The Serpent (28 page)

She had not yet spoken to him. Now, to release him, she said, her whole face speaking to him as it had done so often, with its shy charm, ‘Thank you for coming, Tom.'

‘Get well,' he answered. ‘Fight – your best.'

He could not speak more. And she needed all her strength. He lifted his eyes from her hand to her face.

It was then she gave him that strange white look that haunted him for years. There was loneliness in it, something wild and scared. It glistened distantly from him yet came into him and burned him up. It was more than a farewell in its glistening anguish. And from somewhere in the heart of it she smiled to him.

But the cry, that silent cry of her spirit, remained unuttered.

He blundered out past his mother, who was standing in the porch.

Later, on the bare hillside, he heard his mother coming before he saw her body form in the deep gloom, for the moon had gone under cloud coming up from the west. He heard her slow heavy footsteps and then he heard the low spasmodic sounds of her weeping. Janet was dead.

The Philosopher sat staring at the distant mountain-tops that told the months by the setting sun. The shadow of the stone, in its slow wheeling, lifted its edge from the earth and cut his hands and knees in a sharp warmth. The ceremonial of the stones, of the doctor and the police and the Procurator-Fiscal, of the whispering of the folk under the shadow of tragedy, of the long funeral cortège that bore the bodies of Janet and her mother to the graveyard beyond the grey church.

For the body of Janet's mother had been found under the bridge. It was no ghost he had seen that night when he had rushed for the doctor on the old solid bicycle. Nor had he mentioned his experience to anyone, for the complications of that wild night enmeshed him too fatally.

First to the door of his home came the policeman with a notebook, the same who had questioned him over the smashed bicycle at the time of his father's death, a big fair man, with a fair moustache, a soft full face and sharp blue eyes.

His mother admitted him to the kitchen where Tom sat waiting. With a pitiful smile she bespoke him, finding him a chair in an act of natural hospitality that took on the air of a propitiatory rite. Her voice, thick with concern and fear, trembled, and as she moved about, charged with words and cries, Tom looked at her. ‘You can leave us, Mother.'

But she did not want to go. She started to speak, broke down, and, lifting her dark apron to her face, went out.

In a clear important voice, the policeman introduced the occasion of his visit by stating that it was his duty to investigate certain circumstances attending the deaths of Mrs. Marion Morrison and of her daughter Janet. He
would take evidence from all those who could in any way throw light on what had happened, and he had to warn Tom that what he said would be noted down and used in such manner as the proper authorities would decide. All he wanted was the truth and nothing but the truth.

Tom admitted his presence in the kitchen on the fatal night and described what had happened. The policeman then took each point carefully, inquiring into Mrs. Morrison's apparent condition of mind, the exact words she used, Janet's attitude. He rehearsed each separate act, until he felt he had a clear grip of the whole scene, pondering now and then, between writing, possible points that he might have missed. All this took a long time.

‘Now,' said the policeman, ‘will you tell me how it came about that you were there?'

‘I happened to be passing and heard the noise.'

‘Where were you passing?'

‘Near the back door.'

‘The back door? What were you doing there at that time?'

‘I happened to be passing the door.'

‘Were you going to call on them?'

Tom hesitated for a moment. ‘No,' he answered.

‘What were you doing there at that time?'

‘Taking a walk.'

‘Were you going out for a walk or coming home from one?'

‘I was going out,' said Tom.

‘Do you usually go a walk in that direction?'

‘Sometimes.'

When the policeman had plotted the walk he asked if it was not a curious place to be taking a walk at that time of night, and a Sunday night, too.

‘Not for me,' answered Tom with a touch of bitterness. ‘Besides, there was a moon.'

The policeman looked closely at him, but his further questions Tom answered shortly. ‘I've told you how it happened.'

Then came the questions about Tom's personal relations with ‘the two deceased'.

‘Did you know them well?'

‘As well as one knows the rest of one's neighbours.'

‘No more than that?'

‘About that.'

‘What do you mean by
about
that?'

‘Relations vary between neighbours.'

‘Had you been in the habit lately of seeing much of them?'

‘Very little.'

‘Had you at any time close relations with the daughter Janet?'

‘I knew her quite well.'

