That dinner was a turning-point in young Gourlay's career. It is lucky
that a letter describing it has fallen into the hands of the patient
chronicler. It was sent by young Jimmy Wilson to his mother. As it gives
an idea--which is slightly mistaken--of Jock Allan, and an idea--which
is very unmistakable--of young Wilson, it is here presented in the place
of pride. It were a pity not to give a human document of this kind all
the honour in one's power.
"Dear mother," said the wee sma' Scoatchman--so the hearty Allan dubbed
him--"dear mother, I just write to inform you that I've been out to a
grand dinner at Jock Allan's. He met me on Princes Street, and made a
great how-d'ye-do. 'Come out on Thursday night, and dine with me,' says
he, in his big way. So here I went out to see him. I can tell you he's a
warmer! I never saw a man eat so much in all my born days--but I suppose
he would be having more on his table than usual to show off a bit,
knowing us Barbie boys would be writing home about it all. And drink!
D'ye know, he began with a whole half tumbler of whisky, and how many
more he had I really should _not_ like to say! And he must be used to
it, too, for it seemed to have no effect on him whatever. And then he
smoked and smoked--two great big cigars after we had finished eating,
and then 'Damn it,' says he--he's an awful man to swear--'damn it,' he
says, 'there's no satisfaction in cigars; I must have a pipe,' and he
actually smoked _four_ pipes before I came away! I noticed the cigars
were called 'Estorellas--Best Quality,' and when I was in last Saturday
night getting an ounce of shag at the wee shoppie round the corner, I
asked the price of 'these Estorellas.' 'Ninepence a piece!' said the
bodie. Just imagine Jock Allan smoking eighteen-pence, and not being
satisfied! He's up in the world since he used to shaw turnips at
Loranogie for sixpence a day! But he'll come down as quick if he keeps
on at yon rate. He made a great phrase with me; but though it keeps down
one's weekly bill to get a meal like yon--I declare I wasn't hungry for
two days--for all that I'll go very little about him. He'll be the kind
that borrows money very fast--one of those harum-scarum ones!"
Criticism like that is a boomerang that comes back to hit the emitting
skull with a hint of its kindred woodenness. It reveals the writer more
than the written of. Allan was a bigger man than you would gather from
Wilson's account of his Gargantuan revelry. He had a genius for
mathematics--a gift which crops up, like music, in the most unexpected
corners--and from plough-boy and herd he had become an actuary in Auld
Reekie. Wilson had no need to be afraid, the meagre fool, for his host
could have bought him and sold him.
Allan had been in love with young Gourlay's mother when she herself was
a gay young fliskie at Tenshillingland, but his little romance was soon
ended when Gourlay came and whisked her away. But she remained the one
romance of his life. Now in his gross and jovial middle age he idealized
her in memory (a sentimentalist, of course--he was Scotch); he never saw
her in her scraggy misery to be disillusioned; to him she was still the
wee bit lairdie's dochter, a vision that had dawned on his wretched
boyhood, a pleasant and pathetic memory. And for that reason he had a
curious kindness to her boy. That was why he introduced him to his boon
companions. He thought he was doing him a good turn.
It was true that Allan made a phrase with a withered wisp of humanity
like young Wilson. Not that he failed to see through him, for he
christened him "a dried washing-clout." But Allan, like most
great-hearted Scots far from their native place, saw it through a veil
of sentiment; harsher features that would have been ever-present to his
mind if he had never left it disappeared from view, and left only the
finer qualities bright within his memory. And idealizing the place he
idealized its sons. To him they had a value not their own, just because
they knew the brig and the burn and the brae, and had sat upon the
school benches. He would have welcomed a dog from Barbie. It was from a
like generous emotion that he greeted the bodies so warmly on his visits
home--he thought they were as pleased to see him as he was to see them.
But they imputed false motives to his hearty greetings. Even as they
shook his hand the mean ones would think to themselves: "What does he
mean by this now? What's he up till? No doubt he'll be wanting something
off me!" They could not understand the gusto with which the returned
exile cried, "Ay, man, Jock Tamson, and how are ye?" They thought such
warmth must have a sinister intention.--A Scot revisiting his native
place ought to walk very quietly. For the parish is sizing him up.
