The House With the Green Shutters (31 page)

"Open your mouth!" came the snarl—"
wider, damn ye! wider!
"

"Im-phm!" said Gourlay, with a critical drawl, pulling John's chin about
to see into him the deeper. "Im-phm! God, it's like a furnace! What's
the Latin for throat?"

"Guttur," said John.

"Gutter," said his father. "A verra appropriate name! Yours stinks like
a cesspool! What have you been doing till't? I'm afraid ye aren't in
very good health, after a-all.... Eh?... Mrs. Gourla', Mrs. Gourla'!
He's in very bad case, this son of yours, Mrs. Gourla'! Fine I ken what
he needs, though.—Set out the brandy, Jenny, set out the brandy," he
roared; "whisky's not worth a damn for him! Stop; it was you gaed the
last time—it's
your
turn now, auld wife, it's
your
turn now! Gang
for the brandy to your twa John Gourla's. We're a pair for a woman to be
proud of!"

He gazed after his wife as she tottered to the pantry.

"Your skirt's on the gape, auld wife," he sang; "your skirt's on the
gape; as use-u-al," he drawled; "as use-u-al. It was always like that;
and it always scunnered me, for I aye liked things tidy—though I never
got them. However, I maunna compleen when ye bore sic a braw son to my
name. He's a great consolation! Imphm, he is that—a great consolation!"

The brandy bottle slipped from the quivering fingers and was smashed to
pieces on the floor.

"Hurrah!" yelled Gourlay.

He seemed rapt and carried by his own devilry. The wreck and ruin strewn
about the floor consorted with the ruin of his fortunes; let all go
smash—what was the use of caring? Now in his frenzy, he, ordinarily so
careful, seemed to delight in the smashings and the breakings; they
suited his despair.

He saw that his spirit of destruction frightened them, too, and that was
another reason to indulge it.

"To hell with everything," he yelled, like a mock-bacchanal. "
We
're
the hearty fellows! We'll make a red night now we're at it!" And with
that he took the heel of a bottle on his toe and sent it flying among
the dishes on the dresser. A great plate fell, split in two.

"Poor fellow!" he whined, turning to his son; "poo-oor fellow! I fear he
has lost his pheesic. For that was the last bottle o' brandy in my
aucht; the last John Gourlay had, the last he'll ever buy. What am I to
do wi' ye now?... Eh?... I must do something; it's coming to the bit
now, sir."

As he stood in a heaving silence the sobbing of the two women was heard
through the room. John was still swaying on the floor.

Sometimes Gourlay would run the full length of the kitchen, and stand
there glowering on a stoop; then he would come crouching up to his son
on a vicious little trot, pattering in rage, the broken glass crunching
and grinding beneath his feet. At any moment he might spring.

"What do ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?" he moaned.... "Eh?... What
do ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?"

As he came grinning in rage his lips ran out to their full width, and
the tense slit showed his teeth to their roots. The gums were white. The
stricture of the lips had squeezed them bloodless.

He went back to the dresser once more and bent low beside it, glancing
at his son across his left shoulder, with his head flung back sideways,
his right fist clenched low and ready from a curve of the elbow. It
swung heavy as a mallet by his thigh. Janet got to her knees and came
shuffling across the floor on them, though her dress was tripping her,
clasping her outstretched hands, and sobbing in appeal, "Faither,
faither; O faither; for God's sake, faither!" She clung to him. He
unclenched his fist and lifted her away. Then he came crouching and
quivering across the floor slowly, a gleaming devilry in the eyes that
devoured his son. His hands were like outstretched claws, and shivered
with each shiver of the voice that moaned, through set teeth, "What do
ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?... What do ye think I mean to do wi'
ye now?... Ye damned sorrow and disgrace that ye are, what do ye think I
mean to do wi' ye now?"

"Run, John!" screamed Mrs. Gourlay, leaping to her feet. With a hunted
cry young Gourlay sprang to the door. So great had been the fixity of
Gourlay's wrath, so tense had he been in one direction, as he moved
slowly on his prey, that he could not leap to prevent him. As John
plunged into the cool, soft darkness, his mother's "Thank God!" rang
past him on the night.

