The Red Door (64 page)

One night the village was roused by a quarrel between the old man and his wife. At the end of it he went back into the house, took out a big bag of clothes and set off in the moonlight shouting
that he was going away to live by himself and be a hermit since it was now clear to him that it was possible to live like that. It is true that he did go away for a little while but he eventually
came back. He joked that he had missed his tobacco but everyone knew that he had suffered a defeat. Everyone also knew that he had been staying in an old barn, the owner of which had diplomatically
ignored him, and that the real reason why he had gone back was that the roof of the barn let the rain in. It was noticed that he still gazed wistfully towards the hermit’s hut but he made no
more attempts to speak to the hermit. He would simply regard him with wonder and fear. That was the first thing that happened.

The second thing that happened concerned our schoolmaster. Our schoolmaster was a large bald man who believed that every word that he uttered ought to be listened to with the greatest respect.
It didn’t matter what one talked about, he was sure to talk about it at greater length. For instance if one talked about fishing then he would carry on a long discussion about surface fish
and ground fish and confuse everyone with his learning. If one talked about farming then it seemed that he knew all about that too, and he would tell us how mechanical inventions had changed
farming in the eighteenth century. If one talked politics then he was in his element. He was indeed a very vain man.

Naturally he used to talk about the hermit for he himself was very gregarious. He would say, ‘It is quite unnatural for a man to live like that. He must have some secret. Perhaps he is
working on a scientific process which keeps him occupied during the winter nights. Perhaps he reads a great deal. Or perhaps he is a writer.’ But in fact there was never any sign that he did
any writing, even of letters, for the postman never called at his hut. The schoolmaster would pound the table and say, ‘No man can live on his own like that without some secret, something to
occupy his mind.’ And he would grow very heated, almost as if it was a matter which required his personal investigation. His bald head would shine with sweat and he would shout at us though
none of us ever contradicted him since we all wanted to lead quiet lives. But his weakness was that he had forgotten that after all he was only a schoolmaster in a very small school and that in the
world outside there were many people who were cleverer than him.

One night after drinking some whisky he said that he himself would go and find out what the hermit was doing. We tried to dissuade him, for since he was a schoolmaster he would get into serious
trouble if the hermit caught him, but he said that all he wanted to do was look in the window, and anyway that he had been in the war and had been on many missions more difficult than this. As a
matter of fact we all knew that he had been in the Education Corps and was unlikely to have taken part in any jungle warfare as Hugh Maclean – who was much quieter – had done. In any
case staggering slightly he went off into the night. When he returned two hours later he was at first unusually silent. When we asked him what he had seen through the window he said in a tone of
amazement that the hermit had just been sitting in a chair neither reading nor writing nor doing anything at all, except perhaps thinking. He kept muttering over and over, ‘It’s
impossible. It’s impossible. The man was just sitting there, and he seemed quite happy.’ He emphasised the last sentence very clearly and seemed totally astonished when he said it. Ever
since that night he became much quieter as if he had been stunned by some vision of a world that he did not know existed. Now and again when there were a few of us together he would suddenly burst
out, ‘I wonder if that hermit is sitting there on that chair,’ and he would walk up and down the room in an agitated manner.

The last incident I am going to relate happened as follows. A bachelor whom we knew and who up until this time I speak of had been very gregarious, and who attended local football matches etc.,
though he had a wooden leg, suddenly at about the age of fifty decided that he would also withdraw from society as the hermit had done. He stayed in his house without hardly ever coming out except
that he would go to the village shop but when he did he wouldn’t speak to any of the villagers. He would no longer attend any of the social events that occurred and wouldn’t help with
the peat cutting as he had done in the past. If anyone knocked at the house he would ignore him, so that eventually people ceased to visit him altogether. He neglected his dress and looked ragged
and dirty. He grew a straggly beard which didn’t suit him since he had always been neat and elegant before. He stopped the daily papers (which arrived a day late anyway). He ceased to write
or receive letters. He no longer painted his house and allowed it to go to rack and ruin. He became unpleasant to the children and was disliked by all.

One day after a year or so of this existence he came screaming out of the house and began to take off his clothes in full sight of the villagers. Shouting obscenities, he threw furniture out of
his house. We knew then that he had become touched and he was in fact taken to the asylum. As he sat in the ambulance he kept saying, ‘It is impossible to live like that. It is impossible to
live like that.’

Now whether the hermit found out about this, or whether for some other reason, he decided to leave the village. One morning we woke up and there was no smoke coming from the chimney of the hut.
The door too was wide open as if he was inviting people to see that he had gone. As he took the bicycle, he must simply have travelled in the clothes that he was always wearing. The one chair and
table were left behind: so also was the stove on which he had cooked. No one knew where he went to. No one knew anything about him. But after he had gone it was as if a great weight had been lifted
from the shoulders of the villagers and they walked about and talked more cheerfully than in the past. No one speculated about him or wondered where he had gone. In fact no one ever talked about
him after that except that the schoolmaster would as before suddenly rise from the table saying, ‘I wonder what the hermit is doing now.’ But no one answered him, for we had come to
recognise that the hermit had been an unhealthy influence. We had come to understand, as I have said already, that the very fact of his existence was a disturbance to the village even though he
never talked to us, in fact, precisely because he never talked to us. We succeeded in blotting him out of our minds and he ceased to become a challenge to us. Some time later we even pulled down
his tin hut so that no one would have any memory of his existence, though the shape of the hut still remains in the earth to this day. Some time, however, the grass will grow over it completely and
we won’t remember anything at all about him, thank God.

