The Serpent

by Neil M. Gunn

  The time came at last, when, even in the daylight, he began to be afraid lest the ultimate centre in him, that which had been Tom as child, as boy, as young man in Glasgow, that continuing essence, that known cry, would itself get broken and be no more.

  Lost now in an immensity so vast that it transcended terror’s utmost bound, an immensity that could not be inhabited, that could not be borne, from which one turned to escape, running in madness, while the immensity swelled behind, and above, and slowly but surely reached over to engulf.

  Again, his last hope was Janet.

  One Friday afternoon – it must have been late in November – he was up on the hillside. The day was overcast but quite mild. One of those days that have in them a thought of spring. Small birds were chirping, whisking about in short energetic flights. Towards the Taruv wood the air was alive with rooks, blown about like burnt-black fragments from a fire. A faintly perceptible blueness as of smoke lay against distant land and hillside.

  He would have to see Janet.

  The very nature of the day affected him with such need for urgency that it excited him and sapped his strength.

  There might not be much more time, not if any strength and direction were to be kept.

  But now it was going to be a struggle, an immense deliberate struggle. For he knew the weakness that swirled in where strength had been.

  He might want to throw himself on Janet, to weep, unable, utterly unable, to struggle. The very thought of it could make him tremble now in bitterness, could make the tears wet his eyes.

  But, oh, if that happened it would be worse than time’s last nightmare; it would be the end. Coming away from Janet’s pity would be a degradation too deep ever to rise out of.

  That would not happen. He would fight her, physically and brutally fight her, to get strength out of her. There was no other conceivable hope for him.

  He would fight her, to get the primeval strength out of her which his body and soul needed. Not sexual lust now, but the last lust of life itself, life that needed the act of sexual lust in which to be renewed. And because his need was so desperate, he knew that it would seek satisfaction of itself, whatever emotions were brought into play by his own fevered being.

  He worked out his scheme in the end with sure coolness and considerable cunning. It was Friday, the night on which they used to meet, and he had come away deliberately to plan for this night.

  He would intercept her in the darkness on the way home from the manse. If anyone were with her – and it would be extremely unlikely now – he would follow until Janet was alone and overtake her before she disappeared into her home. A few natural words, pleasant, saying he would like particularly to see her – in an hour or whenever would suit her – just for a little while. Don’t worry – come.

  There was no way out of it for her. None.

  In the first faint smother of dusk, he got up and shivered. The dead bracken glowed like hot rust on a steep patch beyond the little burn. A blackbird scolded in a bush, and the sound sent icy winter over the mild land. The hunter and the hunted alight in his eyes, he followed the track, down past the salley bushes, and his legs stumbled and his body was delicately airborne. His decision had put a stillness on the quiescent land, translating it very slightly into a new aspect. As he came by his own fields, this translating quality increased, and for an instant he was invaded by a strange lightness and happiness, before it turned into an apprehension that grew swiftly into fear, into a clutch of terror. Moving his head half round against the weight of an immense compulsion, he saw his father standing by the corner of the stubble field.

  He was standing where he had last seen him on the afternoon he died. He was exactly the same as he had seen him then. But instead of looking at the growing corn he was looking at Tom.

  Tom was still perhaps forty yards off. Now the appearance of his father was so natural that Tom behaved – and this might well appear an astonishing thing – as if he actually were alive, as if all in an instant things were as they had been. The grip of terror had him (a quivering and melting of the skin inward in a weakening flush of heat), but not, in these first moments, a true supernatural terror. Tom dropped his eyes to the ground and made a slight detour round his father.

  Only as step followed step, and he could not look back, did supernatural terror come behind him, gaining on him. The short distance to the house was an endless journey. Only his will lived. But he made the door and turned blindly for his own room. As he crossed its threshold, invisible waters came about his feet, his legs, swirling about his thighs. He could not push his legs through the flood and fell softly in it and was drowned.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘You seem lost in thought,’ the shepherd greeted him.

