Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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time Tom could not have helped casting an appraising glance at these girls, but now he never even lifted his eyes from the point on the pavement where the danger lay; indeed it seemed beneath his dignity. Still, there were certain afternoons, afternoons on which he was more silent than usual, when he did actually lift his eyes for no more than an instant to shoot a rancorous glance at the plump healthy faces of those girls; and as though his resentment had been automatically communicated to her too, his mother would make some indignant and meaningless remark about those brazen Glasgow hussies. And they would both walk on sheathed in rancour, a rancour that was disgust for all that was young and healthy. On those days they would turn back sooner than usual, as though they had found an immense bank of discouragement lying across their path.
Almost every afternoon their road led them past a school and, looking at the empty concrete playground, automatically there rose in Tom’s mind, afternoon after afternoon, a memory of a Sunday walk with his mother long ago which had taken them past the little country school that he attended. The playground was of turf and not of concrete, and in the clear afternoon light he had peeped in through the gate at the warm, ragged grass, worn bare in patches and no longer pounded by the feet of his schoolmates, but lying lost and vacant; and he seemed to be looking at something forbidden. He had glanced up fearfully at the classroom windows, and his head felt hot and tight again, as if stuffed with warm wool; the feeling one would have if one were shut in a clothes-cupboard. And he had run after his mother very fast and taken her hand. Sometimes he wondered now whether she remembered that walk, but there was nothing in it for her to remember; it was like scores of other walks to her. And at the thought an intense feeling of regret would rise in him; it was as though he had lost something which could never be found again.
For no apparent reason this memory sometimes evoked another, the memory of a young man, the son of a neighbouring farmer, who had come home from Edinburgh to die. Tom had been a mere boy at the time, he could not have been more than nine, and it had seemed very strange to him that this young man should have come home ‘to die’; it was as though he had chosen not only the place and the time, but death itself, and had returned deliberately to accomplish that sad and strange duty. By chance Tom and his father had met the cart which was bringing the dying man from Blackness to his home; he was sitting on a bag stuffed with straw, and his large, lustrous and very sad eyes were not looking at the fields and houses he had not seen for so many years; he had not looked even at Tom, although Tom was standing in front of him on the road, a strange boy that he had never seen before. And in a few weeks the young man had died; and playing in front of the house Tom had watched the funeral procession winding along the distant road to the churchyard; but the sight had not seemed sad, but only very remote and strange, like the things that happened in the old ballads his mother sang. Remembering all this now, a blind hunger for the home he had left swept over him. O God, would he ever see it again? Why had he let himself be trapped here among these miles and miles of houses? And he could hardly walk! He could never escape by his own strength; he could never run away to sea now, even if his mother were to give him full liberty and bid him go with her blessing. Why had his father hauled him back that time? Why had his mother set her face against his going? They had not known what they were doing. And while this wave of despair engulfed him he went on planting his feet carefully on the pavement, kept his eyes fixed on the point a few steps in front of him, and listened without losing a beat to the inaudible ticking on which everything depended. But in a few minutes he felt very tired, stopped, said ‘I’m tired,’ turned round, and made for home, anxiously followed by his mother.
This relatively serene interlude lasted almost for a month. Then, without warning, Tom had another attack. Coming so unexpectedly and after such an interval, it threw him into confusion, his powers were strangely scattered, and it took him several days to assemble them again. Mrs Manson had to implore him to leave his bed, where he seemed to be hiding. When at last he reluctantly obeyed, he fell into a deeper pit of despair, for now he felt palpable difficulty in controlling his limbs, he could no longer conceal it from himself. What could it mean? What on earth could it mean? He did not bother even to shave or put on a collar, but sat by the fire and only at long intervals lurched to the window to gaze up at the sky, or to the front room to watch the people passing in the street. Yet as the days went by and there was no sign of another attack, he plucked up courage again, shaved and dressed himself carefully as before, though a little more slowly, and even went out now and then in the afternoon with his mother.
But another attack came, once more unexpectedly, and after that another; the circle seemed to be narrowing and narrowing, until, except for his outings with Mansie in the evenings, its circumference was the house. For he no longer felt that it was safe to go out with his mother; she could not help him if anything happened; she was not strong enough. And anything might easily happen. For his slowness would no longer obediently translate itself into a pleasant leisurely deliberation; it was a palpable defect that he had to struggle hard to overcome, without being able to judge, even then, in what measure he had succeeded. For his sense of time had curiously changed; it was indeed as though he had two measures of time now. Everything he did seemed a little too late. For instance if he stretched out his hand for the newspaper lying on the table he was often surprised that his fingers should not reach it until a quite definite interval had first elapsed; it was almost as though he had miscalculated the distance. And even when he opened his mouth to say something, the words seemed already said before he heard, as in a dream, his tongue laboriously and quite unnecessarily repeating them. Everything he did seemed to be an unnecessary repetition, retarding him, obstinately delaying his thoughts before they could move on to something else; or rather everything seemed already done, and all that was left for him was to watch this repetition, this malicious aping of each one of his actions after it had already taken place. And this really frightened him. Suppose when he was out with his mother a boy should run into him! He would be lying on his back before the hand he tried to raise in defence left his side; and he saw himself lying in the street with his hand – too late! – raised against nothing, raised against the sky. A terrible state to be in!
This hiatus in his movements was quite perceptible to anyone who watched him, and if Mansie and Mrs Manson had not grown accustomed to it very gradually, from its first beginnings, they might have been far more anxious than they were. Jean was the only one who saw clearly the hopelessness of Tom’s state, and as the summer wore on she kept more and more to the house in the evenings, seeing Brand only once a week. It was as though she foresaw the end and was silently preparing for it. She said nothing to the others, however; for if they too were to become convinced that Tom would never recover, the house would be unendurable. Yet she was bitterly disappointed by Brand’s indifference to Tom’s state. They had talked about it one evening, and Brand had pointed out that Tom had always run his head into things, and that it was asking for trouble to get off a tramcar in motion when one was drunk. He had actually used the word ‘drunk’, and without the least notion that he had been insulting; on the contrary he had looked to her for approval, with his triumphant debating air. It had almost made her sick, and she had flung at him: ‘Oh, you’re a fool!’ And that had really penetrated his hide. He had fallen into an offended silence, and they had parted with few words.
Yet she had been unfair in reading into Brand’s words a particular indifference to Tom, for he was indifferent to everything ‘personal’, and scarcely found any interest even in himself except for the fact that he was an advocate of Socialism, a fact of which for some reason he was inordinately vain. And she had been unfair too in feeling insulted by the short and pungent word with which he had designated Tom’s state; for he had been thinking in all innocence of nothing but the most telling way of stating his views, and the word ‘drunk’ had in the context an artistic and logical appositeness which, even if he had divined Jean’s susceptibilities, he would have found it hard to forgo; it would have been like a violation of his aesthetic sense of fitness. But so intent was he on the general question that he had never thought of her feelings at all. Besides, she had deliberately introduced a personal matter, had wantonly embarked on the kind of talk that he called gossip, and that it was gossip about dying made it only the more inexcusable. For death was one of those questions which did not interest him even in their general aspect, seeing that it could never be solved and so to think of it at all was a wasteful expense of time. ‘I’m only concerned with evils that can be remedied,’ he was fond of saying whenever any of those metaphysical problems which