touched Helen’s breast, that breast which so often had been flung at him by the blind engine of her body, crushed against his so firmly and long that he could hear the beating of her heart; when he raised his hand to those softly outlined spheres, the act had all the appearance of deliberate violation, of Luciferian blasphemy. She was so outraged and incredulous that he at once stammered an apology. Finally she forgave him, but that was the beginning of their rupture. For when she had crushed her breasts against him it had been in involuntary obedience to the compulsion that threw their bodies – no, perhaps not even their bodies – that threw their souls together. And although she was perfectly conscious of the thrill of the impact, and indeed enjoyed it secretly and deliberately, yet no action takes on the indelible stamp of responsibility until it is acknowledged by some other human being; indeed until then one cannot even be sure that it ever happened; and Tom gave no sign, perhaps he had not noticed. Helen was too absorbed in her inner sensations, however, for such questions to present themselves to her except in the vaguest terms. But when Tom raised his hand against her breast as though against herself the cloud was torn asunder; she felt naked, and she could not fling herself into his arms again in such complete obliviousness of what she was doing. It was after this that she began to dream of Tom without his clothes.
THREE
WHILE TOM DREAMT of adventures, Mansie’s reveries were filled with hosts of friends, and his most comforting thought was that with the years their numbers would increase. Yet he never took the first step; he merely held himself expectantly open, and this of itself was enough to tell anyone who met him that here was a real friendly fellow, and to put the more sensitive into a position in which an advance into intimacy was unavoidable. But nobody except undesirable people ever wanted to escape the tacit invitation. Mansie was like one of those actresses to whom bouquets seem to fly of their own accord, and to him each new friendship was indeed a sort of bouquet which he accepted without affectation, privately conscious that he deserved it, but far too decent a fellow to let the slightest sign of this appear. His life was passed among his friends as in a garden exhaling an almost sensible fragrance and warmth; and it filled him with pleasure to know that no corner was uncultivated, and to look forward for a whole week, aware that every evening he would be in some sheltered arbour of this pleasance which expanded in an ever wider concentric ring as the years went on and yet remained intimate, resembling a private estate.
The thing that puzzled him most was how he had got on so well in life, how he had come to be promoted over the heads of men older and more pushing than himself, and he was occasionally troubled by the thought: could he be a sly fellow after all, sly perhaps without knowing it? But these thoughts came to him only in moods of dejection: they were really too absurd. Next morning he would contemplate his business career half in wonder and half in gratitude, and acknowledge frankly how lucky he had been, for his popularity with his employers and with the customers was pure luck! And fortune itself seemed then the paragon of decent fellows, and he cherished for it, though invisible, exactly the feelings one decent fellow cherishes for another who has done him a good turn.
It was somewhat the same feeling that had led to his conversion and his membership of the Baptist Chapel. This had happened a little after he came to Glasgow. There had been a great revival, several men in the warehouse had been accepted by Christ, and Mansie, already so popular with decent fellows, felt assured that he could not be turned away. Perhaps too he was afraid that he might be missing an opportunity of bettering himself, and this was a point on which his conscience was really strict; for bettering himself was associated in his mind with disagreeable effort, with such things as asking the manager for an increase of salary, and to evade such difficulties made him almost fear that he might be a man of weak character. So he went to the revival meeting and was quietly saved. Afterwards he was very glad he had done so, for the uprush of ecstatic feeling that followed had taken him quite by surprise, and again he felt that gratitude, this time tinged with a degree of awe, which one decent fellow feels for another who has done him a good turn.
He read very little, contenting himself with the Glasgow Herald and the British Weekly, and did not regard himself as a ‘literary fellow’; yet he would have been distressed to be found wanting in reverence for things which were deserving of it, and when the Reverend John McKail in his sermon one Sunday quoted, as though in independent confirmation of his own views, ‘God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world,’ Mansie felt that there must be something in this fellow Browning and in poetry too, although from all he had heard it was a rather profane business; and picking up Great Thoughts one day from the desk of one of the clerks in the office, and finding in it extracts in verse from great names, such as Tennyson, Browning, Coventry Patmore and Dante, extracts in which encouraging counsels were expressed in perfectly understandable words, he nodded his head in appreciation of those great men who could descend for a little while from their ‘poetry’, and say something to help a simple fellow like himself. That was true Christianity. Over one of the sentences, not in verse, he actually chuckled: ‘Hitch your wagon to a star.’ What things those great writers thought of! He would have to tell Bob Ryrie that one.
He was as nice in his habits as in his taste for literature. A spot of dirt on his sleeve was enough to make him unhappy, and when occasionally he went out for a country walk for the sake of his health, he always came back, no matter how muddy the roads were, with his black shoes speckless. Clumsiness in others annoyed him; so that whenever Tom returned at night with another wound, the sight of the bloody bandage smeared with oil and grit angered him and sent a thin rush of blood, as though in resentful answer, to his own cheeks; and somewhere in his mind the words took shape: ‘Great clumsy brute!’ For it was all so unnecessary! To live and dress quietly was simple enough, one would have thought, and it wasn’t as if he approved of display, or put a rose in his buttonhole except when he was going to meet a girl. He liked his suits to be of a soft shade of fawn, his neckties to be quiet; and if his circular stiff collar was smooth as glass and white as snow, and his circular bowler hat had the burnished sparkle of good coal, and his shoes were impeccable, he felt he need fear nobody. Yet he disapproved of the travellers who put on a la-di-da Kelvinside accent; that was going too far altogether; and although he tried to speak correctly, in what he took to be English, he kept something plain and unassuming in the intonation: for it would have seemed to him offensive presumption to pretend to be anything but an ordinary fellow like anybody else. And besides it was only decent to the English language to pronounce it as it was spelt.
A young man, good-looking and neatly dressed, who sets out conspicuously to be decent to everybody, will be greeted with decency on every side; the world surrounding him will obediently turn into the world of his imagination, and in that world, if his own decency and his faith in the decency of others are sufficiently strong or blind, he may live secluded as in a soft prenatal reverie for a long time, and if he is fortunate for all his life. Mansie lived in such a world, and except for an occasional harsh echo from the tremendous world outside he was happy in it. Tom was the most constant jarring presence, but being constant, allowance could be made for him, and the disturbance, if not avoided, yet foreseen. The only serious threat to Mansie’s happiness came from those moments, and they were infrequent, when he found himself morally in the wrong. That this should happen seemed to him not only undeserved, but even unnatural, and then he could be very harsh on whatever acquaintance might happen to threaten the inviolate image of his decency. He had, however, a happy capacity for forgetting things; he could forget Tom while he was actually talking to him; and he forgot those other disagreeable moments so completely that, searching his mind, it would have been difficult for him to remember that anybody had ever accused him of an action even slightly incorrect.
And how quietly and yet intensely happy was his life! When, returning in the evening in the tramcar from the semi-exile of the day, he saw his friends like a glorified host awaiting him, friends to whom for the calm rest of the evening he could devote himself, sometimes it seemed too much, and a lump would rise in his throat. But recollection gave him a joy almost as intense; for instance when he remembered the moments that big Bob Ryrie laid his scrubbed and scented hand on his sleeve, and, his face as near as a girl’s, put him up to some business tip; then the memory of the urgent affection in Bob’s voice and eyes