There is a fable I should like to relate to you about the village. Once upon a time there was a man who lived in it, whose name was . . . In actual fact his name doesn’t
matter, since names tell one so little about people nowadays. This man had suffered a great deal in our village. He had first of all lost his land to an older brother who had turned up from America
after having been given up for dead decades before. That was the first thing that happened to him. The second thing – excluding the awful routine common accidents and terrors of the day
– was that he married badly. He married a woman who had a mind like a termite, nibbling all day and all night at the furniture of the world so that it came to look scarred and ghostly and
ugly. In her later years she grew slatternly and gross: she had already been a devoted huntress of dust and a nag. Finally she took to her bed, though no one believed that there was anything wrong
with her. In fact, however, there was, for punctuating her shrill complaints was the erratic tick of her heart which was like the termite she had put into the furniture, now vague and ghostly. For
many years he stayed with her till her lips turned blue and she died. Her last words were that he would regret her death.

He remained reasonably composed after her death and dealt with the burying in a calm manner. Five days after her death he packed a case and early in the morning left the house. He looked free
and joyful for the first time in many years, though one presumes that at some time in his early youth he must have been free and joyful too. He walked along the road that summer morning (the grass
wet with dew on both margins of it) till he came to the cross roads. From this cross roads four other roads wound their way to different possible destinations. He walked down one of them, swinging
his case gaily, and after a while came back. Then he walked down a second one, slightly less gaily, and turned back. He walked down the third one, more slowly, and turned back. For a long time he
waited, sitting on his case, listening to the twitter of the birds and the sound of the streams on that May morning, before setting out again. Then he walked down the fourth road. But after an hour
or so he came back. Finally he sat down on his case, his head on his hands, and that was how they found him. When they raised his head they found that the eyes had no expression in them at all and
he stared dully at all of them as if he didn’t recognise them.

They locked him up in an asylum and because he could not bear to be parted from his case they let him have it. Now and again he will set off with it on a journey to the centre of the room or
round the walls but always he will come back to the centre and sit down on the case. They haven’t even bothered to remove the clothes from it though they did in fact take away the razor which
was a cut-throat one and which, of course, he is never allowed to use now.

In our village there lived an old man who had a white beard and the apparent peace and tranquillity of a character out of the Bible. He stayed by himself and as far as one
could tell never read books or did physical work. Over the years he had been accepted as the wisest man in the village, though no one quite knew how old he was or even much about his past. People
used to take their problems to him and if he solved them, as he nearly always did one way or another, they would bring him gifts such as crowdie or butter or fish or meat. In fact, I think that he
lived entirely off these presents. He didn’t seem at all concerned with material things and unlike the rest of the villagers did nothing to improve his house which was simple, unpretentious,
and always clean. His solutions to problems were often surprising and I often felt that behind his serene look there lay a joker who contrived to create interesting situations out of sheer
high-spirited devilment. At other times his solutions had an interesting severity and rigour and contained an element of the unexpected. For instance . . .

There was another village beside ours. Our principal source of fuel was peat which was cut in the spring and stacked later. These peat banks were situated on the boundaries between the villages
and the other village often claimed that by cutting peats we were in fact invading their territory. Sometimes for one reason or another there were quarrels between the villages and the men of the
other village would wage a war of nerves saying that they wouldn’t allow us to have any peat. In actual fact, I think that the other village was right in its claims and that all the peat
banks did belong legally to them though the case was never judged.

One particular spring there was a lot of rancour and it looked as if there might be a physical battle. The men in our village who had a sense of responsibility were worried as the people in the
other village were threatening that they would come out in strength to defend their peat banks to the death, and use force if necessary. Naturally in this situation it was decided that we should go
and consult the Old Man who would advise us, as we knew that he had a trick of turning a problem over on itself so that it sparkled with a novel solution. So a group of us went to see him. He
listened to us for a long time as we explained what he already knew, that without peat the village would be in extreme difficulty in the winter when the cold weather came. On the other hand we did
not want to pay money to the people of the other village for the peat, as that would create a precedent, and suggest that they were wholly in the right. Also we didn’t want any violence which
might be repeated every year if it happened once. We put our arguments at great length for we were really worried.

There was with us at the meeting a little man called Tommy who was slightly touched in the head and who suffered intensely from the cold. Even on the hottest days he would sit by the fire and we
knew that he would suffer the most of all. He lived with his sister in a dirty house in apparent harmony for his sister was more sensible than he was, though she has a habit of wearing
fishermen’s jerseys. During the meeting Tommy kept muttering, shrugging his shoulders as he did so (for this was a nervous habit that he had), ‘What will I do? What will I do? I will
die of the cold.’ Though we suspected that what he was saying was the truth we also found him funny and there were smiles on the grave faces round the room.

After a while the Old Man said, ‘When two forces which are both aggressive meet each other there is only one thing that can solve the problem without bloodshed.’ He looked at us as
if he wondered whether we ourselves had seen the solution but all of us gazed at him with blank faces. Eventually he said, ‘That thing is the comic. What you must do is make the other side
laugh.’

We stared at each other in amazement till one of us said, ‘How can we do that? We don’t feel like laughing.’

‘I will tell you,’ said the Old Man, ‘what you must do. As the two groups approach each other, you from one side and the people from the other village on the other side, and as
you threaten each other and appear very frightening, and as you may even be carrying weapons, what you will do is this. You will instruct Tommy here to remove his trousers in full view of all. The
other side will be so flummoxed by this comic answer to their threats and will grow so confused that first they will not know what to do (since who would attack a man without trousers?), then they
will burst into laughter for, as anyone can see, Tommy has particularly knobbly knees and one can see from the clothes line that his sister puts out that he wears very long woollen drawers with
patches on them. That’s my answer to the problem. You will have to persuade Tommy to do this yourselves.’