“She is that,” said Mackenzie, nodding. Then, after a pause, he went on hesitantly: “Hasn’t she a lad?”
“Well—there’s many that would like to be her lad,” said Mrs. Lawrence, smiling. “But Jessie’s level-headed—and she’s got her mother to look after. She’s got mair in her head than lads. There’s plenty of time for that yet.”
After that Wednesday it became a routine for Mackenzie to take Jessie to the pictures once a week. He formed the habit too of going to meet her after the choral society practices on Monday nights. When she came out of the hall he advanced shyly from the doorway where he always hid himself and then they strolled homewards. One chilly night she put her arm in his and snuggled close up beside him, and he found himself hardly able to speak because of the sudden pulsing tightness in his chest. On another occasion the practice finished early and she suggested they should take a short walk before going home. They went to a small park just outside the town—a little patch of open ground among the collieries. It was a clear frosty night, with a beautiful ringed moon. Everything was silent—the sound of their footsteps seemed to move away and die in faint echoes among the distant slag heaps. The big wheels and towers of the mine-heads were outlined clearly against the sky, a rat went swimming across the moon-path in the pond of waste water where Mackenzie had fished for sticklebacks as a boy. Far off, on the other side of the town, they could see in the sky the red glow from the big furnaces of the steel works. It made Mackenzie think of his old childhood conception of the end of the world—an immense blaze, and nowhere to run to to escape from it: and he found himself half-wishing that it might indeed be the end of the world—that it might finish here when everything was quiet and he had Jessie beside him. He glanced at her furtively. In the moonlight her skin seemed transparent, her eyes were wide and glistening, her lips were slightly parted. He did not know what he felt: it was not like anything he had ever known before.
And all this time Mackenzie was expanding in other directions too. Now he went very seldom to the pub—he spent his free time in reading his books on self-education and in practising the mandoline. He had one lesson a week from Mr. Fred King and had quite rapidly reached the stage where he would fumble through pieces like A Little Waltz and Air by Haydn. His attitude was one of dogged perseverance. He strummed at a phrase till his fingers knew what to do of themselves. When the music said piano he suddenly played softly, when it said forte he just as suddenly played loudly, with no attempt at any sort of gradation. Always he had a vague vision before him—of himself nonchalantly tuning up his mandoline and dashing off some piece of great difficulty while Jessie looked on admiringly: or he was explaining something to her—not patronizingly, but with an easy air of wisdom:
“You see, Jessie, when a warm wind blows against a mountain slope it is forced to rise into the cooler levels of the atmosphere. Cool air can’t contain so much moisture as warm, so the water vapour condenses and falls as rain.”
And in this way the months went by. When the warm weather came, Mrs. Dean’s health improved a little and she was able to move about, so it was decided that she, Jessie, Mrs. Lawrence and Mackenzie should all go down the Clyde to Rothesay for a day’s outing. They set off very early one Saturday morning, laden with sandwiches and thermos flasks. As they mounted the gangway of the paddle steamer at Gourock, Mackenzie found himself expanding in a delicious sense of freedom and adventure. He was wearing a new pair of flannel trousers, a new cloth cap and a white flannel shirt open wide at the neck. He felt the brisk salt air whipping some colour into his cheeks and waved gaily up to Jessie, who had run on ahead and was standing on top of one of the huge paddle cases of the steamer. She was dressed in a bright frock of green material which the wind pressed closely about her slim young figure. Her hair was tousled and she kept pushing it back from her eyes, laughing all the time with excitement.
“Come on up here, Mr. Mackenzie,” she cried. “It’s grand.”
He set Mrs. Lawrence and Mrs. Dean in deckchairs and then went up to join Jessie on the paddle case. On the top step he lost his footing for a moment and she reached out a hand to steady him. He thrilled at the touch of her cool firm skin. Still holding him by the hand she led him to the railing and he stood there blissfully beside her, watching the animated scene on the pier: the stout mothers steering their children through the crowds, the porters wheeling luggage, the excited factory girls, the keelies with hunched-up shoulders and smart felt hats. He felt very young and energetic—he wanted to sing or shout. He found himself half-wishing he had brought his mandoline with him.
