The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  One day a group of youngsters came to the door and told me that some adults were intending to march on the green hut and burn it down.

  Let me say at this point that I was faced with a particularly interesting scientific problem. I wished naturally to be merely an observer in the experiment I was conducting and for this reason I couldn’t interfere on either side. However, I walked along with the youngsters towards the hut. When we arrived the adults had not yet reached it, and we waited outside the hut in a group. There was a number of boys and girls and many of them were very angry. They felt that they were defending not only a hut but a principle. They felt that the time had come when they must stand up for themselves against the rigid ideology which was demanding the destruction of their hut. My hut had in fact become a symbol.

  We waited therefore and saw in complete silence the adults approaching. There was a large number of them and they carried axes and spades. They stopped when they saw us and the two groups faced each other in the fine sunshine. They were led, as one could see very quickly, by the fiery minister. This was indeed a clash or crash of wills that the prophet had foreseen. The minister came forward and said, ‘Are you going to allow us to pull down peacefully this habitation of the devil?’

  One of the boys who was home from university and whose name was John Maclean said, ‘No, we’re not. You have no right to pull the hut down. It doesn’t belong to you.’ He was studying, as I remember, to be a lawyer. I said nothing but remained an interested spectator. What was I expecting? That there would be an intervention from heaven?

  The minister said no more but walked steadily forward with an axe in his hand. Now this posed another interesting problem. No one had ever laid hands on a minister before, certainly not in a country village. If anyone did, would there indeed be an intervention from heaven? The minister, small and energetic, advanced towards the hut. The group of youngsters interposed themselves. He pushed among them while one or two of the girls, their nerve breaking, rushed to the other side to join their fathers, who were waiting grimly to see the result of the minister’s lone attack. I think they too were wondering what the youths would do. In his tight black cloth the minister moved steadily forward, axe in hand.

  The youths were watching and wondering what I should do but I did nothing. How could I? After all I was a scientist engaged in an experiment. Some of them were clearly speculating on what would happen to them when their parents, many of them large and undeniably fierce, got them home again. In the sunshine the minister advanced. One could see from the expression on his face that for him this hut really was an abomination created by the devil, that its destruction had been ordered by the Most High, that he, the servant of God attired in his sober black, was going to accomplish that destruction. Interestingly enough I saw that among the adults was Buckie the builder placidly awaiting the destruction of the work of his own hands. Did I however glimpse for one moment a twitch of doubt on his face, a fear that he perhaps too was present at a personal surrender? I knew all the invaders, every single one of them, placid, hard-working men, good neighbours, heavy moral men, all bent on destroying my green hut which was at the same time both Catholic and demonic and perhaps life-enhancing. It was odd that such a construction should have caused such violent passions. But I had not met a man like this minister before. When he had finally arrived next to the youths he said in a slightly shrill voice (perhaps even he was nervous?), ‘I have come here to lay this abomination to the ground. Shall any of you dare touch the servant of the Lord?’ Quivering he raised his head, his moustache bristling. There was a long silence. It was clearly a moment permeated with significance. Were the young going to establish their independence once and for all? Or were they going to surrender? The village would never be the same again after this confrontation, no matter what happened.

  The men waited. The minister pushed. And he slipped on the ground. I am not sure how it happened – maybe he slipped on a stone, or maybe he had done it with the unconscious deliberation and immense labyrinthine cunning that the service of the Lord had taught him. Anyway as if this had been what they waiting for, the men pushed forward in a perfect fury (would these sons of theirs defy their elders as represented by the minister?), impatiently pushed their sons and daughters aside and with axes held high hacked away at the hut. Thus in Old Testament days must men such as this have hacked to pieces the wooden gods of their enemies, coloured and magical and savage. Thus they splintered and broke my hut. Before they were finished the youngsters had left, giving me a last look of contempt. I was the fallen champion, the uncommitted one. I who had apparently been on the side of youth against the rigid structures of religion, had surrendered. When the men had accomplished their destruction, their penetration of the bastion of immorality, they too turned away from me as if in embarrassment that I had witnessed such an orgy, almost sexual in its force and rhythm. Without speaking to me they left.

