The House With the Green Shutters (30 page)

To bring a beaten and degraded look into a man's face, rend manhood out
of him in fear, is a sight that makes decent men wince in pain; for it
is an outrage on the decency of life, an offence to natural religion, a
violation of the human sanctities. Yet Gourlay had done it once and
again. I saw him "down" a man at the Cross once, a big man with a viking
beard, dark brown, from which you would have looked for manliness.
Gourlay, with stabbing eyes, threatened, and birred, and "downed" him,
till he crept away with a face like chalk, and a hunted, furtive eye.
Curiously it was his manly beard that made the look such a pain, for its
contrasting colour showed the white face of the coward—and a coward
had no right to such a beard. A grim and cruel smile went after him as
he slunk away. "
Ha!
" barked Gourlay, in lordly and pursuing scorn, and
the fellow leapt where he walked as the cry went through him. To break a
man's spirit so, take that from him which he will never recover while he
lives, send him slinking away
animo castrato
—for that is what it
comes to—is a sinister outrage of the world. It is as bad as the rape
of a woman, and ranks with the sin against the Holy Ghost—derives from
it, indeed. Yet it was this outrage that Gourlay meant to work upon his
son. He would work him down and down, this son of his, till he was less
than a man, a frightened, furtive animal. Then, perhaps, he would give a
loose to his other rage, unbuckle his belt, and thrash the grown man
like a wriggling urchin on the floor.

As he stood glowering from the door Mrs. Gourlay rose, with an appealing
cry of "
John!
" But Gourlay put his eye on her, and she sank into her
chair, staring up at him in terror. The strings of the tawdry cap she
wore seemed to choke her, and she unfastened them with nervous fingers,
fumbling long beneath her lifted chin to get them loose. She did not
remove the cap, but let the strings dangle by her jaw. The silly bits of
cloth waggling and quivering, as she turned her head repeatedly from son
to husband and from husband to son, added to her air of helplessness and
inefficiency. Once she whispered with ghastly intensity, "
God have
mercy!
"

For a length of time there was a loaded silence.

Gourlay went up to the hearth, and looked down on his son from near at
hand. John shrank down in his greatcoat. A reek of alcohol rose from
around him. Janet whimpered.

But when Gourlay spoke it was with deadly quietude. The moan was in his
voice. So great was his controlled wrath that he drew in great,
shivering breastfuls of air between the words, as if for strength to
utter them; and they quavered forth on it again. He seemed weakened by
his own rage.

"Ay, man!" he breathed.... "Ye've won hame, I observe!... Dee-ee-ar
me!... Im-phm!"

The contrast between the lowness of his voice and his steady, breathing
anger that possessed the air (they felt it coming as on waves) was
demoniac, appalling.

John could not speak; he was paralyzed by fear. To have this vast
hostile force touch him, yet be still, struck him dumb. Why did his
father not break out on him at once? What did he mean? What was he going
to do? The jamb of the fireplace cut his right shoulder as he cowered
into it, to get away as far as he could.

"I'm saying ... ye've won hame!" quivered Gourlay in a deadly slowness,
and his eyes never left his son.

And still the son made no reply. In the silence the ticking of the big
clock seemed to fill their world. They were conscious of nothing else.
It smote the ear.

"Ay," John gulped at last from a throat that felt closing. The answer
seemed dragged out of him by the insistent silence.

"Just so-a!" breathed his father, and his eyes opened in wide flame. He
heaved with the great breath he drew.... "Im-phm!" he drawled.

He went through to the scullery at the back of the kitchen to wash his
hands. Through the open door Janet and her mother—looking at each other
with affrighted eyes—could hear him sneering at intervals, "Ay,
man!"... "Just that, now!"... "Im-phm!" And again, "Ay, ay!...
Dee-ee-ar me!" in grim, falsetto irony.

When he came back to the kitchen he turned to Janet, and left his son in
a suspended agony.

"Ay, woman, Jenny, ye're there!" he said, and nipped her ear as he
passed over to his chair. "Were ye in Skeighan the day?"

"Ay, faither," she answered.

"And what did the Skeighan doctor say?"

She raised her large pale eyes to his with a strange look. Then her head
sank low on her breast.

"Nothing!" she said at last.

"Nothing!" said he. "Nothing for nothing, then. I hope you didna pay
him?"

"No, faither," she answered. "I hadna the bawbees."

"When did ye get back?" he asked.

"Just after—just after—" Her eyes flickered over to John, as if she
were afraid of mentioning his name.

