by Neil M. Gunn
He squatted by the cushion, pinched a corner with his fingers, and sniffed his fingers. Aromatic, rich. It penetrated through the congested ways of the head, it did the heart good, this living cleansing scent. Let the heart be lifted up: it is gratitude’s deepest acknowledgment.
Lord, how would he ever be able to make intelligible his entrance into the kingdom of the earth!
A wild bee came along in a buzzing hurry. A very busy fellow. A little drunk by the look of him and by the way he side-slipped, but holding to his ravaging purpose amid the blossom, with interludes of silence and of song. The Philosopher watched him until all of a sudden he buzzed off.
The Philosopher nodded several times in agreement and in a merry wonder that held itself within the light of his eyes.
The Philosopher was no methodical naturalist; indeed he felt himself like nothing very much at all. And in this nothing much there was a freedom, an acceptance, a participation, a part of everything-in-itself, that had a humour subtly produced as honey. Once he had fancied he had seen a grey boulder hold its sides in this cosmic mirth. But the boulder had outstared him and put him back in his place. It’s no good fancying things and making merry with a boulder. It’s been longer on the game than you have and your little fantasies are a silly intrusion.
Fantasy-making was no more than the flitting of errant butterfly-wings round the whin-root of being. But it could be amusing – and had … perhaps … something in it!
Amid the after thoughts to such pleasant thoughts he came over the last ridge and saw the stream, the small river winding from the mountains and hiding parts of itself in little gullies. With the sun at his back, he admired the lower reach as a lovely blue, full of light, that for no particular reason always made him think of the belly of an eel or a serpent. He had known he would find this colour, and lo! he had found it.
The river – the names of rivers – rivers of commerce – the rivers of great continents – the veins of the earth. The river the Greeks called Lethe, and the Gaels called the Black River of Death. Blue, a living blue, blue as heaven.
You cannot leave your money to a river, nor your business, not anything but your thoughts and your affection, unless you left it yourself!
He just loved this stream, and that was all.
Love. Well, there was love. Just as there was suffering. Suffering by itself brutalised. But suffering transformed by love – than that man knows nothing more profound. Just nothing. It was the ultimate experience, the ultimate cleansing … short of death, that enigma.
He had been thinking so much about Janet … and then about his mother … The river passed from his conscious sight for a little while. Through the dead heather he went until he came on the last verge and looked down into the water, which was quite clear though it appeared, as always, faintly brown.
The off bank was low and flat, with tall purple thistles holding about their roots the dead grey grasses of the last spate. Golden flecks of the tormentil … a cluster of trefoil. And the water; the running water – down from the mountains, over the moor, in many a swirl of adventure, and away to the distant sea.
Often the simplest object would set up a train of thought that would reach astonishing heights or depths, or, rather, would confer upon him moments of illumination that stilled his humble being in a beatified wonder.
Where had he been reading about water? Two volumes of hydrogen gas and one volume of oxygen gas invariably come together to form water. That was it. Why? And the only answer the chemist knows is that the oxygen atom has an ‘affinity’ for the two hydrogen atoms. Of the nature of this ‘affinity’ – the chemist’s own word – the chemist has no notion, and the physicist cannot help him out.
Affinity. Odd sort of word to use, denoting a relationship, like a human relationship. Was human love its evolved form? Who was it said that the human being was just matter thinking? Marx. Yes, it was Marx, in the philosophic aspect of his materialism. Was thought, then, potential in all matter? Was affinity, then, not only potential but a recognised constituent – if an unknown one – in matter, and necessary to its ‘revolutionary’ changes?
Were thought and affinity the two supreme active principles in the known universe?
Of the nature of affinity in the human relationship, what was the principal element? Probably a certain tenderness. The tenderness of love.
He had been thinking of tenderness before – yes, the tenderness of Christ – that time, by his mother’s bedside. And that time, too, when he had seen the shepherd leaning on his staff at a little distance. That extraordinary pure tenderness which had penetrated the centuries, which nothing could kill, neither torture nor death, neither the hell-fire of authority nor the ritual of its form, importance nor vanity, nothing, not anything. Amazing that it should so persist, from generation to generation, like the scent of the wild thyme. What relationship did this argue in man that he so manifestly craved it?
The affinity of the oxygen atom for the hydrogen atoms … in cosmic evolution up to the tenderness of Christ, to love. And what relationship in this vast evolutionary process will be (or may now be somewhere) as far beyond human love as that love is already, in its expressive consciousness, beyond the affinity of the three atoms?
