The Serpent (4 page)

One other aspect of the Glasgow period affected him permanently before he returned home.

For while he was adventuring in these vast hinter-lands of Dougal's books, where first the world was created, then life in its simple cells, then the slow evolution of fishes, reptiles, beasts, of man himself, of man learning to settle down in agricultural communities, with the dawning need to explain his importance to himself (whence religions, priesthoods, gods and devils), during all these surprising journeys, he was aware of a constant patter of socialism in the working world around him. ‘Why the hell should
he
have all that?' Why, indeed! ‘Did
he
create the land – or did God?' ‘Well,
he
didn't anyway,' agreed Tom. And so the hectic argument would begin.

Does youth always indulge in these orgies of talk and argument – or do they represent evolutionary phases in society? Bob's headmaster down in Galloway had been daft, for example, on poetry. The Victorian era in its full still flower. A backwater that had not yet been touched by the new ferment.

Then one night Dougal asked Tom to come with him to a meeting.

Just as the talk in the closet bedroom had been for Tom of the nature of revelation, affecting his whole life from that hour, so did his attendance at this meeting provide a mental experience again of the nature of revelation. There is man, there is society, and the two make a rounded whole.

Right away, at the meeting, Tom had a feeling in the faces about him of restraint and power. At a gathering on the Glasgow Green one waited hopefully for the interruptions,
the inevitable drunks, the banded opponents, the shouting, the police, the general fun. Often the stuff was good, and the talk fluent and whole-heartedly provocative. Often, too, the speaker was witty and scored over a heckler in a way that made the audience roar its delight. First-class entertainment that cost nothing.

Here in the rather dingy hall everything was formal. The cheap deal table, the chairman behind it, the speaker of the evening by his side fingering his manuscript. Men of all ages present, including youths no older than Tom himself. No women. Unobtrusively Dougal, amid the general hum of talk, indicated to Tom two or three well-known figures in the political world of Labour. Tom felt anything but laughter in him then; more like a feeling of being at some dark-figured conventicle. The smiling or earnest faces showed up ghastly and glittering in the naked gas light. Faces and eyes. They had an assurance, a concentration of purpose, that made him feel shy, almost afraid, of them. He could hardly take his eyes off Keir Hardie.

In the country they would have called the speaker's face brosy. But while he was still straightening out his manuscript he began: ‘Our chairman mentioned socialism as the goal towards which we all strive. Robert Owen, who died some thirty years ago, was the first to use the word socialism, certainly the first to put it in the tide of a book, the book called
What is Socialism
? published in 1841. Thus if he is not the father of the idea he is at least the father of the word. The idea was in the beginning, but the word was with Robert Owen.'

Over all the faces in that ghastly light a creased smile ran. The speaker maintained a grave stare, inflated his cheeks, pursed his lips, and glanced swiftly from side to side. In a moment Tom felt his intellectual power, his searching gift of humour.

‘When what he made broke in his hands, he was not defeated. Our common human nature might fail him, did fail him, but it could not even turn him sour, much less defeat him. Nothing could defeat him except death, and it took death eighty-seven long years to accomplish its
somewhat enigmatic purpose. Whatever some of us may think of certain of his ideas now, we can – and perhaps it is our small victory over death – salute in Robert Owen the undying pioneer …

‘Of Welsh artisan stock, he began life as an apprentice in a cotton mill. Then he borrowed a hundred pounds and set up as a master spinner. He went ahead swiftly and by the age of thirty was a director and co-proprietor of the New Lanark Mills, getting a name for himself by his introduction of technical improvements, model workshops, model dwellings for the workers. Indeed his experiments there served as a model for the factory legislation of the next half century. He tried to interest his fellow employers, and when they failed him, he turned to foreign Governments, and when they all failed him – he went ahead on his own. He reduced his workers' working day from seventeen hours to ten. He abolished the curse and tyranny of workshop fines. He refused to employ any child under ten years of age, and supplied them with free education in schools specially built for the purpose …'

Tom became aware of an intermingling of strong clear minds. And when the speaker chanced to complete a sentence with the words: ‘for the survival of the fittest may evolve from an unconscious to a conscious purpose, just as man has evolved to the self-consciousness that distinguishes him from the animal,' Tom's own mind had a sudden influx of light.

