The Serpent (30 page)

After Janet's death, Tina had seemed to be scared of him. Even two or three years afterwards, if he chanced to meet her, she gave him the impression of locking her real self up behind a pale strained smile and of being anxious to make the meeting as short as possible. For a while he felt that she must hate him for something he had done, secretly hate him. Yet he could not say that this hatred showed in her face. It was rather as if she had made up her mind about him and definitely wanted to avoid him. He had been sorry about this and a little irritated, for his bitterness was easily invoked in those days. Moreover Tina was the only girl of his own age whom he could naturally talk to, and he had always liked her. In an effort one day to break down her defence and surprise her real feeling, he twitted her pointedly about George.

‘What have you against George?' she asked.

‘Against George? Nothing,' he answered in astonishment.

‘Well –' But her lips closed on whatever she had been going to say and, turning from him, she walked away in the queerest abrupt manner, almost as if she were going to be violently angry – or cry.

He very nearly ran after her.

Next year George and Tina got married and Tom felt he had been a fool. He gave them a clock, but Tina never quite came from behind her masked expression to forgive him.

Though George had a reasonable hope of a share in the business, and ultimately of running the whole business, actually when he died he had no such share, and Tina and her three children were left without any regular support. Her parents were getting on in years and she had been in the habit of helping them latterly with little gifts of food.

Henry had been one of a few boys who could hardly stay away from Tom's shop. He had plenty of self– assurance, a sound head, good hands, and, with some of his father's manner, was inclined to boss the other boys successfully.

When Tom asked him what he was going to do, now
that he had left school, Henry answered, ‘I'd like to be in a job like this.'

‘Well, what about coming in? I'll give you five shillings a week to start you.'

Henry looked at him directly and perhaps a little fearfully. ‘You don't mean it?'

‘I do.'

‘Will I start now?'

‘Perhaps you'd better go home and talk it over with your mother first.'

Henry walked up to the road, but when he thought he was out of sight of the window he took to his heels.

Henry was Tom's best business investment. If he had not Tom's persuasive way with metal or his eye for wood, he was on the other hand a far better manager and salesman. The first day Henry had the shop to himself, Tom hardly knew it when he came back. His stock of small materials had got badly mixed up, corners were becoming litter-dumps of discarded stuff, parts of which might come in useful if kept long enough, and much of the floor space was piled up with cardboard boxes.

Henry had set about cleaning up the whole place, and soon the familiar ‘I know I should have something to fit that somewhere', followed by a ten minutes' search, often fruitless, became a waste of the past. Income increased out of all relation to Henry's wage. For the really profitable business, like selling new bicycles, Henry had a natural genius, and in an uncanny way seemed to get to know youths in neighbouring parishes who were secretly dabbling with the idea of acquiring a new machine. For each such sale Tom gave him a commission of five shillings.

When the Great War broke out Henry, at nineteen, had a fixed wage of fifteen shillings a week and his commission. Tom raised it to a pound, for mechanical repairs to cars and motor cycles and sales of petrol were rapidly increasing as a result of a new ‘passing' trade.

Then Henry grew uneasy and one day said to Tom, ‘I'm thinking of joining up.'

Tom nodded.

‘I'm sorry to go. I hate to leave you alone.'

‘Can't be helped.'

Henry could not look at him. ‘How will you manage?'

‘Oh, I'll do my best.'

‘I feel it – not joining up, at my age.'

‘I understand. When were you thinking of going?'

‘Willie Grant and Duncan Ross are going tomorrow.' Henry began working again on the old bicycle chain which he was shortening by a link. He looked miserable.

‘Well,' said Tom, ‘I'll keep your place open for you, if you care to come back.'

Henry's screwdriver slipped. ‘I'll promise to come back,' he said, examining his thumb.

‘You have done very well by me here,' Tom added. ‘No-one knows what this war will bring us, but one thing is certain: it will mean a tremendous increase in motor traffic. It's not much good making any plans, but if things turn out favourably, I could offer you a share in the business when you come back.'

