The Serpent Read online

  As his heart-beats subsided, he felt airy within himself, withdrawn from the community he could see like a cork from a dark bottle.

  And he could see a fair swatch of it. The village was little more than a straggling line of houses, at the near or western end of which stood the bright petrol pump. It lay in a broad valley basin, with hill lines against the horizon. Beyond it stood the solid grey gable-end of the church, with the hollow bell steeple about the size of a natural chimney. It shut out the manse from him though he could see an upper corner of the wall of the manse garden. Beyond that he caught a glimpse of the road which came from the country town of Muirton, seven miles to the east.

  By church and village and petrol pump the road came, and continued up the wide fertile Glen (now shut off from the Philosopher by the shoulder of the hill he was climbing), topped ridges, wound by pine plantations and lochs, crossed an ultimate watershed, and then descended by birch tree and bracken and tumbling falls, to the western sea.

  Here, towards the eastern seaboard, the fertile low ground of the glens had been cleaned of the folk and turned into great arable farms. Except for those left in the village, the folk had been swept up to the moors, to the Heights. Thus the farm which the Philosopher could still see before the hill-shoulder cut it off was called Taruv, and the croft houses far above it, the Heights of Taruv.

  For a generation or two the folk who went to the Heights had retained a material relationship with the farms below. At harvest time they had descended to reap and to stook, at first with the one-handed hook or sickle at which the women were expert, and, later, with the two-handed scythe, the man’s weapon, behind which the women had gathered and bound the sheaves. Great numbers of men and women were needed to harvest the large farms, and the Heights, while retaining the old life of the folk, were also a reservoir of labour for the new dispensation, a human dam whose sluice could be lifted.

  Changes often appeared to be violent, and indeed were so frequently enough, but it was remarkable how, little by little, change was accepted in the lifetime of a man so fully, so fatally, that bitterness itself was forgotten. Children of the dispossessed, grown into men and women, reap, and sing as they reap, on the lands taken from their fathers. Many a story the Philosopher had heard of ‘the great times there would be in it’ at the harvest-homes of the big farms. The eyes of bearded men from the Heights would glisten with memories that were pagan if not unholy.

  Even in his own lifetime, consider the changes that had taken place in such a thing as a nickname. Tom the Atheist, he had been called; then Tom the Serpent; and finally, as the new young grew up and merely saw a quiet inoffensive little man, pottering about or sitting in the sun reading a book, the Philosopher. There was something derisive in the title, of course; the subtle off-taking derision that country folk like.

  But the village had remained down below, in that wide basin of broken ground, perhaps because here were gathered together certain indispensable trades and craftsmen, the blacksmith, the joiner, the merchant, the schoolmaster, the postmaster, and, by inevitable complement, the widowed woman, the old maid, the young girl who went out to service, the young man who learned a trade or went gillieing or, from carrying a small bursary to the secondary school in town, flowered miraculously into a university student.

  Yet it still was attached to the soil, a crofting hamlet, and as he looked the Philosopher saw figures singling their turnips in between the green cornfields on the narrow cultivated lands behind the houses. With their slightly bent heads they moved so slowly that it was easy to get the illusion of an inner meaning or design that never changed. And this somehow at the moment comforted the Philosopher.

  The car roared and swung away. Some lads on bicycles. And here was the Fraser Arms bus from Muirton: a picnic going up the Glen. As it passed, Henry gave the driver a wave. A noisy cheer from the passengers rose above the whine of the mechanism. And there was another car swinging in – Doctor Manson, a tough old pagan if ever there was one.

  He had been called in for his mother’s death – how many years ago? The Philosopher tried to calculate, but got lost. Sometimes it seemed to him that there had been whole stretches in his life, as long as ten years at a time, when nothing had happened.

