Growing Up In The West. John Muir

breathed quickly as though he had been running, and an intense longing drew him to everything his eyes fell on: an old man walking peacefully along the pavement, the windows opposite with their dingy lace curtains, the impalpable white sky. He felt hollow and cold, as if all the warmth in his body were being drained out through the glass panes into the street below him, and was wandering homelessly there like a lost dog eager to attach itself to any master. Eglinton Street. The pavement was coated with a thick layer of liquid mud, into which one’s feet sank with a humiliating feeling of discomfort and shame. A frightening place, Glasgow! Every winter his father’s farm had been like a thin raft riding on nothing but clay and mud. Terrible clinging mud; but he had escaped, he had found a firm foothold on the dry clean streets of Blackness. If he were only back there again! He felt tired out as though he had been walking and walking to get to the end of Eglinton Street, to get past all those houses, all those people who kept looking at you.

      He began to walk up and down the room. Must get out of this! His mother came in.

      ‘He’s going to bed,’ she whispered. ‘Did he say anything to you?’

      ‘No. He didn’t say much.’

      ‘Isna’ he looking better?’

      ‘Yes. Mother, I think I’ll go out for a turn.’

      ‘Why? Have you an engagement? Come in quietly, then, and be sure not to waken him.’

      She was offended. He turned to the window: the light was running away from him as through a sand-glass. His mother’s soft footsteps receded. He stole into the lobby and softly closed the outside door behind him.

      He hastened up Victoria Road. The park was still open: thank God, the park was still open! For a moment he had half thought of going to the Clarion Scout rooms, for he wanted to lose himself among people and wash away the remoteness with which Tom had touched him. But the park with its trees, its flowers and its crowds, all sending out the same glow, drew him unresistingly. Inside the gate he was caught by the crowd coming away from the band enclosure; he let himself be carried along by the weight of the massed bodies round him, his limbs became slack as under a stream of warmth, and life ran back into his veins. He went up the main avenue and turned along the terraced gardens, from which the scents were pouring in a steady stream, perfuming all the air, perfuming his very breath. Once more his arms and head seemed to break into blossom, and it was as though he were floating, an anonymous shape, in the half-darkness. From the blacker shadows came low voices and now and then a laugh which seemed startled at its own sound; and a warmth radiated out to him from the populated darkness, and he was glad that he could wander here alone, without Helen. And again the warmth of his body flowed out, but freely and blissfully now, filling the twilight, stretching from horizon to horizon, a web as perfect and delicate as the tissue of a moth’s wing, except for one point, a point no bigger than a burn made by a red-hot needle, a blackened point of which as he walked on he was scarcely aware, so distant and so tiny did it seem. But when he emerged from the tree-shaded gardens to barer ground and saw the street lamps far away in Pollokshaws Road, that distant harsh burning leapt so viciously at him that he turned round hastily into the scented darkness again. But now the park-keepers’ whistles blew; a rustling came from the trees; voices that a moment before had sounded sweet or care free all at once became matter-of-fact, and the laughter had a note of embarrassment. It was over. They were going home, just going home, after all. Surely the park-keepers might have waited for a little longer? Mansie mingled with the crowd moving towards the gate. It seemed to be carrying him irresistibly on a wave from which there was no escape, and which must inevitably wash him up on that stair-head, where he could do nothing – nothing at all – but take the key out of his pocket and turn it in the lock. A fine life for a fellow! How long was this to last?

      FIFTEEN

      TO BE SEEN out walking in the company of a man with a physical infirmity makes one self-conscious, it may be even a little ashamed, as one is ashamed of an acquaintance who is shabbily dressed. But if the man should be your brother the matter touches you far more nearly, and you may actually have the feeling that there is something wrong with your own clothes. You take off your bowler hat with a puzzled and absent air and run your palm round it to make sure that the polish has not been tarnished; your stiff collar feels uncomfortable; and when anyone passes you stare carelessly ahead as if nothing were the matter and perhaps throw a casual remark to your companion, signifying by your unconcern that nothing is really the matter with him either, whatever appearances may say.

      If your companion’s infirmity is one that makes it obviously unsafe for him to be out alone, your self-consciousness may become acute. You fancy that people are staring suspiciously at you. ‘Something wrong here,’ their eyes seem to be saying; ‘that poor fellow should be at home or in hospital.’ And when they see what pains he is taking to walk smartly, as though nothing were the matter, planting his heels on the ground with jerky regularity, and reminding one of nothing so much as a sergeant-major blind to the world dazedly upholding the dignity of the British Army, they look reproachfully at you as though you were wantonly making a public exhibition of this friend of yours, whoever he is.

      But this is only at the beginning of your apprenticeship, and soon you discover that there are other people who glance at you with interest and sympathy, first at your companion and then at you, clearly thinking: ‘A good, kind-hearted young fellow, that.’ They are mostly men whose hair is turning grey; but women of all ages also notice you, and the eyes of the younger ones seem to be saying: ‘What a pity that that poor young fellow’s life should be wasted in looking after a helpless invalid!’ And if the girl is pretty, sometimes you sadly return her look, return it without the slightest danger that she will think you are trying to pick her up; for the society you are keeping now makes you immune, puts you indeed in what might almost be called a privileged position. So you can woo as many pretty eyes as you like without any risk of encountering either disdain or, what would be almost shocking, coy encouragement. Still, being a decent fellow, you sometimes feel a little ashamed of being the sole target of this battery of sweet glances, and would like to deflect some of them to your companion, who needs them far more than you do. Then you cannot help half turning towards him, feel tempted indeed to raise your hand and wave it in his direction, like a performer in the theatre wafting half the applause to his assistant, without whom he could do nothing. But your assistant never receives a single glance. Women are really a queer lot!

      Yet this, you know all the time, is only on the surface; all this is unreal: the running fire of sweet glances no less than your rô le to which they are merely the response; the reproving stares of respectable citizens no less than the hang-dog air with which they immediately saddle you; for all the time it is your brother Tom who is spasmodically strutting there by your side, and all the time you are Mansie Manson. None of those people know that, none of them can ever know what that means; for it is a truth so simple and irreducible that if you were to try to explain it you could only repeat your original words again; a secret so securely sealed that even if you gathered all the people in the Queen’s Park together and proclaimed it publicly to them, they would be no wiser.

      And so as Mansie Manson walked by his brother’s side in the warm summer evenings through the Queen’s Park or the recreation grounds, he could freely think of whatever came into his mind, respond to glances, put on an interesting or an unconcerned air; for that was all secondary and idle, so deeply was he aware the whole time that this was his brother Tom and that he himself was Mansie Manson. Even his shame at feeling ashamed of walking here in public with his brother was idle; it was a detached and objective response which did not really touch him; he felt it almost by an act of choice; and it seemed to him that if he cared to make a different choice he would not feel it at all. And the fact that he could quite calmly think of Helen too, and plan where he would take her next evening, was equally idle, seeing that in any case he had to occupy his mind with something. For Tom left him completely to himself, left him far more alone than he would have been unaccompanied; by his absorption in himself Tom seemed to be silently imploring him for heaven’s sake to discover something of his own to think about, it did not matter what. For all that Tom wanted was to escape notice, to ignore and be ignored, so that in peace he might listen to that internal ticking which reassured him so profoundly, and keep his eyes steadily fixed on the path a few steps in front of him, where lay, no