The Serpent (31 page)

Then one night, for the first time, he realised that his mother was dying. The realisation was borne in upon him from his mother in a characteristic way, for now that she knew death was at hand she became concerned for him.

‘The neighbours have been very good,' she said, ‘especially Tina and young Bessie. They have been very good to me.'

‘No more than you would have been to them.'

‘I don't know,' she answered, plainly now with something on her mind. ‘Tina is a good-hearted woman. You must not mind me saying it, but I sometimes wonder who will look after you when I am gone.'

‘You're not gone yet, Mother, so there's not much good in talking like that.'

‘I'm not thinking about it sadly. Don't think that. I just wonder away sometimes to myself.' She always found it difficult to express herself, and quite impossible when she felt that her men folk were impatient with her.

As he saw her thought being bottled up, he said in a kindly voice, ‘I can understand that, Mother. So just say whatever is in your mind.'

‘It's just that I would like to see you with someone.'

‘Well, I'll always get someone – if no-one as good as yourself!'

But she was exercised in her thought. ‘Tina is a fine woman and a good manager. But – I would like to think of you with someone younger about the place.'

He laughed. ‘Tina has never cared much for me, Mother, so I'll have to look elsewhere.'

She did not even smile, but her eyes were on him. Then they withdrew, and he was left with a momentary uncertainty, as if his mother had a secret knowledge of Tina's feelings towards him of which he had never dreamed, and now shielded the knowledge from him by withdrawing her eyes.

‘Very well,' she said. ‘I had to say it. I would like to think of you well looked after, and – and – with someone young. Don't mind me saying that.'

‘Keep your mind at ease, Mother. I'll look after myself. Don't worry about that.'

‘All right,' she said, with a tired nod of acceptance, as if all this had exercised her profoundly, draining her vital strength. She must have been thinking about it whole days and nights.

So oddly moved was he himself by her utterly selfless acceptance of death, that he wondered what he could do to comfort her. ‘Would you like me to read to you?'

She smiled, with longing and regret in her face. ‘I would not understand maybe.'

Then his thought brightened with a sudden inspiration: ‘Would you like me to read out of the Bible?'

‘Oh, Tom!' she said, and her eyes filled with tears.

His reading of the Bible was to him a curious revelation. At first he stuck to the New Testament, in order to avoid what he felt were the barbaric embarrassments of the Old. When he had read to her, and laid the Bible aside, he got up in a practical way saying she must now compose herself for the night, and went out for a little while. On his return, he saw the mild happy expression of her face and the ease of her arms over the coverlet. Instinctively she glanced at the fire, anxious that the house should be comfortable for him.

Seeing the Bible, he took it up instead of Hume and now, in silence, turned to the Old Testament.

Revelation first consisted in his realising that he had passed beyond all the early heats and arguments. He was prepared to read with an objective mind, as if here were ancient stories which could not affect him personally or raise any question of belief. And then, secondly, he realised that the stories were in themselves extraordinarily interesting in the sense that they were so absolutely human. Here were real men and real women, love and hate and pride and superstition and humility and boasting. Nothing was suppressed. Goodness was here but so was vice. Songs of praise and gladness, the tribulations of utter misery. And gathered in clusters, amid the buzzing and stinging and slaughter, were the cells that held the golden honey of wisdom.

No wonder such a human record had kept its hold on a living humanity.

Next afternoon the minister called. He was an oldish, humdrum, humming man, and when Tom in the evening asked his mother how she had liked the visit, she said, ‘Och, well enough. He seems a good-meaning man.'

‘You'll be saying next you prefer my own reading!'

‘Indeed and I do, and I hope that's not wrong of me.'

A small note of distress crept into her voice. She was getting weak. ‘He makes everything seem so – terrible, and I feel – I feel cast out, as if it couldn't be for me.'

‘Don't feel that, Mother. If you'll be cast out then most of us will be cast out with you!'

But she couldn't fully respond. Some solemn mood had been engendered, leaving behind the dead waters of despondency, whereon she now found herself alone and desolate.