It was the first time Tom had ever seen Henry really moved. His skin darkened with blood and his elbows stuck out awkwardly.

In the third winter of the war his mother sickened. She was now over seventy years of age and he himself must have been over forty-five. She had not lost her stoutness as her age increased, and the doctor – a man of about his own years and son of the Dr. Manson for whom he had once ridden through the night – said after his examination: ‘I'm afraid it's just a case of the old machinery running down.' He folded his stethoscope. ‘Make her rest in bed for a day or two and I'll look in later in the week.'

Tina now began calling on his mother in the forenoon when he was at the shop, cleaning up the house, and leaving her daughter Bessie to finish the cooking of the midday meal or dinner. Bessie was fifteen, dark, serious-faced, shy, and anxious to do her best. At first Tom thought she did not like to be with his mother, as if old age and ill health frightened her. But she responded to kindness in a marked way, and soon she was quite at home, leaving the house spick and
span, with nothing for Tom to do when he returned in the late afternoon or evening but boil the kettle. It was Tom's own mother who insisted that Bessie was too young a lassie to stay the whole day with a sick old woman.

Perhaps the doctor knew what was wrong with his mother: perhaps he didn't. Tom was never sure. Sometimes she said she was ashamed to be lying in bed and looked at Tom with a shame-faced expression. He answered her that that was all nonsense and that she must stay in bed until the doctor allowed her to get up. Whereupon she seemed relieved and accepted the position with a quiescence which secretly rather astonished him, for all her life had been one of action, of doing, and now that she was confined to bed he had expected her to fret.

Soon after four o'clock in the afternoon the lamp was lit and he settled in his chair by the kitchen fire for the whole evening. She lay quietly; and often for long spells, two to three hours, he would forget her. At that time he had got four volumes of the writings of David Hume, and the breadth and common sense of that philosopher's mind was an almost perpetual surprise. Every page held some sort of discovery which, after a pause for self-investigation, he acknowledged, sometimes with complete agreement, at other times with a certain doubt or reserve, but always with interest and not infrequently with delight.

The letters that passed between Hume and Rousseau held for him, the deeper he went into Hume, a remarkable fascination. Rousseau's last long letter, with its incredible suspicions and vilifications of Hume, he read several times, and though he favoured Hume, acknowledging the strong clarity of his male intellect, yet there gradually developed in him a profound sympathy for Rousseau. He had no knowledge of any other writings by Rousseau then, and looked upon that last long epistle as a manifestation, almost perverse in its innate subtlety, of the feminine mind. He felt no essential kinship to Rousseau. The relationship seemed one of extreme interest, brought about by irrational experiences he had gone through, and sometimes, in the contemplative pause of his thought, a pale reflection of Janet's face would, as it were, pass him
by. Only gradually indeed did he perceive the existence of that queer irrational world as a realm of experience all its own with even a rationale of its own, particularly where it approached in living essence the feminine mind.

In these penetrative pauses he would get glimpses of the workings of Janet's mind and body. Just as Hume's essential attitude to life, on which his principles were based, was different from Rousseau's, so was the male attitude from the feminine. He began to perceive definitions of justice, beauty, chastity, truth, not as absolutes but as masculine conceptions, often obviously related to economic conditions or to property rights (as in the case of chastity). More than once he glimpsed that pale reflection of the feminine face – it was always Janet's face – flitting by in a darkness, like the darkness of a wood, where also there were caves and solitary tall grey rocks, and each grey rock was like a door, and the feminine face appeared first at one side of it from behind and then at the other, in that darkling world, but could not enter the male clearing where Hume sat or where Tom himself watched. These grey doors were the male categories, the philosophic absolutes, the masculine rules of life.

‘What is it, Mother?' he asked once, startled out of his thought.

‘Nothing, Tom, I was just coughing.'

‘Would you like a cup of tea?'

