Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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IN A HOUSEHOLD consisting of four people a state of armed silence between two of them is like the opening of a hole in the middle of the floor. They have all moved about at their ease, they have sat where they liked; but now their chairs are pushed back against the wall and when they speak to each other it is across a gulf. Arithmetically the silence between Tom and Mansie should have affected only themselves, and the possibilities of intercourse that remained were obviously considerable. Mrs Manson and Jean could still speak to everyone in the house, and Tom and Mansie could each speak to Mrs Manson and Jean. But though it was on this strictly arithmetical foundation that the new domestic arrangements were based, for there was nothing else to base them on, the subtler effects of the silence were inescapable. One of these was irremediably to reduce the size of the family. When both Tom and Mansie were in no one could talk naturally, and so they were always wishing one of their number away. For then the family was reborn again; a family, it was true, that had been lopped, and suffered from an unuttered bereavement; yet nothing unites a household more selfishly and tenderly than the absence of one of its members. And if Mansie and Tom, the inconstant links in that constant chain – by turns the bereaved and the absent – felt their position an equivocal one, that only made them identify themselves more eagerly with the family while the chance was given them. They did so as if under the approaching shadow of extinction, as if they were taking a last chance.
Or at least it was so at the beginning, before the new state of things had hardened and been accepted with the selfishness of habit. Then Tom, already careless of himself, very soon became careless too of what his mother and Jean thought of him, and began to use the house as a mere convenience. It was Mrs Manson who suffered most, for Jean and Mansie were very often out during the evenings. But even when Jean was in talk was as constrained now in Tom’s presence as it had once been when both he and Mansie were there. For by some mysterious legerdemain Tom seemed to evoke by himself, as he sat morosely over the fire, that gulf in the middle of the floor which they both wanted to forget.
And Tom was in the house a great deal. His weekly routine had become so mechanical that it could be calculated beforehand. By Tuesday night he had drunk all his wages, except for the few shillings to take him to and from his work, and from Tuesday to Friday he sat over the fire every evening, staring into the coals and doing nothing, yet bitterly annoyed if he was interrupted in that empty occupation. He seemed to find a peculiar satisfaction in the warmth and silence, a satisfaction without pleasure, however; indeed a strictly impersonal satisfaction. For it was not himself that he warmed there, but his grudge against Mansie and Helen, and as this was a private duty rather than a pleasure it was only natural that his expression should be austere and jealously guarded. Sometimes, partly out of old habit, partly out of joyless self-indulgence, he took out his long cherished dreams of a free life in the colonies and warmed them there too. But by now they had become as cold and empty as everything else; they were like pictures hung up on the wall and shuttered in with glass; and even when he thought of ships, often all that would come into his mind was the neat little model of a liner high and dry in its glass case in the window of a shipping agency in Renfield Street. All this was no longer a possibility in his mind, hardly even a dream, simply a picture; yet he took pleasure in contemplating that picture with his mother sitting so near him quite unaware of what he was doing; it was a malicious, almost a revengeful pleasure.
The family had to make a show of unity when anyone came in, but that was quite easy, and the insincerity it involved was actually enjoyable; for when one after another the whole family had spoken or replied to the visitor, the invisible gulf seemed to close; it became a merely private abyss that existed only while no spectator was there to see it. They all felt this particularly when Bob Ryrie called; but Brand, being absorbed in himself, left them in their isolation; and besides Tom was always quarrelling with him. It was partly Brand himself that he disliked, partly Brand’s ideas; and when Brand brought out as a last appeal, ‘You must give the bottom dog a chance,’ Tom would retort, ‘You can say what you like, but there’ll always be wasters, and why should decent chaps have to pay for their damn foolishness? They’ve too damn much done for them as it is.’ And the fact that Mansie was coming more and more to agree that the bottom dog must be given a chance winged Tom’s anger; such sentiments in Mansie seemed the most open and shameless hypocrisy.
Jean, to Brand’s surprise, always took Tom’s side in those arguments. It was partly an indirect demonstration that she considered Tom ill-used, partly an act of loyalty to the family. And when she joined the ILP she told Brand that Tom must not know about it. But such things cannot be hid; Tom soon came to know, and, although he did not reproach her, he felt that she had betrayed him, and he no longer argued with Brand, but simply ignored him. Mrs Manson too was hurt by Jean’s action, and it was only when Mansie as well as Brand assured her that Socialism was Christianity in practice, and that the Reverend John himself was coming more and more round to it, that she was content to be uneasily reassured.
Nevertheless Jean’s action was to her only another proof of the corrupting influence of Glasgow. In her heart she blamed Glasgow for all the misfortunes that had happened since they had come south, though she did not say this for fear of being laughed at. Yet it was inconceivable to her that had they all stayed in the surroundings she knew and trusted, Mansie should have taken Tom’s girl. It was simply the portion of the corruption of Glasgow allotted to them, their private share of the corruption that was visible in the troubled, dirty atmosphere, the filth and confusion of the streets, the cynical frankness, hitherto unknown to her, with which people here talked of their privatest affairs, their fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers. She could not understand them or their ways, and she grew shy of talking about Tom and Mansie even to Jean, and especially after Jean joined the ILP. For with that Jean had identified herself with Glasgow; she had become by deliberate choice a Glasgow girl, and – who could tell? – perhaps she would no longer even understand. And when one evening Mrs Manson found Robert Blatchford’s Britain for the British in a drawer in Mansie’s bedroom, it seemed to her that she no longer understood her family and that Glasgow had taken them and made them almost as strange as itself.
But worse was her fear of all the machinery, machinery she did not understand, and with which Tom was so unavoidably associated. Indeed Tom had now more accidents than ever; his hands were perpetually in bandages. He had always been reckless; he was now indifferent as well; but what exposed him most of all to accidents was the fact that, feeling shut out from everything, he felt shut out too from the very work he was doing every day, and so never penetrated within it to that security which work itself seems to give. He never reached that almost trance-like abstraction which we envy in the workman bowed over his bench, enclosed in his task as in a private Eden where time no longer exists, so remote and calm that even a child will become quiet and hesitate to speak to him. Tom remained outside, and this made him irritated with his tools, and in his irritation he began to treat them disrespectfully, began indeed to acquire an impatient scorn for machinery wherever he encountered it. Nothing, however, punishes disrespect more promptly and ruthlessly than machinery, and when Tom was brought home late one Saturday night with his head bandaged and his blue serge suit covered with mud, it was because he had treated a tramcar with insufficient deference. He had been drinking; yet while descending the stairs to get off he had provocatively kept one hand in his trouser pocket, using only the other as a support. When, after what seemed to him a long time, he found himself lying in dirt and water in the street with a crowd of strange people round him, he naturally enough felt cold and miserable, for it was the middle of November; but he also felt a little frightened. These people standing round meant well, he could see that; yet he was helplessly exposed to them like an exhibit, and the overpowering stream of kindness that they poured down on him was like a threat and filled him with sudden panic; he felt as though he had been lynched in some strange way, lovingly and tenderly lynched by the assembled YMCA. So that he was glad when a young man raised him up, asked his address and led him home. Someone had bound up his head, which felt stiff, tight and wooden, and it was with surprise that he felt under the bandage a quite soft, pulsing trickle.
Next day was Sunday. Sunday morning was always a bad time for him, and he lay in bed gloomily listening to the church bells jangling; there were loud pompous peals with blank intervals which filled him with apprehension, and busy fretful nagging little bells that went on and on; it was like a tin factory gone mad. His head throbbed, and when