Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  At that moment all was forgotten, the angry words, the barbaric barrack room, the eternal spit and polish, the heart-break of those nights when I had lain sleeplessly in bed watching the moonlight turn the floor to yellow and hearing the infinitely melancholy sound of the Last Post, All was forgiven because of the exact emotion I felt then, that pride that I had come through, that I was one with the others, that I was not a misfit.

  When the parade was over, I ran into the barrack room with the others. There was no one in the room except Lecky who was lying on his bed. I went over to him, thinking he was ill. He had shot himself by putting the rifle in his mouth and pulling the trigger. The green coverlet on the bed was completely red and blood was dripping on to the scrubbed wooden floor. I ran outside and was violently sick. Looking back now I think it was the training that did it. I didn’t want to be sick on that clean floor.

  Of course, there was an inquiry but nothing came of it. No one wrote to his m.p. or to the press after all, not even the public schoolboys. There was even a certain sympathy for the corporal: after all, he had his career to make and there were many worse than him. The two public schoolboys became officers: one in the Infantry and the other in education. I never saw them again. Perhaps the corporal is a sergeant major now. Anyway, it was a long time ago but it was the first death I had ever seen.

  The sheriff leaned down and spoke briefly to the two youths after they had been found guilty. He adjusted his hearing aid slightly though he had nothing to listen for. He said,

  ‘If I may express a personal opinion I should like to say that I think the jury were right in finding you guilty. There are too many of you people around these days, who think you can break the law with impunity and who believe in a cult of violence. In sentencing you I should like to add something which I have often thought and I hope that people in high places will listen. In my opinion, this country made a great mistake when it abolished National Service. If it were in existence at this date perhaps you would not be here now. You would have been disciplined and taught to be clean and tidy. You would have had to cut your hair and to walk properly instead of slouching about insolently as you do. You would not have been allowed to be idle and drunk. I am glad to be able to give you the maximum sentence I can. I see no reason to be lenient.’

  The two of them looked at him with insolence still. I was quite happy to see the sheriff giving them a stiff sentence. After all, the victim must be protected too: there is too much of this molly-coddling. I hate court work: I would far rather be in my little office working on land settlements or discussing the finer points of wills.

  It was a fine summer’s day as I left the court. There was no shadow anywhere, all fresh and new, just as I like to see this town.

  The Hermit

  ONE DAY A HERMIT came to live in or rather on the edge of our village. The first we knew about it was when we saw the smoke rising from one of the huts that the R.A.F. had left there after the war. (There is a cluster of them just outside the village, tin corrugated huts that had never been pulled down, though the war was long over and their inhabitants had returned to their ordinary lives in England and other parts of Scotland.)

  Shortly afterwards, Dougie who owns the only shop in the village told me about the hermit. The shop of course is the usual kind that you’ll find in any village in the Highlands and sells anything from paraffin to bread, from newspapers to cheese. Dougie is one of the few people in the village that I visit. He served in Italy in the last war and has strange stories about the Italians and the time when he was riding about in tanks. He’s married but drinks quite a lot: he doesn’t have a car but goes to town every Saturday night and enjoys himself in his own way. However, he has a cheerful nature and his shop is always full: one might say it is the centre of gossip in the village.

  ‘He’s an odd looking fellow,’ he told me. ‘He wears a long coat which is almost black and there’s a belt of rope around him. You’d think in this warm weather that he’d be wearing something lighter. And he rides a bicycle. He sits very upright on his bicycle. His coat comes down practically to his feet. He’s got a very long nose and very bright blue eyes. Well, he came into the shop and of course I was at the counter but he didn’t ask for his messages at all. He gave me a piece of paper with the message written on it. I thought at first he was dumb—sometimes you get dumb people though I’ve never seen one in the village—but he wasn’t at all dumb for I heard him speaking to himself. But he didn’t speak to me. He just gave me the paper with the messages written on it. Cheese, bread, jam and so on but no newspapers. And when he got the messages and paid me he took them and put them in a bag and then he put the bag over the handlebars and he went away again. Just like that. It was very funny.

  ‘At first I was offended—why, after all, shouldn’t he speak to me?—but then I thought about it and I considered, Well, as long as he can pay for the messages why shouldn’t I give them to him? After all he’s not a Russian spy or a German.’ He laughed. ‘Though for all he said he might as well be. But I don’t think he is. He wasn’t at all aggressive or anything like that. In fact I would say he looked a very mild gentle sort of man. The other people in the shop thought he was a bit funny. But I must say that after you have travelled you see all sorts of people and you’re not surprised. Still, it was funny him giving me the paper. He wore this long coat almost down to his feet and a piece of rope for a belt. I don’t know whether his coat was dirty or not. He looked a very contented sort of man. He didn’t ask for a newspaper at all, or whisky. Some people who are alone are always asking for whisky but he didn’t ask for any. All he wanted was the food. He had a purse too and he took the money out of the purse and he gave it to me. And all this time he didn’t say anything at all. That has never happened to me before but I wasn’t surprised. No, I’m telling a lie. I was surprised but I wasn’t angry. They say he’s living in one of the R.A.F. huts and he doesn’t bother anybody. But it’s strange really. No one knows where he’s come from. And when he had got his messages he got on to this old bicycle and he went away again. He sits very upright on his bicycle and he rides along very slowly. I never saw anyone like him before. It’s as if he doesn’t want to speak. No, it’s as if he’s too tired or too uninterested to speak. Most people in the shop speak all the time—especially the women—but he wasn’t like that at all. Still if he can pay for his messages he can be a Russian for all I care.’ And he laughed again. ‘There are some people in the village who don’t pay for their messages but I can’t say that about him. He paid on the nail. And after all, in my opinion, people talk too much anyway.’

