The Serpent

by Neil M. Gunn

  The long, narrow, dark pupils in the pale yellow eyes, the air of indifference that was yet watchful, the slanting, measuring look of the antique world …

  Inevitably the lads had thought of the goat and of no other beast on that desperate ploy. They had hidden while the girls had gone secretly by ones and twos to the thatched cottage by the pine wood at the far-out end of the crofts on the Heights of Taruv.

  It was Halloween, when the rein is withdrawn from the hallowed and licence takes the bit in its teeth. Horses were removed from stables, carts run down hills, turnips heaved down chimneys, wheels sent hurtling, the painfully gathered gear of civilisation broken up and cast away in the night by youth reverting in wild glee to primeval freedom.

  But the girls did not break up civilisation. While the old stored and locked what they could, the girls secretly gathered at the house of Margad, whom some called a spae-wife and others a witch, in order to have their fortunes told. Each carried two fresh eggs. One of these Margad broke and from the convolutions of the white in a glass she read the girl’s future. The second egg was a gift, and as Margad retained the broken egg as well, she had payment for her labours in kind. But this was the ancient custom, and the girls had their own excitement.

  That it was an extreme excitement there could be no doubt, for Margad had her mysterious procedures, knowing well out of the experience of her grey-haired years and out of the vast and cunning lore of tradition what sat nearest the heart of a girl on Halloween. The window was blinded, the peats heaped on the hearth until their slow yellow flames sent heads and arms to fantastic dancing on the walls. That the gathering, in the eyes of the church and its elders, was unlawful and unholy came at the very core of the girls’ excitement, for though they would not disrupt material possessions on which the home was founded, they were ready enough to disrupt all schemes of damnation reared by male elders who fulminated against the evils of the body that conceived in sin.

  The two ways of looking at things! And there was never any doubt about the difference between man and woman in that old world.

  Margad made them give promises that never would they divulge what they learned from her. The promise took the form of a rite, and by the time the first egg was broken, the girls were all vivid expectancy, brimming with the spirit of wild merriment.

  It was then that the lads of the Heights, who had seen one or two of the girls stealing towards Margad’s got together and decided that instead of removing old Donald Davie’s harrows, as they were on the point of doing, and setting them teeth inwards against Duncan Donald’s door (a crabbit old devil), they would invade Margad’s and, by breaking up the unlawful gathering, join orgy to orgy in one wild splore.

  Heaven knows who was the originator of the thought, but Jimmy Macdonald and Donnie Mackenzie were the leaders and Tom was in Jimmy’s company for the night’s fun.

  So off they set. They approached the door warily, with many whispered consultations and the mounting wildness that only the thought of girls could give. But when finally they rushed the door they found Margad one too many for them: the door was solidly barred.

  Foiled now, they started taunting those inside. But not in their own voices. They disguised their voices, and produced accents and weird sounds that rolled them off the wall, doubled up like animals. As their madness mounted they swore that they would not be foiled. Nothing would foil them. If the door wasn’t opened at once, they would break it down. ‘Open the door, ye old witch, or we’ll smash it in!’

  They thundered at the door. They threatened to push in the window. Then a voice, rumbling and raucous: ‘T’hell, let us smoke them out!’

  Broad divots they tore off Margad’s potato-pit, and soon a lad was climbing over shoulders and up the gable-end. It was a wide chimney, a great hole in the roof, through which folk inside could see the moon of a night when they wanted to get some idea of the time. With the help of a wooden batten, the divots were supported, and the chimney choked.

  Then it was that Kraak, the cripple, had his moment of inspiration.

  No-one questioned it. It was too utterly apt to be questioned. Three of them would go to Taruv farm, bring back the goat, and drop it down the chimney. With soot and a rumbling sound it would appear before them in the flames of the fire; it would appear before them as the very Devil they worshipped!

  The lads set off.

  They kept a goat on Taruv then, as they kept a goat today, in order to ensure fertility and successful birth among the farm stock. No-one knew how ancient the tradition was; and today – well, the goat just happened to be among the sheep, standing between juniper bushes, with the long narrow pupils in the pale yellow eyes and that air of indifference which seemed privy to much hidden not so very deep in the human mind.

  Back the three lads brought the goat, and now began that weird abracadabra of preparing the minds inside to receive their Satanic master. Only afterwards did the lads learn of the steady heightening of tension and of the awful scene that presently took place in the blue infernal smoke-gloom of Margad’s den.

  For the lads were at last riding the whirlwind of their mad spirits. The fight on the roof with the goat, its devilish yell, the scrabbling and scrambling and choked voices.

  Heavens, it was an infernal thing to do!

  Down through the hole came the goat and landed four-footed in the fire. Its hair went up in a singeing lowe and with a leap the demented brute was among the women.

  The girls lost all reason. Two of them fainted. Their screams had a high horror beyond anything that could be imagined. Scream upon scream, abject and sickening, so that the knees of the lads went weak and their stomachs flat.

  It was the moment for escape in the anonymous secrecy that was Halloween’s rite. But the lads stood rooted, until Jimmy cried ‘My God!’ and made for the door. He heaved his full weight at it, yelling at the same time to be let in. When the door suddenly opened, he went headlong into Margad’s bosom.

