The scion of the house of Gourlay was a most untravelled sprig when his
father packed him off to the University. Of the world beyond Skeighan he
had no idea. Repression of his children's wishes to see something of the
world was a feature of Gourlay's tyranny, less for the sake of the money
which a trip might cost (though that counted for something in his
refusal) than for the sake of asserting his authority. "Wants to gang to
Fechars, indeed! Let him bide at home," he would growl; and at home the
youngster had to bide. This had been the more irksome to John since most
of his companions in the town were beginning to peer out, with their
mammies and daddies to encourage them. To give their cubs a "cast o' the
world" was a rule with the potentates of Barbie; once or twice a year
young Hopeful was allowed to accompany his sire to Fechars or Poltandie,
or--oh, rare joy!--to the city on the Clyde. To go farther, and get the
length of Edinburgh, was dangerous, because you came back with a halo of
glory round your head which banded your fellows together in a common
attack on your pretensions. It was his lack of pretension to travel,
however, that banded them against young Gourlay. "Gunk" and "chaw" are
the Scots for a bitter and envious disappointment which shows itself in
face and eyes. Young Gourlay could never conceal that envious look when
he heard of a glory which he did not share; and the youngsters noted his
weakness with the unerring precision of the urchin to mark simple
difference of character. Now the boy presses fiendishly on an intimate
discovery in the nature of his friends, both because it gives him a new
and delightful feeling of power over them, and also because he has not
learned charity from a sense of his deficiencies, the brave ruffian
having none. He is always coming back to probe the raw place, and Barbie
boys were always coming back to "do a gunk" and "play a chaw" on young
Gourlay by boasting their knowledge of the world, winking at each other
the while to observe his grinning anger. They were large on the wonders
they had seen and the places they had been to, while he grew small (and
they saw it) in envy of their superiority. Even Swipey Broon had a crow
at him. For Swipey had journeyed in the company of his father to far-off
Fechars, yea even to the groset-fair, and came back with an epic tale of
his adventures. He had been in fifteen taverns, and one hotel (a
temperance hotel, where old Brown bashed the proprietor for refusing to
supply him gin); one Pepper's Ghost; one Wild Beasts' Show; one
Exhibition of the Fattest Woman on the Earth; also in the precincts of
one jail, where Mr. Patrick Brown was cruelly incarcerate for wiping the
floor with the cold refuser of the gin. "Criffens! Fechars!" said Swipey
for a twelvemonth after, stunned by the mere recollection of that home
of the glories of the earth. And then he would begin to expatiate for
the benefit of young Gourlay--for Swipey, though his name was the base
Teutonic Brown, had a Celtic contempt for brute facts that cripple the
imperial mind. So well did he expatiate that young Gourlay would slink
home to his mother and say, "Yah, even Swipey Broon has been to Fechars,
though my faither 'ull no allow _me_!" "Never mind, dear," she would
soothe him; "when once you're in the business, you'll gang a'where. And
nut wan o' them has sic a business to gang intill!"
But though he longed to go here and there for a day, that he might be
able to boast of it at home, young Gourlay felt that leaving Barbie for
good would be a cutting of his heart-strings. Each feature of it, town
and landward, was a crony of old years. In a land like Barbie, of quick
hill and dale, of tumbled wood and fell, each facet of nature has an
individuality so separate and so strong that if you live with it a
little it becomes your friend, and a memory so dear that you kiss the
thought of it in absence. The fields are not similar as pancakes; they
have their difference; each leaps to the eye with a remembered and
peculiar charm. That is why the heart of the Scot dies in flat southern
lands; he lives in a vacancy; at dawn there is no Ben Agray to nod
recognition through the mists. And that is why, when he gets north of
Carlisle, he shouts with glee as each remembered object sweeps on the
sight: yonder's the Nith with a fisherman hip-deep jigging at his rod,
and yonder's Corsoncon with the mist on his brow. It is less the
totality of the place than the individual feature that pulls at the
heart, and it was the individual feature that pulled at young Gourlay.
