The Serpent (21 page)

Next day he started on the scythe. She came and worked behind him, gathering and binding the sheaves. The weather was still dull and looked like breaking, but no rain fell.

He worked into the darkness, stooking the sheaves, while she went home to prepare supper. None called that day. Towards noon on the following day it started to rain. When he had set up the sheaves she had bound, he hung his scythe in the barn and presently went in for food. When he had eaten, she broke the silence, asking, ‘Have you been to the shop?'

As he opened the shop door a draught blew in his face from the window, which had been smashed with stones. The stones had also damaged some small things displayed on the shelf before the window. He picked up the stones, looked at them, stared through the vacant window with incredulity and a slow gathering and narrowing of understanding and hate.

While he was nailing boards across the window outside, the two women, whose voices he had overheard on Saturday, came down past him. He kept his back to them and they did not speak.

After their visit his mother started sighing at odd moments in a vacant way. What mind she had was getting clouded over. This sighing sadness would become her mode of life henceforth. Mindless and sighing and sad. All at once she was aged, a dumb beast, the quickness and the bustle gone.

Before he went to bed, she said, ‘Alec is getting on.'

‘Alec? What Alec?'

‘Alec Wilson. They say he will live now.'

‘Live?'

‘Did you not know?' she said sadly. ‘When he was going for the doctor, he ran into Peter Grant's dog. The dog had to be destroyed. But Alec is getting on, it seems. His collarbone is broken.'

The news appeared old to her. She turned away from it.

But the news for Tom had an edge of infernal humour. For the first time in many days he smiled, sitting on his bed. Then a thought struck him and he went out and up to the shop. The bicycles were always wheeled into a corner which he had built for them, with wooden racks to hold the front wheels. There was only the one bicycle. The other would have been badly damaged and cleared off the road. No-one had brought it back.

And Alec – he had not asked about him. He dare not go and ask. Alec's parents would …

He let the thought die, with the infernal humour.

The wind was strong, with stinging raindrops. It was pitch dark. He turned his face to the hill path, but up there the wind was a mournful howl, ridden by hounds. Beyond the byre it staggered him, and he had to feel with his feet for the path. He thought of Janet, and before he knew it a yell of defiance at the hounds had ripped from him, a harsh tearing yell that emptied and silenced him. His body, like a thin husk, shuddered in the rain-spitting cold wind.

Shortly after daybreak the wind died and by the forenoon the sun was shining. The standing corn and the fallen stooks were bone dry from the high wind, and after an early midday meal they were setting out for the harvest field when a shout made them turn round. The town policeman was coming from the road towards the shop and as they looked he raised his right arm.

No policeman had been stationed in the village since the liquor licence was taken from it many years ago. At intervals, a policeman from the town met here a policeman
from the village of Cardin, which lay inland beyond the Glen where two roads merged in the one road to the west. They could sometimes be seen standing by the roadside talking together, often for nearly an hour, before they parted and returned each his own way. Only once or twice in all Tom's memories had the police had any official duties to perform in the Glen. Crime, as the word was understood in the cities, was unknown.

The uniform and the commanding arm sent a shiver over Tom's body, and it was only when he heard his mother's broken intake of breath that he got his legs to move. He went to meet the policeman, who, before opening his mouth, gave him a long and searching look.

‘Are you Tom Mathieson?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is that your bicycle lying by the end of the post office?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why haven't you removed it?'

‘I – I was going to. The harvest – we're at the harvest.' He could hardly speak.

‘It's strange that you didn't retrieve it?'

‘I'll go just now,' said Tom, starting away from the policeman.

‘Wait a minute,' called the policeman, who joined Tom and proceeded with him towards Peter Grant's shop.

‘How did it happen that the bicycle is there?'

‘My father – a fellow used it to go for the doctor. He ran into a dog.'

‘What fellow?'

‘Alec Wilson, from the Heights of Taruv.'

‘I see. Your father was ill and he was going for the doctor?'

‘Yes.'

The policeman gave a sidelong considering look at Tom. He obviously knew the whole story. That there was no case could now be taken as corroborated.

‘And what do you mean by leaving your damaged goods on another man's property?'

Tom did not answer.

‘Have you nothing to plead?'

‘My father died,' said Tom.

As the policeman looked at him again, a cold anger tautened Tom's muscles.

‘Did Grant object?' he asked.

‘That's my business,' answered the policeman.

‘It's all right,' said Tom.

He breasted the village with the policeman, and folk stood back into doors and at windows. The front wheel of the bicycle was buckled. Tom lifted the frame over his head and bore it away on his shoulder, the policeman, with authoritative legs apart, looking after him.

He saw his mother waddle down from the road as he hove in sight. Locking the bicycle in the shop, he went to the harvest field, and she joined him there. For a while the physical effort of swinging the scythe brought out sweat on his weakened body.

In the days that followed he grew thin as an eel. Had he not known this himself, his mother's actions would have told him. There were eggs and meat when previously there had not been. But he ate without relish. Sometimes a fresh egg had a repulsive taste, slimy as mire and tainted with a certain midden flavour. That this was purely imaginary he knew, but that did not make it the less difficult to swallow the stuff. His mother remained solemn and resigned, and the way she had of sighing at an unexpected moment got on his nerves. Even her half-hidden concern for his bodily well-being irritated him. And when he had worked himself stupid with fatigue, it often happened that it was then his brain came abnormally alive with a feverish and ferocious activity.

It was easiest to bear these mental bouts when he was completely alone, shut up in the barn or shop, for, unobserved, he could gnash his teeth or make his body writhe against clenched muscles, and so free himself from the momentary but appalling stress, which came upon him often without any very clear conscious cause.

