experience for him – almost silent as well as null.
SEVENTEEN
THEY WALKED ALONG the still canal. The sun had set long since, but the light was still ebbing. As it faded it became more and more transparent, so that what was left was not darkness, the darkness that the eyes expected and almost longed for, but an unearthly stationary clarity into which every object rose distinctly but blindly, as though already coiled in sleep within itself and turned away from all that was round it. The water in the canal shone like polished steel; it shone blankly, as though nothing but itself were there. In front, quite far away, another pair of lovers were walking with their arms round each other. Nobody else was in sight. It was midsummer.
‘He’s been queer since the last attack,’ said Mansie. It was always at this hour, when the light was fading and their faces were turned towards Glasgow again, that they talked about Tom. They never mentioned him by name.
Mansie had taken his arm from Helen’s waist when he began to speak about his brother. The pair away in front were still walking with their arms round each other.
Helen looked at him but made no reply. Mansie walked on for a little, then he said: ‘He seems to be thinking of something all the time. I’ve done my best to rouse his interest, but it’s no use.’
‘Maybe he’ll come round by himself,’ said Helen. ‘He was always moody.’
Mansie was silent again. Then he said: ‘Yes, he may come round by himself. I wish I understood him. But he never tells me anything. He goes his own road, as he’s always done. I’ve never known all my life what he would be up to next. He was always reckless.’
‘Yes, he was terribly reckless. Sometimes I’ve almost been afraid of him, Mansie.’
Mansie frowned as though the words displeased him and said: ‘He’s never hurt anybody but himself.’ Then after a pause: ‘It was hard lines that this should come just when the fellow had turned over a new leaf.’ And after another pause: ‘He’s greatly changed.’
Helen made no reply. The darkness was now falling at last; one could no longer see whether the two in front had their arms round each other.
As if encouraged by the darkness, Mansie said presently, speaking into it as one speaks into an unlighted room knowing that someone else is there: ‘Well, there’s this comfort: when he recovers he’ll be a different fellow.’
And Helen’s voice answered cheerfully at his side: ‘Yes, and then everything will be for the best after all.’
The confidence in her voice made him uneasy for some reason, but there was nothing more to be said. And when they had gone on for a little farther in silence he put his arm round Helen’s waist again. It was a reassurance.
EIGHTEEN
Und die findigen Tiere merken es schon dass wir nicht sehr verlässlich zu Haus sind in der gedeuteten Welt.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
WHEN HE WAS twelve Mansie had had a curious experience. It took up only a few minutes, but afterwards it seemed to have filled the whole of that summer afternoon, and to have coloured not only the hours which followed, but the preceding hour as well, which became a mysterious time of preparation whose warnings he had not heeded.
‘That strange afternoon’ was how he thought of it, and the strangeness had begun with the class being dismissed after the dinner hour. Some state event had just been published, an important event, for it had to do with the royal family, yet human and touching, for it might have happened in any ordinary household; and this perhaps was what had made the teacher’s voice, for all its reverence, sound almost confidential when he asked the class to give three cheers. Yet there had been something unreal in the teacher’s elation, and although the class were glad to get such an unlooked-for holiday, and felt grateful to the royal family, the three cheers had a hypocritical ring. Afterwards Mansie’s companions had decided to spend the afternoon in town, and he had taken the road alone. In the bright afternoon sun the road looked unusually deserted; on the fields the men and women seemed more active than usual, as though they had just begun the day’s work, a day in which time had been displaced in some curious way, making everything both too early and too late. So even the wild flowers along the roadside were unfamiliar, as though they had sprung up that moment, supplanting the ones that should have been there. Still, this was the road he had always taken, and so he went on.
It was in the little sunken field sloping down to the burn that it happened. There were generally several horses in this field, and he had always passed them without thinking. This day, however – it may have been because of the displacement of everything, for the shifting of time had subtly redistributed the objects scattered over space as well – there was only one horse, a young dark chestnut with a white star on its brow. Mansie had almost reached the footbridge over the burn before he saw it, for it was standing half-hidden in a clump of bushes. They caught sight of each other at the same moment, and Mansie stopped as though a hand had been laid on his forehead: into his mind came instantaneously, as a final statement of something, the words: ‘A boy and a horse.’ For out of the bushes the horse looked at him with a scrutiny so devouring and yet remote that it seemed to isolate him, to enclose him completely in the moment and in himself, making him a boy without a name standing in a field; yet this instantaneous act of recognition came from a creature so strange to him that he felt some unimaginable disaster must break in if he did not tear his eyes away. This feeling was so strong that his body seemed to grow hollow. Then slowly the stone dyke by which he had stopped grew up, wavered, and steadied itself; he put out his hand to it, the stones were rough and warm, and this gave him courage to stand his ground a little longer. But now as he gazed on at the horse, which still stared steadily and fiercely at him, he seemed on the point of falling into another abyss, not of terror this time, but of pure strangeness. For unimaginable things radiated from the horse’s eyes; it seemed to be looking at him from another world which lay like a hidden kingdom round it, and in that world it might be anything; and a phrase from a school book, ‘the kingly judge,’ came into his mind. And how could be tell what it might do to him? It might trample him to death or lift him up by its teeth and bear him away to that other world. He took to his heels and did not feel safe until he was at the other side of the footbridge, with the burn behind him.
At the time Mansie was not of course aware of all those feelings; he was merely filled with terror of something very strange, and felt – though this perhaps was a deliberate fancy – that if he had waited a moment longer the horse might have carried out its sentence on him. But when, several months later, he happened to look at a portrait of John Knox in The Scots Worthies, the long face, still more elongated by the wiry, animal-looking beard, transported him to that field again, and he felt afraid of the eyes gazing out at him from the flat smooth page. And one day in Glasgow many years later he caught sight of a plaster statue in a shop window and suddenly felt dizzy, standing on the hot pavement; and although a tramcar clanked past, throwing sharp beams from its windows into the dark window of the shop, he again felt transported to that distant hot still field, and the sound made by a message-boy running past echoed in his ears like the sound of his own feet on the little footbridge. Strange! he had clean forgotten that afternoon. In a little he saw that there were two names outlined in rough relief at the foot of the plaster cast: ‘Moses’ and in smaller letters ‘Michelangelo’. Michelangelo was a great man; the Reverend John often mentioned him in his sermons. Queer how solid the beard looked, just as solid as the head, all of a piece like the head of some strange animal, and the two funny little horns on the forehead were like blunt pricked ears. Uncanny, the thoughts that must have been in the mind of the fellow who made that thing. And yet the Reverend John thought a lot of him, so he must have been a Christian; all the same one simply couldn’t think of a Christian bringing out a thing like that.
