The House With the Green Shutters (34 page)

The dog was barking in the street. A cry of the night came from far
away.

That voice was as if a corpse opened its lips and told of horrors beyond
the grave. It brought the other world into the homely room, and made it
all demoniac. The women felt the presence of the unknown. It was their
own flesh and blood that spoke the words, and by their own quiet hearth.
But hell seemed with them in the room.

Mrs. Gourlay drew back from John's head on her lap, as from something
monstrous and unholy. But he moaned in deprivation, craving her support,
and she edged nearer to supply his need. Possessed with a devil or no,
he was her son.

"Mother!" gasped Janet suddenly, the white circles of her eyes staring
from the red flannel, her voice hoarse with a new fear—"mother,
suppose—suppose he said that before anybody else!"

"Don't mention't," cried her mother with sudden passion. "How daur ye?
how daur ye? My God!" she broke down and wept, "they would hang him, so
they would! They would hang
my
boy—they would take and hang
my
boy!"

They stared at each other wildly. John slept, his head twisted over on
his mother's knee, his eyes sunken, his mouth wide open.

"Mother," Janet whispered, "you must send him away."

"I have only three pounds in the world," said Mrs. Gourlay; and she put
her hand to her breast where it was, but winced as if a pain had bitten
her.

"Send him away wi't," said Janet. "The furniture may bring something.
And you and me can aye thole."

In the morning Mrs. Gourlay brought two greasy notes to the table, and
placed them in her son's slack hand. He was saner now; he had slept off
his drunken madness through the night.

"John," she said, in pitiful appeal, "you maunna stay here, laddie.
Ye'll gie up the drink when you're away—will ye na?—and then thae een
ye're sae feared of'll no trouble you ony mair. Gang to Glasgow and see
the lawyer folk about the bond. And, John dear," she pleaded, "if
there's nothing left for us, you'll try to work for Janet and me, will
ye no? You've a grand education, and you'll surely get a place as a
teacher or something; I'm sure you would make a grand teacher. Ye
wouldna like to think of your mother trailing every week to the like of
Wilson for an awmous, streeking out her auld hand for charity. The folk
would stand in their doors to look at me, man—they would that—they
would cry ben to each other to come oot and see Gourlay's wife gaun
slinkin' doon the brae. Doon the brae it would be," she repeated, "doon
the brae it would be"—and her mind drifted away on the sorrowful future
which her fear made so vivid and real. It was only John's going that
roused her.

Thomas Brodie, glowering abroad from a shop door festooned in boots, his
leather apron in front, and his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat,
as befitted an important man, saw young Gourlay pass the Cross with his
bag in his hand, and dwindle up the road to the station.

"Where's
he
off to now?" he muttered. "There's something at the boddom
o' this, if a body could find it out!"

When John had gone his mother roused herself to a feverish industry.
Even in the early days of her strength she had never been so busy in her
home. But her work was aimless and to no purpose. When tidying she would
take a cup without its saucer from the table, and set off with it
through the room, but stopping suddenly in the middle of the floor,
would fall into a muse with the dish in her hand; coming to herself long
afterwards to ask vaguely, "What's this cup for?... Janet, lassie, what
was it I was doing?" Her energy, and its frustration, had the same
reason. The burden on her mind constantly impelled her to do something
to escape from it, and the same burden paralyzed her mind in everything
she did. So with another of her vacant whims. Every morning she rose at
an unearthly hour, to fish out of old closets rag-bags bellied big with
the odds and ends of thirty years' assemblage. "I'll make a patchwork
quilt o' thir!" she explained, with a foolish, eager smile; and she
spent hours snatching up rags and vainly trying to match them. But the
quilt made no progress. She would look at a patch for a while, with her
head on one side, and pat it all over with restless hands; then she
would turn it round, to see if it would look better that way, only to
tear it off when it was half sewn, to try another and yet another. Often
she would forget the work on her lap, and stare across the room,
open-mouthed, her fingers plucking at her withered throat. Janet became
afraid of her mother.

