The Serpent (7 page)

In this way his absences from the evening service of praise increased. His father never said anything to him directly, but his manner seemed to grow more distant, more enigmatic in a grave way. Tom knew that his mother
made excuses for him and perhaps exaggerated the number of shillings he gave her once or twice. Possibly she overdid this and touched in her husband not exactly a note of jealousy but some queer mood that got mixed up with his own physical weakness and those staring periods of meditation or vacancy. Sometimes a ghostliness of silence walked with him, or stood in his body and face like a presence.

One afternoon he came into the barn, and though it is the way of country folk, even of the young, to refer to an invalid's health, yet none of the lads expressed the hope that he was keeping well. He spoke to one or two of them and inquired after their parents, and they answered him with the constrained politeness they would have shown to the minister. There was a difficult silence and the old man went slowly out.

Then one dull cold evening Andie brought an old brazier he had picked up somewhere; thereafter darkness came into the barn to find their country faces brown and glistening in the glow of the fire.

The barn cut them off even from their own home world. Here they were completely freed; their bodies uncoiled, warmed and full of expectant pleasure, amid the smell of the straw and the wood, the shavings and the shadows. Their minds grew light and quick as ferrets, quick as their own glancing eyes. A ribald country story by Andie had the very smell about it of the natural functions. Laughter was a sheer joy. Nothing was ugly when you understood it. It just made you laugh, often helplessly, for once the mood of happiness was induced, it was extraordinary how even a facial expression, a monosyllable, was enough to set you off. You knew what was coming!

In this atmosphere the slowest country mind grew unusually alert, and when discussion started on the beginnings of the world, on evolution, on God and Devil, every phrase used, every new thought produced by Tom, scored an impression with the sharp definition of a graving tool.

One day, in the dead of winter, his father looked at him
with his grave stare, and in that moment, before his father opened his mouth, Tom knew that gossip about atheism had at last reached his father's ears. He felt the blood drain away from his heart.

The Philosopher got up and went slowly on, for that look on his father's face, graver than death, could wither all things.

But only for the instant it took the eyes to focus on the sunny world. Then the face faded out, a ghost face conjured up in a daylight stare, and where it had been were the bushes, the soft grass, a warbler singing sleepily. Round the shoulder of the hill he heard the shepherd whistle his dog, heard the cry that had already sent the dog on a swift out-flanking race.

Life was a happy thought, wherever it came out of! And death's face intensified its beauty, its vivid loveliness.

What an amount of time he had wasted, so studiously, trying to find out the meaning of life!

He smiled like one who had found not a meaning but a secret. Thus to move slowly, under the sun of a temperate land, owing no allegiance, owning nothing now, was a great pleasure. One had to travel a long road, perhaps, before disinterestedness came so lightly about the feet, passing from the briars to the nostrils in an idle eddy of wind, from a warm throat to juniper bushes showing their green berries, bitter flavoured, like an essence of pine forests.

His wandering glance rested on a rabbit crouching in its shallow bed under the roots of a juniper. Its brown eyes looked back at him, hardly four paces away. The head was low, the ears flattened, the after part of the body a gathered hump. Its stillness was an arrestment of all motion. He could feel its living warmth. How clean the fur, how full of light the dark brown eye! The fear in its body gave it the tension of a compressed spring. Communication passed between them, an alert subtle intermingling at the
core of the heart's beat. It could not be held long, and quietly he stepped away, so that there need be no hurry and scurry in this world, and came, before he knew it, into a narrow alleyway of close-cropped grass winding between juniper bushes whose lower limbs were grey with lichen. At once, as though he had been climbing strongly, his breath quickened and a dizzying shadow passed before his eyes. His mind quickened, and the orgy of sex and of the earth that had overwhelmed him here long ago touched his body so that it momentarily weakened into the living effluence from that past scene. Then, looking up, he saw the goat.

The long, narrow, dark pupils in the pale yellow eyes, the air of indifference that was yet watchful, the slanting, measuring look of the antique world …

Inevitably the lads had thought of the goat and of no other beast on that desperate ploy. They had hidden while the girls had gone secretly by ones and twos to the thatched cottage by the pine wood at the far-out end of the crofts on the Heights of Taruv.

It was Halloween, when the rein is withdrawn from the hallowed and licence takes the bit in its teeth. Horses were removed from stables, carts run down hills, turnips heaved down chimneys, wheels sent hurtling, the painfully gathered gear of civilisation broken up and cast away in the night by youth reverting in wild glee to primeval freedom.

