Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 10

THREE

WHILE TOM DREAMT of adventures, Mansie’s reveries were filled with hosts of friends, and his most comforting thought was that with the years their numbers would increase. Yet he never took the first step; he merely held himself expectantly open, and this of itself was enough to tell anyone who met him that here was a real friendly fellow, and to put the more sensitive into a position in which an advance into intimacy was unavoidable. But nobody except undesirable people ever wanted to escape the tacit invitation. Mansie was like one of those actresses to whom bouquets seem to fly of their own accord, and to him each new friendship was indeed a sort of bouquet which he accepted without affectation, privately conscious that he deserved it, but far too decent a fellow to let the slightest sign of this appear. His life was passed among his friends as in a garden exhaling an almost sensible fragrance and warmth; and it filled him with pleasure to know that no corner was uncultivated, and to look forward for a whole week, aware that every evening he would be in some sheltered arbour of this pleasance which expanded in an ever wider concentric ring as the years went on and yet remained intimate, resembling a private estate.

The thing that puzzled him most was how he had got on so well in life, how he had come to be promoted over the heads of men older and more pushing than himself, and he was occasionally troubled by the thought: could he be a sly fellow after all, sly perhaps without knowing it? But these thoughts came to him only in moods of dejection: they were really too absurd. Next morning he would contemplate his business career half in wonder and half in gratitude, and acknowledge frankly how lucky he had been, for his popularity with his employers and with the customers was pure luck! And fortune itself seemed then the paragon of decent fellows, and he cherished for it, though invisible, exactly the feelings one decent fellow cherishes for another who has done him a good turn.

It was somewhat the same feeling that had led to his conversion and his membership of the Baptist Chapel. This had happened a little after he came to Glasgow. There had been a great revival, several men in the warehouse had been accepted by Christ, and Mansie, already so popular with decent fellows, felt assured that he could not be turned away. Perhaps too he was afraid that he might be missing an opportunity of bettering himself, and this was a point on which his conscience was really strict; for bettering himself was associated in his mind with disagreeable effort, with such things as asking the manager for an increase of salary, and to evade such difficulties made him almost fear that he might be a man of weak character. So he went to the revival meeting and was quietly saved. Afterwards he was very glad he had done so, for the uprush of ecstatic feeling that followed had taken him quite by surprise, and again he felt that gratitude, this time tinged with a degree of awe, which one decent fellow feels for another who has done him a good turn.

He read very little, contenting himself with the Glasgow Herald and the British Weekly, and did not regard himself as a ‘literary fellow’; yet he would have been distressed to be found wanting in reverence for things which were deserving of it, and when the Reverend John McKail in his sermon one Sunday quoted, as though in independent confirmation of his own views, ‘God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world,’ Mansie felt that there must be something in this fellow Browning and in poetry too, although from all he had heard it was a rather profane business; and picking up Great Thoughts one day from the desk of one of the clerks in the office, and finding in it extracts in verse from great names, such as Tennyson, Browning, Coventry Patmore and Dante, extracts in which encouraging counsels were expressed in perfectly understandable words, he nodded his head in appreciation of those great men who could descend for a little while from their ‘poetry’, and say something to help a simple fellow like himself. That was true Christianity. Over one of the sentences, not in verse, he actually chuckled: ‘Hitch your wagon to a star.’ What things those great writers thought of! He would have to tell Bob Ryrie that one.