As he set the lamp to its highest point of illumination and, bending before the fire, began to bank up the glowing core with new peat, he continued talking in an easy natural voice. ‘I know you often wondered why I wouldn't go to church. But the trouble with a lot of these men, like William Bulbreac, is that they're so full of themselves and so sure they're right. They're only happy when they make you feel like a sinner. Is it St. Paul who says that joy is next to godliness? But to them joy is a sin. And if you dare question them, they grow angry and threaten you with the bad place. They're solemn because to be solemn makes them feel important. The last thing they would do is turn the other cheek. No fear! They want to have the power of the lash. And the only real sin is to question their belief and their authority. The world knows all about it, Mother. The world was weary of it in the old days. And in Europe today, not in religion now but in politics, the same old hideous thing is working away. So it's no good being upset about it, Mother. Men who have power are like that. Now isn't that a good fire?'

‘Yes,' she said, turning her face. Her eyes were shining.

He had to go on. So, as he got his books together,
walking back and fore and preparing to sit down, he continued lightly: ‘Christ was so gentle and kind. He never sent anyone away with a sore heart if he could help it. Suffer little children to come unto me. Always that human understanding and warmth. I was watching old Norman in that blink of sun yesterday with his two grandchildren rushing about him. They were swarming over him like two puppies and shouting to beat the band. It would never occur to Norman to cast a stone at anyone. But William Bulbreac would have cast a whole quarryful. Well, why should we worry about people like William? And if the minister comes in about in a doleful solemn way, interceding for us and so on, well, Mother, we're not doleful and sad. We just do our best according to our natures, and there's no more we can do. If anything is going to be understood hereafter, surely that will be. And if Christ was kind, it was because He understood. With Him always it was kindness and mercy.' He looked over his shoulder. ‘Do you think I could have made a preacher myself.'

But she could not articulate, and the tears came again, and in a moment she was weeping heavily, her sobs all the louder for the effort she made to control them.

Tom sat down in his chair and took up Hume, leaving her to herself.

‘It's not because – because I'm sad,' she tried to explain, as her emotion died down. ‘It's like lifting a load off me.'

‘Right you are, Mother. I understand fine. I may as well put fresh water in the kettle. I think it makes a better drop. Don't you?'

‘Yes,' she said. And as he lifted the kettle off the crook, she murmured, ‘I'm so happy.'

As he stood in the gloom of the passage filling the kettle with the tin skillet, he thought: That so little should make her happy! The smile seemed not only in himself but, with an equal irony, extending into the farthest reaches of life, and the irony was profound, deeper and gentler than he could ever plumb. He felt the faint coldness of its exaltation as something forever inexplicable and beyond him.

On the third night thereafter she died. By a great mercy
she died not in pain or suffering but quietly, life sinking away from her like water through sand. Her mind had been clouded now and then in the two preceding days, but with the cloudiness of a dream she had hardly the strength to wake out of. What secret suffering she may have had, she never mentioned, but it could not have been very great or he would have divined it. To inquiring neighbours, he reported her condition as more favourable than it was. The doctor in his frank way had said she might last a little while or she might go any day.

He knew on this night that death was coming by her eyes. They spoke to him and told him. The change is coming, they said, but she herself did not speak. In the lamplight, he moved from his own place and sat on the simple wooden chair, its padded seat covered in bright-coloured knitted wools, by the bedside. ‘I'll read to you,' he said in his normal voice.

He read out of the New Testament many of the things Christ had done and said. He left the Pharisees alone and all uncharitableness. He left Calvary and redemption alone. Because now, at this final moment, he could not raise even as a shadow in his own mind what was contentious or difficult. None of that now, not salvation even, but only this wisdom of act and mind, this penetration, this gentleness, that gave out kinship and lifted the heart into eternal community with all fine hearts, this singing of wisdom, this song of life, down the great ways. For if there was no death, then all is life. And if, at the end, there is death only, then here is life's greatness and its beauty.

The strange reserve – the reserve of the stranger – that always was in him when he read the Bible, he now allowed to leave him, so that his mind was open as the book before him and his voice natural as a hill stream.

He stopped reading aloud and read to himself in the peace of the kitchen, and this peace was somehow about him in a calm strength, even though he was profoundly sensitive to his mother's presence and to her condition.

Glancing from under his brows, he saw her eyes staring in a sightless way and heard her breath in her half-open mouth, short shallow breaths like ghostly sighs.

She stirred and he hid his eyes from her in his book, listening acutely.

Then he looked again and saw that her spirit was struggling with its earthly tie, that it was wanting to come back, to resolve some final difficulty, as if it were not yet ready, and in this struggle there was for a poignant moment, it seemed to him, the final pathos of human tragedy.

