Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 13

SIX

THOUGH JEAN WAS four years his junior, Mansie had a great respect for her opinion and felt singled out when it supported his; and so her dislike for Bob Ryrie, a dislike which nothing, it seemed, could alter, deeply disappointed him and even shook a little his own regard for his friend, although he would not admit it. After Bob’s first visit to the house – it was a few weeks before Helen broke with Tom – he asked Jean a little uncertainly what she thought of Ryrie. She put her nose in the air and said: ‘You feel he’s offering you a coupon.’ The blood rushed to Mansie’s cheeks; it was as though he himself had been attacked, and he replied: ‘Bob’s a gentleman! And he’s the kindest-hearted fellow you’ll meet.’

‘Well, he can keep his kindness to himself,’ said Jean, and it was clear that she did not consider Bob in the first class.

This was a very small class, but to her a definite one, and indeed the only one she was able to tolerate. She could not have told what qualities people had to possess to belong to it; yet she thought in classes, and so the very first thing that she might be expected to say when asked such a question as Mansie’s was, ‘He’s a pure third-rater,’ or ‘He’s tenth rate.’ But Bob was Mansie’s best friend, and so the exasperated figure of speech escaped her, and she felt irritated at Mansie for forcing her to speak ‘in conundrums’.

Oh, no doubt this Ryrie man was kind-hearted; he let you see that only too clearly; he let you see it in the way he shook hands, in his anxious hopes that you might like Glasgow – as if Glasgow belonged to him! – in his gentlemanly attentiveness, which made you feel that with his eyes he was supporting you in the mere act of living, helpfully assisting you to breathe and endure the immense strain of sitting upright in your chair. And Jean had sat up straighter, had braced her shoulders to hold off this smothering load of solicitude which was about to crush her. No, she could not stand the man, she could not stand his brown eyes with their protective glance, nor his brown moustache waxed at the points, which also seemed in some way an earnest of masculine protection, but became slightly limp, in spite of its waxy rigidity, when the protection was blankly ignored. She could not stand his brown tweed suit, which recapitulated again the note of enveloping protectiveness and gave out the delicatest aroma of tobacco and peat, a faint, pleasant and yet oppressive emanation of somnolence. She wanted to yawn, felt that she would like to go straight to sleep, and her voice when she replied to his polite enquiries sounded remote to her, like a monologue heard when one is half awake. And neither could she stand his neatly shaven face to which the bay rum still clung like a transparent film, making his cheeks look as though they had been iced; nor his scrubbed and manicured hands, nor his pipe for which he apologised, nor the way he inclined his head, like a servant awaiting orders. A fatuous ass, a pure tenth-rater, she told herself, and she was angry with Mansie for having such an acquaintance, and angry too that she could not say so more unequivocally.

But she was quite unequivocal enough for Mansie, and he felt both insulted in his taste and hurt on Bob’s account. For a fellow who made people feel that he was offering them coupons could hardly be considered first rate, and it was a galling reflection that his best friend was not first rate. Of course it was all a misunderstanding of Jean’s, all due to Bob’s kindness of heart; and besides she hadn’t seen him at his best; no, it was a pity, but Bob hadn’t been at his best. All the same the coupon stuck, and now Mansie could not help remembering that when he met Bob first he too had been a trifle nonplussed, maybe a little put off even. They had met at the Baptist Chapel a little after Mansie’s conversion. Bob had begun to pour out information on him right off in the helpful voice of someone directing you to a strange address, saying, ‘You should go there,’ or ‘You should join them, a nice set of fellows.’ Mansie had felt quite rushed. Yes, it seemed impossible for Bob to say anything at all without making you think that he was lending you a helping hand; even when he told a funny story he seemed to be making you a present of it, so that you might win social credit for yourself by telling it to someone else; well, perhaps a fellow who was so genuinely anxious to help as Bob got into the habit of talking in that way and just couldn’t help it. But later Mansie had stopped thinking about it, and especially after Bob had taken him to that church soirée where all those Boy Scouts were. For they were exactly the same, all eager to help; he couldn’t make them out at first, thought they were dashed forward; but then he saw it was all quite genuine: when you lived in a big place like Glasgow you had to be on the look-out for opportunities to help people, that is if you had any decency in you at all; you might need a helping hand some time yourself. Jean didn’t realise that yet; she was new to Glasgow and didn’t know how hard life might be for a girl there, not to speak of temptations. He didn’t care whether Bob was first rate according to her silly notions or not. She could dash well think what she liked.