  TWO

  That evening, a warm, fine evening, I was out at a moorland loch with my fishing rod, pretending to fish. I do this quite often, I mean I pretend to fish, so that I can get away from the village which I often find claustrophobic. I don’t really like killing things, and all I do is hold the rod in my hand and leave it lying in the water while I think of other things and enjoy the evening. Out on the moor it is very quiet and there is a fragrance of plants whose names I do not know. I might mention here that I was once the local headmaster till I retired from school a few years ago, and I live alone since my wife died.

  I was born and brought up in the village but in spite of that I sometimes find it, as I have said, claustrophobic and I like to get away from it and fishing is the pretext I use. When people see you sitting down dangling a rod in the water they think you are quite respectable and sensible whereas if you sat there and simply thought and brooded they would think you eccentric. It’s amazing the difference a long piece of wood makes to your reputation among your fellow-men. After all if I never catch anything they merely think I am a poor fisherman and this is more acceptable than to think me silly.

  So I sit there by the loch with the rod dangling from my hand and I watch the sun go down and I smell the fragrance of the plants and flowers and I watch the circles the fish make in the water as they plop about the loch. Sometimes if there are midges I am rather u
ncomfortable but one can’t have everything and quite a lot of the time there are no midges. And I really do like to see the sun setting, as the mountains ahead of me become blue and then purple and then quite dark. The sunsets are quite spectacular and probably I am the only person in the village who ever notices them.

  So I was sitting by the lochside when I saw the hermit at a good distance away sitting by himself. I knew it was the hermit since there was no loch where he was and no other person from the village would sit by himself on the moor staring at nothing as the hermit was doing. He was exactly like a statue—perhaps like Rodin’s ‘Thinker’—and as Dougie had said he looked quite happy. I nearly went over to talk to him but for some reason I didn’t do so. If it had been anyone from the village I would have felt obliged to do so but as I didn’t know the hermit I felt it would be all right if I stayed where I was. Sometimes I watched him and sometimes I didn’t. But I noticed that he held the same pose all the time, that statue-like pose of which I have just spoken. I myself tend to be a little restless after a while. Sometimes I will get up from the lochside and walk about, and sometimes I will take out a cigarette and light it (especially if there are midges), but I don’t have the ability to stay perfectly still for a long period as he obviously had. I envied him for that. And I wondered about him. Perhaps he was some kind of monk or religious person. Perhaps he had made a vow of silence which he was strictly adhering to. But at the same time I didn’t think that that was the case.

  At any rate I sat there looking at him and sometimes at the loch which bubbled with the rings made by the fish, and I felt about him a queer sense of destiny. It was as if he had always been sitting where he was sitting now, as if he was rooted to the moor like one of the Standing Stones behind him whose purpose no one knew and which had been there forever. (There are in fact Standing Stones on the moor though no one knows what they signify or where they came from. In the summer time you see tourists standing among them with cameras but it was too late in the evening to see any there now.) I thought of what Dougie had said, that the hermit was not in the habit of buying whisky, and I considered this a perceptive observation. After all, lonely people do drink a lot and the fact that he didn’t drink showed that he was exceptional in his own way. It might also of course show that he didn’t have much money. Perhaps he was not a monk at all, but a new kind of man who was able to live happily on his own without speaking to anyone at all. Like a god, or an animal.

  All the time that I had been looking at him he hadn’t moved. And behind him the sun was setting, large and red. Soon the stars would come out and the pale moon. I wondered how long he would stay there. The night certainly was mild enough and he could probably stay out there all night if he wished to. And as he obviously didn’t care for other people’s opinions he might very well do that. I on the other hand wasn’t like that. Before I could leave the village and sit out by myself I had to have a fishing rod even though I didn’t fish. And people in the village knew very well that I didn’t fish, or at least that I never brought any fish home with me. Still, the charade between me and the villagers had to be played out, a charade that he was clearly too inferior or superior to care about. In any case there were no new events happening in the village apart from his arrival there and therefore I thought about him a lot. It was almost as if I knew him already though I hadn’t spoken to him. It was as if he were a figment of my imagination that had taken shape in front of me. I even felt emotions about him, a mixture of love and hate. I felt these even though I had only seen him once. Which was very odd as I had always thought myself above such petty feelings.