There were two things to be said against Allan, and two only--unless, of
course, you consider drink an objection. Wit with him was less the
moment's glittering flash than the anecdotal bang; it was a fine old
crusted blend which he stored in the cellars of his mind to bring forth
on suitable occasions, as cob-webby as his wine. And it tickled his
vanity to have a crowd of admiring youngsters round him to whom he might
retail his anecdotes, and play the brilliant _raconteur_. He had cronies
of his own years, and he was lordly and jovial amongst them--yet he
wanted another _entourage_. He was one of those middle-aged bachelors
who like a train of youngsters behind them, whom they favour in return
for homage. The wealthy man who had been a peasant lad delighted to act
the jovial host to sons of petty magnates from his home. Batch after
batch as they came up to College were drawn around him--partly because
their homage pleased him, and partly because he loved anything whatever
that came out of Barbie. There was no harm in Allan--though when his
face was in repose you saw the look in his eye at times of a man
defrauding his soul. A robustious young fellow of sense and brains would
have found in this lover of books and a bottle not a bad comrade. But he
was the worst of cronies for a weak swaggerer like Gourlay. For Gourlay,
admiring the older man's jovial power, was led on to imitate his faults,
to think them virtues and a credit; and he lacked the clear, cool head
that kept Allan's faults from flying away with him.
At dinner that night there were several braw, braw lads of Barbie Water.
There were Tarmillan the doctor (a son of Irrendavie), Logan the
cashier, Tozer the Englishman, old Partan--a guileless and inquiring
mind--and half a dozen students raw from the west. The students were of
the kind that goes up to College with the hayseed sticking in its hair.
Two are in a Colonial Cabinet now, two are in the poorhouse. So they go.
Tarmillan was the last to arrive. He came in sucking his thumb, into
which he had driven a splinter while conducting an experiment.
"I've a morbid horror of lockjaw," he explained. "I never get a jag from
a pin but I see myself in the shape of a hoop, semicircular, with my
head on one end of a table, my heels on the other, and a doctor standing
on my navel trying to reduce the curvature."
"Gosh!" said Partan, who was a literal fool, "is that the treatment they
purshoo?"
"That's the treatment!" said Tarmillan, sizing up his man. "Oh, it's a
queer thing lockjaw! I remember when I was gold-mining in Tibet, one of
our carriers who died of lockjaw had such a circumbendibus in his body
that we froze him and made him the hoop of a bucket to carry our water
in. You see he was a thin bit man, and iron was scarce."
"Ay, man!" cried Partan, "you've been in Tibet?"
"Often," waved Tarmillan, "often! I used to go there every summer."
Partan, who liked to extend his geographical knowledge, would have
talked of Tibet for the rest of the evening--and Tarmie would have told
him news--but Allan broke in.
"How's the book, Tarmillan?" he inquired.
Tarmillan was engaged on a treatise which those who are competent to
judge consider the best thing of its kind ever written.
"Oh, don't ask me," he writhed. "Man, it's an irksome thing to write,
and to be asked about it makes you squirm. It's almost as offensive to
ask a man when his book will be out as to ask a woman when she'll be
delivered. I'm glad you invited me--to get away from the confounded
thing. It's become a blasted tyrant. A big work's a mistake; it's a
monster that devours the brain. I neglect my other work for that fellow
of mine; he bags everything I think. I never light on a new thing, but
'Hullo!' I cry, 'here's an idea for the book!' If you are engaged on a
big subject, all your thinking works into it or out of it."
"M'yes," said Logan; "but that's a swashing way of putting it."
"It's the danger of the aphorism," said Allan, "that it states too much
in trying to be small.--Tozer, what do you think?"
"I never was engaged on a big subject," sniffed Tozer.
"We're aware o' that!" said Tarmillan.
Tozer went under, and Tarmillan had the table. Allan was proud of him.
"Courage is the great thing," said he. "It often succeeds by the mere
show of it. It's the timid man that a dog bites. Run _at_ him and he
runs."
