Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  I sipped my whisky slowly and read my Browning. I drank much more now since my wife had died. Not that I actually loved her, at least I didn’t think I did. It had never been a large glowing affair, much more a quieter, more continuous fire. We were companions but we weren’t lovers. But in those days I didn’t drink as much as I do now. I think loneliness and drink must go together, as Dougie said. Browning however is another matter. His poetry has a cheerful tone and apparently he was in love with his wife, or at least so we must believe after that dramatic elopement. I wondered what people would say of me when one day I died in this house as was inevitable. They might perhaps say, ‘Well, he was a good headmaster. He was interested in the children,’ and then dig a hole and leave me there. On a cold rainy day perhaps. And then they would go back to their homes. But they wouldn’t say that I had done much for the village. I hadn’t, of course. I had always been a stranger in the village. Just as much as the hermit was. Though I had been born and brought up in it. My thoughts had never been the villagers’ thoughts, they aspired to be higher and more permanent than the business of the seasons.

  It was strange how quiet I felt the house was, as if I missed that monotonous conversation, as if even yet I could see someone sitting in that chair opposite me. But of course there was no one. Mary was rotting away somewhere else, in the damp ground. In spite of Browning. In spite of the illusion of warmth which the whisky momentarily gave me.

  THREE

  The following day I met Kirsty who was on her way to Murdo’s house with a cup in her hand. An evil Christian woman. She never misses a sermon or Communion, going about in her dark clothes, with her thin bitter face and the nose from which there is a continual drip like the drip from a tap which needs a washer and which makes an irritating sound in the sink night and day. She has a daughter who appears periodically from London and then goes away again after a stormy period at home. It is said that she works in the streets in Soho but this may be malice since anyone as bitterly Christian as Kirsty is must be brought down to the level of common humanity and given at least one cross to bear in this fallen world.

  It wasn’t long before she spoke about the hermit.

  ‘It shouldn’t be allowed,’ she said.

  ‘What shouldn’t?’ I asked.

  ‘That man living in that hut. Why, he might be a murderer or a thief or a gangster. The police might be after him. I wonder if anyone’s thought of that.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think he is any of these things,’ I said. ‘I’m told he looks very gentle.’

  ‘So do lots of murderers,’ she said sharply.

  I didn’t want to be talking to her. I was listening to the music of the sea which one can hear clearly on a fine summer’s day, as this one was. Sometimes when I hear it I don’t want to be talking to people at all. What would we do without this ancient unalterable music which lies below our daily concerns and which at the deepest moments of our lives we hear eternally present, with its salty echo?

  ‘And the children,’ she said, ‘go to school past that hut. He might … why, he might …’

  ‘He might what?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you see things like that in the newspapers. People like that. Strangers, lonely people. He might give them sweets and …’

  ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that,’ I said. In the old days I wouldn’t be talking to her at all but now I would talk to anyone. That was the extent of my downfall, of my hunger. Would it not be better for me to be like the hermit if I had the strength?

  After a while she said, ‘Some people say that it’s love that sent him here.’

  ‘Love?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, the women say that. That he was disappointed in love. That is why they say he won’t speak to anyone.’

  I nearly laughed out loud. Why should this woman be talking to anyone about love? This bitter salty woman addicted to Christianity? Why, her greatest love was to shake hands with the minister.

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Well, why else would he not speak to anyone? Aren’t we good enough for him? I don’t suppose he even goes to church. He has never been, so far. And perhaps where he came from he never went to church either. I think the minister should go and speak to him. If he was led into the ways of God he might improve.’

  The music of the sea was growing louder and louder. Why don’t you drown her, I pleaded with it. Why don’t you extend your salt waters as far as her skinny body and drown her? Why do you allow her to exist to spoil the harmony of your ancient world? She is the thorn in our side. Her confidence, her silly confidence, is the thorn in our side. Her invincible vanity is obscene.

  ‘What does the minister say to that?’ I asked her.

  ‘No one has spoken to him about it,’ she said.

  ‘Well, then, perhaps you should do that,’ I said. ‘Perhaps that is your destiny. To bring his soul to God.’

  ‘More than him need to be brought to God,’ she said with a wicked sidelong glance. I knew she was getting at me, because I never go to church myself.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’m not a hermit. And how’s your daughter?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I was thinking about the hermit,’ I said. I had slid the knife into her for a moment and I was pleased with myself. She had thought I was talking about her daughter haunting the streets of Soho in her hunting leathers, though I couldn’t imagine that large gross body exposing itself in a nightclub or walking the yellow streets of London. I almost laughed out loud again.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think something must be done about him. What does he do with himself anyway? He may be plotting something. For all we know he may be a spy. And the children should be protected.’

  ‘From what?’ I said.

  ‘I told you already from what. But you don’t care. Maybe you’re a friend of his. I don’t know why else you’re standing up for him.’

  ‘I’m not standing up for him,’ I said. ‘I’m only saying that he hasn’t bothered anyone.’