  Sometimes I thought that I would take a book out with me and read it in the clear evening light, but that too would have made me appear odd. Fishing didn’t matter but reading books did, so I had never done that. The hermit wasn’t reading a book but I knew that if he had thought about it and were a book reader he would have taken his book out with him and not cared what people thought of him. He wasn’t a prisoner of convention. I on the other hand had been a headmaster here and I could only do what I thought they expected of me. So I could dangle a rod uselessly in the water—which I thought absurd—and I couldn’t read a book among that fragrance, which was what would have suited me better. After a while—the hermit still sitting throughout without moving—I rose, took my rod, and made my way home across the moor which was red with heather.

  When I arrived back at the house Murdo Murray was as usual sitting on a big stone beside the house he was building. He has been building this house for five years and all that he has finished is one wall. Day after day he goes out with his barrow to the moor and gathers big solid stones which he lays down beside the partially finished house. As usual too he was wearing his yellow canvas jersey.

  ‘Did you catch anything?’ he asked and smiled fatly.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘nothing.’

  He smiled again. Sometimes I dislike intensely his big red fat face and despise him for his idleness. How could a man start on a project like building a house and take such a long time to do it and not even care what people thought of him or what they were saying about him? Did he have no idea what excellence and efficiency were? But no, he lived in a dream of idleness and large stones, that was his whole life. Most of the time he sat on a stone and watched the world go by. He would say, ‘One day there will be a bathroom here and a bedroom there,’ and he would point lazily at spaces above the ground around him. Then he would sigh, ‘My wife and daughters are always after me, but I can’t do more than it is possible for me to do, isn’t that right?’

  After a while he would repeat, ‘No man can do more than it is possible for him to do.’

  As a matter of fact, we often wondered what he would do with himself if he ever finished the house. It looked as if he didn’t want to finish it. The children of the village would often gather round him, and help him, and he would tell them stories as he sat on a big stone, large and fat. No, he would never finish the house, that was clear, and for some reason that bothered me. I hated to see these big useless stones lying about, as if they were the remnants of some gigantic purpose of the past.

  ‘It’s a fine evening,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and there are no midges. Why don’t you go out fishing yourself?’ I added.

  ‘Me?’ he said and laughed. ‘I’ve got enough to do without going fishing.’ And he probably believed that too, I thought. He probably believed that he was a very busy man with not a minute to himself, living in the middle of a world of demanding stones.

  ‘If you want any help at any time,’ I would say to him, but he would answer, ‘No, I’ll do fine as I am. If I don’t finish the house someone will finish it.’ And he lived on in that belief. He shifted his big buttocks about on the stone and said, ‘I used to go fishing in a boat as you know but I never fished in the lochs. And that was a long time ago. Myself and Donald Macleod. We used to go in the boat but I never fished the lochs.’

  I felt a tired peace creeping over me and I didn’t want to speak. Sometimes it’s impossible to summon up enough energy to talk to people, and I had been growing more and more like that recently. I was growing impatient of those long silences when two people would sit beside each other and think their own thought and then finally like a fish surfacing someone would speak, as he was doing now, words without meaning or coherence. Why was it necessary to speak at all?

  He was clearly finished for the day, sitting there surrounded by his stones. Perhaps he didn’t want to go into the house in case his wife would nag him for not making quicker progress. Or perhaps he was sitting there inert as a mirror on which pictures print themselves. In the late light I thought of him as a man sitting in a cemetery with rough unengraved headstones around him. Perhaps that was what our world was like, a world of rough unengraved headstones, lacking the finished marble quality of the world of the Greeks.

  Big rough stones on a moor.

  I left him there and went back to my own house.

&nb
sp; When I entered I felt as I usually did the emptiness and the order. The TV set, the radio and the bookcases were in their places. The mirrors and ornaments and furniture had their own quiet world which I sometimes had the eerie feeling excluded me altogether. When my wife was alive the furniture seemed less remote than it seemed to be now. Even the pictures on the walls had withdrawn into a world of their own. I often had the crazy feeling that while I was out my furniture was conducting a private life of its own which froze immediately I went in the door and that sometimes I would half catch tables and chairs returning hastily to their usual places in the room. It was all very odd, very disquieting.

  I went to the cupboard and poured myself a whisky and then I sat down in my chair after switching on the fire and picking up a book from the bookcase. It was a copy of Browning’s poems. Since I retired I had far more time to read books unconnected with my job but I didn’t read as much as I thought I would have done and what I did read was mostly poetry. I would find myself falling asleep in the middle of the day and at other times I would pace about the house restlessly as if I were in a cage which I myself had built.

  In the chair opposite me my wife used to sit and she would tell me stories which I hardly ever listened to. ‘Kirsty’s daughter’s gone away to London again. They say that she’s walking the streets, did you know?’ And I would raise my head and nod without speaking. And she would go on to something else. But most of the time I wouldn’t say anything. It didn’t occur to me that my wife’s remarks required an answer and for a lot of the time I couldn’t think of anything to say anyway. Her voice was like a background of flowing water, a natural phenomenon which I had grown accustomed to. Now there was no voice at all in the house except that of the radio or the TV and the only order was that which I imposed on it.