  The Philosopher blinked and looked up. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said and a welcoming smile slowly crept over his face.

  ‘It’s a lovely day. I saw you sitting there and I thought to myself: he’s enjoying it!’

  ‘And when I saw you over there a little while back I thought: the good shepherd leadeth his sheep. But you don’t lead your sheep in this country: you drive them. Sit down.’

  The shepherd sat down, the warm smile on his face making it appear modest and mannerly. ‘Yes, I have seen them lead the sheep when I was out East in the Great War, but we have different ways here.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t we?’ remarked the Philosopher lightly. ‘Each land to its own customs. It makes for variety anyhow, and that’s something. The pity it is that our best customs die.’

  The shepherd’s thin face and intelligent hazel eyes liked this sort of talk. ‘I was standing round the corner over there, looking across at the Heights of Taruv. There are only three crofts now. It’s sad to look at the ruins.’

  ‘I can remember at least thirty. And then there were crofts all along the top, right to Braelone. I can remember stealing off as a lad on a summer evening to see the young fellows at the sports, jumping and putting the shot and throwing the hammer – on the green strip, you know, just by the Taruv Wood.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been there. I used to enter at the Games for the high jump myself.’

  ‘You did, I suppose. And the cycle race. I remember.’

  ‘Not the cycle race. I practiced one year, but I didn’t go in for it. I felt I wasn’t good enough. I hadn’t the time for the road.’

  ‘What I remember best was the warmth of the life up in that crofting district. A ceilidh there of a night was thick with life; singing and dancing, you would think they hadn’t a care in life. And neither they had. They drowned care periodically.’

  The shepherd laughed. ‘Faith, they did,’ he said. ‘And the wild ploys! I have been in a few myself, but Alec Wilson was telling me not long since about a splore they had once with a goat.’

  The Philosopher smiled. ‘I was there,’ he said.

  Old days came alive as they remembered this incident or that, one person or another. An elder of the church, who had tried to stop dancing, was accosted one night on a dark road by a tall figure wrapped in a white sheet … The wasting away of the Factor and the little clay figure found in the burn of Taruv … Donul Macallister, the all-round athlete from the Heights of Braelone, who had thrown the mad bull with his bare hands …

  The shepherd was forty-five and his memories went back into the early nineties, but Tom had been in Glasgow before the shepherd was born.

  ‘When I was a lad,’ said the Philosopher, ‘twenty to thirty women came from the Heights of Taruv to the harvesting on the great farms below. Women worked then for eightpence a day. What a swarm of life was there! The harvest field – and the harvest home. A merry crowd they were, and each as full of character as an egg of meat. And all Gaelic amongst themselves.’ The Philosopher’s eyes glimmered.

  ‘And now not a single woman coming down at all,’ said the shepherd. ‘What an extraordinary change there has been in less than a lifetime!’

  ‘Machinery,’ said the Philosopher. ‘First the reaping hoo
k, then the scythe, and now the binder.’

  ‘Ay, and the land is not cultivated as it was. It’s cattle and sheep now, stock-rearing, and you don’t need the same hands for that.’

  ‘Machinery again,’ said the Philosopher. ‘The Clyde builds great steamships; the ships take grain across the seas; and you look at the ruins on the Heights of Taruv.’

  ‘It will never come back, the old life,’ said the shepherd thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, it will come back, but not in the old way,’ said the Philosopher. ‘We are in the period of the great decline in the country here. A period like that will cover a hundred – two hundred – years. We have not reached the end of the ebb yet. But we will, and then the tide will slowly begin to flow again.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Life will come back – not merely in numbers – but with the old warmth. You have seen a place swarming with rabbits. Then in a few years you have seen it deserted. Then one day in another few years you see the rabbits have come back.’