  After they had all gone, leaving an axe or two behind, I stood there beside my ruined hut, the shell which had been ripped open and torn. Not even the Bacchanalians had been so fierce and ruthless. Thinking hard, I poked among the fragments. Above me the sky was blue and enigmatic. No prophecy emerged from its perfect surface. I remembered the words, ‘When the wood is raised at the Corner wills will crash.’ Or rather ‘will clash’. Suddenly in a moment of perfect illumination such as must have been granted to the prophets I realised that the words could also be ‘walls will crash’. But even before I had assimilated that meaning another one so huge and comic and ironic had blossomed around me that I was literally staggered by the enormous terror of its implications and sat down with my head in my hands. For I now knew that I could not stay in the village. My time there had come to an end. I was ready to start afresh. My retreat had ended. I must return to the larger world and continue with my work. But then the final revelation had come, as I shivered suddenly in the suddenly hostile day. I thought of my discussion on predestination with the schoolmaster. I thought of his casual remarks about the prophet. I thought of how I had been led to this particular village to learn about the prophecy and this prophet. I thought of the hundred years the man had been dead. I thought of the last meaning of all which had just come to me and I laughed out loud at the marvellous joke that had been perpetrated on me, rational psychologist from an alien land. There the words stood afresh in front of my mind’s eye as if written in monstrous letters, luminous and hilarious, in the sunny day of clear blue. It was as if the heavens themselves cracked, just like my hut, as if the vase, elegant and beautiful, had shown a crack running right down its side, as if I could see the joking face, the body doubled over in laughter. For the words that came to me at that moment, the last reading of all, were these: ‘WHEN THE WOOD IS RAISED AT THE CORNER WELLS WILL CRASH .’

  The Letter

  When you find this letter I shall hope to be dead. Though in fact it is not a letter but an explanation. I am as you know your village headmaster and you understand who and what I am. Or at least you understand me as far as anyone can understand anyone else. You know me as one who takes care of your children. You know me, I hope, as a dedicated man. I am fifty years old and I have been here a long time. I have presided at your small concerts. I have a wife and children and have loved in my way this village since I first came to it many years ago when I was twenty-five years old on a fine day in a light such as I had never seen before on earth. I cannot describe to you what I felt that day. If I were a poet I might be able to but I am not. I am, I think, a very ordinary man and the older I grow the more ordinary and less exceptional I see that I am. But that day was the beginning of a new world, a new life. The air seemed cleaner, objects in the world more solid and luminous, the sky and sea bluer. It was as if I had undergone a resurrection. Yet there was no question of a previous death. I have seen a painting like that somewhere, but I can’t remember where.

  And indeed my love of the place as a new land communicated itself to my work. I taught as if I were inspired. I loved the
minds and motions of children. I saw the world through their eyes, in flashes, unpredictably. I think that in fact I became a child and that all these years I was in fact a child. The world was immediate to me, I fed on it. I had immense unremitting hope. I woke in the morning as if to a new world as children do. I taught and read and taught. All that I read was for them. All that I did was for them. I surrendered myself to them. I became their servant. And in that I was entirely happy.

  I cannot remember when that dream faded. Perhaps there was no particular day. Perhaps it is a poison that we all have to drink and that those who love most dearly drink most deeply. It wasn’t anything that they – I mean the children – did. For I must say that they have always been faithful to me as far as it is possible for them to be so. I believe I have understood them more than most people do since I have been for so many years a child myself. Even now perhaps I am a child expecting more than the world can give.

  I never asked of the world material possessions. You all know that. My life has been very simple and seen from the outside must have appeared even limited and dull. I did not seem to enjoy riches or to have great passions. I was happily married, as you saw. I used even to read the books the children read. I became fond of fairy stories. I loved especially the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and saw in my mind’s eye the wolf lounging against a tree while the girl carried her scones or whatever it was to her white-shawled granny. I loved that world of pigs and foxes and cats and dogs and old women and magic lamps. Indeed the more I progressed in life the more I abandoned my books of philosophy in favour of the fairy story and its animals and its more creative and happy logic.

