Growing Up In The West. John Muir

to Strathblane, and many times in his childhood, returned again. He felt as he had done when a boy, looking at the farm planted precariously on the side of the hill, that the position of his heaven was in some inexplicable way wrong, so deeply wrong that it filled him with apprehension. He felt that it was not where it should be; yet when he dreamt of another station for it he became blind and could see nothing but a shining vacancy. It was a vague sense of ill-ease that he felt, and it never hardened into a definite thought. But had he been able to read his mind he would have found, strangely enough, that what he longed for was not to bring his dreamt-of heaven nearer, so near that he would be able to see it outspread before him and cross its frontiers and be received finally within it, stepping out of a dying world into one new born, but rather to raise his heaven to some position high above itself, to lever it upwards with his eyebeams to a height where it would no longer be in Time; for so long as it was in Time, Time would sunder him from it. And with his sense of separation his old dread of chaos returned, for chaos is universal separation; and at the uttermost end of the blind longing to lift his heaven from the distant future place where it stood so implacably, there must have been the hope that if it could be raised high enough, uplifted to an inconceivable height, Time would once more become whole and perfect, and a meaning be given not only to present death, but to all the countless dead lying under their green mounds, so that the living and the dead and the unborn might no longer be separated by Time, but gathered together in Time by an everlasting compact beyond Time. All that he felt was an uneasy sense that even the perfect future state was not all that it should be; but when, brooding on Tom’s certain death, he said as he often did now, ‘Well, there’s no use in expecting a miracle to happen,’ he was probably thinking, without knowing it, of a greater miracle. But he had no hope that it would happen.

      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