The House With the Green Shutters (2 page)

It had been a big morning, he felt. It was the first time for many a
year that all his men, quarrymen and carriers, carters of cheese and
carters of grain, had led their teams down the brae together in the full
view of his rivals. "I hope they liked it!" he thought, and he nodded
several times at the town beneath his feet, with a slow up-and-down
motion of the head, like a man nodding grimly to his beaten enemy. It
was as if he said, "See what I have done to ye!"

Only a man of Gourlay's brute force of character could have kept all the
carrying trade of Barbie in his own hands. Even in these days of
railways, nearly every parish has a pair of carriers at the least,
journeying once or twice a week to the nearest town. In the days when
Gourlay was the great man of Barbie, railways were only beginning to
thrust themselves among the quiet hills, and the bulk of inland commerce
was still being drawn by horses along the country roads. Yet Gourlay was
the only carrier in the town. The wonder is diminished when we remember
that it had been a decaying burgh for thirty years, and that its trade,
at the best of times, was of meagre volume. Even so, it was astonishing
that he should be the only carrier. If you asked the natives how he did
it, "Ou," they said, "he makes the one hand wash the other, doan't ye
know?"—meaning thereby that he had so many horses travelling on his own
business, that he could afford to carry other people's goods at rates
that must cripple his rivals.

"But that's very stupid, surely," said a visitor once, who thought of
entering into competition. "It's cutting off his nose to spite his face!
Why is he so anxious to be the only carrier in Barbie that he carries
stuff for next to noathing the moment another man tries to work the
roads? It's a daft-like thing to do!"

"To be sure is't, to be sure is't! Just the stupeedity o' spite! Oh,
there are times when Gourlay makes little or noathing from the carrying;
but then, ye see, it gies him a fine chance to annoy folk! If you ask
him to bring ye ocht, 'Oh,' he growls, 'I'll see if it suits my own
convenience.' And ye have to be content. He has made so much money of
late that the pride of him's not to be endured."

It was not the insolence of sudden wealth, however, that made Gourlay
haughty to his neighbours; it was a repressiveness natural to the man
and a fierce contempt of their scoffing envy. But it was true that he
had made large sums of money during recent years. From his father (who
had risen in the world) he inherited a fine trade in cheese; also the
carrying to Skeighan on the one side and Fleckie on the other. When he
married Miss Richmond of Tenshillingland, he started as a corn broker
with the snug dowry that she brought him. Then, greatly to his own
benefit, he succeeded in establishing a valuable connection with
Templandmuir.

It was partly by sheer impact of character that Gourlay obtained his
ascendency over hearty and careless Templandmuir, and partly by a bluff
joviality which he—so little cunning in other things—knew to affect
among the petty lairds. The man you saw trying to be jocose with
Templandmuir was a very different being from the autocrat who "downed"
his fellows in the town. It was all "How are ye the day, Templandmuir?"
and "How d'ye doo-oo, Mr. Gourlay?" and the immediate production of the
big decanter.

More than ten years ago now Templandmuir gave this fine, dour upstanding
friend of his a twelve-year tack of the Red Quarry, and that was the
making of Gourlay. The quarry yielded the best building stone in a
circuit of thirty miles, easy to work and hard against wind and weather.
When the main line went north through Skeighan and Poltandie, there was
a great deal of building on the far side, and Gourlay simply coined the
money. He could not have exhausted the quarry had he tried—he would
have had to howk down a hill—but he took thousands of loads from it for
the Skeighan folk; and the commission he paid the laird on each was
ridiculously small. He built wooden stables out on Templandmuir's
estate—the Templar had seven hundred acres of hill land—and it was
there the quarry horses generally stood. It was only rarely—once in two
years, perhaps—that they came into the House with the Green Shutters.
Last Saturday they had brought several loads of stuff for Gourlay's own
use, and that is why they were present at the great procession on the
Monday following.

It was their feeling that Gourlay's success was out of all proportion to
his merits that made other great-men-in-a-small-way so bitter against
him. They were an able lot, and scarce one but possessed fifty times his
weight of brain. Yet he had the big way of doing, though most of them
were well enough to pass. Had they not been aware of his stupidity, they
would never have minded his triumphs in the countryside; but they felt
it with a sense of personal defeat that he—the donkey, as they thought
him—should scoop every chance that was going, and leave them, the
long-headed ones, still muddling in their old concerns. They consoled
themselves with sneers, he retorted with brutal scorn, and the feud kept
increasing between them.

