‘All right, then! All right!’ Mansie exclaimed to the vacant lighted seats in front of him. And after a while, when the tram was already slowing down for the next stop: ‘Good riddance!’
Yet after all he did not feel any discomfort when he met his mother that night, nor indeed when he saw Bob Ryrie and his other friends next day. For one moment when he was left alone in the tramcar, the thought – which seemed to have deliberately bided its time until that woman had gone – the appalling thought, How could he, a professing Christian and a Sunday-school teacher, face his God after this? had risen up before him and seemed to fill the lighted top of the tram, which for a moment had a glassier look than ever. Yet the fact that God already knew comforted him in some way and made his offence seem more ordinary. And an ardent plea for forgiveness that night freed him with extraordinary ease from his distress. And when he met Bob Ryrie next evening he was surprised to discover within himself, instead of shame and embarrassment, a secret sense of condescension. He even mentioned casually the name of Isa Smith. What sort of a girl was she?
Bob leant towards him and said earnestly: ‘Don’t you have anything to do with her, Mansie; I know about her. She’ll go the full length with any fellow, and when it’s over that’s the last he’ll see of her. Queer! Gets them to the point, and then looks clean through them the next time she meets them in the street!’
Mansie met her a few weeks later, and she did in fact look through him. ‘Just as if she’d scored off me!’ he fumed. ‘The other way about, I think, my dear girl!’
Yet it was Isa who had scored, for Mansie had fallen, and she had only fallen again. The celerity too with which he had got rid of his remorse, while it eased his mind, disquieted him at the same time. What sort of a fellow could he be not to feel up or down after committing a sin like that? And sometimes to reassure himself he would again ask God’s pardon, though he could never feel sure that this might not be an act of presumption against God, an indirect reflection on God for having forgiven him so quickly, and for so completely having removed any trace of remorse. Almost like over-complaisance, almost like collusion! The very thought, the very thought of such a thought, was blasphemous, and now Mansie really did not know for what he should pray to God, nor in what terms his prayer could be couched. Yet his soul seemed to be begging him for something that he could not give it.
The other effect of his offence was more practically difficult to deal with. For he knew now that he could get relief – and with alarming ease – from the stress of desire, and so he was no longer safely enclosed within his own confusion and torment of mind: the door of temptation stood wide open. Girls, even the most faultlessly dressed, even the most unapproachable and nurse-like, were accessible. During the next few years, in spite of an unwearied fight, Mansie fell more than once and less involuntarily than the first time. And curiously enough he too, like Isa, could never afterwards bear the sight of his partners in guilt. To have continued such connections would have seemed to him indecent. How a fellow could deliberately, with his eyes open, go on associating with a girl after it had happened once – planning out their indulgence, perhaps even unblushingly talking it over together! – he simply could not understand such a thing. But if it were always with a different girl it might be called unpremeditated at least, in fact almost a surprise; and if one fell always with a different girl, it was in a way a first fall every time. And the ease with which one obtained forgiveness was almost uncanny.
Yet now and then Mansie still felt the lack of the remorse that would not come. It was as though there was a vacuum within his soul, and at its centre, completely insulated and quite beyond reach, a tiny point of pain.
As he lay thinking of the past evening and involuntarily glancing every now and then at the iron skeleton of the forsaken bed, the memory of that first hour of guilt haunted him, and it was as though something far within his mind, so far within that he could not reach it or stop what it was doing, was trying to weave some connection between Isa and Helen. He had the feeling, at any rate, that something was being woven, something implicating him and yet beyond his control, and the words shot through his mind, ‘I’m in for it!’ as he thought of Saturday, when he was to meet Helen. And he knew that he would go to the appointed meeting-place in spite of everything, of the scandal, of Tom, of his mother and Jean, and of the opinion of all good fellows.
FOUR
But ye loveres, that bathen in gladnesse,
If any drope of pitee in yow be,
Remembreth yow on passed hevinesse
That ye han felt, and on the adversitee
Of othere folk.
CHAUCER
THEY CAUGHT SIGHT of each other at the same instant; twenty yards of the Central Station separated them. People hurrying to their trains, message-boys, porters, crossed the line stretched between his eyes and hers, but it did not waver, and as he walked straight towards her he seemed to be following a beautiful and exact course which cut through the aimless crowd as through smoke and only reached its end when it joined his hand and hers. At first, when they were too far off to read each other’s faces, their eyes had been filled with doubt and questioning; but now love had risen round them and enclosed them like a wall, and within that perfect security they could once more look questioningly at each other, no longer with dread, as a few moments before, but with delight at the thought of the strangeness which it was their reciprocal right to explore. And so keen was their desire to do so that the suddenly arisen citadel of love within which they now stood became an objective fact whose consideration they could calmly postpone.
But the joy of discovery had also to be postponed when presently they found themselves in a crowded third-class compartment of the Gourock train. Helen sat in the corner, Mansie sat beside her; they were silent and gazed out through the window, scarcely seeing the things that fleeted past their eyes: the backs of sooty tenement buildings with washing clouts hanging out to dry from kitchen windows, the neat red-gravelled suburban stations sweeping smoothly past as if on runners, sharp bridges, coal trucks, a red factory wall. But when, after Paisley, the train ran through the flat farm-country, and they saw the yellow cornfields half-reaped, and the red and yellow woods, they felt that it was for them that nature had transformed itself in this strange and brilliant way, for the last time they had seen the country it had been an ordinary green. Now everything was dry and bright; the stubble fields glistened, the ancient castle of Dumbarton on its rock across the river seemed to give out an infinitesimal sparkle as of impalpable dust, the jewelled leaves rested on nothing more solid than the air, were held in it as in a translucent crystal, and the trunks and branches of dried wood rose unencumbered, as if they no longer felt the weight of their shining burden. Yet this aridity was not that of barrenness; the dust on the roads beside the railway lines seemed as rich as seed, and the coloured leaves fell ceaselessly as though they wanted to bury the earth. At Langbank gardens rows of deep and bright yellow flowers flashed by, then the inky tenements of Port Glasgow passed, almost unseen, before their eyes, and Greenock rotting patiently between the beautiful hills and the majestic firth. Nevertheless when they emerged from the stifling tunnel, and for a moment the estuary of the Clyde flashed upon them like a turning mirror before the train ran into Gourock station, they felt as though an oppression had been lifted.
Yet now that they walked along it, they scarcely saw the estuary outstretched like a great blue stone, nor the near houses, nor the dark hills on the opposite shore; for the desire to know and make known had again taken possession of them, and they reached the end of the long and empty promenade as though it had melted into air before them, so open were their minds to each other, and so vivid were the images that they contemplated there. They felt that they must know everything, but still more strongly that they must tell everything; for in the suspended calm which preludes desire, a calm in which passion is so subtly diffused that it is bodiless, they had been so transmuted that they were conscious of nothing within them that needed to be hidden; and at the moment there was indeed nothing. After they had walked on in this way for a while they stopped of one accord and looked round them. They found themselves on the shore road gazing across at Dunoon and Innellan, and they watched for a little a paddle-steamer passing down the estuary towards Rothesay.
‘Isn’t