Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 34

TWENTY-FIVE

BOB RYRIE HAD finished his account of the afternoon’s football. He got up and said: ‘Well, so long, Tom, see you again tomorrow.’ In the lobby he turned to Mansie: ‘Can I speak to you for a minute?’ and he pushed open the parlour door. Mansie followed him and lit the gas. The venetian blinds were not down, and the blank window looked like a hole let into the room, leaving it perilously exposed.

Bob cleared his throat. But after all he did not speak for quite a while. At last he said: ‘Helen’s been to see me.’ It was the first time that Helen’s name had been mentioned between them since Mansie had announced the breaking of the engagement.

Mansie stared at the floor. He was standing beneath the chandelier and the light falling on his head again made him feel exposed. She’s gone to him next, he thought. Hasn’t wasted much time. She’ll never be at a loss for anyone to take her part, by gum! ‘Well?’ he said.

‘Mansie,’ said Bob, ‘is it all off between you?’ He added hastily: ‘Helen’s been going through a pretty rotten time, you know.’

‘It’s all off,’ said Mansie. ‘And I can’t discuss it.’ The exposed window troubled him; Bob and he seemed to be standing there as on a stage. Almost like rivals.

‘All right, Mansie, all right. I don’t want to interfere. But I thought you would like to know— Well, we won’t say any more about it.’

They stood in silence for a few moments; but the window still troubled Mansie, and as if confronting a danger, he walked over to it. There, looking out into the foggy darkness with his back to Bob, he said: ‘Bob, do you think I’m to blame in this business?’

Bob cleared his throat again: ‘This business? You mean Helen?’

‘No,’ Mansie jerked out, swinging his arm towards the kitchen, ‘Tom.’

‘Come, come, you’re overwrought, Mansie. You’re getting fancies into your head. I can say this, and I defy anybody to deny it: you’ve done everything a brother could have done for Tom.’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Mansie, still looking out through the window. Then he burst out: ‘If it hadn’t been for my going with that girl this might never have happened! I wish to God I had never set eyes on her, Bob!’

Bob was silent again. At last he began in an embarrassed voice: ‘I don’t see—’ Then, as if taking a plunge: ‘She broke with Tom long before that, you know. She would never have gone back to him, whatever happened. And besides – I don’t like to say it now – but it was Tom’s own fault. She was actually afraid of him; she told me so herself. If Tom had any grudge against you, it was all pure imagination. And he knows it now. And besides Tom was always a little too fond of a glass; you know that as well as I do. He might have tumbled off a car on his head any time these last two years. It was sheer good luck he didn’t do it before.’

Mansie listened vigilantly. Bob was certainly pretty cool about the business! He said: ‘Well, it may be.’ Then he burst out: ‘But a fellow would like to be sure!’

‘Mansie, you never did anything intentionally against Tom. Keep that fixed in your mind. It’s only his intentional actions that any fellow can be held responsible for. You shouldn’t stick to the house so much, you know. Makes you begin to fancy things. Well, I must be going.’ Bob looked at his watch. ‘I’m late. I’ll have to hurry.’

Mansie escorted him to the door. Earlier in the evening he had had thoughts of taking a turn with Bob himself, but Bob was evidently in a great hurry to meet someone else. Who could it be? A girl? And suddenly Mansie knew: it was Helen. He glanced into Bob’s face. ‘Well, good luck, Bob,’ he said, and he could not refrain from adding bitterly, ‘I hope you have a pleasant evening.’

‘Right!’ said Bob hastily. ‘Right! So long, Mansie.’ And he turned and literally flew downstairs.

Mansie returned to the parlour. So Bob was off for a pleasant evening. Kissing and cuddling. First Tom, then me, then Bob. She should be satisfied now, by gum. Made you want to spit. But it was downright indecent to go straight off to Bob, to one’s best friend. Was she to make trouble between all the fellows she could get her claws into? By gum, she wouldn’t do it this time, she wouldn’t make trouble between him and Bob; he would see to that. Though Bob might have shown a little more delicacy. It wasn’t like him. But that woman had got round him, and she was equal to anything. Kissing and cuddling and Tom dying. And she couldn’t even have forgotten the feel of Tom’s kisses yet! Well, he was glad he had cleared out. Hard lines on Bob, in a way; almost as if he had been let in for it; but he dashed well deserved all he got, behaving like that!

Mansie went on walking to and fro between the window and the door. The fog outside had grown thicker. He let down the blinds. Kissing and cuddling. A fellow couldn’t stay here evening after evening! Must go out once in a while; Saturday night too; all Glasgow out enjoying itself and him chained here. Might try a music-hall, the Pavilion or the Alhambra, and be among people and see and hear something cheerful for a change. Kissing and cuddling. A fellow couldn’t go on like this! A fine life! He went through to the kitchen. His mother and Jean, sitting before the fire, looked up; Tom seemed to be asleep.

‘I think I’ll go out for a little, mother,’ he said, ‘if you can spare me.’

‘Do that, my lamb, you need a change.’

