Free The Serpent by Neil M. Gunn

in the manse pew, Donald Munro, who had spent a year at college, where he was studying for the Church, seemed far removed, with his young man’s distinguished bearing and good looks, from the cheeky eye-flashing schoolboy, as he seemed far removed from Tom himself and the other youths of the congregation. Certainly Tom could have had no faintest premonition, in those early days of his return home, of the emotions that were yet to move him to the cold, deliberately conceived plan of destroying Donald. As near pure evil it had been, evil from which the last emotion is abstracted, as, surely, it is possible for man to reach on earth.
    With the nights drawing in and the weather variable and often stormy, Tom had to spend more and more hisevenings at home. He had taken some books back with him from Glasgow, but in the quiet of the lamplight, with his father in bed and his mother’s knitting needles clicking away to themselves, he could not produce them, for his father would ask what they were, ask to see them; not even his books on socialism, for the word socialism was then a synonym for atheism.
    For the most part his father lay quietly in his bed, his arms over the coverlet, staring before him; and though Tom, reading in some old weekly periodical, or mending a domestic vessel or implement, or glueing together a simple picture frame for a merchant’s flamboyant calendar, could forget about him, yet he could not forget where he was, any more than he could forget where he was when in church. Sometimes this quietude had a curious seductive influence, and when at bedtime he got up and went through into the parlour where his own bed was, he was already like one in a state of dream, like one who had taken a mild narcotic and heard the outside world of wind and rain beat upon the walls and pass away, pass away, its own sounds whimpering softly as they left.
    If his father read at all now in the late evening, it was out of the Bible. And one night, just before bedtime, he said, ‘I will read you a chapter. It is in the Gospel according to St. Matthew.’
    His father always ‘took the books’ on a Sabbath night, but not on a weekday night, though many held this family service every night. When he had finished reading the chapter, he turned over the leaves of the big Bible and read three verses of a psalm. Then he looked at his wife.
    She led the singing, and Tom muttered the words in his throat, muffling and muting them, singing like one who could not sing, rebellion stirring vaguely in his heart at being thus pushed too far. On his bed in the parlour, he sat like one who had taken part in a final and fatal rite, and the night outside passed away, passed away to the hills, in a sadness, seductive and without end.
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    From Glasgow, in addition to a few books – two of them presents from Dougal – he had brought home with him hisown tools, and one of the new blowlamps. After his talk with Dougal, he had realised that he might have to stay at home a long time, and out of the workshop Dougal had given him lots of odds and ends. ‘They may come in handy,’ said Dougal. ‘At the last Fair holiday, I called on an old friend of mine in the country. He’s the sort of man that can put his hand to anything and he was making quite a good living out of a little repair shop. He sold things, too; ironmongery stuff. And that year he had taken on the safety bicycle. He had two second-hand ones for learners. Threepence the half-hour he was charging. He was doing well.’
    Something in his tone had struck Tom and he had asked, ‘Would you like to go to the country yourself?’
    Dougal had not spoken for a moment, then a characteristic dark glow had come into his eyes, and, turning away, he had said, ‘No. I would not care to live in the country myself.’
    Something enigmatic in Dougal’s attitude at that moment now seemed clear to Tom. He knew why Dougal would not care to