by Alan Warner
I went over to the house next door and talked to Big Donald who as usual was wearing a blue jersey. He told me, ‘There’s no doubt of it. There will be a war in a day or two. No doubt of it,’ he said, spitting into the fire. The globs of tobacco spit sizzled for a moment and then died. ‘No doubt of it,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see this village bare.’
‘Thank God I don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘But if I had been younger . . . ’ and he made a sign as if he were cutting someone’s throat with a knife. ‘The Boche,’ he said, ‘were all right. But I didn’t like the Frenchies. You couldn’t trust a Frenchie. The Boche were good soldiers.’ And he sighed heavily. ‘Sometimes,’ he added, ‘we called him Fritz. But there’s no doubt. We’ll be at war in two or three days.’
I left him and stood at the door of our house before going in. I felt that something strange was about to happen, as if some disturbance was about to take place. Another plane crossed the sky and I stared up at it. It looked free and glittering in the sky, a quaint insect that buzzed up there by itself.
‘Why aren’t you coming in?’ said my mother.
‘I’m coming,’ I shouted back, and as I shouted a dog barked.
I felt obscurely that the village would never be the same again, and it seemed to me that the standing stones which stood out in silhouette against the sky a mile behind our house had moved in the gathering twilight, with a stony purposeful motion.
‘I’m coming,’ I shouted again.
I went in and my mother arose from the table at which she had been sitting. She suddenly looked helpless and old and I thought she had been crying. ‘Bloody Germans,’ I thought viciously.
Suddenly my mother clutched me desperately in her arms and said, ‘You’ll have to carry on with your studying just the same.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I trembled in her arms like the needle on a gauge. I was rocking in her arms like a ship in the waves. Ahead of me through the window I could see the red sun setting like a cannon ball.
The Painter
We only once had a painter in our village in all the time that I can remember. His name was William Murray and he had always been a sickly, delicate, rather beautiful boy who was the only son of a widow. Ever since he was a child he had been painting or drawing because of some secret compulsion and the villagers had always encouraged him. He used to paint scenes of the village at harvest time when we were all scything the corn, or cutting it with sickles, and there is no doubt that the canvas had a fine golden sheen with a light such as we had never seen before. At other times he would make pictures of the village in the winter when there was a lot of snow on the moor and the hills and it was climbing up the sides of the houses so that there was in the painting a calm fairytale atmosphere. He would paint our dogs – who were nearly all collies – with great fidelity to nature, and once he did a particularly faithful picture of a sheep which had been found out on the moor with its eyes eaten by a crow. He also did paintings of the children dressed in their gay flowery clothes, and once he did a strange picture of an empty sack of flour which hung in the air like a spook.
We all liked him in those days and bought some of his pictures for small sums of money since his mother was poor. We felt a certain responsibility towards him also since he was sickly, and many maintained that he wouldn’t live very long, as he was so clever. So our houses were decorated with his colourful paintings and if any stranger came to the village we always pointed to the paintings with great pride and mentioned the painter as one of our greatest assets. No other village that we knew of had a painter at all, not even an adult painter, and we had a wonderful artist who was also very young. It is true that once or twice he made us uncomfortable for he insisted on painting things as they were, and he made our village less glamorous on the whole than we would have liked it to appear. Our houses weren’t as narrow and crooked as he made them seem in his paintings, nor did our villagers look so spindly and thin. Nor was our cemetery, for instance, so confused and weird. And certainly it wasn’t in the centre of the village as he had placed it.
He was a strange boy, seeming much older than his years. He hardly ever spoke and not because there was anything wrong with him but because it seemed as if there was nothing much that he wished to say. He dressed in a very slapdash manner and often had holes in the knees of his trousers, and paint all over his blouse. He would spend days trying to paint a particular house or old wall or the head of an old woman or old man. But as we had a lot of old people in the village, some who could play musical instruments – especially the melodeon – extremely well, he didn’t stand out as a queer person. There is, however, one incident that I shall always remember.
Our village of course was not a wholly harmonious place. It had its share of barbarism and violence. Sometimes people quarrelled about land and much less often about women. Once there was a prolonged controversy about a right of way. But the incident I was talking about happened like this. There was in the village a man called Red Roderick who had got his name because of his red hair. As is often the case with men with red hair he was also a man of fiery temper, as they say. He drank a lot and would often go uptown on Saturday nights and come home roaring drunk, and march about the village singing.
He was in fact a very good strong singer but less so when he was drunk. He spent most of his time either working on his croft or weaving in his shed and had a poor thin wife given to bouts of asthma whom he regularly beat up when it suited him and when he was in a bad temper. His wife was the daughter of Big Angus who had been a famous fisherman in his youth but who had settled down to become a crofter and who was famed for his great strength though at this time he was getting old. In fact I suppose he must have been about seventy years old. His daughter’s name was Anna and during the course of most days she seemed to be baking a lot without much result. You would also find her quite often with a dripping plate and a soggy dishcloth in her hand. She had seven children all at various stages of random development and with running noses throughout both summer and winter.
