The House With the Green Shutters (27 page)

He leapt in his bed with a throb of horror. Could this be the delirium
of drink? But no; he had often had an experience like this when he was
sleepless; he had the learned description of it pat and ready; it was
only automatic visualization.

Damn! Why couldn't he sleep? He flung out of bed, uncorked a bottle with
his teeth, tilted it up, and gulped the gurgling fire in the darkness.
Ha! that was better.

His room was already gray with the coming dawn. He went to the window
and opened it. The town was stirring uneasily in its morning sleep.
Somewhere in the distance a train was shunting;
clank, clank, clank
went the wagons. What an accursed sound! A dray went past the end of his
street rumbling hollowly, and the rumble died drearily away. Then the
footsteps of an early workman going to his toil were heard in the
deserted thoroughfare. Gourlay looked down and saw him pass far beneath
him on the glimmering pavement. He was whistling. Why did the fool
whistle? What had he got to whistle about? It was unnatural that one
man should go whistling to his work, when another had not been able to
sleep the whole night long.

He took another vast glut of whisky, and the moment after was dead to
the world.

He was awakened at eight o'clock by a monstrous hammering on his door.
By the excessive loudness of the first knock he heard on returning to
consciousness, he knew that his landlady had lost her temper in trying
to get him up. Ere he could shout she had thumped again. He stared at
the ceiling in sullen misery. The middle of his tongue was as dry as
bark.

For his breakfast there were thick slabs of rancid bacon, from the top
of which two yellow eggs had spewed themselves away among the cold
gravy. His gorge rose at them. He nibbled a piece of dry bread and
drained the teapot; then shouldering into his greatcoat, he tramped off
to the University.

It was a wretched morning. The wind had veered once more, and a cold
drizzle of rain was falling through a yellow fog. The reflections of the
street lamps in the sloppy pavement went down through spiral gleams to
an infinite depth of misery. Young Gourlay's brain was aching from his
last night's debauch, and his body was weakened with the want both of
sleep and food. The cold yellow mist chilled him to the bone. What a
fool I was to get drunk last night, he thought. Why am I here? Why am I
trudging through mud and misery to the University? What has it all got
to do with me? Oh, what a fool I am, what a fool!

"Drown dull care," said the devil in his ear.

He took a sixpence from his trousers pocket, and looked down at the
white bit of money in his hand till it was wet with the falling rain.
Then he went into a flashy tavern, and, standing by a sloppy bar, drank
sixpenny-worth of cheap whisky. It went to his head at once, owing to
his want of food, and with a dull warm feeling in his body he lurched
off to his first lecture for the day. His outlook on the world had
changed. The fog was now a comfortable yellowness. "Freedom and whisky
gang thegither: tak aff your dram," he quoted to his own mind. "That
stuff did me good. Whisky's the boy to fettle you."

He was in his element the moment he entered the classroom. It was a bear
garden. The most moral individual has his days of perversity when a
malign fate compels him to show the worst he has in him. A Scottish
university class—which is many most moral individuals—has a similar
eruptive tendency when it gets into the hands of a weak professor. It
will behave well enough for a fortnight, then a morning comes when
nothing can control it. This was a morning of the kind. The lecturer,
who was an able man but a weakling, had begun by apologizing for the
condition of his voice, on the ground that he had a bad cold. Instantly
every man in the class was blowing his nose. One fellow, of a most
portentous snout, who could trumpet like an elephant, with a last
triumphant snort sent his handkerchief across the room. When called to
account for his conduct, "Really, sir," he said, "er-er-oom—bad cold!"
Uprose a universal sneeze. Then the "roughing" began, to the tune of
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave"—which no man seemed
to sing, but every man could hear. They were playing the tune with their
feet.

The lecturer glared with white repugnance at his tormentors.

Young Gourlay flung himself heart and soul into the cruel baiting. It
was partly from his usual love of showing off, partly from the drink
still seething within him, but largely, also, as a reaction from his
morning's misery. This was another way of drowning reflection. The
morbidly gloomy one moment often shout madly on the next.

At last the lecturer plunged wildly at the door and flung it open.
"Go!" he shrieked, and pointed in superb dismissal.

A hundred and fifty barbarians sat where they were, and laughed at him;
and he must needs come back to the platform, with a baffled and
vindictive glower.

