by Neil M. Gunn
So that to find the old Janet in the hollow was just what he wanted. Even if she seemed a trifle withdrawn into herself, more given to pleasant talk and good common sense than to showing her personal feelings, surely that was understandable, a tribute to the independence that would make up for her recent weakness by the back door. She was asking nothing from him! So delicately she kept him at a slight distance! Their play was delightful and rarely had she been so continuously alive and various. When he kissed her she sank into a strange apathy, but even that he understood as a backwash from the mood of fear and hopelessness.
What if there was something hidden and strange about her, alive and yet reluctant, keeping him off now and then with a gaiety just a little forced? She would not want to break down again – and ah, now, he held the secret key! He was making no demands upon her, none, until the cottage was empty and his plan mature.
His plan obsessed him. It held a brightness that nothing could dim. Janet had asked him to take her away. She had gone to the manse for reasons that moved him. If he could read signs, Donald had a student girl in the town. And he, Tom, had his plan!
When next Friday passed, and the following week-end, without sign of Janet, he was pursued by a restless impatience rather than that first awful premonitory fear. His desire to see Janet alone began to burn in him, but the strength that came from his command of circumstance was greater. He was distracted, too, by thoughts of the cottage and Widow Macrae’s death. He now made up his mind that immediately Widow Macrae died he would tell Janet his plan: a definite point that steadied his whole world.
Meantime he had money to make and work to do; he had to work for the future, and the more he was troubled by not seeing Janet the harder he worked.
From his next meeting with Janet, he came away uneasy. There had been much of the old liveliness, but now he saw that she was troubled about something, that she was keeping him at a distance, as if she were weary of emotion. She denied it – or at least she said he would have to forgive her, because she was tired. No, there was nothing wrong, but if he could just be friendly it would help her.
His uneasiness in the following days was slowly eaten up by the old premonition, but not now a vague premonition descending in stillness. This premonition had a claw that caught at his physical heart. It could pounce upon him at the oddest moments, clutch him and stop his breathing.
She was overworked, had trouble at home, was tired. Anyone might get tired and despondent. Look how his own father had affected himself at times.
He worked like a slave, but now sleep would desert him for spells, awful desperate agony of midnight hours that saw new meaning, revelation in a gesture, a smile, an attitude, an intonation, the slightest movement of reluctance. Those awful eyes of the midnight hours that he cursed and blinded with Glasgow gutter-oaths.
Widow Macrae died in the second week of September.
Tom had not seen Janet for a long time. He now had to see her at all costs. Running into Tina in the village, he stopped to chat and asked her if she had seen Janet lately. ‘Yes,’ she answered lightly, ‘I saw her last night’, and she gave him a curious glance. In a flash he realised that Tina must know of their meetings: Janet would have had to tell her, if only to prepare Tina for a possible question from Janet’s mother.
‘I would like to see her tonight. Would you tell her that?’
‘Yes, I will,’ said Tina. ‘I don’t think she has anything on.’
‘Good. How’s George?’
‘Who? That fellow!’ said Tina.
Tom went off smiling.
And Janet came, making no excuse for her long absence, friendly and pleasant, in the night-light by the field corner wrapped coolly in herself, like a pillar. She had at times a lovely grace of slow movement.
He saw at once that she wished to keep him at a friendly distance, that she desired this friendliness above all else, that she deliberately set herself to achieve it, using her full powers.
Though more uneasy than ever, her manner bewitched him and he had the surprise and hope of his plan.
Then, after some time, leading up to it not without cunning, he told her of it.
To begin with, his words came haltingly. He had been thinking over their difficulties, he said. Something would have to be done for both their sakes. His own father – he was not actively against him now, but – it was like having something hanging over your head, it preyed on you, it got you down. It would be best for his father, for his mother, if he wasn’t there at all. And Janet, having to work so hard all day, and then – at night – her mother. It was getting her down, too. If all this went on, it would tear them to bits. They must look at it sensibly. life was only beginning for them. They must take it into their own hands.
A silence had come upon Janet. He felt her stillness.
Widow Macrae’s cottage was not much to look at, he went on, keeping his excitement down. But it could be made a fine place. It could be added to. It could be made one of the neatest little houses in the whole district. And he could make it that. His excitement was difficult now to keep down. ‘If you and I were living there, Janet, you could look after your mother and I could look after my own folk. What do you say?’
She did not speak.
‘I could get it ready for the November term.’ The quiver of his excitement got the better of him. ‘Janet?’ He put his arms round her shoulders, ‘Janet,’ cried his quivering voice through a rush of eager feeling. ‘Isn’t that – wouldn’t that – be lovely for us? It’s the one way, Janet, Janet my own one. Janet!’ He crushed her and shook her. ‘Janet!’
But she did not respond to his wild play. Naturally enough she was overcome. It was a big thing to have come upon her all at once.
She stirred like one in a heavy dream.
‘I never thought – I couldn’t –’
‘I know, I know, Janet, but isn’t it the perfect way? I have been thinking over it for weeks. Oh, I have everything worked out.’
She was silent.
‘Look at it this way,’ he began eagerly.
