the students used to call him. "Learn that this is not a place to bray in."

  The giant slunk down, trying to hide himself.

  "Yes," said Tam, "I have learned what a poor sense of proportion some of you students seem to have. It was not to see who could write the most, but who could write the best, that I set the theme. One gentleman—he has been careful to give me his full name and address," twinkled Tam, and picking up a huge manuscript he read it from the outer page, "Mr. Alexander MacTavish of Benmacstronachan, near Auchnapeterhoolish, in the island of South Uist—has sent me in no less than a hundred and fifty-three closely-written pages! I dare say it's the size of the adjectives he uses that makes the thing so heavy," quoth Tam, and dropped it thudding on his desk. "Life is short, the art of the MacTavish long, and to tell the truth, gentlemen"—he gloomed at them humorously—"to tell the truth, I stuck in the middle o't!" (Roars of laughter, and a reproving voice, "Oh, ta pold MacTa-avish!" whereat there was pandemonium). MacTavish was heard to groan, "Oh, why tid I leave my home!" to which a voice responded in mocking antiphone, "Why tid you cross ta teep?" The noise they made was heard at Holyrood.

  When the tumult and the shouting died, Tam resumed with a quiver in his voice, for "ta pold MacTavish" had tickled him too. "Now, gentlemen," he said, "I don't judge essays by their weight, though I'm told they sometimes pursue that method in Glasgow!"

  (Groans for the rival University, cries of "Oh-oh-oh!" and a weary voice, "Please, sir, don't mention that place; it makes me feel quite ill.")

  The Professor allayed the tumult with dissuasive palm.

  "I believe," he said dryly, "you call that noise of yours 'the College Tramp;' in the Senatus we speak o't as 'the Cuddies' Trudge.' Now gentlemen, I'm not unwilling to allow a little noise on the last day of the session, but really you must behave more quietly.—So little does that method of judging essays commend itself to me, I may tell you, that the sketch which I consider the best barely runs to half a dozen short pages."

  Young Gourlay's heart gave a leap within him; he felt it thudding on his ribs. The skin crept on him, and he breathed with quivering nostrils. Gillespie wondered why his breast heaved.

  "It's a curious sketch," said the Professor. "It contains a serious blunder in grammar and several mistakes in spelling, but it shows, in some ways, a wonderful imagination."

  "Ho, ho!" thought Gourlay.

  "Of course there are various kinds of imagination," said Tam. "In its lowest form it merely recalls something which the eyes have already seen, and brings it vividly before the mind. A higher form pictures something which you never saw, but only conceived as a possible existence. Then there's the imagination which not only sees but hears—actually hears what a man would say on a given occasion, and entering into his blood, tells you exactly why he does it. The highest form is both creative and consecrative, if I may use the word, merging in diviner thought. It irradiates the world. Of that high power there is no evidence in the essay before me. To be sure there was little occasion for its use."

  Young Gourlay's thermometer went down.

  "Indeed," said Aquinas, "there's a curious want of bigness in the sketch—no large nobility of phrase. It is written in gaspy little sentences, and each sentence begins 'and'—'and'—'and,' like a schoolboy's narrative. It's as if a number of impressions had seized the writer's mind, which he jotted down hurriedly, lest they should escape him. But, just because it's so little wordy, it gets the effect of the thing—faith, sirs, it's right on to the end of it every time! The writing of some folk is nothing but a froth of words—lucky if it glistens without, like a blobber of iridescent foam. But in this sketch there's a perception at the back of every sentence. It displays, indeed, too nervous a sense of the external world."

  "Name, name!" cried the students, who were being deliberately worked by Tam to a high pitch of curiosity.

  "I would strongly impress on the writer," said the shepherd, heedless of his bleating sheep—"I would strongly impress on the writer to set himself down for a spell of real, hard, solid, and deliberate thought. That almost morbid perception, with philosophy to back it, might create an opulent and vivid mind. Without philosophy it would simply be a curse. With philosophy it would bring thought the material to work on. Without philosophy it would simply distract and irritate the mind."