He was as nice in his habits as in his taste for literature. A spot of dirt on his sleeve was enough to make him unhappy, and when occasionally he went out for a country walk for the sake of his health, he always came back, no matter how muddy the roads were, with his black shoes speckless. Clumsiness in others annoyed him; so that whenever Tom returned at night with another wound, the sight of the bloody bandage smeared with oil and grit angered him and sent a thin rush of blood, as though in resentful answer, to his own cheeks; and somewhere in his mind the words took shape: ‘Great clumsy brute!’ For it was all so unnecessary! To live and dress quietly was simple enough, one would have thought, and it wasn’t as if he approved of display, or put a rose in his buttonhole except when he was going to meet a girl. He liked his suits to be of a soft shade of fawn, his neckties to be quiet; and if his circular stiff collar was smooth as glass and white as snow, and his circular bowler hat had the burnished sparkle of good coal, and his shoes were impeccable, he felt he need fear nobody. Yet he disapproved of the travellers who put on a la-di-da Kelvinside accent; that was going too far altogether; and although he tried to speak correctly, in what he took to be English, he kept something plain and unassuming in the intonation: for it would have seemed to him offensive presumption to pretend to be anything but an ordinary fellow like anybody else. And besides it was only decent to the English language to pronounce it as it was spelt.

A young man, good-looking and neatly dressed, who sets out conspicuously to be decent to everybody, will be greeted with decency on every side; the world surrounding him will obediently turn into the world of his imagination, and in that world, if his own decency and his faith in the decency of others are sufficiently strong or blind, he may live secluded as in a soft prenatal reverie for a long time, and if he is fortunate for all his life. Mansie lived in such a world, and except for an occasional harsh echo from the tremendous world outside he was happy in it. Tom was the most constant jarring presence, but being constant, allowance could be made for him, and the disturbance, if not avoided, yet foreseen. The only serious threat to Mansie’s happiness came from those moments, and they were infrequent, when he found himself morally in the wrong. That this should happen seemed to him not only undeserved, but even unnatural, and then he could be very harsh on whatever acquaintance might happen to threaten the inviolate image of his decency. He had, however, a happy capacity for forgetting things; he could forget Tom while he was actually talking to him; and he forgot those other disagreeable moments so completely that, searching his mind, it would have been difficult for him to remember that anybody had ever accused him of an action even slightly incorrect.

And how quietly and yet intensely happy was his life! When, returning in the evening in the tramcar from the semi-exile of the day, he saw his friends like a glorified host awaiting him, friends to whom for the calm rest of the evening he could devote himself, sometimes it seemed too much, and a lump would rise in his throat. But recollection gave him a joy almost as intense; for instance when he remembered the moments that big Bob Ryrie laid his scrubbed and scented hand on his sleeve, and, his face as near as a girl’s, put him up to some business tip; then the memory of the urgent affection in Bob’s voice and eyes would fill him with embarrassment, and he would feel almost as though he had listened to a love declaration. Often, thinking of the way in which Bob inclined his head as they walked slowly side by side, in Mansie’s mind a very early and apparently inconsequent memory would rise, the memory of a picture of the disciples in a child’s Life of Jesus which his mother had read to him; and there one of the disciples was shown with his head lying on another’s breast. Somewhere in Mansie’s mind was the definite knowledge that the other figure was Jesus Himself, yet as Bob was confused with this recollection the idea that it should have been Jesus was in some way blasphemous; and it seemed to him a more reverent thought that the second man had been merely a disciple. And while he was dreamily absorbed in this thought, his business round would suddenly appear a sort of pilgrimage, and he himself a humble disciple doing good to people. A real nice fellow, Bob, anyway.

Yet although Bob was so good a friend, something in Mansie shrank from according him more than the privilege of one friend among many; for he had a profound need to diffuse painlessly in an ever wider concentric circle every impulse within him that was urgent or painful, to vaporise himself hygienically without leaving any muddy residue; and to do this he needed many friends. There is one impulse, however, that is so palpably localised in the body that all the arts of the vaporiser must fail; and like most single young men living in a Puritan country, Mansie was sometimes hard beset by sex. He tried to fight it, he vaporised heroically; nevertheless there were hours in which, most incomprehensibly and undeservedly, his mind was besieged by lascivious images, and it was during one of those periods that he went, at Bob Ryrie’s suggestion, to an address for men only at the Southern PSA. He never went back again, and for some time there was a slight coldness between Bob and him. The Wesleyan parson had talked so much about ‘control’ that Mansie had not known where to look; then the word ‘sex’ had rolled roundly and often through the church, followed by the Biblical term ‘seed’ – and that was really going a bit too far; it had almost turned his stomach. And in the back seat of the gallery a crowd of young boys – hooligans they must have been – had sniggered so much that at last the preacher, getting quite red about the gills – Mansie could not understand how that vulgar expression had leapt so nimbly to his tongue – had had to rebuke them for their ‘filthy minds’. These Glasgow people were really a funny lot.