‘My mother –’
‘Yes, I know. But don’t you see that this would settle everything? You would not only be able to look after your mother, but you would have me behind you.’
‘My mother – I couldn’t. Not yet. Wait, Tom. Let us wait for a little.’
‘But what’s the good of waiting? Things will not get any better. They’ll only get worse. And the house is there. It’s there now!’
‘My mother – it would kill her.’
‘But if you’re going to wait for your mother, you might wait all your life. For heaven’s sake, Janet, let us be sensible.’
‘Give me time, Tom. Let me think it over.’ Her voice had the quiet desperation of one under a paralysing burden.
‘Yes, but –’
‘Please, Tom – don’t – make me break down.’
He was swiftly moved by that appeal. At the touch of his hands, she got up, turned away, and he heard her controlling the threatening gulps.
Sensitively he stood beside her, giving her time, but as he looked at the dark hillside, a strange withering came upon him like a shivering of cold, an immense, an immortal loneliness.
It made him feel bleak and bitter and yet in some aloof way tender. It passed, leaving him quietened, and as they went along the hillside his voice came back, helping her, for she seemed blinded now and altogether uncertain of her feet.
‘Think it over,’ he said quietly at the corner of the field. ‘You’ll have to let me know soon. Others may be after the house.’
Her lip pressed down over her top teeth. ‘Give me time to –’ He heard her hold her breath. All at once she turned and walked away.
What was it? Could it possibly be her mother? Could it possibly be that it was just her mother?
If she had really desired to go to the cottage would not that at least have been clear? asked the eyes of the midnight hour.
But if she had been overcome by the plan,
he reasoned, if she had been so overcome by her own desire to go to the cottage, to get away from her mother, that she couldn’t – even – speak of it?
The eyes smiled.
But he refused to give up that immense hope, that fathomless possibility. Janet did keep things to herself, and there might be something in her home life far more desperate than he dreamed.
One day passed, two, three. He would have to see Janet. He must put in for the cottage; and at once or he would be too late. Already perhaps someone had spoken for it, had been to the estate office. His impatience grew fevered.
To go along the road and watch for Janet coming home in the dark was like prying. Normally it would have been a natural thing to do, but it wasn’t so for him now. He had hated spying on her before and had sworn he would never do it again.
On the third night he waited by the dark shadow of the hedge beside the field gate. Donald and Janet came along. They stopped exactly opposite him as if at the direction of an invisible stage-manager.
‘No, no farther,’ she said, not quite in her village voice, with the slight anglicising of the High School, a delicate excitement.
‘You are frightened,’ said Donald, laughing, enamoured of her.
‘Well – but –’
He took her in his arms. Their embrace was long.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he said.
She did not speak. Her feet went quickly and then more firmly along the road. Donald stood for a moment, as if listening to her, then went back to the manse.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The hours, the days, that followed had a bitterness, an inner cruelty that changed his nature, hardened and shaped it blade-sharp.
And the blade was turned on himself. Inwardly it cut and twisted, shearing off the soft adhesions of sentiment, of tender belief, whose existence he now regarded with an excruciating mockery.
Her mother! ‘My mother – I couldn’t.’ Ο God!
The enormity of it was almost beyond belief. The sheer wantonness of it.
She was a wanton by nature. He saw it now, not in vague spite, but in the record of every gesture and thought and act. She was a book he had read but whose meaning was only now revealed. On each page, every character was inked in acid.
It was beyond all considerations of anger and hate. She moved beyond them still, the same body, the same grace, only now he understood what moved her, understood it in every twist of secret thought and desire, to the last fibre of her being. She was revealed and he saw her.
‘Not yet. Wait, Tom. Let us wait for a little … My mother.’
Genuinely moved, the break in her voice. Trying to think of her mother. Being moved, thinking of her mother. And behind it – the real fear, that she was not yet on with the new love, not yet certain of the new love, not yet sorry for the old love, clinging to the old love in a clutch of fear, lest the new love be too good to be true.
By God, behind the sentiments and play-acting, behind her nature, behind her very self– what a sheer ruthlessness!
She would have had him, for lack of anyone better. He would do, until the more attractive turned up.
And this is what he had known by an intuition whose implications he had never faced. This was what his premonition had meant. Donald was the test, the crisis, and he had realised it when she mentioned to him – that ironic stroke of fate – that she was going to work at the manse. Not that working at the manse was necessary. It merely created the opportunity which otherwise, by the customs of the tribe, would not normally have presented itself. Though it might – if Donald’s girl in the town had disappointed him; and he had looked a bit travel-worn and dejected when trundling in the bicycle at midday!
Perhaps Donald’s girl in town had another scheme on of her own! He would be needing sympathy. Well, he had come back to the right place for it!
And it wasn’t as if Tom didn’t know all about this. Great heaven, what had all his life in Glasgow meant, that life with Bob and Dannie and the girl-hunts, with Dave and Tim and the Winnie Johnstons? It was just the kind of stuff he did know. He had seen it in the open.
‘The little bitch – she thinks he’s more of a swell!’ The lament of the disappointed swain. Everywhere, with an echo of bawdy laughter.
