The Serpent (12 page)

If he could not make a stand, what damned use was he?

At last there were noises. Sandy was going. Tom picked up a plane, made one sweep, and listened. Sandy's voice was loud but not too hearty. No sound of his father's voice; only his mother's. There was Sandy off. Silence now. He began working steadily, pulling the shaving away when it stuck, hissing through his teeth. After all, he had to have planks and battens ready. There was still a whole lot of work to do in that respect. And measurements. Though he could not get the exact measurements, of course, until he had sunk his main gable beams.

No-one came near him. In a little while, he heard his mother's footsteps. She passed the door, shook her head for silence, and indicated that he was to remain where he was. There was an anxiety in her face which she tried to infuse with some confidence, but her effort at pantomime was pathetic and when she had gone, a small bitter smile came to him.

He worked on in a dull timeless way.

His mother came out and hit the side of a tin basin with a spoon. Hens cackled and ran and fluttered. ‘You needn't be going away,' she called aloud to him. ‘Supper will soon be ready.' Then she came to the barn door and said in a low voice: ‘He had a bit of a turn but he's feeling better, you'll come in to your supper and say nothing.'

‘I don't think I will,' he replied, indifferently.

‘You will,' she said. ‘Don't do any more digging just now. Just wait.' Her voice was harsh with concentration. She was plainly deeply disturbed. But there was something cunning, too, in her eye, and resourceful. ‘Don't you desert me,' she added suddenly on a breath of distress. Then she listened – and withdrew.

He worked on automatically. There could be no satisfaction any longer in what he did. He wanted to drop things from his hands, push them away, and walk off. The mountains drew him, drew him powerfully. To go in and eat his supper was beyond his strength, beyond the power of his stomach to take the food. The vision was revolting. But up in the hollows, on the lonely sweep of the moor, he could wander, and lie down and be hidden, and gather that strength which could take him anywhere.

Presently he went to the door and looked out. The barn was small and stood by itself, opposite the byre but a little lower down. The house and byre had the one long roof and sloped gently downward from the main road. Just beyond the barn the ground flattened and then began slightly to slope upward for the length of the cultivated fields. Beyond the fields the green braes rose steeply.

He looked at the braes, saw where they angled into the hollow of the burn towards his right, with its bushes and its tumbling hillocks, with its sheep paths to the moor and the moor stream and the mountains that lay beyond the last visible crest.

It was a chilly evening and already there was a faint darkening in the air. The sodden ground was drying and ploughing was at hand. The world looked solid and drab. All at once he heard bird-singing. It was a sound he did not hear consciously very often, any more than he heard the lowing of cattle or the whinnying of the horse. And even now he hardly listened, as if the notes were trivial and meaningless. But suddenly something came out of the land, out of the air, some cool shiver of spring like an immemorial essence, an elusive scent, and it ran through his flesh and into his blood. It was enlivening, touched with hope and promise, and for a moment it set him whole within himself in an access of fine courage. But when he turned into the barn he was beset by a new and sad despair, and he stood staring out of the little back window, hardly hearkening for that fugitive beauty which had touched him from so far away, from so near.

When his mother's voice called, he went towards the house not nearly so much on edge as he had been before,
in a dumb mood that could bear much, and he felt relieved at this and glanced about him and heard a thrush on the bourtree bush by the cabbage plot behind the house.

His father was in bed and his mother was dishing out a stew, the stream rising about her bent figure with a strong appetising smell of onions.

‘Sit down,' she said at once; ‘it's better for you hot in this weather.'

The father said grace and they began eating. The mother got up, attended to a pot, and sat down. It was the usual sort of movement and little was spoken. But often a meal was partaken of in silence, except for a remark about the food itself.

His father tonight was more distant than ever, and now and then there was a sighing as of deep thought and a far weariness. Tom felt it like an unspoken condemnation. Never once did he look at his father's face. The presence of the father was strong in the house, so strong that had Tom not got this dumb quiet mood from somewhere, he might have been irked beyond endurance.

The father said grace after meat with an austere unction. It was a silent calling-to-witness of that which had come to pass under his roof.

