The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  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.

  The Existence of the Hermit

  There once came to our village – or rather to the outskirts of our village – a hermit from somewhere in the south. He was a fairly stocky man with an unshaven face and intense blue eyes, and he wore a long ragged coat which he tied with a belt. He built himself a tin hut with a tall narrow chimney near the road, and he stayed there by himself. As is often the case with men who live mysteriously on their own, romantic stories grew up about him. The favourite one was that he was of a good family but had been crossed in love in his youth and had ever since then avoided the company of people, especially women. With the greatest certainty the villagers would tell this story, for which there was not the slightest evidence, to strangers who visited the place, and, almost without realising that what they were relating was a fiction, would embroider the essential fable with the most elaborate details such as that he was a scientist or a writer or even a singer. Since in all the time that I saw him he never sang a single song this seemed strange but then they could have argued that he had given up singing as well, as a gesture of contempt and defiance. He did visit the village shop and he bought his groceries in it though he would never speak more than was necessary. He rode a bicycle and when he passed along the village street he looked like a chimney sweep with his dirty belted black coat which seemed as if it had been dipped for a long time in soot. He stayed by himself in the hut most of the time except when he took walks across the moors and no one knew how he passed the time except that perhaps he might be reading. The strange thing was that as far as we knew he never drank. There was no drink to be had in the village and he never went to the town, so he didn’t have any unless he made it himself.

  We were curious about him when he first came but after a while most of us grew to accept him. For myself, I couldn’t live like that but then everybody is different from everybody else and he seemed to be able to live on his own, an ability which is not given to many men. We often tried to question him in an oblique manner, but he wouldn’t speak to us and made an excuse to get away again, even though we might waylay him in the shop. The children tried to see inside his hut but he chased them away so ferociously that they never returned. Clearly, all he wanted was to be left alone. It is true that sometimes he might be seen fishing from a rock but usually in an isolated place where no one was likely to talk to him.

  At last, as I said, we accepted him as part of the landscape in which we all lived but gradually we came to realise that he was a disturbance to the village, though he was in no sense a nuisance. What I mean by disturbance is that the very fact of his existence was a kind of insult to us all. Or perhaps insult is not the right word. The fact is that human beings are made in such a way that anyone who lives differently from themselves, even though he does not seek to influence them in any way, is a challenge and a cross. Stories are composed about such a person in order to make him comprehensible. There was, as I have said, no reason at all to believe that the man was avenging himself on the world because of an emotional wound but that was the only way in which the villagers could make sense of his mode of existence. For no matter how much such a person wishes to withdraw, he cannot, since after all he exists. Why else do we envy people who have done us no harm? Why do we envy a man for being outstanding in a job which we may even despise? There is no doubt that we all suffer from being human.

  Let me say, first of all, that I never found out anything about this man. He might have been intelligent or stupid, I couldn’t tell. He might have been a plumber or a physicist, I never found out. And neither did anyone else. He might have been a great scholar or a dunce. No one knew. Certainly he seemed competent enough. He looked after himself pretty well. He was never ill all the time he stayed near the village. He bought a reasonable amount of food and seemed able to cook it. He never at any time asked for any help. It is true also that he could fish, for one of the villagers saw him from a distance and said that he knew perfectly well what he was doing. Naturally he never went to church.

  But, as I have said, the very fact of his existence was a disturbance since one cannot hope not to exist if one is alive. In the long winter nights, in the long summer days, we knew that he was there. We didn’t think of him as judging us. He was simply there and that was enough. Let me explain to you what I mean.

  There lived in our village an old ma
rried couple who had been happily married for a very long time. At least they had never quarrelled openly and had seemed to exist in harmony. Now about two years after this hermit came to live near our village we noticed that the husband, a large bearded fellow, began to insult his wife and to say that he wished he had never got married. This was indeed very odd since his wife had been a good wife. She had reared his children who were now married and away from the island. She had looked after the land with him and had carried peats home in the summer. She had cooked his meals and kept his house neat and tidy and now when she was ready to reap the rewards of her good useful life her husband began to grow restless and to say that he had missed a great deal in his life. He began to treat her abominably and would as I have said insult her in public. Then he would ask for forgiveness and go to church on Sunday.

  It was noticed that he would go and stand near the hermit’s hut and stare at it unblinkingly for a whole morning or afternoon as if he was wondering what the hermit was doing. But he never actually tried to enter the hut. Once he tried to speak to the hermit in the shop but the hermit pushed by him and cycled away. The old man stared after him with great wistfulness.

  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.

  Fable

  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.