‘You seem lost in thought,’ the shepherd greeted him.
The Philosopher blinked and looked up. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said and a welcoming smile slowly crept over his face.
‘It’s a lovely day. I saw you sitting there and I thought to myself: he’s enjoying it!’
‘And when I saw you over there a little while back I thought: the good shepherd leadeth his sheep. But you don’t lead your sheep in this country: you drive them. Sit down.’
The shepherd sat down, the warm smile on his face making it appear modest and mannerly. ‘Yes, I have seen them lead the sheep when I was out East in the Great War, but we have different ways here.’
‘And why wouldn’t we?’ remarked the Philosopher lightly. ‘Each land to its own customs. It makes for variety anyhow, and that’s something. The pity it is that our best customs die.’
The shepherd’s thin face and intelligent hazel eyes liked this sort of talk. ‘I was standing round the corner over there, looking across at the Heights of Taruv. There are only three crofts now. It’s sad to look at the ruins.’
‘I can remember at least thirty. And then there were crofts all along the top, right to Braelone. I can remember stealing off as a lad on a summer evening to see the young fellows at the sports, jumping and putting the shot and throwing the hammer – on the green strip, you know, just by the Taruv Wood.’
‘Yes, I’ve been there. I used to enter at the Games for the high jump myself.’
‘You did, I suppose. And the cycle race. I remember.’
‘Not the cycle race. I practiced one year, but I didn’t go in for it. I felt I wasn’t good enough. I hadn’t the time for the road.’
‘What I remember best was the warmth of the life up in that crofting district. A ceilidh there of a night was thick with life; singing and dancing, you would think they hadn’t a care in life. And neither they had. They drowned care periodically.’
The shepherd laughed. ‘Faith, they did,’ he said. ‘And the wild ploys! I have been in a few myself, but Alec Wilson was telling me not long since about a splore they had once with a goat.’
The Philosopher smiled. ‘I was there,’ he said.
Old days came alive as they remembered this incident or that, one person or another. An elder of the church, who had tried to stop dancing, was accosted one night on a dark road by a tall figure wrapped in a white sheet … The wasting away of the Factor and the little clay figure found in the burn of Taruv … Donul Macallister, the all-round athlete from the Heights of Braelone, who had thrown the mad bull with his bare hands …
The shepherd was forty-five and his memories went back into the early nineties, but Tom had been in Glasgow before the shepherd was born.
‘When I was a lad,’ said the Philosopher, ‘twenty to thirty women came from the Heights of Taruv to the harvesting on the great farms below. Women worked then for eightpence a day. What a swarm of life was there! The harvest field – and the harvest home. A merry crowd they were, and each as full of character as an egg of meat. And all Gaelic amongst themselves.’ The Philosopher’s eyes glimmered.
‘And now not a single woman coming down at all,’ said the shepherd. ‘What an extraordinary change there has been in less than a lifetime!’
‘Machinery,’ said the Philosopher. ‘First the reaping hook, then the scythe, and now the binder.’
‘Ay, and the land is not cultivated as it was. It’s cattle and sheep now, stock-rearing, and you don’t need the same hands for that.’
‘Machinery again,’ said the Philosopher. ‘The Clyde builds great steamships; the ships take grain across the seas; and you look at the ruins on the Heights of Taruv.’
‘It will never come back, the old life,’ said the shepherd thoughtfully.
‘Yes, it will come back, but not in the old way,’ said the Philosopher. ‘We are in the period of the great decline in the country here. A period like that will cover a hundred – two hundred – years. We have not reached the end of the ebb yet. But we will, and then the tide will slowly begin to flow again.’
‘In what way?’
‘Life will come back – not merely in numbers – but with the old warmth. You have seen a place swarming with rabbits. Then in a few years you have seen it deserted. Then one day in another few years you see the rabbits have come back.’
‘But surely we’re not just like the rabbits?’ said the shepherd, smiling doubtfully.
