Growing Up In The West. John Muir
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door again before he dared to lift his eyes to the place where the coffin stood; he must have a way of retreat behind him. Then, exerting all his strength, he lifted his eyes.
The light was dim, but Tom was there, almost within reach of his hand. He saw the face with startling vividness, more clearly, it seemed to him, than he had ever seen it before; and as if death had restored Tom to himself, tranquilly reinstating him anew in his body, which had been usurped those many months by a mad and suffering pretender, Mansie realised, as if for the first time, that this was his young brother. How handsome and fine-looking he was! How serious and distant and proud! So this was his brother. Mansie gazed at the face opened to him in death, and all the things that he had been unable or too dulled by custom to read in it while Tom wore it as one living identification mask among many others, a useful everyday mask announcing that here was a fellow called Tom Manson – all these qualities, now absolutely simplified in death, and in that process themselves become absolute and pure, were written clearly on his face, and Mansie saw that his brother had been strong and generous and brave. No, he had never known Tom, never known that he was like this though they had grown up together and lived in the same house. But indeed Tom looked changed, he looked younger, as though in putting off life he had put off at the same time all that had thwarted and defaced it, all that had clouded the lofty fate for which, his brow declared so clearly now, he had been born.
Mansie stood without moving, breathed in the scent of the lilies, and no longer felt any desire to go away; for though he knew that he was standing here in the parlour with his dead brother, something so strange had happened that it would have rooted him to a place where he desired far less to be: the walls had receded, the walls of the whole world had receded, and soundlessly a vast and perfect circle – not the provisional circle of life, which can never be fully described – had closed, and he stood within it. He did not know what it was that he divined and bowed down before: everlasting and perfect order, the eternal destiny of all men, the immortality of his own soul; he could not have given utterance to it, although it was so clear and certain; but he had a longing to fall on his knees. It was not death that he knelt before; he did not know indeed to what he was kneeling, or even whether he was kneeling; for his head might have been bowed by the weight of immortality, by the crushing thought of that eternal and perfect order in which he had a part. He did not go down on his knees; perhaps a sense of shame restrained him; he stood with his eyes fixed on Tom’s face, though now he scarcely saw it, and everything seemed clear to him: he saw his long struggle to justify himself towards Tom as a perverse and obstinate and yet quite simple error, inconceivable in front of this greatness; he understood why he had felt, after the May Day procession, that his happiness had been made of the wrong substance; for nothing less than death could erase all wrong and all memory of wrong, leaving the soul free for perfect friendship: and, his heart pierced, he knew that Tom could never have completely forgiven him but for this, no, never but for this. Never while they both lived could he and Tom have found that perfect friendship for which every human being longed; for even if Tom had freely forgiven him, memory, which only died with the body, would have remained between them. No, never on earth could that dream be realised; he saw this with perfect clearness; yet now he was no longer ashamed of his feelings on May Day, though in the twinkling of an eye they had become as pathetic as the make-believe of children trying to penetrate, in all reverence, though quite aware of the deception, into mysteries beyond their understanding. But this was only a dim intuition which he was incapable of grasping, and all that he felt was that he was glad he had been there with the others.
Again the longing to kneel down came over him, imperiously bowing his head, so that now he looked at the carpet, pensively absorbed as one might be in the presence of an old friend whom one can treat like oneself; and as if in the stillness of the house all the walls had fallen, he saw Jean sitting in the kitchen by the fire, and his mother lying in her room under the gaslight, and they all seemed to be together in one place, he and Jean and his mother, united in boundless gentleness and love, like a family in the Bible. Bob should be there too, and Brand should come, and Helen should come. And at the thought of all the people who should gather to the house, as in the evening all the exiled workers are gathered to their homes and to themselves, he felt embedded in life, fold on fold; he longed to go at once and look at Jean, as if she herself were life, sitting there by the fire; he wanted to experience again, like someone learning a lesson, all that he had already experienced; for it seemed a debt due by him to life from which he had turned away, which he had walked round until his new road seemed the natural one, although it had led him to places where all life was frozen to rigidity, and the dead stood about in the mist like the statues in George Square. He was in haste to begin, and with a last glance at Tom’s face, which he could only dimly discern now, for darkness was falling, he left the room and closed the door after him.
FERNIE BRAE: A SCOTTISH CHILDHOOD
J. F. Hendry
And see you not that bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland
Where you and I this night maun gae.
‘But Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever ye may hear or see,
For gin a word you should chance to speak
You will ne’er win back to your ain countrie.’
(Old Scottish Ballad:
Thomas the Rhymer)
FOR
MAMIE
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