Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 20

TWELVE

DURING THE WINTER Mansie and Helen had been assiduously attending Socialist dances and whist drives. Helen had hesitated at first, but when she was at last persuaded to go to one of the monthly dances given by the Clarion Scouts, the number of well-dressed people, the liberal sprinkling of evening suits and smart low-necked ball dresses, reassured, impressed, even a little awed her; and besides during the evening Mansie introduced her to several school-teachers of both sexes. She was agreeably surprised; it was clear that a girl who respected herself could come here without fearing that she might regret it; indeed she felt that she had risen several steps in the social scale, and so – for that is invariably the corollary of such a feeling – was delighted to have at last found her true level. If doubts recurred during the evening, when she came in contact, during a set of quadrilles or lancers, with the more proletarian elements, she was immediately reassured, say, by some white-haired old lady, obviously of superior station, who sat regarding with good-humoured amusement the rude but well-meant antics of the more obvious working class; and these rough men and stern-looking women, of whom she would have been slightly afraid otherwise, became harmlessly transformed into a chorus of comic yokels in a play; there was no real harm in them, they were doing their best, and before the evening ended she too was smiling experimentally at them, conscious that that was the right thing to do in this more elegant and emancipated society into which she had stepped.

It was a revelation; and there was nothing now to prevent Mansie and Helen from flinging themselves into a whirl of dances and whist drives that lasted the whole winter. And as though that exhilarating rush of movement were a revolving fan winnowing the chaff from the grain, its last revolution cast them strangely clean and light into the lap of an early spring. It may have been merely the discovery that things which they had hitherto regarded as wicked were not only permitted, not only harmless, but good for one; in any case the whole atmosphere of their thoughts and feelings cleared, the brooding twilight which had meant happiness to them at one time rolled back, some life process reversed its course, and they found themselves in calm and luminous light, the light of a sunny Saturday afternoon. They were happy without misgiving: that was all. The faint shadow of apprehension that had darkened all their pleasures, that had made even dancing an enjoyment to be indulged sparingly if one were not to tempt providence, had been danced clean away. They had danced themselves into a new world.

But though it was dancing that most radically transformed their ideas, some credit must also be given to Socialist thought. Yet even that they seemed to absorb more through their bodies than their minds; and while they whirled on the smooth floors of a consecutive flight of brilliantly-lit ballrooms, from the throng of other couples revolving round them were flung out radiating intellectual sparks which softly pelted them and in course of time adhered; so that without knowing how it had come about they presently found themselves convinced that the world belonged to mankind, and that in collaboration with mankind they might seek and confidently expect to find happiness there. They seemed to possess far more things than they had ever done before, but they were quite unable to distinguish between those that were actual and those that were merely potential; for if anything the latter were the more real to them, and gave them a pleasure quite as solid as corporeal substances could have done. For suddenly all the suffering in the world, all the evils which they had once accepted as ordained, were revealed as remediable – things that could be ‘abolished’; and for their liberated minds, still a little dizzy at the new prospect, the step from the possibility of a remedy to the accomplished cure was a short and dreamlike one, and they might be easily forgiven for taking it. With half their minds, the half that was freed when their day’s work was done, they lived in the future as some people, especially in youth, live in poetry or in music; and so, breathing in anticipation the more spacious air of the coming Socialist state, they had no need to con books on economics, thick volumes which in any case the consummation of Socialism itself would providentially abolish; no more need than they had to open the works of Nietzsche and Shaw to acquaint themselves with the attributes of the Superman, seeing that they already felt far closer affinities with him, as merely another inhabitant of the future, a sort of neighbour, than with the previsionary phenomenon of mankind. And if it had not been that all young Socialists of his time without exception read Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, Mansie would not have read that either; for any limitation of his floating ideas, even on free love, was an interruption of his undifferentiated delight, a violation, a disfigurement. And in fact Mansie was shocked by the book, and did not hand it to Helen after all when he was finished with it. He was still more shocked than he had been one evening when a clever young fellow in the Clarion Scouts told him that, according to Nietzsche, the Superman would be as different from man as man was from the monkeys. The idea displeased Mansie; that wasn’t how he saw it in his own mind at all. He felt he disagreed with Nietzsche.

Yet all this dwelling in the future did not lessen Mansie’s benevolent friendship for mankind, or for the trifling part of it that he met; and if the future revealed a world in which humanity, every evil abolished, was at last free and glorified, it was in unjust social conditions that the decency of decent fellows shone most eminently, and he still felt that he was surrounded by a great host of decent fellows. Indeed now they seemed more decent than ever, for his vision of a transfigured humanity cast a reflected radiance back upon their faces, and sometimes he could see in a flash how gloriously they would shine out if poverty and adversity and dulling toil and servitude were lifted from them. It was like a pain at his heart. Why should such things be? Why should injustice and hate and suffering and strife continue? Why should not Socialism come now, in the twinkling of an eye, and put the world’s sorrows to rest?

In the spring they went for rambles into the country, sometimes with the Clarion Scouts, sometimes with a more select party made up for the occasion. Bob Ryrie often went with them, and Helen was charmed by his gentlemanly attentiveness, which made her feel that with his eyes he was supporting her in the mere act of walking, helpfully assisting her to climb over any stile, it did not matter how low, anxiously hoping that she would enjoy her ramble – as if he were responsible for it, the absurd fellow! His brown eyes with their protective glance enveloped her warmly, and even his brown tweeds, which gave out the delicatest aroma of tobacco and peat, were like a soft buffer against every shock, and she felt secure and irresponsible behind them. To Mansie Bob was enthusiastic about her. ‘A superior girl!’ he said, and it was at his suggestion that Mansie ceased to take her to the Clarion Scout rambles. ‘A bit rough and tumble,’ Bob said. ‘Playing football in a field’s all right for you and me, even if it’s on a Sunday. But for a refined girl like Helen—’ So they made up a small party every Sunday and went out to Strathblane or the Mearns. They were very happy.

Yet though such a revolutionary change had taken place within Mansie and Helen, anyone perusing their actions would not have found any sign of it, for conduct too lay for them in the future. So although they devoutly believed in free love it never entered their minds to put it into practice; and had Mansie attempted any of the liberties with Helen which had caused Tom’s downfall, she would have been just as indignant again, in spite of her emancipated ideas; still more indignant, indeed, for she had fled to Mansie as a refuge from those very perils. But she had no need to fear Mansie. For in this atmosphere disinfected by the future, an atmosphere generated by Ibsen, Shaw, Nietzsche, Carpenter and Wells, but whose fantastic possibility was unbounded even by that fact, for Mansie had not even read those writers, it became quite easy to dissipate in an ever wider concentric circle every impulse that was urgent or painful, to vaporise oneself until one was conscious of no residue. Never before had Mansie felt so free.

When a disturbing fact, a case of objective suffering, an illness, say, in the family, impinges on the consciousness of anyone in Mansie’s state, at first it is a distant and muffled sound heard by the physical ear while the mind is securely asleep, and for a while the mind tries to weave it into its dream. Until the moment comes when the phantom shadow becomes so gigantic and affrighting, so far more oppressive than the objective fact itself, that with a start the sleeper awakes.