Presently the gangway was hauled in, the steamer vibrated and the water immediately beneath them began to froth and swish as the paddles revolved. A sailor on the pier cast off the mooring rope and it fell into the water with a long hissing sigh. The boat began to move. A small orchestra somewhere among the crowded trippers on the deck started playing Over the Waves and some screaming gulls slewed round a steward who had appeared from the dining saloon and was throwing scraps of bread into the sea.
“Oh, it’s grand, it’s grand!” cried Jessie. Her cheeks were full of colour, her eyes were wide, her whole body was alert. Mackenzie felt enormously proud: he imagined that people were looking at them as they stood there at the rail. Against the background of the excited crowd and the garish music it seemed suddenly as if life had a strange glamour: it was like the final scenes of the pantomimes he had sometimes seen as a child in Glasgow—bold and picturesque and full of a vague meaning. A young couple mounted the paddle case and came over to stand beside Mackenzie and Jessie. The boy put his arm round the girl’s waist and Mackenzie suddenly felt a sense of affinity with him. He wondered: Should he put his arm round Jessie’s waist? Then he realised that she was still holding his hand and it seemed that to hold hands was an infinitely superior way of being affectionate.
The journey progressed. Mackenzie and Jessie went forward to the bows and looked down into the water until they felt giddy. Sometimes they saw the ghostly shapes of jellyfish near the surface, sometimes a long trailer of shining brown seaweed drifted past them. Once they saw a porpoise: it made several jumps into the air, its body glistening in the bright sunlight. Later on they went down into the engine room and watched the big pistons pushing at the cranks of the paddles. Mackenzie debated whether he should begin: “You see, Jessie, steam possesses kinetic energy or motion, since it can be used to work machinery.” But before he could frame the sentence naturally into the conversation, Jessie complained that the smell of the oil was making her feel a little sick and they went up into the air.
As they neared Rothesay, Mackenzie, for politeness’s sake, went to sit for a moment or two with Mrs. Dean and Mrs. Lawrence, leaving Jessie to roam about the decks by herself for a bit. The two women had found a secluded corner on the second deck at the base of one of the funnels, where it was warm. Mackenzie fetched a deck chair and sat down beside them. The three were quite alone. All the other travellers were on the top deck or in the bows, waiting for the first sight of Rothesay or looking out for Shamrock and Britannia, the two famous yachts, which were in the channel that day.
By this time the sun was hot and presently Mackenzie fell into a half doze, lulled by the rhythm of the steamer and the soft drone of the women’s voices. His thoughts went hazily to Bella and then beyond her to his childhood. It seemed very near to him these days: little incidents had come back to his memory as if they had happened only a few weeks back. Yet before, when he had been living with Bella, his childhood had seemed lost and remote. For the first time in his life he was overcome with a sense of the strangeness of things—the sadness of time and of death and above all the unrealisable longing for joy to be something permanent and solid, like a pebble, that could be locked away and guarded for ever. He had a sense of panic: it seemed as if things were vanishing away from him, were flowing past and getting lost. Perhaps, if he opened his eyes, all his present joy would melt away too: there would be no steamer, no Jessie, and he would
be sitting before the range in that small house of black brick while Bella washed the dishes at the sink. With an effort he forced his mind back to deal with the realness of the moment: the cries of the gulls, the attenuated sound of the orchestra from further along the deck, the voices of the women. But how could one confirm the realness of the moment? He wanted to open his eyes, and then, half-ashamed, he held back. He thought: It might be a dream: but I want it to be real, and if I stay like this it will seem real and that will be as good.
Suddenly, in a strange half-witted way, he became aware of what it was the two women were talking about. He had caught Jessie’s name. He did not open his eyes but now he was awake and listening intently.
“I told her there was no harm in having a lad,” Mrs. Dean was saying. “After all, she cannae tie herself to me a’ her days.”
