Growing Up In The West. John Muir
allowance than she needed or could use, and was offended when she chid him for his extravagance. It was dashed hard lines for a fellow to be taken to task for trying to do his best for his brother! But it was for another sacrifice that his mother and Jean felt most genuinely grateful. Mansie did what he had never done before; he stayed in the house evening after evening. He had grown thin, and his mother sometimes actually pushed him out through the door and made him go for a walk.
At the beginning of an illness, when the presence of the sick man in the house is merely a disagreeable fact, one flies for relief to society which offers the most complete distraction, to people who do not even know that one’s brother is ill; and one is grateful that such society should exist and that one has so many and such diverse friends. But when the illness takes the last turn and enters the short dark high lane that narrows steadily to the final point, to nothing at all, the household of the dying are gradually stripped to the skin, to the bone, are stripped of feeling after feeling, of friend after friend, until nothing and nobody is left except the thoughts and the friends that still come to bear them company, that consent to sit here with them in this oppressive prison half-light between the narrowing walls, and voluntarily cut themselves off from life. And any friend who makes that sacrifice is a visitor from a higher sphere, for a household of the dying are like a band of outlaws. Society has turned away from them in its irresistible onward course, and if one has put one’s faith in society and dreamt of its end when all men will be happy and beautiful and without pain, one feels cast off by the universal process itself, a stone unworthy of the builder of the world, a pariah like the noseless beggar selling matches on the bridge. And when your friend talks of the world outside, he seems to be telling you of things which no longer concern you, of a country you have left where great things are being done in which you can have no part. And in your home-sickness for it there is the bitterness of the rejected.
It was now that Bob Ryrie showed his true mettle. Every evening he dropped in, if only for a few minutes, to sit and talk by Tom’s bed. He faithfully reported the football match on Saturday, and every evening had some new funny story to tell. And he seemed to know exactly what to say to Mrs Manson as well. Even Jean’s manner changed towards him, and one evening when Mansie was putting on his hat in the lobby he heard her saying in the kitchen, in reply to Mrs Manson’s customary eulogy of their visitor: ‘Bob? Yes, he’s a trump.’ That was high praise for Jean, and next evening Mansie told Bob about it. But although Bob was obviously pleased, he remained quite cool, accepted the compliment, one might almost say, as his due. Well, Jean hadn’t treated the fellow very well, but all the same he might have shown more appreciation.
Still, Mansie was very proud of Bob. But it wasn’t so easy to explain why Brand should have begun to come about the house again. Nobody wanted him in any case; even Jean didn’t seem particularly pleased to see him. After staying away all the summer when Tom was able to move about and talk like a human being, it was almost indecent of him to come to the house now when Tom was pinned to his bed and unable even to protest. And it wasn’t as if he came to see Tom; didn’t care a hang, seemingly, how the poor chap was. Besides one couldn’t take him in to see Tom; Tom couldn’t stand the fellow; and so one had to sit with him in the parlour and talk about the ILP and Guild Socialism – his latest fad, what would the weathercock take up next? Almost seemed as if he wanted Tom out of the way before he came to the house again. Still, he appeared to be put out about something or other; always telling one to go for walks and look after one’s health. What was that that he had brought out the other evening? Some quotation from Ruskin: that you should help those that could be helped, not those that were past help. Him and his quotations. Well, if Jean married the fellow she had less sense than he gave her credit for.
But Brand still continued to visit the house and to ask with anxious looks after Mansie’s health.
TWENTY-FOUR
A YOUNG MAN whose heaven has recently altered its position, shooting down from the transcendental to the historical plane, is likely to be thrown into greater bewilderment even than other human beings by the fact of death. For until a year ago death and heaven have been so close to each other in his mind that only an unimaginable something, infinite yet infinitesimal, divided them; but now they are separated by an immovable expanse of quite ordinary time, by days, weeks and years just like other days, weeks and years, and there remains nothing to connect death which is here with heaven which is merely somewhere else. The secular transplantation of heaven, which should have brought it closer, has removed it to an inaccessible distance, so that not even man’s last desperate resort, not even death, is of any avail. And as your mind, no matter how ignorantly, demands a meaning for everything, even for death, you may feel at times that your brother is doing something quite unnatural in dying now, and that, to have any meaning, the act should at least be postponed – say for a few hundred years: postponed until he has first known what life can be. It is as though he were dying in a provisional chaos where neither life nor death has yet completely evolved – scarcely even dying therefore, but simply falling into a bottomless hole that swallows everything and gives no sign. And if you suspect in your heart – even though it is palpably untrue – that you have robbed your brother of his girl, you may feel now that you have cheated him of his legitimate death as well, and substituted for it something small and commonplace without his knowing what has happened.
If Mansie Manson felt this, he was hardly aware of it, for his most articulate sensation was one of painful and embarrassed repugnance, a repugnance that muffled without softening the icy and majestic dread which heralds the approach of death. And that he should feel this embarrassed repugnance was inevitable, although he did not know it; for the new creed he had embraced was different from all the older faiths of mankind in one startling respect: that it did not take death into account at all, but left it as an arbitrary fact, a private concern of the dead. It took death so little into account that it could comfortably transform death into a mere moment in the progress of life towards its Utopian goal, a necessary and indeed progressive factor in human destiny; for how except through death could the ever-advancing armies of the generations relieve one another? It socialised death so radically as to forget altogether that it is human beings who die, and that all human beings must die. It transmuted death into another kind of life, so that, pitifully isolated in your ego and in time, you could still believe that you would live on in the lives, as pitifully isolated, of the legatees of your breath; or that, consigned to the earth, you would enjoy at least a sort of immortality in the fortuitous flowers that might spring from your dust, a chemical or biochemical immortality through which finally, it might be, you would enter in some appropriate incarnation into the chemical bliss of your far distant Utopia.
Not having any great intelligence or sincerity of mind Mansie Manson was quite incapable of perceiving this; as incapable as he was of seeing that, in spite of its extreme Utopianism, his faith contained as necessarily as the strictest Calvinism a dogma of reprobation. A dogma of reprobation far more sweeping, indeed, than Calvin’s, for until the gates of the earthly heaven are opened all who die are automatically lost. Automatically, for it does not matter whether you have striven for that heaven or perversely turned your back upon it; in either case you are lost ‘by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment’: Calvin’s words used in another connection apply with just as overwhelming cogency to you.
All this Mansie might have discovered had he chosen, or been able, to understand the Marxian interpretation of history, which for all its harshness is the true theology of every Utopian religion. But he was quite incapable of understanding it, or of seeing that the penalty for certainty in any faith, heavenly or earthly, is some form of predestination, involving election and damnation. He accepted the inevitability of the heaven with which Marx’s economic doctrine had presented him, but he disliked Marxians as heartily as a popular religious enthusiast dislikes theologians who insist on demonstrating the necessity of hell. They were a set of sordid-minded materialists who kept nice people out of the movement.
Yet now that Tom lay on his back unable to stir or to speak, passively submitting to the automatic process of death, Mansie, while still clinging to his far distant heaven, felt that Tom was incomprehensibly and irretrievably lost, lost as one might be who had died on a world frozen to rigidity long before this world came into existence. Heaven still floated before him at just the same point in the future; it had not changed its position by a hand’s breadth;