The Serpent

by Neil M. Gunn

  ‘I – I was going to. The harvest – we’re at the harvest.’ He could hardly speak.

  ‘It’s strange that you didn’t retrieve it?’

  ‘I’ll go just now,’ said Tom, starting away from the policeman.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ called the policeman, who joined Tom and proceeded with him towards Peter Grant’s shop.

  ‘How did it happen that the bicycle is there?’

  ‘My father – a fellow used it to go for the doctor. He ran into a dog.’

  ‘What fellow?’

  ‘Alec Wilson, from the Heights of Taruv.’

  ‘I see. Your father was ill and he was going for the doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The policeman gave a sidelong considering look at Tom. He obviously knew the whole story. That there was no case could now be taken as corroborated.

  ‘And what do you mean by leaving your damaged goods on another man’s property?’

  Tom did not answer.

  ‘Have you nothing to plead?’

  ‘My father died,’ said Tom.

  As the policeman looked at him again, a cold anger tautened Tom’s muscles.

  ‘Did Grant object?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s my business,’ answered the policeman.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Tom.

  He breasted the village with the policeman, and folk stood back into doors and at windows. The front wheel of the bicycle was buckled. Tom lifted the frame over his head and bore it away on his shoulder, the policeman, with authoritative legs apart, looking after him.

  He saw his mother waddle down from the road as he hove in sight. Locking the bicycle in the shop, he went to the harvest field, and she joined him there. For a while the physical effort of swinging the scythe brought out sweat on his weakened body.

  In the days that followed he grew thin as an eel. Had he not known this himself, his mother’s actions would have told him. There were eggs and meat when previously there had not been. But he ate without relish. Sometimes a fresh egg had a repulsive taste, slimy as mire and tainted with a certain midden flavour. That this was purely imaginary he knew, but that did not make it the less difficult to swallow the stuff. His mother remained solemn and resigned, and the way she had of sighing at an unexpected moment got on his nerves. Even her half-hidden concern for his bodily well-being irritated him. And when he had worked himself stupid with fatigue, it often happened that it was then his brain came abnormally alive with a feverish and ferocious activity.

  It was easiest to bear these mental bouts when he was completely alone, shut up in the barn or shop, for, unobserved, he could gnash his teeth or make his body writhe against clenched muscles, and so free himself from the momentary but appalling stress, which came upon him often without any very clear conscious cause.

  Sometimes, too, a quite simple affair, like that of Peter Grant and the policeman, would induce an extreme violence of agitation and desire for revenge. Even if he worked out that probably Peter Grant was not to blame for the disgrace of the policeman’s visit, it made no difference. Perhaps the policeman had observed the bicycle, questioned Peter Grant, got the whole story, and promptly acted on his own. But Tom saw into Peter Grant’s mind. Saw that he wanted the bicycle removed – and knew why, knew the wordless effect he would create on others, on himself, and on the atheist Tom. Oh, he knew!

  But of all these early and horrible bouts, the most horrible occurred on the hill-top where he had gone to spy on the manse. The craving to go had come upon him quite suddenly, but with such overpowering force that he not only had to give in to it but in a moment was actuated by a feeling of ruthless cunning.

  When he got amongst the hollows of the hills, he ran, grabbing at the heather, pulling himself up, his heart pounding, a slaver at his mouth, not waiting a moment except now and then to look warily around, lest he be late for what he had to see.

  It was October and Donald must have gone back to college. But Tom felt he had not gone back.

  Tom had just flung himself down when he saw Janet come out from the manse, walk a little way as if going to the village, pause, and then circle back until she was swallowed by the outhouses. Round the off gable-end came Donald and set out for a walk – that circled back, until he, too, was swallowed by the outhouses.

  Half an hour later, Janet emerged from the outhouses and continued on her way to the village.

  It was simple. So inevitable that it happened often. Nothing particularly miraculous in coming upon it so aptly.

  And then the bout got him.

  It turned him on his back, and first his body heaved from the right shoulder and his heels, then rocked to the left shoulder and heaved again into the quivering arch, his head crushing back and thrashing from side to side. There was no particular pain; hardly even anguish in the mind; nothing but this terrible straining to get away from himself, from knowledge, from all he knew. Out of it his voice groaned and cried, ‘God, Ο God’; crushing and emptying himself, slaying the thing that was in him, that was himself.

  When it passed, he slumped over on his face, in an exhaustion so complete that it was a total forgetting, like sleep or death.

  But nothing was forgotten for very long. The mood might change, but beneath it, even under long spells of numb indifference, there persisted that which did not change. The lower the form of life the more difficult it is to kill. The persistence was of that kind.

  When it seemed his body could hardly bear up much longer to a day’s work, when already he knew that its processes were slowing down, and that he was covering this with what might look like a calculated indifference, a deliberate unconcern, he was assaulted by a new and more terrible enemy.

  Life does not get slashed at every exit without wanting to hit back. Self-protection is in the bite of the adder, in its poisonous fangs.

  Tom began to see what a fool he had been, what a soft self-destroying fool, not to have hit out where it would hurt most fatally. He had not bitten where he might have bitten, not eaten where he might have eaten.

