The Serpent (29 page)

He sat looking before him and gave her time to compose herself.

‘I did not know where you had gone,' she said.

‘It's all right,' he answered, nodding to the hillside.

‘Don't be angry with me,' she said. And then after a short pause, ‘I told the policeman myself.'

‘What did you tell him?'

‘That Janet told me you were not the father.'

She said it naturally, but to him the words had there at that moment a dreadful, an appalling intimacy.

‘Why did you not tell him yourself?' she asked.

‘Doesn't matter,' he muttered shortly.

She had said the wrong thing again, and stirred in her distress.

‘I came after you – to tell you,' was all she could add.

‘You could have waited till I came home.'

‘Yes. I should have done that. But I got an awful feeling that – that you were going away.'

‘Where would I go away to?'

‘I – don't know.'

The sun must now have sunk well behind its peak for the first shadows were in the bed of the valley.

‘When you feel rested we'll go,' he said, ‘for it will be dark before we get home.'

She arose and they started back down the valley. When they came to its outlet and the ground steepened for a short way, he took her arm. ‘You'll have to watch your feet,' he cautioned her.

She had to pause and say it. ‘You're not angry with me for coming?'

‘No, Mother. I know why you came.'

He felt her look on him and heard the breath in her nostrils, but she did not speak and, his eyes searching for the easy way, they went down together.

What Janet had said to his mother was only a mother's evidence. Humanity realises that a mother will tell a lie. Janet had not told the doctor who the father was, nor had Tom's mother.

The Procurator-Fiscal arrived from Muirton to interrogate Tom.

During all this time Tom had no care for himself, no fear. He still lived in Janet's death and was bitterly resentful of all this horrible pawing and sniffing over the dismembered place where love and life had been. He felt its degradation in him, and his instinct was to shut his mouth and let happen what would happen.

But the Fiscal was a lawyer of sensibility and a wide experience in human motive and feeling. He was clean shaven except for a stubby grey moustache, and his brown eyes were intelligent and friendly, not given to any obvious effort at penetration.

‘You see,' he explained to Tom, ‘unless I can be sure that no living person was implicated, was the direct cause of what happened, I'll have to prepare for a full court case, and then the whole thing will have to be gone into, in the
smallest detail, in public. It may have to be that way, of course, in any case. But that depends on what I learn now. Take this difficulty, for one. Can you throw any light on the condition of the mother's mind? You saw her at the time.'

Tom hesitated.

‘Was she wrought up, in your opinion, just because she had found out her daughter's condition?'

‘It was more than that,' said Tom.

‘Tell me everything, my boy. This is something that goes beyond you and me. We owe whatever justice we can give to the dead.'

Then Tom, his head down, began to speak, and he told the Fiscal what Janet had told him of her mother's periodic bouts.

‘Where did she get the stuff?'

‘In Muirton. She went herself for it by bus.'

‘You don't know where she bought it?'

‘No.'

The Fiscal nodded. He could easily find that out.

‘You were friendly with the girl, Janet, then?'

‘Yes. We were friendly for a time.'

‘Did that friendliness change?'

‘Yes.'

‘When?'

‘After she had been going to the manse.'

‘Did it change on your part or on hers?'

‘Hers,' said Tom.

‘When would that be about?'

Tom told him.

‘Why do you think she changed towards you?'

Tom was silent.

‘Tell me this. Did you have reason to suspect who the father of the child was?'

‘It could only be one person.'

‘Who?'

‘Donald Munro.'

‘No one told you that?'

‘No.'

‘How did you first hear that she was in that way?'

Tom told him.

‘How did you feel – did you do anything?'

Tom hesitated a moment, then quietly related the whole story of his trip to Edinburgh, his meeting with the girl from Muirton, his trip to Glasgow and how he discovered that Donald had gone abroad.

‘I see,' said the Fiscal, nodding slowly, realising that here was detail that could be confirmed. ‘What were you going to do to him?'

‘I was going – to get him to marry – Janet.'

The Fiscal was silent.

Then whether because of this man's sympathy or not, emotion touched Tom. He tautened his features but his eyes silently overflowed.

The Fiscal got up and moved to the window.

Tom got control of himself but felt weak and wretched.

The Fiscal came back to the fire and stood before it, slowly washing his hands in the heat.

