The Serpent (26 page)

Something which Donald had left behind!

That night, in a sudden revulsion of feeling against the city, he retrieved his small bag from the left-luggage office and caught the train for the north.

He had got shaved for the first time in his life by a professional barber. His face felt thin almost to vanishing point. His body was so exhausted that it, too, had attained a light incorporeal feeling. Donald's departure for Canada as a steerage passenger induced a sense of finality. There was nothing more he could do. It was a relief to be free of the murderous burden of what he had intended to do; sheer relief, and he cared no more.

He lay slumped in his corner with his eyes closed. In this attitude he could let time pass for ever. Vaguely he dreamed, though he knew he was not asleep. But the drifting figures in his dream had no power over his emotions. Nothing came to a point of feeling. Somewhere in the Perthshire highlands
the carriage lurched and his eyes opened. Through the window he saw the moon, full in the sky. He gazed at it for a long time with some of its own detachment. Slowly an austere quality in its serenity touched him with a shiver of cold. The bare outlines of the near hills, their dumb shoulders, their endurance, their darkness under the living gold of the moon, affected his body to a slow writhing. His lips moved and his head fell back.

He got home on Saturday night. The absence from his mother had somehow estranged her in his mind, and as he approached the house he had all he could do to force himself to enter. But he spoke to her in a friendly even way, and soon he began to feel the security of his home about him. He answered that he had found everyone and everything pretty much as they used to be. ‘Any news?' he asked casually.

‘No, nothing very special. Indeed no-one has been here since you left. I was down at the shop this morning with the eggs. There's not much price for them now. And that's all I have been out. Did you enjoy your journey?'

‘Yes, fine. It was a change.'

‘I thought you would be staying for a few more days when you were at it.'

‘Well, I thought of it – but ach I got tired of the city. It's all right if you're living there.'

She was very busy with the table, making excuses for not having proper food ready, obviously pleased that he had grown tired of the city. He could not but feel her pleasure in having him back. Perhaps she had thought he might never come back!

That night, however, he slept badly, and it angered him for he knew how desperately his hot body needed sleep.

Breakfast over and the soup pot on the fire, his mother began to dress for church. When she had gone, instead of the relief he had expected to find in the empty house, he was pursued by an extra virulent restlessness.

When his mother returned, she was subdued. At table she said, ‘Donald the minister's son was not in his place today. He has not come home.'

‘Oh. Why?'

‘I met Mrs. Maclean on the way to church. She was telling me that Mrs. Grant told her and she got it from Williamina that Donald wrote his father saying that he found the church was not for him, he could not go on with his studies. So he left and has gone to Canada.'

‘To Canada.'

‘Yes. Poor man, it's been a terrible blow to him. If only Donald had come home and told him; anything but going away like that. His voice was wrung today. You could see sorrow on him.'

Clearly his mother had much more on her mind, so as soon as the meal was over he went out.

There would be the new startled whisper that perhaps, after all, there was more in Donald's disappearance than his having found he had no vocation for the church. Though how unwillingly they would shift suspicion from the serpent-atheist who had killed his own father to the son of the minister of the gospel!

Tom might have enjoyed the bitterness of this, were it not for the implication of fatherhood, which he had hitherto kept from really entering his mind. The irony of it in his case was so annihilating that it could not be allowed to enter. It was hardly the sort of thing to brood upon!

That afternoon, when some of the old spasms of violence began to possess him again, he took to the hills.

Damnation! was there to be no peace for him for ever? He would have wept in his rage had there been tears left in his dry hot eyes.

The hills had only loneliness for him, not peace. Nothing had been solved. He was going to have made Donald marry Janet under threat of death. Donald would have understood him. For there would have been no escape for Donald. If Donald made a false promise to gain time, Tom would pursue him. Tom would pursue him, if need be, over the earth, once the position had been made clear and final between them. There would be no let-up after that. It had taken a week for him to achieve this certainty of death in himself. But he had done it. He would not emotionally threaten Donald. Calmly, clearly, he would show Donald
his duty. This calmness would penetrate all vanities and evasions, until Donald would perceive that in Tom
was
death. There had been days when Tom had known a strange peace, when the killer, death, had walked with him as a quiet companion.

But Donald was gone and no word had been spoken between them. Peace was broken. The hours and the hours ahead would press in on him, ever more heavy with what could not be avoided.