But the girls did not break up civilisation. While the old stored and locked what they could, the girls secretly gathered at the house of Margad, whom some called a spae-wife and others a witch, in order to have their fortunes told. Each carried two fresh eggs. One of these Margad broke and from the convolutions of the white in a glass she read the girl's future. The second egg was a gift, and as Margad retained the broken egg as well, she had payment for her labours in kind. But this was the ancient custom, and the girls had their own excitement.

That it was an extreme excitement there could be no doubt, for Margad had her mysterious procedures, knowing well out of the experience of her grey-haired years and out of the vast and cunning lore of tradition what sat nearest the
heart of a girl on Halloween. The window was blinded, the peats heaped on the hearth until their slow yellow flames sent heads and arms to fantastic dancing on the walls. That the gathering, in the eyes of the church and its elders, was unlawful and unholy came at the very core of the girls' excitement, for though they would not disrupt material possessions on which the home was founded, they were ready enough to disrupt all schemes of damnation reared by male elders who fulminated against the evils of the body that conceived in sin.

The two ways of looking at things! And there was never any doubt about the difference between man and woman in that old world.

Margad made them give promises that never would they divulge what they learned from her. The promise took the form of a rite, and by the time the first egg was broken, the girls were all vivid expectancy, brimming with the spirit of wild merriment.

It was then that the lads of the Heights, who had seen one or two of the girls stealing towards Margad's got together and decided that instead of removing old Donald Davie's harrows, as they were on the point of doing, and setting them teeth inwards against Duncan Donald's door (a crabbit old devil), they would invade Margad's and, by breaking up the unlawful gathering, join orgy to orgy in one wild splore.

Heaven knows who was the originator of the thought, but Jimmy Macdonald and Donnie Mackenzie were the leaders and Tom was in Jimmy's company for the night's fun.

So off they set. They approached the door warily, with many whispered consultations and the mounting wildness that only the thought of girls could give. But when finally they rushed the door they found Margad one too many for them: the door was solidly barred.

Foiled now, they started taunting those inside. But not in their own voices. They disguised their voices, and produced accents and weird sounds that rolled them off the wall, doubled up like animals. As their madness mounted they swore that they would not be foiled. Nothing would foil them. If the door wasn't opened at once, they would break it down. ‘Open the door, ye old witch, or we'll smash it in!'

They thundered at the door. They threatened to push in the window. Then a voice, rumbling and raucous: ‘T'hell, let us smoke them out!'

Broad divots they tore off Margad's potato-pit, and soon a lad was climbing over shoulders and up the gable-end. It was a wide chimney, a great hole in the roof, through which folk inside could see the moon of a night when they wanted to get some idea of the time. With the help of a wooden batten, the divots were supported, and the chimney choked.

Then it was that Kraak, the cripple, had his moment of inspiration.

No-one questioned it. It was too utterly apt to be questioned. Three of them would go to Taruv farm, bring back the goat, and drop it down the chimney. With soot and a rumbling sound it would appear before them in the flames of the fire; it would appear before them as the very Devil they worshipped!

The lads set off.

They kept a goat on Taruv then, as they kept a goat today, in order to ensure fertility and successful birth among the farm stock. No-one knew how ancient the tradition was; and today – well, the goat just happened to be among the sheep, standing between juniper bushes, with the long narrow pupils in the pale yellow eyes and that air of indifference which seemed privy to much hidden not so very deep in the human mind.

Back the three lads brought the goat, and now began that weird abracadabra of preparing the minds inside to receive their Satanic master. Only afterwards did the lads learn of the steady heightening of tension and of the awful scene that presently took place in the blue infernal smoke-gloom of Margad's den.

For the lads were at last riding the whirlwind of their mad spirits. The fight on the roof with the goat, its devilish yell, the scrabbling and scrambling and choked voices.

Heavens, it was an infernal thing to do!

Down through the hole came the goat and landed four-footed in the fire. Its hair went up in a singeing lowe and with a leap the demented brute was among the women.

The girls lost all reason. Two of them fainted. Their screams had a high horror beyond anything that could be imagined. Scream upon scream, abject and sickening, so that the knees of the lads went weak and their stomachs flat.

It was the moment for escape in the anonymous secrecy that was Halloween's rite. But the lads stood rooted, until Jimmy cried ‘My God!' and made for the door. He heaved his full weight at it, yelling at the same time to be let in. When the door suddenly opened, he went headlong into Margad's bosom.

The girls burst out, screaming still, and started running, like demented deer, and from amongst them, with an acrid singeing smell, the springing goat, like a four-footed devil.

The lads made after the girls, and here and there a lad knew a girl's voice, and here and there by ditchside and dike, he held on to her, crying his own name.

