Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  It would have to. I stared directly into the face of the moon which was as pure and direct and strong as Janet’s face and that was the last vision I had before I fell asleep, still searching for that thought, that solution which would permit me to rid the village of the hermit who was to a great extent myself, and yet more dangerous and much stronger than me.

  EIGHTEEN

  And as I slept I dreamed of my childhood. It returned to me in all its clarity and fullness. I saw again my father and my mother, my father so silent and large and my mother so quick and busy and demanding. She seemed always to be running about the house with a duster, or washing, or drying dishes, or sweeping the floor. A vivid insect presence in her blue gown with the white flowers printed on it. And always saying to me, Keep at your books. You have to get on in the world. What is there here for you? Look at all those other boys. What are they doing but wasting their lives fishing and crofting? You keep at your books.

  While my father, slow and silent, said nothing and did nothing to protect me from this quick demanding presence which wouldn’t leave me alone, which would not let me ripen in my own darkness but was always shining its sharp little torch on me. Always without cease. And my father was so slow and heavy and perhaps lazy and silent. It seemed to be an effort for him to speak, as if he had allowed my mother to speak for both of them. It was she who was proud and small and quick, who was alert to insults, even imagined ones, from the villagers who didn’t like her because of her ambition. He on the other hand seemed to have no sense of honour but he got on better with them than she did. In a way he was like Murdo Murray but deeper, more vulnerable. He wasn’t at ease in his environment but perhaps more so than she was. She saw her environment as something hostile, she confronted it with her quick agile mind and her quick body: she was always improving it, cleaning it up, tidying it. And my father would sit by the fireside reading the paper and he didn’t protect me at all. He would hardly touch me except that now and again he might lay his hand on my head absently in passing, but he would say nothing.

  Eventually he withdrew to a shed where he kept his loom and there he would play his ancient dark music among a smell of oil, his feet on the treadles, his hands busy. He was like a big composer in the half darkness, a sort of Beethoven, heavy and silent and dull. I would go there and watch him and marvel at his quick skill as he made the cloth, but in the house he was so quiet.

  And my mother would say, Keep at your books. And I wasn’t allowed out at night hardly at all in those years. All the other boys of the village including my brother whom she had given up as far as education was concerned would play football and shinty and go bird nesting but I stayed in the house reading and writing. She didn’t understand what I was studying but had a superstitious reverence for it all and made sure that I kept at it. And all the time my father would sit by the fireside sometimes sleeping, sometimes looking at a newspaper, or at other times he would be down at the shed or sometimes he would stand at the door gazing outwards perhaps at the sky, perhaps at some imagined land of his own. And this quick insect hummed about me and would not let me alone. It cleaned everything up and tidied my life and kept it on course. And I brought home all the prizes from school and she would place the cups on the sideboard and show them to visitors till I grew tired of her as they did too. They disliked her for her ambition, they much preferred my father, he was much more like themselves than she was. She was like a sliver of wood in a fingernail, never resting. And my father would play the music of his loom, dark and silent and dull, till one day he had a heart attack while he was in the shed. His body toppled off his seat and he lay under it, his eyes sightless and gazing upwards and it was I who found him. And I remember the humming of the large black flies about the shed on that summer day with the door open to the fragrance of flowers outside.

  He was buried, and I was left to the mercies of my mother who became very religious. She would even look in the Bible for texts which would prove to me that study was important. It was as if my father had never been, as if that dark music was buried forever in the dark earth.

  And the world passed me by with its perfume for others but for me nothing but books. My mother’s small sharp beak was always probing at me. Till one day she also died. Before she died I used to sit at her bedside listening to the business of her breath which was like an accelerating train. She was very brave. Even then she told me to keep at my books lest, I suppose, she should feel betrayed in eternity. She told me that death dues were in a drawer in a dressing table and that there was money there for her coffin as well. She wasn’t afraid to die, she thought that she had done her work in the world by bringing me up to study books which she did not understand, though her faith was great. ‘I am going to that place where there is rest and calm,’ she said.

