The Serpent (13 page)

‘Does it go?' asked Dan.

‘Yes,' said Tom. ‘But I think we should leave it to Flora to start it up.'

‘There's no hurry,' said Dan. ‘Do you see the little ducks? Now I wonder what the mannie who painted them meant when he put them in?' he asked in wondering innocence.

But that was enough of Dan and one or two of the girls pushed him aside. Dan saw a strained look on Jimmy's face and he winked to some of the lads. But this was no place for practical fun, so back they went into the kitchen.

There were songs and stories and Dan, who suddenly had an inspiration as to the meaning of the baby ducks, was physically set upon by three young women and shown no mercy. Dan had good sense and put up no fight. But the girls were in great form and soon nothing would reduce their energies but a set dance on the kitchen floor. Inside an hour the evening was made, unison was complete, and nothing that was said or done could go wrong.

Tom had an extraordinary liberation of spirit that night. Janet seemed to have been revealed to him in a new and thrilling way. Flora's mother spoke to him specially, and Flora's father, a large, ungainly, neighbourly man, had a
few words for him about nothing in particular. He did not need to look at Janet. Her brightness was behind his eyes, was everywhere. He could feel that the folk liked him, were attracted by the seemingly careless but actually intense happiness that made him dance, and double up with laughter, and promise anything.

‘I'll see you down the way,' said George Macrae, a tall handsome young man, assistant to Fraser, the general merchant, and not unaware of his own importance among the crofting lads. The evening had come to an end at last and George had spoken as it were negligently to Janet. Tom's whole being stood still as if the living muscle of his heart had been gripped. An immense time seemed to pass before Tina said simply, ‘We're waiting for Tom.'

‘I'm here,' said Tom cheerily, pulling on his cap as he bobbed up against them in the dark.

‘Come on then,' cried George, in his boisterous managing way, and he must have caught Janet by the arm for in no time he had swung her ahead.

But she turned round, ‘Are you coming?' and waited for Tom and Tina. She took Tina's arm. ‘I enjoyed tonight. Wasn't it good?' She laughed in her abrupt way, and stopped dramatically. She sounded very happy, inwardly excited.

All four kept together, chattering readily and at random. Tom was between the girls and George on the outside next Janet. Tom caught Janet's hand as their arms swung together. Her fingers spoke to him in secrecy and withdrew. Then their hands hit in passing and Janet was full of gaiety. Tina mocked and challenged George over something. George in his somewhat heavy large way said that if she wasn't careful he would throw her over the hedge. ‘I would like to see you try it!' challenged Tina, who had a game spirit in her small but sturdy body. ‘You talk a lot,' she added. George's manhood felt it had to go to the attack and Tom, gripping Janet's arm, slipped ahead. Tina was obviously holding her own and fighting well, but Janet could not go quickly in the dark. She stumbled, as she did on the hillside behind her home, and Tom swept her against the blackthorn hedge. ‘Hsh! they won't see us here.' He kissed her and she responded and for a moment
the night shook its stars about them. He pressed her into the hedge, shielding the white of her face, and there in stillness they stood, while the other two went past arguing and bickering.

‘Janet!' he said, as if he had found her at last.

‘Tom!' she whispered.

After a little time they stepped onto the rough cart track, for this was a divine game and they could not let the others escape entirely.

‘Janet, where are you?' called Tina.

‘Hush!' whispered Tom.

But Janet called: ‘We're here!' And as they drew near: ‘How cool of you to walk past us!'

George was nettled and not in the best of humours, and when he felt that Tom and Janet were hanging just behind in order to enjoy this game, he walked on with Tina. They all kept together, however, and when the main road was reached, Janet took Tina's arm.

‘I do hate coming down that road in the dark,' Janet declared.

‘You fairly showed it,' George retorted.

They all laughed so heartily that George was mollified by this acceptance of his wit.

Tom got no further words with her alone, but that did not matter, for in the very way she said good-night was all the conspiracy of their next meeting.

