Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘If you will climb that mountain and if you bring me a blue flower that you will find on its slope I will reward you well. My house is quite near here, a small house made of diamonds, and when you get the flower you will come to it and knock on the door and I shall answer.’

  Murdo looked around him and sure enough there, not very far away, was a small house made of diamonds.

  Well, Murdo made his way towards the mountain and in a short while he found a blue flower and he ran back to the small house with it and knocked on the door, but no one came to answer his knock. He knocked a few times but still no one came and he didn’t know what to do, for he wanted the reward. At last he thought it might be a good idea to return to the mountain and find an even more beautiful flower and bring it back with him. And with that he left the small house made of diamonds and he went back to the mountain. And he climbed with difficulty further up the slope and found a larger even more beautiful blue flower but he was feeling slightly tired by this time, and he walked much more slowly to the house. Anyway he reached it at last, and he knocked on the door again. The house was shining in the light of the snow and the windows were sending out flashes of light. He knocked and knocked but still no one came to the door. And Murdo returned to the mountain for the third time and this time he decided that he would climb to the very top and he would find a flower so lovely that the beautiful girl would be forced to open the door for him. And he did this. He climbed and climbed and his breath grew shorter and shorter and his legs grew weaker and weaker and sometimes he felt dizzy because of the great height. For four hours he climbed and the air was getting thinner and thinner and Murdo was shivering with the cold and his teeth were chattering in his head, but he was determined that he would reach the top of the mountain.

  At last, tired and cold, he reached the top and he saw in front of him the most beautiful flower he had ever seen in his life but this flower was not blue like the other ones. It was white. Anyway Murdo pulled the beautiful white flower out of the ground and he looked at it for a long time as it lay in his hand. But a strange thing happened then. As he looked, the beautiful white flower began to melt and soon there was nothing left of it but a little water. And all around him was the cold white mountain.

  Slowly Murdo went down the mountainside, feeling very tired and cold, and he looked for the small house made of diamonds but he couldn’t find it anywhere. There was only a small hut without windows or doors. And Murdo looked at it for a long time and said to himself, ‘But it may be that I shall meet that beautiful girl again somewhere.’ And he continued on his way through the wood. But I don’t think he ever met that beautiful girl again, though he travelled through many countries, except perhaps for one moment when he was lying on the ground, very tired, and he was staring at an old boot and he saw a flash of what might have been her. But perhaps it was his imagination for the moon was shining on the old boot at the time.

  Murdo looked down at Colin who had fallen asleep.

  ‘Well,’ he said to himself, ‘maybe he didn’t like the story after all.’

  This is an advertisement which Murdo sent to the editor of the local paper but which was never printed:

  Wanted: a man of between a hundred and two hundred years of age who knows the works of Kant and the poetry of William Ross, and who can drive a tractor and a car, for work on the roads for three weeks in the year. Such a man will get—particularly if he’s healthy—two pounds a year. It would be an advantage if he knew a little Greek.

  The reader must now be told something about Murdo. He was born in a small village where there were twenty houses and which stood beside the sea. When he was growing up he spent a lot of his time drawing drifters on scraps of paper: and the most wonderful day of his life was the day that he jumped across the river Caras.

  When he was on his way to school he would think of himself as walking through the forests of Africa, but the schoolmistress told him that he must learn the alphabet.

  One day she asked him to write an essay with the title, ‘My Home’. Murdo wrote twenty pages about a place where there were large green forests, men with wings, aeroplanes made of diamond, and rainbow-coloured stairs.

  She said to him, ‘What does all this stuff mean? Are you laughing at me or what?’ She gave him two strokes of the belt.

  After that Murdo grew very good at counting, and he could compute in his head in seconds 1,005 × 19. This pleased the schoolmistress and when the inspector visited the school she showed him Murdo with great pride. ‘This boy will make a perfect clerk,’ said the inspector, and he gave him a hard white sweet.

  Murdo went home and told his father and mother what the inspector had said. But he didn’t tell them that in the loft he kept an effigy of the schoolmistress which was made of straw and that every evening he pierced it with the sharp point of his pencil.

  Nor did he tell them that he painted the walls of the loft with pictures of strange animals that he could see in his dreams.

  One day when Murdo was fifteen years old the headmaster sent for him.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  Murdo sat down.

  ‘And what do you intend to do now that you are leaving school?’ said the headmaster who had a small black moustache.

  ‘27 × 67 = 1,809,’ said Murdo.

  The headmaster looked at him with astonishment and his spectacles nearly fell off his nose.

  ‘Have you any idea at all what you’re going to do?’ he asked again.

  ‘259 × 43 = 11,137,’ said Murdo.

  The headmaster then told him that he could leave, that he had much work to do. Murdo saw two girls going into his study with a tray on which there was a cup of tea and two biscuits.

  When he came out the other boys asked him what the headmaster had wanted with him and Murdo said that he didn’t know.

  Anyway he left the school on a beautiful summer’s day while the birds were singing in the sky. He was wearing a white shirt with short sleeves and it was also open at the neck.

  When he was going out the gate he turned and said,

  ‘45 × 25 = 1,125.’

