Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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did not reply, but left the road and clambered down the sloping banks of the cliff until she reached a shelf of dry turf. Beneath them the sea’s surface ran smooth and unbroken to the opposite shore several miles away. And lying there they were frozen to the same immobility as the sea; it was not a frame of flesh and blood but a transubstantiated body that he clasped; for though they lay for a long time like this they felt no lessening of their trance-like ease, nor did his arms grow tired, so perfect was the equilibrium that reciprocally upbore them, an equilibrium as of a double trunk growing out of the ground where they lay. When at last they sat up, it was as by a single impulse coming from without, as though a voice had called to them both at the same moment; yet even then they could not break the spell binding them, and they remained silently leaning against each other while their eyes gazed out across the firth. Sometimes their faces turned of one accord and they kissed; the trance deepened and when they awoke it had kept that deeper darkness, and now it was a little more difficult for them to move their limbs. Only once did the spell threaten to break, letting in the menacing world. Mansie had been playing with a locket hanging at her neck; he opened it idly and saw inside a twisted strand of black hair. Something far within his mind said: ‘That is Tom’s hair.’ Helen sat up and snatched it from him. ‘I don’t want it! I don’t want it!’ she cried, as if in answer to an accusation he had not made, and she tore the locket from the chain and flung it into the sea. He looked at her, hardly aware yet of what she had done, but she said: ‘I won’t have you made unhappy,’ and again leant towards him, closing her eyes. And while he was still wondering that she should carry about Tom’s hair clasped in a locket, and still thinking of Tom’s hair drowned in the sea – that gave one an uncanny feeling, as if part of Tom had been drowned without his knowing it – the spell stole over him again, the trance held them suspended, and when at last they rose and walked back the flashing arc made by the locket as it fell into the sea had been lost in the web of their dream, woven into it like the curves cut by the seagulls in their flight and the constant lines of the Highland hills opposite.
They had tea in a little tea-room on the sea front. They did not speak much; fragmentary pictures of seaweed and rocks flowed through Mansie’s mind, he felt the salt scent of the sea air, and still remembered with surprise and delight Helen in her smart clothes sitting on that piece of common turf among the rough rocks and taking up a few ordinary pebbles in her hand as though it were the most natural thing in the world; and although with her fine clothes she belonged to a quite different world, calling up a vision of lace-covered sofas and curtained rooms, she had fitted perfectly into the picture and had gone splendidly with the sky and the sea and even the gritty little pebbles. Nor did the grease-spotted tablecloth in the dingy tea-room destroy the unshakable harmony between her and her surroundings; yet when they were out in the street again they did not take the road they had taken that afternoon, but turned their backs upon it and climbed a steep lane leading to the hill behind the town. And now as though with the closing in of the day something else which they did not know were closing in upon them, their trance became blinder, and when, reaching the top of a winding path, they saw a rowan-tree with its red berries burning in the last rays of the sun, and beyond it a field of corn transfigured in the same radiance, they looked at that strange scene as from a dark and shuttered room, and it seemed a momentary vision that must immediately vanish again. The sky darkened over them as they lay in the heather, and now they clung together until all their limbs ached. At last she rose abruptly, and as they descended the hill once more all the heaviness that had so strangely left her body during the day returned, slackening her limbs, and she leant all her weight upon his arm as though to break it.
The train was crowded, and the country lay in darkness. The other people in the carriage were weary and silent. Now and then a smile flitted across Helen’s face, and her gloved hand sought his. When they walked out of the Central Station in Glasgow, the lights, after the clarity of the spaces they had left, seemed to float in a fume of dust and noise; and that acrid infusion now entered into their trance, troubling and thickening it, so that when they reached the end of the close where she lived they stood for a long time in a blind embrace which was neither happy nor sad, yet from which it seemed unendurable that they should ever be torn.
It was only when he was nearing his home that any external thought broke into Mansie’s reverie. The memory of the locket falling into the sea returned very distinctly, and with it a rush of urgent anxiety for Tom. He remembered his own humiliation that evening after Isa Smith left him in the lighted tramcar. Tom must feel like that too, only far worse. It was terrible to cast off a fellow like that, terrible to cast a fellow’s hair into the sea; women were hard, and he could not help blaming Helen and even feeling a little afraid of her. Yet that day had wiped off for good his humiliation with Isa Smith; it had washed everything clean again; ‘a clean page’, the words came into his mind. But then he saw that division and atonement, wrong and right, were mingled in the love that bound Helen and him together, and this made the bond still stronger; it could never be broken. He stole softly into the house, as softly as one might steal into a place where a victim is still secretly bleeding; he hoped that Tom had not heard him, for it was very late.
FIVE
BRAND AND RYRIE had dropped in for the evening. They sat in the kitchen talking to Mansie and Jean. The table had been cleared and pushed against the wall. Brand was holding forth as usual.
‘And I tell you you can’t be a Christian without being a Socialist,’ he said, looking across at Mansie with his cold blue eyes. They were so cold that they seemed made of glass.
Mansie looked doubtful. ‘I don’t see that,’ he said.
‘Don’t see that either,’ said Bob Ryrie.
‘That’s because you’ve never thought about it,’ Brand went on. ‘What did Christ say?’
Mrs Manson, sitting in the armchair by the fire, looked up. The tone in which Brand mentioned Christ disquieted her; he brought out the name as he might have brought out ‘Smith’ or ‘Mackay’.
‘What did Christ say? That you’re to love your neighbour as yourself. Is it loving your neighbour to pay him starvation wages, as lots of your churchgoing capitalists do? As I’ve told you before, it’s the churches that have got to be converted first.’
‘Yes, to Socialism,’ said Bob Ryrie, giving Mansie a wink.
‘And why not?’ Jean retorted. She did not even glance at Bob Ryrie, but kept her eyes fixed on Brand.
‘I thought myself that the churches were out for Christianity,’ said Bob, still to Mansie. ‘I may be mistaken, of course.’
Jean shrugged her shoulders.
‘And so they should be,’ Brand seized the lead again. ‘That’s just our quarrel with them. What have they done all these hundreds of years they’ve been in existence? Have they helped the weak? Have they abolished poverty? Look at the slums of Glasgow. You’ve never faced the problem yet. What did Christ say—’
‘In 1872,’ said Tom sarcastically, entering in his stocking soles and going to the fireplace to get his shoes.
‘Tom, Tom, my lamb, you mustna’ say things like that,’ said Mrs Manson, bending down to get his shoes for him or to hide her face.
Brand looked at Tom with blank uncomprehending eyes. ‘What did Christ say?’ he repeated. ‘That we’re all members of one another. That’s what any Socialist will tell you. That’s what we have been preaching for the last twenty years. And they won’t see it. And the Christians are the worst of the lot.’
‘Fine Christians you Socialists are!’ said Tom, pulling on his shoes. ‘I suppose you consider Ben Tillett a Christian?’
‘If he helps the weak he’s a Christian.’
‘“Oh God, strike Lord Devonport dead”!’ Tom intoned, jeeringly. ‘There’s Christianity for you. And he gets a crowd of ignorant navvies to repeat it after him in public.’
Bob Ryrie shook his head at Brand: ‘No, that wasn’t right, you know. A fellow can go a bit too far.’
Brand glanced at