As he hung about his home, reluctant to go in, late as it was, he somehow could not get over the sheer marvel of Janet and the relationship between them. It was like something that could not be true, that could not really have happened to a fellow like him in this life. That first glimpse of her up in Flora's …

His nostrils caught the warm interior paraffin-lamp smell, and as he noiselessly closed the door his father cleared his throat in a deliberate portentous cough. Tom's face puckered up and, treading softly, he entered his own room and lit a candle.

Then he sat on his bed, his eyes gleaming through the puckered expression on his face. That dry forbidding cough of communication! Ay, ay! The vision of the white body like
the dead Christ came through his mind from his dream. But it could not touch him. Nothing could touch him. He would talk to his father tomorrow. Sitting there, he began to dream about Janet.

Next morning the wind was blowing on a bright day. Tom's heart was affected by it and all his body, as though spring were coming beyond the mountains and the wind had rushed on eddying everywhere to tell the news.

His happiness induced a generous and forgiving mood in him, and when his father appeared in the early afternoon Tom, working by the barn door, felt the moment for speech had arrived. Slowly his father advanced, upright, as usual without the aid of any stick. But he did not pass by the barn door and Tom could not go to meet him. Refusing to be put off by this indifference on his father's part, Tom presently created a natural opportunity, and with his shoulder to his father said in a quiet even voice, ‘The barn is getting a bit full up.'

‘Is it?' said his father. ‘It was big enough in my day.'

‘Yes,' answered Tom, ‘but it's not big enough now with the jobs I have to do.'

‘What jobs?'

‘You know the jobs,' said Tom.

‘You did not mention them to me,' said his father in the same level tones, looking into the distance.

‘I was wanting,' said Tom, coming to the point before his father's voice would defeat him, ‘to put up a place at the end of the house.'

‘What sort of place?'

‘A wooden place. I could have my tools and do my jobs there. That would leave the barn free.'

‘Oh, I see,' said his father, but it was as if he saw some motive or design far beyond the obvious and noted the fact in a dry mockery. His voice, however, held no emphasis.

Tom could not look at him. He had stated his case. He
would hold himself there at whatever cost and wait for a definite answer.

He heard the shuffle of his father's feet, the movement of his body. Tom turned his head. His father was walking away.

Tom went blindly into the barn and for a few moments struggled in the grip of a sheer physical paroxysm of anger. It was too much, too utterly unforgivable. He gripped a plank and sank his nails in the white wood. Anyone could see it was no good. No good giving in to this. It must be one way or the other. And now.

He allowed himself a few minutes to cool down and then walked up past the house to where the pick and shovel were lying. His mother came out at the kitchen door but he did not look at her, nor for that matter did she call him or give any visible sign. He did not know where his father was. He would no doubt find out soon enough!

Thud went the pickaxe and out shot the soil. His mind was working feverishly underneath the thudding sounds. If his father came up and said, ‘What's this?' he would look him straight in the face, right into his eyes, and say, ‘I told you.' And if his father answered that he had not given his assent, then he, Tom, would widen his eyes and say, ‘But you said “I see”. I thought you meant it was all right.' And they would look at each other, behind surface words, and Tom would wait, would not budge, until his father used definite words, stopping the work. He would force him to use definite words and so be done with the whole accursed business. Then he would throw down his pick. That would be an end of that. What would follow would follow.

He was working on a hole in line with the front wall of the house when he saw his father come round the lower gable-end. He tossed out the shovel and started on the pick, glimpsing his father from under his eyebrows. The old man went over towards the barn and stopped and examined the plough that lay by the wall, its coulter sharpened and ready for work. He bent down over the plough, jerking at something, slowly straightened himself and went into the barn. Tom swung the pick with all his strength. What was his father wanting in the barn? The chest of tools was shut
but not locked. If his father lifted the lid he would see the two books, Huxley and Haeckel, as well as the pamphlets on Rationalism which Dougal had enclosed as packing for the clock. Would he dare lift it? Tom knew he would. It was his barn.

Tom worked with fury. If his father appeared in a minute it might be all right. He did not appear. Tom had a wild urge to drop the pick and walk down to the barn.