"Oh, just after this gentleman! But there's noathing strange in tha-at;
you were always after him. You were born after him, and considered after
him; he aye had the best o't.—I howp
you
are in good health?" he
sneered, turning to his son. "It would never do for a man to break down
at the outset o' a great career!... For ye
are
at the outset o' a
great career; are ye na?"

His speech was as soft as the foot of a tiger, and sheathed as rending a
cruelty. There was no escaping the crouching stealth of it. If he had
leapt with a roar, John's drunken fury might have lashed itself to rage.
But the younger and weaker man was fascinated and helpless before the
creeping approach of so monstrous a wrath.

"Eh?" asked Gourlay softly, when John made no reply; "I'm saying you're
at the outset o' a great career; are ye no? Eh?"

Soft as his "Eh" was in utterance, it was insinuating, pursuing; it had
to be answered.

"No," whimpered John.

"Well, well; you're maybe at the end o't! Have ye been studying hard?"

"Yes," lied John.

"That's right!" cried his father with great heartiness. "There's my
brave fellow! Noathing like studying!... And no doubt"—he leaned over
suavely—"and no doubt ye've brought a wheen prizes home wi' ye as
usual? Eh?"

There was no answer.

"Eh?"

"No," gulped the cowerer.

"
Nae
prizes!" cried Gourlay, and his eyebrows went up in a pretended
surprise. "
Nae-ae
prizes! Ay, man! Fow's that, na?"

Young Gourlay was being reduced to the condition of a beaten child, who,
when his mother asks if he has been a bad boy, is made to sob "Yes" at
her knee. "Have you been a good boy?" she asks—"No," he pants; and "Are
you sorry for being a bad boy?"—"Yes," he sobs; and "Will you be a good
boy now, then?"—"Yes," he almost shrieks, in his desire to be at one
with his mother. Young Gourlay was being equally beaten from his own
nature, equally battered under by another personality. Only he was not
asked to be a good boy. He might gang to hell for anything auld Gourlay
cared—when once he had bye with him.

Even as he degraded his son to this state of unnatural cowardice,
Gourlay felt a vast disgust swell within him that a son of his should be
such a coward. "Damn him!" he thought, glowering with big-eyed contempt
at the huddled creature; "he hasna the pluck o' a pig! How can he stand
talk like this without showing he's a man? When I was a child on the
brisket, if a man had used me as I'm using him, I would have flung
mysell at him. He's a pretty-looking object to carry the name o' John
Gourla'! My God, what a ke-o of
my
life I've made—that auld trollop
for my wife, that sumph for my son, and that dying lassie for my
dochter! Was it I that bred him?
That!
"

He leapt to his feet in devilish merriment.

"Set out the spirits, Jenny!" he cried; "set out the spirits! My son and
I must have a drink together—to celebrate the occeesion; ou ay," he
sneered, drawling out the word with sharp, unfamiliar sound, "just to
celebrate the occeesion!"

The wild humour that seized him was inevitable, born of a vicious effort
to control a rage that was constantly increasing, fed by the sight of
the offender. Every time he glanced across at the thing sitting there he
was swept with fresh surges of fury and disgust. But his vicious
constraint curbed them under, and refused them a natural expression.
They sought an unnatural. Some vent they must have, and they found it in
a score of wild devilries he began to practise on his son. Wrath fed and
checked in one brings the hell on which man is built to the surface.
Gourlay was transformed. He had a fluency of speech, a power of banter,
a readiness of tongue, which he had never shown before. He was beyond
himself. Have you heard the snarl with which a wild beast arrests the
escaping prey which it has just let go in enjoying cruelty? Gourlay was
that animal. For a moment he would cease to torture his son, feed his
disgust with a glower; then the sight of him huddled there would wake a
desire to stamp on him; but his will would not allow that, for it would
spoil the sport he had set his mind on; and so he played with the victim
which he would not kill.

"Set out the speerits, Jenny," he birred, when she wavered in fear.
"What are ye shaking for? Set out the speerits—just to shelebrate the
joyful occeesion, ye know—ay, ay, just to shelebrate the joyful
occeesion!"

Janet brought a tray, with glasses, from the pantry. As she walked, the
rims of the glasses shivered and tinkled against each other, from her
trembling. Then she set a bottle on the table.

Gourlay sent it crashing to the floor. "A bottle!" he roared. "A bottle
for huz twa! To hell wi' bottles! The jar, Jenny, the jar; set out the
jar, lass, set out the jar. For we mean to make a night of it, this
gentleman and me. Ay," he yawed with a vicious smile, "we'll make a
night o't—we two. A night that Barbie'll remember loang!"

