Growing Up In The West. John Muir
he thought: Nothing can be the same again. And passing the great red-haired woman standing at the end of her close, he did not make his usual detour, skirting the edge of the pavement, but kept straight on, almost brushing her with his shoulder. Nor did the young hooligans bristling on the pavement have any power to harm him now; yet as he wanted to please even them he stepped eagerly and with a smile into the street when he came to them, and though one of them asked truculently: ‘What the hell are you girning at?’ all Mansie could do was to go on smiling, until another of the youths interposed: ‘Let the young fella alane. He hasna’ hurt you, has he?’
But when Mansie opened the kitchen door and saw Tom sitting by the fire in gloomy and rock-like apathy, it was as though he had run his head against a wall; he paused irresolutely at the door and then went through to the parlour and stood looking out at the people passing. As he watched them his blissful security slowly came back. He stood like this for a long time.
ELEVEN
Und dass mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt,
Herüberglitt aus einem kleinen Kind,
Mir wie ein Hund unheimlich stumm und fremd
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
AT FIRST IT seemed to Mansie that the revelation vouchsafed him on May Day must last for ever. As it happened the first blow to it came in a few days and from those who had shared it with him. On Wednesday evening he eagerly set out for the Clarion Scout rooms. But when he ran up the stairs and burst into the rooms the atmosphere of enveloping acceptance was not there to meet him; nobody paid any attention to him; in the twinkling of an eye they had all dwindled to their former size again; they had all fallen back; and Sunday and all that had happened in it might never have been! He wandered dejectedly from group to group. They were discussing the procession: apparently it had been a disappointment. Mansie listened, at first with bewilderment, then with interest, then to his surprise with pleasure, for as his exaltation of the last few days gradually oozed out of him and he returned to a more comfortable size it was actually a relief – he couldn’t but admit it to himself, it was an undeniable relief, though it left a sort of empty feeling somewhere. His feet were on the earth again. Strange how easily you slipped back into your old feelings! And when a man turned round to him and asked how he had liked his first procession, he said carelessly: ‘Oh, it was quite all right in its way.’
Yet when he left the Clarion Scout rooms he felt cheated and at a loss. The best part of the evening still lay before him, and all at once it seemed quite blank – he had nothing to occupy himself with; an evening wasted! So he resolved to walk home. But coming to Eglinton Street and seeing all those people fallen back again, all those dirty children still crying to the heavens – they would cry for a jolly long time before they got any answer, poor little beggars! – it was more than he could bear; and at the strident voice of an open air evangelist at the first street corner he abruptly crossed to the other side and waited for a tramcar to take him home. As he sat on the top of the tram he reviewed again his feelings on May Day, and now they filled him with alarm. Something far wrong with the whole business; something soft and sticky, almost indecent! The disciple laying his head on the other’s breast rose into his mind; he had been jolly near doing that himself, by gum! Almost made a complete ass of himself. What would the people he knew have said if they had seen him? And a still earlier memory stirred insinuatingly in the grounds of his mind. But he pitilessly repressed it: an unhealthy-minded, unnatural young beggar he must have been then! Had to take care. Dangerous to let yourself go like that. That fat man he had walked beside in the procession, couldn’t even remember now what he had said to him, might have said anything, given himself away hopelessly. The disturbing memory stirred again, rose a little, vague and sickly, and seemed to float down his mind like the procession floating down Glassford Street, becoming involved with the rising and falling shoulders, which now gave him a sensation almost of sea-sickness. He would take dashed good care that he didn’t go to another May Day! But all the time he was on the tramcar he could not get that early memory out of his mind.
It was a quite vague memory, and concerned an affair that he had had, and should not have had, with a little girl from a neighbouring farm when he was six. He had had no consciousness of guilt, or only a sense of it as purely fanciful as the comedy he was playing; and indeed, seeing that sex was still unawakened in him, and he was only acting, he was probably as innocent of any actual or even possible offence as a character playing an enigmatic part in a story. Yet he had felt environed by guilt, and this had made him carry out his games in secrecy. At certain stages children seem to live in two separate worlds, both of which are real. In one world, the world which included his parents and all other grown people and himself, a place perfectly familiar to them but full of perplexities for him, Mansie knew that what he did was, in spite of its simplicity, a sin of awful dimensions; but in the other country where he lived with his playmate there was no evil, or a purely fictitious evil which he could summon before his mind only by make-believe. So accompanying the clear knowledge that he was disobeying his father and mother, was the feeling that he was committing a fabulous sin, a sin which was not a sin to him, but to some shadowy figure – it might beGod – in a world only visible to his elders.
In his memory, and more especially during the years of adolescence, this episode seemed to him, grotesquely enough, the most shameful in all his life. He could no longer remember the feelings that had accompanied his acts, and he seemed to himself simply to have been a very nasty and unnatural little boy. Unnatural, for now he could only see those games, played in a world where the powers of sex were still unawakened and so nonexistent, through the eyes of a youth whose thoughts were penetrated with sex and his awareness of it, and in this distorting medium his childish play acquired not only a shadow of perversity, but even something of the disgrace of impotence; and when, after joining the Clarion Scouts, someone told of the agapemones of the early Christians, those promiscuous love-feasts in which lust seemed so strangely mingled with piety, innocence with vice, universal love with sexual perversity, that period of his childhood wavered up before him again. The forms taken by his games, however, were by then almost completely effaced from his mind, and all that remained was a thickly-woven cloud, corporeally oppressive, and both bright and dense, like a golden nightmare weighing on his mind. Yet at the same time he felt that this cloud lay deeper in childhood than any other memory he could summon, lay there, ring-shaped, in an almost terrifyingly secure and still zone, at that very heart of childhood into which it is perilous even for children to venture too far. Its radiance was richer than the light on the little green hill behind the house where he had lain so often and watched the ships passing over the sound in the shadow of the black islands – passing so slowly that he could discern no motion in them, and yet saw, with a feeling of wonder, that they had moved. The towering hills changing from black to dark blue of the neighbouring isle, the little red coat with the yellow buttons – a red and yellow so absolute that they seemed to exist not as mere qualities but as living things, quivering like flames and glowing like flowers: these he remembered vividly; yet they faded almost to the hue of an ordinary memory if the thought came to him of that rich and bright cloud in which, as in a trance, some part of him for ever beyond his reach still lay imprisoned; so that the memory awoke in him a vague need to struggle and free himself from something or other, he did not know what.
He and his playmate had already turned to other games when his father took a farm on the mainland. And then, without warning, the guilt, which had been hanging, a small and distant cloud in the sky, and should with the discontinuance of the offence have dissolved and vanished, fell upon him in a clap. It was after the time of the sheep-dipping. His father had warned them all against touching the sack in which the sheep-dip was kept. The sack was laid out in a field at some distance from the house; the sheep were dipped, and the empty sack was burned; but for a long time afterwards Mansie could not rid himself of the obsession that the poison had got on to his hands. He washed them in terror many times a day until they had a wasted and transparent look. At first it was the poison that he tried to cleanse from them; but as time went on he washed them in a panic, as though he were purifying them of something that he had long since forgotten, some mysterious stain which could be erased only for a moment and immediately returned again; like the Book of Black Arts which you could drown in the sea or burn in the fire, but would always be found lying in its place in your trunk if you had once been so unfortunate as to