Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 14

SEVEN

A MAN WHO has desperately fought for the possession of an unattainable object finds himself in a very strange position when he realises that it is worthless and that his desire for it has suddenly vanished. Then it may appear to him that he should be perfectly happy again; for the cause of his suffering is removed, and the things that once gave him pleasure are still to be had; he has only to stretch out his hand for them. The sun still shines; friends, music-halls, saw-dusted pubs, the lights and crowds of the city, the excitements of football and wrestling – all these exist unaffected by the experience he has passed through. Everything seems to be as it was before; yet something has changed: a hole has yawned in his world, and through it all the warmth that used to be in things has drained away, leaving them cold and empty. He feels the heat of the sun on his face and the backs of his hands, but it is stopped there as by an icy casing; it does not warm his limbs. He breathes the sharp autumnal air, but it is thin and bodiless, an invisible empty something that he draws into his lungs; and although there is no danger of its failing him and he inhales it automatically, yet he finds that breathing requires a slight effort, an effort that tires him, for it is meaningless. His friends too have become curiously external and objective, have receded into a different dimension like figures in a painting, and for the first time he notices lines in their faces that he had never noticed before, lines which, if he were not outside the picture himself, might make him dislike those people. Nor do the jokes of music-hall comedians give him pleasure, for all that he can see in them is a mechanism for producing the automatic spasm of laughter; he sees this clearly, although he is far less capable of analysing his impressions than many of the people who laugh. Sometimes in the midst of wrestling he suddenly surrenders to his opponent’s grip where he could have jerked himself free; for the knowledge that the stronger must inevitably overcome the weaker makes all resistance meaningless, and his mind refuses to strike out the sudden inspiration that would extricate him, for that too seems irrelevant. And the feeling that nothing is involved but two fixed units of animal energy, incarnated ludicrously in two sweating bodies, disgusts him, and he stops going to the club.

Seeing that so many things are empty, although still perplexingly palpable to his eyes and mind, he falls back on the most simple and gross and therefore dependable realities in his life: on necessity and deliberate pleasure. He rises every morning to go to work, because he must; and he drinks, because drink, if taken in sufficient quantities, can be relied upon to produce an effect as independent of the unstable human will as a natural law. So he clings to drink as the one solid thing in a world that has become insubstantial. Yet he does not drink to forget, but simply to comfort himself: to fill the vacuum within him with a warm and friendly presence, with something that will lie down and coil itself snugly inside him like an affectionate, sleek, soft animal, say a little black puppy. He feels then so intimately united with a cordial and caressing presence that he prefers to sit alone over his beer or his whisky, so that nothing so incalculable as human society may interfere with his pleasure.

But the fact that he has become a solitary drinker shows that other things besides the things he sees and hears have gone empty and blind: his ideas, his very actions. His actions have lost their content, have become neutral, so that now he does without scruple things of which once he would have been ashamed even to think. So when one evening Tom Manson, while sitting before the fire in the empty kitchen, caught sight of his mother’s purse on the mantelpiece and got up and looked inside it, he did so casually and absently, as one turns over an illustrated paper in a doctor’s waiting-room. And when, seeing a number of coins inside, he took one out and put it in his pocket, it was a self-evident and yet unimportant action, the mere shifting of an object from one place to another. He felt neither guilty nor elated, he hardly felt interested, and the fact that presently he put on his shoes and went out to the pub at the corner of the street was only an accidental effect of his original action – if it could be called an action – and not the proof of any design. When he had drunk the half-crown he felt warmed and comforted, but that was all; the coin was gone, and it had such an indirect relation to the glow he felt within him that it might never have existed at all, far less have been stolen by him two hours before; he scarcely gave the matter a thought. Had he kept the half-crown, or had he spent only part of it, no doubt his conscience would have smitten him every time he heard the jingle in his pockets; but the half-crown was gone, and by next evening the effect was gone too. Yet when next evening his mother complained that she must have lost a two-shilling piece he said to her: ‘You should be more careful with your money; you leave it lying about too much’; and he meant what he said. And on Saturday he gave her an extra five shillings for his weekly board: ‘Got a bonus this week,’ he said.

But Mrs Manson continued to leave her purse lying about, until one day she discovered that a pound note was missing. That was a serious matter; she could not get over it, and her lamentations drove Tom into a fury. ‘It serves you right!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you look after your money?’ And on Saturday he did not give her anything extra; it was her own fault, and he needed all his money for himself. After that the purse was not left lying about.

Yet the thought that Tom might have stolen the money never entered Mrs Manson’s head; she could not imagine anyone she knew doing such a thing; and when she read in the newspapers of thefts what she saw was the stylised image of a thief, a being so different from the people she knew that had she interrogated her imagination she would probably have found him furnished with a distinctive cut of clothes, a subtle and inconspicuous livery. So she never suspected Tom, although Mansie was continually complaining of his thefts. Now it would be Mansie’s ivory-headed stick that was missing, now one of his ties; he would find it next morning crumpled up and flung on the floor of Tom’s room. The fellow might at least take care of one’s things, if he insisted on pinching them! Mansie suffered in silence for a while, and when at last he complained to Jean and Mrs Manson, Jean remained silent and Mrs Manson said quite unexpectedly: ‘I never thought you twa boys wad be enemies.’ That silenced Mansie, and he could not complain to Tom either, for they were not on speaking terms; and besides, in the midst of his anger sometimes he felt strangely touched by those naïve thefts; they were so childish, they were what a little boy might do to an elder brother who did not love him. Occasionally he was actually alarmed at Tom’s familiar use of his things; it touched one so intimately, it was like a threat, and it was unnatural too, quite unlike Tom; and the thought would come into his mind: Tom must be very unhappy. But then his exasperation, tinged with a little dread, would return again, and seeing that his mother and Jean refused to do anything he spoke bitterly of his wrongs to Helen.

Tom’s own feelings when he took Mansie’s ties and vests might have been expressed in the words: ‘Why should he have everything?’ and although he was not consciously aware of Helen as an item in that everything, no doubt it was she, and she alone, that was at the back of his mind. So his open use of his brother’s belongings was not merely a silent announcement that Mansie was outside the pale now, with no right to protest, whatever was done to him; it was also the symbolical declaration of a claim to have unconditionally all that Mansie had, and Mansie had been wise in seeing a threat in it. A very indeterminate and quite powerless threat, however, almost a fictitious one, for the Helen that Tom wanted was not the Helen who had passed into Mansie’s possession, but an illusion, once cherished and now dead, which his brother was powerless to restore to him. He did not know what he wanted from Mansie, and so he took whatever he could get.