  ‘But surely we’re not just like the rabbits?’ said the shepherd, smiling doubtfully.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Philosopher, ‘that we should despise the rabbits. Many a pleasant half-hour I have spent watching the young ones playing together. If you ask any man what is the reason for the decline in our land, he will tell you that folk will not live on porridge and milk as they used to do; in short, he’ll tell you that the causes are economic. It’s the same with the rabbits. Too many of them, not enough grass, liver disease. It will be time enough for man to despise the rabbit’s economics when he arranges his own in a more intelligent way.’

  ‘And do you think the resources are here?’

  ‘We have hardly touched them yet. What do you think all these big fellows are trying to get hold of Highland hydro-electric power for? The machine is finding out our land. The machine has taken away, the machine will give, blessed be the machine!’

  As the Philosopher smiled, the shepherd did not know quite what to make of him. The Philosopher always excited his mind, for about him there still lingered a memory of strange deeds, of the coils of the serpent in mystery and prophecy.

  ‘And it’s more than economics, in the sense that we are more than economics,’ said the Philosopher. ‘There is the superstructure of thought, especially, say, of religion. Just as the economic life ebbed, so did the religious. Science, with freethought, was the machine there. When William Bulbreac called me the Serpent he wasn’t so far wrong. In my own small way, I was Antichrist. And the awful thing about the Antichrist is that he has nothing to put in the place of that which he destroys. For every personal problem is more than a personal problem: it is a communal one.’

  ‘I never rightly understood – about that,’ murmured the shepherd, poking the point of his stick in the grass.

  ‘Who does?’ replied the Philosopher. ‘After giving more years to it than I can remember, my own thoughts have become a little clear only to myself. You read one philosopher and in your young enthusiasm you acknowledge him master – until you read another. In my early days in Glasgow, socialism, as we saw it then, solved everything, socialism and freethought. But socialism soon began to need a philosophy and so developed its materialist interpretation of all history, and as for freethought – what exactly was ‘free’?How sure we were in those days that the atom was the final indivisible particle of matter! You just couldn’t get beyond it. That was that settled for all time! Then the atom disappeared, like the old Devil, leaving an electric swirl behind him. Take even this business of the Serpent. How that, too, has changed!’

  ‘Yes, folk are not now so religious as they were. I mean they’re more tolerant now to a man with a point of view of his own. In the old days some of the ministers and elders were real tyrants! And how they liked to use their power! I suppose they believed so strongly themselves that they were sure they were doing what was best for everyone else.’

  ‘Yes; power. They loved to exercise their power, particularly when they could link it up with the power that underlay and explained and upheld everything. In this way they became, as it were, larger than themselves; they became part of the company of the sons of God; the executive power on earth. Much the same thing is happening at the moment with the new communist religion in Russia. The ministers and the elders there are behaving in the same way: the same certainty of rightness, the same profound belief that their way is the way of the ultimate good of mankind; the same intolerance of criticism, and a more ruthless way of liquidating the heretic than you or I knew here – though not more ruthless than in the far times of the Covenantors or the Inquisition. That is not to condemn Communism or Christianity as a barbarous creed. It is merely to understand how man acts in a certain set of circumstances – perhaps necessarily acts. He has done it often in history, and each time, in his own mind, he has been certain that he was right in a final eternal way. Without that belief, that faith, he might have accomplished little. However, that’s another argument, if a long one! That’s not what I was thinking of when I mentioned how our attitude to the Serpent has changed.’

  ‘I thought you were a keen Communist,’ said the shepherd.

  The Philosopher smiled. ‘I couldn’t be anything unless I was extreme, could I? How a man’s reputation will stick to him! When I was a young socialist in Glasgow we used all the jargon of the time with just the same ease as the young do now. A man had only to use a phrase or quotation for us to “place” him at once – Robert Owen, Henry George, the Communist Manifesto, and so on. But of all these tags that floated about the one that stuck most strongly in my mind was one by Bakunin the anarchist. This is it: “Liberty without socialism means privilege, socialism without liberty means slavery and brutality”.’

  The shepherd’s eyebrows crinkled thoughtfully as the Philosopher turned his head and looked at him, apparently awaiting some expression of opinion.