"Have ye skill o' drink?" he asked, turning to his son.

"No," wheezed John.

"No!" cried his father. "I thought ye learned everything at College!
Your education's been neglected. But I'll teach ye a lesson or
this
nicht's by. Ay, by God," he growled, "I'll teach ye a lesson."

Curb his temper as he might, his own behaviour was lashing it to frenzy.
Through the moaning intensity peculiar to his vicious rage there leapt
at times a wild-beast snarl. Every time they heard it, it cut the veins
of his listeners with a start of fear—it leapt so suddenly.

"Ha'e, sir!" he cried.

John raised his dull, white face and looked across at the bumper which
his father poured him. But he felt the limbs too weak beneath him to go
and take it.

"Bide where ye are!" sneered his father, "bide where ye are! I'll wait
on ye; I'll wait on ye. Man, I waited on ye the day that ye were bo-orn!
The heavens were hammering the world as John Gourla' rode through the
storm for a doctor to bring hame his heir. The world was feared, but
he
wasna feared," he roared in Titanic pride, "
he
wasna feared; no,
by God, for he never met what scaured him!... Ay, ay," he birred softly
again, "ay, ay, ye were ushered loudly to the world, serr! Verra
appropriate for a man who was destined to make such a name!... Eh?...
Verra appropriate, serr; verra appropriate! And you'll be ushered just
as loudly out o't. Oh, young Gourlay's death maun make a splurge, ye
know—a splurge to attract folk's attention!"

John's shaking hand was wet with the spilled whisky.

"Take it off," sneered his father, boring into him with a vicious eye;
"take it off, serr; take off your dram! Stop! Somebody wrote something
about that—some poetry or other. Who was it?"

"I dinna ken," whimpered John.

"Don't tell lies now. You do ken. I heard you mention it to Loranogie.
Come on now—who was it?"

"It was Burns," said John.

"Oh, it was Burns, was it? And what had Mr. Burns to say on the subject?
Eh?"

"'Freedom and whisky gang thegither: tak aff your dram,'" stammered
John.

"A verra wise remark," said Gourlay gravely. "'Freedom and whisky gang
thegither;'" he turned the quotation on his tongue, as if he were
savouring a tit-bit. "That's verra good," he approved. "You're a great
admirer of Burns, I hear. Eh?"

"Yes," said John.

"Do what he bids ye, then. Take off your dram! It'll show what a fine
free fellow you are!"

It was a big, old-fashioned Scotch drinking-glass, containing more than
half a gill of whisky, and John drained it to the bottom. To him it had
been a deadly thing at first, coming thus from his father's hand. He had
taken it into his own with a feeling of aversion that was strangely
blended of disgust and fear. But the moment it touched his lips, desire
leapt in his throat to get at it.

"Good!" roared his father in mock admiration. "God, ye have the
thrapple! When I was your age that would have choked me. I must have a
look at that throat o' yours. Stand up!...
Stand up when I tall 'ee!
"

John rose swaying to his feet. Months of constant tippling, culminating
in a wild debauch, had shattered him. He stood in a reeling world. And
the fear weakening his limbs changed his drunken stupor to a
heart-heaving sickness. He swayed to and fro, with a cold sweat oozing
from his chalky face.

"What's ado wi' the fellow?" cried Gourlay. "Oom? He's swinging like a
saugh-wand. I must wa-alk round this and have a look!"

John's drunken submissiveness encouraged his father to new devilries.
The ease with which he tortured him provoked him to more torture; he
went on more and more viciously, as if he were conducting an experiment,
to see how much the creature would bear before he turned. Gourlay was
enjoying the glutting of his own wrath.

He turned his son round with a finger and thumb on his shoulder, in
insolent inspection, as you turn an urchin round to see him in his new
suit of clothes. Then he crouched before him, his face thrust close to
the other, and peered into his eyes, his mouth distent with an infernal
smile. "My boy, Johnny," he said sweetly, "my boy, Johnny," and patted
him gently on the cheek. John raised dull eyes and looked into his
father's. Far within him a great wrath was gathering through his fear.
Another voice, another self, seemed to whimper, with dull iteration,
"I'll
kill
him; I'll
kill
him; by God, I'll
kill
him—if he doesna
stop this—if he keeps on like this at me!" But his present and material
self was paralyzed with fear.