But in the ensuing months Jean showed no sign of getting over her aversion; it became more frank, and so it was no wonder if Bob didn’t do himself justice; he hadn’t a dog’s chance. All the same he was a dashed sight too anxious. After all, had he any need to go to such pains to please Jean? He actually seemed to be quite put out because Jean didn’t take to him, and he couldn’t help trying again, getting more and more red in the face every time; no, he didn’t show to advantage then.

Nevertheless when one evening after Bob had left Jean turned to Mansie and said: ‘I object to people making eyes at me because I’m your cousin,’ Mansie flared up and shouted, ‘He’s too dashed good for you!’ He had had no intention of saying such a thing; it just jumped out, and for a moment he felt quite taken aback.

‘Well, you’d better tell him so,’ replied Jean. ‘He bores me stiff.’

‘Everybody else in the house gets on with Bob. Why shouldn’t you?’

‘He doesn’t make eyes at them.’

‘You flatter yourself if you fancy he’s making eyes at you!’ Mansie became angry again. ‘He’s only trying to be humanly decent.’

‘I prefer people to keep their distance.’

There was no use talking to her, that was clear, and when a few evenings later Bob said with a slight catch in his voice, ‘Mansie, I’m afraid I’m making no headway with your cousin; I’ve done my best to be nice to her, but it’s no use,’ Mansie replied, ‘Don’t you bother, Bob. You’ve been too dashed considerate to her. Yes, by gum!’ But then he suddenly felt embarrassed; they walked on without looking at each other; and when Bob broke the silence it was to speak of something quite different.

After this Bob was careful to treat Jean with distant politeness, and the change in fact seemed to take her somewhat aback. Mansie decided that Bob had got the better of the exchanges after all; but that was nothing to be surprised at, for Bob could be quite the man of the world when he chose to take the trouble. And Bob’s superiority remained unchallenged until David Brand appeared. By bad luck Bob happened to drop in that evening after Brand had been holding forth for more than an hour, and the sight of Jean sitting listening with her eyes on Brand’s face seemed to knock him flat. He began to talk to her in his old confidential tone; she stared at him in surprise for a moment and then snubbed him; but he was completely rattled and couldn’t stop until he had been snubbed three or four times. Then he got into an argument with Brand about Socialism; but Brand just played with him, giving Jean a look every now and then; and at last Bob simply turned tail and had to console himself with a long and helpful talk with Mansie in the lobby. Mansie had never seen Bob at such a disadvantage, and was sorry he had ever invited Brand to the house.

He couldn’t understand what Jean saw in Brand anyway. A striking-looking fellow, no doubt about it, with his Roman nose and his yellow hair; but there was something queer and cold about him; you could never think of him as a friend. Mansie had met him first at a YMCA dance. It was in the men’s cloakroom, Mansie was standing before the looking-glass putting the finishing touches to his necktie, and some fellows were discussing the Insurance Act. ‘What do you say to that, Brand?’ someone had asked. Mansie turned round at that moment, and he saw a tall, lanky young man raising his head, which had been bowed over a dancing-pump that he was pulling on. ‘I think it’s claptrap,’ came the reply in a falsetto voice, but Mansie was so astonished by the beauty of the briefly upturned face, which was now bent over the other pump, that he continued to stare in a trance at the smooth flaxen hair presented objectively to him, its fairness and the even masses in which it lay reminding him somehow of butter. Afterwards he saw Brand dancing; he was a very bad dancer and seemed to talk to his partners all the time. It was not until near the end of the dance that Brand strolled up, stood beside him, and made some remark about the heat. ‘Lots of nice girls here,’ Mansie said, not knowing what else to say; but Brand replied, ‘I’m not interested in females, I’m here to make converts.’ Females! thought Mansie, so it must have been Socialism that he was spouting to them! and as a new dance was just beginning he rushed away.