  Why then am I writing this letter to you telling you that never again will you see me? I will tell you. Yesterday I held a service in the hall. This was one of my concessions to you. I knew and I have always known that I must appear religious, otherwise I would not be able to teach your children. And I did want to teach, and not only to teach but to teach these particular children. So I consoled myself with the fiction that if I wished to serve them at all – and I really thought I would serve them better than anyone else – I would simply have to surrender to you on this point, not realising that this mumbo jumbo of the Old Testament which they did not understand was a poison which was steadily eroding all the other bloom that I was putting on them. But then I was cowardly; I did not wish to leave. One can only work creatively in one particular place at one particular time, in a place where objects are known long enough to be converted to symbols, and become beautiful and enduring and permeated with the hue of one’s life-blood. I was not a tourist – that at least I can say. And there is no one I despise more than the tourist.

  I will tell you what happened. Yesterday they were singing a hymn and I was watching and listening, and I had a vision. The vision was so deadly that I know that I shall not recover from it. It is the death blow. As I looked at them singing from their hymn books I saw them all as children of their mothers and fathers. I saw them as what they would become and I knew that they would become like their mothers and fathers. I could see it in the turn of their heads, in their petulant or absorbed pose. I knew not only that I personally had failed them but that anyone would have failed them. I knew that there is a spirit of the universe which is plotting to make us as like each other as possible. I knew that there is no heaven and that my vision for twenty-five years had been a fake. I knew that the tree produces the leaf and the fish produces the fish, that the corruption has been there from the beginning, and that the teacher also is the corrupter. No one is free from the plague. Christ was the man or god whom they thought would uncorruptedly break the ring, but in order to do that he had to remain a virgin and be crucified. We are producing each other endlessly and corruptedly. There is no Eden and no heaven. At that moment I looked into hell. For in one girl in particular I saw already forming the fat jowls of her mother. I saw that clearly and without evasion. And when I saw the one I saw all the others. I cannot bear to be part of this conspiracy. I cannot bear to see the old emerging from the young. I cannot bear not to believe in my vision. For this reason, when you find this letter I shall be dead. I have to withdraw myself, this instrument of corruption, from the world. I now believe that we have been visited by some original sin of the most immense magnitude and that there is no way of cleansing this sin. And I cannot live with this experience since it negates the whole idea of my life. I am a warder who wished to throw prisons open, while all the time I was creating them. Because of my egotism I thought that I was a saviour but I was not. To be a saviour one must have blood that is not human. There is nothing any of you can do about this. I wish it to be clear that it is not your fault. So goodbye, my fellow human beings in trouble. You can do none other than you do. Neither can I. I have no message for you and without a message what am I? Nothing. And to nothing I go back.

  Jimmy and the Policeman

  There was once in our village an unpopular policeman and a pickpocket. When I say that the policeman was unpopular I mean that he was far too energetic to be a good village policeman and he was also too thin. Most village policemen are fat large men with red faces who usually have their tunics open and pace steadfastly like comics from a film. They will pass the time of day with the locals, pretend that the bar has actually shut at ten o’clock on the dot, discuss gardening, lean over fences and generally leave the villagers to mind their own business. This particular policeman wasn’t like that at all. First of all he was, as I have said, very thin, and secondly he was determined to clamp down on all crime and thirdly he didn’t want to be outwitted by anyone.