  The girls burst out, screaming still, and started running, like demented deer, and from amongst them, with an acrid singeing smell, the springing goat, like a four-footed devil.

  The lads made after the girls, and here and there a lad knew a girl’s voice, and here and there by ditchside and dike, he held on to her, crying his own name.

  The same instinct moved all the lads, as the instinct of escape moved all the girls. Tom made after a girl who had turned for the down slope of the hill and the village. She went like a hind, her head up, screaming as she went. There was more than half a moon in a sky of broken cloud and the sight of her there in front of him, fleeing the horror behind, brought his manhood full upon him. He made up on her swiftly, but the beat of his feet and his crying voice only increased her terror, and, as he was stretching out a hand to grip her, she stumbled and fell, with a wild screech, whereupon, unable to check himself, he kicked into her back and went headlong over her body.

  He was on his feet again in a moment, but already she was scrambling to her knees. ‘It’s all all right! It’s me – Tom Mathieson from the village!’ he cried, and laid his hands on her shoulders. She fought him off like a wild cat. She was full-bodied and strong. He saw she did not know what she was doing and he came to grips with her. Her strength surprised him. Her hands broke free and bashed his face. He kept telling who he was, saying it was all right, it was all right. She nearly got to her feet, but he held her, crying now in a hushed intimate voice into her face, her ear, who he was, exerting at the same time his strength against her, until all in a moment she went slack, and lay down, and turned over, and began to vomit.

  He felt sorry, he felt contrite, then. But he did not feel awkward. There came over him indeed an extraordinary competence. Normally he was shy of girls. But not at all now. Now he felt tender and contrite, and, on his knees by her side, put his right hand under her forehead, to support it, and help her with her sickness, continuing to whisper urgently at the same time that it was all right, that she would soon be all right. ‘Don’t worry any
more. It’s all right. I’ll see you home.’

  She tried to move her forehead from his hand in a repelling motion. But the action was not strong. At last she was too weak to bother with him, and, turning away from where she had been sick, she lay with her face buried in the grass.

  As he sat beside her, looking down on her back, he saw short spasmodic movements and wondered if she was crying. But he decided not to say any more, not to touch her, divining that what she needed was a few moments’ utter rest.

  He knew who she was now quite well. Janet Morrison was her name. In the class below him at school, she had been noticeable for her large dark eyes and a certain – not exactly wondering expression but something like that. For a time, at any rate, she had borne the nickname ‘Picture’, because once a grown woman had been foolish enough to say, in the hearing of Janet’s classmates, ‘Why, you’re just like a picture!’ He had heard the nickname used by one of her friends recently, however, quite naturally, and in truth fondly.

  He had noticed her since coming home. No-one could help noticing her. For at twenty she was tall and good-looking. A dark country beauty, with a ready lash of colour in the cheeks. But there was something more than that, some subtle indescribable life about the eyes, in the glance, a distinction about the eyelids. The eyes could melt in shyness and yet crinkle at the same time curiously, almost assessingly, so that when the smile followed, it could be extremely attractive. She laughed abruptly, somewhere between the roof of her mouth and the back of her throat, as if she were trying to laugh awkwardly. But she could not laugh any other way, and the sound of her own laughter often amused herself. She would stop it suddenly, glance around, and laugh again. Already there was some deep consciousness in her of her power as an attractive woman. But what made this attraction more powerful was some simple lingering element of the child mind. Very difficult to define, this, and, perhaps conscious of it, she could, in her cleverness, use it. But though it thus might be a weapon, it was not an affectation, any more than her laugh was an affectation.

  So that, altogether, on any other occasion, she might have intimidated Tom. But now her very qualities deepened his solicitude. For tonight she had been brought too low for anything but the utmost care. Towards any other girl in such circumstances on such a night, he would have experienced the same desire to help, the same emotion.

  Halloween, with the humped moon moving in and out dark clouds. Behind them the unlawful experience of Margad’s cottage. The intense quickening of the mind, the primal fear, the shattering of the body, its awful cleansing in vomit.

  Janet sat slowly up.

  ‘Feeling a bit better now?’ Tom asked gently.

  Janet looked around her and then gave a sudden shudder. ‘I’m cold,’ she murmured. Her face looked death cold, her eyes pitch-black holes.

  Tom, murmuring, put his arms round her, to crush warmth back into her body.

  She protested.

  He caught her hands. ‘You are cold. It was an awful thing to do. Heaven knows why we did a thing like yon. But you’re all right now. I’ll see you home.’

  Her hands lay passive, while he crushed and fondled them. Then she withdrew her hands.

  He spoke to her in an eager encouraging voice as he might speak to a child, or to a companion who had come round after being knocked out. His words seemed to have no effect on her. Her face was dead white, and all at once he saw that she was extraordinarily beautiful, not only with a beauty of the face but also with something of the moon in the blue pool of the sky, with a fey fragile quality, the weird quality that inhibits the country beyond Halloween.

  And this again did not embarrass him, but only increased his tenderness, so that the tenderness came into his own throat, and he was greatly moved to help her.