‘I don’t know,’ said the Philosopher, ‘that we should despise the rabbits. Many a pleasant half-hour I have spent watching the young ones playing together. If you ask any man what is the reason for the decline in our land, he will tell you that folk will not live on porridge and milk as they used to do; in short, he’ll tell you that the causes are economic. It’s the same with the rabbits. Too many of them, not enough grass, liver disease. It will be time enough for man to despise the rabbit’s economics when he arranges his own in a more intelligent way.’
‘And do you think the resources are here?’
‘We have hardly touched them yet. What do you think all these big fellows are trying to get hold of Highland hydro-electric power for? The machine is finding out our land. The machine has taken away, the machine will give, blessed be the machine!’
As the Philosopher smiled, the shepherd did not know quite what to make of him. The Philosopher always excited his mind, for about him there still lingered a memory of strange deeds, of the coils of the serpent in mystery and prophecy.
‘And it’s more than economics, in the sense that we are more than economics,’ said the Philosopher. ‘There is the superstructure of thought, especially, say, of religion. Just as the economic life ebbed, so did the religious. Science, with freethought, was the machine there. When William Bulbreac called me the Serpent he wasn’t so far wrong. In my own small way, I was Antichrist. And the awful thing about the Antichrist is that he has nothing to put in the place of that which he destroys. For every personal problem is more than a personal problem: it is a communal one.’
‘I never rightly understood – about that,’ murmured the shepherd, poking the point of his stick in the grass.
‘Who does?’ replied the Philosopher. ‘After giving more years to it than I can remember, my own thoughts have become a little clear only to myself. You read one philosopher and in your young enthusiasm you acknowledge him master – until you read another. In my early days in Glasgow, socialism, as we saw it then, solved everything, socialism and freethought. But socialism soon began to need a philosophy and so developed its materialist interpretation of all history, and as for freethought – what exactly was ‘free’?How sure we were in those days that the atom was the final indivisible particle of matter! You just couldn’t get beyond it. That was that settled for all time! Then the atom disappeared, like the old Devil, leaving an electric swirl behind him. Take even this business of the Serpent. How that, too, has changed!’
‘Yes, folk are not now so religious as they were. I mean they’re more tolerant now to a man with a point of view of his own. In the old days some of the ministers and elders were real tyrants! And how they liked to use their power! I suppose they believed so strongly themselves that they were sure they were doing what was best for everyone else.’
‘Yes; power. They loved to exercise their power, particularly when they could link it up with the power that underlay and explained and upheld everything. In this way they became, as it were, larger than themselves; they became part of the company of the sons of God; the executive power on earth. Much the same thing is happening at the moment with the new communist religion in Russia. The ministers and the elders there are behaving in the same way: the same certainty of rightness, the same profound belief that their way is the way of the ultimate good of mankind; the same intolerance of criticism, and a more ruthless way of liquidating the heretic than you or I knew here – though not more ruthless than in the far times of the Covenantors or the Inquisition. That is not to condemn Communism or Christianity as a barbarous creed. It is merely to understand how man acts in a certain set of circumstances – perhaps necessarily acts. He has done it often in history, and each time, in his own mind, he has been certain that he was right in a final eternal way. Without that belief, that faith, he might have accomplished little. However, that’s another argument, if a long one! That’s not what I was thinking of when I mentioned how our attitude to the Serpent has changed.’
‘I thought you were a keen Communist,’ said the shepherd.
The Philosopher smiled. ‘I couldn’t be anything unless I was extreme, could I? How a man’s reputation will stick to him! When I was a young socialist in Glasgow we used all the jargon of the time with just the same ease as the young do now. A man had only to use a phrase or quotation for us to “place” him at once – Robert Owen, Henry George, the Communist Manifesto, and so on. But of all these tags that floated about the one that stuck most strongly in my mind was one by Bakunin the anarchist. This is it: “Liberty without socialism means privilege, socialism without liberty means slavery and brutality”.’
The shepherd’s eyebrows crinkled thoughtfully as the Philosopher turned his head and looked at him, apparently awaiting some expression of opinion.