Tom got up. His mother turned to him. ‘You haven't to go out tonight, have you?'

‘Yes,' answered Tom. ‘I have some things to do for Jimmy Macdonald's new house.' He spoke quietly, indifferently.

‘Well, see and be finished as soon as you can,' she said.

Tom did not answer. He hesitated for one moment. Now was the time to say that he thought of putting up a wooden place – he needn't call it a shop – at the end of the house if it was all the same to them. But somehow he could not command himself, could not control the feeling that immediately started beating up. He glanced at his father's face. That settled it. He took his cap off the peg behind the door and walked slowly out.

Bitterness assailed him sharply as he faced the gloom of the night. His father had been deliberately using his illness to dominate the house and them. In a cunning austere
way he had been play-acting. He hadn't been so bad as he silently made out. He had impressed Sandy. That stagger, as he had turned away …

Tom felt ashamed. Even he himself had been weak in the flesh then, his muscles jumpy, and he hadn't a bad heart. Too great an excitement, an over-concentrated moment of emotion, and his father would drop dead. That was certain. His father knew it.

Tom could not work in the barn and, dreading lest some of the lads appear, he left the barn and made for the hillside. The hollow where Janet and himself met he avoided on his left, climbing steadily for the moor.

Presently a scent touched his nostrils like that scent of spring under the singing birds. It had the same elusive character but now it seemed more real. As he came out on the moor he saw a long low wall of red flame in the distance, strange and beautiful against the darkness. Heather-burning. The gamekeepers of the Castle were burning the moor, on the slope beyond the stream towards the mountains. The fire must have got out of control, but now the wind, even up here, had fallen and he could see small dark figures like demons beating down the flames with their long birch switches.

It was a necromantic sight and he was held by it completely. The flames were a living red against the dark mountains. He could see them leap in tongues and tatters and vanish magically in the air. The crackling of their fierce joy was removed by distance, as his own boyhood was removed, leaving the wonder and the vivid glow, like a memory of times long past.

His boyhood called to him, and boyhood beyond boyhood, from far mornings, from still twilights, with their scent about him, this scent, keen on the air and in the nostrils.

He stood gazing towards the fire unable to tear himself away. He would have liked to join the men and the lads in the fierce tumult of their switching and their cries. He would have hit and hit the swerving beast as it chewed up the thin bones of the heather in a crackling roar, hit and directed it with man's cunning
towards the drowning stream and the sweet tired darkness of the end.

But solitariness was upon him and, as his skin shivered after the warmth of the climb, he started back the way he had come. Every now and then, he turned his head over his shoulder, and at last on the brow of the moor he paused for a long time. The fire glowed now like a jewel on the throat of the night, beautiful to look at, holding his eyes in a mood that was beyond all understanding, joyous and yet strangely sad.

What curious quality was this, calling him back to the hollows and the streams, to the lonely moor and the mountains? And why ‘back'?

That night he had a disturbing dream. As he thudded with the pick he was aware of the effect the sounds had on his father, precisely as if he suffered them himself. He was in a moment somehow present with his father and mother in the kitchen as the thudding went on. And his father knew that the sounds meant the digging of his grave, and he heard them as a condemned man might hear the hammering that set up the gallows beyond his prison wall. No power now could stop the thudding. It went on remorselessly in soft deadly impacts. Nothing more could be done. They had to accept – and wait.

The dream was disconnected, for now his father was dead. His body was naked and the mother, sitting on a kitchen chair, held it in her extended arms, one arm under the knees and the other round the shoulders so that the head fell slightly back and the body slumped naturally to her lap. The naked body was white and smooth, and with the white beard on the ashen face, the eyebrows gaunt and jutting above the sunken closed eyes, the mouth slightly open in a remote solemnity, the whole figure looked like a Christ grown old.

The following day he left the pick and shovel lying by the hole which he had started to dig and busied himself with many things, for the spring season of ploughing and sowing was at hand. Whatever happened, he realised now that he would have to put down the crops. He could not leave the burden of finding ways and means on his mother.
Besides, that evening he was taking the clock up to Flora's home – his wedding present to Jimmy and herself. Quite a few would be there and it should be a good evening. He had told Janet he was going and she had said Flora had specially invited her and she would certainly go if she could. She would go, of course, with Tina Sinclair.

