Growing Up In The West. John Muir

listened with his head to one side as if weighing Mansie’s words, but he did not look up, and even when they were sitting in the cab they still avoided looking at each other.

      ‘Go on quietly!’ Tom said at last to the floor of the cab. ‘Is that all he said? It’s easy for him to talk!’

      Mansie gazed out through the window at the sooty front-garden railings spinning past. It was a dull November afternoon. Why had he said that about going on quietly? A child could see through it, and he was astonished and a little shocked that Tom hadn’t. But Tom was really as helpless as a child, couldn’t even fasten his buttons. He replied with an effort: ‘Oh, he said you weren’t to worry. That’s the only thing that might do harm.’

      It was as though he were talking to an object that had Tom’s shape and was able to reply in Tom’s voice, but that was all: an object that you carted about in a cab and had to deliver like a package at its destination. It didn’t matter what one said now, and yet it was hard work to say anything at all. Tom asked:

      ‘Did he say how long it would take?’

      And mechanically Mansie responded: ‘He said it might be a matter of months, but possibly of weeks.’

      The specialist’s very words! He had given the whole bally show away! But Tom seemed actually reassured by his answer.

      After a pause Tom said: ‘Do you know what he asked me? Asked me if I had gone with loose women!’ Mansie glanced at him in alarm. ‘Fancy asking a fellow a thing like that!’ Tom went on. ‘A funny set, these doctors, I must say!’

      ‘He had no right to ask you that!’ exclaimed Mansie. It was going a bit too far, and the fellow dying! ‘It was a dashed insult!’

      But he was thinking: That was the first thing that Doctor Black had asked too.

      Tom looked out through the window: ‘Oh, I told him off all right. Still, it was a damned cool thing to ask a chap.’ The cab was rolling along Sauchiehall Street. ‘I see they’ve opened a new cinema there.’

      ‘Yes, cinemas going up all over the show now,’ said Mansie. ‘Money in them too. Pay as much as 40 per cent, some of them.’

      But Tom seemed to be profoundly dejected all at once. Hadn’t been in a cinema for a long time, poor chap. Would never see the inside of one again. The thought brought the presence of death very near. Mansie glanced at his brother and hastily turned away his eyes again. What could one talk to him about? A matter of months, perhaps of weeks. This cab was taking a terribly long time. Only Union Street still. If you could only get out and walk: do something!

      The dull afternoon brightened; they were crossing the Jamaica Bridge now. Tom put his head out through the window and sniffed as if he felt the sea air. The rusty funnels of a tramp steamer showed over the low parapet of the bridge. Tom sat with his head just inside the window; he seemed turned to stone. Then he lay back in his corner with a thud. Thinking of the sea, no doubt, poor beggar. Eglinton Street. These squalling children. You could hear them here all right; seemed to be right down among them. Orange-peel on the pavement. The red-haired woman. As usual. Everything unchanged. Would this cab never get there?

      At last the cab stopped. There was the close, right enough. And Mansie eagerly pushed Tom up the stairs as if he still feared that he would never get him delivered. Mrs Manson was waiting in the doorway.

      ‘It’s all right, mother,’ said Mansie. ‘The specialist expects he’ll be better in a matter of weeks, but it may be months.’

      It came quite easy now. Queer how easy a fellow got used to it. Tears started to Mrs Manson’s eyes, and she silently took Tom by the hand. They went in. Delivered safely.

      When Tom was settled in his chair by the kitchen fire Jean made a sign to Mansie and left the room. He found her standing by the window in the parlour. ‘No hope,’ he said, and he repeated the specialist’s words.

      ‘Your mother mustn’t be told,’ was all that Jean said. Then she went back to the kitchen.

      Mansie walked through to his room and lay down on the bed. Took it out of a fellow. Wouldn’t like to go through that again. Helen. Have to write to her. But he lay where he was without moving. Too dashed tired. He awoke with a start. Why, he must have fallen asleep; it was quite dark. He got up and lit the gas. Have to write that letter. The thought exasperated him. Well, better get it over. But there was no letter-paper in his room. Dash it, what if there was none in the house! That would be the bally limit. At last he found a writing-block in the kitchen, and ignoring his mother’s advice that he should write in comfort at the kitchen table, bore it back to his room, sat down on the bed and with a resolute air took out his fountain pen. But the sight of the letter-block reminded him of all the letters he had written to Helen, letters beginning with terms of endearment that he could never use again, and the strength went out of his fingers. It couldn’t be true that he would never see her again! That couldn’t be the meaning of this letter that he was going to write to her! It couldn’t be! Tom couldn’t be dying on them like this! Dash it all, were they doing any harm to anybody? It seemed hard lines that they had to give each other up because Tom got a clout on the head falling off a tramcar. But as though this were merely a rhetorical protest by a spectator watching an impersonal process accomplishing itself, his fingers gripped the pen and wrote the words, ‘Dear Helen’. Fatal words; for at the sight of them his heart hardened and he went on setting down one short sentence after another, as though he were doling out in minute doses some strange and dreadful substance – for it did not seem to come out of him at all: ‘Tom has seen the specialist today. The specialist says there is no hope. Tom may live for a few months, or it may be only weeks. In these circumstances I feel we cannot go on. It would be better not to see each other again. I hope you will forgive me and see that this is not my fault. I think you will agree that we cannot go on. I trust you will be happy in the future.’ He stopped and gazed at the written page. He felt very tired. Should he add anything more? What more could he say? He pondered for a moment and then signed his name. A queer end to that day on the cliffs outside Gourock! Oh, dash it, dash it! Must stick to the house and Tom now. Enough to keep any fellow occupied.

      He put on his hat, went out to the corner, and dropped the letter in the post-box. All the tramcars were packed with people returning from their work.

      PART THREE

      TWENTY-TWO

      IN THE NATIONAL Gallery in London there is a picture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane by Giovanni Bellini. The dawn is wakening and on the high hill to the north the walls of Jerusalem are rosy against a night sky sullenly dissolving away. The garden, a coign of clean and carven rock, a little wave-like shell of stone, lies in a hollow where the shadow is like clear water. In the cup of this shell recline the three disciples in a slumber that looks more like a trance, so rigid are their postures, so blind and rebellious their faces. To the right the basin swells up to a thick frill of rock, where, overlooking the ultimate curved crest of the wave in whose trough the sleepers lie, Christ kneels with arms upraised towards the dark mountains, His face turned away from His followers. He is a powerful, deep-chested man with reddish-fair hair and beard, and one can see that the bars of the cross will take a long time to break Him. In the middle ground, between Jerusalem’s hill and Gethsemane, a handful of soldiers are straggling along a country road. The road does not lead towards Gethsemane but runs at right angles to it, and one might imagine at first that the soldiers are making for some other destination, until one sees that the road presently bends round. Christ’s eyes are lifted to the mountains. Has He seen the soldiers? It is impossible to tell; but if He should turn His head, it will not be the familiar fields and roads that He will see, but a stage on which He can watch, as if it were somebody else’s, the unfolding of His personal fate. And where the road bends towards Him the soldiers will become taller and He will see that their eyes are fixed on Him.

      Somewhat like this is the apparently fortuitous and yet deliberate approach of a disease which intends to remain for a long time with its object, and can afford at leisure to fulfil its purposes. All that the watcher may discern at first is a tiny moving shape at the head of some remote mountain path. He watches it with an uneasiness