So keen, indeed, became his mind that when the speaker entered upon the discussion of Association, which had ‘naturally developed' into Co-operation as we now knew it, Tom sensed in the audience a subtle awakening of the critical spirit. Co-operation, for the speaker, was the solution that not only by its nature and, therefore, organisation excluded profit, but was also the solution that made allowance for those irrational human factors which theorists of the reading-room were inclined to overlook when perfecting their mathematical or scientific systems. For let us consider for a moment the nature of this thing called property. What is property?

And from the audience a voice: ‘Property is theft.'

Gravely but swiftly flashed the speaker's response: ‘Prudhon
also
said: “Communism is the religion of misery”.'

There was a burst of laughter and though the interrupter cried that he meant private property, the ‘abolition of private property', the audience was not going to be done out of its pleasure over the swift thrust, and the chairman called ‘Order! Order!'

Two known personalities, two variations of political faith, had evidently touched in a revealing flash, but the real nature of this flash, that amused the audience as if they were school children, was lost on Tom and he knew it.

Then in another moment Tom felt the faces and eyes of the whole hall flash on himself, while a laugh went up that he failed utterly to understand. The speaker had touched on ‘what is called progress, the progress of the machine age, of capital, of world-wide expansion. When we come down to human essentials, what does this progress amount to?'

‘Progress and poverty,' responded Dougal in his clear quiet voice.

Later Tom was to understand Dougal's leaning towards Henry George and his system of the single tax, the land tax, as formulated in his book called
Progress and Poverty
. He was even to understand how the fierce land speculation in America had affected Henry George and how a chord of sympathy had been struck in Dougal whose grandfather had been burned out of his home in Tiree; but at that moment, he was aware only of the faces, the white laughing faces, turned towards him where he sat uncomfortably by Dougal's side.

Question time was a very lively period, and when at last the meeting was over Tom rose stiffly and felt lost in the mingling crowd. He saw the man who had cried ‘Property is theft' go up to the speaker and say, ‘Ye fairly got me on the hop that time, Duncan!' ‘It's not often ye give me the chance,' replied Duncan, and they chuckled together. Then Dougal got hold of Tom and introduced him to two or three young men. One was an Irish lad, Tim Mahoney, with a dark sleepy face in which satire stirred like an habitual element. Something in this face attracted him but at the same time made him wary and shy. Another, Dave Black,
was Glasgow-born, with an oval face and eyes set so far apart that his expression seemed extremely wide awake and bright and full of energy. Two or three more came up to chuckle over special ‘points' in the meeting.

Six weeks thereafter Tom shifted his lodgings and went in with two artisan apprentices.

It had not been easy to do, because for Dannie he had a natural liking – they had both something of the same light-hearted gamin quality in them – and for Bob … what was it in Bob that drew him? After the disrupted-Tennyson episode, he forbore from saying anything provocative. But now it was Bob, shutting himself away behind a scoffing voice, who could not leave him alone.

But their working hours no longer coincided. More and more Bob and Dannie went off on ploys of their own at night, and Tom had meetings to go to, books to read, and was often fast asleep by the time they returned.

Two sets of lodgings, that represented two ways of life, almost two different worlds.

Toil and sleep still took up some twenty hours out of the twenty-four. There was no change in the streets, in the hurrying streams of folk, the night lamps, girls loitering about the mouths of closes. The city was one and the same city.

The division was inside himself, and this was brought home to him one night in a way all the more profound for being completely undramatic. Perhaps it was, after all, one of the most revealing experiences he had in Glasgow.

