The House With the Green Shutters (20 page)

"Oh, don't ask me," he writhed. "Man, it's an irksome thing to write,
and to be asked about it makes you squirm. It's almost as offensive to
ask a man when his book will be out as to ask a woman when she'll be
delivered. I'm glad you invited me—to get away from the confounded
thing. It's become a blasted tyrant. A big work's a mistake; it's a
monster that devours the brain. I neglect my other work for that fellow
of mine; he bags everything I think. I never light on a new thing, but
'Hullo!' I cry, 'here's an idea for the book!' If you are engaged on a
big subject, all your thinking works into it or out of it."

"M'yes," said Logan; "but that's a swashing way of putting it."

"It's the danger of the aphorism," said Allan, "that it states too much
in trying to be small.—Tozer, what do you think?"

"I never was engaged on a big subject," sniffed Tozer.

"We're aware o' that!" said Tarmillan.

Tozer went under, and Tarmillan had the table. Allan was proud of him.

"Courage is the great thing," said he. "It often succeeds by the mere
show of it. It's the timid man that a dog bites. Run
at
him and he
runs."

He was speaking to himself rather than the table, admiring the courage
that had snubbed Tozer with a word. But his musing remark rang a bell in
young Gourlay. By Jove, he had thought that himself, so he had! He was a
hollow thing, he knew, but a buckram pretence prevented the world from
piercing to his hollowness. The son of his courageous sire (whom he
equally admired and feared) had learned to play the game of bluff. A
bold front was half the battle. He had worked out his little theory, and
it was with a shock of pleasure the timid youngster heard great Allan
give it forth. He burned to let him know that he had thought that too.

To the youngsters, fat of face and fluffy of its circling down, the talk
was a banquet of the gods. For the first time in their lives they heard
ideas (such as they were) flung round them royally. They yearned to show
that they were thinkers too. And Gourlay was fired with the rest.

"I heard a very good one the other day from old Bauldy Johnston," said
Allan, opening his usual wallet of stories when the dinner was in full
swing. At a certain stage of the evening "I heard a good one" was the
invariable keynote of his talk. If you displayed no wish to hear the
"good one," he was huffed. "Bauldy was up in Edinburgh," he went on,
"and I met him near the Scott Monument and took him to Lockhart's for a
dram. You remember what a friend he used to be of old Will Overton. I
wasn't aware, by-the-bye, that Will was dead till Bauldy told me. '
He
was a great fellow my friend Will
,' he rang out in yon deep voice of
his. '
The thumb-mark of his Maker was wet in the clay of him
.' Man,
it made a quiver go down my spine."

"Oh, Bauldy has been a kenned phrase-maker for the last forty year,"
said Tarmillan. "But every other Scots peasant has the gift. To hear
Englishmen talk, you would think Carlyle was unique for the word that
sends the picture home—they give the man the credit of his race. But
I've heard fifty things better than 'willowy man' in the stable a-hame
on a wat day in hairst—fifty things better—from men just sitting on
the corn-kists and chowing beans."

"I know a better one than that," said Allan. Tarmillan had told no
story, you observe, but Allan was so accustomed to saying "I know a
better one than that," that it escaped him before he was aware. "I
remember when Bauldy went off to Paris on the spree. He kept his mouth
shut when he came back, for he was rather ashamed o' the outburst. But
the bodies were keen to hear. 'What's the incense like in Notre Dame?'
said Johnny Coe, with his een big. '
Burning stink!
' said Bauldy."

"I can cap that with a better one still," said Tarmillan, who wasn't to
be done by any man. "I was with Bauldy when he quarrelled Tam Gibb of
Hoochan-doe. Hoochan-doe's a yelling ass, and he threatened Bauldy—oh,
he would do this, and he would do that, and he would do the other thing.
'
Damn ye, would ye threaten me?
' cried Bauldy. '
I'll gar your brains
jaup red to the heavens!
' And I 'clare to God, sirs, a nervous man
looked up to see if the clouds werena spattered with the gore!"

Tozer cleared a sarcastic windpipe.

"Why do you clear your throat like that?" said Tarmillan—"like a craw
with the croup, on a bare branch against a gray sky in November! If I
had a throat like yours, I'd cut it and be done wi't."