  ‘Mm, well, he may do it some day.’ And she closed her bitter lips like a trap. ‘It’s not natural for a man to be going about not speaking to anyone. If a stranger comes to the village he should act like the other people in the village. And anyway he’s dirty. Everybody says that. He wears a piece of rope for a belt. And his coat is dirty.’

  I nearly said that we are all dirty but I didn’t. I just wanted her to go away and leave me alone, to leave this day with its flowers growing wild around us and the sun so warm in the sky. She disfigured the day in her black clothes. And she disfigured the music of the sea. And anyway it was said that when her own daughter was home there was nothing but quarrels between them, and their own house was dirty with half empty coffee cups lying about and her daughter getting up at noon and sometimes later. And sometimes the house was not cleaned for days and weeks. Still one couldn’t say these things to her. I wondered how the hermit might have handled her. Perhaps his muteness might have reduced her to an equivalent silence. The triviality of her mind confounded me. And all the time I wished to listen to the music of the sea.

  She twisted the cup in her hands and said finally, ‘Well, anyway, that’s what I say, and remember that I said it when what will happen happens. Things that aren’t natural will cause trouble, you mark my words. I’m surprised that you, a professional man, should be standing up for him.’

  A few years ago she wouldn’t have said that to me. She wouldn’t have dared to talk to me in that way. Of course a few years ago I wouldn’t have talked to her at all. But now she knew I had no power and no position and she thought she could say what she liked to me. Before my retirement she would have been bowing and scraping and speaking only when she was spoken to and she would have thought it a great honour that I spoke to her at all.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to go to Murdo’s house. I’ve got to borrow a cup of sugar.’

  ‘And you certainly need it,’ I s
aid to myself as she walked away. ‘I know of no one who needs sugar more than you do.’

  Still, one couldn’t live on the music of the sea. That was certain. I couldn’t understand why she was going on about the hermit. She didn’t truly understand as I did the spiritual threat he represented. She was only saying what she did because she had to have something to talk about and it was the same with the other women of the village who had concocted a story of disappointment in love as the reason for the hermit’s appearance among us. Naturally when confronted by an inexplicable silence they had to explain that silence in their own way, and in a way flattering to themselves. It was funny that they should not have thought of him as a monk sworn to silence, they had thought of him as a man condemned to silence by love. What vanity, what enormous vanity! As if only women could be responsible for that final silence! Why, I could think of a thousand other things that might have condemned him to silence. He might for instance be a poet or physicist whose world had failed him. It seemed to me highly unlikely that his silence came from a failure in love, except perhaps from a failure of love as far as people in general were concerned, and not exclusively women. Soon, however, a myth would grow up about him that he had left the world he had lived in simply because he had been jilted and that this had perhaps driven him ‘beyond the seas’ and so on. What a trivial explanation! Only I, I was convinced, knew the meaning of his silence for I partially shared silence with him. Only I knew the depth of the question that he posed. Only I knew the threat his silence was to us.

  FOUR

  I was born and brought up in this village and there is nothing about it that I do not know. For me it is a processional play with continually changing actors. Some are playing at one time sad parts and then happy ones. There is the tragedy of the Disappearing Daughter, the comedy of the Appearing Son. The young man for some reason puts on the disguise of the middle-aged man and the middle-aged man in turn the guise of the old man. The earth flowers with corn and then becomes bare again. The sky at moments is close and then as far away as eternity. I have seen the people, as if they belonged to the Old Testament, bring water from the well, and later sit down in front of television. I have sat in a small dark desk in the school and then I have sat in the headmaster’s study. I have taught the little children about the thunder and the lightning and the autumn moon.

  When I was seventeen years old I left the village to go to bare beautiful Edinburgh where I attended university in the large shadow of its history. There I read many books and studied many subjects. There, I, with others of my generation, wondered what the world means and what its destiny is. I have walked down Princes Street among taxis black as hearses and been entranced by the theatrical appearance of the castle where the drama of history repeats itself nightly. That lighting told nothing: it was merely a fairy lighting. In youth one devour-s everything indiscriminately and ideas arrive like revelations. I have walked among the leaves of autumn tormented by desire and nostalgia as if for a world once known that would never return. I have read and debated there, but the skies had no answer to give, only the bloody answer of past history. As I listen to the sound of the sea here so I listened to the sound of the traffic there and found it senseless. I read whole libraries driven on by my merciless mind and at night I went to plays and to the cinema. One night I met a boy from our village staggering drunkenly about the street but he did not know me. The city is a terrible place of stone and mad music, of white-faced clocks and massive buildings. The city has no meaning at all, and its plays are not real plays, they are sensational potboilers.