With intellect little or none, he had a vast, sensational experience,
and each aspect of Barbie was working in his blood and brain. Was there
ever a Cross like Barbie Cross? Was there ever a burn like the Lintie?
It was blithe and heartsome to go birling to Skeighan in the train; it
was grand to jouk round Barbie on the nichts at e'en! Even people whom
he did not know he could locate with warm sure feelings of superiority.
If a poor workman slouched past him on the road, he set him down in his
heart as one of that rotten crowd from the Weaver's Vennel or the
Tinker's Wynd. Barbie was in subjection to the mind of the son of the
important man. To dash about Barbie in a gig, with a big dog walloping
behind, his coat-collar high about his ears, and the reek of a
meerschaum pipe floating white and blue many yards behind him, jovial
and sordid nonsense about home--that had been his ideal. His father, he
thought angrily, had encouraged the ideal, and now he forbade it, like
the brute he was. From the earth in which he was rooted so deeply his
father tore him, to fling him on a world he had forbidden him to know.
His heart presaged disaster.
Old Gourlay would have scorned the sentimentality of seeing him off from
the station, and Mrs. Gourlay was too feckless to propose it for
herself. Janet had offered to convoy him, but when the afternoon came
she was down with a racking cold. He was alone as he strolled on the
platform--a youth well-groomed and well-supplied, but for once in his
life not a swaggerer, though the chance to swagger was unique. He was
pointed out as "Young Gourlay off to the College." But he had no
pleasure in the role, for his heart was in his boots.
He took the slow train to Skeighan, where he boarded the express. Few
sensational experiences were unknown to his too-impressionable mind, and
he knew the animation of railway travelling. Coming back from Skeighan
in an empty compartment on nights of the past, he had sometimes shouted
and stamped and banged the cushions till the dust flew, in mere joy of
his rush through the air; the constant rattle, the quick-repeated noise,
getting at his nerves, as they get at the nerves of savages and
Englishmen on Bank Holidays. But any animation of the kind which he felt
to-day was soon expelled by the slow uneasiness welling through his
blood. He had no eager delight in the unknown country rushing past; it
inspired him with fear. He thought with a feeble smile of what Mysie
Monk said when they took her at the age of sixty (for the first time in
her life) to the top of Milmannoch Hill. "Eh," said Mysie, looking round
her in amaze--"eh, sirs, it's a lairge place the world when you see it
all!" Gourlay smiled because he had the same thought, but feebly,
because he was cowering at the bigness of the world. Folded nooks in
the hills swept past, enclosing their lonely farms; then the open
straths, where autumnal waters gave a pale gleam to the sky. Sodden
moors stretched away in vast patient loneliness. Then a gray smear of
rain blotted the world, penning him in with his dejection. He seemed to
be rushing through unseen space, with no companion but his own
foreboding. "Where are you going to?" asked his mind, and the wheels of
the train repeated the question all the way to Edinburgh, jerking it out
in two short lines and a long one: "Where are you going to? Where are
you going to? Ha, ha, Mr. Gourlay, where are you going to?"
It was the same sensitiveness to physical impression which won him to
Barbie that repelled him from the outer world. The scenes round Barbie,
so vividly impressed, were his friends, because he had known them from
his birth; he was a somebody in their midst and had mastered their
familiarity; they were the ministers of his mind. Those other scenes
were his foes, because, realizing them morbidly in relation to himself,
he was cowed by their big indifference to him, and felt puny, a nobody
before them. And he could not pass them like more manly and more callous
minds; they came burdening in on him whether he would or no. Neither
could he get above them. Except when lording it at Barbie, he had never
a quick reaction of the mind on what he saw; it possessed him, not he
it.