  ‘That about hits it off, I think,’ said the shepherd slowly. ‘Only,’ he added, troubled, ‘I thought anarchism meant – meant –’

  ‘Chaos?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said the Philosopher, and quite suddenly and merrily he laughed, tilting his head and looking around on the bright world, and it seemed to the shepherd in that merry moment that the bright world laughed back. ‘Extraordinary the effect a man’s early environment can have on his mind,’ proceeded the Philosopher. ‘When I try to work out how it is that always, at the back of everything, I have been a natural anarchist, do you know to what I am inclined to attribute it?’

  ‘No,’ said the shepherd.

  ‘Precisely to the old days in the crofting world on the Heights of Taruv as I knew it when a boy. Then – and back for centuries and centuries – they were all anarchists. Anarchism was the working basis of their lives, both their economic and mental lives. Think it out and you’ll see it for yourself. In my boyhood, I never actually remember seeing the laird in person, the owner of the land. He was an absentee, as you know. Once a year the men put on their Sunday suits and went to the place where the Factor was having his sitting for the collection of rents. They paid their pound or two, got their dram, and came away. After that each man was his own master, worked his own land, having no boss or bureaucrat over him to drive or direct him. Accordingly in the community as a working or going concern, all were equal in social status, or rather the idea of class distinction amongst themselves could not arise, simply because it did not exist. The farther back you go the clearer that becomes because you recede more from the power of money. Then almost everything was, as we say, ‘in kind’. Even what tribute was paid to the chief as a leader was paid in kind, just as in Russia some who now work the nationally owned land pay Stalin in produce, in kind. But the crofting country, through long centuries, had reached beyond an active bureaucracy and leaders. True, the chiefs at intervals stirred up the clansmen to fight for some power-scheme the chiefs had on hand, some dirty business or other, but actually for generations on end whole
regions of the country lived in peace, cultivating the land and rearing their cattle and sheep. The individual bits of dirty business are remembered. History has so far been a remembering of the dirty business rather than an understanding of the arts and the way of life of the peaceful generations. I remember Alec Wilson getting a hiding in school one day because he couldn’t remember all the high-up intrigues behind the bloody Massacre of Glencoe. The history of the Highlands to us as boys was a sort of enlarged massacre of Glencoe, and we had to remember the bloody bits or get walloped.’

  ‘That’s right!’ said the shepherd, laughing softly. Presently, when they had swopped one or two schoolboy memories, the shepherd came back to the word anarchism and its difference from communism, for he had a curious mind in such matters.

  When the Philosopher had in a somewhat elementary way explained the difference, he went on, ‘In Taruv in those days – for there were, of course, no big farms in the Glen then – you had the individual responsible for his own bit of land, while at the same time he was an active member of the community, abiding by its customs and laws, just as his own bit of land was part of the communal land. In fact in the old run-rig days the men used to cast lots every year for the various portions of land. Then each worked the portion he got for that year. They naturally helped one another and at certain times – say, at the peat-cutting – they voluntarily joined forces and worked in squads, and these were usually the happiest times of all. In short, you had a true balance between the maximum freedom of the individual and the common welfare of all, and at the same time – and this is where the anarchism comes in – they had no bosses, no tyrants, no bureaucrats, no profit-drivers among themselves. You see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes. I believe I see what you’re getting at now. But do you think folk would go back to that today?’

  ‘No. We are dealing with what anthropologists would call a primitive society. What I am trying to show to you is that the society worked. You and I know that. When we use the word communism or anarchism, we have something real to go on. Our minds quite naturally take the next step and say: if we could get our society today, with the machine, working after the old pattern – if we could evolve the old into the new – then once more the life of the folk would be warm and rich and thick. For remember, they were primitive in the old days only in so far as the absence of the machine was concerned. They had their way of life, their religious attitude to life, their arts. Take what is considered the highest manifestation of art, namely, music. Look at the music our forefathers produced. One of the finest folk musics in the world. Do we in the Highlands produce music of any kind now?’