In a little while his father came out of the barn and, going to the plough, began to hammer at it. Tom swung his pick now in a wild derision. His father went back into the barn and stayed there. Tom felt that all this was being done deliberately, to torture him. He apprehended it, not vaguely, but in a piercing intuition.

His father came out and stood at the barn entrance, then crossed over to the door into the conjoint byre and stable. Perhaps he was going to take out the horse to start ploughing the stubble. By God, it was just the sort of thing he would do at that moment! The final and devastating thing to do!

Now Tom caught the movement of his mother's shoulder in the kitchen door and knew in a flash that she had been standing there the whole time listening, peeping out unseen. With a tin dish in her hand she appeared and went down towards the byre. Gathering her eggs, by way of it! The henhouse was a black lean-to shed against the lower gable of the barn, but one of the hens laid away in the byre behind the grain barrel where the horse-feed was kept. So naturally she went to the byre, hesitating, however, in a listening moment at the door before going in.

Let them fight it out! thought Tom. Let them get on with it! The point of the pick sprang off a submerged boulder, just missed his shin bone in the narrow hole, and numbed the whole right foot in a glancing blow.

The numbness, the pain, took up his attention like an urgent companion, dissipating the weakness of excitement against his father and leaving him more formidable in himself. As he exploded at the pain, he turned down his sock and examined his ankle. It would probably swell, though the skin was not broken. He examined it
carefully and for a long time. Let his father come on him now!

But though he lingered, thus engaged, his father did not come. His mother emerged from the byre door. One glance at her swithering body was enough to assure him that she had been overborne, had been turned out. He bent his head in the hole. When he looked up again, she had disappeared.

He went through the motion of spitting out of a dry mouth on his palm and gripped the shaft and swung it. Half an hour afterwards he saw his father coming up the wall of the house, walking slowly and deliberately like a man who has had a dram too many.

Tom bent to examine his ankle, needing the strength of an ally against this maddening mixture of weakness and fear which at once beset him and which he could not control. He pushed down his sock, but hardly saw his ankle, felt no pain.

There was a final white moment when his father looked up at him; then he went in at the kitchen door.

Tom worked on in a dogged, dumb endurance, keeping thought and feeling at bay. He had conquered, but the end was not yet. A certain calmness came over him, a tired fatal feeling of bitterness. He hung on to it, but when at last he stopped digging and went down towards the barn, his body dragged wearily as if it had been mauled.

He looked at the tool chest, lifted the lid. At least nothing had been purposely disordered. Tom tried to think this out but could make little of it. It might be against his father's dignity to let Tom see that he had been peeping into the tool chest's private property.

The father had the all-knowing power to gather information and hold it against the day of final judgement. His restraint held a cunning yet terrifying quality. It could break a fellow's spirit. But it would never break Tom's. Never! Not on this earth!

His mother darkened the door. ‘I told him,' she said, ‘you were going to start ploughing tomorrow.'

The whisper in her presence irritated him and he turned away to the bench, his eyes roving over it as though looking for something.

‘Tom, will you start tomorrow?' she pleaded.

‘If I can get Norman's horse,' he answered indifferently.

‘Oh that's good!' she muttered, like one given an unexpected present, and off she went.

The ploughing was a great relief, and as he looked down the gleaming furrows of black soil, straight enough for a ploughing match, fine pleasure sharpened his spirit, a loneliness that was a near friendliness of the earth, of the flighting and alighting gulls, a wake of gulls white as blown foam, with the inevitable one or two black rooks amongst them. The work would normally have been heavy drudgery, but now out here in the open field it had somehow a rare freedom. And more than once, on returning to work after a meal and finally as he paused to look over the black furrows that lapped the little grey dikes, he had been caught up by a feeling of great happiness, light and delicate, a stillness and a dancing. Where this came out of, or how or why it came, there was neither knowing nor desire to know. It was there, like that curious stilled laughter which he came to find in bushes or outcrops of grey rock or tumbling green hillocks or wild flowers nodding now and then. It was not in them, of course. They were inanimate. By an understandable illusion it was communicated by him to them. Naturally. Of course. These ‘explanations' – how amusing! How easy! Worth a laugh on their own account. What a solemnity of importance man had achieved!

