The Serpent (19 page)

What was it? Could it possibly be her mother? Could it possibly be that it was just her mother?

If she had really desired to go to the cottage would not that at least have been clear? asked the eyes of the midnight hour.

But if she had been overcome by the plan, he reasoned, if she had been so overcome by her own desire to go to the cottage, to get away from her mother, that she couldn't – even – speak of it?

The eyes smiled.

But he refused to give up that immense hope, that fathomless possibility. Janet did keep things to herself, and there might be something in her home life far more desperate than he dreamed.

One day passed, two, three. He would have to see Janet. He must put in for the cottage; and at once or he would be too late. Already perhaps someone had spoken for it, had been to the estate office. His impatience grew fevered.

To go along the road and watch for Janet coming home in the dark was like prying. Normally it would have been a natural thing to do, but it wasn't so for him now. He had hated spying on her before and had sworn he would never do it again.

On the third night he waited by the dark shadow of the hedge beside the field gate. Donald and Janet came along. They stopped exactly opposite him as if at the direction of an invisible stage-manager.

‘No, no farther,' she said, not quite in her village voice, with the slight anglicising of the High School, a delicate excitement.

‘You
are
frightened,' said Donald, laughing, enamoured of her.

‘Well – but –'

He took her in his arms. Their embrace was long.

‘See you tomorrow,' he said.

She did not speak. Her feet went quickly and then more firmly along the road. Donald stood for a moment, as if listening to her, then went back to the manse.

The hours, the days, that followed had a bitterness, an inner cruelty that changed his nature, hardened and shaped it blade-sharp.

And the blade was turned on himself. Inwardly it cut and twisted, shearing off the soft adhesions of sentiment, of tender belief, whose existence he now regarded with an excruciating mockery.

Her mother! ‘My mother – I couldn't.' Ο God!

The enormity of it was almost beyond belief. The sheer wantonness of it.

She was a wanton by nature. He saw it now, not in vague spite, but in the record of every gesture and thought and act. She was a book he had read but whose meaning was only now revealed. On each page, every character was inked in acid.

It was beyond all considerations of anger and hate. She moved beyond them still, the same body, the same grace, only now he understood what moved her, understood it in every twist of secret thought and desire, to the last fibre of her being. She was revealed and he saw her.

‘Not yet. Wait, Tom. Let us wait for a little … My mother.'

Genuinely moved, the break in her voice. Trying to think of her mother. Being moved, thinking of her mother. And behind it – the real fear, that she was not yet on with the new love, not yet certain of the new love, not yet sorry for the old love, clinging to the old love in a clutch of fear, lest the new love be too good to be true.

By God, behind the sentiments and play-acting, behind her nature, behind her very self– what a sheer ruthlessness!

She would have had him, for lack of anyone better. He would do, until the more attractive turned up.

And this is what he had known by an intuition whose implications he had never faced. This was what his premonition had meant. Donald was the test, the crisis, and he had realised it when she mentioned to him – that ironic stroke of fate – that she was going to work at the manse. Not that working at the manse was necessary. It merely created the opportunity which otherwise, by the customs of the tribe, would not normally have presented itself. Though it might – if Donald's girl in the town had disappointed him; and he had looked a bit travel-worn and dejected when trundling in the bicycle at midday!

Perhaps Donald's girl in town had another scheme on of her own! He would be needing sympathy. Well, he had come back to the right place for it!

And it wasn't as if Tom didn't know all about this. Great heaven, what had all his life in Glasgow meant, that life with Bob and Dannie and the girl-hunts, with Dave and Tim and the Winnie Johnstons? It was just the kind of stuff he did know. He had seen it in the open.

‘The little bitch – she thinks he's more of a swell!' The lament of the disappointed swain. Everywhere, with an echo of bawdy laughter.

Had he expected something different in the country, with its ancient customs and decencies and loyalties? He had never really been part of the Glasgow scene. He had observed the scene with an extreme clarity, taken part in it as far as need be, but something in him had held back. Thus he had often enjoyed its fun to the highest degree, but with the watcher's enjoyment, with a queer liberating detachment that made the happiness at times almost pure.

This was his scene –
here
, at home. Not Glasgow, known and honest.
This
.

The slashing and cutting was not continuous. He worked with a hard pith, choosing jobs that needed brute energy rather than accuracy or finish. The spasms were intermittent, involuntary cleavages inside him, and his insight was sustained by a light that switched on of itself, coming
from God knew where, but holding him remorselessly to the moments of revelation.