  And after that he walked home.

  His mother was hanging clothes on the line when he arrived and taking the pegs out of her mouth she said:

  ‘Your schooldays are now over. You will have to get work.’

  Murdo admitted that this was true and then went into the house to make tea for himself.

  He saw his father working in the field, bent like a shepherd’s crook over a spade. Murdo sat at the table and wrote a little verse:

  He he said the horse

  ho ho said the goat

  Ha ha, O alas,

  said the brown cow in the byre.

  He was greatly pleased with this and copied it into a little book. Then he drank his tea.

  * * *

  One day Murdo said to his wife, ‘Shall we climb that white mountain?’

  ‘No,’ she said with astonishment. ‘It’s too cold.’

  Murdo looked around him. The chairs were shining in the light like precious stones. The curtains were shimmering with light as if they were water. The table was standing on its four precious legs. His wife in her blue dress was also precious and precious also was the hum of the pan on the cooker. ‘I remember,’ he told his wife, ‘when I was young I used to listen every Sunday to the sound of the pot boiling on the fire. We had herring all during the week.’

  ‘We too,’ said his wife, ‘but we had meat on Sunday.’ She was thinking that Murdo wasn’t looking too well and this frightened her. But she didn’t say anything to him.

  ‘Herring,’ said Murdo, ‘what would we do without it? The salt herring, the roasted herring. The herring that swims through the sea among the more royal fish. So calm. So sure of itself.’

  ‘One day my father killed a rabbit with his gun,’ said his wife.

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Murdo.

  ‘I’m telling the truth,’ Janet insisted.

  ‘I’m not denying it,’
said Murdo as he watched the shimmering curtains. And the table shone in front of him, solid and precious and fixed, and the sun glittered all over the room.

  O my happiness, he said to himself. O my happiness. How happy the world is without me. How the world doesn’t need me. If only I could remember that. The table is so calm and fixed, without soul, single and without turmoil, the chairs compose a company of their own.

  ‘Come on, let’s dance,’ he said to Janet.

  ‘What now?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Murdo, ‘now.’

  ‘Let’s dance now.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Janet.

  And they began to dance among the chairs, and the pan shone red in a corner of its own.

  And Murdo recalled how they had used to dance in their youth on the autumn nights with the moon above them and his heart so full that it was like a bucket full of water, almost spilling over.

  At last Janet sat down, as she was breathless.

  And Murdo sat on a chair beside her.

  ‘Well, well,’ said he, ‘we must do that oftener.’

  ‘Oh the pan,’ said his wife and she ran over to the cooker where the pan was boiling over.

  The pan, said Murdo to himself, the old scarred pan. It also is dancing.

  On its own fire.

  Everything is dancing, said Murdo, if we only knew it. The whole world is dancing. The lion is dancing and the lamb is dancing. Good is dancing with Evil in an eternal reel in an invisible light. And he thought of them for a moment, Good and Evil, with their arms around each other on a fine autumn evening with the dew falling steadily and invisibly on the grass.

  Sometimes Janet thought that Murdo was out of his mind. Once when they were in Glasgow they went into a café where there was a juke box which was playing ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and Murdo sat at the green, scarred, imitation marble-topped table. He was wearing a thick heavy black coat such as church elders wear and a hard black hat on his head.

  When the music stopped he went over to the juke box, put money in the slot and the music started again, whereupon sitting at the table in his black coat and stiff black hat he swayed to the music, moving his head from side to side as if he were in a trance of happiness. A number of girls gazed at him with astonishment.

  Also in Glasgow he went up to a policeman and asked him, ‘Could you please direct me to Parnassus Street, officer? I think it’s quite near Helicon Avenue, or so I was told.’

  He bent his head as if he were listening carefully to what the policeman might say.

  ‘Parnassus Street,’ said the policeman, a large heavy man with a slow voice. ‘What part of the city did you say it was in again?’

  ‘I think, or so I was told, I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong, I’m a stranger in the city myself,’ said Murdo, ‘I’m sure someone said to me that it’s very near Helicon Avenue.’

  ‘Helicon Avenue?’ said the policeman, gazing at Murdo and then at Murdo’s wife and then down at his boots.

  ‘It may be in one of the new schemes,’ said Murdo helpfully, his head on one side like a bird’s on a branch.

  ‘That may be,’ said the policeman. ‘I’m very sorry but I can’t inform you where the places you mention happen to be.’

  ‘Oh that’s all right,’ said Murdo looking at a radiant clock which had stopped at three o’clock. ‘There are so many places, aren’t there?’ (Muttering under his breath, ‘Indonesia, Hong Kong, Kilimanjaro.’)

  ‘You’re right,’ said the policeman, and then turned away to direct the traffic, raising a white glove.

  ‘I think that policeman is from the Highlands,’ said Murdo. ‘He’s got a red neck. And red fists. Big red fists.’

  But at other times Murdo would sit in the house completely silent like a spider putting out an invisible web. And Janet wasn’t used to such silence. She came from a family that always had something to say, always had morsels of news to feed to each other.

