The House With the Green Shutters (10 page)

Wilson might have set up for himself in the nippy northern town. But it
is an instinct with men who have met with a rebuff in a place to shake
its dust from their shoes, and be off to seek their fortunes in the
larger world. We take a scunner at the place that has ill-used us.
Wilson took a scunner at Aberdeen, and decided to leave it and look
around him. Scotland was opening up, and there were bound to be heaps of
chances for a man like him! "A man like me," was a frequent phrase of
Wilson's retired and solitary speculation. "Ay," he said, emerging from
one of his business reveries, "there's bound to be heaps o' chances for
a man like me, if I only look about me."

He was "looking about him" in Glasgow when he forgathered with his
cousin William—the borer he! After many "How are ye, Jims's" and mutual
speirings over a "bit mouthful of yill"—so they phrased it; but that
was a meiosis, for they drank five quarts—they fell to a serious
discussion of the commercial possibilities of Scotland. The borer was of
the opinion that the Braes of Barbie had a future yet, "for a' the
gaffer was so keen on keeping his men in the dark about the coal."

Now Wilson knew (as what Scotsman does not?) that in the middle 'fifties
coal-boring in Scotland was not the honourable profession that it now
is. More than once, speculators procured lying reports that there were
no minerals, and after landowners had been ruined by their abortive
preliminary experiments, stepped in, bought the land, and boomed it. In
one notorious case a family, now great in the public eye, bribed a
laird's own borers to conceal the truth, and then buying the Golconda
from its impoverished owner, laid the basis of a vast fortune.

"D'ye mean—to tell—
me
, Weelyum Wilson," said James, giving him his
full name in the solemnity of the moment, "d'ye mean—to tell—
me
,
sir"—here he sank his voice to a whisper—"that there's joukery-pawkery
at work?"

"A declare to God A div," said Weelyum, with equal solemnity, and he
nodded with alarmed sapience across his beer jug.

"You believe there's plenty of coal up Barbie Valley, and that they're
keeping it dark in the meantime for some purpose of their own?"

"I do," said Weelyum.

"God!" said James, gripping the table with both hands in his
excitement—"God, if that's so, what a chance there's in Barbie! It has
been a dead town for twenty year, and twenty to the end o't. A verra
little would buy the hauf o't. But property 'ull rise in value like a
puddock stool at dark, serr, if the pits come round it! It will that. If
I was only sure o' your suspeecion, Weelyum, I'd invest every bawbee I
have in't. You're going home the night, are ye not?"

"I was just on my road to the station when I met ye," said Weelyum.

"Send me a scrape of your pen to-morrow, man, if what you see on getting
back keeps you still in the same mind o't. And directly I get your
letter I'll run down and look about me."

The letter was encouraging, and Wilson went forth to spy the land and
initiate the plan of campaign. It was an important day for him. He
entered on his feud with Gourlay, and bought Rab Jamieson's house and
barn (with the field behind it) for a trifle. He had five hundred of his
own, and he knew where more could be had for the asking.

Rab Jamieson's barn was a curious building to be stranded in the midst
of Barbie. In quaint villages and little towns of England you sometimes
see a mellow red-tiled barn, with its rich yard, close upon the street;
it seems to have been hemmed in by the houses round, while dozing, so
that it could not escape with the fields fleeing from the town. There it
remains and gives a ripeness to the place, matching fitly with the great
horse-chestnut yellowing before the door, and the old inn further down,
mantled in its blood-red creepers. But that autumnal warmth and cosiness
is rarely seen in the barer streets of the north. How Rab Jamieson's
barn came to be stuck in Barbie nobody could tell. It was a gaunt, gray
building with never a window, but a bole high in one corner for the
sheaves, and a door low in another corner for auld Rab Jamieson. There
was no mill inside, and the place had not been used for years. But the
roof was good, and the walls stout and thick, and Wilson soon got to
work on his new possession. He had seen all that could be made of the
place the moment he clapped an eye on it, and he knew that he had found
a good thing, even if the pits should never come near Barbie. The bole
and door next the street were walled up, and a fine new door opened in
the middle, flanked on either side by a great window. The interior was
fitted up with a couple of counters and a wooden floor; and above the
new wood ceiling there was a long loft for a storeroom, lighted by
skylights in the roof. That loft above the rafters, thought the
provident Wilson, will come in braw and handy for storing things, so it
will. And there, hey presto! the transformation was achieved, and
Wilson's Emporium stood before you. It was crammed with merchandise. On
the white flapping slant of a couple of awnings, one over each window,
you might read in black letters, "JAMES WILSON: EMPORIUM." The letters
of "James Wilson" made a triumphal arch, to which "Emporium" was the
base. It seemed symbolical.

