Growing Up In The West. John Muir
enter her imagination only as a legendary happening. To Tom this final and sterile kiss, rehearsed so often, gave a momentary appeasement, an appeasement which was half torture, however, for it seemed to have so little meaning; it was followed by a feeling of apprehension which he could not shake off. It was as though he had gone with Helen into the house of love, thinking at first: This is only the ante-room, but presently discovering that it was the only chamber in the house. For though there is another door in the inner wall of this room so much frequented by young couples in the larger towns of Scotland, a door leading presumably to other chambers, when one examines it one finds that it is only painted, very realistically, on the wall. There is even, it may be, a handle affixed to this door, but if there is, the handle is false too, it turns round and round accommodatingly as long as one chooses to turn it, but nothing happens: it is wooden, the ante-room is wooden, the whole house is wooden, a long narrow wooden shell with a splendid façade. Behind this façade, in such a long and shallow room, Tom and Helen performed their passionate and sterile rites.
Yet at certain moments, when two lovers strain against the painted door, there must come, no matter how convincingly their conscience assures them of the contrary, the urgent knowledge that the door is real after all, that other rooms lie beyond it, and that if they could awaken they might find themselves, with fear and trembling, but with definite relief, ensconced there. And while to all appearances they are quite happy in the bright room, and feel privileged to be there, in secret they are thinking of those other chambers whose existence they never admit to each other, and which have become a subterranean domain through which their thoughts can licentiously roam while they stand so chastely clasped. In time their embraces become merely a device to gain them admittance to that place, where they can wander in solitary thought, and where, if they ever met, they could not greet each other. So as they stand pressed so closely they are as far apart as secret drinkers indulging their craving in shameful privacy. Once, it is true, when desire first threw them together, they gave themselves when they kissed, but now, while still pretending to give, they are merely filching from each other something they are ashamed of and wish to hide. So when she casts herself into his arms with the splendid gesture of one who surrenders everything, offering her breasts to him as though each were a precious gift which he must accept with homage, she is merely making a breach in her own body through which that secret world may break in and become a private garden where she can wander at her pleasure, but where she had no further need of him, where indeed he would be a burdensome intruder, now that he has been the means through which she has found her way into it. And when she kisses him she closes her eyes as though to hide something, and if she could she would conceal her face as well, for she cannot keep the waves of passion from flowing over it, from rippling under that smooth mask like the muscles under the hide of some lovely animal.
Such secret pleasures are exciting, but they leave a sense of guilt towards the object that was employed to produce them. Tom was filled with shame that such thoughts should come into his mind when he was with Helen, and told himself that he was a waster. He felt that he had desecrated their love, and the fact that she did not know it made his treachery only the worse. Yet sometimes, almost drowned by his self-reproaches, a feeling that he had been betrayed would rise in him; and then the country girls that he had lain with, frank whether in conferring or refusing their favours, would seem to him innocent compared with this Glasgow girl, superior as she was to them, and unassailable as was her virtue. And if they had been within reach he would have gone to them to be cured.
But, although he observed them, the conventions of the city were still strange to him, and so he accepted this as one of them. Certainly it seemed a queer arrangement that young fellows courting should go about for years with their senses aroused under their clothes and pay no more attention to it than to a slight physical inconvenience, a corn or an attack of indigestion. But no doubt they got used to it; perhaps it was a normal drawback of love that had to be accepted with the rest; still it was queer to think of so many of them, dressed in their best, bow ties neatly in place, every button fastened, trousers creased, and all the time— The Rabelaisian picture, comic and yet sordid, imprinted a sheepish grin on his mouth whenever he realised that he was one of that ignominious army. It was a quite definite sense of solidarity, and although it humiliated him it gave him a satisfaction as of revenge, though on what or whom he could not have said. It was unpleasant to remember Helen at those times.
But to Helen those limitations of love were far less irksome. As she climbed the stairs, turned the key in the door of her lodgings, lit the gas in her room and absently looked round her, she still breathed that richer atmosphere which the touch of Tom’s lips and arms had distilled, an atmosphere that she inhaled effortlessly through every pore of her body, giving her a dreamful sense of lightness. It was only when she was undressing, still in a dream, that the weight of her body began to return; and the undoing of her corsets, and all the trifling acts of liberation which had to be accomplished before she could lie outstretched in bed, were like a series of infinitely complicated petty problems that she could never hope to solve. When at last she lay between the smooth sheets, every inch of her body seemed weighed down by a separate burden, lay there dead and impenetrable, a foreign load attached to her, a trunk which was of no further use, for it had been ethereally decapitated; and her lips, on which the savour of Tom’s kisses was slowly fading, seemed alone to harbour any life, seemed alone dedicated to love, a solitary beacon in the darkness. When she turned on her other side for relief it seemed an ignominious thing that she had to turn all her body; it was a conscious and deliberate act that was shameful and also in some way perilous. And she plunged into sleep like a stone falling into an abyss.
Sensual images came to her very seldom, but when they did they were brutally vivid. She saw Tom before her stripped naked, his head cropped like a boxer’s, his flesh leaden. But worst of all were the times when his nakedness was persistently obstructed by some trifle, a collar fastened by a stud round his neck, or a sock on one foot; for that was like a dismemberment, as though the collar severed his head from his shoulders and the sock darkly conjured his foot away. These startling materialisations terrified her at the rare moments when she remembered them, and it seemed impossible that she should have seen or imagined them – she, the girl who stood in the ante-chamber of love.
It is in the hand that the human will is most unequivocally incarnated, so unequivocally, indeed, that we are often held responsible even for its involuntary motions. So when Tom raised his hand and almost imperceptibly touched Helen’s breast, that breast which so often had been flung at him by the blind engine of her body, crushed against his so firmly and long that he could hear the beating of her heart; when he raised his hand to those softly outlined spheres, the act had all the appearance of deliberate violation, of Luciferian blasphemy. She was so outraged and incredulous that he at once stammered an apology. Finally she forgave him, but that was the beginning of their rupture. For when she had crushed her breasts against him it had been in involuntary obedience to the compulsion that threw their bodies – no, perhaps not even their bodies – that threw their souls together. And although she was perfectly conscious of the thrill of the impact, and indeed enjoyed it secretly and deliberately, yet no action takes on the indelible stamp of responsibility until it is acknowledged by some other human being; indeed until then one cannot even be sure that it ever happened; and Tom gave no sign, perhaps he had not noticed. Helen was too absorbed in her inner sensations, however, for such questions to present themselves to her except in the vaguest terms. But when Tom raised his hand against her breast as though against herself the cloud was torn asunder; she felt naked, and she could not fling herself into his arms again in such complete obliviousness of what she was doing. It was after this that she began to dream of Tom without his clothes.
THREE
WHILE TOM DREAMT of adventures, Mansie’s reveries were filled with hosts of friends, and his most comforting thought was that with the years their numbers would increase. Yet he never took the first step; he merely held himself expectantly open, and this of itself was enough to tell anyone who met him that here was a real friendly fellow, and to put the more sensitive into a position in which an advance into intimacy was unavoidable. But nobody except undesirable people ever wanted to escape the tacit invitation. Mansie was like one of those actresses to whom bouquets seem to fly of their own accord, and to him each new friendship was indeed a sort of bouquet which he accepted without affectation, privately conscious that he deserved it, but far too decent