The struggle passed and now her eyes looked at him from the midst of the calm.

They had the nameless gleam of intelligence by which she had first communicated the knowledge that her death was at hand. But now the gleam softened and shone in a tender light. The hand nearest him made a tentative movement and he put out his own right hand and caught it.

‘I'm leaving you, Tom.'

The whispering voice brought a great tenderness upon him, dissolving the hardness of his flesh, and tears came welling up into his eyes and ran down his face.

‘You have been a good mother to me,' he said, and he caressed her wrist with his free hand.

She took in a breath and he thought she was going to cry, but slowly she smiled upon him in a profound pity and tenderness that was love's last service, and perceptibly moved her head in a negation that knew her love and service had not been enough. Not enough. He felt her fingers grip at his hand.

Now she wanted to say something to him, which yet she knew she could never say. Her strange gleaming look seemed to regard him as if he were not looking at her, but only she at him.

This last effort at communion exhausted her strength, and on a faint surge of emotion she drew in a deep shuddering breath. As the breath ebbed from her life went with it and the gleam faded from her eyes.

The deserted croft came to a focus in the Philosopher's eyes, whose blue was full of a glowing light. It was the sort of croft where shadowy figures like those of his mother and Janet might pass, busy in the sunlight.

He looked about him, at the grass, the wild flowers, the tufts of rushes, the white flags of the canna, the shorn sheep nibbling away among the whin bushes. The valley was now hidden from him, the land continuing beyond it, great rolling sweeps of brown heath, with a far crofting township showing up in a quartering of tiny fields like a shield.

He got to his feet, but before leaving that old croft, with its silent stones and half-obliterated rigs, he gave it one long look, and his eyes smiled.

It has a gladness about it, he thought, as he faced the moor. Not altogether the sort of joy that is next to godliness nor yet the solemn tenderness of Christ. But a gladness that is part of the old human gaiety. Pagan is hardly the word, not exact enough. It is the ultimate gaiety that comes from a knowledge of loneliness. It is a gaiety that knows the wind and the grasses and the sunlight and moves with them. It is the gaiety that is lost in the crowd, and lost to oneself when too concerned with the crowd. It is a final individual bubbling up of the spirit of positive life.

Yes, it would be a long inquiry – before he covered all the ground. In the years that immediately followed his mother's death, he had had many a mixed dealing with the world. Tina … there had been that time when he wondered if he would drift into marriage with Tina. That had been an earthy time, long drawn out, tormented. His mind seemed to lose its power to come to any decision, to
lose itself in haunting the physical body, in creating physical fantasies that took possession with a sort of horrible inertia. Very little then might have made him many Tina. But it had to come from the outside in order to overcome the inertia. The inertia was too strong of itself, and Tina lacked something, some directive compelling element. Or was he, unconsciously, even in his physical fantasy with her, fighting against her? Why else had he cleared off to Glasgow for a few days more than once?

By contrast, his occasional reading at this time attained moments of extreme clarity, so that an involuntary memory of them was like silver-bright windows in a dark house. But the house had been dark – dark with that sense of weariness, of frustration, which now and then came to a pitch of bitterness that flared in acute physical spasms and died down into a condition as unresponsive as mire. Yet possibly most of the time passed in an even normality, a sort of grey good nature. Anyway, a period that would require a long chapter to itself – that might prove revealing of a human nature not directed by or towards anything, but living in itself, at the mercy of chance currents and gusts.

Henry came back from the war, grown in body and strength, full of energy and confidence. He took the eager young man's command of everything, including the business and his mother. Tom gave him the promised half-share of all profits, retaining final control himself. Henry had ideas galore and the business began swiftly to open out and thrive.

That was a not unpleasant time, full of Henry's talk and energy and friendliness. Behind Henry, Tina slowly retired.

When Bessie left him at the age of twenty-one to go and get married, he had turned fifty, and found in the loneliness of the house a secret pleasure which he did not feel disposed to give up. Henry said his mother would look in in the mornings and tidy things for him, but Tom said he would rather not have anyone for a while as he wanted to make certain alterations in the kitchen, fix up some bookshelves and other odds and ends suitable for a bachelor.

How many years was it since he had made a will by
which the business would be left to Henry and his money divided between Tina and her other two children, Bessie and George? Difficult to remember because from that time when he had first begun to live alone, a new life had opened out.