It must be said that, when sober, Red Roderick was a very kind man, fond of his children and picking them up on his shoulders and showing them off to people and saying how much they weighed and how clever and strong they were, though in fact none of them was any of these things, for they were in fact skinny and underweight and tending to have blotches and spots on their faces and necks. In those moments he would say that he was content with his life and that no one had better children or better land than he had. When he was sunny-tempered he was the life and soul of the village and up to all sorts of mischief, singing songs happily in a very loud and melodious voice which revealed great depth of feeling. That was why it seemed so strange when he got drunk. His whole character would change and he would grow violent and morose and snarl at anyone near him, especially the weakest and most inoffensive people.
One thing that we noticed was that he seemed very jealous of his father-in-law who had, as I have said, a reputation in the village for feats of strength. It was said that he had once pulled a cart loaded with peat out of a deep muddy rut many years before when he was in his prime, but now that he was ageing and wifeless he lived on more failingly from day to day, since after all what else is there to do but that?
Red Roderick in his drunken bouts would say that it was time the ‘old devil’ died so that he might inherit something through his wife, since there were no other relations alive. Red Roderick would brood about his inheritance and sometimes when he was drunk he would go past his father-in-law’s house and shout insults at him. He brooded and grew angry, the more so since his father-in-law’s land was richer than his own and better looked after, and also there were a number of sheep and cows which he coveted. I sometimes think that this must have been how things were in the days of the Old Testament, though it doesn’t mention that people in those days drank heavily unless perhaps in Sodom and Gomorrah.
His whole mind was set on his inheritance mainly because he regretted marr
ying the old man’s daughter who, in his opinion, had brought him nothing but a brood of children whom in his drunken moments he despised and punished for offences that they had never even committed. Yet, as I said, in his sunny moments there was no one as gay and popular as he was, full of fine interesting stories and inventions.
However, I am coming to my story. One day he went to town in the morning (which was unusual for him) and came home in the afternoon on the bus, very drunk indeed. This was in fact the first time he had been drunk during the day, as it were, in the village, and we all thought that this was rather ominous, especially as he began by prowling around his own house like a tiger, sending one of his children spinning with a blow to the face in full sight of the village. The trouble was that all the villagers were frightened of him since none of them was as strong as he was in those moments of madness.
After he had paced about outside his house for a while shouting and throwing things, he seemed to make up his mind and went down to the byre from which he emerged with a scythe. At first I thought – since I was his neighbour – that he was going to scythe the corn but this was not at all what was in his mind. No, he set off with the scythe in his hand towards his father-in-law’s house. I remember as he walked along that the scythe glittered in his hand as if it was made of glass. When he got to the house he shouted out to the old man that it was time he came out and fought like a man, if he was as great as people said he had been in the past. There was, apart from his voice, a great silence all over the village which drowsed in the sun as he made his challenge. The day in fact was so calm that there was an atmosphere as if one was in church, and it seemed that he was disturbing it in exactly the same way as a shouting lunatic might do who entered a church during a service.
One or two people said that someone should go for a policeman but no one in fact did. In any case looking back on it now I think that in a strange shameful way we were looking forward to the result of the challenge as if it would be a break in an endless routine. Nevertheless there was something really frightening and irresponsible about Red Roderick that day as if all the poison that seethed about his system had emerged to the surface as cloudy dregs will float upwards to the surface of bad liquor. Strangely enough – in response to the shouting, as in a Western – the old man did come out and he too had a scythe. He advanced towards Roderick, his eyes glittering with venom and hatred as if he too shared in the madness which was shattering the silence of the day. Then they began to fight.
As Red Roderick was drunk perhaps the advantage given him by relative youth was to a certain extent cancelled. There was however no doubt that he wished to kill the old man, so enraged was he, so frustrated by the life that tortured him. As they swung their scythes towards each other ponderously, it looked at first as if they could do little harm, and indeed it was odd to see them, as if each was trying to cut corn. However, after some time – while the face of the old man gradually grew more demoniac in a renewal of his youth – he succeeded at last in cutting his son-in-law’s left leg so that he fell to the ground, his wife running towards him like an old hen, her skirts trailing the ground like broken wings.
But that was not what I meant to tell since the fight in itself, though unpleasant, was not evil. No, as I stood in the ring with the others, excited and horrified, I saw on the edge of the ring young William with his paint-brush and canvas and easel painting the fight. He was sitting comfortably on a chair which he had taken with him and there was no expression on his face at all but a cold clear intensity which bothered me. It seemed in a strange way as if we were asleep. As the scythes swung to and fro, as the faces of the antagonists became more and more contorted in the fury of battle, as their cheeks were suffused with blood and rage, and their teeth were drawn back in a snarl, he sat there painting the battle, nor at any time did he make any attempt to pull his chair back from the arena where they were engaged.
