every time his knees bent there was something abject in the jack-knife-like action of the joints. If Bob Ryrie were only here with him instead of this girl! The picture of the disciple laying his head on the other’s breast floated up as from a drowning sea of shapes trying to smother it and sank again, leaving Mansie’s head slightly inclined, as though in desperation he were resting it on the soft evening air. And assemblies of young men in clean raiment and with brushed hair, at YMCAs and Bible Classes and Christian Endeavour meetings, appeared in his mind row upon row: there in those decent ranks he would be secure, there he would be clean.
By now they had come within reach of the lighted tramcar at the terminus, and as Mansie stepped into the diffused glassy radiance from the windows he shrank for a moment as if stung. Isa climbed the stairs without turning to look at him, yet she was careful that her long skirts should not float out behind and disclose any glimpse of her ankles. Well, he had seen a lot more than her ankles, he thought, shocked at his own sudden cynicism. Yet, sitting now in the lighted tram, she looked so proud and unapproachable that what had happened that evening seemed a blasphemous impossibility, and when, seeing the conductor approaching, she said coldly, ‘I get off at Strathbungo,’ it sounded like a reproof of his disrespectful thoughts, and he felt like a servant receiving an order, and hastily thrust his hand into his pocket for the coppers. Nothing he could do now, not even the simplest action, that did not seem vulgar! She was like those nurses, he thought. And he remembered the hospital where his friend had lain, and where the nurses had had just that same insolent and distant look. Yet his friend had told him that they were ready for anything, and knew all about a chap, and quite callously exploited their knowledge, and had as little respect for the decency of the human body as an engineer had for the works of a machine. And they smoked too. Did she smoke? he was wondering, when her voice startled him: ‘Have you lost your tongue, Mr Manson?’ The impudence! He could not keep the blood from flushing his face, although he knew she was looking at him. ‘That’s my business!’ he rapped out, but she merely turned away her head with insulting slowness and looked out through the window. Just like a nurse. When the Strathbungo stop came in sight he got up silently to let her out, and silently made to follow her, but when she reached the top of the stairs – they were alone in the tramcar, and only the conductor could hear – she turned and said: ‘I don’t need your company any further, thanks. Good night.’ And she disappeared.
‘All right, then! All right!’ Mansie exclaimed to the vacant lighted seats in front of him. And after a while, when the tram was already slowing down for the next stop: ‘Good riddance!’
Yet after all he did not feel any discomfort when he met his mother that night, nor indeed when he saw Bob Ryrie and his other friends next day. For one moment when he was left alone in the tramcar, the thought – which seemed to have deliberately bided its time until that woman had gone – the appalling thought, How could he, a professing Christian and a Sunday-school teacher, face his God after this? had risen up before him and seemed to fill the lighted top of the tram, which for a moment had a glassier look than ever. Yet the fact that God already knew comforted him in some way and made his offence seem more ordinary. And an ardent plea for forgiveness that night freed him with extraordinary ease from his distress. And when he met Bob Ryrie next evening he was surprised to discover within himself, instead of shame and embarrassment, a secret sense of condescension. He even mentioned casually the name of Isa Smith. What sort of a girl was she?
Bob leant towards him and said earnestly: ‘Don’t you have anything to do with her, Mansie; I know about her. She’ll go the full length with any fellow, and when it’s over that’s the last he’ll see of her. Queer! Gets them to the point, and then looks clean through them the next time she meets them in the street!’
Mansie met her a few weeks later, and she did in fact look through him. ‘Just as if she’d scored off me!’ he fumed. ‘The other way about, I think, my dear girl!’
Yet it was Isa who had scored, for Mansie had fallen, and she had only fallen again. The celerity too with which he had got rid of his remorse, while it eased his mind, disquieted him at the same time. What sort of a fellow could he be not to feel up or down after committing a sin like that? And sometimes to reassure himself he would again ask God’s pardon, though he could never feel sure that this might not be an act of presumption against God, an indirect reflection on God for having forgiven him so quickly, and for so completely having removed any trace of remorse. Almost like over-complaisance, almost like collusion! The very thought, the very thought of such a thought, was blasphemous, and now Mansie really did not know for what he should pray to God, nor in what terms his prayer could be couched. Yet his soul seemed to be begging him for something that he could not give it.
The other effect of his offence was more practically difficult to deal with. For he knew now that he could get relief – and with alarming ease – from the stress of desire, and so he was no longer safely enclosed within his own confusion and torment of mind: the door of temptation stood wide open. Girls, even the most faultlessly dressed, even the most unapproachable and nurse-like, were accessible. During the next few years, in spite of an unwearied fight, Mansie fell more than once and less involuntarily than the first time. And curiously enough he too, like Isa, could never afterwards bear the sight of his partners in guilt. To have continued such connections would have seemed to him indecent. How a fellow could deliberately, with his eyes open, go on associating with a girl after it had happened once – planning out their indulgence, perhaps even unblushingly talking it over together! – he simply could not understand such a thing. But if it were always with a different girl it might be called unpremeditated at least, in fact almost a surprise; and if one fell always with a different girl, it was in a way a first fall every time. And the ease with which one obtained forgiveness was almost uncanny.
Yet now and then Mansie still felt the lack of the remorse that would not come. It was as though there was a vacuum within his soul, and at its centre, completely insulated and quite beyond reach, a tiny point of pain.
As he lay thinking of the past evening and involuntarily glancing every now and then at the iron skeleton of the forsaken bed, the memory of that first hour of guilt haunted him, and it was as though something far within his mind, so far within that he could not reach it or stop what it was doing, was trying to weave some connection between Isa and Helen. He had the feeling, at any rate, that something was being woven, something implicating him and yet beyond his control, and the words shot through his mind, ‘I’m in for it!’ as he thought of Saturday, when he was to meet Helen. And he knew that he would go to the appointed meeting-place in spite of everything, of the scandal, of Tom, of his mother and Jean, and of the opinion of all good fellows.
FOUR
But ye loveres, that bathen in gladnesse,
If any drope of pitee in yow be,
Remembreth yow on passed hevinesse
That ye han felt, and on the adversitee
Of othere folk.
CHAUCER
THEY CAUGHT SIGHT of each other at the same instant; twenty yards of the Central Station separated them. People hurrying to their trains, message-boys, porters, crossed the line stretched between his eyes and hers, but it did not waver, and as he walked straight towards her he seemed to be following a beautiful and exact course which cut through the aimless crowd as through smoke and only reached its end when it joined his hand and hers. At first, when they were too far off to read each other’s faces, their eyes had been filled with doubt and questioning; but now love had risen round them and enclosed them like a wall, and within that perfect security they could once more look questioningly at each other, no longer with dread, as a few moments before, but with delight at the thought of the strangeness which it was their reciprocal right to explore. And so keen was their desire to do so that the suddenly arisen citadel of love within which they now stood became an objective fact whose consideration they could calmly