"I wonder what's the cause of that extraordinary vividness in the
speech of the Scotch peasantry?" said Allan—more to keep the blades
from bickering than from any wish to know.

"It comes from a power of seeing things vividly inside your mind," said
a voice, timorous and wheezy, away down the table.

What cockerel was this crowing?

They turned, and beheld the blushing Gourlay.

But Tarmillan and Tozer were at it again, and he was snubbed. Jimmy
Wilson sniggered, and the other youngsters enjoyed his discomfiture.
Huh! What right has
he
to set up his pipe?

His shirt stuck to his back. He would have liked the ground to open and
swallow him.

He gulped a huge swill of whisky to cover his vexation; and oh, the
mighty difference! A sudden courage flooded his veins. He turned with a
scowl on Wilson, and, "What the devil are
you
sniggering at?" he
growled. Logan, the only senior who marked the byplay, thought him a
hardy young spunkie.

The moment the whisky had warmed the cockles of his heart Gourlay ceased
to care a rap for the sniggerers. Drink deadened his nervous perception
of the critics on his right and left, and set him free to follow his
idea undisturbed. It was an idea he had long cherished—being one of the
few that ever occurred to him. He rarely made phrases himself—though,
curiously enough, his father often did without knowing it—the harsh
grind of his character producing a flash. But Gourlay was aware of his
uncanny gift of visualization—or of "seeing things in the inside of his
head," as he called it—and vanity prompted the inference, that this was
the faculty that sprang the metaphor. His theory was now clear and
eloquent before him. He was realizing for the first time in his life
(with a sudden joy in the discovery) the effect of whisky to unloose the
brain; sentences went hurling through his brain with a fluency that
thrilled. If he had the ear of the company, now he had the drink to
hearten him, he would show Wilson and the rest that he wasn't such a
blasted fool! In a room by himself he would have spouted to the empty
air.

Some such point he had reached in the hurrying jumble of his thoughts
when Allan addressed him.

Allan did not mean his guest to be snubbed. He was a gentleman at heart,
not a cad like Tozer; and this boy was the son of a girl whose laugh he
remembered in the gloamings at Tenshillingland.

"I beg your pardon, John," he said in heavy benevolence—he had reached
that stage—"I beg your pardon. I'm afraid you was interrupted."

Gourlay felt his heart a lump in his throat, but he rushed into speech.

"Metaphor comes from the power of seeing things in the inside of your
head," said the unconscious disciple of Aristotle—"seeing them so vivid
that you see the likeness between them. When Bauldy Johnston said 'the
thumb-mark of his Maker was wet in the clay of him,' he
saw
the print
of a thumb in wet clay, and he
saw
the Almighty making a man out of
mud, the way He used to do in the Garden of Eden lang syne. So Bauldy
flashed the two ideas together, and the metaphor sprang! A man'll never
make phrases unless he can see things in the middle of his brain.
I
can see things in the middle of my brain," he went on cockily—"anything
I want to! I don't need to shut my eyes either. They just come up before
me."

"Man, you're young to have noticed these things, John," said Jock Allan.
"I never reasoned it out before, but I'm sure you're in the right o't."

He spoke more warmly than he felt, because Gourlay had flushed and
panted and stammered (in spite of inspiring bold John Barleycorn) while
airing his little theory, and Allan wanted to cover him. But Gourlay
took it as a tribute to his towering mind. Oh, but he was the proud
mannikin. "Pass the watter!" he said to Jimmy Wilson, and Jimmy passed
it meekly.

Logan took a fancy to Gourlay on the spot. He was a slow, sly, cosy man,
with a sideward laugh in his eye, a humid gleam. And because his blood
was so genial and so slow, he liked to make up to brisk young fellows,
whose wilder outbursts might amuse him. They quickened his sluggish
blood. No bad fellow, and good-natured in his heavy way, he was what the
Scotch call a "slug for the drink." A "slug for the drink" is a man who
soaks and never succumbs. Logan was the more dangerous a crony on that
account. Remaining sober while others grew drunk, he was always ready
for another dram, always ready with an oily chuckle for the sploring
nonsense of his satellites. He would see them home in the small hours,
taking no mean advantage over them, never scorning them because they
"couldn't carry it," only laughing at their daft vagaries. And next day
he would gurgle, "So-and-so was screwed last night, and, man, if you had
heard his talk!" Logan had enjoyed it. He hated to drink by himself, and
liked a splurging youngster with whom to go the rounds.

