The Serpent (6 page)

His mother's voice had a curious effect upon him. He could hear it beside him, close upon his right ear, isolated from, while merging into, the great surge. Sometimes it gave him a twinge of discomfort, so queer the sound she made, a drawn-out
hee
sound behind her nostrils, pushing upward against the limit of utterance, almost an animal sound that was yet a tribal sound, going back into primeval time, before song as an individual, cultivated art emerged. It would have been ludicrous, but for a strange ultimate power in it; and even while outwardly it repelled him, so that he would not have liked anyone, listening, to have heard her, yet here, where her voice was lost, except to his ear, in the community of singing, it discovered in him, beneath his superficial reactions, a deeper movement of intimacy, of fondness, towards her, and discovered at the same time within him a sensation of far-reaching tolerance that had an element of lightness in it, of personal freedom, pleasant as a bright memory in an outside world, in a distant place.

The minister was a tall, straight man, with a natural grace of movement, strong yet finely cut features and a grey spade-beard, an aristocratic-looking man who, at sixty, seemed to have come into his full vigour, his final assurance. There was no longer any need for him to prepare his sermon with care. He could repeat what he had just said, with inflections, with variations, leaning back from the great open Bible; he could repeat it again as he came forward, his eyes glowing, and, gathering God's judgement upon the biblical man who was a fool, thump the pulpit, nailing the fool and his folly there for all to see. And even then he could lean back and begin again lightly, Yes, the man was a fool; oh yes, the man was a fool, a very great fool …

His sermon lasted for an hour and a half, so there was no hurry. And though he started from a given text and proceeded from a firstly to a sixthly, there was no compelling evidence of logical cohesion in the whole, not for the wearied bodies listening to him, but there was – what was far more compelling for them – an air of authority in
the man himself. He was not the mere spiritual pastor, he was the patriarchal leader, the man who went before them, through the land of desert and plague, through tribulation and sorrow, toward the promised land.

In a sudden revealing moment Tom realized that here was, in very truth, the living idol of the tribe. Had any suspicion of his own backsliding ever touched him, this revelation freed him from it. In the minister's favourite phrase, it ‘encompassed him about'.

In the manse pew sat the minister's housekeeper and his only son, a very good-looking youth, a year younger than Tom. Tom remembered him quite well at school, a clever boy, but mischievous, as if his freedom from the strict confines of the manse drove him beyond the normal boy's bounds. He seemed to have no conscience about harrying a bird's nest or doing cruel things to frogs and bees. Yet he could do it and laugh, not in a cruel so much as an interested and absorbed fashion. And occasionally he could be cheeky, flashing his brown eyes at an older boy in a mocking way. He had the gift of saying a piercing thing even then. His mother had died when he was three, and over the housekeeper he had developed an early and varied tyranny. She was now sixty-five, with one or two tufts of brown-gleaming hair on moles on her withered face, but still with the old-fashioned grace of manner that distinguished the lady of social position.

Now as he sat there in the manse pew, Donald Munro, who had spent a year at college, where he was studying for the Church, seemed far removed, with his young man's distinguished bearing and good looks, from the cheeky eye-flashing schoolboy, as he seemed far removed from Tom himself and the other youths of the congregation. Certainly Tom could have had no faintest premonition, in those early days of his return home, of the emotions that were yet to move him to the cold, deliberately conceived plan of destroying Donald. As near pure evil it had been, evil from which the last emotion is abstracted, as, surely, it is possible for man to reach on earth.

With the nights drawing in and the weather variable and often stormy, Tom had to spend more and more his
evenings at home. He had taken some books back with him from Glasgow, but in the quiet of the lamplight, with his father in bed and his mother's knitting needles clicking away to themselves, he could not produce them, for his father would ask what they were, ask to see them; not even his books on socialism, for the word socialism was then a synonym for atheism.