But beyond anger, beyond rage and bitter misery, there was this that was happening to his essential nature. He felt the change taking place, and held to the new edge of hard cruelty. Out of the bloody violence to the old simple kindly nature, the new nature was being fashioned. It might have to bide its time, but it would be quite merciless.

Janet made no effort to get in touch with him again. The house could go. The house went. One day he saw new planking by its front wall and Willie Ross, the joiner, coming out of the door, folding his yard-rule.

The first symptom of the new nature showed itself one afternoon when he suddenly found his mother looking at him. He had been standing gazing at a pile of timber for which now he had no immediate use. Or perhaps he hadn't been gazing at it. Anyway he had been standing quite still and, on becoming aware of a presence, glanced round and saw his mother's eyes, her expression. At once, such anger gripped him, so swift a hatred of her prying sympathy that he had to grit his teeth and turn away. She did not speak, and he went into the shop, hissing to himself, emptying his mind.

Work was the sure salvation. Work for the night cometh when no man can work. Tom edged his tools and worked far into the night, disproving that primitive conception of darkness. October came in and the days shortened; the lads drew the blind. The winter session of talk and discussion was on the way.

Tom welcomed them. ‘Come in and shut the door.' He was as ruthless as the next now in keeping out those whom they did not want. His friends noticed the change in him, but found it exhilarating. In argument he was not only more incisive, but full of mockery.

Months before, Dougal had sent him some translations from the works of Voltaire. He had read them at the time, as he read all that Dougal sent him, for he felt that the best way to express his thanks was by showing his appreciation of the matter. And he had liked Voltaire, his seeming innocence in not understanding God's partiality towards some criminal
individuals and tribal atrocities among the Jews, his suave irony. To tell the truth, much of what he had read in criticism of the Bible had secretly repelled him. He saw the force of what was written, but was repelled by the spirit of the writer, by what appeared a sheer destructiveness for its own sake. At least, it had often made him uncomfortable. They were like fire-eaters, destroyers, and in their presence whatever was amiable or amusingly irrational in human nature withered. They licked up the purely likeable in man in the best tradition of the avenging Jewish prophets.

But with Voltaire it was quite different. Just as the normal atheistical writer might be compared with the avenging prophet, so might Voltaire, it seemed to Tom, be compared in a certain way with Christ. Tolerance was his cry. No wonder the intolerant church of his day had hated this ‘lewd atheist'. ‘Voltaire the Mocker', whose plea was ‘Justice, kindness, compassion, and tolerance'.

And did he not make a mess and a battlefield of the Old Testament! Did he not lay about him, with a thoroughness that surpassed all others in the field, with a courtesy that was as subtle as the edge of his sword! There was a leader a man could follow, and feel he was doing something for his own human kind.

Tom could lay about him, too, and use tolerance as a weapon, for he had not a great deal of tolerance for his own kind now.

And he did, producing for the first time his book or pamphlet, reading from it to clinch an argument and leave his listeners in an amazed silence. Sometimes the silence would last for a minute. Even Andie began to feel uneasy, for on the dark Glen road home, heaven alone knew what gargantuan shapes might come at him for such mockery of the great figures of the past of God's world, like Abraham and David. The Psalms of David. By God, it was not canny.

But Alec stretched out an arm for the book. He read, standing by the lamp, others grouped round him.

Tom went on with his work, hearing their snorts, their suppressed gusts of half-frightened laughter. Alec did not read aloud. ‘Wait a minute,' said a voice. ‘Let me see that,'
said another. None of them repeated aloud what he read. Not all of it they understood, and the learning which was beyond them served to add a mythical power and wonder, impressive as the Devil's sleight-of-hand, marvels on the edge of the unseen that took the breath with the nearness of an ominous presence.

Alec asked leave to take the book home with him, and enjoyed the sensation of his own courage. There was excitement and to spare. ‘By George, it's going to be a winter, this!' said Alec leading the way to the road.

Tom shut up shop and went to bed.

Alec would now have plenty of secret ammunition. He would spread the news to add to the turmoil and gaiety of life. Get people by the ears and have a good joke.

Well, why not? What the hell did it matter to Tom? The church and its servants, its idols, its students. It's young Donalds!

He would clear out. Why should he have had to bear what he had borne? Duty to his father? His father did not want him. His father hated him. That had long been clear.