Once she saw her smiling to herself, when she thought nobody was
watching her—an uncanny smile as of one who hugged a secret to her
breast—a secret that, eluding others, would enable its holder to elude
them too.

"What can
she
have to laugh at?" Janet wondered.

At times the haze that seemed gathering round Mrs. Gourlay's mind would
be dispelled by sudden rushes of fear, when she would whimper lest her
son be hanged, or herself come on the parish in her old age. But that
was rarely. Her brain was mercifully dulled, and her days were passed in
a restless vacancy.

She was sitting with the rags scattered round her when John walked in on
the evening of the third day. There were rags everywhere—on the table,
and all about the kitchen; she sat in their midst like a witch among the
autumn leaves. When she looked towards his entrance the smell of drink
was wafted from the door.

"John!" she panted, in surprise—"John, did ye not go to Glasgow, boy?"

"Ay," he said slowly, "I gaed to Glasgow."

"And the bond, John—did ye speir about the bond?"

"Ay," he said, "I speired about the bond. The whole house is sunk in't."

"Oh!" she gasped, and the whole world seemed to go from beneath her, so
weak did she feel through her limbs.

"John," she said, after a while, "did ye no try to get something to do,
that you might help me and Janet now we're helpless?"

"No," he said; "for the een wouldna let me. Nicht and day they follow me
a'where—nicht and day."

"Are they following ye yet, John?" she whispered, leaning forward
seriously. She did not try to disabuse him now; she accepted what he
said. Her mind was on a level with his own. "Are they following ye yet?"
she asked, with large eyes of sympathy and awe.

"Ay, and waur than ever too. They're getting redder and redder. It's
not a dull red," he said, with a faint return of his old interest in the
curious physical; "it's a gleaming red. They lowe. A' last nicht they
wouldna let me sleep. There was nae gas in my room, and when the candle
went out I could see them everywhere. When I looked to one corner o' the
room, they were there; and when I looked to another corner, they were
there too—glowering at me; glowering at me in the darkness; glowering
at me. Ye mind what a glower he had! I hid from them ablow the claes;
but they followed me—they were burning in my brain. So I gaed oot and
stood by a lamp-post for company. But a constable moved me on; he said I
was drunk because I muttered to mysell. But I wasna drunk then, mother;
I wa-as
not
. So I walkit on, and on, and on the whole nicht; but I aye
keepit to the lamp-posts for company. And than when the public-houses
opened I gaed in and drank and drank. I didna like the drink, for whisky
has no taste to me now. But it helps ye to forget.

"Mother," he went on complainingly, "is it no queer that a pair of een
should follow a man? Just a pair of een! It never happened to onybody
but me," he said dully—"never to onybody but me."

His mother was panting open-mouthed, as if she choked for air, both
hands clutching at her bosom. "Ay," she whispered, "it's queer;" and
kept on gasping at intervals with staring eyes, "It's gey queer; it's
gey queer; it's gey queer."

She took up the needle once more and tried to sew; but her hand was
trembling so violently that she pricked the left forefinger which upheld
her work. She was content thereafter to make loose stabs at the cloth,
with a result that she made great stitches which drew her seam together
in a pucker. Vacantly she tried to smooth them out, stroking them over
with her hand, constantly stroking and to no purpose. John watched the
aimless work with dull and heavy eyes.

For a while there was silence in the kitchen. Janet was coughing in the
room above.

"There's just ae thing'll end it!" said John. "Mother, give me three
shillings."

It was not a request, and not a demand; it was the dull statement of a
need. Yet the need appeared so relentless, uttered in the set fixity of
his impassive voice, that she could not gainsay it. She felt that this
was not merely her son making a demand; it was a compulsion on him
greater than himself.

"There's the money!" she said, clinking it down on the table, and
flashed a resentful smile at him, close upon the brink of tears.

She had a fleeting anger. It was scarcely at him, though; it was at the
fate that drove him. Nor was it for herself, for her own mood was,
"Well, well; let it gang." But she had a sense of unfairness, and a
flicker of quite impersonal resentment, that fate should wring the last
few shillings from a poor being. It wasna fair. She had the emotion of
it; and it spoke in the strange look at her son, and in the smiling
flush with the tears behind it. Then she sank into apathy.

