Growing Up In The West. John Muir
him. So Tom got unsteadily to his feet.
But as he approached Garvin Street a long forgotten memory of his childhood came back to him. A big lout, the son of a neighbouring farmer, had lain in wait for Mansie one evening. Mansie had stood with a terrified look on his face, refusing to fight; but Tom, although he was only a little boy at the time, had flown at Mansie’s tormentor screaming: ‘You’re no’ to hurt Mansie! You’re no’ to hurt Mansie!’ And everybody had laughed, and there had been no fight. And now Mansie had given him a stab in the back. Without provocation. His elder brother that he had always looked up to, that he would have done anything for. ‘By God, I’ll get even with him!’ he said as he went up the stairs, but it was only the repetition of an empty phrase. And when he opened the door he felt so tired that he walked straight through to the parlour – driven out of his very room, by God! – and forlornly went to bed.
After a long and inconclusive debate with his mother in the kitchen, Mansie wearily betook himself to his room. He had denied that there was anything between himself and Helen, denied it as indignantly as if he were speaking the truth; and indeed what he had told her was partly true at least, entirely true in fact if you only counted the time up to the moment when, yielding to a silly impulse – it had become far too much of a habit with him, dash it! – he had stooped down and kissed Helen on the mouth. He knew it was a mistake the minute it was done, knew it as soon as he found her in his arms, knew it while her lips were still clinging to his: a silly goat to have got himself into such a fix for the sake of a moment’s pleasure. But then, whether it was the total abandon with which Helen fell into his arms, as if she had been fatefully poised in a perilous equilibrium that only one touch was needed to destroy, or whether it was the slightly terrifying thought that this was Tom’s girl, whom it would be wicked to trifle with, almost blasphemous to embrace unless one were driven by an irresistible passion that excused everything: all at once they had both become serious, they had looked at each other like conspirators suddenly bound together by a fatal act that they had not foreseen a moment before, revealing them to each other in a flash, so that it would have been useless, even perverse, to pretend any longer. This wasn’t like his other affairs with girls at all! The frightening thought had shot through Mansie’s mind while Helen’s lips were still pressed to his. There was no turning back now. A serious business!
And now, as he lit the gas-jet in his room, he thought again, listening involuntarily for any sound from the parlour where Tom was lying: A serious business! But all the same what he had told his mother was true. Helen had only come to him for help and advice. And besides, it was a dashed shame of Tom to have lain in wait for her, stopping her and speaking to her like that: the poor girl was frightened out of her wits and didn’t know where to turn. Tom should have taken his dismissal like a man. Why, it was two months now since she had told him that it was all over between them! And yet the fellow still went on persecuting her, even stopping her in the street: that was carrying things a bit too far. Still it was dashed unfortunate that Tom had seen them that evening. It was like him, all the same; always stumbling against things that hurt him, always getting himself and other people into trouble. Well, he had only himself to blame; Helen would never have had him back whatever happened.
Mansie glanced round the bedroom. It had a strange naked look. Made a fellow feel quite queer, that empty iron bedstead; something ugly and threatening about it. Things would be dashed uncomfortable in the house now, with Tom in that state of mind. Mansie slowly took off his clothes. Unpleasant going to bed with that thing standing there by the wall as if it were watching you. Wish Bob Ryrie were here to keep a fellow company. Bob would be able to advise one too. He turned his back on the bedstead. A serious business! And he was to see Helen on Saturday afternoon. He almost wished now that he had not fixed up that appointment with her; but there was no drawing back; the damage was done; Tom had seen them, and there would be no use in trying to convince him that—
Putting out the gas, Mansie slipped into bed, carefully avoiding the iron bedstead still reproachfully and threatingly exposing its shameful nakedness to him in the light of the street lamp outside. For a long time he lay awake thinking of Helen and Tom and wishing that Bob Ryrie were there with him. He felt forsaken and unjustly treated, like a child locked as a punishment in an empty room where damaged and disused pieces of furniture are kept. But at last he fell asleep.
TWO
Since there’s no hope, come let us kiss …
DRAYTON
IF TOM MANSON had had the ability to crystallise his vague feelings of betrayal connected with Glasgow he might have said that he was betrayed by a kiss. For it was a kiss, or rather a special kind of kiss, known perhaps only in Puritan countries which have been thoroughly industrialised without being civilised to the point requisite for an industrialised population, that was one of the chief causes of his later misfortunes.
Like all born lovers of freedom Tom had always been irked by a countless number of things which tamer natures adapt themselves to without inconvenience. His father’s farm had irked him because it was stationary, because the seasons followed one another, because the soil had to be ploughed and the harvest reaped; and the little town of Blackness had begun to irk him as soon as he felt that he knew every stone in it. For on the farm he had at least felt the horizon round him wherever he went; but here his sight was bounded by arbitrary walls, and if he got drunk oftener than he should it was partly because then the houses lost their stability, rocked lightly like ships at anchor, and seemed on the point of floating away; and this fluctuating barrier was far more endurable than the rigid walls that sobriety raised about him. Sometimes as he walked home at night after a spree he would kick a particularly massive stone in the wall, at first to convince himself that it was as solid as it looked, and finally in anger at its unresponsiveness. Next day his imprisonment was always harder to bear.
When at last his apprenticeship in the engineering shop was over and he could go to Glasgow, the hugeness of that city became an image of inexhaustible freedom. For a year he was enchanted by the variety and strangeness of Glasgow. Even the unfamiliar conventions pleased him, and he set himself eagerly to acquire them. And although he came from a northern island where people’s speech had still a ballad frankness and young men still climbed in through their sweethearts’ windows at night, he soon learned what words might and might not be addressed to a respectable young Glasgow typist. Like almost everybody, indeed, who, coming from a relatively primitive state of society, seeks to adapt himself to one that is more complex, he made the error of taking the new conventions at their face value and fell from his natural frankness into a fantastic propriety. One thing in particular helped to make his attitude to women excessively correct. A man who has been accustomed to steal to his sweetheart under cover of night insensibly comes to associate love with loosened hair on pillows and matches clandestinely struck, and the sight of a young lady, correctly dressed, walking towards him through the crowd, which he has been watching for the last ten minutes, awakens in him quite a different train of thoughts and conducts him into a world from which there is no bridge to the world of love as he has known it. And that bridge being unthinkable, he comes in time to conceive of the transition to the physical rites of love as a perfectly arbitrary step not provided for by the convention, a blind leap out of one world into another, a violent settlement of a question for which there is no legitimate solution. Tom, in other words, simply could not imagine himself lying in bed with the stylishly dressed girls whom he walked out – at least while he was walking them out; or rather he could not imagine the process which would lead to that consummation: day and night attire having for him almost the force of two absolute conditions – the present in which he was embedded, and the past from which he had been roused for ever. And even when he fell in love with Helen his feelings still remained in this suspended state, and it was only when she granted him a little more than he had reckoned upon that Glasgow and its conventions began to irk him: the small draught of freedom represented by a special kind of kiss was enough to make him feel his bonds.
They must have kissed sooner or later; but while in the world which Tom had known an ardent kiss was only the prelude to a more intimate caress, to Helen it seemed to be the end. And the passion with which she flung herself upon it had something of despair and renunciation. It was as though in a fury of make-believe she hoped to transform it without anyone’s knowledge, even her own, into that ultimate surrender