He refused to see a doctor, although for several days his head hummed and rang, and at the back, where the wound was, there clung a lump of pain; it felt like a clod of hardened mud that would not be dislodged. At last the pain went away and his scalp healed. And in spite of his indifference, his relief was so great that he resolved to pull himself together and go straight.
When Mansie first heard of Tom’s accident he was very angry. A fine way to behave, the fool would break his neck some time yet! But when Tom began to go straight, keeping decent company, dressing neatly and taking a drink only now and then, Mansie became ashamed of his annoyance. He expected every day that Tom would suddenly turn to him and say something, for the fellow was completely changed, he had quite a different look about him; and when Tom gave no sign of speaking Mansie felt a little hurt. But on one account he was sincerely relieved by Tom’s reformation; for now he felt there was nothing to prevent his joining the Clarion Scouts. With a brother who was a waster he would never have been quite sure; it might have looked a bit fishy, for lots of people looked upon Socialism as fishy. Pure prejudice, of course; the crowds he had met at Socialist demonstrations were a very decent lot; welcomed you too, no side about them, a friendly set of fellows. So Mansie decided to take the plunge; with Bob joining at the same time one felt better about it. And once his application form was filled in and sent off a surprise awaited him; it was as though the Masonic circle of decent fellows had widened infinitely all at once, and he felt as a visionary democrat feels when he sees everywhere hosts of free and intelligent electors spring up at some great extension of the franchise, hosts of free and intelligent electors where before there had been a dull and slavish mass. The very distinguishing marks of decent fellows were radically altered, the old marks seemed inessential and ridiculous, and it was almost by a whole world of decent fellows that Mansie now delightedly saw himself surrounded. You had only to look below the surface, and even those hooligans in Eglinton Street might turn out to be much better than they seemed.
PART TWO
TEN
THE PROCESSION WAS gathering in George Square. It was a warm still May morning; a few white clouds floated far up in the sky. As Mansie turned the corner of St Vincent Street he saw, far away, the banners languidly waving in the square, waving in silence, for no sound came from those parti-coloured rectangular blocks of human beings, which from here looked as peaceful and dumb as the rectangular buildings frowning above them. Mansie’s footsteps rang sharply in the deserted street. It was the first Sunday in May.
As he drew nearer, and on the motionless rectangles isolated points of movement started out and spread into an imperceptible ripple running along the whole line, he wished that Bob Ryrie had not had to call off at the last moment; but a fellow could not take risks with a bad cold. At last he reached the procession and paused on the pavement, feeling very exposed while he looked around him distractedly for some face he knew. A voice quite near at hand shouted his name; it was like a lifeline thrown out to him where he was standing on the pavement. Why, there were the Clarion Scouts almost under his nose, and he hadn’t seen them! He smiled back and hastily fell in at the rear beside a white-faced pot-bellied man whom he did not know.
And immediately he was enclosed in peace. It was as though he had stepped out of a confused and distracted zone into calm and safety, as though the procession had protectively enfolded him, lifted him up and set him down again on the farther bank of a tranquil river among this multitude who like him had reached the favoured land; and the people who passed on the pavement with averted or hostile or curious eyes, on their way to church or merely out for a walk, had no longer any power over him; for they were still wandering out there in exile, out there on the pavement, and he was safe, at home and free. 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