This would be perhaps the most difficult period to get a clear grip of, for its essential adventures lay in the region of the intellect and the spirit. And what extraordinary adventures they had been! How brilliant a creature was the individual genius in history! How marvellous a receptacle was society which retained the stuff of his genius as a feeding trough retains food! From Hume to Kant. From Kant to Hegel. And the emergence in practice of the bureaucratic concept among those who derived from, however in theory they ran counter to, Hegel. The new formulation of materialism under its three headings: dialectical, historical, and philosophical. Parallels in the physical world. Water changing quantitatively in temperature until the moment of revolution when it is changed qualitatively into ice – or steam. A reasoning that held some of the clear beauty of mathematics.

The opposed school of thought: the ideal, the transcendental, the mystical. Mathematical proof absent here. Adventures now in the realm of individual experience. Ah, this was the difficult realm. Because an individual experience here was insusceptible of ‘proof' that did not mean its reality was less valid to the one who experienced it. This, too, had its own parallel in the physical world. However brilliant your description of the taste of a blaeberry, it will never evoke the taste in the mind of one who has never eaten the fruit; just as you can never communicate the scent of wild thyme to a man with no ‘nose', or its colour to a man born colour blind.

This nodding of tall grasses in the wind, with its literary (historical) associations for him, such as the passing of ‘the lordly ones', how communicate the exquisite gaiety that invades the mind at such a moment?

Literature. He remembered his first vague dissatisfaction with literature because it ‘proved' nothing. It had taken him a long time to realise that outside mathematics and pure
science, nothing was susceptible of their kind of proof. Voltaire was probably the first to give him some idea of the meaning of literature. For very early he made what seemed to him a curious personal discovery, namely, that it did make a difference who presented particular ‘truths'. Obviously a truth was a truth whoever expressed it and the introduction of ‘difference' was absurd. Still, truth in the living (as distinct from the mathematical) realm had to be phrased and the way in which it was phrased affected as a matter of simple fact the mind of the recipient. He found, for example, that he preferred Voltaire's phrasing in biblical criticism to that of the hammer-and-tongs rationalist or freethinker. He began to feel that the realm of experience of the propagandist rationalist was too confined, too partial. In Voltaire's phrasing there was implicit a wider experience, a profound apprehension of total life. And it was with this experience of total life that literature was forever dealing in all places, at all times.

Let the philosophers and political theorists build up their opposing systems, let science add to the pool of common knowledge its marvellous discoveries, but somewhere somehow the individual has to stand on his own two feet and reckon with it all.

And the proof of this? That here he was a simple individual, a unit of the crofting folk, nameless to the world, wandering across this deserted moor now and trying to bring to a focus in himself, if not the meaning of the whole, at least some coherent apprehension of the whole.

Does not a time come to every man when he walks and thinks, in however different a degree, as I do now, I, the solitary individual?

So literature would seem to prove out of an immense body of evidence that traversed all systems and all times.

Perhaps amid the intellectual and spiritual efforts of man, literature in its detachment from any specific field of effort, as an observer in all fields, had the job of synthesising for and in the individual all the theses and anti-theses, and bringing the result with some coherence to walk on its own two feet amid the tall grasses! The ultimate of what is felt and thought and experienced by all, expressed in terms of
life. The living essence of the communal whole. The living individual.

Yes, it was going to take a good few trips, many days and nights, to look into these matters and apply them to some reasonable understanding of the pattern he himself had woven in his days on this old earth and of those, close to his spirit, whom the pattern had touched.

The prospect pleased him, and he set his eyes upon the moor in greeting.

A snipe got up from a marshy hollow in front and he stood watching its irregular flight until it was lost in the far air. Casting his eyes towards the green hillock on the right, he saw a white spot and thought– Ah, a mushroom! No-one in this country ate mushrooms except himself. A mushroom was a snow-white legend in the grass. But when he reached the spot he found it was a sheep's skull. He smiled and examined it curiously, noting, as man instinctively does, the perfect teeth.

As he straightened himself, three peewits took the air from beyond the hillock, but only one cried, and its cry had lost the sibilant urgency of the spring. This was one of his favourite birds and his mind had developed a curious almost esoteric intimacy with its life-cycle and its anxious impatient moods. He often spoke a few words to it. In the spring and early summer: ‘It's all right – all right – you needn't worry!' Now: ‘You're not worrying much, are you?' and he observed how they tumbled away from him, in a grace almost sad with distance and fulfilment.