Now, the shops of Barbie (the drunken man's shop and the dirty man's
shop always excepted, of course) had usually been low-browed little
places with faded black scrolls above the door, on which you might read
in dim gilt letters (or it might be in white)

"LICENS'D TO SELL TEA & TOBACCO."

"Licens'd" was on one corner of the ribboned scroll, "To Sell Tea &"
occupied the flowing arch above, with "Tobacco" in the other corner.
When you mounted two steps and opened the door, a bell of some kind went
"
ping
" in the interior, and an old woman in a mutch, with big specs
slipping down her nose, would come up a step from a dim little room
behind, and wiping her sunken mouth with her apron—she had just left
her tea—would say, "What's your wull the day, sir?" And if you said
your "wull" was tobacco, she would answer, "Ou, sir, I dinna sell ocht
now but the tape and sweeties." And then you went away, sadly.

With the exception of the dirty man's shop and the drunken man's shop,
that kind of shop was the Barbie kind of shop. But Wilson changed all
that. One side of the Emporium was crammed with pots, pans, pails,
scythes, gardening implements, and saws, with a big barrel of paraffin
partitioned off in a corner. The rafters on that side were bristling and
hoary with brushes of all kinds dependent from the roof, so that the
minister's wife (who was a six-footer) went off with a brush in her
bonnet once. Behind the other counter were canisters in goodly rows,
barrels of flour and bags of meal, and great yellow cheeses in the
window. The rafters here were heavy with their wealth of hams,
brown-skinned flitches of bacon interspersed with the white tight-corded
home-cured—"Barbie's Best," as Wilson christened it. All along the
back, in glass cases to keep them unsullied, were bales of cloth, layer
on layer to the roof. It was a pleasure to go into the place, so big and
bien was it, and to smell it on a frosty night set your teeth watering.
There was always a big barrel of American apples just inside the door,
and their homely fragrance wooed you from afar, the mellow savour
cuddling round you half a mile off. Barbie boys had despised the
provision trade, heretofore, as a mean and meagre occupation; but now
the imagination of each gallant youth was fired and radiant—he meant to
be a grocer.

Mrs. Wilson presided over the Emporium. Wilson had a treasure in his
wife. She was Aberdeen born and bred, but her manner was the manner of
the South and West. There is a broad difference of character between the
peoples of East and West Scotland. The East throws a narrower and a
nippier breed. In the West they take Burns for their exemplar, and
affect the jovial and robustious—in some cases it is affectation only,
and a mighty poor one at that. They claim to be bigger men and bigger
fools than the Eastern billies. And the Eastern billies are very willing
to yield one half of the contention.

Mrs. Wilson, though Eastie by nature, had the jovial manner that you
find in Kyle; more jovial, indeed, than was common in nippy Barbie,
which, in general character, seems to have been transplanted from some
sand dune looking out upon the German Ocean. She was big of hip and
bosom, with sloe-black hair and eyes, and a ruddy cheek, and when she
flung back her head for the laugh her white teeth flashed splendid on
the world. That laugh of hers became one of the well-known features of
Barbie. "Lo'd-sake!" a startled visitor would cry, "whatna skirl's
tha-at!" "Oh, dinna be alarmed," a native would comfort him, "it's only
Wilson's wife lauchin at the Cross!"