But soon after this, before the impression left by the PSA had faded, unexpected relief arrived. At the YMCA Sunday afternoon meeting he had admired a girl secretly for a long time, glancing across at her where she sat among the other girls under the long row of windows at the opposite side of the hall. Yet he had never dared to speak to her, for obviously she was a superior girl, perhaps even a school-teacher. She was tall and dark, and her clothes had a ruthless perfection of cut; and individually all those things daunted him. Then one day he caught sight of her approaching on the pavement, and when half-defensively and half-hopefully he put up his hand to his hat she smiled and stopped. And in a few moments he found that they had arranged to go for a walk that evening.

It was the last Saturday of the Glasgow Fair. The city had that spacious look which is given to great masses of stone when the cares within them are suspended; the very houses seemed to be breathing a more rarefied atmosphere (perhaps it was merely that no smoke was ascending from the chimneys), the children’s shouts rose with unusual clearness, and even the regular boozers who on this vacant Saturday night got drunk because after all it was a Saturday night, seemed forlorn and ineffectual figures wandering about in a mere dream of intoxication which they were striving to make real: in vain, for the sober crowds whose presence alone can prove beyond doubt to a man that he is drunk had inexplicably melted away. On this one Saturday night in the year a drunken man wandering through the solitary streets, where the summer evening still lingers, may carry on for a long time a peaceful metaphysical debate with himself and at the end of it not know whether he is drunk or sober; and finally he will go to bed more in perplexity than anger, yet with the indefinable feeling that the world has changed.

Mansie and Isa took the tram to Maxwell Park, from which they intended to walk to the Pollok Estate. On the top of the tram, which was almost empty, Mansie felt, as he always did when he was committed for the evening to a single companion, a doubly vivid consciousness of all the friends whom he had left behind and whose company he was in a sense sacrificing, and a trace of bitterness came over him at this girl for being the cause of such a separation, a trace so faint, however, that presently it passed into the resolve to get all the enjoyment he could out of the evening. The paths and woods of the Pollok Estate were deserted, and the sense that he was walking here almost alone with this girl intensified the pleasurable feeling which Mansie received from nature, a feeling compounded of a vague melancholy and a solid conviction of religious comfort. After he had carefully spread out the light raincoat that he always carried with him in provenance, they sat down on the grass behind a line of bushes which screened them from the road. Mansie generally kissed, at some suitable moment, the girls he took for a walk. The moment came, he kissed Isa, and then the dreadful thing happened. What was this woman after? Was this a way for human beings to behave? As if fleeing from violation the trees and bushes around him that had stood tranced as if in anticipation of the coming Sabbath receded to a remote distance, leaving him to his fate … yet the worst moment of all came when, turning away awkwardly on his side, he had to readjust his clothes, while behind him he heard a surreptitious rustling. Yes, she could be as discreet now as she liked, he might pretend that he was only brushing the dust from his coat: nothing could hide the vulgarity of this final end; and he felt as though he had been transported among the working classes, who sat about collarless and in their shirt-sleeves, and washed themselves down to the waist at the kitchen sink while the rest of the family sat at the table eating, and the word ‘proletariat’, which Brand was so fond of using, came into his mind, an ugly and yet meaningless-sounding word. A rush of unavailing pity for his defenceless clothes, which had been so rudely violated, almost blasphemed against, came over him; and he was sorry for hers too. To treat a beautiful summer frock like that showed an insensitive, almost a brutal nature. What need had she for pretty clothes, if this was all she wanted? Any shawlie in the streets was better dressed for it.