‘When did you know her quite well?'

‘Since I was a child.'

‘Had you been keeping company with her within the last year?'

‘I had been in her company occasionally.'

In such matters the policeman had the countryman's knowledge and all the native cunning. Obviously he suspected Tom of hedging and was determined not to be outdone. But though there was a queer nervousness all over Tom's body, his mind was coldly clear.

‘You repeat, do you, that there had been no special understanding or relation between you?'

‘I knew her quite well.'

‘You're not answering my questions.'

‘I am.'

‘You're not. Do you refuse to answer it?'

‘I have answered it.'

‘Were you engaged in any way to each other?'

‘No.'

And then the inevitable question at last:

‘Were you courting at any time?'

It maddened Tom. ‘That's my business.'

‘So you were courting?'

‘I never said so.'

‘Do you deny it?'

‘I have had enough of this.' Tom jumped to his feet. ‘What right have you to ask about my private life?' he shouted.

‘I have to inquire into all facts bearing on the case. So keep calm, and answer my questions – or it may be the worse for you.'

‘What facts?' blazed Tom.

‘We'll come to that.'

‘Well, come to them!' Tom was now quivering all over.

‘I'm coming to them. Sit down.'

‘I will not sit down.'

‘Were you courting the late Janet Morrison within the last year or less?'

‘What has that to do with it?'

‘It may have a lot. Answer me.'

‘I won't.' Tom turned away. The policeman put a hand on his shoulder. Tom swung round as if he had been hit. ‘Don't dare touch me!' he yelled.

The door opened and his mother cried, ‘Oh, Tom! Tom!'

Tom walked swiftly past her. The policeman made to follow but his mother must have stopped him. Tom found himself alone in the barn.

He was trembling all over and full of a madness of anger. As his mind cleared and he was able to stand still, the real purport of the policeman's questions began to dawn on him. It had been obvious all along that what the policeman had been coming at was the fatherhood of Janet's child. His effort at a cunning approach had been maddening, until at last it could not be borne, and if the policeman had grabbed him again he would certainly have lashed out.

But why was the policeman … ? Had Janet not told anyone who the father was? In a flash of utter certainty Tom realised that Donald would have held her to silence until such time as he could plan … Janet herself would have been silent. The birth was some distance away. Any woman would protect her lover – and Donald was the minister's son!

My God! thought Tom, seeing the significance of his own particular appearance in Janet's kitchen at the fatal hour. The mystery of the mother's dead body in the river. The fight – in which he had taken part, of which he bore
the mark. The local whispering that he was the father of the child. Big Ann's words …

Tom the atheist who had killed his own father … now driven by ‘the judgement' upon him to destroy the girl whom he had fatally wronged
and
her mother!

Tom's body ran cold, and he laughed.

The completeness of the case would make anyone laugh! My God, it would! Make the whole hellish world rear like a serpent in silent black laughter.

His own body seemed to rear, enlarged, the legs sheathed in frost, awkward, divorced from him, the temples cold as thin sheets of ice.

In Janet's silence he stood condemned before men. Janet's silence – now eternal.

In the silence of Janet he stood condemned before himself. ‘The author and the finisher' – that pulpit cry! – of death.

The guilt of all mankind, the guilt of the hunted man, the terrible horror of the outcast, ‘fleeing the wrath to come', now assailed him, and in these moments was comprehended with an unearthly clarity.

Over all the earth it went, from all the byways of the earth it came, down all the twisting years of time, pastoral ages and cities… the dark pursuing serpentine evil, with its eyes and mouth of sin.

Coming in to him, serpents gathering to their focal point, their central pit.

The policeman darkened the door, stooped and entered a pace. He had one more question to ask. His tidy sense of duty made it necessary that he ask this question. He had to complete his case. ‘Are you the father of the child in the girl Janet Morrison?'

Tom saw the face in all its soft fat lineaments, looked in at the small glinting windows of the eyes.

‘Do you refuse to answer?'

All the movements of the policeman's mind were seen. The policeman. Then Tom's own mind blurred, like water over which a wind blows, and out of the coldness of the wind came a bitter remorselessness. The policeman must have seen the change.