  And for a lot of the time she felt lonely even when Murdo was with her. Sometimes when they were sitting in the kitchen Murdo would come over to her with a piece of paper on which he had written some such word as blowdy.

  ‘What do you think that word means?’ Murdo would say to her.

  ‘Blowdy?’ Janet would say. ‘I never heard that word before.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ Murdo would say. Blowdy, he would say to himself again.

  Blowdy, blowdy, among the chairs, the green walls.

  Once when his mother-in-law was in drinking tea Murdo said to her quietly:

  ‘It’s a fine blowdy day today.’

  ‘What did you say?’ said his mother-in-law, the cup of tea in her lap and a crumb of bread on her lip.

  ‘A fine blowdy day,’ Murdo said, ‘a fine windy bright blowdy day.’

  ‘It’s a windy day right enough,’ said his mother-in-law, looking meaningfully at Janet.

  ‘That’s an Irish word,’ said Murdo. ‘The Irish people used it to give an idea of the kind of marbly clouds that you sometimes see in the sky on a windy day, and also when the wind is from the east.’

  ‘Oh?’ said his mother-in-law looking at him carefully.

  When Murdo had gone back to his room she said to Janet:

  ‘I don’t think Murdo is all there. Do you think he is?’

  ‘Well,’ said Janet, ‘he acts very funny at times.’

  ‘He’s worse than funny,’ said her mother. ‘Do you remember at the wedding when he took a paper ring from his pocket and he was wearing a piece of cabbage instead of a flower like everybody else?”

  ‘I remember it well enough,’ said her daughter. ‘But he’s very good at figures.’

  ‘That’s right enough,’ said her mother, ‘but a man should be more settled than he is. He should be indeed.’

  After her mother had left Janet sat in her chair and began to laugh and she could hardly stop, but at the same time she felt frightened as if there was some strange unnatural being in the house with her.

  For about the seventh or the eighth time Murdo tried to write a story.

  ‘There was a clerk once and he was working in a bank …’

  When Murdo was working he used to go into the bank at nine in the morning and he would finish at five in the afternoon. And he had an hour for his lunch. There were another ten people working in the bank with him and Murdo would sit at a desk and add figures all day, at the back of the bank, in the half-dark.

  Beside him there sat a small bald man who had been in the bank for thirty years and who was always wiping his nose as if there was something there that he wished continually to clean off. At last Murdo said to him, ‘Why do you do that?’

  ‘What?’ said the man.

  ‘Why do you wipe your nose all the time?’ said Murdo.

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ said the bald man and after that he wouldn’t speak to Murdo. They would sit beside each other all day and they wouldn’t speak to each other. They wouldn’t even say Good morning to each other.

  Murdo would begin to think about money. When he was in the bank he would see thousands and thousands of banknotes and it would occur to him:

  What if I stole some money and went away to the Bahamas or some place like that? But actually the place he really wanted to go to was Rome and he imagined himself standing among these stony ruins wearing a red cloak while the sun was setting and he was gazing down at the city like a conqueror.

  After a time, he would, in his imagination, enter a café and eat spaghetti and he would meet a girl in a mini-skirt and he would say to her:

  ‘Is your name Beatrice?’

  And they would stand in the sunset where red fires were burning and there would be a church behind her, a church with gigantic carvings by Michelangelo.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Leonardo da Vinci?’ he would say to her and she would look at him with dull pebbly eyes in which no soul was visible.

  And in the morning Murdo would rise from his bed and he would see a new world
in front of him, a bright clean world, a new morning, and he’d say:

  ‘Where will we go today?’

  And she would be asleep and he would leave her there like a corrupted angel with arms as white as those of Venus and a small discontented mouth, and he would go out and he would talk to the women with their long Italian noses and after that he would leave Rome and travel to Venice and sail on a gondola, his red cloak streaming from his shoulders.

  And all around him there would be colours such as he had never seen before and his nose would twitch like a rabbit’s.

  And in an art gallery he would stand in front of a painting and the painting would show a man walking down a narrow road while ahead of him the sun was setting in a green light like the light of the sea.

  And he would meet a priest and he would say to him, ‘What is keeping you alive?’

  And the priest would say to him, ‘Come with me and I’ll show you.’

  And they would go into a small room in a small dirty house and there would be a child lying in bed there with a red feverish face, and beside the bed there would be a woman wearing a black snood. And she would be sitting there motionless while the child stirred restlessly in the bed. And the priest would say to Murdo:

  ‘She has been sitting by that bed for nearly a week now.’

  ‘Do you think,’ Murdo would ask, ‘that Leonardo had as much care for the Mona Lisa as this woman has for her child?’

  And he would look around him, at the picture of the Virgin Mary and the candle that was burning in a corner of the room.

  ‘I understand what you’re saying,’ the priest would say.

  ‘I hope the child will recover,’ Murdo would say.

  ‘Exactly like that,’ the priest would say, ‘God keeps a watch over the world till the sun rises.’

  Murdo would leave the priest and the woman and the child and walk down a street where he would be met by the two men who would attack him, beating him on the head and chest, and steal all the money he had except for the six thousand pounds that were tied round his pants.