“That’s right enough,” said Mrs. Lawrence. “Now that you’re a wee thing better it would be the very idea for her. Has she been mentioning anybody in particular?”
“Well, once or twice she did gi’e a bit hint about young Tom Kennedy—in the choral society, you know. He’s a real nice lad. I’d like it fine if they got going steady thegither and maybe mairrit someday. She told me he’d asked to see her home one or two nights, but of course Mr. Mackenzie was meeting her, so she couldnae very well say yes.”
“Tom Kennedy,” said Mrs. Lawrence reflectively. “Now who would he be? I wonder if I know him?”
“Of course—Meg Hamilton’s boy. She married Alex Kennedy down at the steel works. You’re bound to remember Meg Hamilton—sister to Robert Hamilton, the one that was killed in the colliery accident some years syne. He was the one that was carrying on wi’ Bella——”
“Ssh!” the other woman said suddenly, nudging her friend. There was a silence, then the two gossips went on talking in lower voices.
But Mackenzie was no longer listening. The voices drifted away and once more he was asleep and in his dream. It was as if, suddenly, he were fabulously alone and very small, and it was as if, too, he had somehow to cling on to something, something undefinable that had slipped just beyond his grasp. He was on an immense plain. Far off, on the horizon, on the edge of things, were the peaked slag heaps and the mine-heads of a colliery. The sky above them was pulsing and red, and as he looked he saw that it was no reflection from the steel works he was seeing this time, but flames—vast slow flames. And he realised why it was that he felt so small as he stood there. He was a child again—on that vast plain he was a child, quite naked and lonely, and the sky was burning. It was the End of the World.
For a moment he had a feeling of terrible panic. He looked desperately about him for somewhere to run to. But there was nowhere, nowhere.
Then suddenly there swept over him an immense sense of comfort and relief. The distant slag heaps and mine-heads had gone, and in their place now, on the horizon, on the edge of things, stood Jessie. She was smiling and her arms were outstretched. Her green dress whipped round her, writhing like the vast flames that were her background.
Mackenzie gave a strange, quiet, muffled sob and started to run across the plain. And Jessie too advanced, still smiling. Yet by now her dress seemed to be writhing vividly and to be growing out from her and to be mingling with the red flames in the sky. They flowed together, and it seemed that the cool green flames of the dress gave their colour to the flames of the burning sky. And all was green—the whole world burned green, with Jessie’s smiling face all shining among the flames.
He still rushed forwards, his arms outstretched. He sobbed. And he was among the flames, but they did not burn, they were cool. As they writhed all round him they did not torment him. They soothed him. His sobbing changed to a sort of laughter. He went further and further into the flames. His consciousness left him, he went deep and deeper into the green fire. He saw, in the flames, a thousand things that he had forgotten, good comfortable things. And all of them shone green.
He opened his mouth and filled his lungs with the green cool fire. And there was nothing more to worry about. It all was real . . .
* * * *
The two women gossiped on in low voices. Suddenly they saw Jessie running towards them. Her eyes were bright and she was beckoning excitedly.
“I think I can see Rothesay,” she cried. “And we saw the yachts about ten minutes ago—the Shamrock, and Britannia, the king’s yacht.”
She broke off suddenly and looked at the empty deckchair beside the two women.
“But where’s Mr. Mackenzie?” she asked. “Where’s he gone?”
“Didn’t he go to find you?” said Mrs. Dean. “I saw him get up a few moments ago, while we were talking. He went over towards the rail. I didn’t see which way he went after that, though . . .”
They looked at each other in silence for a moment or two. Then Jessie said:
“He must be somewhere—in the engine room, perhaps. I’ll go and look . . .”
She ran all over the ship. But Mackenzie was not to be found. Mystified, she went to the stern and stared back at the expanse of sea they had traversed. The green tossing wake stretched out in a long broad ribbon behind the steamer. Some gulls swooped round her head, screaming. A quarter of a mile away a porpoise leapt into the air.