‘I finished the low ley,' he said after supper. ‘Norman is coming for our horse tomorrow.'

His father did not speak. It was a long-standing arrangement between Norman and himself, and while the dry weather held it was as well to have a shot at getting the heavy ground of both crofts ploughed. They had always suited each other's convenience and more or less kept evenly abreast of the work.

On the following afternoon, Tom resumed his digging at the end of the house and felt for the first time a confidence in what he was doing. His father could have no real reason for interfering now. But he remained uneasy until supper
was over and nothing had been said. The next afternoon he worked with a will, and before Norman was temporarily finished with their horse, the uprights were in position and some planking on the roof. But he had not nearly enough wood. However, he left the work and started ploughing again. One afternoon he saw the minister call and at supper his mother said to him, ‘The minister wants you to take two ton of coal for him from the town.'

‘All right,' said Tom quietly. ‘When does he want it?'

‘As soon as you can go. He said he did not want to interfere with the ploughing if he could help it.'

Tom was silent for a moment. At this season how could the minister help interfering with the ploughing? ‘I better go tomorrow then – in fairness to Norman.'

His mother looked at the father, but the father said nothing.

Two loads a day were all he could manage. But he so arranged his loads that on the last one he carried the planking he needed. On bringing home the horse and cart in the evening, he stopped by the gable-end and quietly unloaded his wood behind the new erection, taking care that the boards did not slap together.

That evening he waited for Janet in the hollow, but she did not come. After an hour, he slipped along the hillside and stood gazing towards the back of her house. All was dark and dead down there. Growing chilled, he returned to the hollow. But though he waited about the bleak hillside for a long time, there came no sign from her.

In the morning he went round to see Norman, who was a jobbing stone mason, over sixty years of age. As a young man he had become an apprentice mason to a firm of builders in the town. On the day he drew his first pay as a journeyman, his elder brother, Iain, got into trouble over a fight which the fond but cantankerous mother of the lad whom Iain had laid out insisted, against all local custom, should be investigated by the police. Iain disappeared and when next they heard of him he had joined the soldiers. Two years after that, the father had died, and Norman had come back to run the croft and look after his mother and two younger sisters.

Norman was a pleasant decent man, with a twinkling greeting in his eyes and the easy-going ways that made young fellows treat him as a companion. His face was thickset with a dark whisker.

‘Man,' he now answered Tom, ‘I must get some stone from the quarry for a little job they want done at Taruv. I have the stones ready and I'd need to cart them today and tomorrow. It's a pity, but I sort of promised.'

‘In that case I'll yoke Prince and come along with you.'

‘No, no, that would be too much –'

‘It'll shorten the time you need your own horse and that's a good enough excuse for me!'

Tom went home and in the kitchen explained casually that he was going to give a day to Norman. It would mean he would have both horses for the ploughing all the sooner. His mother would clearly have liked to have told him it was a neighbourly thing to do, but she waited for her husband who said nothing.

Tom started off with the air of being on holiday and in the quarry Norman and himself worked away quietly, loading the carts. Norman asked him how the new building was getting on and Tom answered, ‘Slowly but steadily!' Norman glanced at him and paused to take a snuff. ‘You're doing fine,' he said, nodding pleasantly. ‘Once a craftsman always a craftsman, and you need some building of the kind. How I could have got on myself without the extra bit that came in from the mason-work I sometimes wonder. But it's made life very comfortable for us. This work is a change, too, it takes you out of yourself.'

Tom agreed and presently he found himself saying, ‘In fact I thought of turning it into a bit of a shop with the ironmongery and odds and ends you don't get readily here.' He smiled, as though amused. ‘I mean, with the sort of stuff I could handle and mend and all that. I could get my material then at wholesale price. I'm not like you – with the stuff of your trade lying to your hand!'

‘That's very true,' answered Norman, ‘very true indeed.' He looked thoughtfully at Tom. ‘Have you mentioned it to your father?'

‘This is the first time I have mentioned it to anyone,' answered Tom, looking at the stone he was about to lift.