them. Wouldn’t like Helen to have to walk through this street, by gum! A difference between this and that shore road outside Gourock.
Maybe it would be best to take the tramcar at the next stop after all. He hesitated, but to stand down here frightened one; walking was bad enough, but standing was far worse; and so before he had time to weigh the matter he abruptly went on again, and as he did so he felt angry. A fine kind of street to be in a Christian town! Blatchford was quite right, by gum; streets like this had no right to exist, people could say what they liked. A warm cloud of stench floated into his face, he hurried past a fish-and-chip shop, and in a flash Eglinton Street rose before him from end to end as something complete, solid and everlasting; it had been there all the time, he realised, and it would always be there, something you had to walk round every morning and evening, that forced you to go out of your way until at last you got used to your new road and it seemed the natural one. As he passed the shop, whose crumbling door-posts seemed rotted and oozing with rancid grease, something made him glance up. Yes, there in the next close mouth she was standing, the great fat red-haired woman with her arms clasped about her overflowing breasts as if to keep them from escaping. Queer, he had clean forgotten her. But there she was, and it seemed to him that she too had been there all the time, standing at the end of the close and keeping them from escaping; and she too was something that one had to walk round, a fixed obstacle that could never be removed. He hurried on. Terrible to have to live down here; but the street was mounting, the houses were thinning, the crowds were thinning too, only a few had managed to struggle up here where he was; and they were better dressed, they were like himself, they lived in the suburbs. And his confidence began to return, and with it pity for those poor beggars who were shaken together down there to the bottom of the street like rubbish at the bottom of a sack. A church. Queer to see a church here. A group of young men, clean-shaven and with mufflers round their necks, stood bristling on the pavement and stared at him without moving aside. He stepped into the street – still muddier, still nearer the ground down here – and made to walk round them; but then he changed his mind – these fellows had to be taught a lesson! – and so he strode straight across to the tramcar halt at the other side of the street and stopped there as though waiting. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of thinking he had stepped off the pavement for them!
But he had to wait a long time, for all the tramcars were full. Now and then he glanced across at the bristling group on the other pavement; it was almost dark now, but they were standing under a lamp-post and he could see them quite clearly. The stream of home-going pedestrians flowed more thickly now along the pavement, but where the group was stationed it made a bend, wavered, turned aside, and then flowed on again. Mansie’s anger mounted and mounted. A set of hooligans! And the sight of that long, living, helpless animal stretching away under the rows of lamps until it was lost in a dirty haze, stretching so far that it seemed tired and weighed down by its own dragging length, but yet flowed laboriously round this small hard obstacle when it came to it, made him far angrier than his own discomfiture had done. Tom wouldn’t let himself be shouldered aside like that, by gum he wouldn’t! He would teach those young hooligans a lesson; he would send them flying! And Mansie longed for Tom to appear, and when at last he got on to a tram in which there was only standing room he blamed the roughs for that too, and his anger flamed up again. They flourished in the slums, those hooligans, it suited them down to the ground, they were in clover. It was time to put an end to these plague spots; for that was what they were, just plague spots. But those other poor beggars at the bottom of the street, it was no joke for them; a fellow couldn’t close his eyes to the fact; they were a problem. Blatchford might be an atheist, but he was quite right there, people could say what they liked. The words of Gibson in the office came into his mind: ‘And what about the poor bloody little children?’ but he did not smile this time; Gibson was a bit of a card, and an extremist too, but by gum he was right. It was enough to make a fellow join the Clarion Scouts. And as he got off the tramcar at the corner of his street he half wished that it was Brand he had to meet that evening, instead of Bob Ryrie.
NINE
IN A HOUSEHOLD consisting of four people a state of armed silence between two of them is like the opening of a hole in the middle of the floor. They have all moved about at their ease, they have sat where they liked; but now their chairs are pushed back against the wall and when they speak to each other it is across a gulf. Arithmetically the silence between Tom and Mansie should have affected only themselves, and the possibilities of intercourse that remained were obviously considerable. Mrs Manson and Jean could still speak to everyone in the house, and Tom and Mansie could each speak to Mrs Manson and Jean. But though it was on this strictly arithmetical foundation that the new domestic arrangements were based, for there was nothing else to base them on, the subtler effects of the silence were inescapable. One of these was irremediably to reduce the size of the family. When both Tom and Mansie were in no one could talk naturally, and so they were always wishing one of their number away. For then the family was reborn again; a family, it was true, that had been lopped, and suffered from an unuttered bereavement; yet nothing unites a household more selfishly and tenderly than the absence of one of its members. And if Mansie and Tom, the inconstant links in that constant chain – by turns the bereaved and the absent – felt their position an equivocal one, that only made them identify themselves more eagerly with the family while the chance was given them. They did so as if under the approaching shadow of extinction, as if they were taking a last chance.
Or at least it was so at the beginning, before the new state of things had hardened and been accepted with the selfishness of habit. Then Tom, already careless of himself, very soon became careless too of what his mother and Jean thought of him, and began to use the house as a mere convenience. It was Mrs Manson who suffered most, for Jean and Mansie were very often out during the evenings. But even when Jean was in talk was as constrained now in Tom’s presence as it had once been when both he and Mansie were there. For by some mysterious legerdemain Tom seemed to evoke by himself, as he sat morosely over the fire, that gulf in the middle of the floor which they both wanted to forget.
And Tom was in the house a great deal. His weekly routine had become so mechanical that it could be calculated beforehand. By Tuesday night he had drunk all his wages, except for the few shillings to take him to and from his work, and from Tuesday to Friday he sat over the fire every evening, staring into the coals and doing nothing, yet bitterly annoyed if he was interrupted in that empty occupation. He seemed to find a peculiar satisfaction in the warmth and silence, a satisfaction without pleasure, however; indeed a strictly impersonal satisfaction. For it was not himself that he warmed there, but his grudge against Mansie and Helen, and as this was a private duty rather than a pleasure it was only natural that his expression should be austere and jealously guarded. Sometimes, partly out of old habit, partly out of joyless self-indulgence, he took out his long cherished dreams of a free life in the colonies and warmed them there too. But by now they had become as cold and empty as everything else; they were like pictures hung up on the wall and shuttered in with glass; and even when he thought of ships, often all that would come into his mind was the neat little model of a liner high and dry in its glass case in the window of a shipping agency in Renfield Street. All this was no longer a possibility in his mind, hardly even a dream, simply a picture; yet he took pleasure in contemplating that picture with his mother sitting so near him quite unaware of what he was doing; it was a malicious, almost a revengeful pleasure.
The family had to make a show of unity when anyone came in, but that was quite easy, and the insincerity it involved was actually enjoyable; for when one after another the whole family had spoken or replied to the visitor, the invisible gulf seemed to close; it became a merely private abyss that existed only while no spectator was there to see it. They all felt this particularly when Bob Ryrie called; but Brand, being absorbed in himself, left them in their isolation; and besides Tom was always quarrelling with him. It was partly Brand himself that he disliked, partly Brand’s ideas; and when Brand brought out as a last appeal, ‘You must give the bottom dog a chance,’ Tom would retort, ‘You can say what you like, but there’ll always be wasters, and why should decent chaps have to pay for their damn foolishness? They’ve too damn much done for them as it is.’ And the fact that Mansie was coming more and more to agree that the bottom