  Yet whenever the image of his mother came to mind, at once life moved on its feet, working and suffering. And immediately other pictures were begot – of his father, the fields, the croft work, school days, sunny stretches of the countryside. A small stout dark woman, forever busy. He remembered little scraps of letters he had got from her when he was in Glasgow. She knew she could not write or spell very well and his father formally answered all letters, but these scraps, painfully and probably secretly written, had a curious suppressed warmth, though they attended entirely to physical needs. The ordinary phrase ‘see and be eating plenty’ could make him laugh and feel awkward, and even, if he thought about it, slightly hot. It was almost as if she had come into the room and spoken to him with others there.

  And that would have been awkward! Never any real idea had she had of the life he had moved amongst in Glasgow in the two crucial years between nineteen and twenty-one.

  And it was as well! Bowed her head would have been then, and her back, like the women who turned away from Calvary as the darkness came upon the world. What agony there must have been at that scene, what incredible affright!

  He was the only son. A second child had died at birth, following an accident with a washing tub, and conception had ceased in her after that. When a neighbour came with sad news, her eyebrows would go up, making arched creases immediately above, so that her eyes, now round and wide open and dark, seemed smaller than ever, while she sat with resigned palms on her broad knees. In a curious haunting sense, she was like an animal. She had never told him a story when he was a child, and if she did refer to bogles when he was obstreperous at bedtime, it was never more than a reference, as if he knew the creatures only too well himself. What a fearsome reality this often gave to them!

  When society could produce beings like his mother, it could from that moment dispense with all force and coercion. He had realised as much more than once, and always in a moment of illumination. Was she in this respect in her simple way the embodiment of a once perfected mode of society?

  Not at all so unusual a question as it might seem – in those days in Glasgow, away back in the late ’eighties or early ’nineties, when questions about society and socialism had an eagerness, almost a bloom, upon them which they have since lost, however a practical earnestness may have increased.

  Huxley. Darwin. Robert Owen. Haeckel. Oh, the excitement in those days! Impossible for this late age ever to recapture that first fearful delight, that awful thrill, of Scepticism. The horizon lifted, the world extended itself like a Chinese lantern and glowed with strange beasts and designs.

  He had taken to the Glasgow life, the life of the streets, almost at once and with a real avidity. For a boy out of the Highland country, this may have been unusual, but then he had always had a zest for life, and particularly the outsider’s zest. He was not in himself a ‘character’ so much as a ‘watcher’ – something more than a spectator, ready if need be to mix in, and shout, and retreat, doubled up with laughter. Something of the gamin in him from the beginning, beyond doubt.

  If his mother’s mind had had to express evil in its two highest forms it would naturally have avoided definition and sought for images, and if Antichrist and the Scarlet Woman had been whispered to help her out, she would have gone silent in utter acknowledgment or, at the most, said ‘Yeth’ on a slow intake of breath, solemn and sad, as though these two eternal figures, caparisoned in the scarlet and black of night and of nightmare, could hardly be on this earth.

  Antichrist and the Scarlet Woman.

  The little shop, before it sprouted a red petrol pump, had warred disastrously enough with the grey church.

  In and around such war had come love, that red terrifying urge, and tragedy, that bitter defeat, and murder
that had sat in his head through days and nights with so awful a clarity.

  Antichrist …

  Coming into close contact with Dougal Robertson had been so simple. A customer, a stout noisy woman, had returned to the Glasgow shop, an ironmonger’s, with a cheap clock she had bought the previous day, declaring the thing had stopped and would not go again. She had done nothing to it, she declared, and wanted a new one or her money back. The owner of the shop appeared and talked with the woman. Tom was called. He had sold her the clock? Yes. And it was all right then? It was, said Tom. While the woman repudiated his assertion angrily, Tom lifted the clock, shook it gently, and listened.

  A faulty clock might be replaced, free of cost, by the makers, but not one damaged by accident. The owner was trying to explain something of this to his customer, whom he clearly did not trust, when Tom said, ‘I don’t think there’s much wrong with it.’ Quickly he left them and came back with pliers, tweezers, and a screwdriver.

  His master, about to stop him, hesitated. The woman said loudly she did not want any mended clock; she wanted a new one or her money back. ‘Just a minute, ma’m,’ said Tom politely, ‘and we’ll see what’s the matter.’

