by Neil M. Gunn
His father and mother would have read a chapter, and sung, and would now be asleep. Or did his father sleep?
It was difficult somehow to believe. The pale face would be staring into the darkness, hearkening for heaven knew what inaudible sounds, in that awful stillness.
All through the summer he had moved about with quietude upon him. Little tasks he had done, like twisting straw ropes or herding. He was very careful about giving the beasts a good bite where it might be missed and grow rank. When Tom found himself thinking his father did this not out of kindliness to the animals but out of a parsimony of spirit, a niggardliness that must turn a mouthful of grass to the best profit, as if the man were going to live for ever, he was ashamed yet half stuck to his thought in a sort of spite. In his father’s attitude to him, he sensed a continuous criticism. Nothing directly was said now, or nothing that Tom could answer back in his own defence, but the encroachment upon him was there.
Once when his father looked up as Tom passed home from the field where he had been hoeing turnips, the expression on the grave face had not altered, but as the eyes resumed their distant look it seemed to Tom that the long hairs in the eyebrows had stood out in anger.
That was probably pure fancy, but then it was the sort of fancy that happened.
Ever since his father had dared to tackle him about his beliefs, he could not subdue his own mistrust and, in a surging instant, a sheer malevolence. The very way his father had on that occasion said, quietly, looking at him, ‘What’s this I’m hearing?’ had been too much from the first word.
‘Hearing what?’
‘About the opinions you have brought back from Glasgow.’
‘What opinions?’
‘They say that you have brought back opinions which are corrupting the young.’
‘Who says?’
‘Never mind who says it. That does not matter. What matters is – if it’s true.’
Tom could not speak. There was a power coming out from the father that choked him. His thoughts and feelings got all jumbled, and he began to tremble from anger. The father had never raised his slow voice.
‘You can listen to gossip if you like. I don’t care.’ Tom picked up a piece of wood and ran his eye fiercely along it. The wood shook in his hand.
‘I want to know if it’s true.’
‘I can have my own opinions.’
‘You cannot have godless opinions and live in my house.’
‘Then I can leave your house.’ Tom slammed down the board and walked past the old man, and out and up the hillside. His rage blinded him. As he lay down behind a bush he had a convulsion of anger and tore the grass with his claws. That settled it! He would go back to Glasgow. He was free now.
But when he returned, his mother was waiting for him at the end of the byre. He made to avoid her, but she ran out a step or two, a waddling creature with an anxious face, near on tears, and a thick husky voice going thin. ‘Tom, Tom, come here!’ and against his new-found dignity and decision, she led him into the byre with an air of secrecy, of hiding, that made him speak out loud in his own clear natural voice, indifferent to whomsoever heard him.
She was all appeal. Any sudden excitement might kill him. ‘Oh, Tom, bear with him, bear with me.’
‘Well, but what right has he –’
‘He’s your own father, Tom, and a done man. You’re young. Don’t forget that. Oh, my boy, that anything should come between you and your father would break my heart. It would kill me.’ She wept, and the sounds she made were ugly and terrible. He felt their power in his bowels and his knees. Stark and terrible and naked, while she lifted her apron and choked her mouth with it and wiped her eyes. Sheer animal sounds, beyond everything, in the place where the heart bursts. She came round, and looked at him with her small wet eyes, and the longing stood in her face, beyond words.
‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘he shouldn’t say anything to me.’ And all at once, heaven knew why or whence, his mouth trembled and tears came into his own eyes. It was a weakness that he had not known since he was a little boy and its onset so astonished him, in shame and anger, that he turned away from his mother and picked up the hoe and began scraping the bedding down on the nearest stall, while his teeth ground and the tears broke wet on his lips.
Ah, you can do nothing against a mother when you see her like that. You can hold any opinions about her mind or person you like, but in the ultimate moment it makes no difference. And she was coming after him, coming at him. In a surge of unbearable impatience, he cried inwardly for her to go.
But when she spoke her voice was simple and confiding, like the voice of a girl, remembering still the trouble beyond them but now with his understanding taken for granted, in conspiracy, while yet her voice broke a little and her breath wheezed.
‘It was William Bulbreac. He was in one day and I overheard him talking to your father. I didn’t hear it all, but he was saying things, awful things about what happens in a place like Glasgow. He was saying you knew and – and – you were telling – I don’t know what it was – but he was holding you to blame. I thought he had little to do to come talking like that to your father. And your father shouldn’t have paid any attention to him but you know how he is now.’
‘Awful things … ye knew….’ The tones of her voice were charged with Antichrist and the Scarlet Woman, they stood, unlooked at, in her mind, while she shielded him away from unthinkable traffic with them.
There could be no arguing with her. Denial would have comforted her, but denial or affirmation was beyond him, as explanation would have been beyond her understanding. Words and words would convey nothing.
It irritated him acutely that at that moment her sheer ignorance had a simplicity and force in it beyond argument, deeper than knowledge itself. That it should usurp such power, that he should be aware of guilt – where demonstrably there was no guilt – in his silence, was maddening.
