Without a word of thanks for the money, Peter knocked the mould off his
heavy boots, striking one against the other clumsily, and shuffled away
across the bare soil. But when he had gone twenty yards he stopped, and
came back slowly. "Good-bye, sir," he said with a rueful smile, and held
out his hand.
Gourlay gripped it. "Good-bye, Peter! good-bye; damn ye, man, good-bye!"
Peter wondered vaguely why he was sworn at. But he felt that it was not
in anger. He still clung to his master's hand. "I've been fifty year wi'
the Gourlays," said he. "Ay, ay; and this, it seems, is the end o't."
"Oh, gang away!" cried Gourlay, "gang away, man!" And Peter went away.
Gourlay went out to the big green gate where he had often stood in his
pride, and watched his old servant going down the street. Peter was so
bowed that the back of his velveteen coat was halfway up his spine, and
the bulging pockets at the corners were midway down his thighs. Gourlay
had seen the fact a thousand times, but it never gripped him before. He
stared till Peter disappeared round the Bend o' the Brae.
"Ay, ay," said he, "ay, ay. There goes the last o' them."
It was a final run of ill-luck that brought Gourlay to this desperate
pass. When everything seemed to go against him he tried several
speculations, with a gambler's hope that they might do well, and
retrieve the situation. He abandoned the sensible direction of affairs,
that is, and trusted entirely to chance, as men are apt to do when
despairing. And chance betrayed him. He found himself of a sudden at the
end of his resources.
Through all his troubles his one consolation was the fact that he had
sent John to the University. That was something saved from the wreck, at
any rate. More and more, as his other supports fell away, Gourlay
attached himself to the future of his son. It became the sheet-anchor of
his hopes. If he had remained a prosperous man, John's success would
have been merely incidental, something to disconsider in speech, at
least, however pleased he might have been at heart. But now it was the
whole of life to him. For one thing, the son's success would justify the
father's past and prevent it being quite useless; it would have produced
a minister, a successful man, one of an esteemed profession. Again, that
success would be a salve to Gourlay's wounded pride; the Gourlays would
show Barbie they could flourish yet, in spite of their present downcome.
Thus, in the collapse of his fortunes, the son grew all-important in the
father's eyes. Nor did his own poverty seem to him a just bar to his
son's prosperity. "I have put him through his Arts," thought Gourlay;
"surely he can do the rest himsell. Lots of young chaps, when they
warstle through their Arts, teach the sons of swells to get a little
money to gang through Diveenity. My boy can surely do the like!" Again
and again, as Gourlay felt himself slipping under in the world of
Barbie, his hopes turned to John in Edinburgh. If that boy would only
hurry up and get through, to make a hame for the lassie and the auld
wife!
Young Gourlay spent that winter in Edinburgh pretty much as he had spent
the last. Last winter, however, it was simply a weak need for
companionship that drew him to the Howff. This winter it was more: it
was the need of a formed habit that must have its wonted satisfaction.
He had a further impulse to conviviality now. It had become a habit that
compelled him.
The diversions of some men are merely subsidiary to their lives,
externals easy to be dropped; with others they usurp the man. They usurp
a life when it is never happy away from them, when in the midst of other
occupations absent pleasures rise vivid to the mind, with an
irresistible call. Young Gourlay's too-seeing imagination, always
visioning absent delights, combined with his weakness of will, never
gripping to the work before him, to make him hate his lonely studies and
long for the jolly company of his friends. He never opened his books of
an evening but he thought to himself, "I wonder what they're doing at
the Howff to-night?" At once he visualized the scene, imagined every
detail, saw them in their jovial hours. And, seeing them so happy, he
longed to be with them. On that night, long ago, when his father ordered
him to College, his cowardly and too vivid mind thought of the ploys the
fellows would be having along the Barbie roads, while he was mewed up in
Edinburgh. He saw the Barbie rollickers in his mind's eye, and the
student in his lonely rooms, and contrasted them mournfully. So now,
every night, he saw the cosy companions in their Howff, and shivered at
his own isolation. He felt a tugging at his heart to be off and join
them. And his will was so weak that, nine times out of ten, he made no
resistance to the impulse.
