Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 24

SIXTEEN

THE FIRST FEW weeks after Tom’s return from hospital passed in a Sabbath calm. All the life in the house seemed to slow down with the slowing down of Tom’s bodily movements, bringing a compulsory relaxation in which even anxiety for the future was lulled to sleep, a sleep which had to be watched over with bated breath, as one watches through the protracted crisis of an illness. It was a tension which consisted in a deliberate avoidance and postponement of tension, and it demanded somewhat the same effort that is prescribed in exercises for completely relaxing the muscles of the body.

Yet although in this Sabbath-like daily communion with her son, serene as the dawn of a new dispensation, Mrs Manson drank comfort as from a fount that had been sealed for many years, and although the thought that he might never get better did not enter her mind, often she gazed at him with sudden alarm. True, Tom’s slowness had something restful, something deliberate and leisurely, as though he were quietly reflecting on what he should do next – as he had been doing, for instance, before he got up a minute ago from his chair and walked over to the window to look down into the backyard and up at the sky, where the white June clouds were floating. And it was pleasant to see with what contentment he enjoyed his ease in bed every morning, like a good boy who has been told that he must lie still; and when he got up the leisurely care with which he put on his clothes was pleasant too, he so obviously enjoyed it. It gave one quite a sense of ease and order to see him spending such a long time on everything; on shaving, for instance, and knotting his tie, and brushing his hair. Yet even when that was done, and he had put on his waistcoat and jacket, even then he was not finished. For then he would sit down to a new occupation he had found, one that he kept to the last and seemed to enjoy most of all. Seated erect in his chair by the fireside he would take a little file from his waistcoat pocket and carefully file and polish the nails of his hands, which, after their long idleness, were nearly as white and smooth as Mansie’s. And it was when he was busied in occupations as harmless and reassuring as this that Mrs Manson would gaze across at him in sudden alarm.

The days of a sick man who is able to walk about, dress carefully and attend to his appearance, have something of an aristocratic seclusion and spaciousness. His infirmity may confine him to a pair of small rooms, but for the spatial freedom that he is denied, Time, Time in which he can do nothing at all if he chooses, richly recompenses him, translating itself into a new and more satisfying, because more amenable, dimension of space. And so when, instead of madly rushing through the far-stretching temporal vista represented by a day – in a fury to reach the end of it, as most people seem to be – one travels at one’s leisure and by easy stages, it is a form of luxury, a privilege that one cherishes, an aristocratic privilege. For when there is abundant time for everything, it becomes a matter involving one’s personal dignity that everything should be done without haste and planned in due sequence. And although at bottom all Tom’s watchful deliberation, which kept him from ever making a sudden movement, was caused simply by the necessity never to lose a beat of that internal ticking to which he was listening all the time, and which was merely the non-arrival of the pain that he dreaded and hoped would never return, the deliberation of his movements gave him genuine pleasure, the pleasure of being master both of them and of such an abundance of time. And besides, in moving with this controlled slowness one cancels, one makes merely accidental, the fact that one could not move more quickly, no matter how hard one tried. It may have been this that Mrs Manson divined when she glanced at him with that look of alarm.

In the afternoon, if it was fine, they went out for a short walk. Like everything else that Tom planned, the hour for setting out was carefully chosen; it was the dead time between the dinner rush and the dismissal of the schools, when very few people were about. Keeping to the quiet side-streets they would walk slowly along, conscientiously enjoying their constitutional, meeting little but an occasional nursemaid push a perambulator. At one time Tom could not have helped casting an appraising glance at these girls, but now he never even lifted his eyes from the point on the pavement where the danger lay; indeed it seemed beneath his dignity. Still, there were certain afternoons, afternoons on which he was more silent than usual, when he did actually lift his eyes for no more than an instant to shoot a rancorous glance at the plump healthy faces of those girls; and as though his resentment had been automatically communicated to her too, his mother would make some indignant and meaningless remark about those brazen Glasgow hussies. And they would both walk on sheathed in rancour, a rancour that was disgust for all that was young and healthy. On those days they would turn back sooner than usual, as though they had found an immense bank of discouragement lying across their path.