John took up the money and went out, heedless of his mother where she
sat by the table; he had a doom on him, and could see nothing that did
not lie within his path. Nor did she take any note of his going; she was
callous. The tie between them was being annulled by misery. She was
ceasing to be his mother, he to be her son; they were not younger and
older, they were the equal victims of necessity. Fate set each of them
apart to dree a separate weird.

In a house of long years of misery the weak become callous to their
dearest's agony. The hard, strong characters are kindest in the end;
they will help while their hearts are breaking. But the weak fall
asunder at the last. It was not that Mrs. Gourlay was thinking of
herself rather than of him. She was stunned by fate—as was he—and
could think of nothing.

Ten minutes later John came out of the Black Bull with a bottle of
whisky.

It was a mellow evening, one of those evenings when Barbie, the mean and
dull, is transfigured to a gem-like purity, and catches a radiance.
There was a dreaming sky above the town, and its light less came to the
earth than was on it, shining in every path with a gracious immanence.
John came on through the glow with his burden undisguised, wrapped in a
tissue paper which showed its outlines. He stared right before him like
a man walking in his sleep, and never once looked to either side. At
word of his coming the doors were filled with mutches and bald heads,
keeking by the jambs to get a look. Many were indecent in their haste,
not waiting till he passed ere they peeped—which was their usual way.
Some even stood away out in front of their doors to glower at him
advancing, turning slowly with him as he passed, and glowering behind
him as he went. They saw they might do so with impunity; that he did not
see them, but walked like a man in a dream. He passed up the street and
through the Square, beneath a hundred eyes, the sun shining softly round
him. Every eye followed till he disappeared through his own door.

He went through the kitchen, where his mother sat, carrying the bottle
openly, and entered the parlour without speaking. He came back and asked
her for the corkscrew, but when she said "Eh?" with a vague wildness in
her manner, and did not seem to understand, he went and got it for
himself. She continued making stabs at her cloth and smoothing out the
puckers in her seam.

John was heard moving in the parlour. There was the sharp
plunk
of a
cork being drawn, followed by a clink of glass. And then came a heavy
thud like a fall.

To Mrs. Gourlay the sounds meant nothing; she heard them with her ear,
not her mind. The world around her had retreated to a hazy distance, so
that it had no meaning. She would have gazed vaguely at a shell about to
burst beside her.

In the evening, Janet, who had been in bed all the afternoon, came down
and lit the lamp for her mother. It was a large lamp which Gourlay had
bought, and it shed a rich light through the room.

"I heard John come in," she said, turning wearily round; "but I was too
ill to come down and ask what had happened. Where is he?"

"John?" questioned her mother—"John?... Ou ay," she panted, vaguely
recalling, "ou ay. I think—I think ... he gaed ben the parlour."

"The parlour!" cried Janet; "but he must be in the dark! And he canna
thole the darkness!"

"John!" she cried, going to the parlour door, "John!"

There was a silence of the grave.

She lit a candle, and went into the room. And then she gave a squeal
like a rabbit in a dog's jaws.

Mrs. Gourlay dragged her gaunt limbs wearily across the floor. By the
wavering light, which shook in Janet's hand, she saw her son lying dead
across the sofa. The whisky-bottle on the table was half empty, and of a
smaller bottle beside it he had drunk a third. He had taken all that
whisky that he might deaden his mind to the horror of swallowing the
poison. His legs had slipped to the floor when he died, but his body was
lying back across the couch, his mouth open, his eyes staring horridly
up. They were not the eyes of the quiet dead, but bulged in frozen fear,
as if his father's eyes had watched him from aloft while he died.

"There's twa thirds of the poison left," commented Mrs. Gourlay.

"Mother!" Janet screamed, and shook her. "Mother, John's deid! John's
deid! Don't ye see John's deid?"

"Ay, he's deid," said Mrs. Gourlay, staring. "He winna be hanged now!"