Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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companion. When neighbours come to the house he looks at their sunburnt faces with distant eyes and cannot quite conceal his aversion; his glance appraisingly runs over their shoulders, arms and legs, as it might over a horse which he would not buy at any price, knowing that it cannot be depended on. Nor do his eyes change whether it is male or female that is reflected in them; he may stare a little longer than is seemly at the outward spout of the women’s breasts, but a sick man has privileges, and although those spheres may bring to his mind, now arid as dried bone, the thought of gushing fountains, their existence seems as mechanical as that of a spring bubbling up and maintaining incessantly its glassy bell-like shape by a perpetual feat of illusion; and besides he has no longer any desire, parched though he is, to drink of those waters. For now he lives in a world of impersonal forces, a world where anything less than infallibility is insufficient and almost shameful, and where there are only straight lines. He has grown so far beyond the normal human stature which men call maturity, that even those who pride themselves on having put away childish things seem to him children or at best clumsy adolescents. For much as they may talk of necessity not one of them understands the word ‘must’; and although they admit perhaps that there is no appeal against and no reprieve from the powers that rule their fates, they are incapable of believing it, for they still hope to escape. And when his mother, perhaps out of over-anxiety, fails to understand some casual sign, he gives her a deadly look; but it is not lack of love or solicitude that he hates her for; it is lack of infallibility, for infallibility is the only thing that can save a man beset by infallible forces.
When he sees this, it is the beginning of despair. Yet sometimes he thinks that if he were a clever man he would be content to give all his mind to the foiling of his enemy, content to pass the rest of his life up to old age in that impersonal and stationary combat; and if in the midst of the fight he should be snatched away by some irrelevant accident, a vulgar epidemic or mere old age, he reflects that he would go willingly, for that too would be a triumph over his enemy. For it is no longer death that he is fighting, but the infallible consummation of an objective process.
So he has to think impersonally and infallibly, and not like ordinary people ruled by such blind motions as love and fear and pity. Yet sometimes it seems to him that this very impersonality which he opposes to his enemy is merely the last capitulation, the habituation to the inevitable. Then in terror he seeks an escape, he flies back to fallible human contacts, and with lowered eyes, ashamed and threatening, dreams of admission to his wife’s bed. But it is a sad and unnatural physiological experiment, a trivial post-mortem ecstasy in an automatic hell where only the flesh still lives. Afterwards he may lie by his wife’s side while the tears flow down his cheeks, but then with averted face he finds himself in his own bed, where he remains in a despair so profound that he does not even notice his companion lying beside him.
In this final redoubt of despair, beleaguered by forces which are neither cruel nor benevolent, but merely pitiless, at the very last moment he appeals to a power beyond them, a power as infinitely loving as they are infinitely without love. And although hitherto he has clearly recognised his sufferings as a dispensation from God, now he appeals to God from them and sees no contradiction in his appeal. Yet – for he has learnt cunning – he does it stealthily, so stealthily that, in spite of his wild desire that God should hear and answer him, he leaves a last hope: the hope that God may not have heard. For if God were to hear and yet not answer, his faith might perish, and dying he might despair even of death. At last, when no answer comes, the hour of resignation breaks in gently and brutally, destroying everything but itself; and he is resigned to all, to God, to his persecution, to his agony, to the fabulous waterless regions through which he is now more and more dizzily whirled, and to the thought of the death of his body.
This last stage is so hateful to human eyes that even the involuntary object of the metamorphosis can hardly be contemplated without a faint but deep feeling of aversion. Those who are nearest him have now perpetually the look that can be seen in the eyes of people returning to their house after saying good-bye to a son or a brother who has set out on a journey from which it is unlikely that he will ever return; it is a look in which despair, resignation and a trace of relief are mingled. And although he has not actually gone away, but still lies there in the bed, they take no pains to conceal this look; they gaze upon him, tenderly but with a little aversion, as on something whose presence is inexplicably troubling, with those eyes that have already said farewell. This aversion lasts until the final moment of metamorphosis. But then hatred both of death and his victim falls away, and in astonishment the living see that something stranger than they could ever have imagined has been accomplished. And looking at the face, so remote now that even the white sheet that touches it seems to have far more of the pathetic associations of mortality, they are wafted on to a shore so strange that they can find no name for it; they stand on the very edge of Time, they stand there as in a sleep, and dread lest they might awaken and Time be no longer there with them.
TWENTY-THREE
IN A HOUSE of sickness, as in any house, the ordinary routine of the day must be observed. The breadwinner must get up in the morning and go to work; the meals must be on the table at the appointed hours; fires have to be kindled, floors swept, beds made, brass scoured, dishes washed and dried. Yet all those daily offices whose very monotony once gave a sense of comfort, as though they were a perpetually renewed covenant securing the day’s peace and order, become meaningless once the covenant has been repudiated by the other invisible party to it, and is left in one’s hands, a useless piece of paper whose terms nevertheless bind one, strangely enough, as absolutely as before. So even the simplest household tasks which Mrs Manson had performed with automatic ease for many decades would on some days rise up before her as alarming problems that she needed all her skill to solve, and she would look round the kitchen as if everything in it – the range, the brass taps, the pots and pans – had grown strange and hostile; and it was a mathematical labour to move the table from the wall to the middle of the floor, and to remember the number of dishes, of knives and forks and spoons, she had to lay out on it. Even when, shortly after Tom’s visit to the specialist, Jean threw up her job and took over most of the housework, Mrs Manson was still dazed by the little that remained for her; the routine of the house had become a piece of recalcitrant machinery whose workings she had painfully to foresee and provide against, and it inspired her with something of the dread that she felt for all machinery: for the tramcars rushing about the streets, for the cash tickets neatly shot out like little sneering tongues by the automatic cash registers in the shops, for the dreadful maze of machinery through which, since he came to Glasgow, Tom had walked for a time miraculously unscathed, until at last it struck him down. Often she would stop in the middle of the morning’s work and say: ‘Oh, why did we ever come here, Jeannie?’ But she had asked the question so often that she never waited for a reply, but simply resumed her work again.
Tom became more and more incapable of controlling his limbs, and a few weeks after his visit to the specialist he had a severe stroke and next day collapsed on the floor when he was getting out of bed. As they lifted him up he said something, but his speech was indistinct – it was as though his tongue were swollen – and Jean and Mrs Manson could not make out his mumbled words. This made him very angry; he gave them a furious look and refused to repeat what he had said. For some time he lay in silence. At last he said, very slowly and deliberately: ‘Give – me – a – drink – of – water,’ as though he were repeating a difficult exercise, and when Jean hastily ran and filled a glass at the tap he looked at her reproachfully, for her quickness was a wanton exposure of his new infirmity. So now he must lie in bed and have everything done for him.
After this even Mansie gave up hope. Yet a few days later he wanted to call in another specialist, and his mother and Jean had to plead with him for a long time before he gave up the idea. Surely there was something that could be done! It was terrible to sit there with idle hands and resign yourself to the whole business like his mother and Jean. But it may have been that he simply needed to spend to the last penny the money that still lay in the bank for his marriage with Helen. And possibly the very fact that the sacrifice was quite useless, that he took no risk whatever in throwing away all his money on Tom, made him all the more eager to do it: it was a sacrifice without even an object to qualify it, an absolute act uncontaminated by consequences. In any case he was fantastically generous during those last few weeks, supported the whole household uncomplainingly on