  It was doubtful if she heard him, for a desperate weakness was upon her. She wanted to be left alone. But she could not be left alone. They both knew that. She never spoke. Then her unnatural control could not be borne any longer and her body, of its own accord, began taking great gulping breaths, as if it were being choked. Her hands stirred restlessly, aimlessly, and her body turned to this side and that in a futile effort at flight. Her face now shone tragic and wild. It could not be borne. As the cry came up into her throat, she made to get to her feet, but he held her, telling her not to hurry, to wait a minute. ‘Take your time, Janet. It’s all right. I’ll stick by you.’ The words were practical and friendly, yet they broke in his throat.

  As her cry came through, some of her strength came back. But he held her firmly, and her strength broke, and she collapsed against him, her mouth in his shoulder. Her whole body was swept by convulsive sobs, and as though ashamed of them in some final deep of her mind, she clung to him and gripped him tight and pressed her face hard against his shoulder. He felt her brow clammy and cold against his neck.

  He spoke to her now with a final tenderness, encouraging little words, soothing words. ‘Hush, Janet. Hsh, it’s all right.’ His right hand patted her on the back, pressed into her back, pressed her against him. Never had he known such tenderness as this. It swept him in a warm living fire. There was nothing on earth or beyond earth, he would not have done for her, in the dim light on the lonely slope of the Glen. Never had his being known wholeness like this.

  It not only felt competent, but full of an uncanny knowledge, of the night, of himself, but especially of the girl beside him. And his tenderness was directed in delicate instinctive ways towards giving her back her confidence, so that once more she would be herself, whole and of a living piece, herself coming alive and whole, her lovely natural self coming back to life.

  This had to be made easy for her.

  And her hair was against his mouth, and the smell of it in his nostrils.

  Her sobs subsided and she lay without stirring, so inert that her body would have fallen from him had he not continued to hold her.

  She lay so still that she might have fallen asleep or died, like this he held her for a long time, until, half in fear, half in a searching urgency, he whispered her name. ‘Janet? Janet, are you all right?’ He brought his face down to a level with hers, slowly, searchingly. The sweet madness of his quest for her lost spirit came upon him. ‘Janet?’ The living fire bathed him. Her cheek came against his mouth. ‘Janet?’ There was no life in her at all. A wild fear touched him, a hot urgency. He brought his mouth against hers. She gave a small shudder, her mouth drew back, and then, as if for the groping comfort of his mouth, it gave way to him.

  There was no life in her mouth, but little by little life came back before the warmth of his life, and when her lips were warm they smothered away from his mouth, not hurriedly, and he had her still in his arms.

  He spoke to her now only by the firm but gentle way he held her, not any more in words.

  They lay like that for a long time, in the trance of youth, to which there seems no beginning and no end.

  Then the strange nameless fear of this suspension touched him afresh, and he brought his mouth whisperingly against her cheek, and searched for her mouth against her reluctance, and found it.

  When this had happened for the third time, he felt suddenly and for the first time the pressure of her lips, the living acknowledgement of her spirit and her body, a swift sweet gratitude, and now in an instant she was gone from him, and before he could do anything she was sitting up.

  She did not speak, but lifted her hands to her hair. It had become disordered and he sat watching her pinning it up. But it was beyond pinning up, and with a shake of her head, all her dark hair was released and fell over her shoulders.

  This action had something in it purely feminine and necromantic, there on the hillside. He could not intrude, but his hand went up and into her hair. She held her head back, her face tilted to the sky waiting for him to take away his hand. But his hand went through her hair and, pressing against her cheek, drew her face towards him. Her face resisted but came, and as he kissed her, her long hair fell about his face.

  For on
e wild moment he lost himself then, but she pressed him away with her hand on his breast, gently but firmly. ‘No!’ she said, as if she had shaken her head at him, in understanding.

  The sound of her voice and the firm quiet action of her body were an entrancement he had no desire to break down.

  Her hair was thick and long and before she had got it all up, her arms grew so wearied that they fell limp on her lap, and she sighed, and blew out her breath, ‘Oh dear.’ But as he stirred, her hands went up again.

  In this display of her body, her uplifted hands and breasts and face against the sky, there was an intimacy that grew upon him. It was something that could not be avoided, and because of that he felt in her very attitude, in each quiet motion, a shyness that held a gentle humour and common sense, holding him away, because she had to hold him away, but doing all this before him because they were there together by the strange circumstances of the night.

  At last her hands fell heavily and she sighed in relief, and her face turned towards him with a smile.

  He did not know what to say or do, all direction in his mind dissipated by the enchantment of that smile as it hovered on the momentary verge of a laughter that he knew would not come. In that instant, she was the living embodiment of all grace.

  ‘I wonder where Tina is?’ she said, and her face tilted to listen.

  ‘Oh, she’ll be all right,’ he answered at once, repelling the very thought of intrusion.

  ‘I must find her; we came up together.’

  ‘She’ll probably be home by this time. There’s no earthly use trying to look for her now.’

  ‘But I must. Perhaps she’s looking for me.’

  They argued for a little, until at last she agreed with him, and said she must go home.

  As they went down the hillside, he took her arm.