They were standing at the Cross, to enjoy their Saturday at e'en, when
Gourlay's "quarriers"—as the quarry horses had been named—came through
the town last week-end. There were groups of bodies in the streets,
washed from toil to enjoy the quiet air; dandering slowly or gossiping
at ease; and they all turned to watch the quarriers stepping bravely up,
their heads tossing to the hill. The big-men-in-a-small-way glowered and
said nothing.

"I wouldn't mind," said Sandy Toddle at last—"I wouldn't mind if he
weren't such a demned ess!"

"Ess?" said the Deacon unpleasantly. He puckered his brow and blinked,
pretending not to understand.

"Oh, a cuddy, ye know," said Toddle, colouring.

"Gourlay'th stupid enough," lisped the Deacon; "we all know that. But
there'th one thing to be said on hith behalf. He's not such a 'demned
ess' as to try and thpeak fancy English!"

When the Deacon was not afraid of a man he stabbed him straight; when he
was afraid of him he stabbed him on the sly. He was annoyed by the
passing of Gourlay's carts, and he took it out of Sandy Toddle.

"It's extr'ornar!" blurted the Provost (who was a man of brosy speech,
large-mouthed and fat of utterance). "It's extr'ornar. Yass, it's
extr'ornar! I mean the luck of that man—for gumption he has noan, noan
whatever! But if the railway came hereaway I wager Gourlay would go
down," he added, less in certainty of knowledge than as prophet of the
thing desired. "I wager he'd go down, sirs."

"Likely enough," said Sandy Toddle; "he wouldn't be quick enough to jump
at the new way of doing."

"Moar than that!" cried the Provost, spite sharpening his insight, "moar
than that—he'd be owre dour to abandon the auld way.
I
'm talling ye.
He would just be left entirely! It's only those, like myself, who
approach him on the town's affairs that know the full extent of his
stupeedity."

"Oh, he's a 'demned ess,'" said the Deacon, rubbing it into Toddle and
Gourlay at the same time.

"A-ah, but then, ye see, he has the abeelity that comes from character,"
said Johnny Coe, who was a sage philosopher. "For there are two kinds of
abeelity, don't ye understa-and? There's a scattered abeelity that's of
no use! Auld Randie Donaldson was good at fifty different things, and he
died in the poorhouse! There's a dour kind of abeelity, though, that has
no cleverness, but just gangs tramping on; and that's—"

"The easiest beaten by a flank attack," said the Deacon, snubbing him.

With the sudden start of a man roused from a daydream Gourlay turned
from the green gate and entered the yard. Jock Gilmour, the "orra" man,
was washing down the legs of a horse beside the trough. It was Gourlay's
own cob, which he used for driving round the countryside. It was a
black—Gourlay "made a point" of driving with a black. "The brown for
sturdiness, the black for speed," he would say, making a maxim of his
whim to give it the sanction of a higher law.

Gilmour was in a wild temper because he had been forced to get up at
five o'clock in order to turn several hundred cheeses, to prevent them
bulging out of shape owing to the heat, and so becoming cracked and
spoiled. He did not raise his head at his master's approach. And his
head being bent, the eye was attracted to a patent leather collar which
he wore, glazed with black and red stripes. It is a collar much affected
by ploughmen, because a dip in the horse-trough once a month suffices
for its washing. Between the striped collar and his hair (as he stooped)
the sunburnt redness of his neck struck the eye vividly—the cropped
fair hairs on it showing whitish on the red skin.

The horse quivered as the cold water swashed about its legs, and turned
playfully to bite its groom. Gilmour, still stooping, dug his elbow up
beneath its ribs. The animal wheeled in anger, but Gilmour ran to its
head with most manful blasphemy, and led it to the stable door. The off
hind leg was still unwashed.

"Has the horse but the three legs?" said Gourlay suavely.

Gilmour brought the horse back to the trough, muttering sullenly.

"Were ye saying anything?" said Gourlay. "
Eih?
"

Gilmour sulked out and said nothing; and his master smiled grimly at the
sudden redness that swelled his neck and ears to the verge of bursting.