His immediate feeling was of coolness and width and spaciousness, in
contrast with the hot grinding hostility that had bored so closely in on
him for the last hour. He felt the benignness of the darkened heavens. A
tag of some forgotten poem he had read came back to his mind, and,
"Come, kindly night, and cover me," he muttered, with shaking lips; and
felt how true it was. My God, what a relief to be free of his father's
eyes! They had held him till his mother's voice broke the spell. They
seemed to burn him now.

What a fool he had been to face his father when empty both of food and
drink! Every man was down-hearted when he was empty. If his mother had
had time to get the tea, it would have been different; but the fire had
been out when he went in. "He wouldn't have downed me so easy if I had
had anything in me," he muttered, and his anger grew as he thought of
all he had been made to suffer. For he was still the swaggerer. Now that
the incubus of his father's tyranny no longer pressed on him directly, a
great hate rose within him for the tyrant. He would go back and have it
out when he was primed. "It's the only hame I have," he sobbed angrily
to the darkness; "I have no other place to gang till! Yes, I'll go back
and have it out with him when once I get something in me, so I will." It
was no disgrace to suck courage from the bottle for that encounter with
his father, for nobody could stand up to black Gourlay—nobody. Young
Gourlay was yielding to a peculiar fatalism of minds diseased: all that
affects them seems different from all that affects everybody else; they
are even proud of their separate and peculiar doom. Young Gourlay not
thought but felt it—he was different from everybody else. The heavens
had cursed nobody else with such a terrible sire. It was no cowardice to
fill yourself with drink before you faced him.

A drunkard will howl you an obscene chorus the moment after he has wept
about his dead child. For a mind in the delirium of drink is no longer a
coherent whole, but a heap of shattered bits, which it shows one after
the other to the world. Hence the many transformations of that
semi-madness, and their quick variety. Young Gourlay was showing them
now. His had always been a wandering mind, deficient in application and
control, and as he neared his final collapse it became more and more
variable, the prey of each momentary thought. In a short five minutes of
time he had been alive to the beauty of the darkness, cowering before
the memory of his father's eyes, sobbing in self-pity and angry resolve,
shaking in terror—indeed he was shaking now. But his vanity came
uppermost. As he neared the Red Lion he stopped suddenly, and the
darkness seemed on fire against his cheeks. He would have to face
curious eyes, he reflected. It was from the Red Lion he and Aird had
started so grandly in the autumn. It would never do to come slinking
back like a whipped cur; he must carry it off bravely in case the usual
busybodies should be gathered round the bar. So with his coat flapping
lordly on either side of him, his hands deep in his trousers pockets,
and his hat on the back of his head, he drove at the swing-doors with an
outshot chest, and entered with a "breenge." But for all his swagger he
must have had a face like death, for there was a cry among the idlers. A
man breathed, "My God! What's the matter?" With shaking knees Gourlay
advanced to the bar, and, "For God's sake, Aggie," he whispered, "give
me a Kinblythmont!"

It went at a gulp.

"Another!" he gasped, like a man dying of thirst, whom his first sip
maddens for more. "Another! Another!"

He had tossed the other down his burning throat when Deacon Allardyce
came in.

He knew his man the moment he set eyes on him, but, standing at the
door, he arched his hand above his brow, as you do in gazing at a dear
unexpected friend, whom you pretend not to be quite sure of, so
surprised and pleased are you to see him there.

"Ith it Dyohn?" he cried. "It
ith
Dyohn!" And he toddled forward with
outstretched hand. "Man Dyohn!" he said again, as if he could scarce
believe the good news, and he waggled the other's hand up and down, with
both his own clasped over it. "I'm proud to thee you, thir; I am that.
And tho you're won hame, ay! Im-phm! And how are ye tummin on?"

"Oh,
I
'm all right, Deacon," said Gourlay with a silly laugh. "Have a
wet?" The whisky had begun to warm him.

"A wha-at?" said the Deacon, blinking in a puzzled fashion with his
bleary old eyes.

"A dram—a drink—a drop o' the Auld Kirk," said Gourlay, with a
stertorous laugh down through his nostrils.

"Hi! hi!" laughed the Deacon in his best falsetto. "Ith that what ye
call it up in Embro? A wet, ay! Ah, well, maybe I will take a little
drope, theeing you're tho ready wi' your offer."

They drank together.

"Aggie, fill me a mutchkin when you're at it," said Gourlay to the
pretty barmaid with the curly hair. He had spent many an hour with her
last summer in the bar. The four big whiskies he had swallowed in the
last half-hour were singing in him now, and he blinked at her drunkenly.