He came back through the dusk and the bird-singing, looked at the corner of the field where his father had stood, saw the near dead ground and the outlines of the low hills far away, and, as once before, there was a blueness on the hills, but now in a moment it held as in a remote memory the promise of spring, of distant summers. Their shining days ran on youth's feet over the land.

About nine o'clock he got up to go out, for he had communicated his own silence to his mother and suddenly became afraid that she would speak.

There was a strong wind blowing. The sky was dark in colour but clear of cloud, and he could see well enough to know that the moon had risen beyond the hill which he began slowly to climb. His feet took him to the hollow where Janet and himself had met so often.

For a moment his heart rose into his throat, but when he had stumbled down he saw that the bent back was no more than a low salley bush. That weakened him, and for a while he lay down on the damp grass.

But the illusion brought Janet very near to him, so near that he realised how she inhabited his mind. His bitterness was suffused by a sensation of tears, of an extreme weariness, of irrevocable loss.

Moving up out of the hollow, he came presently on to a shoulder and saw the moon. Its circle was flawless. It looked over the hill ridge down upon the Glen. The intensity of its stare whitened its golden face. Its withholding serenity was ominous. Its calm sinister. Suddenly Tom was struck by a primeval ghastliness of fear. In the moon's light was a dread more terrible than any darkness knew.

He turned away and began hurrying down. Without
hesitation he went straight along the base of the hillside until he stood above Janet's home. He saw the light in her kitchen window. From the house to the left of it rose the muffled singing of a psalm. It was the hour for Sunday night family worship, and everyone was within doors.

To go down there was worse than futile: it was betrayal of himself; it was a maddening advance against his own loathing. Not though his life depended on it would he have touched Janet with a finger-tip. There had been times when he had wished with a sick hatred that he could let her see how much he loathed her, as a desperate man might desire the only medicine that would cool him.

But now he knew that nothing could keep him back. After the first few steps he hardly thought, indeed, of what he was doing. It was nothing of any importance, it meant nothing. By the time he reached the henhouse wall, he was like a cool stranger to himself, the invisible one who can't be seen.

He had no sooner reached the wall than he heard high voices beyond the yellow blind. At once he stepped across to the window and in a moment his skin ran cold.

By their voices, he had plainly come on the scene as it was reaching a culminating point.

‘But I will make you tell me. Do you hear me?' The voice was shrill, but not out of control. It was charged with the horrible menace of one who, however mad, would fulfil her words, and fulfil them now. ‘Who is he? Will you tell me?'

‘No,' answered Janet in shrill defiance.

‘You won't tell me, won't you?' There was a clatter of fireirons. ‘You won't tell me!' screamed the voice. ‘You hussy, you impudent, brazen, dirty hussy. I'll make you tell me! I'll smash in your pretty face for you, you whore. I'll teach you how to go with men, you low bitch!'

‘Mother!' yelled Janet. ‘Mother!'

Tom sprang to the back door. It was on the latch. He stumbled over a bucket of water against the wall in the small dark porch, and as he pitched against the door to the kitchen it burst open before him to the
sound of a scream from Janet, the upsetting of the kitchen table, and a spilling roar from a drawer of cutlery.

The woman was standing with hair wisps over her brows, her eyes, blazing with an insane light, now concentrated on Tom with such speechless, motionless intensity that he could hardly draw his own eyes away from them. The table, tilted over on its side, lay across Janet's thighs. In its shadow he saw Janet's pale face, streaked with blood. Her chest and shoulders squirmed slowly, her head tilted, giving a low moan.

‘My God, what have you done?' he breathed.

In an instant he forgot her, going towards Janet. He was stooping to lift the table back, when he heard her yell and turned. He knew he was too late; in the fraction of an instant he realised, with a sense of prolonged dismay, that he was too late. Almost indeed it seemed to him that he waited for the blow. Possibly he could not have moved more swiftly. But that was not how it seemed. And when the heavy fireiron struck him, he still had the feeling of standing and looking at her and waiting.

Later his bruised forearm showed that it had taken part of the blow, and his head must have dodged to one side, for the heavy end, shaped like a huge soldering bolt, of the long iron poker struck him across the side of his face from above the right ear down to the jaw.