  And I thought that perhaps there too she would be going about dusting heavenly tables and making sure that the saints kept at their theology.

  I was then twenty years old and in university. While home one Christmas I had taken a girl to the house but after she had left my mother said, ‘She won’t do for you. She smokes.’ And after that I never brought anyone home. I cried when she died. I cried more than I had cried for my father. I hadn’t really known my father, that dark musician of the flesh. My mother’s quick agile spirit had however sustained me, she had taught me the way to go though at times I hated it. And after all but for her would I ever have read the Greek authors? Would I ever have listened to great music, would I ever have seen great works of art? And that, in spite of the pain, is something. And also in spite of the fact that she herself had never looked at a painting in her life nor ever listened to Mozart or any other composer. Her favourite magazine was the People’s Friend where after a great struggle the nurse eventually married the surgeon who had never noticed her till finally she had helped him in that Great Operation. But her will was indomitable and her ambition without end.

  So I wept for her more than my brother did, for he knew that she had found him wanting and therefore he resented her.

  And my mother is always clearer in my mind than my father is, he who had never shielded me from her remorseless light, who sat in his dumbness and his hopelessness. At least she had been optimistic. She had looked into the future and made me a school-master. But at least she had been conscious of a future. My father had only been conscious of a past.

  Once in Edinburgh I went to the Zoo and in it I saw in a corner of a cage a great hulking bear lying down in its dark stink. In another cage I saw a leopard or perhaps a panther pacing restlessly up and down. And I wished to say to the bear, Why don’t you get up from there? Why do you accept the darkness and the stink and the servitude? And I far preferred the leopard with its restless proud pacing. And also I liked the birds with their quick movements and their colourful plumage and their beaks that seemed to question the world around them. All that perhaps was dreams. But I did not like the dark bear. I wished to be like the leopard, optimistic and angry and agile.

  For the bear had never used its strength but the leopard used all its energy without surrender to the end.

  When I woke up I knew perfectly well what I must do. The idea came to me in my sleep.

  NINETEEN

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Dougie.

  ‘You heard what she said, that she was …’

  ‘Attacked. I heard her and I don’t believe it. The man is, was, quite harmless.’

  ‘We have to believe her,’ I said, ‘and anyway after that the villagers wouldn’t have allowed him to stay.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Dougie. His eyes were cold and hard and hostile. ‘Did you see his eyes?’

  ‘His eyes?’

  ‘Yes. When he set off on that bicycle of his again. It was like watching a refugee that I’d once seen in Europe. The same expression on his face.’

  I didn’t tell Dougie, but I did remember his expression when he set off again, upright on his bicycle in his dark clothes with the belt of rope around his waist. And
the villagers standing watching him, hostile and threatening. The hermit’s eyes had turned for a moment to look at me as if by strange magic the hermit had recognised his true enemy. After all, really, he had done nothing to me. And that perhaps accounted for his expression.

  ‘I must say again,’ said Dougie, ‘that I don’t believe it, that she was attacked. That man would never attack anyone. He has no possessions at all, did you notice? That was the hellish thing. He had nothing. He set off again. With nothing. And where was he going? And if he goes somewhere else will the people there also put him out? And we never,’ he said, ‘found out anything about him. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He could be a fool or a genius—he could be anybody.’ And he looked at me with horror.

  Well, I had used the corrupted to get rid of the corrupted, I thought. Sometimes such things are necessary, sometimes ethics themselves have to be poisoned in order to create health.

  ‘There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Janet that I could see,’ Dougie repeated. ‘She seemed to me self-possessed enough.’

  ‘Why should she say she had been attacked unless she had been?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘I don’t know but I have an idea,’ he said. And there was the glitter of hate in his eyes.

  The village would now be silent. It would now return to its ancient ways, it would not be disturbed. The mirror image of myself would have left it, expelled forever.

