The Serpent by Neil M. Gunn

jealousy but some queer mood that got mixed up with his own physical weakness and those staring periods of meditation or vacancy. Sometimes a ghostliness of silence walked with him, or stood in his body and face like a presence.
    One afternoon he came into the barn, and though it is the way of country folk, even of the young, to refer to an invalid’s health, yet none of the lads expressed the hope that he was keeping well. He spoke to one or two of them and inquired after their parents, and they answered him with the constrained politeness they would have shown to the minister. There was a difficult silence and the old man went slowly out.
    Then one dull cold evening Andie brought an old brazier he had picked up somewhere; thereafter darkness came into the barn to find their country faces brown and glistening in the glow of the fire.
    The barn cut them off even from their own home world. Here they were completely freed; their bodies uncoiled, warmed and full of expectant pleasure, amid the smell of the straw and the wood, the shavings and the shadows. Their minds grew light and quick as ferrets, quick as their own glancing eyes. A ribald country story by Andie had the very smell about it of the natural functions. Laughter was a sheer joy. Nothing was ugly when you understood it. It just made you laugh, often helplessly, for once the mood of happiness was induced, it was extraordinary how even a facial expression, a monosyllable, was enough to set you off. You knew what was coming!
    In this atmosphere the slowest country mind grew unusually alert, and when discussion started on the beginnings of the world, on evolution, on God and Devil, every phrase used, every new thought produced by Tom, scored an impression with the sharp definition of a graving tool.
    One day, in the dead of winter, his father looked at himwith his grave stare, and in that moment, before his father opened his mouth, Tom knew that gossip about atheism had at last reached his father’s ears. He felt the blood drain away from his heart.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Philosopher got up and went slowly on, for that look on his father’s face, graver than death, could wither all things.
    But only for the instant it took the eyes to focus on the sunny world. Then the face faded out, a ghost face conjured up in a daylight stare, and where it had been were the bushes, the soft grass, a warbler singing sleepily. Round the shoulder of the hill he heard the shepherd whistle his dog, heard the cry that had already sent the dog on a swift out-flanking race.
    Life was a happy thought, wherever it came out of! And death’s face intensified its beauty, its vivid loveliness.
    What an amount of time he had wasted, so studiously, trying to find out the meaning of life!
    He smiled like one who had found not a meaning but a secret. Thus to move slowly, under the sun of a temperate land, owing no allegiance, owning nothing now, was a great pleasure. One had to travel a long road, perhaps, before disinterestedness came so lightly about the feet, passing from the briars to the nostrils in an idle eddy of wind, from a warm throat to juniper bushes showing their green berries, bitter flavoured, like an essence of pine forests.
    His wandering glance rested on a rabbit crouching in its shallow bed under the roots of a juniper. Its brown eyes looked back at him, hardly four paces away. The head was low, the ears flattened, the after part of the body a gathered hump. Its stillness was an arrestment of all motion. He could feel its living warmth. How clean the fur, how full of light the dark brown eye! The fear in its body gave it the tension of a compressed spring. Communication passed between them, an alert subtle intermingling at thecore of the heart’s beat. It could not be held long, and quietly he stepped away, so that there need be no hurry and scurry in this world, and came, before he knew it, into a narrow alleyway of close-cropped grass winding between juniper bushes