He was just turning, as it chanced, when young Gourlay put his hands to
his mouth and bellowed "
Cock-a-doodle-do
!"

Ere the roar could swell, the lecturer had leapt to the front of the
rostrum with flaming eyes. "Mr. Gourlay," he screamed furiously—"you
there, sir; you will apologize humbly to me for this outrage at the end
of the hour."

There was a womanish shrillness in the scream, a kind of hysteria on the
stretch, that (contrasted with his big threat) might have provoked them
at other times to a roar of laughter. But there was a sincerity in his
rage to-day that rose above its faults of manner; and an immediate
silence took the room—the more impressive for the former noise. Every
eye turned to Gourlay. He sat gaping at the lecturer.

If he had been swept to the anteroom there and then, he would have been
cowed by the suddenness of his own change, from a loud tormentor in the
company of others, to a silent culprit in a room alone. And apologies
would have been ready to tumble out, while he was thus loosened by
surprise and fear.

Unluckily he had time to think, and the longer he thought the more
sullen he became. It was only an accident that led to his discovery,
while the rest escaped; and that the others should escape, when they
were just as much to blame as he was, was an injustice that made him
furious. His anger was equally divided between the cursed mischance
itself, the teacher who had "jumped" on him so suddenly, and the other
rowdies who had escaped to laugh at his discomfiture; he had the same
burning resentment to them all. When he thought of his chuckling
fellow-students, they seemed to engross his rage; when he thought of the
mishap, he damned it and nothing else; when he thought of the lecturer,
he felt he had no rage to fling away upon others—the Snuffler took it
all. As his mind shot backwards and forwards in an angry gloom, it
suddenly encountered the image of his father. Not a professor of the
lot, he reflected, could stand the look of black Gourlay. And he
wouldn't knuckle under, either, so he wouldn't. He came of a hardy
stock. He would show them! He wasn't going to lick dirt for any man. Let
him punish all or none, for they had all been kicking up a row—why, big
Cunningham had been braying like an ass only a minute before.

He spied Armstrong and Gillespie glinting across at him with a curious
look: they were wondering whether he had courage enough to stand to his
guns with a professor. He knew the meaning of the look, and resented it.
He was on his mettle before them, it seemed. The fellow who had
swaggered at the Howff last night about "what
he
would do if a
professor jumped on
him
," mustn't prove wanting in the present trial,
beneath the eyes of those on whom he had imposed his blatancy.

When we think of what Gourlay did that day, we must remember that he was
soaked in alcohol—not merely with his morning's potation, but with the
dregs of previous carousals. And the dregs of drink, a thorough toper
will tell you, never leave him. He is drunk on Monday with his
Saturday's debauch. As "Drucken Wabster" of Barbie put it once, "When a
body's hard up, his braith's a consolation." If that be so—and Wabster,
remember, was an expert whose opinion on this matter is entitled to the
highest credence—if that be so, it proves the strength and persistence
of a thorough alcoholic impregnation, or, as Wabster called it, of "a
good soak." In young Gourlay's case, at any rate, the impregnation was
enduring and complete. He was like a rag steeped in fusel oil.

As the end of the hour drew near, he sank deeper in his dogged
sullenness. When the class streamed from the large door on the right, he
turned aside to the little anteroom on the left, with an insolent swing
of the shoulders. He knew the fellows were watching him curiously—he
felt their eyes upon his back. And, therefore, as he went through the
little door, he stood for a moment on his right foot, and waggled his
left, on a level with his hip behind, in a vulgar derision of them, the
professor, and the whole situation. That was a fine taunt flung back at
them!

There is nothing on earth more vindictive than a weakling. When he gets
a chance he takes revenge for everything his past cowardice forced him
to endure. The timid lecturer, angry at the poor figure he had cut on
the platform, was glad to take it out of young Gourlay for the
wrongdoing of the class. Gourlay was their scapegoat. The lecturer had
no longer over a hundred men to deal with, but one lout only, sullen yet
shrinking in the room before him. Instead of coming to the point at
once, he played with his victim. It was less from intentional cruelty
than from an instinctive desire to recover his lost feeling of
superiority. The class was his master, but here was one of them he could
cow at any rate.