But he would not give in to him any longer. He would stare him back in the eye. He would make him speak, make him say the irrevocable word.

Go back to Glasgow. Or start a business elsewhere. But no – not elsewhere in the country. The childish simplicity of his mind when he had asked Dougal if he would not like to go back to the country! Enough to make one grovel.

God, this sleeplessness!

Up in the morning. Breakfast, and there was his father in the bed with his graven face. That face that looked at him and lifted. That pursuing face. That expressionless, blinded face, with the life behind it coming only to the boundary of the skin, to the eye.

He ignored it, and at evening did not tell of things in the indirect respectful way that had been established. What his father wanted to know he could ask.

His mother, uneasy, tried to cover up the situation, with a show of naturalness. Let her!

‘When are you starting the harvest?' she asked, though she knew already.

‘Monday,' he answered shortly.

He saw his father's hand grip above the quilt. It looked ungainly at the end of the gaunt wrist bones.

‘Is that a way to answer your mother?' The voice, so long silent, came like a blow.

Tom paid no attention.

‘Answer me!' The voice behind a whip.

Tom pushed his plate from him, got up and walked out.

He would not eat there again. Bedamned if he would.

When he returned late that night, he found a glass of milk and a buttered oatcake by his bedside. He tried to eat the oatcake but it stuck in his throat. He drank the milk.

In the morning, he took the oatcake with him in his pocket and did not go into the kitchen for breakfast. Around one o'clock his mother appeared. ‘Aren't you coming in to your dinner, Tom?'

‘No.' He did not turn round to look at her.

His mother brought him food, potato soup in a small milk pail, with a couple of whole potatoes and a knuckle of meat from a lean bone in the midst of it, oatcake and a spoon.

When he thought she was going to talk, he frowned intolerantly. As she turned away, he saw her look up towards the road. She would keep guard over the public decencies!

His brain was not working very well; it was tried, and could not be bothered hunting an immediate decision. There was no particular hurry. He was not running away all at once, not before he had said and done a few things.

As he went down to the barn to inspect some harvesting gear, including the scythe which needed resetting, he saw his father standing on the little path by the corner of the oat field. He looked taller than in ordinary life, and somehow appeared to be there by a miracle. As if suddenly he was there!

But Tom knew why he was looking at the field of grain so silently and so fixedly. It was ripe enough for cutting to have started that day.

In the dusk of the evening while Tom was still in this state
of mind, Alec and two or three of the lads came drifting into the shop. They were very early and Alec said, ‘Hallo, I see the bicycles are out?' as if they had intended going a run. Tom replied that they would be in shortly, and Alec said it didn't greatly matter for it would be dark soon now anyway.

While they were talking, William Bulbreac appeared in the door and in an instant Tom knew that Alec had staged his master ‘argument'.

‘Ha, so here you all are in the academy of learning,' William greeted them in a dry but not unpleasant voice.

Tom looked at him, but did not answer, waiting for what might be the business purpose of the visit.

Against this silence, William entered, crooking his hazel staff over his arm. ‘You don't happen to have a round-headed five-eighths bolt?'

‘I believe I have,' said Tom, turning to the back wall.

‘Yes,' said William, looking about him, ‘so this is where you congregate for the new learning?'

‘Do you feel like joining us yourself?' asked Alec in a hearty off-taking voice, a pleasant smile on his face.

‘In what branch of knowledge do you think you could instruct me?' inquired William, still looking about him.

‘Oh, you'd wonder,' replied Alec, with a sideways nod. ‘You'd wonder.'

‘I have no doubt,' said William. ‘I have no doubt.'

‘Is this what you want?' asked Tom, quietly concerned with his business.

‘I believe that's it. I believe it's the very thing. Yes. And how much is that?'

‘One penny,' said Tom.

‘A whole penny,' declared William. ‘Well, I wonder if I have that large sum,' and from his trousers pocket he took a dark leather purse.

Alec winked to his friend Ian Fraser. William, glancing up, caught them before they could wipe the knowing smile away.

‘Thank you,' said Tom, taking the penny.

‘So this is where you are taught manners and all good
things,' declared William evenly but getting in his reference to their wink.

‘What's wrong with our manners?' Alec asked.

‘That you know best yourselves,' answered William. ‘And if all I hear is true, you would be advised as young men to mend them.'

‘That's going a bit too far,' declared Alec, shifting to his other foot. ‘I don't like to be accused of something without being told what it is.' He sounded a bit hurt.