  "Name, name!" cried the fellows.

  "The winner of the Raeburn," said Thomas Aquinas, "is Mr. John Gourlay."

  *

  Gourlay and his friends made for the nearest public-house. The occasion, they thought, justified a drink. The others chaffed Gourlay about Tam's advice.

  "You know, Jack," said Gillespie, mimicking the sage, "what you have got to do next summer is to set yourself down for a spell of real, hard, solid, and deliberate thought. That was Tam's advice, you know."

  "Him and his advice!" said Gourlay.

  Chapter XIX

  *

  There were only four other passengers dropped by the eleven o'clock express at Skeighan station, and, as it happened, young Gourlay knew them all. They were petty merchants of the neighbourhood whom he had often seen about Barbie. The sight of their remembered faces as he stepped on to the platform gave him a delightful sense that he was nearing home. He had passed from the careless world where he was nobody at all to the familiar circle where he was a somebody, a mentioned man, and the son of a mentioned man—young Mr. Gourlay!

  He had a feeling of superiority to the others, too, because they were mere local journeyers, while he had travelled all the way from mighty Edinburgh by the late express. He was returning from the outer world, while they were bits of bodies who had only been to Fechars. As Edinburgh was to Fechars so was he to them. Round him was the halo of distance and the mystery of night-travelling. He felt big.

  "Have you a match, Robert?" he asked very graciously of Robin Gregg, one of the porters whom he knew. Getting his match, he lit a cigarette; and when it was lit, after one quick puff, turned it swiftly round to examine its burning end. "Rotten!" he said, and threw it away to light another. The porters were watching him, and he knew it. When the stationmaster appeared yawning from his office, as he was passing through the gate, and asked who it was, it flattered his vanity to hear Robin's answer, that it was "young Mr. Gourlay of Barbie, just back from the Univ-ai-rsity!"

  He had been so hot for home that he had left Edinburgh at twilight, too eager to wait for the morrow. There was no train for Barbie at this hour of the night; and, of course, there was no gig to meet him. Even if he had sent word of his coming, "There's no need for travelling so late," old Gourlay would have growled; "let him shank it. We're in no hurry to have him home."

  He set off briskly, eager to see his mother and tell her he had won the Raeburn. The consciousness of his achievement danced in his blood, and made the road light to his feet. His thoughts were not with the country round him, but entirely in the moment of his entrance, when he should proclaim his triumph, with proud enjoyment of his mother's pride. His fancy swept to his journey's end, and took his body after, so that the long way was as nothing, annihilate by the leap forward of his mind.

  He was too vain, too full of himself and his petty triumph, to have room for the beauty of the night. The sky was one sea of
lit cloud, foamy ridge upon ridge over all the heavens, and each wave was brimming with its own whiteness, seeming unborrowed of the moon. Through one peep-hole, and only one, shone a distant star, a faint white speck far away, dimmed by the nearer splendours of the sky. Sometimes the thinning edge of a cloud brightened in spume, and round the brightness came a circle of umber, making a window of fantastic glory for Dian the queen; there her white vision peeped for a moment on the world, and the next she was hid behind a fleecy veil, witching the heavens. Gourlay was alone with the wonder of the night. The light from above him was softened in a myriad boughs, no longer mere light and cold, but a spirit indwelling as their soul, and they were boughs no longer but a woven dream. He walked beneath a shadowed glory. But he was dead to it all. One only fact possessed him. He had won the Raeburn—he had won the Raeburn! The road flew beneath him.

  Almost before he was aware, the mean gray streets of Barbie had clipped him round. He stopped, panting from the hurry of his walk, and looked at the quiet houses, all still among the gloom. He realized with a sudden pride that he alone was in conscious possession of the town. Barbie existed to no other mind. All the others were asleep; while he had a thrilling consciousness of them and of their future attitude to him, they did not know that he, the returning great one, was present in their midst. They all knew of the Raeburn, however, and ere long they would know that it was his. He was glad to hug his proud secret in presence of the sleeping town, of which he would be the talk to-morrow. How he would surprise them! He stood for a little, gloating in his own sensations. Then a desire to get home tugged him, and he scurried up the long brae.

