Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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minds’. These Glasgow people were really a funny lot.
But soon after this, before the impression left by the PSA had faded, unexpected relief arrived. At the YMCA Sunday afternoon meeting he had admired a girl secretly for a long time, glancing across at her where she sat among the other girls under the long row of windows at the opposite side of the hall. Yet he had never dared to speak to her, for obviously she was a superior girl, perhaps even a school-teacher. She was tall and dark, and her clothes had a ruthless perfection of cut; and individually all those things daunted him. Then one day he caught sight of her approaching on the pavement, and when half-defensively and half-hopefully he put up his hand to his hat she smiled and stopped. And in a few moments he found that they had arranged to go for a walk that evening.
It was the last Saturday of the Glasgow Fair. The city had that spacious look which is given to great masses of stone when the cares within them are suspended; the very houses seemed to be breathing a more rarefied atmosphere (perhaps it was merely that no smoke was ascending from the chimneys), the children’s shouts rose with unusual clearness, and even the regular boozers who on this vacant Saturday night got drunk because after all it was a Saturday night, seemed forlorn and ineffectual figures wandering about in a mere dream of intoxication which they were striving to make real: in vain, for the sober crowds whose presence alone can prove beyond doubt to a man that he is drunk had inexplicably melted away. On this one Saturday night in the year a drunken man wandering through the solitary streets, where the summer evening still lingers, may carry on for a long time a peaceful metaphysical debate with himself and at the end of it not know whether he is drunk or sober; and finally he will go to bed more in perplexity than anger, yet with the indefinable feeling that the world has changed.
Mansie and Isa took the tram to Maxwell Park, from which they intended to walk to the Pollok Estate. On the top of the tram, which was almost empty, Mansie felt, as he always did when he was committed for the evening to a single companion, a doubly vivid consciousness of all the friends whom he had left behind and whose company he was in a sense sacrificing, and a trace of bitterness came over him at this girl for being the cause of such a separation, a trace so faint, however, that presently it passed into the resolve to get all the enjoyment he could out of the evening. The paths and woods of the Pollok Estate were deserted, and the sense that he was walking here almost alone with this girl intensified the pleasurable feeling which Mansie received from nature, a feeling compounded of a vague melancholy and a solid conviction of religious comfort. After he had carefully spread out the light raincoat that he always carried with him in provenance, they sat down on the grass behind a line of bushes which screened them from the road. Mansie generally kissed, at some suitable moment, the girls he took for a walk. The moment came, he kissed Isa, and then the dreadful thing happened. What was this woman after? Was this a way for human beings to behave? As if fleeing from violation the trees and bushes around him that had stood tranced as if in anticipation of the coming Sabbath receded to a remote distance, leaving him to his fate … yet the worst moment of all came when, turning away awkwardly on his side, he had to readjust his clothes, while behind him he heard a surreptitious rustling. Yes, she could be as discreet now as she liked, he might pretend that he was only brushing the dust from his coat: nothing could hide the vulgarity of this final end; and he felt as though he had been transported among the working classes, who sat about collarless and in their shirt-sleeves, and washed themselves down to the waist at the kitchen sink while the rest of the family sat at the table eating, and the word ‘proletariat’, which Brand was so fond of using, came into his mind, an ugly and yet meaningless-sounding word. A rush of unavailing pity for his defenceless clothes, which had been so rudely violated, almost blasphemed against, came over him; and he was sorry for hers too. To treat a beautiful summer frock like that showed an insensitive, almost a brutal nature. What need had she for pretty clothes, if this was all she wanted? Any shawlie in the streets was better dressed for it.
Isa had got to her feet and said curtly: ‘Well, are you coming?’ The light seemed to have faded very quickly: how long had they been lying there? They walked side by side and in silence between the vague trees. Now and then he flicked an invisible speck of dust from his coat sleeve. Suddenly the terrible fear fell upon him that his bowler hat might have lost its polish, might even have been dinted; and he took it from his head and anxiously ran his palm round it. His clothes seemed to sit less well on him; he put his hand up to his necktie and was surprised to find it in place; but his shoes, he knew it for a certainty, must be covered with dust, and a feeling of despair came over him, and he said under his breath: ‘Well, they’ll just have to wait till I get home.’
The security of home for a moment floated before him, but the sinking at his heart had already forewarned him before the dreadful question leapt to his mind: How could he face his mother now? He saw himself stealing into the house, having walked about until he knew she would be in bed; and he would have to forgo her welcoming smile tonight when he was so much in need of it. Even the cleansing of his shoes from this dust, the witness of his delinquency, would no longer be a symbolical act, emblem of his nicety and the purity of his house, but a sordid utilitarian stratagem to conceal his transgression from his mother, and from Tom too, for Tom would exult in his fall. Suddenly the thought ‘Tom has done this’ shot through his mind, and an indeterminate and yet vehement gust of anger rose into his throat – anger which demanded a direction and clamoured to be fed, and which he deliberately fed now with the thought (though he knew it to be false) that Tom had tricked him into this, that Tom had in some way by his evil communications caused him to do this. Tom probably liked it; with his low passions he would. And the feeling that Tom had done what he himself had just done was a greater affliction, and gave him a deeper sense of degradation, than the impure act itself; and suddenly he remembered, as something which he had no longer any right to remember, his mother laying her hand on his head, after her Sunday reading from the child’s Life of Christ, and saying: ‘That’s my good boy.’
And how was he to face all the fellows and girls he knew? They were walking now along the railings of Maxwell Park, and he was glad that night had fallen, for his appearance seemed to have shrunk, had grown tarnished and mean, and every time his knees bent there was something abject in the jack-knife-like action of the joints. If Bob Ryrie were only here with him instead of this girl! The picture of the disciple laying his head on the other’s breast floated up as from a drowning sea of shapes trying to smother it and sank again, leaving Mansie’s head slightly inclined, as though in desperation he were resting it on the soft evening air. And assemblies of young men in clean raiment and with brushed hair, at YMCAs and Bible Classes and Christian Endeavour meetings, appeared in his mind row upon row: there in those decent ranks he would be secure, there he would be clean.
By now they had come within reach of the lighted tramcar at the terminus, and as Mansie stepped into the diffused glassy radiance from the windows he shrank for a moment as if stung. Isa climbed the stairs without turning to look at him, yet she was careful that her long skirts should not float out behind and disclose any glimpse of her ankles. Well, he had seen a lot more than her ankles, he thought, shocked at his own sudden cynicism. Yet, sitting now in the lighted tram, she looked so proud and unapproachable that what had happened that evening seemed a blasphemous impossibility, and when, seeing the conductor approaching, she said coldly, ‘I get off at Strathbungo,’ it sounded like a reproof of his disrespectful thoughts, and he felt like a servant receiving an order, and hastily thrust his hand into his pocket for the coppers. Nothing he could do now, not even the simplest action, that did not seem vulgar! She was like those nurses, he thought. And he remembered the hospital where his friend had lain, and where the nurses had had just that same insolent and distant look. Yet his friend had told him that they were ready for anything, and knew all about a chap, and quite callously exploited their knowledge, and had as little respect for the decency of the human body as an engineer had for the works of a machine. And they smoked too. Did she smoke? he was wondering, when her voice startled him: ‘Have you lost your tongue, Mr Manson?’ The impudence! He could not keep the blood from flushing his face, although he knew she was looking at him. ‘That’s my business!’ he rapped out, but she merely turned away her head with insulting slowness and looked out through the window. Just like a nurse. When the Strathbungo stop came in sight he got up silently to let her out, and silently made to follow her, but when she reached the top of the stairs – they were alone in the tramcar, and only the conductor could