Growing Up In The West. John Muir

filled with alarms and trepidations which invisibly lay in ambush and did not leave him even when he slipped suddenly round a corner to avoid them, or locked himself in the dark cupboard where he hoped they could not enter. He did not know from what source they came or what brought them on him; for by now he had completely forgotten the little girl, and when he thought of that time a comforting blank, which yet disturbed him as if it concealed some treachery, was all that his memory gave back. He could not tell his father and mother of his fears, and so they enclosed him in a silent world whose invisible terrors he had to face by himself. The knowledge that there were things in which his parents’ help, no matter how anxious, could be of no use to him, bewildered him most of all; the feeling that he lived in a blind place was perpetually with him; yet this blind place was only a thin film surrounding him, from which if he ran very fast and very far he might be able to escape; and his cousin playing a few feet away in the sun, and his mother taking his own head on her shoulder in the firelight, were in that secure world, and yet he was outside. The only way he could think of escaping his terrors was by running very fast until he could run no farther; and when he fell and bruised himself he felt that the blood trickling down must, as by an expiatory rite, bring him back to the ordinary world where other children too bruised their knees and bled. But these accidents staved off his invisible alarms only for a little, and deceived him.

      This period in his life was one of real and urgent terror. How long it lasted he could not tell now, but it must have been towards the end, when his fears were thinning, and twisted gleams of the real world appeared again as through running glass, that his mother had taken him out to the back of the house to see the lamb. He had been ill, of what he could not remember, and this was his first day out. As between two folds of cloud he could still see the black lamb beside its mother against the spring sky. The lamb was weak and tottered as it ran; the soft black wool covering its gawky body, the lacquered little cloven hoofs, the soft eyes, which still had a bruised look, appeared to have been just made; and the lamb seemed both surprised and glad to be on the earth. And suddenly, as though it had come for this, a black lamb cast up without warning on the green sward, it charmed him out of his nightmare, and he saw the young sky and the great world outspread. The lamb paid no attention to him and yet seemed aware of him; it played like a child who feels its mother’s eyes upon it and in its inward dream is telling her something which it wants her to know. The dark cloud returned again, but soon after this it must have vanished.

      So Mansie sat on the top of the tramcar smoking a cigarette; and the ship passed and did not pass, the little red coat glowed and glittered, the two hands cleansed each other and yet were not cleansed. And over all hung the ring of golden cloud with two long lost figures, himself and the little girl, hidden at its heart, hidden there and past all help. He shrugged his shoulders as if shaking himself free of something, he did not know what. But even while he did so he felt his helplessness. Somewhere beyond his control the ring-shaped cloud of childhood touched the ring that had encircled him as he floated in bliss on his island down the stony defiles of the streets of Glasgow, touched it and melted into it; and now he could scarcely tell what filled him with such apprehension, the apprehension evoked by things born irrevocably before their time, or made of too soft and perishable substance. He resolved again, definitely, never to go to another May Day.

      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