Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 32

TWENTY-THREE

IN A HOUSE of sickness, as in any house, the ordinary routine of the day must be observed. The breadwinner must get up in the morning and go to work; the meals must be on the table at the appointed hours; fires have to be kindled, floors swept, beds made, brass scoured, dishes washed and dried. Yet all those daily offices whose very monotony once gave a sense of comfort, as though they were a perpetually renewed covenant securing the day’s peace and order, become meaningless once the covenant has been repudiated by the other invisible party to it, and is left in one’s hands, a useless piece of paper whose terms nevertheless bind one, strangely enough, as absolutely as before. So even the simplest household tasks which Mrs Manson had performed with automatic ease for many decades would on some days rise up before her as alarming problems that she needed all her skill to solve, and she would look round the kitchen as if everything in it – the range, the brass taps, the pots and pans – had grown strange and hostile; and it was a mathematical labour to move the table from the wall to the middle of the floor, and to remember the number of dishes, of knives and forks and spoons, she had to lay out on it. Even when, shortly after Tom’s visit to the specialist, Jean threw up her job and took over most of the housework, Mrs Manson was still dazed by the little that remained for her; the routine of the house had become a piece of recalcitrant machinery whose workings she had painfully to foresee and provide against, and it inspired her with something of the dread that she felt for all machinery: for the tramcars rushing about the streets, for the cash tickets neatly shot out like little sneering tongues by the automatic cash registers in the shops, for the dreadful maze of machinery through which, since he came to Glasgow, Tom had walked for a time miraculously unscathed, until at last it struck him down. Often she would stop in the middle of the morning’s work and say: ‘Oh, why did we ever come here, Jeannie?’ But she had asked the question so often that she never waited for a reply, but simply resumed her work again.

Tom became more and more incapable of controlling his limbs, and a few weeks after his visit to the specialist he had a severe stroke and next day collapsed on the floor when he was getting out of bed. As they lifted him up he said something, but his speech was indistinct – it was as though his tongue were swollen – and Jean and Mrs Manson could not make out his mumbled words. This made him very angry; he gave them a furious look and refused to repeat what he had said. For some time he lay in silence. At last he said, very slowly and deliberately: ‘Give – me – a – drink – of – water,’ as though he were repeating a difficult exercise, and when Jean hastily ran and filled a glass at the tap he looked at her reproachfully, for her quickness was a wanton exposure of his new infirmity. So now he must lie in bed and have everything done for him.

After this even Mansie gave up hope. Yet a few days later he wanted to call in another specialist, and his mother and Jean had to plead with him for a long time before he gave up the idea. Surely there was something that could be done! It was terrible to sit there with idle hands and resign yourself to the whole business like his mother and Jean. But it may have been that he simply needed to spend to the last penny the money that still lay in the bank for his marriage with Helen. And possibly the very fact that the sacrifice was quite useless, that he took no risk whatever in throwing away all his money on Tom, made him all the more eager to do it: it was a sacrifice without even an object to qualify it, an absolute act uncontaminated by consequences. In any case he was fantastically generous during those last few weeks, supported the whole household uncomplainingly on his shoulders, gave his mother every Saturday a far larger allowance than she needed or could use, and was offended when she chid him for his extravagance. It was dashed hard lines for a fellow to be taken to task for trying to do his best for his brother! But it was for another sacrifice that his mother and Jean felt most genuinely grateful. Mansie did what he had never done before; he stayed in the house evening after evening. He had grown thin, and his mother sometimes actually pushed him out through the door and made him go for a walk.

At the beginning of an illness, when the presence of the sick man in the house is merely a disagreeable fact, one flies for relief to society which offers the most complete distraction, to people who do not even know that one’s brother is ill; and one is grateful that such society should exist and that one has so many and such diverse friends. But when the illness takes the last turn and enters the short dark high lane that narrows steadily to the final point, to nothing at all, the household of the dying are gradually stripped to the skin, to the bone, are stripped of feeling after feeling, of friend after friend, until nothing and nobody is left except the thoughts and the friends that still come to bear them company, that consent to sit here with them in this oppressive prison half-light between the narrowing walls, and voluntarily cut themselves off from life. And any friend who makes that sacrifice is a visitor from a higher sphere, for a household of the dying are like a band of outlaws. Society has turned away from them in its irresistible onward course, and if one has put one’s faith in society and dreamt of its end when all men will be happy and beautiful and without pain, one feels cast off by the universal process itself, a stone unworthy of the builder of the world, a pariah like the noseless beggar selling matches on the bridge. And when your friend talks of the world outside, he seems to be telling you of things which no longer concern you, of a country you have left where great things are being done in which you can have no part. And in your home-sickness for it there is the bitterness of the rejected.

It was now that Bob Ryrie showed his true mettle. Every evening he dropped in, if only for a few minutes, to sit and talk by Tom’s bed. He faithfully reported the football match on Saturday, and every evening had some new funny story to tell. And he seemed to know exactly what to say to Mrs Manson as well. Even Jean’s manner changed towards him, and one evening when Mansie was putting on his hat in the lobby he heard her saying in the kitchen, in reply to Mrs Manson’s customary eulogy of their visitor: ‘Bob? Yes, he’s a trump.’ That was high praise for Jean, and next evening Mansie told Bob about it. But although Bob was obviously pleased, he remained quite cool, accepted the compliment, one might almost say, as his due. Well, Jean hadn’t treated the fellow very well, but all the same he might have shown more appreciation.

Still, Mansie was very proud of Bob. But it wasn’t so easy to explain why Brand should have begun to come about the house again. Nobody wanted him in any case; even Jean didn’t seem particularly pleased to see him. After staying away all the summer when Tom was able to move about and talk like a human being, it was almost indecent of him to come to the house now when Tom was pinned to his bed and unable even to protest. And it wasn’t as if he came to see Tom; didn’t care a hang, seemingly, how the poor chap was. Besides one couldn’t take him in to see Tom; Tom couldn’t stand the fellow; and so one had to sit with him in the parlour and talk about the ILP and Guild Socialism – his latest fad, what would the weathercock take up next? Almost seemed as if he wanted Tom out of the way before he came to the house again. Still, he appeared to be put out about something or other; always telling one to go for walks and look after one’s health. What was that that he had brought out the other evening? Some quotation from Ruskin: that you should help those that could be helped, not those that were past help. Him and his quotations. Well, if Jean married the fellow she had less sense than he gave her credit for.

But Brand still continued to visit the house and to ask with anxious looks after Mansie’s health.