Sometimes, too, a quite simple affair, like that of Peter Grant and the policeman, would induce an extreme violence of agitation and desire for revenge. Even if he
worked out that probably Peter Grant was not to blame for the disgrace of the policeman's visit, it made no difference. Perhaps the policeman had observed the bicycle, questioned Peter Grant, got the whole story, and promptly acted on his own. But Tom saw into Peter Grant's mind. Saw that he wanted the bicycle removed – and knew why, knew the wordless effect he would create on others, on himself, and on the atheist Tom. Oh, he knew!

But of all these early and horrible bouts, the most horrible occurred on the hill-top where he had gone to spy on the manse. The craving to go had come upon him quite suddenly, but with such overpowering force that he not only had to give in to it but in a moment was actuated by a feeling of ruthless cunning.

When he got amongst the hollows of the hills, he ran, grabbing at the heather, pulling himself up, his heart pounding, a slaver at his mouth, not waiting a moment except now and then to look warily around, lest he be late for what he had to see.

It was October and Donald must have gone back to college. But Tom felt he had not gone back.

Tom had just flung himself down when he saw Janet come out from the manse, walk a little way as if going to the village, pause, and then circle back until she was swallowed by the outhouses. Round the off gable-end came Donald and set out for a walk – that circled back, until he, too, was swallowed by the outhouses.

Half an hour later, Janet emerged from the outhouses and continued on her way to the village.

It was simple. So inevitable that it happened often. Nothing particularly miraculous in coming upon it so aptly.

And then the bout got him.

It turned him on his back, and first his body heaved from the right shoulder and his heels, then rocked to the left shoulder and heaved again into the quivering arch, his head crushing back and thrashing from side to side. There was no particular pain; hardly even anguish in the mind; nothing but this terrible straining to get away from himself, from knowledge, from all he knew. Out of it his voice groaned and cried, ‘God, Ο God'; crushing and
emptying himself, slaying the thing that was in him, that was himself.

When it passed, he slumped over on his face, in an exhaustion so complete that it was a total forgetting, like sleep or death.

But nothing was forgotten for very long. The mood might change, but beneath it, even under long spells of numb indifference, there persisted that which did not change. The lower the form of life the more difficult it is to kill. The persistence was of that kind.

When it seemed his body could hardly bear up much longer to a day's work, when already he knew that its processes were slowing down, and that he was covering this with what might look like a calculated indifference, a deliberate unconcern, he was assaulted by a new and more terrible enemy.

Life does not get slashed at every exit without wanting to hit back. Self-protection is in the bite of the adder, in its poisonous fangs.

Tom began to see what a fool he had been, what a soft self-destroying fool, not to have hit out where it would hurt most fatally. He had not bitten where he might have bitten, not eaten where he might have eaten.

This smouldering vengefulness grew, and like every new mood, each fresh departure of his mind, it circled ultimately around Janet.

He remembered her quiescent moments, the passive fall of her body in his arms.

He knew what that meant now.

As he sat in the dark of the shop, his face narrowed.

He had not been ignorant of what it meant then. But
then
he had been under the glow of love, of responsibility, of tenderness, of the future, of wonder, of beauty, of the customs man had created in weakness and illusion under the guise of hope and social continuance and other futile little dodges and schemes for containing the earnest and the simple so that the cunning might wallow.

He saw it now very clearly.

He saw it through days and nights. The torment
grew. Vision slipped from the past into the present, into nights ahead.

Donald was gone.

He had only to meet Janet and appear to be as he had been – quietened a little by the death of his father. His father's death would account for the interruptions in their meetings. Janet must be wondering about him, knew how everyone's hand was against him. She would be waiting, waiting for his next move, her conscience guilty. Could she, with her guilty conscience, desert him, too? She could – that would be her secret and quite remorseless intention – but she could not do it with a hard indifference, brutally. That was not her nature. Her nature was soft. She would want to reconcile him, to part from him in sadness, in tragic sadness, so that her own happiness would thereafter be the greater. Poor Tom – he had been so good to her!

Then it was up to him to play-act as she did. And he would do it, not in obvious ways, not the silly ways of the outraged male, with his rights and wrongs and petty dignities, but with the cunning of the serpent, the ‘subtil serpent'. He would be so good to her, trusting her so naturally, looking forward to some vague future – nothing urgent to frighten her – that her sense of guilt would swell to a suffocating cloud. She might begin to try to tell … but it would be child's play heading that off, turning it into some halting thought about her mother. Not that she would tell him directly about Donald. If he knew Donald, then it was certain she had nothing very definite to hold to – beyond their meetings, their passionate meetings. She would want to hint at some change in her feelings, to suggest that perhaps it had all been a mistake. But she wouldn't be able to do that, not if he handled her properly. One night, perhaps the first night, she would collapse, she would give in, particularly if it followed a bout with her mother.

He would make no mistake then.

Such thought lived on itself in endless involution. Its subtlety at times partook of an extreme clairvoyance, so that again he did not think his thought so much as see it in living picture. There was no hesitancy, no movement, no colour in the face or light in the eye, of which Janet was
capable, voluntarily or involuntarily, which he could not observe as clearly as if she sat before him; indeed more clearly, because this solid breathing semblance of her held no uncertainty for him, no doubt. He could not only see her face; he could feel her flesh by touch. Nothing was hidden from him; there was nothing that could not take place.

Now it so happened by some curious chemistry of the body that the more tired he was from labour and the deeper his exhaustion, the greater, the more feverish was his responsiveness to this secret visioning of the physical Janet. Almost before he began to think of her he became excited, not only physically but with an elated, poisonous, mental excitement.

All this did extreme violence to his nature. Under his exhaustion, it tore the core of his nature apart, caused a slow disintegration in its fibres, and the fleshly saps that oozed over and into it were poisonous ejections, slow-dissolving and vile.