I cannot explain to you the feelings that seethed through me as I watched him. One feeling was partly admiration that he should be able to concentrate with such intensity that he didn’t seem able to notice the danger he was in. The other feeling was one of the most bitter disgust as if I were watching a gaze that had gone beyond the human and which was as indifferent to the outcome as a hawk’s might be. You may think I was wrong in what I did next. I deliberately came up behind him and upset the chair so that he fell down head over heels in the middle of a brush-stroke. He turned on me such a gaze of blind fury that I was reminded of a rat which had once leaped at me from a river bank, and he would have struck me but that I pinioned his arms behind his back. I would have beaten him if his mother hadn’t come and taken him away, still snarling and weeping tears of rage. In spite of my almost religious fear at that moment, I tore the painting into small pieces and scattered them about the earth. Some people have since said that what I wanted to do was to protect the good name of the village but I must in all honesty say that that was not in my mind when I pushed the chair over. All that was in my mind was fury and disgust that this painter should have watched this fight with such cold concentration that he seemed to think that the fight had been set up for him to paint, much as a house exists or an old wall.
It is true that after this no one would speak to our wonderful painter; we felt in him a presence more disturbing that that of Red Roderick who did after all recover. So disturbed were we by the incident that we would not even retain the happy paintings he had once painted and which we had bought from him, those of the snow and the harvest, but tore them up and threw them on the dung heap. When he grew up the boy left the village and never returned. I do not know whether or not he has continued as a painter. I must say however that I have never regretted what I did that day and indeed I admire myself for having had the courage to do it when I remember that light, brooding with thunder, and see again in my mind’s eye the varying expressions of lust and happiness on the faces of our villagers, many of whom are in their better moments decent and law-abiding men. But in any case it may be that what I was worried about was seeing the expression on my own face. Perhaps that was all it really was. And yet perhaps it wasn’t that alone.
In Church
Lieutenant Colin Macleod looked up at the pure blue sky where there was a plane cruising overhead. He waved to the helmeted pilot. Here behind the lines the sound of the gunfire was faint and one could begin to use one’s ears again, after the tremendous barrages which had seemed to destroy hearing itself. Idly he registered that the plane was a Vickers Gun Bus and he could see quite clearly the red, white and blue markings. The smoke rising in the far distance seemed to belong to another war. He had noticed often before how unreal a battle might become, how a man would suddenly spin round, throwing up his arms as if acting a part in a play: as in the early days when they had driven almost domestically to the front in buses, the men singing, so that he looked out the window to see if there were any shops at the side of the road. Released for a short while from the war he wandered into a wood whose trees looked like columns in a church.
He was thinking of the last bombardment by the Germans which had thrown up so much dust that the British gunners couldn’t see what they were firing at and the Germans were on top of them before they knew what was happening. The only warning had been the mine explosion to their left. They had fought among trenches full of dead bodies, and grey Germans had poured out of the dust clouds, seeming larger than life, as if they had been resurrected out of the dry autumnal earth. It was after the plugging of the line with fresh troops that he and his company had been pulled out after what seemed like years in the trenches digging, putting up wire, in the eternal hammering of the German big guns, the artillery battles which were so much worse than local fights, for the death which came from the distant giants was anonymous and negligent as if gods were carelessly punching them out of existence.
He was grateful now for the silence and for the wood which had a certain semblance of order after the scarred ground worked over and over, continuously revised
by shells, so that it looked like carbon paper scribbed over endlessly by a typewriter that never stopped.
He looked up again and as he did so he saw two birds attacking another one. They seemed to synchronise their movements and they were low enough for him to see their beaks quite clearly. The third tried to fly above them but they attacked, probing upwards from below. He could no longer see the plane, just the birds. The third bird was weakening. He couldn’t make out whether it was a buzzard or a crow. The other two birds were zeroing in at it all the time, pecking and jabbing, going for the head.
He couldn’t stand watching the fight any more and turned away into the wood, and it was then that he saw it – the church. It was completely intact though quite small and with gravestones beside it. It was strange to see it, like a mirage surrounded by trees whose brown leaves stirred faintly in the slight breeze. From the sky above, the birds had departed: perhaps the two had killed the third one or perhaps it had escaped. It reminded him of a dogfight he had seen between a German triplane and a British Sopwith Camel. After a long duel, the German triplane had destroyed the British plane but was in turn shot down by another British fighter. The triplane made a perfect landing. The British troops rushed up to find the pilot seated at the controls, upright, disciplined, aristocratic, eyes staring straight ahead, and perfectly dead. Later they found the bullet which had penetrated his back and come out at the chest.
He pushed open the door of the church and stood staring around him. He had never been in a church like this before with the large effigy of the Virgin Mary all in gold looking down at him, hands crossed. The stained glass windows had pictures of Christ in green carrying a staff and driving rather shapeless yellow sheep in front of him. In one of the panes there was another picture of him holding out his hands in either a helpless or a welcoming gesture. There were no Bibles or hymn books on the seats as if no one had been there for some time. At the side there was a curtained alcove which he thought might be a confessional. He pulled the curtains aside but there was no one there.