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 would fill him with embarrassment, and he would feel almost as though he had listened to a love declaration. Often, thinking of the way in which Bob inclined his head as they walked slowly side by side, in Mansie’s mind a very early and apparently inconsequent memory would rise, the memory of a picture of the disciples in a child’s Life of Jesus which his mother had read to him; and there one of the disciples was shown with his head lying on another’s breast. Somewhere in Mansie’s mind was the definite knowledge that the other figure was Jesus Himself, yet as Bob was confused with this recollection the idea that it should have been Jesus was in some way blasphemous; and it seemed to him a more reverent thought that the second man had been merely a disciple. And while he was dreamily absorbed in this thought, his business round would suddenly appear a sort of pilgrimage, and he himself a humble disciple doing good to people. A real nice fellow, Bob, anyway.
Yet although Bob was so good a friend, something in Mansie shrank from according him more than the privilege of one friend among many; for he had a profound need to diffuse painlessly in an ever wider concentric circle every impulse within him that was urgent or painful, to vaporise himself hygienically without leaving any muddy residue; and to do this he needed many friends. There is one impulse, however, that is so palpably localised in the body that all the arts of the vaporiser must fail; and like most single young men living in a Puritan country, Mansie was sometimes hard beset by sex. He tried to fight it, he vaporised heroically; nevertheless there were hours in which, most incomprehensibly and undeservedly, his mind was besieged by lascivious images, and it was during one of those periods that he went, at Bob Ryrie’s suggestion, to an address for men only at the Southern PSA. He never went back again, and for some time there was a slight coldness between Bob and him. The Wesleyan parson had talked so much about ‘control’ that Mansie had not known where to look; then the word ‘sex’ had rolled roundly and often through the church, followed by the Biblical term ‘seed’ – and that was really going a bit too far; it had almost turned his stomach. And in the back seat of the gallery a crowd of young boys – hooligans they must have been – had sniggered so much that at last the preacher, getting quite red about the gills – Mansie could not understand how that vulgar expression had leapt so nimbly