by Neil M. Gunn
“And rats. Horrible.” She was now wholly concentrated on interesting him.
“Really? You mean they swarmed about?”
“I tried to keep it from Nan. She came here at the tail-end of the last great hunt. She couldn’t help seeing something of it. They were not only in and about the stealing. They were in the grain stacks. Everywhere. Burrowing in the banks like rabbits, actually using the rabbit burrows. Horrible—particularly,” she added, “as a subject for lunch! Have some more potatoes?”
“Thanks. I feel hungry.”
“Perhaps the country air is doing you good?”
“I believe it is.”
“Pity you’re going away so soon.”
“I should really go to-morrow.”
“Must you?”
“I should really.” He ate his stew and potato.
“I’ll slip up with a plate of broth for Nan now, if you’ll excuse me.”
When she came back, she looked cheerful, happy. “I do believe she’s taken the turn. If she could just have a day or two to get some pith back into her!”
“Have a cigarette,” he said. “Between us, we’ll manage all right. Is that coffee? Good!”
“You’re driving me into bad habits again.” She stuck the cigarette in her holder.
“Not at all. One must have a burst occasionally—particularly after killing rats. By the way, how did you kill them?”
“It would take me hours to tell you. I remember one night in the wintertime, about bed time, hearing savage cries and going to the window to see lights rushing about the ploughed field out there. It looked as if some strange beast had got loose in the field and they were after it in a weird death hunt. I got frightened in an awful way. At last I couldn’t bear it.” She smiled. “Some young lads were after the rats with sticks and electric torches. I had told the grieve I would pay threepence a tail.”
He laughed.
“Then there was the time when Donnie fell through the stack. Getting threshed early was a real problem. Anyway, it was well into the spring. The threshing mill was in place between the stacks in the field. Donnie had climbed up onto a stack to begin forking to the mill—when he suddenly disappeared. They had to tear the stack away to get at him. He was nearly suffocated.”
“But how?”
“You know how a stack is built? Anyway, the rats had eaten the heart out of the stack and he had fallen down through it.”
“Good God!”
Aunt Phemie nodded. “That was during the war—when seamen were being torpedoed and drowned taking grain across the Atlantic.”
“I say! You had your war too.”
“We did what we could.”
“But surely the Ministry of Agriculture should have done something about rats. Hang it, they should know about dealing with them scientifically I mean. It’s really pretty bad.”
“I don’t know,” said Aunt Phemie: “I suppose they had their problems too.”
“That’s the worst of it,” declared Ranald with a restless movement. “You’ll all go on excusing them. It’s just damned silly. Clearly, over rats, they just had no plan at all. You make that clear. Don’t you?”
“Believe me, I was angry enough,” admitted Aunt Phemie. “But that doesn’t help. We must try and be fair. Where would the Ministry of Agriculture—though it’s the Department of Agriculture in Scotland—where would they get the men—the rat-killers—in war time to cover all the farms in the country? They just hadn’t got them. In the end we got two men from the Department for ten days—just before Nan came. In bare traps they caught over seven hundred—I made them lock the heap in a shed until they were counted lest Nan might see them. They also used gas and poison. So we’ve got them under—for the time being anyway.”
“But how were they allowed to multiply like that?”
“They weren’t allowed to,” said Aunt Phemie. “They just did in spite of us. Life is like that.”
Ranald shook his head. “I see your point—but I am not being had. You can destroy that kind of life. You must. You must destroy the rat; or the rat will destroy you.”
Aunt Phemie blew away a stream of smoke.
“You’ve got to make a plan, a national plan, to destroy rats and stick to it, ruthlessly. There is no other way.” He leaned back. “However, I suppose you’ll think that’s politics!”
“I shouldn’t mind that. It’s when you actually come to deal with things, with life itself—it’s difficult.” She hesitated. “I know you’ll think that’s vague. But when you have got to get the real work done, the actual grain and calves and what not produced, the land ploughed, and so on, with real human beings working at it—it’s not easy. You’re only a human being, and the other person is a human being, and if you’re going to respect him as an individual with a right to some freedom of his own—it’s difficult to plan him in your way.”