‘No, no. Don't you bother.'

‘It's no bother.' And he got up and swung the lazily steaming kettle back over the fire.

She loved these interludes, these little picnics, and it gave him a real pleasure to attend to her. Whether the world outside was a frosty silence or a roaring wind, there was peace inside, the soft lamplight, his books, the need for his presence in his mother's illness.

Rarely did she ask what he was reading or thinking, possibly because she felt she would not understand if he told her or because his peculiar reading had caused such trouble before her husband's death, but tonight – she may have caught some interest or lively expression on his face – she asked him if he liked the books he had.

‘Yes,' he answered, after pressing the small table with the tray close against her bed. ‘They deal with philosophy – a big subject! But it's interesting, too. The author was a Scotsman, very famous in the learned world. And do you know how old he was when he wrote this great work on the Human Understanding?'

‘No?'

‘Between twenty-three and twenty-six.'

‘Dear me!' She shook her head in wonder. ‘And did it have any ill effect on his health?'

‘No.' He laughed.

‘He was so young,' she explained. ‘He must have been clever.'

‘He was, and he became a very famous man even abroad.' He went on talking about Hume because he knew his mother liked this friendliness of speech, though the personal detail of Hume's
Autobiography
was slim enough.

She listened and by way of final comment said, with a distant strangely longing look at him, ‘I wish you could have got a chance for more schooling yourself.'

‘Nonsense, Mother. I got all I needed. Are you comfortable?'

‘Yes, Tom. You're very good to me.'

‘That's fine.'

‘I enjoyed my tea. And I like to hear your voice sometimes.' There was no hidden reproach here, only explanation, a deep natural gratitude. ‘You be doing your reading now.' She hesitated. ‘You're not feeling lonely staying in here with me?'

‘The very opposite,' he assured her. ‘We haven't had such peace in the house for a long time!'

‘Very well,' she said, smiling, and her rough hands smoothed the counterpane.

He got back to his reading, but often before becoming completely absorbed in it, his mind would carry on some thought or intuition aroused by perhaps no more than an expression in his mother's eyes or a tone of her voice. Often, too, when he had read to the limit of what he could comfortably absorb for the time being, his mind would
wander inward and take up again its hidden problem or preoccupation.

And ever more clearly he began to perceive that what at one time he had denounced as instability, as cunning, as treachery, in Janet, only seemed to be so to him. To Janet her conduct would have appeared quite differently. Within her realm of actual experience these acts that to him appeared deceitful were to her a feminine manner of releasing herself from what had become to her unreal in order that she bring herself into contact with the real. And he saw now how vivid a woman's apprehension of the real was. A man could cloud his apprehension with all sorts of rules, categories, principles, theories. Not so a woman. She saw what she wanted, the inner kernel, the thing-in-itself, and went, by some law of her feminine being, unerringly for that. When she did this lightly, without appearing to care in the least for her ‘deceit', man called her a wanton.

True tragedy began for her when her desire to lay hold of the real was defeated.

But though he worked this out through ethical and other realms until it assumed at last a realisable pattern, he was not then freed from his own particular problem. For now a terrible thing took place in his thought.

Janet's love for Donald having been to her the true reality, an absolute, he, Tom, was forever shut out from that central citadel of her spirit. The curious thing was that this should affect him with a feeling of eternal desolation, though he himself professed not to believe in personal immortality. In these quiet hours, this sense of eternal desolation could become very acute. Not only consciousness but matter itself became a bleakness extending to infinity in time. Death would not end or mend it. Death was but an incident on the way. What had been, had been – and would for evermore be.

And cleansed by this bleakness, he saw how right Janet had been, how true her life instinct to nature, to the phenomenal world, the stars, the dialectic of rhythm and change, all the processes that together make up the sum total of what we know and guess at. And this vision came back upon him with a still deeper sense of loss, of
bleakness, and, because he could not get beyond himself, of bitterness.