But next Sunday afternoon at the YMCA Brand fastened on to him, seemed in fact to have taken quite a fancy to him, and although Mansie didn’t really care much for the fellow, no doubt about it he was a dashed handsome figure to be seen with. But though Brand was a brilliant success in the Church Literary Society, he didn’t make a really deep impression on Mansie until that evening in late spring when they went to see Arms and the Man. And it wasn’t because Brand laughed at all the right places, looking round him contemptuously, that Mansie was impressed; what struck him was a sentence that Brand dropped carelessly as they were walking to the tramcar; he said, ‘I think I’ll have to write a play too.’ Then Mansie realised all at once that Brand lived in a completely different world from him. For to Mansie the writing of a book or play, even one he could understand, was a mysterious act, he simply didn’t understand how it was done; and yet here was a fellow who after being at a play one could make neither head nor tail of simply said: ‘I’ll have to write a play too!’ Mansie felt excited, yet was resolved not to show it, but to reply in the same tone. ‘You should, Brand,’ he said. ‘I think you really should.’

Brand was in fact very handsome, and that was probably enough to give Jean an immediate respect for him; but what won her final approval was the fact that he carried his handsome looks almost scornfully, as though he ignored them; for that seemed to her the perfection of good taste. And so it might have been had he merely ignored them, magnanimously declining to employ them to his advantage; but it would be nearer the truth to say that he was completely oblivious of them, and that they were thrown away on him and so bereft of all meaning. They were like a thankless gift that he was always trying to forget, that he even did his best to deface; for he had so little respect for his exquisite features that he was continually knitting his brow like a schoolboy and twisting his mouth into peevish lines that deserved to look mean, and would have done so in any face less perfectly formed. When he did this, such treatment of a rare physical miracle gave one a sense of ingratitude, even of desecration; nevertheless it was ineffectual, for no matter how he scowled, the lines instead of disfiguring his face merely fell effortlessly into new patterns of symmetry, one more interesting than the other. No, he could not escape from the beauty that had been so unwelcomely thrust upon him.

But though he could not rid himself of it he could refuse to impregnate it with life. So his face was like the photographed faces of actors which seem to be mutely begging for a rôle to bring them to life and add expression and character, no matter of what tinge, to those unemployed features with their tell-tale vacancy. And Brand’s face sometimes struck one as that of a man waiting for his rôle, a rôle that should have been his life, a rôle that he would never find. His talk, too, was as trite as that of actors or popular preachers who after declaiming as though in another world, ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying,’ or ‘Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters’ have nothing left to utter in private but the stale clichés of political and social snobbery. It shocks one that they should do so with such flat conviction. But what shocks one still more is the recognition that after all they are merely acting another part, an innate and compulsory part which has no connection whatever with Antony or Hamlet or Othello, with Christ or Paul. The conversation of Brand seemed to belong to a part such as this, a part which did not suit him, which was false and even badly played, and yet had been imposed upon him so imperatively that he would have to act it all his life. But his words had also the sonorous emptiness that is so often found in the conversation of men who spend their lives advertising commodities which they have not made and will never use, but who nevertheless become mechanically rapturous upon the virtues of those commodities whenever a prospective buyer comes in sight. It had that false and portentously edifying conviction; but also, somewhat incongruously, a touch of the flat assurance of a school-teacher imparting to his class information that means hardly anything to him; securely supported in a sense of right when he asserts that Milton is the greatest English poet after Shakespeare (although Milton bores him), or that man’s chief end is to glorify God (although he has never in his life felt the slightest impulse to glorify God). And Brand was a school-teacher.