  He knew he was taking little risk, because he had always been good with his hands, and never cared much for monotonous croft work. Indeed it was because of his intelligent fingers that his father’s sister, who had married a widowed shopkeeper in Stirling, had got him this ‘beginning’ in a city business.

  Tom pulled the brass works clear of the wooden frame. Then he drew his master’s attention to the pallet which had got jammed against the escape wheel. ‘When I sold the clock it was going. It could not have been going if it was like that. Someone must have given the clock a dunt.’ Thus he justified both himself and his master.

  While the woman denied the allegation vociferously, his master watched Tom ease the pallet with a slow delicate pressure. As he removed his hand there was a whir of racing wheels. Soon he had the works screwed into the wooden frame, the little pendulum attached, and the clock ticking away normally.

  ‘Well, if it was Lizzie did it and told me a lie, I’ll tak’ the skin off her, the limmer!’ said the woman, her face blown red and apparently angrier than ever. Tom tied up the pendulum.

  After watching her stalk away with the clock under her arm, his master, a dry humour in his face, turned to his young assistant. ‘Where did you learn about clocks?’

  ‘I used to do little jobs like that for folk at home,’ replied Tom as indifferently as he could, but now feeling embarrassed.

  ‘Did you?’ There was a pause. ‘They are short-handed in the workshop. Dougal’s assistant is in the infirmary, his head broken – they say with a bottle. Would you care to give him a hand for a day or two?’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ answered Tom, with every appearance of calm.

  ‘Follow me,’ said his master.

  Some of the happiest days of his youth were spent in that repair shop. It was not a very big place and had the appearance of being extraordinarily overcrowded with tools in racks, laden shelves, a wall-face of small chocolate-coloured wooden drawers with wire and whatnot hanging even from their knobs, a smith’s fire, two anvils, a turning lathe, heaps of metal and junk, weird assortments of household articles, an uneven clay floor, long wooden benches with vices of varying size, adzes, planes, chisels, and an outlet to a backyard stale with the smell of horse dung.

  What a thrill – the first time he lit and pumped and handled the new-fashioned blowlamp!

  Good days! Dougal, his boss, had slowly thawed. Not that he had been anything less than just from the beginning, but clearly a young counterjumper as a temporary mechanic had been a bit too much at first for an irony that could take filings off such a situation with the metallic precision of the turning lathe.

  One day, nearly a fortnight later, the master came back. There had been an earlier interview between the master and Dougal, though Tom did not know that then. They had both, with a sense of fairness, decided to leave it to the lad himself.

  ‘Well, you’ll be longing to get back to your old job?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ answered Tom, in a quiet enough voice, but hardly knowing where to look.

  His north-country expressions often made fellows laugh. His master smiled now and asked, ‘Do you mean you would like to stay on here and learn to be a mechanic?’

  Tom’s eyes lifted to a bench, to his master’s face, and suddenly and quite clearly, he said, ‘I would.’

  The master looked at him in a concentrated considering way and then asked, as though it was not what was really in his mind, ‘What will your uncle say?’

  Tom looked away. ‘I think it would be all the same to him,’ he answered reasonably.

  ‘Think over it for a day, and then come and tell me.’

  A little later Tom said to Dougal, who was busily silent, ‘I’d like to stay if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘Suit yourself, my boy. If you’d care to stay, I’d like to have you.’

  Tom felt a swelling in his breast. The following night Dougal asked him out, and so it began.

  Dougal was over forty, tall, with a slight stoop, dark, and spare. His forearm was hard as a board, his fingers persuasive but unyielding. He was a first-class craftsman and conscientious in so austere a way that it struck Tom at first as being almost religious. Perhaps of all he heard and saw in Glasgow, this alone he thoroughly understood and brought back with him, this (as it became) need of his nature to finish a job well. Outside human relations, it was surely the finest thing life had had to offer. The fingers loved it, and in the doing the mind was at peace.

  There was pride in it, no doubt; even the religion of the individual, for it was the circle that Dougal put about himself against creeds and the existing economic system in which he did not believe. It took Tom a fair time to comprehend this fully.