There was a scarlet ribbon on her dark curls, coquettish, vivid, and
Gourlay stared at it dreamily, partly in a drunken daze, and partly
because a striking colour always brought a musing and self-forgetting
look within his eyes. All his life he used to stare at things dreamily,
and come to himself with a start when spoken to. He forgot himself now.

"Aggie," he said, and put his hand out to hers clumsily where it rested
on the counter—"Aggie, that ribbon's infernal bonny on your dark hair!"

She tossed her head, and perked away from him on her little high heels.
Him, indeed!—the drunkard! She wanted none of his compliments!

There were half a dozen in the place by this time, and they all stared
with greedy eyes. "That's young Gourlay—him that was
expelled
," was
heard, the last an emphatic whisper, with round eyes of awe at the
offence that must have merited such punishment. "
Expelled
, mind
ye!"—with a round shake of the head. "Watch Allardyce. We'll see fun."

"What's this 'expelled' is, now?" said John Toodle, with a very
considering look and tone in his uplifted face—"properly speaking, that
is," he added, implying that of course he knew the word in its ordinary
sense, but was not sure of it "properly speaking."

"Flung oot," said Drucken Wabster, speaking from the fullness of his own
experience.

"Whisht!" said a third. "Here's Tam Brodie. Watch what
he
does."

The entrance of Brodie spoiled sport for the Deacon. He had nothing of
that malicious
finesse
that made Allardyce a genius at nicking men on
the raw. He went straight to his work, stabbing like an awl.

"Hal-lo!" he cried, pausing with contempt in the middle of the word,
when he saw young Gourlay. "Hal-lo!
You
here!—Brig o' the Mains,
miss, if
you
please.—Ay, man! God, you've been making a name up in
Embro. I hear you stood up till him gey weel," and he winked openly to
those around.

Young Gourlay's maddened nature broke at the insult. "Damn you," he
screamed, "leave
me
alone, will you? I have done nothing to
you
,
have I?"

Brodie stared at him across his suspended whisky glass, an easy and
assured contempt curling his lip. "Don't greet owre't, my bairn," said
he, and even as he spoke John's glass shivered on his grinning teeth.
Brodie leapt on him, lifted him, and sent him flying.

"That's a game of your father's, you damned dog," he roared. "But
there's mair than him can play the game!"

"Canny, my freendth, canny!" piped Allardyce, who was vexed at a fine
chance for his peculiar craft being spoiled by mere brutality of
handling. All this was most inartistic. Brodie never had the fine
stroke.

Gourlay picked himself bleeding from the floor, and holding a
handkerchief to his mouth, plunged headlong from the room. He heard the
derisive roar that came after him stop, strangled by the sharp swing-to
of the door. But it seemed to echo in his burning ears as he strode
madly on through the darkness. He uncorked his mutchkin and drank it
like water. His swollen lip smarted at first, but he drank till it was a
mere dead lump to his tongue, and he could not feel the whisky on the
wound.

His mind at first was a burning whirl through drink and rage, with
nothing determined and nothing definite. But thought began to shape
itself. In a vast vague circle of consciousness his mind seemed to sit
in the centre and think with preternatural clearness. Though all around
was whirling and confused, drink had endowed some inner eye of the brain
with unnatural swift vividness. Far within the humming circle of his
mind he saw an instant and terrible revenge on Brodie, acted it, and
lived it now. His desires were murderers, and he let them slip, gloating
in the cruelties that hot fancy wreaked upon his enemy. Then he suddenly
remembered his father. A rush of fiery blood seemed to drench all his
body as he thought of what had passed between them. "But, by Heaven," he
swore, as he threw away his empty bottle, "he won't use me like that
another time; I have blood in me now." His maddened fancy began building
a new scene, with the same actors, the same conditions, as the other,
but an issue gloriously diverse. With vicious delight he heard his
father use the same sneers, the same gibes, the same brutalities; then
he turned suddenly and had him under foot, kicking, bludgeoning,
stamping the life out. He would do it, by Heaven, he would do it! The
memory of what had happened came fierily back, and made the pressing
darkness burn. His wrath was brimming on the edge, ready to burst, and
he felt proudly that it would no longer ebb in fear. Whisky had killed
fear, and left a hysterical madman, all the more dangerous because he
was so weak. Let his father try it on now; he was ready for him!