His eyes lit on a small object in front of his feet, black spots on brown, like a tiny circle of tapestry. The tapestry divided into powder-blue wings with a white edging, and the butterfly got up and flew off, with a flitting elegance that neither the snipe nor the peewit had quite achieved.

The roses red and white, the golden broom, the red and the white clover, tall wild flowers of the grassy ditches, gave way now to the dead heather of the moor. But there! the bell heather was in bloom, a deep red glory, an old red with blue in it. That invisible shimmer of blue in the
shadow, how lovely and elusive! Why should it make him think of blood?

Bog asphodel! One has to know flowers, year by year, before they evoke the friendly silent cry. And now, almost under his feet, the trailing deer's grass has set up its yellow-green spikes. Everything that crawls will some time lift its spiring thought to the sun! No, not thought, but desire … The butterwort, still in bloom, but the leaves now growing yellow and curling up in their old age. They had had a pretty good season … Petty whin – but beyond, yes, wild thyme, a whole purple cushion of it.

He squatted by the cushion, pinched a corner with his fingers, and sniffed his fingers. Aromatic, rich. It penetrated through the congested ways of the head, it did the heart good, this living cleansing scent. Let the heart be lifted up: it is gratitude's deepest acknowledgment.

Lord, how would he ever be able to make intelligible his entrance into the kingdom of the earth!

A wild bee came along in a buzzing hurry. A very busy fellow. A little drunk by the look of him and by the way he side-slipped, but holding to his ravaging purpose amid the blossom, with interludes of silence and of song. The Philosopher watched him until all of a sudden he buzzed off.

The Philosopher nodded several times in agreement and in a merry wonder that held itself within the light of his eyes.

The Philosopher was no methodical naturalist; indeed he felt himself like nothing very much at all. And in this nothing much there was a freedom, an acceptance, a participation, a part of everything-in-itself, that had a humour subtly produced as honey. Once he had fancied he had seen a grey boulder hold its sides in this cosmic mirth. But the boulder had outstared him and put him back in his place. It's no good fancying things and making merry with a boulder. It's been longer on the game than you have and your little fantasies are a silly intrusion.

Fantasy-making was no more than the flitting of errant butterfly-wings round the whin-root of being. But it could be amusing – and had … perhaps …
something
in it!

Amid the after thoughts to such pleasant thoughts he came over the last ridge and saw the stream, the small river winding from the mountains and hiding parts of itself in little gullies. With the sun at his back, he admired the lower reach as a lovely blue, full of light, that for no particular reason always made him think of the belly of an eel or a serpent. He had known he would find this colour, and lo! he had found it.

The river – the names of rivers – rivers of commerce – the rivers of great continents – the veins of the earth. The river the Greeks called Lethe, and the Gaels called the Black River of Death. Blue, a living blue, blue as heaven.

You cannot leave your money to a river, nor your business, not anything but your thoughts and your affection, unless you left it yourself!

He just loved this stream, and that was all.

Love. Well, there was love. Just as there was suffering. Suffering by itself brutalised. But suffering transformed by love – than that man knows nothing more profound. Just nothing. It was the ultimate experience, the ultimate cleansing … short of death, that enigma.

He had been thinking so much about Janet … and then about his mother … The river passed from his conscious sight for a little while. Through the dead heather he went until he came on the last verge and looked down into the water, which was quite clear though it appeared, as always, faintly brown.

The off bank was low and flat, with tall purple thistles holding about their roots the dead grey grasses of the last spate. Golden flecks of the tormentil … a cluster of trefoil. And the water; the running water – down from the mountains, over the moor, in many a swirl of adventure, and away to the distant sea.

Often the simplest object would set up a train of thought that would reach astonishing heights or depths, or, rather, would confer upon him moments of illumination that stilled his humble being in a beatified wonder.

Where had he been reading about water? Two volumes of hydrogen gas and one volume of oxygen gas invariably come together to form water. That was it. Why? And the
only answer the chemist knows is that the oxygen atom has an ‘affinity' for the two hydrogen atoms. Of the nature of this ‘affinity' – the chemist's own word – the chemist has no notion, and the physicist cannot help him out.