‘William Bulbreac can say what he likes. That’s nothing to do with me. Am I going to keep my mouth shut because William Bulbreac goes sneaking behind a fellow’s back?’
‘Hush, Tom! Your father will hear us.’
‘Let him hear us.’
He was shouting. She looked out of the door, in dread or terror as if his father were not her husband, but some power that had to be watched and propitiated.
He found himself, even while he scraped the cobbles of the stall, listening for footfalls.
Let them come! Only the presence of his mother kept him from flinging the hoe down and walking away.
But he did not walk away.
And his mother talked to him, unburdening her mind, as to an equal, to one who could understand, so that he could feel the good that talk was doing her. And she did not blame her husband. She looked upon him as one afflicted. Her compassion was aroused by the mystery of his affliction. And this compassion, by telling it aloud, she conveyed to her son. ‘He was never the same after it….’ Simple words, but curling round him like strands of wire.
CHAPTER SEVEN
What was that extraordinary power in his mother, which he felt and must ever acknowledge? Often, in these latter years, he had tried to think out the problem. He had found it was just no good dismissing her as ‘a primitive creature’. That was mere mental superiority or laziness, a slick intellectual trick. For often she would enter his mind, quite involuntarily, at a moment when a philosophical speculation or piece of reasoning was so intricate that he had all he could do to grasp it and give or withhold his assent. Take Hume, who was the first to lead him to tidy up his mind and see how it worked. Take his – Were abstract ideas general or particular in the mind’s conception of them? Hume proceeds at once to agree with Berkeley that all ‘general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals which are similar to them’. The various particular ideas are not present in the mind when the general or abstract term for them all is
used. Or as Hume puts it, ‘They are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power …’
Well, he had to pause to think that out, for one of the most interesting things he had found in philosophy was the need for constant reference to the workings of his own mind in order to check the propositions of the philosopher.
Now his mother could use abstract terms in a profound manner. In fact she did not always use the terms, but as it were a reflection or thought of the terms, and even this thought did little more than inform a simple language which, in the very moment of its usage, had a curious indirect mythological power. But how could he know this? By experience, of course, but also by a certain if inexplicable intuition of what went on in her mind.
In learning or knowledge the use of the general or abstract term is a vast convenience. like an x or y in algebra, as he had himself decided.
But, with his mother, it was not learning. It was power. Her algebraic symbols were not lifeless. They came out of some deep of the mind – like Antichrist or the Scarlet Woman.
And to something in this attitude he had to hold on, or the philosophers would altogether forget the particular in the general. She was a test that had to be met. And often indeed he felt that both Hume and himself were cutting pretty figures on the surface.
Or was he looking back on all this now with the eye of age, wherein his mother was the symbol of creation, his father of God, and Janet the symbol of love?
Add to that what little he knew of modern psychology, the analysis of the psyche, and where was he?
He was here amongst the juniper bushes and he was smiling. You have got to watch those fellows! came his thought. You have got to watch them like a hawk.
You have got to watch them or they’ll get you, each one of them: atheist, socialist, psychologist, philosopher, religious. Each is ready to take you ‘the only way’.
How could there be so many philosophies, so many ‘perfect systems’, each contradicting the other on the vital issues, if each were not a manifestation of a purely personal bias or need, an emotional fulfilment, of the individual philosopher?
That’s what it came down to in the end. In the process many things were accomplished, of course, from efforts at social integration to personal ‘immortality’. Quite. And excellent. And cheers all round. But watch them, or they’ll have you in a cell or a beehive like so many willing exhibits, while the broom blows and the goat finds it unnecessary to smile.
Janet as a symbol!
High heaven save us from the symbolists, from the abstracters! Give us back the earth and the flesh and the lovely currents that flow in and between them!
The Philosopher smiled at the waywardness of his thought. Looking around, he found the goat had vanished.
He was climbing. He was getting up. There was a hidden inexplicable mirth in the earth so that at moments one’s simplest thought – climbing, getting up – had a secondary meaning, an elusive humour.
Never mind. She had been lovely those days. She had in very truth been with him at the rising of the sun and in the dew of the evening. She was never far away from him. Like the swirl he made in the air, or like the stillness in the barn when he stood looking out of the little window, she was with him. Sometimes, alone in the barn, he turned round.
He had much plotting to do, in order to avoid or get rid of the lads, to deceive the village, to do anything and everything that would secretly bring Janet and himself together in the dark night. Why this secrecy? Heaven knew, but it had been part of the fun, the delicious essence of their escape into freedom.
One night, he had been fairly caught by the lads. And by way of excuse he said that he was going to spend the evening with the old folk. The implication was that he had better take part, once in a while, in their religious service. Remarkable how dutiful he had felt when he had permitted the implication, with how solemn an off-hand air he spoke!
They understood. A son had to do many a thing when his father was in a low condition. They held it to his credit and he accompanied them up to the main road and bade them good-night.
Then back solemnly to the house, and round it, and up the hillside. No main roads for Janet and him! Circling round the hillside and down by the crofting ground to within a stone’s throw of Janet’s back door.
