The Serpent Page 3

  ‘But what?’

  ‘That we all come from monkeys,’ said Tom.

  Dougal’s eyes lit up. ‘And Darwin the Devil himself?’

  ‘Complete with tail,’ said Tom. ‘Once from the pulpit the minister thundered at him.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Dougal, looking at Tom now with close but smiling interest. His shadowed eyes glowed. ‘And what did the folk think?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘No-one believed we came from monkeys. Some thought it a good joke. But even then, you had to go canny with the joke.’

  ‘Something sinful about it – like blasphemy?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Tom, nodding.

  ‘They have the supernatural world behind them as well. It gives them tremendous power,’ said Dougal thoughtfully. ‘Have you ever thought of that – the power it gives them? And it’s cunning, too. You see, they have the earthly power. And when that power is questioned, they refer back to the supernatural power. The minister gets his power not from himself but from God. He remains the master of your thought – as the servant of God. Render unto the Chief the things that are the Chief’s, and unto me the things that are God’s. So we’re back at the idols of the tribe, only now we’re on the supernatural plane, a plane of superstitious belief, not reality, a place created by the first witch-doctors. In this supernatural world of the tribe, the Devil is one idol. God is the other.’

  So clearly Dougal said these last words, with such quiet precision, that Tom’s mind, completely emptied of thought, acquired an extraordinary awareness. Had God and the Devil come into the room his mind could hardly have been made more sensitive. It was something more personal than a vague rebellion by life, as he had known it, against blasphemy. It was as if Dougal were giving himself away, exposing himself personally. There was an intimacy somewhere that was too much, like a dark path opening up into Dougal’s breast.

  Yet at the same time there was a gleam, a gleam reflected off darkness, a frightening yet attractive gleam. It was beyond him – he wasn’t touching it – like evil. Jeanie was standing by her father, looking up at him, her eyes dark as night.

  When Dougal’s wife returned some two hours later it was quite dark and they were still in the closet. Whether Jeanie had heard her come up the outside stairs, Tom did not know. Once or twice the child had left them, and come back again, and once she had asked her father if they wanted a light. But he was talking at the time, and beyond putting out a blind hand and stroking her head he did not answer. Now just as the outside door swung inward Jeanie appeared before them with a candle lighting up her fragile face.

  ‘What a house of darkness!’ called the woman, in a controlled voice, lest she waken the sleeping children.

  That was the beginning of the awakening of his mind. The books he borrowed from Dougal were brighter and more exciting than any chance toy or ‘bonnie thing’ he had ever got as a child. Their arguments were so clear, so obviously incontrovertible, that they had about them the quality of laughter. Often indeed he did laugh, laugh outright, and tilt up a face in which the eyes danced with merriment, keen in their cunning delight as they waited for Bob’s counter.

  Bob Barbour was a strange mixture, difficult to explain, though he felt he understood him to the bone. Bob and Dannie were his fellow lodgers in that first high tenement. Dannie was an apprentice in his own shop, but Bob worked in a large grocer’s emporium, was a year older than both, bigger in bone and flesh, with thick brown hair, and followed his good nature into all sorts of swaggering exploits. Dannie was a dark Glasgow orphan, but Bob came from the Galloway country where his father had a village store. When Bob was bent on adventure, Dannie led. By the time Tom joined them Dannie was already in the habit of handling Bob’s wages to the extent of ensuring that the landlady would be paid.

  Earnings! Five bob a week for bed, breakfast, and supper. On the remaining half-crown they lunched throughout the week and comported themselves as young men of the world. When Bob got money from home he spent it royally.

  What an entanglement and variety of life, what a breaking through of taboos, had there been in that early period in Glasgow!

  Even the long shop hours – he had no grudge against them. They were there, like the streets and the purchasers. And that being so he accepted them and gave himself up to learn what he had to learn. Willingly he did his best to please. There was curiously little feeling or desire in him to learn his job in order to get on in the world. And actually he found very little of this desire in most other young men. They lived for the day, with its problems and stories and reprimands and rows, with its little conclaves and whisperings, its suppressed titters and swift scatterings.

  Bob must have been brought up fairly strictly. Anyway, he could not get enough of street adventures, of seeing fights and women and bloody mix-ups. And through it all he sailed, not only untouched but with a deepening of his natural aptitude for romantic poetry. There was a laughing rush of life in him, and it almost seemed as if Tennyson had no more than prepared him for the appreciation of the full drama of a Saturday night in what he regarded as the more juicy parts of the slums.

  The slums and Galloway moss-hags and the graves of the martyrs. Whaup-wings through the night of the ancestral mind. Anything for Bob was human and moving and full of laughter, anything – except this freethought which Tom brought back with him from Dougal Robertson and so assiduously hunted out of his books.

  Bob struggled manfully, outrageously, blasphemously, but, like one caught in a maddening thicket, he could not clear himself because the arguments of the books were so lucid, with a lucidity bright and inexorable and deadly.

  And Tom watched him like a ferret, waiting for the definite statement which he could destroy with logic, this instrument of the freethinker that was more precise and exquisite in its work than any turning lathe.

