The House with the Green Shutters

by George Douglas Brown

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.