And there at last she came, a tall darkness in the darkness. She was as tall as himself, or very nearly. He liked in those days to think that if anything he had it by half an inch.
‘Janet!’ And he caught her hand beyond the whisper. Not a word. This way, carefully. Take your time. When your eyes get used to it it’s not so dark. Isn’t it a fine night? Isn’t it a marvellous night? Yes, it’s lovely.
He was surefooted as any goat then. He could stand on the edge of nothing and pick up his balance with the greatest ease. She was not good in the dark, and sometimes hung against his hand, putting out her foot, trying for the ground, in a curious awkward fear, her whole body awkward, almost ungainly, as if about to step into a crevasse.
I’m no good in the dark.
You’re doing grand. He loved her for being no good in the dark. He himself could have run full pelt along the dark hillside. But to find someone who moved with genuine difficulty, as Janet did, that was an amusing pleasure about which he was most earnest. This way now. We’ll soon be there.
And then they were there, in their own place.
It was not that he was shy of her, not altogether, in the first moments of their arrival. He could not really, solemnly, draw her up to him and kiss her and stand there in straining silence, not straight away. He felt anything but the heavy romantic. All lightness and airy spirits, full of interrupted laughter and talk, introducing her to the place, making her comfortable. It was so extraordinary for them to be there alone. Keep everything else off.
Then she would sit, and look around her at the dark hillside, and up into the sky where the stars were. It was much lighter when you were out a while. She sat with her knees up and her arms round them, an intimacy with herself that was ravishing to see, and she would turn her head sideways and look at him, and laugh, and suddenly clap her hand over her mouth to stop the abrupt sounds. And then let the laugh out, controlled in a droll way.
She talked as readily as he did himself – or very nearly. For a long time after she came the disturbing element in her presence kept the excitement light and fine. Not that he ever got used to that element, that disturbing grace like a light in her flesh, a seduction in her simplest movement, issuing in a readiness to be amused, in play – a not altogether unconscious play, perhaps, but none the less disturbing on that account.
How cold some of those nights must have been! Frost in the air, a sheet of snow on the mountains. But the cold – ah, that was the final excuse. The involuntary shudder, the click of her white teeth, with two or three in front, above rather large, giving her mouth at certain moments a rich fullness.
Come into the heart of life away from the cold. Come close in and keep the cold out, keep it at bay in a circle round.
That trance, with its tenderness. Was she as natural and simple as he was? Was it that they were coming into the heart of life, slowly, like entranced youth, wanderers approaching with the delicate wonder upon them?
For just here his Glasgow experiences were completely wiped out, as if they had never been. Unless indeed they intensified, in ways too profound to follow, the naturalness of the moment, moment simply following moment in an intensity of living, as if Hume were right!
Having seen and experienced so much – here at last was the thing-in-itself, and so he could not only experience it but know it.
As he had not known what to do with Winnie Johnston. What a fright he had got there! His mind dodging, instinctively trying to escape, but seeing it might be held. What a sweat he had been in! On his way home that night, life had seemed an inexorable affair, a vast gloomy prison governed by Fate, predestined. Invisible ribs to the prison, like the ribs that contained his beating heart. Wander as he would
, he would nevermore wander out of it.
A terrifying fantasy it had been. Only youth knows of that fantasy, and only now and then in the odd moment that comes with an appalling separateness – who knows from what waiting or watching region? The uttermost experience makes little difference then – unless indeed to sharpen the awareness. Why else do people who have gone too far in experience commit suicide or murder? Or, if neither, get beaten down into ‘disillusion’?
But deeper than that. Much deeper it ran than that, and simpler, perhaps.
For here he was now back in his own environment, in his native place, where all the customs of his people, their immemorial mode of social life, held sway over even his most intimate emotions.
Was this possible? Yes, it was not only possible, but much more profound than any mere quantitative analysis of possibility because it concerned the quality of emotion itself. His emotion was enriched and directed in its expression because of the way his own folk had lived in the past.
Was the new analysis, then, that thought and emotion took shape as a superstructure from the basic economic life essentially true?
Yes, but the trouble here seemed to be that many thought the analysis thus ‘explained’ emotion. Nothing could explain emotion. It was an absolute. But the analysis did account for the mode of the emotion, its general tendency in expression.
And that was a happy and a clarifying thought!
A lovely thought besides – that two persons can come into communion, gathering this extra treasure of assurance as a gift, this wordless understanding of emotion’s method and mood.
For she could understand his tenderness. Of that there could be no doubt. It freed her. It left her without any feeling of fear. That had been certain. She could come away from the rapt moment, like a rabbit coming out of its burrow to look around.
Look around at the hillside and up at the stars, and sometimes she would utter a low drawn-out vowel sound, like the moan of the wind, and shake her head in a shudder, half of cold, and it was a heart-catching comment on the world of night around them, its inanimate mystery, its distance and nearness. And then she would turn her head over her shoulder and look at him, and he knew she was smiling.