Isa had got to her feet and said curtly: ‘Well, are you coming?’ The light seemed to have faded very quickly: how long had they been lying there? They walked side by side and in silence between the vague trees. Now and then he flicked an invisible speck of dust from his coat sleeve. Suddenly the terrible fear fell upon him that his bowler hat might have lost its polish, might even have been dinted; and he took it from his head and anxiously ran his palm round it. His clothes seemed to sit less well on him; he put his hand up to his necktie and was surprised to find it in place; but his shoes, he knew it for a certainty, must be covered with dust, and a feeling of despair came over him, and he said under his breath: ‘Well, they’ll just have to wait till I get home.’

The security of home for a moment floated before him, but the sinking at his heart had already forewarned him before the dreadful question leapt to his mind: How could he face his mother now? He saw himself stealing into the house, having walked about until he knew she would be in bed; and he would have to forgo her welcoming smile tonight when he was so much in need of it. Even the cleansing of his shoes from this dust, the witness of his delinquency, would no longer be a symbolical act, emblem of his nicety and the purity of his house, but a sordid utilitarian stratagem to conceal his transgression from his mother, and from Tom too, for Tom would exult in his fall. Suddenly the thought ‘Tom has done this’ shot through his mind, and an indeterminate and yet vehement gust of anger rose into his throat – anger which demanded a direction and clamoured to be fed, and which he deliberately fed now with the thought (though he knew it to be false) that Tom had tricked him into this, that Tom had in some way by his evil communications caused him to do this. Tom probably liked it; with his low passions he would. And the feeling that Tom had done what he himself had just done was a greater affliction, and gave him a deeper sense of degradation, than the impure act itself; and suddenly he remembered, as something which he had no longer any right to remember, his mother laying her hand on his head, after her Sunday reading from the child’s Life of Christ, and saying: ‘That’s my good boy.’

And how was he to face all the fellows and girls he knew? They were walking now along the railings of Maxwell Park, and he was glad that night had fallen, for his appearance seemed to have shrunk, had grown tarnished and mean, and every time his knees bent there was something abject in the jack-knife-like action of the joints. If Bob Ryrie were only here with him instead of this girl! The picture of the disciple laying his head on the other’s breast floated up as from a drowning sea of shapes trying to smother it and sank again, leaving Mansie’s head slightly inclined, as though in desperation he were resting it on the soft evening air. And assemblies of young men in clean raiment and with brushed hair, at YMCAs and Bible Classes and Christian Endeavour meetings, appeared in his mind row upon row: there in those decent ranks he would be secure, there he would be clean.

By now they had come within reach of the lighted tramcar at the terminus, and as Mansie stepped into the diffused glassy radiance from the windows he shrank for a moment as if stung. Isa climbed the stairs without turning to look at him, yet she was careful that her long skirts should not float out behind and disclose any glimpse of her ankles. Well, he had seen a lot more than her ankles, he thought, shocked at his own sudden cynicism. Yet, sitting now in the lighted tram, she looked so proud and unapproachable that what had happened that evening seemed a blasphemous impossibility, and when, seeing the conductor approaching, she said coldly, ‘I get off at Strathbungo,’ it sounded like a reproof of his disrespectful thoughts, and he felt like a servant receiving an order, and hastily thrust his hand into his pocket for the coppers. Nothing he could do now, not even the simplest action, that did not seem vulgar! She was like those nurses, he thought. And he remembered the hospital where his friend had lain, and where the nurses had had just that same insolent and distant look. Yet his friend had told him that they were ready for anything, and knew all about a chap, and quite callously exploited their knowledge, and had as little respect for the decency of the human body as an engineer had for the works of a machine. And they smoked too. Did she smoke? he was wondering, when her voice startled him: ‘Have you lost your tongue, Mr Manson?’ The impudence! He could not keep the blood from flushing his face, although he knew she was looking at him. ‘That’s my business!’ he rapped out, but she merely turned away her head with insulting slowness and looked out through the window. Just like a nurse. When the Strathbungo stop came in sight he got up silently to let her out, and silently made to follow her, but when she reached the top of the stairs – they were alone in the tramcar, and only the conductor could hear – she turned and said: ‘I don’t need your company any further, thanks. Good night.’ And she disappeared.