  He stole round the corner of the House with the Green Shutters. Roger, the collie, came at him with a bow-wow-wow. "Roger!" he whispered, and cuddled him, and the old loyalist fawned on him and licked his hand. The very smell of the dog was couthie in his nose.

  The window of a bedroom went up with a crash.

  "Now, then, who the devil are you?" came the voice of old Gourlay.

  "It's me, faither," said John.

  "Oh, it's you, is it? This is a fine time o' night to come home."

  "Faither, I have—I have won the Raeburn!"

  "It'll keep, my mannie, it'll keep"—and the window slammed.

  Next moment it was up.

  "Did young Wilson get onything?" came the eager cry.

  "Nut him!" said John.

  "Fine, man! Damned, sir, I'm proud o' ye!"

  John went round the corner treading on air. For the first time in his life his father had praised him.

  He peeped through a kink at the side of the kitchen blind, where its descent was arrested by a flowerpot in the corner of the window-sill. As he had expected, though it was long past midnight, his mother was not yet in bed. She was folding a white cloth over her bosom, and about her, on the backs of chairs, there were other such cloths, drying by the fire. He watched her curiously; once he seemed to hear a whimpering moan. When she buttoned her dress above the cloth, she gazed sadly at the dying embers—the look of one who has gained short respite from a task of painful tendance on the body, yet is conscious that the task and the pain are endless, and will have to be endured, to-morrow and to-morrow, till she dies. It was the fixed gaze of utter weariness and apathy. A sudden alarm for his mother made John cry her name.

  She flew to the door, and in a moment had him in her arms. He told his news, and basked in her adoration.

  She came close to him, and "John," she said in a smiling whisper, big-eyed, "John," she breathed, "would ye like a dram?" It was as if she was propounding a roguish plan in some dear conspiracy.

  He laughed. "Well," he said, "seeing we have won the Raeburn, you and I, I think we might."

  He heard her fumbling in the distant pantry. He smiled to himself as he listened to the clinking glass, and, "By Jove," said he, "a mother's a fine thing!"

  "Where's Janet?" he asked when she returned. He wanted another worshipper.

  "Oh, she gangs to bed the moment it's dark," his mother complained, like one aggrieved. "She's always saying that she's ill. I thocht when she grew up that she might be a wee help, but she's no use at all. And I'm sure, if a' was kenned, I have more to complain o' than she has. Atweel ay," she said, and stared at the embers.

  It rarely occurs to young folk who have never left their homes that their parents may be dying soon; from infancy they have known them as established facts of nature like the streams and hills; they expect them to remain. But the young who have been away for six months are often struck by a tragic difference in their elders on returning home. To young Gourlay there was a curious difference in his mother. She was almost beautiful to-night. Her blue eyes were large and glittering, her ears waxen and delicate, and her brown hair swept low on her blue-veined temples. Above and below her lips there was a narrow margin of the purest white.

  "Mother," he said anxiously, "you're not ill, are ye? What do ye need so many wee clouts for?"

  She gasped and started. "They're just a wheen clouts I was sorting out," she faltered. "No, no, dear, there's noathing wrong wi' me."

  "There's one sticking in your blouse," said he, and pointed to her slack breast.

  She glanced nervously down and pushed it farther in.

  "I dare say I put it there when I wasna thinking," she explained.

  But she eyed him furtively to see if he were still looking.

