and seemed to float down his mind like the procession floating down Glassford Street, becoming involved with the rising and falling shoulders, which now gave him a sensation almost of sea-sickness. He would take dashed good care that he didn’t go to another May Day! But all the time he was on the tramcar he could not get that early memory out of his mind.
It was a quite vague memory, and concerned an affair that he had had, and should not have had, with a little girl from a neighbouring farm when he was six. He had had no consciousness of guilt, or only a sense of it as purely fanciful as the comedy he was playing; and indeed, seeing that sex was still unawakened in him, and he was only acting, he was probably as innocent of any actual or even possible offence as a character playing an enigmatic part in a story. Yet he had felt environed by guilt, and this had made him carry out his games in secrecy. At certain stages children seem to live in two separate worlds, both of which are real. In one world, the world which included his parents and all other grown people and himself, a place perfectly familiar to them but full of perplexities for him, Mansie knew that what he did was, in spite of its simplicity, a sin of awful dimensions; but in the other country where he lived with his playmate there was no evil, or a purely fictitious evil which he could summon before his mind only by make-believe. So accompanying the clear knowledge that he was disobeying his father and mother, was the feeling that he was committing a fabulous sin, a sin which was not a sin to him, but to some shadowy figure – it might beGod – in a world only visible to his elders.
In his memory, and more especially during the years of adolescence, this episode seemed to him, grotesquely enough, the most shameful in all his life. He could no longer remember the feelings that had accompanied his acts, and he seemed to himself simply to have been a very nasty and unnatural little boy. Unnatural, for now he could only see those games, played in a world where the powers of sex were still unawakened and so nonexistent, through the eyes of a youth whose thoughts were penetrated with sex and his awareness of it, and in this distorting medium his childish play acquired not only a shadow of perversity, but even something of the disgrace of impotence; and when, after joining the Clarion Scouts, someone told of the agapemones of the early Christians, those promiscuous love-feasts in which lust seemed so strangely mingled with piety, innocence with vice, universal love with sexual perversity, that period of his childhood wavered up before him again. The forms taken by his games, however, were by then almost completely effaced from his mind, and all that remained was a thickly-woven cloud, corporeally oppressive, and both bright and dense, like a golden nightmare weighing on his mind. Yet at the same time he felt that this cloud lay deeper in childhood than any other memory he could summon, lay there, ring-shaped, in an almost terrifyingly secure and still zone, at that very heart of childhood into which it is perilous even for children to venture too far. Its radiance was richer than the light on the little green hill behind the house where he had lain so often and watched the ships passing over the sound in the shadow of the black islands – passing so slowly that he could discern no motion in them, and yet saw, with a feeling of wonder, that they had moved. The towering hills changing from black to dark blue of the neighbouring isle, the little red coat with the yellow buttons – a red and yellow so absolute that they seemed to exist not as mere qualities but as living things, quivering like flames and glowing like flowers: these he remembered vividly; yet they faded almost to the hue of an ordinary memory if the thought came to him of that rich and bright cloud in which, as in a trance, some part of him for ever beyond his reach still lay imprisoned; so that the memory awoke in him a vague need to struggle and free himself from something or other, he did not know what.
He and his playmate had already turned to other games when his father took a farm on the mainland. And then, without warning, the guilt, which had been hanging, a small and distant cloud in the sky, and should with the discontinuance of the offence have dissolved and vanished, fell upon him in a clap. It was after the time of the sheep-dipping. His father had warned them all against touching the sack in which the sheep-dip was kept. The sack was laid out in a field at some distance from the house; the sheep were dipped, and the empty sack was burned; but for a long time afterwards Mansie could not rid himself of the obsession that the poison had got on to his hands. He washed them in terror many times a day until they had a wasted and transparent look. At first it was the poison that he tried to cleanse from them; but as time went on he washed them in a panic, as though he were purifying them of something that he had long since forgotten, some mysterious stain which could be erased only for a moment and immediately returned again; like the Book of Black Arts which you could drown in the sea or burn in the fire, but would always be found lying in its place in your trunk if you had once been so unfortunate as to possess it. Every day was filled with alarms and trepidations which invisibly lay in ambush and did not leave him even when he slipped suddenly round a corner to avoid them, or locked himself in the dark cupboard where he hoped they could not enter. He did not know from what source they came or what brought them on him; for by now he had completely forgotten the little girl, and when he thought of that time a comforting blank, which yet disturbed him as if it concealed some treachery, was all that his memory gave back. He could not tell his father and mother of his fears, and so they enclosed him in a silent world whose invisible terrors he had to face by himself. The knowledge that there were things in which his parents’ help, no matter how anxious, could be of no use to him, bewildered him most of all; the feeling that he lived in a blind place was perpetually with him; yet this blind place was only a thin film surrounding him, from which if he ran very fast and very far he might be able to escape; and his cousin playing a few feet away in the sun, and his mother taking his own head on her shoulder in the firelight, were in that secure world, and yet he was outside. The only way he could think of escaping his terrors was by running very fast until he could run no farther; and when he fell and bruised himself he felt that the blood trickling down must, as by an expiatory rite, bring him back to the ordinary world where other children too bruised their knees and bled. But these accidents staved off his invisible alarms only for a little, and deceived him.
This period in his life was one of real and urgent terror. How long it lasted he could not tell now, but it must have been towards the end, when his fears were thinning, and twisted gleams of the real world appeared again as through running glass, that his mother had taken him out to the back of the house to see the lamb. He had been ill, of what he could not remember, and this was his first day out. As between two folds of cloud he could still see the black lamb beside its mother against the spring sky. The lamb was weak and tottered as it ran; the soft black wool covering its gawky body, the lacquered little cloven hoofs, the soft eyes, which still had a bruised look, appeared to have been just made; and the lamb seemed both surprised and glad to be on the earth. And suddenly, as though it had come for this, a black lamb cast up without warning on the green sward, it charmed him out of his nightmare, and he saw the young sky and the great world outspread. The lamb paid no attention to him and yet seemed aware of him; it played like a child who feels its mother’s eyes upon it and in its inward dream is telling her something which it wants her to know. The dark cloud returned again, but soon after this it must have vanished.
So Mansie sat on the top of the tramcar smoking a cigarette; and the ship passed and did not pass, the little red coat glowed and glittered, the two hands cleansed each other and yet were not cleansed. And over all hung the ring of golden cloud with two long lost figures, himself and the little girl, hidden at its heart, hidden there and past all help. He shrugged his shoulders as if shaking himself free of something, he did not know what. But even while he did so he felt his helplessness. Somewhere beyond his control the ring-shaped cloud of childhood touched the ring that had encircled him as he floated in bliss on his island down the stony defiles of the streets of Glasgow, touched it and melted into it; and now he could scarcely tell what filled him with such apprehension, the apprehension evoked by things born irrevocably before their time, or made of too soft and perishable substance. He resolved again, definitely, never to go to another May Day.
TWELVE
DURING THE WINTER Mansie and Helen had been assiduously attending Socialist dances and whist drives. Helen had hesitated at first, but when she was at last persuaded to go to one of the monthly dances given by the Clarion Scouts, the number of well-dressed people, the liberal sprinkling of evening suits and
