by Neil M. Gunn
‘Man, some of these old Gaelic airs are lovely,’ said the shepherd fondly. ‘Do you know, sometimes when I am on the hill by myself, one of them will keep me company off and on for hours. And as it comes and goes it will bring into mind all sorts of strange things.’ His eyes shone, amused and reticent.
‘And all from the anarchists of Taruv!’
They laughed, enjoying the friendly talk and looking upon a wide world that also seemed to enjoy the leisured hour.
‘This feverish fascination in the discussion of politics!’ remarked the Philosopher. ‘Odd to think that in another century or so it will have passed. To us now it is nearly everything. I couldn’t begin even talking about the Serpent without landing straight in it!’
The shepherd smiled but said nothing.
‘My point was simply that in those old days, when they had a settled way of life, when politics and economics had no meaning for them as they have for us they had a special way of looking even at the Serpent. Folk swore here in our country then, not by god or devil, but by the earth. Their bible for swearing on was the earth. You took a little earth in your hand and swore by that. The Serpent was the earth spirit.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said the shepherd.
‘The Serpent was the symbol of wisdom,’ said the Philosopher. ‘By the way, have you never used the serpent-stone?’
The shepherd hesitated. ‘To tell the truth, I have,’ he confessed. ‘It’s been in our family for a long time. About the size of the palm of your hand, with a hole in it.’
‘And you put it in water, and the water cures?’
The shepherd nodded. ‘The last time I used it was for a ewe that got stung by an adder on this very moor. Whether it was the stone or not, the ewe got better.’ The shepherd smiled through a certain embarrassment.
The Philosopher nodded in turn. ‘Possibly your serpent-stone is the symbol of the ancient sacred python, of the belief that death came by the woman, whose type is the serpent, and that through the same source life comes again. Just as the sun destroys – and is the source of life. The Babylonians put a serpent round the heavens. But I like the idea of swearing by the earth. It is the ultimate thing; the mother of all life. And today she is good to look upon. What?’
‘She is,’ said the shepherd, looking around.
‘She is pretty nearly my philosophy, my religion, and everything now. But she has taken a lot of knowing.’
‘I suppose so,’ murmured the shepherd, never quite sure of a certain fine light that came into the Philosopher’s eye at times.
‘For at the end of the day, what’s all the bother about? Simply about human relations, about how we are to live one with another on the old earth. That’s all, ultimately. To understand one another, and to understand what we can about the earth, and in the process gather some peace of mind and, with luck, a little delight.’
‘The understanding of one another – that is often very difficult.’
‘Very difficult,’ repeated the Philosopher.
‘And sometimes,’ said the shepherd, ‘you think you have got hold of something, something bright and fine, and then when you try to tell about it, I mean, when you try to bring it into life and make it work – it’s like the fairy gold.’
‘How the fairy gold?’
‘Don’t you know the legend of the fairy gold and what happens to it when, after finding it, you bring it into the light of the common day?’
‘I have heard of the fairy gold but not what happens to it when you bring it into the common day.’ The Philosopher looked expectantly at the shepherd.
‘It turns,’ said the shepherd, simply, ‘in your hands into withered leaves or horse dung.’
The Philosopher continued to look at the shepherd, the light brightening his eyes, then he looked away over the valley, his head nodding to the rhythm of an inner delight, as if he had been presented with an unexpected gift.
‘Wisdom,’ he murmured. ‘No wonder Christ had to talk in parables.’ He began to laugh in sheer tribute, quite friendly chuckles, in which the shepherd joined.
As the Philosopher arose and took a step or two up the hill, his heart began to knock and his breath to labour. ‘I’m not so young as I was,’ he explained, smiling to the shepherd. ‘I also find,’ he added, thus gaining time to stand still, ‘that when I have been sitting for a long time in thought, the first move afterwards should be a careful one – but rarely is! And that parable of yours was worth coming a long way to hear.’
‘Take it easy,’ said the shepherd, with friendly concern. ‘If you’re along the hill burn, I may see you later on.’
‘Very good,’ said the Philosopher.
‘So long, then, just now.’ Saluting with his stick, the shepherd moved away along the face of the hill.
Every few yards the Philosopher had to pause for breath, but this was no hardship, for it gave him time to look at what lay about his feet or flew through the bright air or wandered in the blue field of the sky. The story of the fairy gold was in his mind like a tune or like a gift that he could not help looking at every now and then. He knew the value of such a gift, appreciated the chance circumstance of its presentation, was in no hurry to pass away from it. life was not so lavish with such gifts but that one should pause and smile as the fairy gold gleamed in the mind, gleamed with a cunning brightness that was the very laughter of gold. More subtil (that biblical word!) than coined gold, this gold of vision, of wisdom, this final medium of exchange between all minds. And not expressed abstractly but with so visible a gleam that even the child mind was held. Particularly the child mind! The dismay of the child mind at the withered leaves, the horse dung! The child mind – coming from where – that it should be so dismayed?