As he took his supper before setting out, there was no sign of any satisfaction or hidden triumph in his father over the cessation of the digging. There was indeed about the old man an air of extreme weariness. Something genuine and as it were withered in this forsaken weariness touched Tom, but his own life was too near him to let it penetrate far.

Nor did his mother ask him where he was going, as though she sensed that any words of hers would not help but only irritate the father and perhaps stir him out of his weakness to say in a cold, rejecting voice: ‘Let him go.'

All the same, outside, in the darkness, on the road, the gaiety of escape assailed him. His body felt light and fall of energy, and the clock would astonish them.

There was a whole lot of girls in, with a fair number of fellows and more coming. Everyone was laughing, and now and then a girl let out a yelp. Flora met Tom at the door, for she rushed forward to greet each newcomer, and there she was taking him into ‘the room' where the presents were laid out. They heard her say ‘O Tom!' in the proper breathless way. But she did not add ‘That's too kind of you' or other phrase of the sort. So they went on talking in the kitchen, but in a moment came her quick feet and her flushed face, and she said, ‘Jimmy, this is Tom.'

Out Jimmy went awkwardly as much as to say, What have I got to do with it? and the girls laughed. Jimmy and Tom were special friends and the present therefore would likely have some particular character on Jimmy's account.

Jimmy's brown face flushed with surprise and pleasure when he saw the clock. Tom, on his knees by the table, was fixing the pendulum and looked up at Jimmy with a quizzical smile. ‘I promised I would give you a clock,' he said.

‘This is too much, boy,' said Jimmy slowly.

‘Nothing could be too much for either of you,' answered Tom lightly.

‘O Tom, that's lovely of you,' said Flora in a trembling happy voice.

Tom got up and shook hands with both of them. This somehow came also as a surprise. ‘I wish you the best of luck,' said Tom, his face merry, ‘and may your good times never stop.'

Flora was an impulsive girl, big-boned, dark, and kindness or generosity invaded her face in a spate. Now she gripped her own hands and swayed, smiling warmly, shyly overcome. She hardly knew what to do about it. No more did Jimmy. Tom laughed, bunching together the wrappings. ‘Where will I put this?' he asked.

‘Oh anywhere,' said Flora, taking it from him and crushing it still more.

‘Well, let us go through,' said Tom, ‘lest they come in.'

But Flora could not help saying to her mother that Tom had brought a lovely clock. In no time everyone was having a look at it. It was over two feet in height and the glass front had a beautiful painting of a country scene. Not a Highland scene, more like a real English scene, with tall green reeds, not rushes but broad reeds that turned over at the top in a delicate refined way, and with the smooth water of a quiet river, if not a lake, held to a stillness that time would never change. And when you looked carefully there were other interesting features: two big ducks and four little ones, for example, and a tree, and a dark cavern. Hanging dead centre, over the water, and between the reeds was the round brass pendulum, with a brighter glitter than that of gold.

‘Ay, ay,' said slack-mouthed Dan, his droll humour now held in wonder. He was fifty and modest girls were always a trifle afraid of what he would say next. But now he was examining the clock with the keen eyes of a neat-handed man, nodding in tribute.

‘It's a fine thing,' he said, ‘to have a wealthy friend from the south.'

‘What was the good of being in the trade,' said Tom, ‘unless a fellow could get a clock like that for nothing?'

There was a laugh and Tom, glancing round, saw Janet. A sheer living freshness about her struck him like a sudden light. She seemed to him at that moment to be apart from the others, reserved and distinguished, yet with her eyes crinkling with humour as if she were taking everything in and might all at once laugh outright. Usually she wore coloured homespun tweeds in soft greens or blues or browns like the other girls. Now her skirt was black and her blouse snow white. Her face was fresh as if it had been washed in spring water, its contours full and firm, with the top teeth showing in the smile that was about to break. Yet in an instant he saw nothing but her eyes, and they looked at him, and from them something came towards him, and stilled in a recognition that only he could see, and withdrew, and she turned her head away and laughed with the others.