He had always a feeling of depression when he must sit down to his
books. It was the start that gravelled him. He would look round his room
and hate it, mutter "Damn it, I must work;" and then, with a heavy sigh,
would seat himself before an outspread volume on the table, tugging the
hair on a puckered forehead. Sometimes the depression left him, when he
buckled to his work; as his mind became occupied with other things the
vision of the Howff was expelled. Usually, however, the stiffness of his
brains made the reading drag heavily, and he rarely attained the
sufficing happiness of a student eager and engrossed. At the end of ten
minutes he would be gaping across the table, and wondering what they
were doing at the Howff. "Will Logan be singing 'Tam Glen'? Or is
Gillespie fiddling Highland tunes, by Jing, with his elbow going it
merrily? Lord! I would like to hear 'Miss Drummond o' Perth' or 'Gray
Daylicht'—they might buck me up a bit. I'll just slip out for ten
minutes, to see what they're doing, and be back directly." He came back
at two in the morning, staggering.
On a bleak spring evening, near the end of February, young Gourlay had
gone to the Howff, to escape the shuddering misery of the streets. It
was that treacherous spring weather which blights. Only two days ago the
air had been sluggish and balmy; now an easterly wind nipped the gray
city, naked and bare. There was light enough, with the lengthening days,
to see plainly the rawness of the world. There were cold yellow gleams
in windows fronting a lonely west. Uncertain little puffs of wind came
swirling round corners, and made dust and pieces of dirty white paper
gyrate on the roads. Prosperous old gentlemen pacing home, rotund in
their buttoned-up coats, had clear drops at the end of their noses.
Sometimes they stopped—their trousers legs flapping behind them—and
trumpeted loudly into red silk handkerchiefs. Young Gourlay had fled the
streets. It was the kind of night that made him cower.
By eight o'clock, however, he was merry with the barley-bree, and making
a butt of himself to amuse the company. He was not quick-witted enough
to banter a comrade readily, nor hardy enough to essay it unprovoked; on
the other hand, his swaggering love of notice impelled him to some form
of talk that would attract attention. So he made a point of always
coming with daft stories of things comic that befell him—at least, he
said they did. But if his efforts were greeted with too loud a roar,
implying not only appreciation of the stories, but also a contempt for
the man who could tell them of himself, his sensitive vanity was
immediately wounded, and he swelled with sulky anger. And the moment
after he would splurge and bluster to reassert his dignity.
"I remember when I was a boy," he hiccupped, "I had a pet goose at
home."
There was a titter at the queer beginning.
"I was to get the price of it for myself, and so when Christmas drew
near I went to old MacFarlane, the poulterer in Skeighan. 'Will you buy
a goose?' said I. 'Are ye for sale, my man?' was his answer."
Armstrong flung back his head and roared, prolonging the loud
ho-ho!
through his big nose and open mouth long after the impulse to honest
laughter was exhausted. He always laughed with false loudness, to
indicate his own superiority, when he thought a man had been guilty of a
public silliness. The laugh was meant to show the company how far above
such folly was Mr. Armstrong.
Gourlay scowled. "Damn Armstrong!" he thought, "what did he yell like
that for? Does he think I didn't see the point of the joke against
myself? Would I have told it if I hadn't? This is what comes of being
sensitive. I'm always too sensitive! I felt there was an awkward
silence, and I told a story against myself to dispel it in fun, and this
is what I get for't. Curse the big brute! he thinks I have given myself
away. But I'll show him!"
He was already mellow, but he took another swig to hearten him, as was
his habit.
"There's a damned sight too much yell about your laugh, Armstrong," he
said, truly enough, getting a courage from his anger and the drink. "No
gentleman laughs like that."
"'
Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est
,'" said Tarmillan, who was on one
of his rare visits to the Howff. He was too busy and too wise a man to
frequent it greatly.
Armstrong blushed; and Gourlay grew big and brave, in the backing of the
great Tarmillan. He took another swig on the strength of it. But his
resentment was still surging. When Tarmillan went, and the three
students were left by themselves, Gourlay continued to nag and bluster,
for that blatant laugh of Armstrong's rankled in his mind.
"I saw Hepburn in the street to-day," said Gillespie, by way of a
diversion.
"Who's Hepburn?" snapped Gourlay.
"Oh, don't you remember? He's the big Border chap who got into a row
with auld Tam on the day you won your prize essay." (That should surely
appease the fool, thought Gillespie.) "It was only for the fun of the
thing Hepburn was at College, for he has lots of money; and, here, he
never apologized to Tam! He said he would go down first."