His conscience had been troubling him about paying a visit to Bob and Dannie. Several times in the last two months he had set an evening apart for this purpose, but always some of the new lads had interfered to divert his attention. But at last he got to his first lodging, climbed the stairs, gave the secret knock, his heart beating with the feeling of surprise, some of the old boisterous pleasure, waiting for Bob's face or Dannie's to look astonished and shout. The door opened slowly and the landlady, thinner and older than ever, looked up from her stoop. He greeted her heartily. She peered at him. ‘Oh, it's you,' she said.

‘Yes. Are the boys in?'

‘I think so.' She did not seem certain and a cheerful inquiry after her health died on his lips. ‘Are you in?' she called in her screechy voice. There was sudden movement and the door was pulled open by Dannie.

‘If it isna' Tom himsel'! Wonders'll never stop!' cried that lad in a welcoming bantering voice.

Bob got off the big bed. ‘So you've found your way back,' he cried, ‘at last?'

‘Find my way is it?' cried Tom. ‘The miracle is finding you in. Do you think I have shoe leather for nothing else?'

When the banter had gone on for a little time, and Tom at last admitted that he had not called and began to explain why, something settled down upon the room that was quite indescribable but that could be felt. They all honestly tried to defeat this, and Bob was full of large gesture, but somehow it was a gesture that supported his way of life, that now was like a boastful defence of it. Not consciously meant to be that, perhaps, but something of that in it. It was somehow their old life against his new one, and though Bob could not know anything about this new life, yet it was as if he divined it and had to counter it instinctively.

Tom played up, asked after old acquaintances, probed new ploys, laughed with his old friends. He got Bob talking. Bob suddenly stopped talking and began to probe Tom with questions. Tom did his best, frankly telling of his new companions, the kind of lads they were, chuckled over their keen interest in socialism. ‘I thought I knew something about it – but, lord, I soon found out I knew nothing – not a thing. It was an eye-opener to me!'

‘Swotting it up?' asked Bob, the laughing gleam held assessingly in his eyes.

‘A bit,' nodded Tom. ‘But it's in the arguments that go on that you learn most – or learn how much you don't know!' He shook his head as he smiled. ‘Very funny sometimes.'

‘I've heard them at it,' said Dannie. ‘A lot of it, if ye ask me, is just fudge and bloody show-off.' He said this with an abrupt good nature. ‘I ken some o' them. They dinna use the word socialism much, it's economics. Political economics!'

Bob shouted his laughter. Tom joined in. You could never be offended with Dannie, and as he opened out on a couple of ‘economic bastards' he knew, he nearly cleared the air.

But here was Bob helpfully suggesting, ‘Your atheism would be of some use to you? They'll all be atheists, of course?'

‘Not all, but mostly, I should say.'

It was no use. He could not get back to them, and when at last he was able decently to go, he did so with a sense of relief.

Once outside, however, he was overcome by a feeling of sadness, of regret, of real sorrow. The streets seemed darker than he had known them, more canyon-like, hidden more deeply from the sky.

Bob and Dannie were in a world left far behind. Their jokes were no longer real jokes, their ploys held no moving interest, their ways of life, their thoughts, everything about them, belonged to that distant world. It was a world complete in itself, an old-fashioned world. Airy fairy Lilian had an uncomfortable simplicity. She was terrible, guilelessly terrible, with little mannerisms. A wax doll, fixed in eternal hand-clapping, pretty. Prostitutes moving through their dark streets in an old-fashioned myth. Old-fashioned, distant, gone from him, that world.

As he walked along the quiet streets, he was overcome by a feeling of loss and sorrow. It's a pity, he said to himself. I'm sorry about it.

Why was he sorry? What was the something, particularly in Bob, that he was losing and that he was regretting?

For Bob knew, too. Bob was privy to this uncomfortable severing. The incommunicable was known to him; the gulf between the two worlds.

Like a countryman gone back home to the companions and scenes of his youth, to find he can no longer stay there, the bands of ancient custom irking him in a place gone small and grey.

Like one converted to a new religion who sees no more his friends as they have been, nor the streets, nor the habitual things that men do, nor all the ways of life.