A boy, standing in his shirt and trousers at an open window of the house
above, had looked down at the scene with craning interest—big-eyed. He
had been alive to every turn and phase of it—the horse's quiver of
delight and fear, his skittishness, the groom's ill-temper, and
Gourlay's grinding will. Eh, but his father was a caution! How easy he
had downed Jock Gilmour! The boy was afraid of his father himself, but
he liked to see him send other folk to the right about. For he was John
Gourlay, too. Hokey, but his father could down them!

Mr. Gourlay passed on to the inner yard, which was close to the scullery
door. The paved little court, within its high wooden walls, was
curiously fresh and clean. A cock-pigeon strutted round, puffing his
gleaming breast and
rooketty-cooing
in the sun. Large, clear drops
fell slowly from the spout of a wooden pump, and splashed upon a flat
stone. The place seemed to enfold the stillness. There was a sense of
inclusion and peace.

There is a distinct pleasure to the eye in a quiet brick court where
everything is fresh and prim; in sunny weather you can lounge in a room
and watch it through an open door, in a kind of lazy dream. The boy,
standing at the window above to let the fresh air blow round his neck,
was alive to that pleasure; he was intensely conscious of the pigeon
swelling in its bravery, of the clean yard, the dripping pump, and the
great stillness. His father on the step beneath had a different pleasure
in the sight. The fresh indolence of morning was round him too, but it
was more than that that kept him gazing in idle happiness. He was
delighting in the sense of his own property around him, the most
substantial pleasure possible to man. His feeling, deep though it was,
was quite vague and inarticulate. If you had asked Gourlay what he was
thinking of he could not have told you, even if he had been willing to
answer you civilly—which is most unlikely. Yet his whole being,
physical and mental (physical, indeed, rather than mental), was
surcharged with the feeling that the fine buildings around him were his,
that he had won them by his own effort, and built them large and
significant before the world. He was lapped in the thought of it.

All men are suffused with that quiet pride in looking at the houses and
lands which they have won by their endeavours—in looking at the houses
more than at the lands, for the house which a man has built seems to
express his character and stand for him before the world, as a sign of
his success. It is more personal than cold acres, stamped with an
individuality. All men know that soothing pride in the contemplation of
their own property. But in Gourlay's sense of property there was another
element—an element peculiar to itself, which endowed it with its
warmest glow. Conscious always that he was at a disadvantage among his
cleverer neighbours, who could achieve a civic eminence denied to him,
he felt nevertheless that there was one means, a material means, by
which he could hold his own and reassert himself—by the bravery of his
business, namely, and all the appointments thereof, among which his
dwelling was the chief. That was why he had spent so much money on the
house. That was why he had such keen delight in surveying it. Every time
he looked at the place he had a sense of triumph over what he knew in
his bones to be an adverse public opinion. There was anger in his
pleasure, and the pleasure that is mixed with anger often gives the
keenest thrill. It is the delight of triumph in spite of opposition.
Gourlay's house was a material expression of that delight, stood for it
in stone and lime.

It was not that he reasoned deliberately when he built the house. But
every improvement that he made—and he was always spending money on
improvements—had for its secret motive a more or less vague desire to
score off his rivals. "
That
'll be a slap in the face to the Provost!"
he smiled, when he planted his great mound of shrubs. "There's noathing
like
that
about the Provost's! Ha, ha!"

Encased as he was in his hard and insensitive nature, he was not the man
who in new surroundings would be quick to every whisper of opinion. But
he had been born and bred in Barbie, and he knew his townsmen—oh yes,
he knew them. He knew they laughed because he had no gift of the gab,
and could never be Provost, or Bailie, or Elder, or even Chairman of the
Gasworks! Oh, verra well, verra well; let Connal and Brodie and
Allardyce have the talk, and manage the town's affairs (he was damned if
they should manage his!)—he, for his part, preferred the substantial
reality. He could never aspire to the provostship, but a man with a
house like that, he was fain to think, could afford to do without it. Oh
yes; he was of opinion he could do without it! It had run him short of
cash to build the place so big and braw, but, Lord! it was worth it.
There wasn't a man in the town who had such accommodation!