There was a range for thought! How glorious a range, how supreme and unending an adventure for the human spirit! To get a glimpse of it was to feel glad.
So caught up by his visioning was the Philosopher that it exhausted him a little and he was pleased to sit down.
The feeling of freedom, of expansiveness, that came to him on the moor, was always increased, when, having chosen his spot, he sat down, extending his legs, and lay back against a heathery support for his shoulders and head.
There was first the delicious feeling of rest, of sinking down upon the moor and thereby set floating upon its whole varied expanse, with the subdued sounds of the stream running by and the slow curves of the near hills against the summer sky. Then secondly, and in a moment, there was that ancient intimate scent of the old heather stalks. One always forgets that scent and its surprise has the freshness of an original memory. Long lives ago it was here; it is here still; and this element of time in it is an abiding strength.
The Philosopher settled himself comfortably and his heart expanded in tribute. Indeed for a little while his eyes closed under the snout of his bonnet and he floated deep and away. Not wishing, however, to lose altogether this solitary delight, this pagan sensation, he half-opened his eyes, so that he only half-slept, a temporary in-between state which permitted what was heavy to dissolve quite away. Than these moments there were none more pleasant in his life.
Presently not only his mind but his eyes and his ears and the skin inside his clothes came delicately alive. His ear was the whorl of a shell that hears the song of the ocean. His eyes saw the mountains uplifted, singing the song of the earth to the sky, one far cone clear as a pipe. Jocund was the word the poet used. He smiled in divine ease, for if all he heard was the song in his own blood, that blood came out of ocean and earth and sky and would return thither. Not much separated one element from another. Not much – but yet how exquisite the little, the little that separated being from not-being!
The Philosopher’s thought, now entering into its ultimate region, assumed the extremely tenuous condition wherein it distinguished subtleties that no pen could record, because the least physical movement, even the speaking of a word, would have dispelled them. And in this experiencing there was no labour, as if by some miracle thought found its true flow and moved like vision.
His chin fell to his chest, his eyes to the heather by his upturned toes, for in this attitude sight went more readily inward, identifying itself with those inner eyes that produced the light by which thought was made visible.
He knew the moment of extreme pause when it seems that the veil which divides being from not-being becomes filmy, verges on complete translucence. Here the last illusion seems to be dispelled and time in stillness completes itself; the begi
nning and the end are comprehended.
To be suddenly recalled from this pause by the outside world is to experience an extreme almost anguished beating of the heart, with the body putting forth its whole strength in a supreme effort, the breath labouring, sweat breaking on the forehead.
Properly such a pause should fall away into the sleep that is like the sleep of death, until one awakens, not only refreshed, but with a feeling of delight, which cannot be named, of having wandered in a place which leaves no memory.
Just beyond the Philosopher’s boots was a small outcrop of quartz before the ground dipped sharply to the stream. In a damp crevice grew a saxifrage whose gold was paler than the spikes of the bog asphodel. The heather about his legs and under his body was springy and comfortable. It was a natural place, with its gentle slope to the south-west, for animal life to enter upon and curl up in the sun.
The Philosopher’s eyes were on the heather by his boots, though they did not consciously see it, for all external things were now out of focus. Last year’s pin-head blossoms, withered to a delicate ash-brown, still adhered to the dark-brown heather stalks. But already up through this darkness and withered ashen blooms, the new green shoots were sprouting, tipped with tiny pale buds, pale to living white.
Suddenly over from his left boot the stalks began to shiver and pouring through them came the body of an adder from two to three feet long.
This movement brought the Philosopher’s staring eyes into focus and a slow swelling started in his chest. The adder slid through the heather towards the left hand, which was extended, palm upward, pale as quartz. Over the root of the Philosopher’s little finger the diamond head uprose, seeking warmth. The hand was warm as a rock in the sun, but the head, swaying slightly from side to side, seemed at a loss. Then tentatively it poured some of its cold dark-brown body onto the palm, touched the wrist innocently with its mouth, stopped suddenly as the hand gave a slight convulsive jerk, and quickly slid off over the ball of the thumb and down into the heather where the Philosopher’s sleeve lay sunk.
He must be asleep, thought the shepherd, smiling to himself. However, too much sun mightn’t be good for him. Instead of shouting again, he decided to go over and wake him.