  Then into their arguments crept a personal heat, a certain antagonism, that slowly but surely invaded and began to destroy their personal relations. It came to a head one Sunday morning.

  Airy, fairy Lilian,

  Flitting, fairy Lilian,

  When I ask her if she love me,

  Claps her tiny hands above me,

  Laughing all she can;

  She’ll not tell me if she loves me,

  Cruel little Lilian.

  Bob read the verse aloud, in a rich and tender bravado, then looking down his body – for he lay on his back above the bed-clothes – at Tom who was sitting on the single bed, reading the Origin of Species, demanded, ‘What do your wizened old potatoes think of that?’

  ‘Just sex,’ answered Tom.

  There was a pause. Then, ‘O Christ!’ cried Bob, ‘you make me spew.’ As he spoke he flung the poetry book at Tom. There was a wild rustling of leaves in the air, a thud against Tom’s body, and the much-handled volume fell to the floor like a shot bird, scattering poem-feathers as it fell.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Philosopher got up and saw the world around him with slow delight and his nostrils caught the delicate scent of briar. He remembered how, on coming back to it after his first long absence from home, he had thought it like the sun-bleached and newly-laundered scent of a countrywoman’s linen. Or like the fresh pinafores of little girls at school when he was a boy. That clean freshness and living purity.

  One high rose, wide open, was almost apart from the body of the bush below, as a girl’s face in rapt wonder remains memorable in itself. It was a vivid scarlet.

  Scarlet …

  There was no scarlet about that first woman of the streets. There was darkness and there was night; the stillness of quiet dark streets and his own rushing feet.

  ‘Of the streets.’ How profoundly apt!

  They had been round, two other young mechanics and himself, at Sammy Dose’s place. Sammy, in his late thirties, had a big bed-sitting-room all to himself. Some said that Dose was a contraction of his surname Douglas, and others lightheartedly suggested that Sammy had got ‘a dose’. He had a po
werful singing voice and sometimes, quite suddenly, would let it out in an opera song that lent itself to shattering the roof and putting this gimcrack world on its back for a fair distance round. The skin under his jaw would inflate and quiver like a taut dewlap as his mouth opened to its utmost capacity. As unexpectedly as he began, he stopped. Then he would thump his chest, ‘Ha, that’s better!’ and proceed to tell the lads what he thought would do the world and them a power of good. He was ribald at times to an extreme degree, but for the most part with a rough core of sense, and nearly always with an elbowing earnestness that could not be bothered with ideal and nonsensical argument. He thought the constitution of society so amazing a piece of hypocrisy, that, so help his god, it was worth enduring as a sheer piece of wonder, a fantastic circus-spectacle.

  To-night his parting oracle had been, ‘Free love, free beer, keep your mind and your bowels open, and no socialism.’ As the three lads, after leaving his place, stood at the corner of the street before parting, it was perhaps symptomatic of the state of their mind at this time that what struck them as particularly rich and ironic in the oracle, what they repeated as they laughed, were the words, ‘and no socialism’.

  As young Tom was going homeward alone, his fresh country mind was so amused by the experience of the evening – for it had the wonder of being entirely outside of him – that he quite forgot where he was, and when a woman spoke to him, he stopped, as he would have done on the Glen road at home, and said, ‘What’s that?’ instantly anxious to help.

  She was dressed in dark clothes, the long skirt of the period reaching to the pavement, and took a slow step towards him, with two words of greeting in a quiet, low, but incredibly clear voice.

  He could not answer and for a moment could not move. Then he gave a sort of stiff smile, looked away, and walked on.

  Presently, glancing over his shoulder, he saw that she was following him. When a fellow did not want to be seen walking with a whore, this was the way to set about it. He had given her the tip.

  From the increased beating of his heart, a tremulous weakening went up into his throat. His desire for escape made his feet feel so light that they might have had beating wings. But somehow he dare not run yet. He dare not. He could not run.

  He quickened his speed by lengthening his pace lightly and stealthily, but when he half-glanced over his shoulder she was still coming on. They were off the main thoroughfare and it was fairly dark, with no-one about. She was still coming, dark, upright, without any visible motion of legs, without any sound.

  Terror touched him out of that advancing figure and the lateness of the night, terror, thickened by the tremulousness in his throat, by a formless pulsing emotion that had knowledge of the body in it, and of its needs. But first he had to escape – to think.

  He turned, right, up a side street, quickening his pace at once. He gained on her, and when he came to the next opening, he entered and ran swiftly along it on his toes. It was a short lane and soon he was in a somewhat narrow street but with lamp-posts here and there. Suddenly he stopped running, caught by a swift fear on seeing a figure almost beside him, upright and black, close by the lamp-post in the central shadow of the pool of light. The face turned, a man’s face, pale, watchful, and, as it seemed to Tom, coldly inimical.

  But it was not a policeman, and the man neither moved nor spoke.

  Tom went on walking so quickly that his legs broke into a run of their own accord, and as he ran his mind told him with a fantastic humour, a wild careless humour, an urgent beating humour, that he had a shilling in his pocket, and that it was enough.

  It was as though he had escaped from the woman and also somehow from the sinister man, and now in the half-won freedom already what he had missed was rearing its serpent’s head.

