McClure's Magazine/Volume 20/Number 1/The Closing of the Shutters
THE CLOSING OF THE SHUTTERS
BT ROBERT BARR
WHEN death visits a house in England the shutters are at once closed. If there are no shutters, the blinds are drawn down, and the house looks out sightless to the world. In many novels this fact has formed a climax, and if I remember aright, in William Black's last book, the hero of the story knows that the girl he loved is dead by coming suddenly upon her house and seeing the blinds down. Many a man has hurried home in response to a telegram, and if, as is often the case, no one met him at the statoin, and no news had reached him since the hurried message of the wire, words can hardly depict his anxiety as his own house comes into view and the windows tell him their tale. That awful book, "The House with the Green Shutters," ends with these words:
"No man dared to speak. They gazed with blanched faces at the Hoose with the Green Shutters sitting dark there and terrible beneath the radiant arch of the dawn."
Doubtless the green shutters were closed, not because of the triple death within, but because the tragedy occurred in the night, and no one was left alive in that ill-fated house to open the blinds when morning came.
As I write these words, the shutters are closed in a house on Highgate Hill, to the north of London, because George Douglas Brown, the author of one famous book, lies dead in a darkened room. Even yet his strident voice is ringing in my ears, while it seems but yesterday that he sat in the chair beside my table. If ever a man was built for a long life it was Brown. He was as stalwart as Harold Frederick; tall, broad-chested, huge, with a massive jaw that betokened dogged determination. He was a man with very few friends and apparently no relatives, for at the present moment there seems to be no next-of-kin to inherit the money that came to him from America for his first and only book, and the lawyers say that the British Government will seize upon what remains to his credit at the bank unless he has left a will, which is extremely unlikely, for no man thought himself so likely to live long as did Brown one short week ago.
I met him for the first time not much more than a month since, and after the conventional conversation which is preliminary to an acquaintance of two men just introduced, we adjourned from the room in which I write to an unkempt place called the Edinburgh Castle, a spot where Scotsmen foregather. There is little about the place to suggest either castle or palace. The ground floor is furnished with uncomfortable chairs and small round tables made of the heads of barrels that have contained Islay whiskey. The apartment immediately above is celebrated in London because the walls are lined with the tartans of all the Highland clans. The liquors sold at the Edinburgh Castle are of the best, and represent every vintage in Scotland. This public house is situated just off the Strand, in the very midst of journalistic London. On every side of it presses are threshing night and day. Cheek by jowl with it are the editorial rooms of the " Daily Graphic," and across the narrow alley are the offices of the "Illustrated London News." Almost any hour of the day or night you will meet there at least a dozen men of world-wide celebrity. The smoking-room of the most noted club in London is neither so dirty nor so distinguished.
Sitting at the barrel head Brown outlined to me the novel on which he was working, and when I heard it dealt with the times of Cromwell, I cried out in alarm, saying this was unfair competition, because my own next novel dealt with the same theme. He answered with a laugh: "Then this is a timely meeting. If I am knocked down by a cab you will finish my novel, and if you are run over by a 'bus I'll finish yours."
The talk drifted to "The House with the Green Shutters," and now that the formality of meeting had melted away. Brown spoke freely about it, and about its purpose. I said that there could not possibly be in existence any village in Scotland or elsewhere which contained so many objectionable characters. He agreed that this was so, but maintained that his chief characters were true to the life, and told stories about them, naming the hamlet where they had lived. His chief character, John Gourlay, was a photograph from life, and so were most of the other subordinate figures in his book.
One story he told me it is almost impossible to set down in print, because of the fierce profanity that characterizes it. Brown said that his own father was the most profane man in the district, and yet a man of sterling good heart. As a little boy he remembers listening appalled to a conversation which took place between his father and an elder of the church who had just risen from what had been supposed his death bed, and now was crawling tremulously out into the sun, his gaunt hand shaking on the end of the stick that supported him.
"Ye auld deevle," cried the elder Brown, "Hell hasna swallowed ye yet, when we a' thocht it yawned for ye."
