The Serpent Read Free

natural consciousness – in effect, to death. Presumably he is killed by the ‘shock’ of the adder’s innocent touch, the return of the Serpent. In titling his novel, Gunn surely knew that readers would wrestle with the Serpent’s multiple meanings. Yet the book warns us against wrestling too much, as Tom had with the meaning of the Father. ‘High heaven save us fromthe symbolists, the abstracters!’ exclaims the author. The old philosopher smiles at us ‘like one who had found not a meaning but a secret’.
    The novel’s true ending is not the mystery of the Serpent, but the simple kindness of the shepherd. As he overcomes his ‘primal fear’ and lifts the body, he speaks to Tom ‘as he might have spoken to a boy. “It’s all right, Tom, boy,” he said reassuringly. “I’ll see you home.”’ The words are a virtual echo of Tom’s words to Janet on that long ago Halloween. The act is the same as Old Hector’s on finding the lost Young Art asleep in the ruin of his ancestral croft. The story has come full circle. The serpent takes its tail in its mouth. Eternity.
    F.R. Hart

CHAPTER ONE
    As the Philosopher paused on the upward slope to let out a stream of breath he felt the beating of his heart and heard its dark buzz in his ears. This for some reason gave him a momentary pleasure, as though he would applaud the organ, now as old as himself, yet still holding to it. His eyes were a milky blue and moved about him with the leisurely clairvoyance that rests lightly, yet so penetratingly, on what it loves. Almost they might consciously have been looking in farewell. But the Philosopher did not know he was going to his death within a few hours, a death so startling that deep in the mind of the countryside the old menacing images would stir and lift their dark heads.
    The only image in his own mind was of the ground around his feet, and he saw it tumble in gentle frolic, in little green dips and braes, broom and juniper and whin and wild briar, and grey salleys huddled in clumps over the tiny burn, hushing and hiding it. He smiled. The wild roses had just come into bloom, pink roses and white, and the broom was yellow as meadowland butter with an eddy of scent now and then that choked the brain like a sickly sweet narcotic.
    Glancing back the way he had come, his eyes were caught by the red petrol pump on the roadside, a dozen paces up from the wooden shop which he had built by the gable-end of the old croft house. It was a local holiday and every shop was closed except that one. Even as he looked, a car drew up at the pump and a dark figure moved towards it from the cream-coloured front of the wooden shop. Henry wouldn’t miss any twopences that were going, holiday or no holiday!
    His smile broadened in happy humour and he decidedhe might as well sit down. He had the whole day before him and it looked like being a good day, for though there were some large billowing clouds in the sky, they sailed, set a spinnaker, or hove to, against a vast blue ocean that was calm with summer.
    As his heart-beats subsided, he felt airy within himself, withdrawn from the community he could see like a cork from a dark bottle.
    And he could see a fair swatch of it. The village was little more than a straggling line of houses, at the near or western end of which stood the bright petrol pump. It lay in a broad valley basin, with hill lines against the horizon. Beyond it stood the solid grey gable-end of the church, with the hollow bell steeple about the size of a natural chimney. It shut out the manse from him though he could see an upper corner of the wall of the manse garden. Beyond that he caught a glimpse of the road which came from the country town of Muirton, seven miles to the east.
    By church and village and petrol pump the road came, and continued up the wide fertile Glen (now shut off from the Philosopher by the shoulder of the hill he was climbing),