He was conscious of a crushing of his face rather than of pain. His physical strength ebbed and his sight dimmed. He made a supreme effort to keep to his feet, but the darkening thickened. Through it he heard her savage cry, small as if shouted from a great distance, and saw her draw back to swing the iron once more. The squat brown-painted tin lamp, with its bright reflector behind the glass funnel, sat on the mantelshelf at the level of her ear, glowing from a trimmed wick fully turned up. The end of the poker caught the metal bowl of the lamp and swept it from the mantelshelf. As his consciousness faded out he saw the moving light flare up violently in the funnel behind her head.

He came to with a not unfamiliar feeling, though the first gropings into consciousness never lost their freshness of terror. He was not in his bed, however. He fought back the panic. Where was he? cried his silent fear as he cunningly lay still. The pain in his head became real. He sucked in a deep breath and choked on the paraffin fumes. He moved and, his face coming away from the shield of the upturned table, saw the smouldering glow of the peat fire.

Memory now returned but still in an unreal way. He scrabbled at the table and heaved it round. On his knees – he saw Janet.

Janet! On hands and knees he approached her. Janet! ‘Janet!' he cried.

In the dim glow from the flameless fire, her face was still and ghastly white. He saw the dark blood-streak on her temple.

For a little while he lost his head. ‘Janet, speak to me!' he cried, like a frightened child. ‘Janet, my own love! Janet!' He touched her cheeks, caught her face in his hands, and turned it to him to make her speak. He kept calling her name, moving and fondling her, stretching her out, so that it would be easier for her to answer him. There was a cry behind. He started back, a wary enraged beast, and saw Tina.

He must have continued to glare at her, even when she had stepped past him and was on her knees beside Janet.

Presently Tina turned wildly, and looked up at him.

He nodded. ‘I'll get my mother,' he said. ‘Stay here.'

He fell many times before he rattled in at the door and came on his mother in the kitchen.

‘Mother!' he cried. ‘Run to Janet's! Quick! She's hurt!'

His mother's mouth, her whole face, opened as she stared at him, at the shaking body, the bruised cheek, dark with dried blood.

‘Run, I tell you!' he shouted.

She did not speak, but let out a cry and in a moment was gone.

He drank some well water out of the pail that was always kept in the passage, slapped more of it against his face, and hurried away to the shop. He had to come back to the
house for the key, but soon he was on his bicycle, heading for Muirton and the doctor.

It was a wild ride, but he was never once thrown. This was even to him at the time extraordinary, because there was a long spell when he had hardly any bodily feeling or, rather, when his body felt light as cotton wool and it was a marvel how the bicycle kept upright. He suffered, too, what was to him at the time an incredibly vivid hallucination. Some three miles from the village the road turns sharply from the moor to a bridge over the stream. Stunted Scots firs grow about this spot; there is an old quarry on the right by the entrance to the bridge; and here the stream narrows and is noisy over a bed of broken rock. The bridge itself has a three-foot stone wall on either side and a drop to the water of about thirty feet.

Of all spots in the district – and there were a few – it had the worst reputation for being haunted. Varied were the apparitions, but pride of place was held by the woman of the tragic love story. She could be seen walking from the quarry to the keystone of the bridge, where she disappeared, sometimes silently, sometimes with a cry. Tom himself had explained the legend away by reference to witchcraft, running water, and the probability that there had been a bridge here from ancient times.

So far he had been helped by the wind, which was funnelled by the Glen, but its true direction was such that when he turned sharply towards the bridge, a back eddy, from the steeply banking ground on his right, hit him strongly in the face. Head down, straining on the pedals, he was all but stopped, and as the machine wobbled on some loose gravel he let out a cry of rage, of desperation, at being kept back when every second had a fatal value. As he tugged at the handlebars his head jerked up and there in front of him, perfectly distinct in the bright moonlight, was the figure of a woman, dressed in black, just entering between the walls of the bridge. He saw her ghost-like face turned over her shoulder, and her whole action was that of watching him and at the same time escaping from him. This suggestion in the figure not of haunting the spot but of itself being hunted, was somehow so unexpected, so
ominous, that an icy cold drenched his skin. His legs kept the pedals going round automatically, for now he had cleared the high ground on his right and the wind was once more being funnelled downstream. As the figure gained the keystone of the bridge, he heard its unearthly screech above the roar of the narrowed tumbling water and the howl of the wind in the trees. For a moment it hesitated on the wall of the bridge and then went clean over.