So it was only in their form that Brand’s opinions differed from those of a gentlemanly actor or an unctuous business man. He had been brought up in a Socialist family; his father was an atheistic Marxian; and only when he was twenty-five did David discover Christianity. The discovery was so novel that the ideas he encountered seemed novel too, not unlike those of Ibsen and Shaw, and in his mind Christ was enthroned between those two contemporary idols as a great advanced thinker; a position which, Brand was really convinced in his heart, conferred fresh glory on the New Comer, though he was fond of saying – to impress people with his brilliance – that Jesus was the most advanced and revolutionary of them all. Yet he felt that he had done Jesus a favour in promoting Him to such company, and so he spoke of Him with involuntary condescension; but then he spoke of everything with involuntary condescension – it may have been because he spent so much of his time in teaching. And besides, the people he had to teach now were Christians, and they simply did not know the rudiments of their own subject! So he had to make the matter as simple as possible.

Yet it may be that he could not help making it simple; for a man who has to simplify knowledge for several hours a day to suit minds of twelve or thirteen often ends by simplifying everything; he may acquire such a love for simplification that only simplified ideas give him pleasure. And in fact the more elementary a truth was the more pleasure Brand found in uttering it; and if he could impart to it a sort of flashing triteness he himself was dazzled, as though he had achieved an epigram. So when he came across the axiom, ‘God is love,’ it was not the statement itself that thrilled him, but the tellingly terse form in which it was couched; and he did not see anything blasphemous in this treatment of a saying which all the wisdom of the world is insufficient to comprehend. For a school-teacher of the conventional kind may not only admire simplified statements; he is capable of falling in love with them simply as statements. He falls in love with them as the commercial traveller falls in love with gypsum, clinkers, or asbestos jointing; for though he can make no more personal use of them than the commercial traveller of those wares, yet they are the things that give meaning to his deliberate and rational activity as a human being. But his love is less humble and passionate than the love of a commercial traveller for asbestos jointing; for he has a monopoly of his goods and the commercial traveller has not, and he can pass them on to the recipient without being obliged to exercise the arts of persuasion, whereas his commercial brother has to summon all his eloquence, has to plead, to propitiate, to dazzle. So when Brand made any simple assertion which his interlocutor refused to accept on the spot, he had a habit of saying: ‘I’m telling you.’ After asserting that Jesus was a Socialist or that the Kingdom of Heaven was within you – if you voted intelligently – he would add, ‘I’m telling you,’ and it may be that, yielding to habit, he once or twice capped even the sublime axiom, ‘God is love,’ with this unseemly addition. For he could not utter even that saying without seeming to clinch something, without appearing to be making a point.

All this, however, is only the outside of Brand, and what lay behind it would be hard to say. It is questionable indeed, whether anything lay behind, for the thing one was most vividly aware of was a want. And in that want there must of necessity have been some deficiency of sex. Nothing else could have made him such a glittering and vacant fool; for even a hardened libertine, if his attention were seriously drawn to the sentence, ‘God is love,’ would see at least that it was a very extraordinary statement, even if he did not understand it. But to Brand it was not in any way extraordinary; it was an obvious truth contained in a simple sentence of three words. So his lanky body with its unselfconscious and yet ungainly movements was that of one unaware of life; his bones beneath the clothes of a tall man were the shameless, raw bones of a boy of twelve or thirteen. He had also the shy affectionateness of a boy; but he had no charity, for charity is an adult virtue. And catching sight of his inarticulate limbs stretched out like a cry for help as he half lay in a chair, one saw all at once that his words were not after all those of an actor or a teacher, but those of a bright boy of twelve, and one forgave him and felt sorry for him, no matter how intolerable his arrogance may have been a moment before.

It was probably his sexlessness that attracted Jean. Had she known it was sexlessness, it is true, she would have been repelled. But being herself passionate and yet self-repressed, she saw in Brand’s demeanour only a scornful superiority to the fatuity of desire. She hated sentiment, she hated the disorder and disingenuousness of love, she hated, above all, women who got left with illegitimate children; she hated them with the naïve hatred of one who passionately disliked ambiguity. So Brand’s logical advocacy of women’s suffrage and common-sense exposition of religion appealed equally to her; they seemed to exclude all sentimentality. She began to go to women’s suffrage meetings with Brand, then to plays, then to Socialist demonstrations. He never touched her or treated her like a woman, and she felt that she had come at last to know a rational being. Nobody else in the house liked Brand, and perhaps that made her go about more constantly with him than she would otherwise have done. It also made her oblivious of the strange state Tom was in.