Next time the Philosopher caught himself smiling, he was over the crest and saw the brown heather moor before him, and, upon a knoll at some little distance, the four grey standing stones.
These massive stones were prehistorically old, but age was about them in other ways. The peat had grown up past their waists; they were grouped closely together, tilted slightly, so that they were like old men, like the shoulders of squatting bodachs, held for ever in a last moment of meditation. He sometimes made a fifth in this eternal séance and, after the labour of the climb, became as mindless as any of them.
Today it was particularly pleasant to sit down in the shadow of the western stone and cool off a bit, for his body seemed rather light on its legs, probably because his mind was so active. And always he liked to look abroad upon the immense prospect of near moor and hidden glen, of vast visible hollows and low hills, until along a skyline stretching over two counties ran the peaks of great mountain ranges. If he were sent to sleep over a long period of time and then were wakened at sunset beside these stones, he would not only be able to tell the month but very nearly the day of the month. On the shortest day of the year the sun set in a small dip below the peak of a mountain in the south-west. He had stared at it with his naked eye when it looked like the end of a half-molten axle revolving in the dip which exactly contained it. It never went farther south than that. From there to the north-west the peaks told the months with a certainty which the prehistoric shepherd never found at fault. Whether the year was marching to high summer or receding through autumn to winter was written on the ground. The fixed mountains and the moving ball of the sun made an impressive calendar!
Perhaps the local folk then gave to short divisions of time the names of the peaks? ‘Ah, the sun’s in the Dip today! He’ll start travelling north tomorrow.’ Or, ‘No, you’ll find no real growth in the grass until Sgurannich.’
The Philosopher’s mind began to speculate amusedly, and in a little while vision drew in about him the prehistoric ones who herded their flocks and hunted over moor and mountain, through glens and forests and across streams. Any folk who saluted the sun and evolved legends about fairy gold must have had a warm human way of looking at things! And what a vantage point this knoll provided, not only for study of the
sun but for seeing the folk approach, from strath and corrie and upland. How vastly important was this knoll in the ancient days!
In about him they came; and over there was an old woman bending down and doing something; whispering to a small boy she was, for the boy was a little frightened on his first visit to this place of worship. She was just the sort of woman who would be doing something, even to understanding a little boy’s private needs at such a moment. She seemed strangely familiar to him in this simple daydream, and then as he looked more closely, he saw that she was his mother.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The feeling of falling softly into the swirling tide in his room was no doubt a delusion. He had probably fallen full length with a crashing sound. Anyway, when some sort of consciousness returned and he felt the fumbling hands about his body, he was fighting in an extreme, instinctive terror. The first clear picture was of his mother staggering back from a blow, her hair in lank wisps over her forehead and blood at one corner of her mouth. This picture paralysed him, his legs gave way, and he sat heavily on the bed, staring in horror at his mother’s drunken face. She brushed the hair back from her forehead in a slow characteristic gesture with her left hand, gulping heavily for breath, and in a lifted quivering voice cried, ‘Oh, Tom!’
The appeal in the voice was utterly beyond bearing, and now behind it, in an instant, uprose the memory of having seen his father a moment ago in the field. As his mother took a step towards him, he cried ‘No! No!’ in a frenzy of denial, leaping at the same time to his feet, staggering, and then he was gripping the pillow in both fists, tearing at it, collapsing over the bed and smashing his face into the pillow, still shouting ‘No!’ out of clenched muscles.
But the blindness of the pillow was a treachery from which he swung round, for his father would now have had time to come into the room. Everywhere he searched for the bearded face, looking through his mother, his whole body shaking ungovernably, his jaws clicking.
His mother was moving towards him and speaking, shutting out his vision. ‘No!’ he screamed at her. To be touched was to be trapped. Premonition of the familiarity of touch revolted him with such fear and hatred that his whole chest felt like vomiting up. But he lived now beyond physical reaction in an unquenchable agony of fear.
‘Hush, Tom, it’s only your mother.’
She was standing two paces from the bed, afraid to draw nearer.
Her solid body, her voice like tears turned into profound, yearning, hopeless sadness, made a maddening distraction. It would smash his defences, it would break him down. ‘Get out!’ he yelled at her.
But that momentary concentration on her, rather than on his father, pierced him inwardly so that something in him gave, and in a renewed frenzy, with the inward pieces flying asunder, he smothered voice and eyes in the pillow and shook in a fit of dry mad weeping.
But he was still wary, some part of him was still listening, and suddenly swinging his head round he glanced about the room. ‘I saw him,’ he gulped. ‘He’s out there.’
‘No, no,’ she answered. ‘He’s not there.’ She turned, however, and looked about the room, now in the eerie gloom of late twilight.
It was that instinctive action on her part, that human weakness, that joining-in with his fear, which helped him to defeat the madness whose mounting wave might else have broken clean over him. In an instant, not by design but by belief, she became in some measure an ally.