For the most part his father lay quietly in his bed, his arms over the coverlet, staring before him; and though Tom, reading in some old weekly periodical, or mending a domestic vessel or implement, or glueing together a simple picture frame for a merchant's flamboyant calendar, could forget about him, yet he could not forget where he was, any more than he could forget where he was when in church. Sometimes this quietude had a curious seductive influence, and when at bedtime he got up and went through into the parlour where his own bed was, he was already like one in a state of dream, like one who had taken a mild narcotic and heard the outside world of wind and rain beat upon the walls and pass away, pass away, its own sounds whimpering softly as they left.

If his father read at all now in the late evening, it was out of the Bible. And one night, just before bedtime, he said, ‘I will read you a chapter. It is in the Gospel according to St. Matthew.'

His father always ‘took the books' on a Sabbath night, but not on a weekday night, though many held this family service every night. When he had finished reading the chapter, he turned over the leaves of the big Bible and read three verses of a psalm. Then he looked at his wife.

She led the singing, and Tom muttered the words in his throat, muffling and muting them, singing like one who could not sing, rebellion stirring vaguely in his heart at being thus pushed too far. On his bed in the parlour, he sat like one who had taken part in a final and fatal rite, and the night outside passed away, passed away to the hills, in a sadness, seductive and without end.

From Glasgow, in addition to a few books – two of them presents from Dougal – he had brought home with him his
own tools, and one of the new blowlamps. After his talk with Dougal, he had realised that he might have to stay at home a long time, and out of the workshop Dougal had given him lots of odds and ends. ‘They may come in handy,' said Dougal. ‘At the last Fair holiday, I called on an old friend of mine in the country. He's the sort of man that can put his hand to anything and he was making quite a good living out of a little repair shop. He sold things, too; ironmongery stuff. And that year he had taken on the safety bicycle. He had two second-hand ones for learners. Threepence the half-hour he was charging. He was doing well.'

Something in his tone had struck Tom and he had asked, ‘Would you like to go to the country yourself?'

Dougal had not spoken for a moment, then a characteristic dark glow had come into his eyes, and, turning away, he had said, ‘No. I would not care to live in the country myself.'

Something enigmatic in Dougal's attitude at that moment now seemed clear to Tom. He knew why Dougal would not care to live in a country place; he knew it suddenly and certainly.

But Tom had his tools, though so far he had not had the heart to do much with them.

One night he returned late. His parents were in bed and the door on the latch. In the morning his mother asked him where he had been, and he answered that he had been to a certain house on the Heights as he had promised to oil a clock there.

And now the curious thing was that though he had borne the evenings at home with a certain kind of pleasure, yet when he was outside and on the point of returning, he found himself in the grip of an overwhelming reluctance to enter the house until his parents had retired. More than once he leaned against a sheltering wall, looking into the hurrying dark night, danced softly on his toes to keep himself warm, waiting for the light to go out. When he heard his mother's voice, its queer compressed nasal sound, singing far away in a still cavern of the night, he would hearken, the smile fixed on his face, and look around upon the night, in a momentary cunning glee, and feel himself withdrawn and
invulnerable, friend of the eddies that whirled invisibly by, and of the darkness up in the mountains.

One sleety cold day, while in the barn by himself, reluctant to go in to the warm fire and his father's pale bearded face against the pillow, he suddenly had the idea that he would rig himself up a wooden bench, with racks pinned to the wall behind for his tools. There was no slightest chance of his getting away now before the crops were put down in the spring, and unless he were going to give in to the kitchen life altogether, he had better get something to do inside four walls. There was not much room in the barn, but by erecting a couple of rough wooden partitions, which would permit of animal feed being piled up, he would manage.

When his mother came out to see what was keeping him in the cold, he explained his plan. ‘Why should we go to the joiner to get a new door in the cart if I could do it myself? Or to the blacksmith for many a thing, like sharpening a coulter, when I could do it just as well. It would be a pity if I forgot my trade altogether.'

He spoke indifferently, not looking at her, and was surprised at the readiness with which she fell in with his plan. He would need a little money to buy wood and nails and a few bits of metal, he said, but he could buy them cheaply in the town when he went to cart the coal to the schoolhouse.

