The Serpent Read Free Page A

topped ridges, wound by pine plantations and lochs, crossed an ultimate watershed, and then descended by birch tree and bracken and tumbling falls, to the western sea.
    Here, towards the eastern seaboard, the fertile low ground of the glens had been cleaned of the folk and turned into great arable farms. Except for those left in the village, the folk had been swept up to the moors, to the Heights. Thus the farm which the Philosopher could still see before the hill-shoulder cut it off was called Taruv, and the croft houses far above it, the Heights of Taruv.
    For a generation or two the folk who went to the Heights had retained a material relationship with the farms below. At harvest time they had descended to reap and to stook, at first with the one-handed hook or sickle at which the women were expert, and, later, with the two-handed scythe, the man’s weapon, behind which the women had gathered and bound the sheaves. Great numbers of men and women were needed to harvest the large farms, and the Heights, while retaining the old life of the folk, were also a reservoirof labour for the new dispensation, a human dam whose sluice could be lifted.
    Changes often appeared to be violent, and indeed were so frequently enough, but it was remarkable how, little by little, change was accepted in the lifetime of a man so fully, so fatally, that bitterness itself was forgotten. Children of the dispossessed, grown into men and women, reap, and sing as they reap, on the lands taken from their fathers. Many a story the Philosopher had heard of ‘the great times there would be in it’ at the harvest-homes of the big farms. The eyes of bearded men from the Heights would glisten with memories that were pagan if not unholy.
    Even in his own lifetime, consider the changes that had taken place in such a thing as a nickname. Tom the Atheist, he had been called; then Tom the Serpent; and finally, as the new young grew up and merely saw a quiet inoffensive little man, pottering about or sitting in the sun reading a book, the Philosopher. There was something derisive in the title, of course; the subtle off-taking derision that country folk like.
    But the village had remained down below, in that wide basin of broken ground, perhaps because here were gathered together certain indispensable trades and craftsmen, the blacksmith, the joiner, the merchant, the schoolmaster, the postmaster, and, by inevitable complement, the widowed woman, the old maid, the young girl who went out to service, the young man who learned a trade or went gillieing or, from carrying a small bursary to the secondary school in town, flowered miraculously into a university student.
    Yet it still was attached to the soil, a crofting hamlet, and as he looked the Philosopher saw figures singling their turnips in between the green cornfields on the narrow cultivated lands behind the houses. With their slightly bent heads they moved so slowly that it was easy to get the illusion of an inner meaning or design that never changed. And this somehow at the moment comforted the Philosopher.
    The car roared and swung away. Some lads on bicycles. And here was the Fraser Arms bus from Muirton: a picnic going up the Glen. As it passed, Henry gave the drivera wave. A noisy cheer from the passengers rose above the whine of the mechanism. And there was another car swinging in – Doctor Manson, a tough old pagan if ever there was one.
    He had been called in for his mother’s death – how many years ago? The Philosopher tried to calculate, but got lost. Sometimes it seemed to him that there had been whole stretches in his life, as long as ten years at a time, when nothing had happened.
    Yet whenever the image of his mother came to mind, at once life moved on its feet, working and suffering. And immediately other pictures were begot – of his father, the fields, the croft work, school days, sunny stretches of the countryside. A small stout dark woman, forever busy. He