  ‘What the hell is he going to do?’ said Dougie again. ‘I can’t stand thinking about it. Wandering about forever on that bicycle.’ I thought for a moment that he would weep.

  But what in fact he did was to turn away.

  ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea if you came to the house again,’ he said.

  I didn’t say anything but watched him go. Now I myself was truly alone, but then loneliness was something to be suffered in the service of one’s kind. I knew that Dougie would be relentless and that his sense of fairness might not let him rest. But Janet wasn’t going to talk. After all she had plenty of money now.

  I looked at Murdo’s unfinished house, I heard the music of the sea. I turned back into the house, feeling as if I didn’t wish to talk to anyone. I thought of my wife, then of Janet, sitting in the chair by the fire, as I poured myself a whisky. No one understood what had happened. Not even Dougie understood that. It was true that like him I saw the figure of the hermit setting off into nothingness on his old bicycle. But it was true that it was necessary to make a refugee. I had saved them from silence at the expense of my own silence. I laughed bitterly as I sat down by the fireside. Even Kirsty would congratulate me. Even the minister. And yet I had a frightening feeling of emptiness as if I were suffering from a strange disease. What else could I think about now, now that that hut had no inhabitant, now that questions of metaphysics had been removed from me?

  As I sat there for what seemed to be hours the day became dusk and then slowly the moon rose in the sky. I looked at it. It was dazzlingly white and clear, a brilliant stone, it was the eye of a Greek god or goddess. It was the stunning beauty of the mind, it had no physical beauty. It no longer reminded me of Janet, it was pure intellect. For Janet had been only an evanescent being, a sparkle of moonlight on the water. It was the cold stony mind that illuminated its own dead world remorselessly, its own extinct craters. I imagined the hermit cycling along in its light forever.

  The house was extraordinarily peaceful as if by an act of will I had banished all the fertile ghosts. It had an unearthly calm as if I were floating on a dumb sea of solitude. I found myself humming to myself as if I had come to the silence of myself. I went to the bookcase and took out a book and began to read. Strangely enough I didn’t realise at first what book it was. Then I saw that it was the Bible. I turned to the New Testament and began to read,

  ‘In the beginning was the Word …’

  Listen to the Voice

  FOR THE PAST year he has been writing a book and for the past year he has been dying. In fact the disease, cancer of course, seems to have blossomed in harmony with the progression of the book. He will not show it to me till it is finished. It is a book about existentialism: Sartre, Camus, and the rest. He has been reading them thoroughly for many years in his spare time as a French teacher in the school where I myself taught. I have retired, in the natural order of things, and he has retired because of his illness though he has been keeping up a gay battle to the end. I have not been surprised by this. He has always been a man of immense intelligence and courage, a rare combination. I have known for years that his marriage was not a happy one (his wife did not understand his passion for research). She is a very ordinary common woman from England and he should never have married her. They met, I think, when he was at Oxford in the first dew of his youth. (At that time I believe that he was a dedicated left winger, anti-Franco, and the rest of it. The transition from left wing politics towards absurdity must show something about his life.) He has had to put up with a lot from her, not simply indifference but active malevolence and petty spitefulness. I have seen him humiliated by her in company though he smiled all the time. The humiliations were constant and searching, and might take the form of suggesting that he had not done as well as he should have done financially, or even of questioning his intelligence (he was not very practical), or of perfectly placed stab wounds with regard to money. When I have visited him I have treated her strictly as an enemy in whose custody a prisoner happens to be. She hates me as much as she hates him and for the same reasons, that I am like her husband in that I genuinely do not care for material things, I cannot understand why people should need more than one simple meal at a time. In fact the two of us have been unpopular with the staff of the school because at a certain meeting called to discuss possible strike action we spoke up against the greed of the society in which we live. Naturally we failed to persuade our colleagues to adopt our principles (they genuinely seemed to think we were cranks since we talked of money as being a superficial gloss), but our stand didn’t make us popular. Simmons in particular was our bitter foe. He is a devious though apparently bluff fellow who is not only his own worst enemy but everyone else’s as well. I cannot tolerate his hyprocrisy, and he has the scorned woman’s ability to strike neatly at the underbelly.