Had he expected something different in the country, with its ancient customs and decencies and loyalties? He had never really been part of the Glasgow scene. He had observed the scene with an extreme clarity, taken part in it as far as need be, but something in him had held back. Thus he had often enjoyed its fun to the highest degree, but with the watcher’s enjoyment, with a queer liberating detachment that made the happiness at times almost pure.
This was his scene – here, at home. Not Glasgow, known and honest. This.
The slashing and cutting was not continuous. He worked with a hard pith, choosing jobs that needed brute energy rather than accuracy or finish. The spasms were intermittent, involuntary cleavages inside him, and his insight was sustained by a light that switched on of itself, coming from God knew where, but holding him remorselessly to the moments of revelation.
But beyond anger, beyond rage and bitter misery, there was this that was happening to his essential nature. He felt the change taking place, and held to the new edge of hard cruelty. Out of the bloody violence to the old simple kindly nature, the new nature was being fashioned. It might have to bide its time, but it would be quite merciless.
Janet made no effort to get in touch with him again. The house could go. The house went. One day he saw new planking by its front wall and Willie Ross, the joiner, coming out of the door, folding his yard-rule.
The first symptom of the new nature showed itself one afternoon when he suddenly found his mother looking at him. He had been standing gazing at a pile of timber for which now he had no immediate use. Or perhaps he hadn’t been gazing at it. Anyway he had been standing quite still and, on becoming aware of a presence, glanced round and saw his mother’s eyes, her expression. At once, such anger gripped him, so swift a hatred of her prying sympathy that he had to grit his teeth and turn away. She did not speak, and he went into the shop, hissing to himself, emptying his mind.
Work was the sure salvation. Work for the night cometh when no man can work. Tom edged his tools and worked far into the night, disproving that primitive conception of darkness. October came in and the days shortened; the lads drew the blind. The winter session of talk and discussion was on the way.
Tom welcomed them. ‘Come in and shut the door.’ He was as ruthless as the next now in keeping out those whom they did not want. His friends noticed the change in him, but found it exhilarating. In argument he was not only more incisive, but full of mockery.
Months before, Dougal had sent him some translations from the works of Voltaire. He had read them at the time, as he read all that Dougal sent him, for he felt that the best way to express his thanks was by showing his appreciation of the matter. And he had liked Voltaire, his seeming innocence in not understanding God’s partiality towards some criminal individuals and tribal atrocities among the Jews, his suave irony. To tell the truth, much of what he had read in criticism of the Bible had secretly repelled him. He saw the force of what was written, but was repelled by the spirit of the writer, by what appeared a sheer destructiveness for its own sake. At least, it had often made him uncomfortable. They were like fire-eaters, destroyers, and in their presence whatever was amiable or amusingly irrational in human nature withered. They licked up the purely likeable in man in the best tradition of the avenging Jewish prophets.
But with Voltaire it was quite different. Just as the normal atheistical writer might be compared with the avenging prophet, so might Voltaire, it seemed to Tom, be compared in a certain way with Christ. Tolerance was his cry. No wonder the intolerant church of his day had hated this ‘lewd atheist’. ‘Voltaire the Mocker’, whose plea was ‘Justice, kindness, compassion, and tolerance’.
And did he not make a mess and a battlefield of the Old Testament! Did he not la
y about him, with a thoroughness that surpassed all others in the field, with a courtesy that was as subtle as the edge of his sword! There was a leader a man could follow, and feel he was doing something for his own human kind.
Tom could lay about him, too, and use tolerance as a weapon, for he had not a great deal of tolerance for his own kind now.
And he did, producing for the first time his book or pamphlet, reading from it to clinch an argument and leave his listeners in an amazed silence. Sometimes the silence would last for a minute. Even Andie began to feel uneasy, for on the dark Glen road home, heaven alone knew what gargantuan shapes might come at him for such mockery of the great figures of the past of God’s world, like Abraham and David. The Psalms of David. By God, it was not canny.
But Alec stretched out an arm for the book. He read, standing by the lamp, others grouped round him.
Tom went on with his work, hearing their snorts, their suppressed gusts of half-frightened laughter. Alec did not read aloud. ‘Wait a minute,’ said a voice. ‘Let me see that,’ said another. None of them repeated aloud what he read. Not all of it they understood, and the learning which was beyond them served to add a mythical power and wonder, impressive as the Devil’s sleight-of-hand, marvels on the edge of the unseen that took the breath with the nearness of an ominous presence.
Alec asked leave to take the book home with him, and enjoyed the sensation of his own courage. There was excitement and to spare. ‘By George, it’s going to be a winter, this!’ said Alec leading the way to the road.
Tom shut up shop and went to bed.
Alec would now have plenty of secret ammunition. He would spread the news to add to the turmoil and gaiety of life. Get people by the ears and have a good joke.
Well, why not? What the hell did it matter to Tom? The church and its servants, its idols, its students. It’s young Donalds!
He would clear out. Why should he have had to bear what he had borne? Duty to his father? His father did not want him. His father hated him. That had long been clear.