  Chapter XX

  *

  There is nothing worse for a weakling than a small success. The strong man tosses it beneath his feet as a step to rise higher on. He squeezes it into its proper place as a layer in the life he is building. If his memory dwells on it for a moment, it is only because of its valuable results, not because in itself it is a theme for vanity. And if he be higher than strong he values not it, but the exercise of getting it; viewing his actual achievement, he is apt to reflect, "Is this pitiful thing, then, all that I toiled for?" Finer natures often experience a keen depression and sense of littleness in the pause that follows a success. But the fool is so swollen by thought of his victory that he is unfit for all healthy work till somebody jags him and lets the gas out. He never forgets the great thing he fancies he did thirty years ago, and expects the world never to forget it either. The more of a weakling he is, and the more incapable of repeating his former triumph, the more he thinks of it; and the more he thinks of it the more it satisfies his meagre soul, and prevents him essaying another brave venture in the world. His petty achievement ruins him. The memory of it never leaves him, but swells to a huge balloon that lifts him off his feet and carries him heavens-high—till it lands him on a dunghill. Even from that proud eminence he oft cock-a-doodles his former triumph to the world. "Man, you wouldn't think to see me here that I once held a great position. Thirty year back I did a big thing. It was like this, ye see." And then follows a recital of his faded glories—generally ending with a hint that a drink would be very acceptable.

  Even such a weakling was young Gourlay. His success in Edinburgh, petty as it was, turned his head, and became one of the many causes working to destroy him. All that summer at Barbie he swaggered and drank on the strength of it.

  On the morning after his return he clothed himself in fine raiment (he was always well dressed till the end came), and sallied forth to dominate the town. As he swaggered past the Cross, smoking a cigarette, he seemed to be conscious that the very walls of the houses watched him with unusual eyes, as if even they felt that yon was John Gourlay whom they had known as a boy, proud wearer now of the academic wreath, the conquering hero returned to his home. So Gourlay figured them. He, the disconsidered, had shed a lustre on the ancient walls. They were tributaries to his new importance—somehow their attitude was different from what it had ever been before. It was only his self-conscious bigness, of course, that made even inanimate things seem the feeders of his greatness. As Gourlay, always alive to obscure emotions which he could never express in words, mused for a moment over the strange new feeling that had come to him,
a gowsterous voice hailed him from the Black Bull door. He turned, and Peter Wylie, hearty and keen like his father, stood him a drink in honour of his victory, which was already buzzed about the town.

  Drucken Wabster's wife had seen to that. "Ou," she cried, "his mother's daft about it, the silly auld thing; she can speak o' noathing else. Though Gourlay gies her very little to come and go on, she slipped him a whole sovereign this morning, to keep his pouch. Think o' that, kimmers; heard ye ever sic extravagance! I saw her doin'd wi' my own eyes. It's aince wud and aye waur [6] wi' her, I'm thinking. But the wastefu' wife's the waefu' widow, she should keep in mind. She's far owre browdened upon yon boy. I'm sure I howp good may come o't, but—" and with an ominous shake of the head she ended the Websterian harangue.

  When Peter Wylie left him Gourlay lit a cigarette and stood at the Cross, waiting for the praises yet to be. The Deacon toddled forward on his thin shanks.

  "Man Dyohn, you're won hame, I thee. Ay, man! And how are ye?"

  Gourlay surveyed him with insolent, indolent eyes. "Oh, I'm all rai-ight, Deacon," he swaggered; "how are ye-ow?" and he sent a puff of tobacco smoke down through his nostrils.

  "I declare!" said the Deacon. "I never thaw onybody thmoke like that before! That'll be one of the thingth ye learn at College, no doubt."

  "Ya-as," yawned Gourlay; "it gives you the full flavour of the we-eed."

  The Deacon glimmered over him with his eyes. "The weed," said he. "Jutht tho! Imphm. The weed."

  Then worthy Mister Allardyce tried another opening. "But, dear me!" he cried, "I'm forgetting entirely. I must congratulate ye. Ye've been doing wonderth, they tell me, up in Embro."

  "Just a little bit," swaggered Gourlay, right hand on outshot hip, left hand flaunting a cigarette in air most delicate, tobacco smoke curling from his lofty nose. He looked down his face at the Deacon. "Just a little bit, Mr. Allardyce, just a little bit. I tossed the thing off in a twinkling."