  This smouldering vengefulness grew, and like every new mood, each fresh departure of his mind, it circled ultimately around Janet.

  He remembered her quiescent moments, the passive fall of her body in his arms.

  He knew what that meant now.

  As he sat in the dark of the shop, his face narrowed.

  He had not been ignorant of what it meant then. But then he had been under the glow of love, of responsibility, of tenderness, of the future, of wonder, of beauty, of the customs man had created in weakness and illusion under the guise of hope and social continuance and other futile little dodges and schemes for containing the earnest and the simple so that the cunning might wallow.

  He saw it now very clearly.

  He saw it through days and nights. The torment grew. Vision slipped from the past into the present, into nights ahead.

  Donald was gone.

  He had only to meet Janet and appear to be as he had been – quietened a little by the death of his father. His father’s death would account for the interruptions in their meetings. Janet must be wondering about him, knew how everyone’s hand was against him. She would be waiting, waiting for his next move, her conscience guilty. Could she, with her guilty conscience, desert him, too? She could – that would be her secret and quite remorseless intention – but she could not do it with a hard indifference, brutally. That was not her nature. Her nature was soft. She would want to reconcile him, to part from him in sadness, in tragic sadness, so that her own happiness would thereafter be the greater. Poor Tom – he had been so good to her!

  Then it was up to him to play-act as she did. And he would do it, not in obvious ways, not the silly ways of the outraged male, with his rights and wrongs and petty dignities, but with the cunning of the serpent, the ‘subtil serpent’. He would be so good to her, trusting her so naturally, looking forward to some vague future – nothing urgent to frighten her – that her sense of guilt would swell to a suffocating cl
oud. She might begin to try to tell … but it would be child’s play heading that off, turning it into some halting thought about her mother. Not that she would tell him directly about Donald. If he knew Donald, then it was certain she had nothing very definite to hold to – beyond their meetings, their passionate meetings. She would want to hint at some change in her feelings, to suggest that perhaps it had all been a mistake. But she wouldn’t be able to do that, not if he handled her properly. One night, perhaps the first night, she would collapse, she would give in, particularly if it followed a bout with her mother.

  He would make no mistake then.

  Such thought lived on itself in endless involution. Its subtlety at times partook of an extreme clairvoyance, so that again he did not think his thought so much as see it in living picture. There was no hesitancy, no movement, no colour in the face or light in the eye, of which Janet was capable, voluntarily or involuntarily, which he could not observe as clearly as if she sat before him; indeed more clearly, because this solid breathing semblance of her held no uncertainty for him, no doubt. He could not only see her face; he could feel her flesh by touch. Nothing was hidden from him; there was nothing that could not take place.

  Now it so happened by some curious chemistry of the body that the more tired he was from labour and the deeper his exhaustion, the greater, the more feverish was his responsiveness to this secret visioning of the physical Janet. Almost before he began to think of her he became excited, not only physically but with an elated, poisonous, mental excitement.

  All this did extreme violence to his nature. Under his exhaustion, it tore the core of his nature apart, caused a slow disintegration in its fibres, and the fleshly saps that oozed over and into it were poisonous ejections, slow-dissolving and vile.

  In moments of recoil he was overcome, annihilated, by this vileness. Then the original Janet, the Janet of his love, withdrew to a distance so remote that she passed from him and could not hear his cries.

  But he drew back into himself, and presently his purpose reformed; so the cycle started again, the deadly disintegration of the core proceeded, and the vileness began to spread outward, slowly, over the face of all things.

  So concentrated now was this inner life that he was aware only in a dumb heedless way of what went on round about him. His responses to his mother were automatic and perfected. When she tended to some excess of gloom or anxiety, he ignored her, and she quietened in the fatal animalistic way natural to her.

  All the same, he was aware – and no doubt his mother in her fashion was aware – that if pressed too far, by only a hair’s breadth, he would move or hit with an evil swiftness. Beneath the surface, living there all by itself, the stroke was ready.

  Donald, for example, troubled his thought rarely. But once, when he intruded, and was about to smile, with male knowledge in his eye, Tom, in an arc of movement quicker than thought, knifed him. In no time the image had passed, and Tom had forgotten him. He hated Donald, but Donald at this time did not matter. Revenge over Donald, over all life that moved, lay in Janet.

  To recall some of the night hours became unbearable. Their clarity was too stark; the night world – a whole world in itself– was too utterly vivid with movement of passion and evil, with hellish triumph – ebbing into paralysing defeat.

  He began to dread the lack of sleep, not in active fear but in a bitter smouldering anger.

  One early November afternoon, in a small rain, he went up the hillside to the mountains, to get away from himself and his surroundings, to breathe the high free air that might induce sleep. As he climbed upward, his breath quickened distressingly and his heart began pumping with audible thuds. His weakened condition amused rather than alarmed him. To have to give himself time, like an old man, had its oblique humour. He went on until he saw the mountains. On his way back his legs started to tremble, and, coming among the juniper bushes, he had to rest.

  Looking about him for the least wet spot, he saw the bushes and the green grass and the passage-ways that ran secretively. They did not look back at him but were there in their own slyly passive way. A green veil was over the hidden life, but only just over it. Their patience was friendly but watchful.