  There one day in the library I met Mary. I took her to the cinema and then back to her house where in the shadow of her garden her face shone with a greenish light, as if she had caught some demonic plague. Later she was to become my wife. In those days she used to play the violin and she told me she used to ride on horseback down the leafy avenues of Edinburgh. Together we explored the city; much later we married and I brought her to the village. She had no Gaelic and couldn’t understand what people were saying unless they spoke English which some of them couldn’t do very well. She did not love the seas and moors as I did. We never returned to Edinburgh, mainly because of her. At the time I did not understand that her reason for not returning there was not that she didn’t love it but rather that she loved it too much and she couldn’t bear having to be parted from it a second time. How self-satisfied I was! She stopped playing the violin. The two of us would sit in the evenings in our respective chairs staring at TV or at each other after I had finished my schoolwork. My schoolwork was my whole life. The little children came to me in all their freshness and were taught. Their sorrows and joys and tendernesses were my own. The secret innermost recesses of their minds were open to me. Life flooded from them to me and daily I was renewed. My life had purpose and meaning and desire. But my wife sat alone in the house in a village which she did not understand—not its secret linguistic recesses, its private clannish corners—and I did not think of her or if I did I put the thought away from me as if it were an unbearable wound. I did not wish to think of the life she led, of the life that she didn’t lead. No concerts, theatre, cinemas. She did not have her orchestra as I had, she didn’t understand the changing drama, closed to her because she could not speak Gaelic. She was an unwilling bored spectator all her days in this village. I condemned her to imprisonment. She was as much a prisoner as if I had passed sentence on her like a judge.

  One day I arrived home unexpectedly from school and found her in the kitchen with the violin in her hand. As soon as she saw me she rushed out of the room with it and put it away again in the room from which she had taken it. I couldn’t make out whether in fact she played it when I was away at school or not. She could have been a great violinist, they had said that, and I believed it. But she had given it up for me. And what had she seen in me after all? Perhaps the fatal attraction of the exotic. What is your island like, she would ask me. And I would say, The people are so pleasant and friendly. And then of course there is the sea and the moor. It is always beautiful and always changing. And she had found it boring and uncaring. What was the sea to her? Merely a meaningless mass of water. Then later she was seized by cancer, that terrible disease without music or mercy. Maybe I had condemned her to it. Some nights she would scream with pain and I could do nothing. The violin lay unused in the unused room. Bare loved Edinburgh with its resounding streets was far away. My wife’s hair had become grey and hung in wisps from her head. She had nothing to say to me at all and I nothing to her. She would drink whisky and cradle the bottle absently in her arms as if it were a silent violin. And the village went on with its own concerns. What had I done to her? What did life mean after all? Was this what it meant, all it meant? All the books and philosophies, was this what they all came down to after all? All those nights of blazing discussion and debate, was this the end of them? Truly, it was. Truly it was a possible ending that had happened.

  FIVE

  The following day I talked to the postman. He had brought me an airmail letter from my brother in New Zealand and a catalogue from Athena. Athena is a firm which sells reproductions of paintings by post and I already had quite a lot of these, some by Van Gogh, some by Dali and some by Breughel. My favourite painters are in fact Vermeer and Breughel: I admire Vermeer for the cold mathematical clarity of his paintings and Breughel for the strange spawning fertility of his. Sometimes I myself try to paint but the paintings I have done are vicious and aggressive and inhabited by small murderous animals in an atmosphere of intense silence as of a desert.

  The postman is called Hunchbacked John and he takes his time delivering the mail, sometimes stopping here and there for a cup of tea and telling everybody who he’s got letters for. He knows of course when there is a letter from the Income Tax people but he is also adept at knowing all other official notifications even when there are no clues on the outside of the envelope. Season after season: spring, summer, autumn, and winter, Hunchbacked John whose gaze is not muc
h above the level of the ground drives fiercely forward on his errands.

  I accepted the thin blue letter from him and the catalogue and then asked him if he ever delivered any letters to the hermit.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘he never gets any letters. None. From anywhere.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ I said. Had he seen him?

  ‘Saw him once,’ he said. ‘He was sitting in front of the door mending an old coat.’

  ‘How had he looked?’

  ‘He looked very contented. He didn’t speak to me. I said, ‘Hello, it’s a fine day’, but he didn’t answer. He just carried on sewing his coat. I think he must have been mending it or putting on a button.’

  ‘And he never got any letters?’

  ‘No, none at all. He doesn’t expect any. I can tell. I can tell the ones who get letters. Some people in this village never get any letters, others get a lot of letters. Some people don’t expect any letters. The hermit doesn’t. You can see by his eyes.’

  ‘By his eyes?’

  ‘Yes, by his eyes. He’s a man who has given up expecting any letters.’

  For some reason the words so baldly spoken depressed me. What must it be like to expect nothing, not even letters? I myself looked out for the mail every day. Sometimes I would stand at the window watching Hunchbacked John making his way along the road and wondering if he was going to come up the path to my house. Other times I would stand at the door of the kitchen and look down the lobby. I would wait for the letter box to click and then I would watch the white letter drifting on to the mat, like manna from heaven. I would walk down the lobby watching the letter which might after all be an agent for a complete transformation of my life, the letter innocent and packed with joy, or menace. Every day, once a day, I am like a small child waiting to see what Santa Claus has placed for him on the Christmas Tree. Maybe somewhere in the vast world a being known or unknown has decided to write to me, to me alone, with news of the greatest importance. This letter has perhaps travelled the whole world by boat or plane and then finally arrived on this mat in this particular lobby. What magic has taken place? What news lies inside that white square? How could one exist without that opening to the universe? How could one live without that possibility of renewal or resurrection?