He was speaking to himself rather than the table, admiring the courage
that had snubbed Tozer with a word. But his musing remark rang a bell in
young Gourlay. By Jove, he had thought that himself, so he had! He was a
hollow thing, he knew, but a buckram pretence prevented the world from
piercing to his hollowness. The son of his courageous sire (whom he
equally admired and feared) had learned to play the game of bluff. A
bold front was half the battle. He had worked out his little theory, and
it was with a shock of pleasure the timid youngster heard great Allan
give it forth. He burned to let him know that he had thought that too.
To the youngsters, fat of face and fluffy of its circling down, the talk
was a banquet of the gods. For the first time in their lives they heard
ideas (such as they were) flung round them royally. They yearned to show
that they were thinkers too. And Gourlay was fired with the rest.
"I heard a very good one the other day from old Bauldy Johnston," said
Allan, opening his usual wallet of stories when the dinner was in full
swing. At a certain stage of the evening "I heard a good one" was the
invariable keynote of his talk. If you displayed no wish to hear the
"good one," he was huffed. "Bauldy was up in Edinburgh," he went on,
"and I met him near the Scott Monument and took him to Lockhart's for a
dram. You remember what a friend he used to be of old Will Overton. I
wasn't aware, by-the-bye, that Will was dead till Bauldy told me. '_He
was a great fellow my friend Will_,' he rang out in yon deep voice of
his. '_The thumb-mark of his Maker was wet in the clay of him_.' Man,
it made a quiver go down my spine."
"Oh, Bauldy has been a kenned phrase-maker for the last forty year,"
said Tarmillan. "But every other Scots peasant has the gift. To hear
Englishmen talk, you would think Carlyle was unique for the word that
sends the picture home--they give the man the credit of his race. But
I've heard fifty things better than 'willowy man' in the stable a-hame
on a wat day in hairst--fifty things better--from men just sitting on
the corn-kists and chowing beans."
"I know a better one than that," said Allan. Tarmillan had told no
story, you observe, but Allan was so accustomed to saying "I know a
better one than that," that it escaped him before he was aware. "I
remember when Bauldy went off to Paris on the spree. He kept his mouth
shut when he came back, for he was rather ashamed o' the outburst. But
the bodies were keen to hear. 'What's the incense like in Notre Dame?'
said Johnny Coe, with his een big. '_Burning stink!_' said Bauldy."
"I can cap that with a better one still," said Tarmillan, who wasn't to
be done by any man. "I was with Bauldy when he quarrelled Tam Gibb of
Hoochan-doe. Hoochan-doe's a yelling ass, and he threatened Bauldy--oh,
he would do this, and he would do that, and he would do the other thing.
'_Damn ye, would ye threaten me?_' cried Bauldy. '_I'll gar your brains
jaup red to the heavens!_' And I 'clare to God, sirs, a nervous man
looked up to see if the clouds werena spattered with the gore!"
Tozer cleared a sarcastic windpipe.
"Why do you clear your throat like that?" said Tarmillan--"like a craw
with the croup, on a bare branch against a gray sky in November! If I
had a throat like yours, I'd cut it and be done wi't."
"I wonder what's the cause of that extraordinary vividness in the
speech of the Scotch peasantry?" said Allan--more to keep the blades
from bickering than from any wish to know.
"It comes from a power of seeing things vividly inside your mind," said
a voice, timorous and wheezy, away down the table.
What cockerel was this crowing?
They turned, and beheld the blushing Gourlay.
But Tarmillan and Tozer were at it again, and he was snubbed. Jimmy
Wilson sniggered, and the other youngsters enjoyed his discomfiture.
Huh! What right has _he_ to set up his pipe?
His shirt stuck to his back. He would have liked the ground to open and
swallow him.
He gulped a huge swill of whisky to cover his vexation; and oh, the
mighty difference! A sudden courage flooded his veins. He turned with a
scowl on Wilson, and, "What the devil are _you_ sniggering at?" he
growled. Logan, the only senior who marked the byplay, thought him a
hardy young spunkie.