The little orchestra in the waist of the ship was playing a tinny, garish arrangement of Liszt’s Liebestraum. The thin sound came back to her as she stood with her hand on the rail, her green frock whipping about her in the wind, her head upraised to drink the salty air.
“He must be somewhere,” she said to herself. “He must be somewhere . . .”
Miss Thing and the Surrealist
We lived in those days in a constant turmoil. Artists we were most consciously—Surrealists, moreover, for the Movement was at its fashionable height then. Things have changed a lot however. As far as I know only two of us have stuck to the profession—if you discount Tony del Monte who became an academician (and called himself Antonio). Tania went on the stage didn’t she?—and reached Hollywood somehow, I remember (as Howard Darby said, she got into the Temple of the Muses by the tradesmen’s entrance). Jo Haycock married someone from Yorkshire (or Wales?) and poor Chloe Whitehead went mad. And of course there’s me (but I was only on the verge of things ever).
And Kolensky.
But what happened to Kolensky is what this story is about.
And then there was Miss Thing.
You must understand in the first place that we attached more significance to our lives than to our work. We were concerned with being artists. We looked like artists. We behaved in a manner. Our mode was intended as some sort of gesture—a rude one—five extended fingers at the nose aimed at—what? (All that we secretly were, perhaps, and were afraid or ashamed of.) That was almost what we understood by Surrealism. It consisted as we saw it of a series of outrageous snarls. What we flattered ourselves was panache was a sort of temper.
Traces of it all remain. I find shreds still clinging secretly to my own personality—I see large fragments attached to Howard Darby.
It lingers in aspects of style.
Yet amidst all the turmoil of the amorality of it and the picturesqueness of it and the earnestness and (looking back now nostalgically) the glory of it, there were some of us who were serious and good artists. Kolensky I believe was a good artist—and an honest Surrealist. And Chloe. Whitehead had a streak of queer genius somewhere—but she went mad, poor lass, and is out of it all and away.
We had what we fancied was our wit. It was meant to shock.
For example:—Some of us were walking along the King’s Road with some people—some cousins of Tania’s. We passed a tall house with a woman shaking blankets out of one of the upper windows. Some feathers were fluttering to the ground and the large loose white thing waving seemed like a bleached tongue out of a toothless oblong mouth.
“Oh look,” cried Tania, “that house is being sick . . .”
Or again:—We were all talking about Christianity one night with some earnest
theological students.
“How could it possibly fail to have an enormous public?” said Chloe. “Look at its founder. He had the best exit in history.”
On another occasion I remember Howard took us all to a crowded and noisy little restaurant that we knew of, where there was music and a permanent buzz of conversation. He had just been reading an anecdote about Baudelaire. He waited for a moment when the music stopped suddenly and the clatter dropped for an instant, then said in a loud tone as if continuing a conversation he had been shouting through the din—
“. . . but have you ever tasted little children’s brains? Ah they’re the things. They’re very sweet—like little green walnuts . . .”
Yet there were occasions of great seriousness—when suddenly something assumed momentous symbolical significance because, I am sure, of the way we had accustomed ourselves to look at life. I remember one night Jo Haycock and I were sitting talking in my room overlooking King’s Road—in the World’s End part of Chelsea, I should mention. It was late and wonderfully quiet—towards two a.m. And suddenly in a long gap in our quiet conversation there sheared beastily through the night a ghastly prolonged loud scream. We stared at each other and rushed downstairs.
We found a little shocked crowd on the pavement opposite. Some ambulance men came and the screaming ended when they took away the dreadful forlorn thing. A wretch of a prostitute had flung herself from the top floor of the tall house opposite the one in which I had my room. She had impaled herself on the area palings instead of dashing mercifully to the stone as she had hoped.
Jo and I went upstairs again and made tea. We were sick. We were haunted for days by the long scream of agony shearing out across the big quiet city. All the Surrealistic peering into the unconscious with its emphasis on the lower motives—all the speculation in the world could not satisfy the big strange question about Alice Emmanuel (as the papers told us her name was) and the black body falling through the night to the blunt hideous spikes.
The Other Passenger Page 12