"Well?" he asked, bringing his thin finger-tips together, and flinging
one thigh across the other.

Gourlay shuffled his feet uneasily.

"Yes?" inquired the other, enjoying his discomfiture.

Gourlay lowered. "Whatna gate was this to gang on? Why couldn't he let a
blatter out of his thin mouth, and ha' done wi't?"

"I'm waiting!" said the lecturer.

The words "I apologize" rose in Gourlay, but refused to pass his throat.
No, he wouldn't, so he wouldn't! He would see the lecturer far enough,
ere he gave an apology before it was expressly required.

"Oh, that's the line you go on, is it?" said the lecturer, nodding his
head as if he had sized up a curious animal. "I see, I see! You add
contumacy to insolence, do you?... Imphm."

Gourlay was not quite sure what contumacy meant, and the uncertainty
added to his anger.

"There were others making a noise besides me," he blurted. "I don't see
why
I
should be blamed for it all."

"Oh, you don't see why
you
should be had up, indeed? I think we'll
bring you to a different conclusion. Yes, I think so."

Gourlay, being forced to stand always on the one spot, felt himself
swaying in a drunken stupor. He blinked at the lecturer like an angry
owl—the blinking regard of a sodden mind, yet fiery with a spiteful
rage. His wrath was rising and falling like a quick tide. He would have
liked one moment to give a rein to the Gourlay temper, and let the
lecturer have it hot and strong; the next, he was quivering in a
cowardly horror of the desperate attempt he had so nearly made. Curse
his tormentor! Why did he keep him here, when his head was aching so
badly? Another taunt was enough to spring his drunken rage.

"I wonder what you think you came to College for?" said the lecturer. "I
have been looking at your records in the class. They're the worst I ever
saw. And you're not content with that, it seems. You add misbehaviour to
gross stupidity."

"To hell wi' ye!" said Gourlay.

There was a feeling in the room as if the air was stunned. The silence
throbbed.

The lecturer, who had risen, sat down suddenly as if going at the knees,
and went white about the gills. Some men would have swept the ruffian
with a burst of generous wrath, a few might have pitied in their anger;
but this young Solomon was thin and acid, a vindictive rat. Unable to
cow the insolent in present and full-blooded rage, he fell to thinking
of the great machine he might set in motion to destroy him. As he sat
there in silence, his eyes grew ferrety, and a sleek revenge peeped from
the corners of his mouth. "I'll show him what I'll do to him for this!"
is a translation of his thought. He was thinking, with great
satisfaction to himself, of how the Senatus would deal with young
Gourlay.

Gourlay grew weak with fear the moment the words escaped him. They had
been a thunderclap to his own ears. He had been thinking them, but—as
he pleaded far within him now—had never meant to utter them; they had
been mere spume off the surge of cowardly wrath seething up within him,
longing to burst, but afraid. It was the taunt of stupidity that fired
his drunken vanity to blurt them forth.

The lecturer eyed him sideways where he shrank in fear. "You may go," he
said at last. "I will report your conduct to the University."

Gourlay was sitting alone in his room when he heard that he had been
expelled. For many days he had drunk to deaden fear, but he was sober
now, being newly out of bed. A dreary ray of sunshine came through the
window, and fell on a wisp of flame blinking in the grate. As Gourlay
sat, his eyes fixed dully on the faded ray, a flash of intuition laid
his character bare to him. He read himself ruthlessly. It was not by
conscious effort; insight was uncanny and apart from will. He saw that
blatancy had joined with weakness, morbidity with want of brains; and
that the results of these, converging to a point, had produced the
present issue, his expulsion. His mind recognized how logical the issue
was, assenting wearily as to a problem proved. Given those qualities, in
those circumstances, what else could have happened? And such a weakling
as he knew himself to be could never—he thought—make effort sufficient
to alter his qualities. A sense of fatalism came over him, as of one
doomed. He bowed his head, and let his arms fall by the sides of his
chair, dropping them like a spent swimmer ready to sink. The sudden
revelation of himself to himself had taken the heart out of him. "I'm a
waster!" he said aghast. And then, at the sound of his own voice, a fear
came over him, a fear of his own nature; and he started to his feet and
strode feverishly, as if by mere locomotion, to escape from his clinging
and inherent ill. It was as if he were trying to run away from himself.