‘So it wasn't altogether chance that brought you past the back door on that night?'

‘Her mother generally was bad about the full moon. It was full moon that night. I began to wonder.'

The Fiscal nodded.

When at last he was going away, he stretched out his hand. ‘Thank you for what you have told me. You were wise to have done it, for your own sake – and for the girl's.'

But it was Tina finally who cleared Tom. She confessed to the Procurator-Fiscal that she had always been fully in Janet's confidence – the only one who ever was. She knew more about the outbreaks of Janet's mother than Tom did. She had a multitude of intimate details. Of the relationship between Janet and Donald, she spoke freely. She had sworn to Janet that she would never give her secret away. Donald was terribly afraid his father would get to know what had happened. His father was the minister, and he himself was studying for the Church. It was an awful position.

Then Tina said that Janet, who grew desperate once Miss Williamina began to suspect, had got a letter from Donald begging her to give nothing away until he came
home with his plan all ready. Secretly she would then leave with him.

Janet's private belongings were searched and the letter found.

No further Crown proceedings were taken. As far as any public inquiry was concerned, Janet's name was left in peace.

The shadow of the stone had now passed from the Philosopher's face, and the sun was so hot that he blinked and looked about him, and, arising, continued on his way.

From the knoll of the Stones the ground dipped and then rolled into the outskirts of the moor proper. Here was good rough grazing ground, with sheep nibbling by whin bushes and a swampy flat now dry and full of long rank grass, rushes, and the white flags of the cotton plant. The Philosopher skirted this dry marsh, keeping to the firm ground on his left, where vague ridges or rigs told of an old husbandry.

He could, in fact, remember this ground under cultivation over fifty years ago. The ruins of the croft house lay at some little distance in front of him on the sunny side of a green hillock. The old hairy crofter had been a bard, a satirist of some note, and his topical verses were quoted over the countryside. These ruins were usually the Philosopher's last resting place before reaching the banks of the moor stream.

The wealth of wild flowers was familiar to him and he began nodding here and there to tormentil and eyebright, cuckoo flower and primrose, milkwort, pink campion, lady's mantle, stone-crop, petty whin, trefoil, herb Robert and buttercup. He had a special affection for the plants that grew here, probably because, for some reason that he could not quite explain, he loved the place. It was not altogether because, being shut away from sight of all other human habitation, it had won to its own freedom, a freedom from interference, a freedom to smile and laugh, dance in the wind, to curl up in sleepy daydreams in the sun, to know the grey mist and the quagmire, to shelter from the howling storm, to endure like a stone, to be forever natural and in the fullness of the cycle to salute the blue sky with blossoms.

He knew his Rousseau and many of the nature writers; had penetrated into animism and kindred beliefs. He was not prepared to be deceived or led away easily. Why this definite experience of gladness, of happiness, in this place? It always came to him now. He could think of it from a distance.

It was as if happiness itself had worked and dwelt here. The feet of happiness still moved about the grass and eddied in the wind. The place made him smile, as though he were in secret collusion with it and not just prepared to give it away to anyone! For as its fragrance is to wild honey so to this feeling of happiness was its own subtle humour.

As he plodded on, his eyes saluted by the flowers, to which he nodded – he had seen folk of the older generation when he was a boy take off their bonnets to the sun or bow to the new moon – he began to wonder about the true nature of this gladness (gladness coming, perhaps, before happiness, as the earth before heaven – a theme in itself?)

And then the idea came to him and he stood still … went on slowly again … and stood still; and when after many stops he reached the green bank by the lower gable end of the ruins where he usually rested, he stood and looked at it for a long time before he at last sat down on it.

For the idea was an interesting one and had already on this remarkable day been pursued in some small measure. Indeed although he had walked very slowly over these last few yards, he now felt the beating of his heart. It did not take much, of course, to make his heart beat. A legacy of weakness from his father? He smiled in a curious distant way, his sight out of focus.

Clearly the vivid manner in which his mind had wandered back into a certain period of his life had been given an unconscious start by the sight of Henry, who was Tina's son, supplying petrol to the passing cars.