The same instinct moved all the lads, as the instinct of escape moved all the girls. Tom made after a girl who had turned for the down slope of the hill and the village. She went like a hind, her head up, screaming as she went. There was more than half a moon in a sky of broken cloud and the sight of her there in front of him, fleeing the horror behind, brought his manhood full upon him. He made up on her swiftly, but the beat of his feet and his crying voice only increased her terror, and, as he was stretching out a hand to grip her, she stumbled and fell, with a wild screech, whereupon, unable to check himself, he kicked into her back and went headlong over her body.

He was on his feet again in a moment, but already she was scrambling to her knees. ‘It's all all right! It's me – Tom Mathieson from the village!' he cried, and laid his hands on her shoulders. She fought him off like a wild cat. She was full-bodied and strong. He saw she did not know what she was doing and he came to grips with her. Her strength surprised him. Her hands broke free and bashed his face. He kept telling who he was, saying it was all right, it was all right. She nearly got to her feet, but he held her, crying now in a hushed intimate voice into her face, her ear, who
he was, exerting at the same time his strength against her, until all in a moment she went slack, and lay down, and turned over, and began to vomit.

He felt sorry, he felt contrite, then. But he did not feel awkward. There came over him indeed an extraordinary competence. Normally he was shy of girls. But not at all now. Now he felt tender and contrite, and, on his knees by her side, put his right hand under her forehead, to support it, and help her with her sickness, continuing to whisper urgently at the same time that it was all right, that she would soon be all right. ‘Don't worry any more. It's all right. I'll see you home.'

She tried to move her forehead from his hand in a repelling motion. But the action was not strong. At last she was too weak to bother with him, and, turning away from where she had been sick, she lay with her face buried in the grass.

As he sat beside her, looking down on her back, he saw short spasmodic movements and wondered if she was crying. But he decided not to say any more, not to touch her, divining that what she needed was a few moments' utter rest.

He knew who she was now quite well. Janet Morrison was her name. In the class below him at school, she had been noticeable for her large dark eyes and a certain – not exactly wondering expression but something like that. For a time, at any rate, she had borne the nickname ‘Picture', because once a grown woman had been foolish enough to say, in the hearing of Janet's classmates, ‘Why, you're just like a picture!' He had heard the nickname used by one of her friends recently, however, quite naturally, and in truth fondly.

He had noticed her since coming home. No-one could help noticing her. For at twenty she was tall and good-looking. A dark country beauty, with a ready lash of colour in the cheeks. But there was something more than that, some subtle indescribable life about the eyes, in the glance, a distinction about the eyelids. The eyes could melt in shyness and yet crinkle at the same time curiously, almost assessingly, so that when the smile followed, it could
be extremely attractive. She laughed abruptly, somewhere between the roof of her mouth and the back of her throat, as if she were trying to laugh awkwardly. But she could not laugh any other way, and the sound of her own laughter often amused herself. She would stop it suddenly, glance around, and laugh again. Already there was some deep consciousness in her of her power as an attractive woman. But what made this attraction more powerful was some simple lingering element of the child mind. Very difficult to define, this, and, perhaps conscious of it, she could, in her cleverness, use it. But though it thus might be a weapon, it was not an affectation, any more than her laugh was an affectation.

So that, altogether, on any other occasion, she might have intimidated Tom. But now her very qualities deepened his solicitude. For tonight she had been brought too low for anything but the utmost care. Towards any other girl in such circumstances on such a night, he would have experienced the same desire to help, the same emotion.

Halloween, with the humped moon moving in and out dark clouds. Behind them the unlawful experience of Margad's cottage. The intense quickening of the mind, the primal fear, the shattering of the body, its awful cleansing in vomit.

Janet sat slowly up.

‘Feeling a bit better now?' Tom asked gently.

Janet looked around her and then gave a sudden shudder. ‘I'm cold,' she murmured. Her face looked death cold, her eyes pitch-black holes.

Tom, murmuring, put his arms round her, to crush warmth back into her body.

She protested.

He caught her hands. ‘You
are
cold. It was an awful thing to do. Heaven knows why we did a thing like yon. But you're all right now. I'll see you home.'

Her hands lay passive, while he crushed and fondled them. Then she withdrew her hands.

He spoke to her in an eager encouraging voice as he might speak to a child, or to a companion who had come round after being knocked out. His words seemed to have
no effect on her. Her face was dead white, and all at once he saw that she was extraordinarily beautiful, not only with a beauty of the face but also with something of the moon in the blue pool of the sky, with a fey fragile quality, the weird quality that inhibits the country beyond Halloween.