‘That about hits it off, I think,’ said the shepherd slowly. ‘Only,’ he added, troubled, ‘I thought anarchism meant – meant –’
‘Chaos?’
‘Yes.’
‘Apparently not,’ said the Philosopher, and quite suddenly and merrily he laughed, tilting his head and looking around on the bright world, and it seemed to the shepherd in that merry moment that the bright world laughed back. ‘Extraordinary the effect a man’s early environment can have on his mind,’ proceeded the Philosopher. ‘When I try to work out how it is that always, at the back of everything, I have been a natural anarchist, do you know to what I am inclined to attribute it?’
‘No,’ said the shepherd.
‘Precisely to the old days in the crofting world on the Heights of Taruv as I knew it when a boy. Then – and back for centuries and centuries – they were all anarchists. Anarchism was the working basis of their lives, both their economic and mental lives. Think it out and you’ll see it for yourself. In my boyhood, I never actually remember seeing the laird in person, the owner of the land. He was an absentee, as you know. Once a year the men put on their Sunday suits and went to the place where the Factor was having his sitting for the collection of rents. They paid their pound or two, got their dram, and came away. After that each man was his own master, worked his own land, having no boss or bureaucrat over him to drive or direct him. Accordingly in the community as a working or going concern, all were equal in social status, or rather the idea of class distinction amongst themselves could not arise, simply because it did not exist. The farther back you go the clearer that becomes because you recede more from the power of money. Then almost everything was, as we say, ‘in kind’. Even what tribute was paid to the chief as a leader was paid in kind, just as in Russia some who now work the nationally owned land pay Stalin in produce, in kind. But the crofting country, through long centuries, had reached beyond an active bureaucracy and leaders. True, the chiefs at intervals stirred up the clansmen to fight for some power-scheme the chiefs had on hand, some dirty business or other, but actually for generations on end whole regions of the country lived in peace, cultivating the land and rearing their cattle and sheep. The individual bits of dirty business are remembered. History has so far been a remembering of the dirty business rather than an understanding of the arts and the way of life of the peaceful generations. I remember Alec Wilson getting a hiding in school one day because he couldn’t remember all the high-up intrigues behind the bloody Massacre of Glencoe. The history of the Highlands to us as boys was a sort of enlarged massacre of Glencoe, and we had to remember the bloody bits or get walloped.’
‘That’s right!’ said the shepherd, laughing softly. Presently, when they had swopped one or two schoolboy memories, the shepherd came back to the word anarchism and its difference from communism, for he had a curious mind in such matters.
When the Philosopher had in a somewhat elementary way explained the difference, he went on, ‘In Taruv in those days – for there were, of course, no big farms in the Glen then – you had the individual responsible for his own bit of land, while at the same time he was an active member of the community, abiding by its customs and laws, just as his own bit of land was part of the communal land. In fact in the old run-rig days the men used to cast lots every year for the various portions of land. Then each worked the portion he got for that year. They naturally helped one another and at certain times – say, at the peat-cutting – they voluntarily joined forces and worked in squads, and these were usually the happiest times of all. In short, you had a true balance between the maximum freedom of the individual and the common welfare of all, and at the same time – and this is where the anarchism comes in – they had no bosses, no tyrants, no bureaucrats, no profit-drivers among themselves. You see what I mean?’
‘Yes. I believe I see what you’re getting at now. But do you think folk would go back to that today?’
‘No. We are dealing with what anthropologists would call a primitive society. What I am trying to show to you is that the society worked. You and I know that. When we use the word communism or anarchism, we have something real to go on. Our minds quite naturally take the next step and say: if we could get our society today, with the machine, working after the old pattern – if we could evolve the old into the new – then once more the life of the folk would be warm and rich and thick. For remember, they were primitive in the old days only in so far as the absence of the machine was concerned. They had their way of life, their religious attitude to life, their arts. Take what is considered the highest manifestation of art, namely, music. Look at the music our forefathers produced. One of the finest folk musics in the world. Do we in the Highlands produce music of any kind now?’
‘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.