But there were other periods of his life – centring perhaps round that period of intense human relations as round a pivot? The period of childhood, of boyhood, of adolescence – that long early spell curiously allied now to his present state, as if the circle were completing itself. That early freshness of contact with nature – in how far was
it subsumed in his present attitude, with what loss – and with what gain? For a certain loss there was, but the loss could be fairly estimated, and the gain was tremendous. That should be a fascinating inquiry. To it alone he could take days that would be long intimate excursions. Each point worked out with precision through a delicate analysis.

Yet even this gladness, with its golden freshness of a buttercup, could not be fairly valued and understood without help from still other and later periods.

For example, following on Janet's death and those bitter days of official inquiry, there had descended upon him, after a short interval of curious unreal relief, a state of extreme despondency. It was more than that state of negation in which earth is very earth and mud mud, when such negative realism is seen with final conviction as the only positive, when wild flowers are another and tawdry form of grass and both are pushed up and sucked down in a blind and futile and mindless procession. It did not stop there. Had it been able to do so, things might not have been so bad. It was when he lifted up his eyes from this peat bog and looked at the air, at the grey air of an overclouded day, and in the silence apprehended its stillness as that of ten thousand Sabbaths invisibly distilled, that a dazing and quivering came upon him, an apprehension of menace and sadness too overwhelming to be borne.

In the moment of tragedy, of normal death, a countrywoman would throw up her apron over her face. How simple was this natural act!

To decipher the agony that uprose before that nameless grey immanence …

He had run away. Had jumped on his bicycle, with a small bundle, packed by his mother, tied behind the saddle, and pedalled off as hard as he could – up the Glen and on to the West, to places where he had never previously been.

That was a remarkable odyssey, containing some weird and memorable scenes. It lasted barely five weeks, yet in after thought – even now – it had the air of a journey to another world. Not only the remote deep-winding sea-lochs, the small fishing boats, the tides and currents, but the folk themselves in their scattered cottages, their
little townships, as remote from Muirton and a railway train as their story-tellers from Huxley and Haeckel.

At first there had been considerable discomfort in the way of invasion of his privacy and he could have wished he had gone to the solitude of Glasgow. His bicycle was the trouble. Not only did the children rush after him and, when he dismounted, surround him in a wondering mob, but the young men, and the old men, and the girls, and even the old women – ochanee! what is the world coming to!

But he soon learned to deal with that difficulty, and in any case the unpeopled spaces were so much the vaster that often he travelled for the better part of a day without meeting a soul. It took him nearly a fortnight to defeat the need to push ahead, to keep pedalling on tracks that were rutted and dangerous, as if he had an appointment he dare not miss.

White-fishing over the sands off Gairloch in an evening light. A night in a bothie by Gruinard Bay and a midnight expedition for salmon-poaching. How he travelled from Ullapool to Achiltibuie to give John Macleod the following message from Duncan Macrae: ‘They're here and after you. Clear the hold at once.'

The Revenue men found nothing at Achiltibuie and John Macleod threatened to have the law on them for the way they had brought suspicion upon him before his neighbours. Tom had to stay nearly a week with John, who fished lobsters off the Summer Isles and made the finest drop of whisky in these parts. At times wisdom ran so deep in him, in his silence and quiet movements and smiling eyes, that to lie on the heather beside him, or haul up the corked string of the lobster pot, was a rare indulgence in pure life.

That Odyssey alone would need a long mental journey to unfold it. For whereas then it had been full of experience, now it was full of meaning. The night he had slept out in those black rock hinterlands beyond Kylescu … He had come pretty near facing the grey ghost of his soul that night!

Scourie, and the Laxford River with salmon in the pools. The long eastward trek past the lochs. That wet day by the shore of Loch Shin. Was there a more desolate loch, more
desolate moors, anywhere in all the wide Highlands? And then in the midst of that desolation, with the fine rain smothering the view like a clinging smoke, wet and cold and miserable, he had felt so far beyond all mortal care, so stripped of the last vestige of desire, so finally and wholly the outcast, that a rare thin delight, like a wintry sunlight, had for a time lit up his soul and glimmered in his sight.

By the time he came back, the last of the crops were down and everything was tidy on his land. Norman had helped his mother. The neighbours, she said, had been very kind. She was so glad to see him that she lost her wits for a little, and began hunting for the wooden spirtle which was already keeping up the lid of the boiling pot, for he was bound to be very hungry now, she said. More light-hearted than he had known her, she was like one who, harbouring a very special piece of good news, had feared he would never return to get it.