"He was damned right," spluttered Gourlay. "Some of these profs. think
too much of themselves. They wouldn't bully
me
! There's good stuff in
the Gourlays," he went on with a meaning look at Armstrong; "they're not
to be scoffed at. I would stand insolence from no man."
"Ay, man," said Armstrong, "would you face up to a professor?"
"Wouldn't I?" said the tipsy youth; "and to you, too, if you went too
far."
He became so quarrelsome as the night went on that his comrades filled
him up with drink, in the hope of deadening his ruffled sensibilities.
It was, "Yes, yes, Jack; but never mind about that! Have another drink,
just to show there's no ill-feeling among friends."
When they left the Howff they went to Gillespie's and drank more, and
after that they roamed about the town. At two in the morning the other
two brought Gourlay to his door. He was assuring Armstrong he was not a
gentleman.
When he went to bed the fancied insult he had suffered swelled to
monstrous proportions in his fevered brain. Did Armstrong despise him?
The thought was poison! He lay in brooding anger, and his mind was
fluent in wrathful harangues in some imaginary encounter of the future,
in which he was a glorious victor. He flowed in eloquent scorn of
Armstrong and his ways. If I could talk like this always, he thought,
what a fellow I would be! He seemed gifted with uncanny insight into
Armstrong's character. He noted every weakness in the rushing whirl of
his thoughts, set them in order one by one, saw himself laying bare the
man with savage glee when next they should encounter. He would whiten
the big brute's face by showing he had probed him to the quick. Just let
him laugh at me again, thought Gourlay, and I'll analyze each mean quirk
of his dirty soul to him!
The drink was dying in him now, for the trio had walked for more than an
hour through the open air when they left Gillespie's rooms. The
stupefaction of alcohol was gone, leaving his brain morbidly alive. He
was anxious to sleep, but drowsy dullness kept away. His mind began to
visualize of its own accord, independent of his will; and, one after
another, a crowd of pictures rose vivid in the darkness of his brain. He
saw them as plainly as you see this page, but with a different
clearness—for they seemed unnatural, belonging to a morbid world. Nor
did one suggest the other; there was no connection between them; each
came vivid of its own accord.
First it was an old pit-frame on a barren moor, gaunt, against the
yellow west. Gourlay saw bars of iron, left when the pit was abandoned,
reddened by the rain; and the mounds of rubbish, and the scattered
bricks, and the rusty clinkers from the furnace, and the melancholy
shining pools. A four-wheeled old trolley had lost two of its wheels,
and was tilted at a slant, one square end of it resting on the ground.
"Why do I think of an old pit?" he thought angrily; "curse it! why can't
I sleep?"
Next moment he was gazing at a ruined castle, its mouldering walls
mounded atop with decaying rubble; from a loose crumb of mortar a long,
thin film of the spider's weaving stretched bellying away to a tall weed
waving on the crazy brink. Gourlay saw its glisten in the wind. He saw
each crack in the wall, each stain of lichen; a myriad details stamped
themselves together on his raw mind. Then a constant procession of
figures passed across the inner curtain of his closed eyes. Each figure
was cowled; but when it came directly opposite, it turned and looked at
him with a white face. "Stop, stop!" cried his mind; "I don't want to
think of you, I don't want to think of you, I don't want to think of
you! Go away!" But as they came of themselves, so they went of
themselves. He could not banish them.
He turned on his side, but a hundred other pictures pursued him. From
an inland hollow he saw the great dawn flooding up from the sea, over a
sharp line of cliff, wave after wave of brilliance surging up the
heavens. The landward slope of the cliff was gray with dew. The inland
hollow was full of little fields, divided by stone walls, and he could
not have recalled the fields round Barbie with half their distinctness.
For a moment they possessed his brain. Then an autumn wood rose on his
vision. He was gazing down a vista of yellow leaves; a long, deep
slanting cleft, framed in lit foliage. Leaves, leaves; everywhere yellow
leaves, luminous, burning. He saw them falling through the lucid air.
The scene was as vivid as fire to his brain, though of magic stillness.
Then the foliage changed suddenly to great serpents twined about the
boughs. Their colours were of monstrous beauty. They glistened as they
moved.