“But surely not—if your plan is the right plan. You may think—I don’t know—that I’m interested in some brand of politics, some new party, as that sort of thing is understood—in the press, at election meetings, and so forth. I’m not. Not at all. We’ve got to get past all that. We’ve got to have some basis for our political thought. Everyone-for-himself, in the old capitalistic scramble, served its purpose in the historic process by smashing up feudalism. But now it in its turn is finished; it’s gone rotten in our hands. It should be buried, or it will rot all life. We need a scientific socialism.” He was in real earnest now, he was alive, not with that air of complacency which had earlier repelled Aunt Phemie but with a driving purpose in him, an obviously deep belief. The intolerant sharpening of the pale features with the dark blood clots held its own warrant. “You mentioned freedom, for example. Everyone, here and in America, and not only the big political bosses, but the writers, the parsons, everyone who thinks he has two ideas to rattle together, shouts freedom—we’ll die for freedom—and yet not one of them has even attempted to define the word.” He stopped abruptly and his features gave an ironic twist. “Like the old woman shouting her blessed word Jerusalem!” He lit another cigarette.
“Perhaps it’s impossible to define?” suggested Aunt Phemie.
“No.” He shook his head as he blew out smoke. “Take your rats again,” and now he was talking without stress. “You reasoned about rats. You determined they were a menace. You took steps accordingly, and now you have won freedom from rats.”
“But human beings are not rats.”
“The same reasoning process applies nevertheless. Only you have to begin by asking how does a human being in fact attain a consciousness of freedom. The notion persists that man becomes more free the more he grows independent of his fellow men, of society. It’s the old Rousseau gag about man being born free and yet being everywhere in chains. It’s just sentimental nonsense. If you left a child in the forest to fend for itself it would, at the best, grow up an animal, a beast forever hunting its food. You know that. It would be absolutely conditioned by the necessity for grub-hunting. It would have no speech, no music, no literature, no philosophy, no religion. All these things it gets from society. You, in fact, taught children these very things. There are no schools in the jungle.”
“I agree,” said Aunt Phemie. “But I still don’t see quite how it gets its consciousness of freedom in society, or what exactly you think freedom is.”
“Let me give a definition of freedom and then we can argue from that. Freedom consists in the act of recognising necessity and taking the best steps you can to deal with it. Freedom, in short, is the consciousness of necessity. When you became conscious of the necessity for destroying the rats, you took the proper steps and obtained freedom from them.”
“I’m afraid,” said Aunt Phemie, “that we haven’t altogether got free of them.”
He gave her a glance and smiled. “You have got free of them to the extent to which your action went. Had it been scientifically thorough—in your case and every other—then we wouldn’t have been bothered any more with rats. Just
as we have got free of wolves, though it’s not so very long ago since the last one was killed on your hills.”
“I admit it was a weak point,” said Aunt Phemie. “All the same, I am hazy a bit about your definition, about being free the more I recognise necessity. If I am always governed by necessity—well, I am governed by it, and how I can be free from necessity—from the urgent necessity, for example, of washing up these dishes—by recognising that I have got to wash them—well! I’ll be free from the washing up after I have done it. But I sort of knew that before.”
He leaned back, pushing against the edge of the table, obviously delighted with the way she had caught his argument. “Good! Absolute freedom, of course, is a myth. Because we are animals who have to be fed and clothed and housed. Let us recognise that; let us recognise that economic necessity. Then let us take the next step and say that the greater will be our freedom from economic necessity, the more thoroughly we in common organise our productive resources and distribute the goods.”
“And that’s socialism.”
“Yes. But don’t forget that its aim—its philosophy, if you like—is freedom, freedom from economic fear, from want, from war. Not a vague Atlantic Charter notion, however, but something scientifically determined.”
“We stand on the threshold of man’s next great step forward,” said Aunt Phemie, smiling with an attractive humour.
“We do. Even your friend Freud has become hopelessly old-fashioned.”
“Really?”
“Yes. They literally shock patients now into sanity. Assault and battery by electric shocks. Cures them, too. It’s the new age.” His manner was now alert and friendly with a teasing gleam in his eyes.