At that, an extreme trembling weakness came over him, so extreme that he rolled on his back. It was now as if dissolution was to come through the physical breaking up of his body. He felt her hands on his legs but could not keep still. He felt her fingers at the laces of his boots but he had to kick her hands away. Irritation at the return of her hands mounted to torture. But the pulling off the boots was like the pulling of his legs out of a quagmire. She turned the patchwork quilt up over him. And by degrees he subsided into an exhaustion whose approach he felt like a delivering death.
In the days and nights that followed he fought a long battle against the figures and forces of unreason. The battle had all sorts of extraordinary turns and phases, but what was ever present, and varied only in degree of intensity, was the feeling of extreme apprehension. In quietened daylight moments he could say to himself, for example, that the appearance of his father in the field had been a hallucination arising from the overwrought condition of his nerves. In such fashion he could reason out many of his more monstrous delusions. But … the twilight hour … a creak in the woodwork … a soft noise outside … and he was listening in a mounting agony of apprehension. The room, the still pieces of furniture, the grey light in the window, the appalling swelling silence beyond the window. Everything was ‘translated’ in an ineffably sinister way. Yet ‘sinister’ was not always the right word, for the translation sometimes had in it the approaching majesty of God, the terrifying, august, slowly gathering, invisible Presence of the Almighty God whom his father, and his forefathers, had worshipped. At such a moment even the chance sounds his mother made in the kitchen were cut off from him, softened and enigmatical, so that he strained to hear and understand them, to bring them back to known sounds and movements. When defeated in this effort, he would let out a shout. She would hurry into his room; the tension would pass from the muscles of his neck. Moving his head normally, he would say in a literal voice, ‘I’m feeling very dry.’
‘The kettle’s on the boil. I was just thinking of making a drop.’
‘That’s fine.’
Off she would go then.
He would drink the tea, though it had for his palate a vile taste. He had always liked tea, but the sickliness of its flavour was at times now almost more than he could stomach. In particular the cream with which she was specially careful to enrich it – there was nothing too good for him – gave it an oily taste that was like an offensive smell.
By one means or another he would keep her moving about until the blind was drawn and the lamp lit. From the shop he had got her to bring down the round-wicked lamp and had himself made a fixture for it by the head of his bed. This lamp flooded the room with light.
He was certainly weak and often woke out of a nightmare sweating profusely, but in himself he knew there was no real reason why he should not get up. But he did not want to leave the room; above all he did not want to go out and see people moving. The thought of being stopped by someone could induce a fear, a revulsion, that momentarily blinded him.
During all this time his attitude to his mother was largely one of forbearance. She was naturally there, but the life he had to deal with was secret and beyond her. Often, too, she appeared not only tactless but stupid in a way that all but made him shout at her. She could ask if he was feeling a bit better in a gross hopeful manner that made his nerves scream as he put the brake on them. He would turn his face away in silence. But not always in silence.
Then there was that other appalling mood when her voice gathered a sort of dumb despair, a sheer unintelligence, that yet might have been borne were it not that she managed to import into it that sighing mournfulness straight from the religious world. Ο God, this was utterly beyond bearing.
The very first night she had asked, ‘Will I send for the doctor?’ The sweat breaking out on him, he turned upon her like a madman.
One definite thing, however, had happened to her: the mood of settling down into dumb witless resignation, which might easily have been her portion to the end of her days, was killed stone dead. The need to look after him had brought all her working energy back into full play. From early morning until the smooring of the fire she was continuously on the move. There was nothing too much for her to do. And when she lapsed into the mournful mood, it was probably not so much due to exhaustion of body as to the feeling, induced possibly by his restrained anger or snapping savagery, that in herself she was unable to understand him, was bewildered and terrified by the malady which she saw was sapping and wasting him before her eyes.
And she never knew the ri
ght thing to say. Never. But she kept on, kept on working, with an endurance that nothing could break. Never had she answered him back. Her highest reward was to hear him speak a few words normally. And in time she even learned not to go beyond them and ask any question.
Meantime his capacity for apprehension kept growing or at least refining itself, until at last he did really seem to have an extra quality added to the eyes of his mind. They saw instantly with a perfect clairvoyance, not so much through the opaque, but as if the opaque was turned to glass or a thin mist. At such a moment his own body thinned into nothing around the concentrated power of vision.
This affected at times even the faces he saw – and he was continually seeing faces, faces of every normal and abnormal kind. For example, the faces sometimes would be thin as pale blown bladders, delicate as toy balloons with a suffusion of light inside, or pale and watery, with a simplicity of features that might have been drawn by a child. These faces could, in a negative almost comical way, be very horrible, but they were not menacing, until, all in an instant, their objective lack of menace became, on a plane beyond all known planes, in a manner beyond all words, inconceivably menacing.
There came back to him also, at this time, one or two faces which he had known in nightmare as a child – particularly one, dark-skinned as a south-sea cannibal with all the features crushed into lines and curves by a smile that was not a smile but an expression of paralysing anticipation of that which was about to happen – to happen to the little boy. There wasn’t even a neck to this face. Just a round creased face, round as a football, utterly vivid, with the darkness of night all about it.