The moment the whisky had warmed the cockles of his heart Gourlay ceased
to care a rap for the sniggerers. Drink deadened his nervous perception
of the critics on his right and left, and set him free to follow his
idea undisturbed. It was an idea he had long cherished--being one of the
few that ever occurred to him. He rarely made phrases himself--though,
curiously enough, his father often did without knowing it--the harsh
grind of his character producing a flash. But Gourlay was aware of his
uncanny gift of visualization--or of "seeing things in the inside of his
head," as he called it--and vanity prompted the inference, that this was
the faculty that sprang the metaphor. His theory was now clear and
eloquent before him. He was realizing for the first time in his life
(with a sudden joy in the discovery) the effect of whisky to unloose the
brain; sentences went hurling through his brain with a fluency that
thrilled. If he had the ear of the company, now he had the drink to
hearten him, he would show Wilson and the rest that he wasn't such a
blasted fool! In a room by himself he would have spouted to the empty
air.
Some such point he had reached in the hurrying jumble of his thoughts
when Allan addressed him.
Allan did not mean his guest to be snubbed. He was a gentleman at heart,
not a cad like Tozer; and this boy was the son of a girl whose laugh he
remembered in the gloamings at Tenshillingland.
"I beg your pardon, John," he said in heavy benevolence--he had reached
that stage--"I beg your pardon. I'm afraid you was interrupted."
Gourlay felt his heart a lump in his throat, but he rushed into speech.
"Metaphor comes from the power of seeing things in the inside of your
head," said the unconscious disciple of Aristotle--"seeing them so vivid
that you see the likeness between them. When Bauldy Johnston said 'the
thumb-mark of his Maker was wet in the clay of him,' he _saw_ the print
of a thumb in wet clay, and he _saw_ the Almighty making a man out of
mud, the way He used to do in the Garden of Eden lang syne. So Bauldy
flashed the two ideas together, and the metaphor sprang! A man'll never
make phrases unless he can see things in the middle of his brain. _I_
can see things in the middle of my brain," he went on cockily--"anything
I want to! I don't need to shut my eyes either. They just come up before
me."
"Man, you're young to have noticed these things, John," said Jock Allan.
"I never reasoned it out before, but I'm sure you're in the right o't."
He spoke more warmly than he felt, because Gourlay had flushed and
panted and stammered (in spite of inspiring bold John Barleycorn) while
airing his little theory, and Allan wanted to cover him. But Gourlay
took it as a tribute to his towering mind. Oh, but he was the proud
mannikin. "Pass the watter!" he said to Jimmy Wilson, and Jimmy passed
it meekly.
Logan took a fancy to Gourlay on the spot. He was a slow, sly, cosy man,
with a sideward laugh in his eye, a humid gleam. And because his blood
was so genial and so slow, he liked to make up to brisk young fellows,
whose wilder outbursts might amuse him. They quickened his sluggish
blood. No bad fellow, and good-natured in his heavy way, he was what the
Scotch call a "slug for the drink." A "slug for the drink" is a man who
soaks and never succumbs. Logan was the more dangerous a crony on that
account. Remaining sober while others grew drunk, he was always ready
for another dram, always ready with an oily chuckle for the sploring
nonsense of his satellites. He would see them home in the small hours,
taking no mean advantage over them, never scorning them because they
"couldn't carry it," only laughing at their daft vagaries. And next day
he would gurgle, "So-and-so was screwed last night, and, man, if you had
heard his talk!" Logan had enjoyed it. He hated to drink by himself, and
liked a splurging youngster with whom to go the rounds.
He was attracted to Gourlay by the manly way he tossed his drink, and by
the false fire it put into him. But he made no immediate advance. He sat
smiling in creeshy benevolence, beaming on Gourlay but saying nothing.
When the party was ended, however, he made up to him going through the
door.
"I'm glad to have met you, Mr. Gourlay," said he. "Won't you come round
to the Howff for a while?"
"The Howff?" said Gourlay.
"Yes," said Logan; "haven't ye heard o't? It's a snug bit house where
some of the West Country billies forgather for a nicht at e'en. Oh,
nothing to speak of, ye know--just a dram and a joke to pass the time
now and then!"
"Aha!" laughed Gourlay, "there's worse than a drink, by Jove. It puts
smeddum in your blood!"
Logan nipped the guard of his arm in heavy playfulness and led him to
the Howff.