  Anyway we were both interested in our hobbies, he in his Existentialism and I in my literature. I mean in the novel and in poetry. He has always respected my mind and I have respected his. I have never written anything creative of course. How could one have the temerity to add to what is already there, unless what one writes is necessary? And I have never felt the pressure of the necessary. I listen to a great deal of music. I hear the note of necessity even in the flawed opulence of Wagner and over-whelmingly in the apparent simplicity of Mozart. But never within myself. I even wonder why he has decided to write his book. It is in a way unlike him to commit his dreamed perfection to paper. I know that he has taken a certain pleasure in the composition of examination papers and the preparation of notes on French writers but I never thought that he would actually write a book. Certainly not on anything as complicated as Existentialism.

  More recently he has been moved to hospital where he has been getting intensive radiation treatment. I hate hospitals but I have been going to see him every Sunday afternoon. His bed is at the far end of the hospital, in a very distant ward, and I pass old people staring into space with dull eyes. His table beside the bed has the usual assemblage of grapes and oranges: no one ever dreams of bringing him a book to read. But in spite of the heavy atmosphere, relieved only by the sparkling presence of the nurses who know he is doomed, he has managed to finish his own book. We talk about various things. Once we had a long discussion on Keats and wondered how far tuberculosis animates the creative soul. He seems to think it does, though I feel it almost blasphemous to think that without the presence of tuberculosis Keats would never have been a great poet. Still, he lies there in all that white. He knows he is going to die. I suppose being an existentialist—
for he holds the beliefs that they hold—he will die in a different way from those who do not hold such beliefs. He sees neither priest nor minister. I sit in my rather shabby coat—for the ward is sometimes rather cold—beside his bed. I do not think about justice or mercy. What use would there be in that?

  His long haggard face, like one of those windows that one sees in churches, is becoming more and more refined each time that I visit him. The book, it seems, will be his last justification. It may be that he thinks he will posthumously justify his life to his wife, if the book turns out to be a good one. I know that she couldn’t care less, as far as the content goes, but in his strange way he loves her. What could she know of the literature of France? It is only people like himself who have shed the world who can know about literature. In fact he is beginning to look more and more like a saint as the weeks pass. The pure bone is appearing through the flesh. One day I almost said to him, ‘What is it like to die?’ but I caught myself in time. In any case the nurses are often hovering about. Some of them are pupils whom he has taught. He told me that one of them (one of the dimmer ones in fact) had gone to the trouble of speaking to him one day in halting French. He felt that this was a compassionate gesture and so indeed it was. His eyes filled with tears as he told me about it. ‘And yet,’ he said wonderingly, ‘she couldn’t do French at all.’ I don’t think he told his wife about the incident.

  He was of course a perfectionist when he was teaching. ‘No, no, no,’ he would shout, ‘that is not how you say it. Not at all.’ I could hear him two rooms away. ‘Listen again. Listen. You must always listen. Listen to the voice.’ And he would say the word over and over. The inflexion must be exactly right, the idiom must be perfect. Perhaps it was that lust for perfection that brought on his cancer. His own daughter had been one who had not flourished under his teaching (she was intelligent but rebellious), and his wife had never forgiven him for that. ‘But,’ he would say to her, as he told me, ‘she isn’t as good as the others.’ However it happened that one of the others had been the daughter of one of her bitterest enemies and how could one expect that she could reconcile herself to his honesty? ‘Women,’ he would say to me, ‘can’t be impersonal. You cannot ask that of them.’ How much futile quarrelling was concealed under that statement. For his daughter was now working in a shop, Frenchless, resentful, single.