He was attracted to Gourlay by the manly way he tossed his drink, and by
the false fire it put into him. But he made no immediate advance. He sat
smiling in creeshy benevolence, beaming on Gourlay but saying nothing.
When the party was ended, however, he made up to him going through the
door.

"I'm glad to have met you, Mr. Gourlay," said he. "Won't you come round
to the Howff for a while?"

"The Howff?" said Gourlay.

"Yes," said Logan; "haven't ye heard o't? It's a snug bit house where
some of the West Country billies forgather for a nicht at e'en. Oh,
nothing to speak of, ye know—just a dram and a joke to pass the time
now and then!"

"Aha!" laughed Gourlay, "there's worse than a drink, by Jove. It puts
smeddum in your blood!"

Logan nipped the guard of his arm in heavy playfulness and led him to
the Howff.

Young Gourlay had found a means of escaping from his foolish mind. By
the beginning of his second session he was as able a toper as a publican
could wish. The somewhat sordid joviality of Allan's ring, their
wit-combats that were somewhat crude, appeared to him the very acme of
social intercourse. To emulate Logan and Allan was his aim. But drink
appealed to him in many ways besides. Now when his too apprehensive
nerves were frightened by bugbears in his lonely room he could be off to
the Howff and escape them. And drink inspired him with false courage to
sustain his pose as a hardy rollicker. He had acquired a kind of
prestige since the night of Allan's party, and two of the fellows whom
he met there—Armstrong and Gillespie—became his friends at College and
the Howff. He swaggered before them as he had swaggered at school both
in Barbie and Skeighan, and now there was no Swipey Broon to cut him
over the coxcomb. Armstrong and Gillespie—though they saw through
him—let him run on, for he was not bad fun when he was splurging. He
found, too, when with his cronies that drink unlocked his mind, and gave
a free flow to his ideas. Nervous men are often impotent of speech from
very excess of perception; they realize not merely what they mean to
say, but with the nervous antennæ of their minds they feel the attitude
of every auditor. Distracted by lateral perceptions from the point
ahead, they blunder where blunter minds would go forward undismayed.
That was the experience of young Gourlay. If he tried to talk freely
when sober, he always grew confused. But drink deadened the outer rim of
his perception and left it the clearer in the middle for its
concentration. In plainer language, when he was drunk he was less afraid
of being laughed at, and free of that fear he was a better speaker. He
was driven to drink, then, by every weakness of his character. As
nervous hypochondriac, as would-be swaggerer, as a dullard requiring
stimulus, he found that drink, to use his own language, gave him
"smeddum."

With his second year he began the study of philosophy, and that added to
his woes. He had nerves to feel the Big Conundrum, but not the brains to
solve it; small blame to him for that, since philosophers have cursed
each other black in the face over it for the last five thousand years.
But it worried him. The strange and sinister detail of the world, that
had always been a horror to his mind, became more horrible beneath the
stimulus of futile thought. But whisky was the mighty cure. He was the
gentleman who gained notoriety on a memorable occasion by exclaiming,
"Metaphysics be damned; let us drink!" Omar and other bards have
expressed the same conclusion in more dulcet wise. But Gourlay's was
equally sincere. How sincere is another question.

Curiously, an utterance of "Auld Tam," one of his professors, half
confirmed him in his evil ways.

"I am speaking now," said Tam, "of the comfort of a true philosophy,
less of its higher aspect than its comfort to the mind of man.
Physically, each man is highest on the globe; intellectually, the
philosopher alone dominates the world. To him are only two entities that
matter—himself and the Eternal; or, if another, it is his fellow-man,
whom serving he serves the ultimate of being. But he is master of the
outer world. The mind, indeed, in its first blank outlook on life is
terrified by the demoniac force of nature and the swarming misery of
man; by the vast totality of things, the cold remoteness of the starry
heavens, and the threat of the devouring seas. It is puny in their
midst."