She looked into his eyes, shrugged, still smiling, and got up.
He laughed and jumped up. “Let me help with the dishes.”
“No. I’ll tell you what,” Aunt Phemie decided with a confidential air. “I’ll go up first and see Nan. Then perhaps—for a wee while—you might go up. I never stay too long. Whenever you see you have cheered her up, say I’ve got something for you to do.”
He glanced at her with a sly humour. “And have you?”
“Necessity demands,” suggested Aunt Phemie, “that we break some sticks.”
11
“Nothing but accounts,” said Aunt Phemie cheerfully to the postman the following day as she glanced at the red penny stamps.
He took the string from his mouth and as he wound it round the bundle of correspondence for the Greenbank area and stuck the bundle back in his bag he said, “It might be worse. You didn’t hear about young McAlpine?”
“No.”
“You would know him? He’s a poet or artist or something queer like that.”
“No,” said Aunt Phemie. “I know Mr. McAlpine himself, of course. What’s the young man’s first name?”
“Adam. Adam McAlpine. And he’s not so young. He’s well over thirty. But he’s never done much good. They say it’s the mother. But you know how folk gossip. However, what I’m going to tell you is no gossip, for I had it last night from Jamie Johnston himself and he is one of the two—the other was Andie MacFarlane—the two who found the body at the falls pool on the Altfey yesterday.”
Aunt Phemie did not speak.
“They had taken the day off for fishing. It’s a habit of theirs, for they’re clean daft on the fishing. Always was. Jamie and me have had more than one night in our time. However, yesterday they took the road and left their bikes at the shepherd’s yonder below the gorge—you know, where the road ends—and began fishing up the deep pools with—with a bait they have.” He glanced at Mrs. Robertson and though he realised that his subtle hesitation over the kind of bait was lost on her, yet the absolute nature of her attention flattered him. “In time they reached the falls pool, coming in on it from below, for there’s a gravelly bit where they lie—well I know it!—and if you drop your bait—but never mind,” he said, restraining himself, “for they didn’t drop any bait there yesterday. Jamie said to me he saw the thing as he came in below the rock. At first he thought it was a dead otter, but then he saw it was no otter, it was the head of a man with nearly all the body in the water. He gave a cry to Andie. It was young McAlpine and they hauled the body up on the stones. At first they thought he was dead as a drowned pup—it’s Jamie’s own words, for he was always a cool hand, but then, as Jamie said, he noticed he was kind o’ soft like, and he began working on him. And in time they got a movement of life into him. He had taken in a lot of water, but they got him sort of round. And then the queer thing happened and it’s left folk talking and wondering, wondering indeed if it was poor Gordie who did murder old Farquhar. For you see—but I’m going through my story. As I say, Jamie and Andie always carry a gill apiece—hard as it is to come by—but, as Jamie always says, it’s half the day. When they got some of the whisky down him, he came to in a queer sort o’ lost glowering way, showing his teeth, even after he’d spewed, and they saw he had been attacked. He used a word or two I wouldn’t care to mention to you. But Jamie has them.” He paused in bright-eyed sober recollection. “There just was no doubt he’d been attacked. In fact Jamie sent Andie up on top to see if he could see the man lurking about. But all Andie saw was the picture that Adam had been painting and he brought it down with him, thinking that perhaps it was his picture Adam was wanting. But it wasn’t the picture. No, faith, it wasn’t the picture. He was wanting to be at the—at the so-and-so bastard, if you’ll excuse me, Mistress, and, as Jamie said, he couldn’t have hit a fly he was so weak with the spewing. But he was a little beside himself. They had almost to carry him to the shepherd’s cottage, where they put him to bed. The shepherd himself was out, so Jamie stayed with the wife and Andie set out on his bike for the town. His bike punctured, but Andie kept going on the rim and cut his tube to ribbons though he knew, as he said, that devil the hae-penny would he get from old McAlpine for that. And he won’t!” The postman wheezed. “His mother—Adam’s mother—got into an awful state. She’s a feckless downtrodden body right enough. But the car was sent and Adam taken home.” The postman paused, looked shrewdly at Aunt Phemie out of his sharp face with its close-cut greying hair over the ears, and eased the hard official hat from his forehead.