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘You could surely have all the carting money for that, at least. And it would be something for you to do, in the winter days.'

‘Yes, I would like to have something to do.'

As if a hidden sadness had come from his voice, she asked, ‘You're not taking long for Glasgow, are you?'

‘No, not particularly. Only I would like to have something to do.'

She stood quite silent, further personal words beyond her. ‘I'll go and see him this minute.' And she set off, the concentration of purpose in her whole body.

That had been another rare period in his life, perhaps because it had been one of sheer creation, of making something to his own design to fulfil a purpose that was
part of his being. Perhaps, too, the absence of all outside compulsion, particularly the compulsion of time, helped to give the undertaking an air of freedom, of choice, and this freedom may again have been enhanced by contrast with the cold miry fields and that warm dazing quietude of the kitchen. He had escaped into his own place, into himself, and in no time life came all alive in his hands. And alive in his lips that whistled a few soft hissing notes of no particular tune as he turned a shaft of timber this way and that, and eyed its possibilities, and saw the completed article before it was fashioned. The journey to the town was no drudgery, it was an adventure. He saw things on the way, observed them with the humour of the watcher's eye, and when it came to bargaining for timber and nails and iron in the backyards of contractors' premises, he was the working craftsman himself, the son who had come back from Glasgow to help his father, a happy, easy-going lad able to talk of Glasgow prices among other things, one of the workers themselves who could fairly ask for wholesale rates, and when it came to some piece of all but discarded junk – ‘och, shove that on your cart'.

For the first time since returning from Glasgow he knew a genuine happiness, and when his thoughts now wandered freely back to his life in that great city he could recall individuals like Dougal and Bob and Tim with a certain air of amused surmise. What was happening to them now? Was Dougal introducing some raw youth to Huxley? He took a couple of books from the tin trunk under his bed and slipped them into his tool box.

Apart from feeding and cleaning animals, and an occasional day or two on the hand threshing-mill, there is not much to do on a croft in the winter season. Hanging about a small house in dirty weather is a tiresome business for a young man, and when it got known – as it quickly did – that Tom had a workshop, where one could talk and laugh while the rain pelted or the snow whirled, any or no excuse was good enough for those who had helped him with the harvest to slip away from home to visit Tom at his work.

A visit to the joiner's shop or the blacksmith's was not the same at all, for there real work went on under the eye
of a master. But here at Tom's work was like play. One could handle a tool, test a fine edge, hold a board for Tom, become absorbed in punching a hole neatly, or even pump the hissing blowlamp. By the time a fellow took it upon himself to pump the blowlamp, he was getting on! Tom's assistants were of the kind who were secretly proud to be asked to do anything.

Then one of the lads from the Heights, Jimmy Macdonald, a pleasant brown-faced youth of about Tom's age, told a story of how his father, chasing a rat, had kicked a leg from under the dresser and torn away the whole of one side. His mother was in an awful state, but his father, who had missed the rat, said the wood was rotten. ‘And was it?' asked Tom, looking at Jimmy. And Jimmy replied, glancing away, ‘It was, a bit. But I don't know.' ‘I must have a look at it sometime.' ‘Well, if – if you were up that way …'

Tom spent two whole afternoons and evenings at the job, for much of the wood was worm-eaten. The second evening a few neighbours came in, including one or two girls, and there was considerable merriment and a song or two. Jimmy's mother took Tom, when the job was finished, into the ben-end or parlour. Tom felt reluctant to charge anything, but at last said he would take the cost of the wood, which was two shillings. She insisted on his taking four. A new dresser would have cost her nearly as many pounds, she said, and she was ashamed giving so little.

It was the first of small commissions of every kind among the poor crofting folk, who knew the price of things very well, and when they had saved a shilling or two by Tom's labour the money thus saved was more precious than a gift, and all the more because they knew Tom was satisfied. With his blowlamp and soldering bolt he went amongst them like a wizard. He straightened rods of iron with a nicety that brought a gleam of wonder into the eyes of old men who had never seen the hissing blue flame of a blowlamp and kept well clear of it in case it burst.