But when he was sitting on the top of the crowded tramcar suddenly he felt discouraged. All the seats would be booked up; no hope of getting one at that hour; what was the use of trailing from one music-hall to another? So he got off at Gordon Street and wandered into the Central Station. But nobody was there; the book-and tobacco-stalls were closed, and the electric lights hung blankly high up in the fog under the roof; the place looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. He walked out into Union Street. Although the station was deserted the pavement here was packed from side to side with a moving mass of people, and looking down from the steps he saw bowler hats and upturned faces on which the electric lamps shed a fitful glare, coating cheek-bones and eye-sockets as with a luminous and corrosive oil. The pavement, though completely filled, gave passage-way for two sluggish processions that moved in opposite directions, and from where he stood these two processions seemed to be standing each on a long raft that moved with them at a steady speed to some destination that could not be imagined, bore them away without paying any regard to their wishes; for some of them had the air of unwilling captives, while others seemed impatient at the slowness with which they were carried forward. Yet though their progress was so inexorable, it left time for a group of young men here and there to shout inviting or lewd words to the girls on the other raft as it floated past, words that evoked stony stares or tittering or raucous laughter. But at the same time these two rafts bearing all that human freightage floated just a little above the mud, were only a thin partition over a bottomless quagmire, and through the planks the mud oozed up and clung to the passengers’ shoe-soles, though their heads were so high in the air. If the whole business were to collapse! Mansie pushed his way through the moving mass and stepped on to the roadway. Safer there, though it was damp and sticky, like Eglinton Street. There was no help for it; one had just to walk right round a crowd like that. Swaggering there under the electric lights and shouting filth at each other. And people dying!

He came to the corner of St Vincent Street. The street lay before him completely dark and silent, a blank wall of fog, and he plunged into it as though a thin paper wall hiding oblivion or nonentity. But the zone in which he found himself was not completely blank, as might have been thought; for as he walked on there went with him a small intimate circular area of clarity, a private area in which he was far more alone than he could ever have been in a room. And with a shiver of fear he knew that he could no longer escape, here in this perambulating privacy, from the thought that had been trying to catch him all evening. Was he to blame for Tom’s death? Oh God, could he be to blame? He turned a corner as if to escape from the question. Where could he be now? Tram-lines. Must be West Nile Street. Hard if a fellow was to be held responsible for a thing he never intended! Never even in his thoughts! Was it his fault that Tom took a glass too much that night and stumbled as he got off the tramcar? What had he to do with that? How could he have helped it? (Dangerous things these cars; must be careful.) And was it just that Tom should have to die of a tumour on the brain simply because of that one clout on the head? Seemed a pretty heavy punishment for taking one glass too much. And maybe it wasn’t Tom’s fault at all! The car driver may have had too much drink himself and stopped the car with a jerk; that often happened. And was that Tom’s fault? It was the car driver’s, if it was anybody’s. And Tom had to die for it after all these months with that pain in his head. And just after the fellow had turned over a new leaf too. Seemed dashed unjust.

Mansie turned another corner and passed a church. Its grimy walls had the look of many city churches; as though they had been defiled by innumerable passing dogs, or by a long succession of drunken men overcome by need and pathetically willing to find any wall a urinal. That church in Eglinton Street. Those hooligans were still standing there, no doubt. As cocky as ever. Nothing happened to them. They were allowed to do what they dashed well liked seemingly. By gum, they would know how to treat a tart like Helen, all the same. For that was what she was, in spite of her refined airs. Tom was quite right in calling her what he did that evening. And now she was walking with Bob. In the fog where nobody could see them. Safe and cosy. Took dashed good care that nothing ever happened to her. She never went through Eglinton Street. It was simple fellows like Tom that had to pay the penalty. The menacing thought came nearer. He quickened his pace. Women! They always knew how to go scot-free. No, he wasn’t to blame! He was dashed if he was to blame.

He came to an open space. Tall shapes rose round him in the fog. George Square. High up, the electric lamps flung down cones of bluish light on the stony heads and shoulders of the smoke-grimed statues. It was dashed uncanny, all these figures standing there without moving. Standing there for ever so long, some of them for a hundred years maybe. Must seem a queer world to them if they were to waken up now, frighten them out of their wits, think they were in the next world. That tall one was Burns, couldn’t even see his head. No electric light in his time, maybe no fog either. The banks o’ Doon. I’ll steal awa’ to Nannie. And then this. The world was a terrible place, when you came to think of it. Burns had some dashed bad hours in his lifetime. All these women he got in the family way. But none so bad as he would have if he were to waken up here now. Like johnnies frozen stiff and cold; the last fellows left on the earth might look like this. Would the earth be covered with fog then? Scooting through space, dead, the whole dashed lot of them, frozen stiff in the fog. Nobody left to care a hang for the poor beggars.

An immense pity for all those figures staring into the fog, left stranded there in the fog, came over him, and he felt a longing to see human faces again, even if it were only those people parading Union Street.

But when he reached Union Street again and saw the two solid streams of human beings still mechanically flowing, apparently quite unchanged, although now different bowler hats, different cheek-bones and eye-sockets were borne on the dim surface under the misty electric lights, he took the first tramcar that came as though it were an ark riding an advancing deluge about to engulf him. And as he sat on the top of the lighted tramcar he felt somewhat as if he were in an ark, felt almost grateful to the other passengers for allowing him to join them, for picking him from the jaws of danger and taking him into this company of decent fellows. Yet he did not speak to the man sitting beside him, for all those up here in this lighted, enclosed, moving chamber were united by a strangely intimate consciousness of one another, and all at once the knowledge came to him: They have all gone through it. And he was filled with pity for them, a pity quite without patronage, for he himself was included objectively in it. Yes, they had all gone through it. A great weight rolled from his heart.