  He would call at the bar at ten o’clock to make sure that everyone had stopped drinking. He interfered in the Case of the Missing Cow, and made a mess of things. After all, if he had left the affair alone, everyone would have been quite happy but he had to stir things up. And in any case the cow hadn’t been stolen at all. He even bothered the children and there was the case of the Green and Red Marbles which I shall not trouble you with because it was so trivial. Thus it was decided that since in a village everyone must make allowances for everyone else, he should be taught a lesson. And the instrument which destiny chose was Jimmy Smith, a pickpocket. But again let me qualify this. Jimmy was not a criminal, he was a joker. He had quick hands but he used them to entertain people. He was an independent little man with a great dislike for authority of any kind. There was an element of the child in his nature and he liked best to play with the children with whom he would make balloons disappear, handkerchiefs end up in the wrong pockets, and marbles change colour like those sweets they used to call bull’s eyes.

  Now the policeman took an instinctive dislike to him because I suppose he puzzled him. Jimmy had no interest in money or getting on in the world. He did odd jobs for people but otherwise seemed perfectly happy where he was, puffing at his pipe all day. He had a small black pipe with a silver lid on it which was his most precious possession. Most of the day he would sit in front of the door, playing with pebbles which he had picked up, or sitting in his room reading a book. He was a great reader and was never more content than when he was immersed in an old Western or a ragged detective story that had gone the rounds of the village. Nevertheless, though he was harmless, the policeman was suspicious of him partly I think because he was so indolent and there was no way in which power could be exerted over him and partly because there was a peculiar creative streak in his nature which the policeman found disturbing. Once he tried to get him for drinking but in some unaccountable manner Jimmy disappeared and the policeman couldn’t nail him at all.

  One day he came to Jimmy’s house and spoke to him in the following terms.

  ‘Jimmy,’ he said, ‘I’m the policeman in this village and I want you to understand this. I’m determined to be a good one. That is to say, no crime will be permitted here while I am the policeman. I have the feeling that you are secretly laughing at me and I won’t have it. I have heard certain things you have said about me, joking references, and I
won’t put up with them.’

  ‘Oh, excuse me a moment,’ said Jimmy who seemed hardly to be listening, ‘while I make a cup of tea. I wonder if perhaps you would like one.’

  ‘I . . . ’ Now, it happened that it was rather a hot day and the policeman was feeling sticky in his warm blue uniform so thinking that he would make himself look human – for he wasn’t a complete fool – he agreed to accept a cup of tea. Another reason why he accepted the tea was that he wished to have more time to look at Jimmy and study him. Jimmy was apparently unconcerned but bustled about with cups and saucers. The policeman gazed idly round the room, which was neat and tidy and small. There didn’t seem to be enough space, as they say, to swing a cat. There was a sink at which Jimmy was busy, there were two chairs, a fireplace which was completely bare, a small cooker, a table and nothing else. Jimmy, it seemed, was a spiritual monk as far as possessions were concerned. There was however a big red balloon hanging from the middle of the ceiling and a guitar in one corner. All the time, Jimmy bustled about with his pipe in his mouth. It was noticeable that sometimes he didn’t smoke at all, though he still kept the pipe between his teeth.

  When the tea was ready Jimmy took the cups over and laid them down on – oh, yes, I forgot there was a stool. All the time, he had been talking in some mysterious way, for he still had the pipe in his mouth, saying that he had nothing against the policeman, that all he wanted was to be left alone, that he wished he could play the guitar better, that it was a fine day, that someone’s cow had been eating his washing, that he had just finished a comic song which . . . But the funny thing was that when he laid the cups down, somehow or other, either by accident or design, the tea from one of the cups was spilt over the policeman. The latter got up in a rage while Jimmy dabbed at him with a cloth which he had taken over from the sink, his hands flying hither and thither, faster it seemed than lightning and at one time whipping out the policeman’s handkerchief to help repair the damage. All this time he kept up a running fire of apologies while the policeman’s face reddened and reddened. Eventually the trousers were dried out by means of the cloth and the handkerchief, and the policeman was about to storm out still swearing vengeance against Jimmy who appeared entirely anguished and staggered by what had happened and was suggesting that the policeman should have another cup of tea. However, the latter, not to be mollified, prepared to leave, renewing his pose, ready to confront the world again, dry and complete.