Her manner had a hearty charm. She had a laugh and a joke for every
customer, quick as a wink with her answer; her gibe was in you and out
again before you knew you were wounded. Some, it is true, took exception
to the loudness of her skirl—the Deacon, for instance, who "gave her a
good one" the first time he went in for snuff. But "Tut!" quoth she; "a
mim cat's never gude at the mice," and she lifted him out by the scruff
of his neck, crying, "Run, mousie, or I'll catch ye!" On that day her
popularity in Barbie was assured for ever. But she was as keen on the
penny as a penurious weaver, for all her heartiness and laughing ways.
She combined the commercial merits of the East and West. She could coax
you to the buying like a Cumnock quean, and fleece you in the selling
like the cadgers o' Kincardine. When Wilson was abroad on his affairs he
had no need to be afraid that things were mismanaging at home. During
his first year in Barbie Mrs. Wilson was his sole helper. She had the
brawny arm of a giantess, and could toss a bag of meal like a baby; to
see her twirl a big ham on the counter was to see a thing done as it
should be. When Drucken Wabster came in and was offensive once, "Poo-oor
fellow!" said she (with a wink to a customer), "I declare he's in a high
fever," and she took him kicking to the pump and cooled him.

With a mate like that at the helm every sail of Wilson's craft was
trimmed for prosperity. He began to "look about" him to increase the
fleet.

That the Scot is largely endowed with the commercial imagination his
foes will be ready to acknowledge. Imagination may consecrate the world
to a man, or it may merely be a visualizing faculty which sees that as
already perfect which is still lying in the raw material. The Scot has
the lower faculty in full degree; he has the forecasting leap of the
mind which sees what to make of things—more, sees them made and in
vivid operation. To him there is a railway through the desert where no
railway exists, and mills along the quiet stream. And his
perfervidum
ingenium
is quick to attempt the realizing of his dreams. That is why
he makes the best of colonists. Galt is his type—Galt, dreaming in
boyhood of the fine water power a fellow could bring round the hill,
from the stream where he went a-fishing (they have done it since),
dreaming in manhood of the cities yet to rise amid Ontario's woods (they
are there to witness to his foresight). Indeed, so flushed and riotous
can the Scottish mind become over a commercial prospect that it
sometimes sends native caution by the board, and a man's really fine
idea becomes an empty balloon, to carry him off to the limbo of
vanities. There is a megalomaniac in every parish of Scotland. Well, not
so much as that; they're owre canny for that to be said of them. But in
every district almost you may find a poor creature who for thirty years
has cherished a great scheme by which he means to revolutionize the
world's commerce, and amass a fortune in monstrous degree. He is
generally to be seen shivering at the Cross, and (if you are a nippy
man) you shout carelessly in going by, "Good-morning, Tamson; how's the
scheme?" And he would be very willing to tell you, if only you would
wait to listen. "Man," he will cry eagerly behind you, "if I only had
anither wee wheel in my invention—she would do, the besom! I'll sune
have her ready noo." Poor Tamson!

But these are the exceptions. Scotsmen, more than other men perhaps,
have the three great essentials of commercial success—imagination to
conceive schemes, common sense to correct them, and energy to push them
through. Common sense, indeed, so far from being wanting, is in most
cases too much in evidence, perhaps, crippling the soaring mind and
robbing the idea of its early radiance; in quieter language, she makes
the average Scotsman to be over-cautious. His combinations are rarely
Napoleonic until he becomes an American. In his native dales he seldom
ventures on a daring policy. And yet his forecasting mind is always
detecting "possibeelities." So he contents himself by creeping
cautiously from point to point, ignoring big, reckless schemes and using
the safe and small, till he arrives at a florid opulence. He has
expressed his love of
festina lente
in business in a score of
proverbs—"Bit-by-bit's the better horse, though big-by-big's the
baulder;" "Ca' canny, or ye'll cowp;" "Many a little makes a mickle;"
and "Creep before ye gang." This mingling of caution and imagination is
the cause of his stable prosperity. And its characteristic is a sure
progressiveness. That sure progressiveness was the characteristic of
Wilson's prosperity in Barbie. In him, too, imagination and caution were
equally developed. He was always foreseeing "chances" and using them,
gripping the good and rejecting the dangerous (had he not gripped the
chance of auld Rab Jamieson's barn? There was caution in that, for it
was worth the money whatever happened; and there was imagination in the
whole scheme, for he had a vision of Barbie as a populous centre and
streets of houses in his holm). And every "chance" he seized led to a
better one, till almost every "chance" in Barbie was engrossed by him
alone. This is how he went to work. Note the "bit-by-bitness" of his
great career.