The snout of the cap shaded the eyes. Frail and done, the old boy looked. The shepherd put a hand on his shoulder and called, ‘Hi!’ From his stooping position, he was astonished to see that the eyes were wide open. He called again and pushed the snout back a little. The eyes were gazing so intently at something in the distance that the shepherd involuntarily glanced over his shoulder at the mountains. Then the shepherd’s heart chilled and a coldness ran over his skin. He stared at the set face. By God, the old man was dead! He touched the forehead with his hand. Death has a clammy cold there is no mistaking.
Though the shepherd had handled many dead and half-dead bodies on the battlefields of the world, the death of the Philosopher here on his own moor on a sunny day touched him with the mystery that is quick with the ancient fear. But he got his hands under the armpits, and, calling to the Philosopher as though he might yet awaken him, heaved him up. Whereupon a serpent of monstrous length issued, as it seemed, out of the left arm, out of the very hand, and for a moment so intense was the shepherd’s shock of infernal horror that he went muscle-bound. Then as he spasmodically jerked himself away, the cap fell from the Philosopher’s bald head and the light body rolled over and lay still in an incongruous heap.
The shepherd turned and ran, and in the first few steps he lived through those years of his youth, the impressionable years of prophecy and curse, with the Serpent that would devour the atheist who had killed his own father.
He stopped, panting; forgot the primal fear, and tentatively returned. Gripping the neck of the jacket, he stepped backward, hauling the body after him. Presently when he had it on a bare patch, where the heather had been burned in the spring, he stood and looked about him. He could not leave the body for any length of time here where the grey crows waited to peck the eyes out of death. An eyeless body for a Christian burial by the old church – by God no! Not for his old friend!
Remembering their recent meeting, he was deeply moved, flooded in a moment by a tenderness that yet quivered like an exalted fear. He got down on his knees and felt the body all over for concealed snakes. He hardly knew what he was doing – until he became aware of the face.
At once all urgency fell from him before that timeless calm, that austerity which yet gathered about the small wrinkles of the skin a profound and nameless gentleness.
As the shepherd put his hands under the body he spoke to the Philosopher as he might have spoken to a boy. ‘It’s all right, Tom, boy,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I’ll see you home.’
About the Author
THE SERPENT
Neil Miller Gunn (1891–1973) was born in Dunbeath, Caithness, one of the nine children of ‘bookish’ Isabella Miller, ambitious for her sons, and James Gunn, a fishing skipper of local renown. At thirteen, Neil was sent away to live with a married sister in Galloway. At fifteen, he went to London as a boy clerk in the Civil Service. In 1911, he began 26 years as an excise officer, many of them at whisky distilleries in the Highlands and Islands. When the Great War broke out, two of his brothers were killed and one died later of war-related injuries. Gunn was particularly close to his brother John, who was badly gassed, and in later years John’s war experiences were incorporated into Highland River. In 1921, Gunn married Jessie Frew, called ‘Daisy’ for her golden hair. Tragically, their only child was still-born.
Gunn’s duties in Inverness (1923–1937) left ample time for writing and for activity as a leader in Scottish Nationalist politics. The first of his 21 novels, The Grey Coast, appeared in 1926. The fourth, Morning Tide (1930), was a Book Society choice in 1931. In 1937, the acclaim won by his seventh, the prize-winning Highland River, encouraged him to resign his excise post and write full-time.
Notable among his other novels are The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944), The Well at the World’s End (1951), Bloodhunt (1952), and four epic recreations of Highland history, with Sun Circle (1933) for ancient times, Butcher’s Broom (1934) for the Clearances, the hugely successful The Silver Darlings (1941), and from modern times The Drinking Well (1946). Gunn also published short stories, essays and plays. His last book, The Atom of Delight (1956), is an autobiography which reflects his lifelong and Zen-like fascination with the elusive spirit of life, wisdom, and delight.
Gunn’s wife died in 1963, and he lived alone in the Black Isle until his death in January, 1973. Since then, his standing as one of Scotland’s great novelists has grown even more firmly established, and the Neil Gunn International Fellowship was founded in his honour.
Copyright
First published in 1943 by Faber and Faber Ltd
First published as a Canongate Classic in 1997,
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Souvenir Press and John W.M. Gunn, 1978
Introduction copyright © F. R. Hart, 1997
All rights reserved
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 540 8
www.meetatthegate.com
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