Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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for the road forks many times before it passes his house, and there are many populated valleys among the mountains to which it may be going. Presently the path is hidden behind one of the peaks of that country, a mountain so high and broad that it blots the very memory of the traveller from his mind. But several days later he again remembers and looks up towards the mountains. Nothing is moving, the road is bare, and he is about to turn back and walk into his house, when, far nearer than he had thought of looking, he sees the traveller still steadily walking on. His heart contracts; for although still a long distance away, the traveller is now in his valley. When, still at the same deliberate pace, the moving figure turns up the path that leads to the watcher’s door, the watcher retreats a little within the threshold as though to hide himself, and peering out still hopes: Not for me! For my mother, my wife, my child! But not a word is spoken when at last the visitor’s shadow falls across the threshold stone; the householder’s body stiffens for a moment, but then he sits down on a chair and stares at the clear swathe of light falling uninterruptedly now across the doorway.
Afterwards he has no need to strain his eyes looking for his visitor, for they are never separated. Yet he still keeps an anxious watch, but now it is on his wife and mother and child, for though he still lives in his own house, and has indeed inscrutably become a prisoner there, everything has become strangely remote, for his new companion now bears him away on a spectral journey in which all that was once familiar to him recedes to a fabulous distance; and when his wife Helen or his mother speaks to him, often he does not answer, for they are so far away that even if he were to shout his voice would never reach them; and besides his visitor’s silence so encompasses him that he has grown into it.
At the beginning he manages occasionally to shake off his companion’s voiceless converse for a few hours; but the return to it is dreadful. But most dreadful of all is that when he takes off his clothes at night and stretches himself on his bed – from which his wife has been banished, for he has entered on his celibacy – his companion lies down quietly beside him and takes him in his arms. Every morning automatically proffers an instant’s hope; awakening he lies looking at the floor, on which a little strip of light is already stretched, and, his mind vacantly clinging to it, he wonders why the hour should be so late and he still in bed; then he remembers, and the hope stealthily emerges: he cautiously puts out his hand and feels the arm around him. He lies for a little staring into the face beside him on the pillow, and then as though in defiance he feels his arms and the arch of his chest, which are still powerful in spite of all that his enemy has done. He savours his defiance for a little; it is a luxury that he has learned he may safely indulge, for such things as these do not move his companion to retaliation; he may even curse, if the inclination takes him, more, he may insultingly ignore his companion altogether. But all this liberty freely allotted him is only a cheat; suddenly he gazes in front of him as though he had remembered something unpleasant, gets up, and puts on his clothes. As he does so he cannot help once more prodding with the tips of his fingers his arms and legs, which still look round and strong; yet now he is not so sure; he has grown fatter; it is as though he had assumed a new casing of fat as a protection against his enemy, had retreated behind a quivering wall of fat; but it is unavailing, a stupid ruse of the dumb body, and he has ceased to believe in the efficacy of the tissue that so warmly laps him round.
When he sits down to breakfast under the anxious eyes of his mother, once more it is an act of defiance to his visitor. He eats greedily, yet it is an unnatural act, for it is only his body that is eating, and he is aware of the chewed balls of food being driven by a deliberately perverse act of the will down into his stomach, there to enrich his blood and secrete fat to plump his skin. For what? And he feels for a moment that he has been treacherously feeding his enemy. His palate is flat and wooden, and he rises from the table with a hollow nausea, as though he had been participating in an unclean rite. Going outside he walks up and down before the house, slowly, for his left leg jerks forward and swings back again in a strange way, drawn by some external force he has never hitherto been very clearly aware of; it is the force of gravity. He looks at the trees and the stony mountains; once they were a source from which he could draw an infinite supply of health; the cool breath of the leafage refreshed him, the hot breath of the burnt rock lulled his senses; but now everything is hard and sterile; the trees are dead wood and even the leaves are sharp; when autumn comes they will be sharp as blades. His eyes seek the pool lying in shadow in the hollow below the house; he would like to sink far down in it, for then he might get relief; yet he can scarcely tell now whether in that thought of relief the thought of death may not have quietly concealed itself. Nevertheless he feels assuaged, looking at the pool; but then his eyes stray again to the unfriendly trees and hills, and he turns and sees his wife and his mother standing at the door. They too are unfriendly now, for they cannot help him; nothing can help him, neither the cool morning, nor the embalmed evening air. He goes in, the women making way for him, and sits down on the hard chair beside the fireless hearth; for the dead wooden arms of the chair on which his hands rest are no more dead than all those trees standing in their thousands with drooping leaves in the heat; they are nothing but wood, nothing but wood to the core.
So his stationary journey conducts him to more and more arid and waterless regions; but in his dreams his progress is sometimes reversed, and the presence he has been so long accustomed to once more advances upon him as though for the first time. But now it advances with rushing speed. He is in a vast city and he is safe for the moment, for he is lying in a small room at the end of a high-walled street so narrow that it scarcely gives room for a man to pass. His sleep is alarmed by a distant sound, the ghostly brazen clank of some vehicle rushing through the streets. It seems to be miles and miles away, in some distant suburb. Where can it be going? What strange load can it be carrying? He hears it boring its labyrinthine way through stony gullies lit by electric moons like clocks all pointing to the same blank hour; he tries to waken himself, for what if it should be coming to him? But he cannot tear his eyelids open, although the dinning now clashes round him like the waves of a brazen sea, sinking and swelling as the house blocks muffle it and set it free again. Then with a glare of lights the tramcar flashes down on him and hits him full on the head; he puts up his hand and screams. At last he opens his eyes; people are standing round his bed; yes, there they all are, his mother and the rest of them. He looks round; everything in the room is where it had been before; everything is quiet; but his companion has laid his hand, gently, on his head: the laying on of hands. And now, while his mother busies herself with wet cloths, he knows that he must set himself to endure a long ordeal. The pressure is gentle still, but gradually it increases; he sets his teeth, the pain softly bores in and in, he breaks out into words at which his mother turns her face away; but it is of no use, and like a child being whipped he sobs, begging for relief for this one time: the pressure tightens. And to a shadow standing in the dim gaslight he cries: ‘Shoot me, Mansie, shoot me!’ But then as though his companion were only after all tickling him in a particularly ingenious way, his limbs begin to jerk, his face grows red with humiliation and agony, the cry ‘Oh Christ!’ bursts from him, and his arms stretch out like rods, his fingers clench the edge of the bed, the pupils of his open eyes roll round and round like planets whirled out of their orbits, and a long and trembling sigh is expelled through his nostrils, which quiver like those of a snarling dog; it is as though in that long sigh he were trying to breathe out the hard ball of pain. In a little his leaden stupor passes again into sleep.
He awakens next morning shaken and relieved, for having broken him the pain has left its habitation. He lies on in comfortable vacancy, lies longer than usual, and in a half-doze almost forgets his companion. Towards midday he rises and still half in a dream walks up and down before the house. Behind the walls of his dream the trees and hills have receded, and he realises that with a leap last night has borne him on for another great stretch of his invisible journey. And although his senses are still drugged, and he refuses to emerge from the lulling stupor in which he walks, he cannot keep his heart from turning over; yet that spasm is ineffectual and irrelevant, like the straining of a body under an anaesthetic. When he tries to think now of what he would like most in the world, he discovers that his desires cannot reach back beyond the time of his captivity; if he could but be as he was yesterday he would be happy, and the days when he fearfully scanned the mountain path seem an impossible dream.
At last he reaches a stage in his changing progress where he can tell no longer in which world he is moving, that of humanity clothed in the