Almost every afternoon their road led them past a school and, looking at the empty concrete playground, automatically there rose in Tom’s mind, afternoon after afternoon, a memory of a Sunday walk with his mother long ago which had taken them past the little country school that he attended. The playground was of turf and not of concrete, and in the clear afternoon light he had peeped in through the gate at the warm, ragged grass, worn bare in patches and no longer pounded by the feet of his schoolmates, but lying lost and vacant; and he seemed to be looking at something forbidden. He had glanced up fearfully at the classroom windows, and his head felt hot and tight again, as if stuffed with warm wool; the feeling one would have if one were shut in a clothes-cupboard. And he had run after his mother very fast and taken her hand. Sometimes he wondered now whether she remembered that walk, but there was nothing in it for her to remember; it was like scores of other walks to her. And at the thought an intense feeling of regret would rise in him; it was as though he had lost something which could never be found again.

For no apparent reason this memory sometimes evoked another, the memory of a young man, the son of a neighbouring farmer, who had come home from Edinburgh to die. Tom had been a mere boy at the time, he could not have been more than nine, and it had seemed very strange to him that this young man should have come home ‘to die’; it was as though he had chosen not only the place and the time, but death itself, and had returned deliberately to accomplish that sad and strange duty. By chance Tom and his father had met the cart which was bringing the dying man from Blackness to his home; he was sitting on a bag stuffed with straw, and his large, lustrous and very sad eyes were not looking at the fields and houses he had not seen for so many years; he had not looked even at Tom, although Tom was standing in front of him on the road, a strange boy that he had never seen before. And in a few weeks the young man had died; and playing in front of the house Tom had watched the funeral procession winding along the distant road to the churchyard; but the sight had not seemed sad, but only very remote and strange, like the things that happened in the old ballads his mother sang. Remembering all this now, a blind hunger for the home he had left swept over him. O God, would he ever see it again? Why had he let himself be trapped here among these miles and miles of houses? And he could hardly walk! He could never escape by his own strength; he could never run away to sea now, even if his mother were to give him full liberty and bid him go with her blessing. Why had his father hauled him back that time? Why had his mother set her face against his going? They had not known what they were doing. And while this wave of despair engulfed him he went on planting his feet carefully on the pavement, kept his eyes fixed on the point a few steps in front of him, and listened without losing a beat to the inaudible ticking on which everything depended. But in a few minutes he felt very tired, stopped, said ‘I’m tired,’ turned round, and made for home, anxiously followed by his mother.

This relatively serene interlude lasted almost for a month. Then, without warning, Tom had another attack. Coming so unexpectedly and after such an interval, it threw him into confusion, his powers were strangely scattered, and it took him several days to assemble them again. Mrs Manson had to implore him to leave his bed, where he seemed to be hiding. When at last he reluctantly obeyed, he fell into a deeper pit of despair, for now he felt palpable difficulty in controlling his limbs, he could no longer conceal it from himself. What could it mean? What on earth could it mean? He did not bother even to shave or put on a collar, but sat by the fire and only at long intervals lurched to the window to gaze up at the sky, or to the front room to watch the people passing in the street. Yet as the days went by and there was no sign of another attack, he plucked up courage again, shaved and dressed himself carefully as before, though a little more slowly, and even went out now and then in the afternoon with his mother.

But another attack came, once more unexpectedly, and after that another; the circle seemed to be narrowing and narrowing, until, except for his outings with Mansie in the evenings, its circumference was the house. For he no longer felt that it was safe to go out with his mother; she could not help him if anything happened; she was not strong enough. And anything might easily happen. For his slowness would no longer obediently translate itself into a pleasant leisurely deliberation; it was a palpable defect that he had to struggle hard to overcome, without being able to judge, even then, in what measure he had succeeded. For his sense of time had curiously changed; it was indeed as though he had two measures of time now. Everything he did seemed a little too late. For instance if he stretched out his hand for the newspaper lying on the table he was often surprised that his fingers should not reach it until a quite definite interval had first elapsed; it was almost as though he had miscalculated the distance. And even when he opened his mouth to say something, the words seemed already said before he heard, as in a dream, his tongue laboriously and quite unnecessarily repeating them. Everything he did seemed to be an unnecessary repetition, retarding him, obstinately delaying his thoughts before they could move on to something else; or rather everything seemed already done, and all that was left for him was to watch this repetition, this malicious aping of each one of his actions after it had already taken place. And this really frightened him. Suppose when he was out with his mother a boy should run into him! He would be lying on his back before the hand he tried to raise in defence left his side; and he saw himself lying in the street with his hand – too late! – raised against nothing, raised against the sky. A terrible state to be in!

