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!
And so, gradually, his dwelling had come to be a passion of Gourlay's
life. It was a by-word in the place that if ever his ghost was seen, it
would be haunting the House with the Green Shutters. Deacon Allardyce,
trying to make a phrase with him, once quoted the saying in his
presence. "Likely enough!" said Gourlay. "It's only reasonable I should
prefer my own house to you rabble in the graveyard!"
Both in appearance and position the house was a worthy counterpart of
its owner. It was a substantial two-story dwelling, planted firm and
gawcey on a little natural terrace that projected a considerable
distance into the Square. At the foot of the steep little bank shelving
to the terrace ran a stone wall, of no great height, and the iron
railings it uplifted were no higher than the sward within. Thus the
whole house was bare to the view from the ground up, nothing in front to
screen its admirable qualities. From each corner, behind, flanking walls
went out to the right and left, and hid the yard and the granaries. In
front of these walls the dwelling seemed to thrust itself out for
notice. It took the eye of a stranger the moment he entered the Square.
"Whose place is that?" was his natural question. A house that challenges
regard in that way should have a gallant bravery in its look; if its
aspect be mean, its assertive position but directs the eye to its
infirmities. There is something pathetic about a tall, cold, barn-like
house set high upon a brae; it cannot hide its naked shame; it thrusts
its ugliness dumbly on your notice, a manifest blotch upon the world, a
place for the winds to whistle round. But Gourlay's house was worthy its
commanding station. A little dour and blunt in the outlines like Gourlay
himself, it drew and satisfied your eye as he did.
And its position, "cockit up there on the brae," made it the theme of
constant remark--to men because of the tyrant who owned it, and to women
because of the poor woman who mismanaged its affairs. "'Deed, I don't
wonder that gurly Gourlay, as they ca' him, has an ill temper," said the
gossips gathered at the pump, with their big, bare arms akimbo;
"whatever led him to marry that dishclout of a woman clean beats _me_! I
never could make head nor tail o't!" As for the men, they twisted every
item about Gourlay and his domicile into fresh matter of assailment.
"What's the news?" asked one, returning from a long absence; to whom
the smith, after smoking in silence for five minutes, said, "Gourlay has
got new rones!" "Ha--ay, man, Gourlay has got new rones!" buzzed the
visitor; and then their eyes, diminished in mirth, twinkled at each
other from out their ruddy wrinkles, as if wit had volleyed between
them. In short, the House with the Green Shutters was on every
tongue--and with a scoff in the voice, if possible.