  Dougal had three of a family and a wife buxom and quick on her feet, good-looking with untidy dark hair, rather erratic and noisy, perhaps because she could never quite understand her husband. She had the quick warmth and intelligence of the Glasgow working woman, and once Tom caught her eyes in a swift sidelong look at Dougal as he crossed the kitchen. It was so secret and naked a glance, as if she would divine the ultimate propulsive mood in him at the moment, that Tom, feeling he was prying, removed his eyes.

  So this was his new mate! She took in Tom in a bright look, laughed her welcome in a laugh that her quick tongue mixed up with bottles. She had the whole story of his predecessor and the latest information of how he was getting on. Dougal remained silent and she went into detail in an expansive admonitory way. Tom laughed and said that he was afraid he never touched bottles – at least not so far. He suddenly liked her, and liked, too, that something he could not define in her attitude to her husband. There may have been a woman’s fear in it, a woman’s uncertainty, but it sprang from something much deeper.

  A girl of ten, with big dark eyes and black lashes, regarded Tom with a long solemn stare. A boy of six and another of three.

  With the two little boys bedded at last, the woman bustled about, wrapped her head in a dark shawl, and said, ‘I ken fine ye’ll be glad to see ma back!’ She turned with a simple direct look at her husband. ‘I’m off ower to see Bella Power. I winna be long.’ Then her eyes swept Tom with a smile. ‘I’ll be seein’ ye.’ His hand began to go up in a country wave.

  So it was talk then, quietly at first, about topics of the day, Keir Hardie, Trade Unionism, the political gossip of the yards and shops. Tom realised very quickly that he knew little or nothing about what was going on in this world.

  Not that Dougal appeared to notice. He went from one topic to another casually, with the quiet ease that might not mean much. Presently Tom was describing his home country and Dougal asking a question now and then to keep him going. But no, Tom did not know how it came about that there were big farms in the valleys and crofts up on the moor. Yes, he had heard about the evi
ctions, but he couldn’t say exactly … they could hardly apply … he wasn’t sure. With mounting discomfort he realised his complete ignorance of what had happened round his own doorstep at home.

  Dark-eyed Jeanie came nearer and at last stood between her father’s knees, facing Tom. When he looked at her and smiled, she held his eyes in a solemn stare before glancing down at her father’s knee and picking it slowly.

  Dougal told him of Tiree and of how his paternal grandfather had been carried out from the ancestral home, set on fire by the factor’s men, and placed under an upturned boat where he died. He spoke not with anger but with a curious detachment, a remote wistfulness almost, that brought to Tom a silence in which he felt his neck grow stiff.

  For Dougal did not blame anyone. Given on the material side the economic constitution of the clan, with the chief as its master, and on the spiritual side the constitution of the church, with the minister as its master, given these two idols of the tribe, the rest followed.

  ‘You never heard the phrase “Idols of the Tribe”? It’s from Huxley. Come and I’ll show you a few books I have.’ He put Jeanie from between his knees, half lifting her gently, and led Tom into a small room off the kitchen, little more than a closet, nearly filled by a bed. Here on a shelf screwed into the wall were about a score of books and a bunch of pamphlets.

  Dougal pulled out a volume and as he turned its pages Tom glanced at titles and names. Apart from the Origin of Species, all were strange to him. Dougal began reading.

  Tom was later to come across the expression ‘Idols of the Tribe’ in works as far back as the Novum Organum of Francis Bacon, who divided the classes of Idols into four. In the mass they represented the observances, superstitions and customs ‘at the mercy of which’ man is brought up; but now when Tom heard Dougal’s voice advising the seeker after truth to beware of the Idols of the Tribe, they took on in his mind a curious darkness and power, as if ancient taboos were embodying themselves in menacing idol shape behind his inward eyes. He tried to shake this feeling from him as Dougal closed the book and put it back in its place. But he found it difficult to speak, smiled awkwardly, said he had not seen books like that before, had heard of Darwin, but – but –