  All at once a delicate mood of renewal touched him, ran over his body and into his mind. The earth, that old patient mother. But beneath the surface – the hidden heartbeat, that which invigorated and renewed, that which drew his body secretly. His eyes glanced hither and thither.

  A craving came upon him to lie down and give himself to the earth, to sink far down, to sleep.

  He sat under a bush and at once knew release. The scent of the bushes, of the grass, of the mouldering earth, assailed his nostrils like intimate scents of one long forgotten. He stretched out his legs into the wet grass and lay full length, the small mountain rain falling softly. Then Janet came beside him, wordless, full length beside him, that semblance of her which he had made his own, drawing the earth into and about her, usurping the earth.

  There was a moment of passion when the bushes and the grass and all the hillside and the air dizzied into darkness.

  When he was a small boy, perhaps about ten, he had gone nutting in the wooded burn which wanders down the steep slope of the Glen just beyond Taruv. Johnny Munro, the blacksmith’s son, a boy of about thirteen, had been with him. Johnny said that the best trees were near the top of the wooded stretch. There the nuts came out of the clusters a deep dark brown and had a rich flavour – ‘a whisky taste’, Johnny called it. They wandered, and filled their pockets, and cracked the nuts with their teeth, and ate them during long hours on a Saturday in October. When their jaws ached from cracking the nuts, Johnny led the way clear of the last trees to the ruins of an old croft house, where they each searched out a suitable boulder and began cracking the nuts with a stone. Nettles grew about this deserted place and all kinds of weeds and rushes, and here and there, so that you had to watch where you put your feet, were broken iron pots and bottles, rusty, bottomless tin pails, and other bits of household gear. Tom did not care much for the place, and when he got, besides, a faint but filthy old human smell, as if his foot had trodden in something, he cared for it even less.

  Still, this was adventure, and his senses were alert.

  ‘Do you get a smell?’ asked Johnny with his good-natured grin.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what they call this place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Devil’s Croft,’ said Johnny. And while Tom was looking about him so that everything became very clear and vivid, Johnny added, repeating what he had been told, ‘Every place has its Devil’s Croft.’

  No doubt after that he had dreamed about the place. Anyway, in his vision he saw it in a still twilight, dominated by a beast. Except for its full face, he saw this beast with an extreme clearness. It was about four to five feet high as it sat on its hind quarters – he never saw it standing – exactly like a cat. Its hair was rat-coloured, about two inches long, lying smoothly against the body, fine in texture and rather thin. The sweep from the root of the tail up to the back of the neck was a perfect arch, like a young full-grown cat’s on a large scale. And this sweep made a smaller arch up over the head, and continued the line down the side of the face in a sort of sleek whorl. The beast was very slightly turned away from him.

  The emotions of this beast seemed to find expression in the tail, which was its most remarkable feature, for it was not only long and supple, but had two tufts of hair, bushy tufts, equally spaced between tip and root. When the tail slowly whipped from side to side – and it did this after being stared at for a little while – it brushed the earth, passing over broken nettles, rusty tins, flattened stones, while the tufts gathered about them some of the old filthy stuff which Tom had smelt.

  Not only did this vision begin to come back to Tom now, but he became haunted, in these moments of extreme horror and disintegration, by the fear that the beast would turn its face, and look at him.

  Often in bed moments of
such sheer exhaustion beset him that he lay full stretch on his back, arms extended by his sides, face tilted upward, in the posture of one laid out in death. Thought and feeling would lift from him and pass away. With returning self-consciousness his hands, flat open, would in an aloof way slowly pass over his thighs and find them smooth as marble. Sometimes they would fall limp, before continuing their strange journey up over the cage of the chest. There his open hands and forearms crowded together, grown large as ungainly wings.

  Yet through all these experiences there remained the final core that was himself, something beyond his moods and visions, beyond his nature even. It was a small core, sometimes little more than a cry, but it remained – until at last it, too, began to be menaced.

  He entered the next terrible phase of his suffering.

  Images now did not require to be seen completely. Before a thought had time to form he was already wrestling with it, fighting it back. One night, for example, his imagination produced the figure of a man before his bed, a few paces distant. This figure, cut off at the chest, was wearing a dark morning coat. It no doubt had a face, but Tom’s eyes dare not rise above the bare hands, which were hanging loosely, nearly touching, in front of the dark coat. A city man’s figure. Quite normal. Yet there was such menace in its quietude as no physical horror in hell could equal. It was dark, and Tom’s eyes were shut, of course.

  During these days – days and nights that were to Tom two aspects of the one eternity – no-one came to the shop on business. Boys now and then lurked in the distance, with courage not equal to their desire for a bicycle. Their parents had doubtless spoken to them with threats of a punishment beyond the breaking of collarbones. The old Gaelic image of eternity was the wheel made by the serpent when it put its tail in its mouth.

  But nothing now could bring Tom back. He did not go near the shop in daylight hours lest the boys might venture to the door. To avoid meeting a human being – and an occasional one, male or female, did call on his mother – he would have walked any distance.