“When did all this happen?” asked Aunt Phemie.
“In the middle of yesterday, not long after twelve o’clock. And maybe the queerest thing of all has yet to be told. Jamie, though he’s ages with myself—fifty-five—has the eye of a hawk. He always had. I told you how they drew the body back from the rock up onto the stones. Well, when they were taking Adam away from where they’d stretched him on the stones, Jamie noticed a paper. The wet body had flattened it out. Jamie’s eyes caught a figuring on it. He picked it up, read it, and put it in his pocket. He’s a cool customer is Jamie. He gave it to the police inspector when he was telling him the whole story. Do you know what it was?”
Aunt Phemie waited.
“It was the missing deposit receipt in the name of Farquhar Farquharson for the sum of seventy-six pounds.”
“Really,” muttered Aunt Phemie.
The postman nodded, satisfied with her reaction. “It was.”
“And did it—was it—on the body?”
“No, seemingly. For Jamie is quite clear about this; it’s maybe the queerest thing of all. Jamie says he saw the bit of paper as he came up to the pool. It was caught between two stones, he said, as though fixed there by the last spate. And if Jamie said he saw it, he saw it.”
“Extraordinary,” murmured Aunt Phemie.
“Isn’t it? For if there’s one thing that’s clear it is that the man who attacked Adam McAlpine thought he had done him in. Jamie is in no doubt about that. He said they fought on top of the ledge of rock and—as Jamie put it—just as surely as some man killed old Farquhar with an axe so did some man try to drown Adam McAlpine like a rat. And the point now is—was it the same man?”
Aunt Phemie put a hand against the door jamb and stared past
the postman’s avid face.
“Ay, it’s a horrible story,” he said, acknowledging the growing pallor of her skin, and went on more quietly, “the inspector and the sergeant went up with Jamie and Andie to the falls pool and they surveyed it from every angle. But beyond making sure that you couldn’t have seen Adam’s body from the ledge itself—which would satisfy the murderer he’d done his fell job—they didn’t get much, nothing at all really. Not so far anyway.”
“But—Adam?” said Aunt Phemie. “Hasn’t he—didn’t he tell them who—it was?”
“That’s what we’re all waiting for. But Adam McAlpine was very poorly last night. I heard he wouldn’t speak. It is to be hoped under God that he will live. The doctor was out and in.” He added, “He may die yet.”
“Dreadful,” said Aunt Phemie.
“Ay, Mistress, it is. It’s all that. But if it brings to justice the real criminal, it will have done something.” He hitched his bag into position.
“Yes,” said Aunt Phemie.
“Ay.” He nodded. “It will that. Well, I must away. Good day, Mistress.” He saluted soberly, and set off in a hurry to catch the time he was forever losing.
As Aunt Phemie turned into the house she heard Ranald’s laugh from Nan’s room. About to enter the kitchen, she paused, then went on through the back door and into the outside washhouse.
Quietly she closed the door behind her and stood very still.
There was no doubt in her mind at all that the person who attacked Adam McAlpine was Ranald. For a long time her mind could hold no other thought; it grew large and empty and witless. Automatically she upended a wooden box and sat on it, for her legs had grown weak. The newspaper and letters fell to the floor and she left them there. Ranald must believe now—in there—with Nan—that he had killed Adam. He must know that. The change in him—the excitement underneath—the smashed face… .
She stirred and a nervous hand began to pluck at the clothes over her heart. Nan—she must save Nan somehow—not let her know—if the police came. If only no-one came until the morning, until she got Ranald on the train. She got up. She was trembling all over, felt sick. She tried to be sick but only brought a cold sweat to her forehead. This is madness, she thought; I must control myself, show nothing. She went to the wash-tub and turned on a tap. She would do a washing. She rinsed her hands in the cold water. She drank from the tap. She pressed a wet hand against her forehead. She hardly knew what she was doing. She would do a washing.