About twilight, when the rain had ceased, his train was brought up with
a jerk between the stations. While the rattle and bang continued it
seemed not unnatural to young Gourlay (though depressing) to be whirling
through the darkening land; it went past like a panorama in a dream. But
in the dead pause following the noise he thought it "queer" to be
sitting here in the intense quietude and looking at a strange and
unfamiliar scene--planted in its midst by a miracle of speed, and
gazing at it closely through a window! Two ploughmen from the farmhouse
near the line were unyoking at the end of the croft; he could hear the
muddy noise ("splorroch" is the Scotch of it) made by the big hoofs on
the squashy head-rig. "Bauldy" was the name of the shorter ploughman, so
yelled to by his mate; and two of the horses were "Prince and Rab"--just
like a pair in Loranogie's stable. In the curtainless window of the
farmhouse shone a leaping flame--not the steady glow of a lamp, but the
tossing brightness of a fire--and thought he to himself, "They're
getting the porridge for the men!" He had a vision of the woman stirring
in the meal, and of the homely interior in the dancing firelight. He
wondered who the folk were, and would have liked to know them. Yes, it
was "queer," he thought, that he who left Barbie only a few hours ago
should be in intimate momentary touch with a place and people he had
never seen before. The train seemed arrested by a spell that he might
get his vivid impression.
When ensconced in his room that evening he had a brighter outlook on the
world. With the curtains drawn, and the lights burning, its shabbiness
was unrevealed. After the whirling strangeness of the day he was glad to
be in a place that was his own; here at least was a corner of earth of
which he was master; it reassured him. The firelight dancing on the tea
things was pleasant and homely, and the enclosing cosiness shut out the
black roaring world that threatened to engulf his personality. His
spirits rose, ever ready to jump at a trifle.
The morrow, however, was the first of his lugubrious time.
If he had been an able man he might have found a place in his classes to
console him. Many youngsters are conscious of a vast depression when
entering the portals of a university; they feel themselves inadequate to
cope with the wisdom of the ages garnered in the solid walls. They envy
alike the smiling sureness of the genial charlatan (to whom professors
are a set of fools), and the easy mastery of the man of brains. They
have a cowering sense of their own inefficiency. But the feeling of
uneasiness presently disappears. The first shivering dip is soon
forgotten by the hearty breaster of the waves. But ere you breast the
waves you must swim; and to swim through the sea of learning was more
than heavy-headed Gourlay could accomplish. His mind, finding no solace
in work, was left to prey upon itself.
If he had been the ass total and complete he might have loafed in the
comfortable haze which surrounds the average intelligence, and cushions
it against the world. But in Gourlay was a rawness of nerve, a
sensitiveness to physical impression, which kept him fretting and
stewing, and never allowed him to lapse on a sluggish indifference.
Though he could not understand things, he could not escape them; they
thrust themselves forward on his notice. We hear of poor genius cursed
with perceptions which it can't express; poor Gourlay was cursed with
impressions which he couldn't intellectualize. With little power of
thought, he had a vast power of observation; and as everything he
observed in Edinburgh was offensive and depressing, he was constantly
depressed--the more because he could not understand. At Barbie his life,
though equally void of mental interest, was solaced by surroundings
which he loved. In Edinburgh his surroundings were appalling to his
timid mind. There was a greengrocer's shop at the corner of the street
in which he lodged, and he never passed it without being conscious of
its trodden and decaying leaves. They were enough to make his morning
foul. The middle-aged woman, who had to handle carrots with her frozen
fingers, was less wretched than he who saw her, and thought of her after
he went by. A thousand such impressions came boring in upon his mind and
made him squirm. He could not toss them aside like the callous and
manly; he could not see them in their due relation, and think them
unimportant, like the able; they were always recurring and suggesting
woe. If he fled to his room, he was followed by his morbid sense of an
unpleasant world. He conceived a rankling hatred of the four walls
wherein he had to live. Heavy Biblical pictures, in frames of gleaming
black like the splinters of a hearse, were hung against a dark ground.
Every time Gourlay raised his head he scowled at them with eyes of
gloom. It was curious that, hating his room, he was loath to go to bed.
He got a habit of sitting till three in the morning, staring at the dead
fire in sullen apathy.
He was sitting at nine o'clock one evening, wondering if there was no
means of escape from the wretched life he had to lead, when he received
a letter from Jock Allan, asking him to come and dine.