Yet one thing still troubled him: that he was in the last line of the procession, so that the threatening world yawned at his very heels; but when a new contingent from the Kingston ILP marched up and stationed itself behind him his security became perfect; he was embedded in fold after fold of security.
So that now he had leisure to look round. A little in front of him a bareheaded man in a brown velvet jacket and knickerbockers was carrying a child on his shoulder. It was a little girl, and when she turned her head to look down on all those strange faces her yellow hair glinted in the sun. Mansie could not take his eyes from her, and when the procession began to move, when, in a long line like the powerful and easy rise and fall of a quiet surge, the ranked shoulders in front of him swung up and down, bearing forward on their surface that gay and fragile little bark, unexpected tears rose into Mansie’s throat. But when presently from the front of the procession the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ rolled back towards him over the surface of that quietly rising and falling sea, gathering force as it came until at last it broke round him in a stationary storm of sound in which his own voice was released, he no longer felt that the little girl riding on the shoulder of the surge was more beautiful than anything else, for everything was transfigured: the statues in George Square standing in the sky and fraternally watching them, the vacant buildings, the empty warehouses which they passed when presently they turned into Glassford Street, the rising and falling shoulders, even the pot-bellied, middle-aged man by his side; for all distinction had been lost, all substance transmuted in this transmutation of everything into rhythmical motion and sound. He was not now an isolated human being walking with other isolated human beings from a definite place to a definite place, but part of a perfect rhythm which had arisen, he did not know how; and as that rhythm deepened, so that all sense of effort vanished in it, he no longer seemed even to be propelled by his own will but rather to be floating, and with him all those people in front and behind: the whole procession seemed to be calmly floating down a sunny river flanked with rocky cliffs on either side, floating like a long wooded island where the trees stand in orderly ranks and breathe out fragrance and coolness to either shore. His arms and shoulders sprouted like a tree, scents of spring filled his nostrils, and when, still gazing in a trance at the bareheaded man with the little girl on his shoulder, he also took off his hat, his brows branched and blossomed, and he could not help remembering that statue of Moses he had seen in a shop window with the little horns rising from its forehead; they were barren, shrivelled to dry bone, they would never know anything like this. And as he looked round him, seeing and yet unseeing, it was transubstantiated bodies that he beheld everywhere; and it did not matter that on many of those faces were the marks once traced in some other world by greed and humiliating servitude and resentment and degradation, that many of the women’s bodies were shapeless, as though they had been broken into several pieces and clumsily put together again: it did not matter, for all outward semblance was inessential, all distinction had fallen away like a heavy burden borne in some other place; all substance had been transmuted. And although the pot-bellied man by his side spoke to him now and then, and he replied, he could not have told what was said; for words too had lost all distinction and become transparent in this state where speech and silence had equal meaning.
They passed the crumbling houses of the Saltmarket, where women in shawls and men in mufflers stood at the close mouths and stared at them, and it seemed to Mansie that they too were changed, in spite of their jeering laughter, and that only one little thing was needed, a thing as easy as the lifting of a finger, for all those men and women to join the procession, to step on to the floating island and be in bliss; and he thought of the hooligans in Eglinton Street: he would have liked them to be here too; there was room for all. Even when the procession reached the Glasgow Green and that great harmonious being voluntarily broke its body as for some unknown sacrament, crumbled for some mysterious and beneficent purpose into isolated souls again – even then the spell did not lose its power, and Mansie wandered from platform to platform, where Socialist orators, still transfigured so that he scarcely recognised them, spoke of the consummated joys of the future society where all people would live together in love and joy.
It was only in the evening, when everything was over and he was walking home, that he began to wonder whether he had talked a great deal of nonsense during the day; but even that fear did not trouble him, for everything was allowed. He was almost glad that Bob had not been able to come, and that he had plunged into this business by himself. As he walked up Eglinton Street he thought: Nothing can be the same again. And passing the great red-haired woman standing at the end of her close, he did not make his usual detour, skirting the edge of the pavement, but kept straight on, almost brushing her with his shoulder. Nor did the young hooligans bristling on the pavement have any power to harm him now; yet as he wanted to please even them he stepped eagerly and with a smile into the street when he came to them, and though one of them asked truculently: ‘What the hell are you girning at?’ all Mansie could do was to go on smiling, until another of the youths interposed: ‘Let the young fella alane. He hasna’ hurt you, has he?’
But when Mansie opened the kitchen door and saw Tom sitting by the fire in gloomy and rock-like apathy, it was as though he had run his head against a wall; he paused irresolutely at the door and then went through to the parlour and stood looking out at the people passing. As he watched them his blissful security slowly came back. He stood like this for a long time.
ELEVEN
Und dass mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt,
Herüberglitt aus einem kleinen Kind,
Mir wie ein Hund unheimlich stumm und fremd
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
AT FIRST IT seemed to Mansie that the revelation vouchsafed him on May Day must last for ever. As it happened the first blow to it came in a few days and from those who had shared it with him. On Wednesday evening he eagerly set out for the Clarion Scout rooms. But when he ran up the stairs and burst into the rooms the atmosphere of enveloping acceptance was not there to meet him; nobody paid any attention to him; in the twinkling of an eye they had all dwindled to their former size again; they had all fallen back; and Sunday and all that had happened in it might never have been! He wandered dejectedly from group to group. They were discussing the procession: apparently it had been a disappointment. Mansie listened, at first with bewilderment, then with interest, then to his surprise with pleasure, for as his exaltation of the last few days gradually oozed out of him and he returned to a more comfortable size it was actually a relief – he couldn’t but admit it to himself, it was an undeniable relief, though it left a sort of empty feeling somewhere. His feet were on the earth again. Strange how easily you slipped back into your old feelings! And when a man turned round to him and asked how he had liked his first procession, he said carelessly: ‘Oh, it was quite all right in its way.’
Yet when he left the Clarion Scout rooms he felt cheated and at a loss. The best part of the evening still lay before him, and all at once it seemed quite blank – he had nothing to occupy himself with; an evening wasted! So he resolved to walk home. But coming to Eglinton Street and seeing all those people fallen back again, all those dirty children still crying to the heavens – they would cry for a jolly long time before they got any answer, poor little beggars! – it was more than he could bear; and at the strident voice of an open air evangelist at the first street corner he abruptly crossed to the other side and waited for a tramcar to take him home. As he sat on the top of the tram he reviewed again his feelings on May Day, and now they filled him with alarm. Something far wrong with the whole business; something soft and sticky, almost indecent! The disciple laying his head on the other’s breast rose into his mind; he had been jolly near doing that himself, by gum! Almost made a complete ass of himself. What would the people he knew have said if they had seen him? And a still earlier memory stirred insinuatingly in the grounds of his mind. But he pitilessly repressed it: an unhealthy-minded, unnatural young beggar he must have been then! Had to take care. Dangerous to let yourself go like that. That fat man he had walked beside in the procession, couldn’t even remember now what he had said to him, might have said anything, given himself away hopelessly. The disturbing memory stirred again, rose a little,