‘Very well.' He nodded. ‘You refuse.' He stepped outside and in view of the door wrote in his notebook with the official mannerism of menace.

Tom left the barn and went into the hills.

He wandered there for hours, over the dead heath, in the silent valleys, now throwing himself on his face and gripping the heath, now walking in a stupor, his eyes, uncomprehending, on the near and far silent dead valleys and ridges.

The eternal silence.

The far peaks of the mountain ranges drew him. They always had childhood's illusion of being the barrier to a strange country. But Tom was no longer a child, and that strange, half-fearful, half-inviting country he now realised was the country of the dead.

Beyond the barrier, lost for ever, lost to himself, in the quiet sleep of death.

The sun was descending towards the peaks, too strong yet to look at with the naked eye. But presently it could be looked at, when it touched a destined peak, and slowly sank, amid the flowing of colours, of red, and saffron, and pale yellow, of delicate blues and infinitely remote islets of green, sank down beyond the peaks of time into darkness.

As he sat on a ridge, a final ridge it seemed, separating him from the world behind and the world beyond the mountains, a quietening came on him, a premonitory feeling of liberation, and his mind at its core became single as a child's, and he wondered if he would go into that country of the dead.

It was the calm sweet wonder of the mind that is already going. But the mind was troubled in its surfaces, and the wonder as yet no more than its core.

By her silence Janet had shut him out from the world of mankind, and also, and for ever, had shut him out from herself. His was the lonely way into the mountains, a clean separateness, a final forgetting.

A curious treachery there was in women; not so much treachery as a ruthlessness. They would lie, and deceive, and be treacherous to the utmost degree, in order to get
their desire. As if their desire was something more than themselves and knew no law. Knew no mercy, no kindness. Their feelings tender and delicate: tentacles searching for their food. More genuinely cruel at the core than anything yet conceived in the realm of life. Poets had seen them as harpies and wantons and tragic queens. On bleak hillsides they hunted their desire with greed, ruthlessness quivering at the heart of their broken tenderness.

Such thoughts were hardly verbal in him, were little more than the pale death-image of Janet, shut away from him, of Janet who had shut him away.

As the sun was touching the mountain, he heard a cry far down the slope on his left, where boulders and bits of scrub littered the ground before it began to rise again. He looked and saw a squat human figure get up and stumble on. Then it stood, and he heard again its forlorn and broken cry: ‘Tom!'

It was his mother.

She had not seen him, for her eyes went before her up the bottom of the valley. Though she moved slowly she had the appearance of going with earnestness and haste, as a dog seeking the scent of its quarry. Now she leaned with a hand against a boulder, stooping slightly like one drawing harsh laboured breaths. Then on again; but the ground was broken and her exhaustion must have been very great, for, when she stumbled and fell, she drooped in upon herself like one of the boulders, and, listening acutely, he heard the dry whining of her distress.

He got up and slanted down the hillside towards her. But while he was yet a little way off, she got to her feet to continue her journey towards the horizon she had set before her. As he drew in behind her on her right side, she became familiar to him as his mother, in her body and its movements and its laboured breath. The familiarity touched him sharply and in order not to startle her too much he called from twenty yards:

‘Mother!'

She stopped as if she had been hit, and, half-turning, saw him. Her left hand went out vaguely seeking support from the hillside, while her mouth opened and the small
arched creases appeared over her round eyes. In her face for a moment was disbelief like a stupid dismay. ‘Tom!' breathed her mouth.

‘What are you doing here?' he asked quietly.

But her eyes kept devouring his face. ‘Tom, you're here?'

‘Of course I'm here,' he answered evenly. It always took her such a length of time to realise anything.

Then at last her face drooped, and, forgetting that her outstretched hand had found no support, she sat down. All her processes were slow. She struggled against the weakness that followed the breaking of the long-sustained tension in her mind and tried not to weep. But she could not hold out any more and she wept heavily.

He realised as he stood looking at her that the weeping now was not for herself but for all the tragic events that had pursued them.

She recovered, choking down the outburst that had broken the core of struggle, and mumbled against herself as she wiped her eyes and prepared to rise.

‘Rest for a little,' he said, and to make it easier for her to rest he himself sat down a yard or two from her. His voice had been kind but firm. She needed strength.