  He told it to himself and to the street up which he fled, a dark street of tall silent houses, a gloomy cavern with sickly lamp moons receding under a long slice of night-sky that it is doubtful if he saw at the time, but that he could swear ever afterwards he saw, and saw more clearly as the years went by.

  For that particular impression of a city at night he never forgot. It remained as an impression secret to himself, holding in a heedless yet menacing way, in its stone walls and stark roof-ridges, in its blind face that yet could see, a terrifying immanence and power.

  Through it he fled, with the turmoil in his breast and the hot shilling in his pocket. Would he stop or would he not? Would he – would he take a chance? As he rounded the corner within a few doors of his lodging, he paused and listened, but could not hear light footsteps because of the beating blood in his ears. Then he thought he heard them, the soft footfalls of a woman’s shoes, small shoes and a woman’s feet. He retreated to the dark entry leading to his tenement stair. There he took his stand, shielded by the pitch darkness behind. If she came – that would settle it. Would it? Or – would it?

  Again he could not hear very well because of the surgings the blood made in his virgin body. Keeping his mouth open in order to hear better made it very dry, and his throat dry. When membranes met they stuck like damp gum.

  Would it be safe, would he be safe, was it safe here?

  Could he not talk to her anyway? But then – but then – if he did no more than talk, would she denounce him, denounce him in a loud voice to the street, say she had been assaulted? Had he not heard of it, over and over, as a well-known trick that she resorted to at the defeated moment? Dannie and Bob in company could bait a whore, using the most vile language to her, but then that was a game of the pack, the time and the place being chosen.

  But now – here … his body held itself so taut, listening, that it began to tremble in its own fever. Would the footsteps never come? Were they coming? All at once in a moment of acute listening, so acute that his hearing penetrated to a distance in which everything was supremely still, in which his hearing became a second sight, he realised that the footsteps were not coming, that somewhere they had turned off, that they had ceased and were now lost beyond finding in streets receding into the night.

  He stepped out on the pavement, and stood staring towards the corner in a fascination he could not break. His body emptied in a dark, defeated, spiteful way. He was restless and did not know what to do. He was dead tired, yet not tired. Then quite distinctly there were footsteps coming round the corner and at once his body stepped back into the entry. As the footsteps advanced his mouth opened and he thought of nothing. Quietly came the footsteps, but in paces too deliberate and slow, too long, for the small feet of a woman. He flattened himself against the black wall. The figure walked past and instantly, from a murderous evil in the air, he was certain beyond all doubt that it was the sinister figure he had seen under the lamp-post. In ways unknown to the instincts of beasts of prey, that man was on the prowl.

  His body went slack and he turned for the stone stairs. A pervasive, unaired, sour smell, that he had got used to and hardly noticed, now came upon him with the pungency of his first visit. He groped for the wall. It was damp with cold sweat. He coughed, clearing his throat, giving the invisible a chance to declare itself. He pushed up against impalpable presence, body or bodies, and came to the first landing, groped around it, found the inner wall and mounted again. On the third landing, he stopped, breathing heavily, and waited until his sight, which could see nothing, cleared. When he found the door unlocked, relief ran over his body in a soft ease. Noiselessly he closed the door and slid the lock home; listened to make sure the old woman had not heard. Her bed creaked and she gave her rheumy cough. Blast it! he said silently, in a taut silent laugh, his mouth open, hearkening. She had warned them more than once against stealing out and unlocking the door secretly for a late comer. He faced right and his fingers ran over wood until they found the knob. He held to the knob until he had closed the door behind him, then listened for his two companions. Heavy regular breathing proclaimed deep sleep. Lifting his right foot to step carefully, he set it down in the middle of an earthenware vessel which, tilting, plunged h
im forward heavily in a wild stagger that fetched up with a crashing sound across the rail of his bed. The single loose brass knob fell with a tinkling clatter on the floor. The deep sleep of his companions turned into convulsions of choked mirth.

  He hissed curses at them, as he gathered himself off the bed and listened. He had always been sensitive to the poor old woman’s feelings, so miserable she looked, with her thin face and bent shoulders and mittened hands that cut another slice off the loaf only when she could no longer ignore their waiting eyes. Bob could look at the loaf until she squirmed, coughed, drew the back of a mitten across her watery nose, and cut. He prided himself upon this power. Now his thick laughter told of the bolster against his mouth.

  The first thing Tom saw when he struck the match was the parcel of laundry from home. His father’s handwriting was on the brown paper, but inside, as always with the washing, would be a scrap of a note from his mother. This was her opportunity also for sending a small gift, invariably in money, if only a sixpence and two or three coppers, ostensibly to pay for the posting home of his next parcel of underclothes, but actually something secretly saved, a token from her to him, outside the father’s knowledge.

  As the candle flared up, he began opening the parcel, his back to the two scoffing figures in the double bed now asking after his night’s adventure with goodhumoured exaggerated ribaldry.

  Pinned on the breast of his shirt, as usual. He withdrew the pin and unrolled the paper. A single shilling slid onto his palm. He looked at it for a moment, then gripped it, hiding it from his own eyes and theirs.