He soon found out what it was. The true story about Janet and himself and Donald had got abroad, and the sympathy of some of his old friends had returned to him strongly. That summer he opened his shop, repaired the damaged bicycle, and got in touch with Dougal Robertson once more.

There would also have to be examined from this time onward the gradually changing social conditions, the emigration of young men to the Colonies, the slow break-up of the crofting townships. When was it – around 1910? – that he had sold the first petrol engine to a croft? An affair of 1½ h.p., that could be hitched on to the old hand-threshing mill and so dispense with the human labour of turning the drum. Three gallons of petrol would thresh the harvest. But it did not really affect crofting conditions. It merely took the place of the strong arms of the young men and women who had gone away. The old folk remained, and the crofts died out.

All this had been accompanied by a psychological change in the folk themselves, not only towards the ways of the world but even in the attitude to religion. It took the form
of a tolerance that was not a true tolerance but a vague acceptance of the strength of the outside world, a folding of hands before the inevitable. The minister, however, continued to thunder. His son's betrayal and desertion only increased a certain prophetic, fanatical fire in him. But he became gaunt, his clothes flapped on him, and his white beard grew longer. He died just before the end of the Boer war. Some say that he had heard once from his son, but this remained uncertain and Donald never came back.

During that war Tom had been accused of being pro-Boer and his small business had suffered. He tried to explain that he was no more pro-Boer than he was pro-Glen. How would they like it if Imperialists from the other side of the world came here to conquer and hold them? The Lovat Scouts were formed and young men came riding home in pride from their summer camps. But Tom saw in the motor car and motor cycle the inevitable supplanters of the horse on the public highways. He built a petrol store and inquired into sub-agencies for motor cycles and cars. Clocks and hardware goods he dropped altogether. His main business in these opening years of the century lay in hiring, selling, and repairing various models of pneumatic-tyred push cycles.

A period of social and economic change, a ‘transition era' from the old self-sufficiency of the croft in work and thought and Gaelic culture to – this world of today, itself vastly unstable and heading perhaps for future wars on a gigantic scale.

All that as the background – or foreground – affecting individual action and reaction. For he must never forget again that what was important in social change was the effect on the individual.

That was one of the lessons it took him longest to learn. In youth one is taken up with parties, movements, causes, with vast idealisations of social change. Not that one ever used the soft word ideal. Truth, rather; objective truth. One does not cure oneself: one cures the whole world. One's neighbours are miserable narrow-minded people who do not understand objective truth. Beyond them, beyond oneself, is the vast curative pool which can be scientifically
stirred for the lasting good of a blind humanity. The thrill is immense. like the spectator's thrill in an international football match. One gives of one's best. Everything is outward towards mass movement, mass change.

Against this ideal out-thrust stands ‘the reactionary'. As William Bulbreac stood against him when he had called the Pentateuch a Jewish tribal story, in parts self-contradictory and in other parts foul. It did not matter what sort of real person David was or Solomon or Moses or Bathsheba. Did not matter to either of them. What sort of person William Bulbreac was or himself did not matter. Nothing mattered but the ideal fight. With the mood of contest properly worked up, they were prepared to indulge in cruelty on a fabulous scale, to measure out destruction and death till one or the other– and so till half the world – was destroyed or slain.

Tina, Alec, Big Ann, Norman, his mother– what did such simple country folk signify in this fight? Nothing; almost less than nothing, as if they lived on a kind of sufferance, in a backwash that only retarded the great ‘movement'. Let them be scorched with the earth, as the two opposing movements, locked in the death grapple, swept hither and thither. The ‘ideals' involved so transcended them that their human sacrifice in circumstances of hellish barbarity was their privilege and only possible offering to society!

So he came back to the individual, and as the only individual he would ever have a chance of knowing was himself, he drifted from his preoccupations with socialism and freethought into a tentative reading of philosophy. For manifestly each individual was born by himself, lived by himself, and died by himself. There was no getting past that. That was central. All the rest was added to it, was superstructure.

Meantime in these early years of the century his little business, particularly on the repair side, demanded a lot of his time. Niggling affairs like punctures and broken spokes were always awaiting his attention. In 1909 Tina's
husband died and her eldest child, Henry, left school at the age of fourteen.