This hiatus in his movements was quite perceptible to anyone who watched him, and if Mansie and Mrs Manson had not grown accustomed to it very gradually, from its first beginnings, they might have been far more anxious than they were. Jean was the only one who saw clearly the hopelessness of Tom’s state, and as the summer wore on she kept more and more to the house in the evenings, seeing Brand only once a week. It was as though she foresaw the end and was silently preparing for it. She said nothing to the others, however; for if they too were to become convinced that Tom would never recover, the house would be unendurable. Yet she was bitterly disappointed by Brand’s indifference to Tom’s state. They had talked about it one evening, and Brand had pointed out that Tom had always run his head into things, and that it was asking for trouble to get off a tramcar in motion when one was drunk. He had actually used the word ‘drunk’, and without the least notion that he had been insulting; on the contrary he had looked to her for approval, with his triumphant debating air. It had almost made her sick, and she had flung at him: ‘Oh, you’re a fool!’ And that had really penetrated his hide. He had fallen into an offended silence, and they had parted with few words.

Yet she had been unfair in reading into Brand’s words a particular indifference to Tom, for he was indifferent to everything ‘personal’, and scarcely found any interest even in himself except for the fact that he was an advocate of Socialism, a fact of which for some reason he was inordinately vain. And she had been unfair too in feeling insulted by the short and pungent word with which he had designated Tom’s state; for he had been thinking in all innocence of nothing but the most telling way of stating his views, and the word ‘drunk’ had in the context an artistic and logical appositeness which, even if he had divined Jean’s susceptibilities, he would have found it hard to forgo; it would have been like a violation of his aesthetic sense of fitness. But so intent was he on the general question that he had never thought of her feelings at all. Besides, she had deliberately introduced a personal matter, had wantonly embarked on the kind of talk that he called gossip, and that it was gossip about dying made it only the more inexcusable. For death was one of those questions which did not interest him even in their general aspect, seeing that it could never be solved and so to think of it at all was a wasteful expense of time. ‘I’m only concerned with evils that can be remedied,’ he was fond of saying whenever any of those metaphysical problems which trouble even the most ignorant of mankind were brought up. And he would glance round him with a look of conscious rightness, asking for approval like a bright child repeating an incontestable maxim.

None the less, Mansie’s coldness and Jean’s outburst of contemptuous anger shook him. He felt at a loss in this atmosphere where the personal had unaccountably grown to such dimensions, overshadowing and bleaching all colour out of the general, and making even the most clinching argument hollow and unreal. Jean listened to him still, but as she listened he could feel his authenticity oozing out of him, could feel himself, a militant Socialist, fading to an almost transparent insignificance, so that when he sat in the kitchen with Mrs Manson and Jean and Mansie and Tom, sometimes he could hardly convince himself that he was there, no matter how hard he talked. Nor indeed was he actually there to them except as a troubling succession of words, a sequence of syllables in an imperfectly known foreign tongue which one followed with difficulty, or was content – for it did not really matter – not to follow at all. So it was no wonder that in pained perplexity Brand should at last cease to visit the house, and fall back on his weekly meeting with Jean. And no sooner was he gone than he was forgotten; and if once in a few weeks someone said with a surprised air, ‘David Brand hasn’t been in for a long time,’ the words were as empty either of relief or regret as a newspaper paragraph containing a piece of unimportant news from a distant country. It was as though he had faded to such complete nonentity before the reality which preoccupied the household that the removal of his visible presence made no difference, created no void. And indeed in his last visits he had become – an unprecedented experience for him – almost silent as well as null.