"Through the mercy of God," quavered the tremulous voice of the convalescent, "I have been spared a few days longer on this earth."
"Ye doddering thief," roared Brown, "there's nae mercy about it. Grim Satan simply sees ye'r nae ripe yet for perdition, so he leaves ye in ye'r sins for a while langer."
"We're a' sinfu' men. Brown," returned the Elder solemnly, in no way offended by the harsh greeting, "and our hope rests in the benevolence of Heaven."
"Weel, weel, ye auld sinner, I'm glad to see ye; glad to see ye on ye'r feet again. Mony's the time I've looked at ye'r hoose and feared to see the blinds doon, curse ye!"
"Thank' ee kindly, thank'ee kindly, Brown," said the aged Elder with tears in his eyes. "I knew I had ye'r guid wishes."
It is impossible for me to set this story down as Brown told it, in the most inimitable dialect, and with the voice and gestures of a born actor, and the point of it, which may be missed in my imperfect rendering, was that there existed the greatest kindliness and understanding between the two men. One was not blinded by the profanity to the sympathy and sorrow of the other, nor did that other make the mistake of supposing the mild and pious Elder a hypocrite. Each expressed his feeling in his own way, and each thoroughly understood the other.
As we talked at the barrel head, a hand was laid on my shoulder, and looking up I saw a man standing there whom I had some difficulty in recognizing. His face was flushed with fever, and his hand trembled on my shoulder as the old Elder's hand had trembled on his stick. He was Don Cameron, and as a boy had been a pupil of mine when I taught school in Windsor, Ontario, opposite the city of Detroit. I had no idea he was in London. He had just returned from the Gold Coast—from his third visit there—with a fortune beyond the dreams of avarice in his grasp. In the back country of the Gold Coast, for a French company, he had discovered gold in such quantities that Klondike or the Rand are as gravel pits in comparison. Three trips he had made, racing with death through that region of pestilence, and now success burned in his fever-bright eyes. I sprang up and grasped his hand, glad to welcome him again in London, but sorry to see his condition, for he had been one of my favorite boys. I introduced him to Brown, and they sat chatting together—the man of action and the man of letters. Then the talk drifted from books to the realities of life, and Cameron told us of the comical complication which a new King in England had made in his financial outlook. Although he worked for a French company in Paris, he had to pay his coolies with silver coins bearing the head of Queen Victoria. These coins, taken by him to Africa by the bagfull, are accepted by the natives. and disappear entirely from circulation. What the natives do with them no one knows. It is supposed they are melted down into grotesque ornaments, but they will accept nothing that has not the head of Queen Victoria upon it. It is rather striking to note that a French company can only carry on its enterprise in this district with old English shillings and sixpences; and now Cameron had half-a-dozen banks in London collecting for him Victorian coinage, because he knew it was useless to return to the Gold Coast with the head of Edward VII. on the silver. The darkies were well aware of the fact that the great queen could not die, and they would refuse silver that bore the effigy of another.
Brown listened entranced to the actualities related by this forerunner of civilization—a true member of Kipling's "Legion that never was 'listed," and as Cameron talked my brother dropped in on us, and then four sat round the barrel head. My brother and Cameron were old friends, and had been school-mates in Canada. The newcomer listened to his talk less interested than Brown or I, with anxiety on his brow, and at last he asked Cameron to take him to his rooms, for he saw how ill the gold-seeker was. Cameron for years has had a flat in London always ready for him on his return to the metropolis. My brother and he bade us good-by and left us.
"That is the most interesting man I ever met," said Brown. "Lord, how little we writers amount to compared with the men who do things."
At midnight Cameron died in my brother's arms; alone, together, in his rooms, the African fever following him to London as the headsman had followed his victim in the play of "Richelieu."
When next I met Brown, superb in health, and told him of the fate of the man we had met, he was inexpressibly shocked, and commented on the futility of that race for gold, and the irony of the success that had death as one of its ingredients. Now Brown himself lies dead, and somehow it seems as if the strenuous life, after all, were not worth while.