‘All right, then! All right!’ Mansie exclaimed to the vacant lighted seats in front of him. And after a while, when the tram was already slowing down for the next stop: ‘Good riddance!’

Yet after all he did not feel any discomfort when he met his mother that night, nor indeed when he saw Bob Ryrie and his other friends next day. For one moment when he was left alone in the tramcar, the thought – which seemed to have deliberately bided its time until that woman had gone – the appalling thought, How could he, a professing Christian and a Sunday-school teacher, face his God after this? had risen up before him and seemed to fill the lighted top of the tram, which for a moment had a glassier look than ever. Yet the fact that God already knew comforted him in some way and made his offence seem more ordinary. And an ardent plea for forgiveness that night freed him with extraordinary ease from his distress. And when he met Bob Ryrie next evening he was surprised to discover within himself, instead of shame and embarrassment, a secret sense of condescension. He even mentioned casually the name of Isa Smith. What sort of a girl was she?

Bob leant towards him and said earnestly: ‘Don’t you have anything to do with her, Mansie; I know about her. She’ll go the full length with any fellow, and when it’s over that’s the last he’ll see of her. Queer! Gets them to the point, and then looks clean through them the next time she meets them in the street!’

Mansie met her a few weeks later, and she did in fact look through him. ‘Just as if she’d scored off me!’ he fumed. ‘The other way about, I think, my dear girl!’

Yet it was Isa who had scored, for Mansie had fallen, and she had only fallen again. The celerity too with which he had got rid of his remorse, while it eased his mind, disquieted him at the same time. What sort of a fellow could he be not to feel up or down after committing a sin like that? And sometimes to reassure himself he would again ask God’s pardon, though he could never feel sure that this might not be an act of presumption against God, an indirect reflection on God for having forgiven him so quickly, and for so completely having removed any trace of remorse. Almost like over-complaisance, almost like collusion! The very thought, the very thought of such a thought, was blasphemous, and now Mansie really did not know for what he should pray to God, nor in what terms his prayer could be couched. Yet his soul seemed to be begging him for something that he could not give it.

The other effect of his offence was more practically difficult to deal with. For he knew now that he could get relief – and with alarming ease – from the stress of desire, and so he was no longer safely enclosed within his own confusion and torment of mind: the door of temptation stood wide open. Girls, even the most faultlessly dressed, even the most unapproachable and nurse-like, were accessible. During the next few years, in spite of an unwearied fight, Mansie fell more than once and less involuntarily than the first time. And curiously enough he too, like Isa, could never afterwards bear the sight of his partners in guilt. To have continued such connections would have seemed to him indecent. How a fellow could deliberately, with his eyes open, go on associating with a girl after it had happened once – planning out their indulgence, perhaps even unblushingly talking it over together! – he simply could not understand such a thing. But if it were always with a different girl it might be called unpremeditated at least, in fact almost a surprise; and if one fell always with a different girl, it was in a way a first fall every time. And the ease with which one obtained forgiveness was almost uncanny.

Yet now and then Mansie still felt the lack of the remorse that would not come. It was as though there was a vacuum within his soul, and at its centre, completely insulated and quite beyond reach, a tiny point of pain.

As he lay thinking of the past evening and involuntarily glancing every now and then at the iron skeleton of the forsaken bed, the memory of that first hour of guilt haunted him, and it was as though something far within his mind, so far within that he could not reach it or stop what it was doing, was trying to weave some connection between Isa and Helen. He had the feeling, at any rate, that something was being woven, something implicating him and yet beyond his control, and the words shot through his mind, ‘I’m in for it!’ as he thought of Saturday, when he was to meet Helen. And he knew that he would go to the appointed meeting-place in spite of everything, of the scandal, of Tom, of his mother and Jean, and of the opinion of all good fellows.