Pagan's Pilgrimage E-Book

John Herdman

• Herausgeber: Leamington Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 158

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

John Herdman's beautiful and mysterious Edinburgh tale, Pagan's Pilgrimage, first published in Scotland 1978. With nascent love abandoned and the recurring presence of the creeping 'wrinkled-nosed' laundry man of a traumatic childhood, the stagnating life of Pagan must be revived by the discovery of a somewhat questionable raison d'être ― the assassination of an aristocrat. The spleenful nature of Herdman's titular protagonist and a selection of odd experiences perfectly sets up a strife deep within himself: can Pagan commit to his partially book-found life-calling, tangled into his pilgrimage? In Pagan's Pilgrimage, John Herdman expertly demonstrates his capacity to evoke complicatedly moralising characters with haunting effect. Equal parts absurd and ephemeral Pagan's Pilgrimage is an enigmatical Edinburgh tale. "A sustained and often brilliant performance ... sheer comic invention and verbal ingenuity ... This is an observant, intelligent and humorous novel of great merit." Alan Bold, The Scotsman ".... the writing is brilliant .....a kind of exploration of the Scottish soul .... An unforgettable piece of writing." Cuthbert Graham, Press & Journal "There is a seriousness at the heart of it, a wide philosophical background, and an acute psychological verity ... all that I have spoken of will delight you." Catherine Lockerbie, The Student "Remarkable in its clarity and disturbing in its implications. The novel is an impressive construct, amusing, climactic, at times dreadful, and locked together in tidily effective prose." David Campbell, Scottish Educational Journal

Leseprobe

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"A sustained and often brilliant performance … sheer comic invention and verbal ingenuity … This is an observant, intelligent and humorous novel of great merit.”

Alan Bold, The Scotsman

“…. the writing is brilliant …..a kind of exploration of the Scottish soul …. An unforgettable piece of writing.”

Cuthbert Graham, Press & Journal

“There is a seriousness at the heart of it, a wide philosophical background, and an acute psychological verity … all that I have spoken of will delight you.”

Catherine Lockerbie, The Student

“Remarkable in its clarity and disturbing in its implications. The novel is an impressive construct, amusing, climactic, at times dreadful, and locked together in tidily effective prose.”

David Campbell, Scottish Educational Journal

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Contents

Title PageChildhood and YouthBookless and Bone’sThe Mysterious StrangerUnder StrainI Prepare for my MissionThe JourneyTeuchtershardsThe CrisisRepentance and ReturnAbout the AuthorCopyright

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PAGAN’S PILGRIMAGE

Voici le temps des ASSASSINS

Rimbaud6

7

Childhood and Youth

My imagination has been haunted by the wrinkled-nosed laundryman for as long as I can remember. He was a sallow, bad-tempered and laconic fellow, who used to collect and deliver the laundry at our house, and he had a wrinkled nose. I was frightened of him, but also fascinated by him; he wore a uniform, and this marked him out for me as one having authority, so that I came to believe that this sinister character had powers to remove me from parental control and place me under durance. I used to loiter around the front door when he called, however, partially concealed behind my mother’s skirts, flirting with danger. As well as a uniform, I remember, he had a leather satchel in which he kept his change. Whenever I misbehaved—threw my little sister’s dolls on the fire, wet my bed or plunged my granny’s six-inch hat-pin into the cat—my mother used to say, ‘The wrinkled-nosed laundryman will get you.’ You should not say things like that to a child. If you do, he, or she, may grow up with deep, unconscious fears: say, that the wrinkled-nosed laundryman will get him, or her. So it has been with me. I remain terrified of wrinkled-nosed laundrymen, to this day, even though my reason assures me that I am in little danger from them.

The stress which I lay upon the wrinkled-nosed laundryman at this early stage in my recollections is not fortuitous, as later events in my narrative will make clear. A more immediate influence upon my development, 8however, was that of my father, the Rev. Cuthbert Pagan, whom I much resemble. He was a Scotch preacher of the old school, and a man of infinite hypocrisies. A crafty peasant from Sanquhar, he had a mind of weaving, tortuous illogicality and a sullen temper. He also had illusions of grandeur. On a famous occasion he discharged from the pulpit the following blasphemous catalogue of the prophets of God: ‘Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, John the Baptist, Christ!’—then, in quiet, subdued but penetrating tones— ‘and lastly, Christ’s humble servant, Cuthbert Pagan.’ My mother was a kindly, long-suffering soul, and if she had a fault it was that she instilled in me an ineradicable and perhaps unjustified mistrust of wrinkled-nosed laundrymen. I had an elder brother, who persecuted me, and a younger sister, whom I persecuted. Yes, we were a close-knit family, we Pagans: discord being an infinitely more compelling bond than harmony.

My schooling proceeded apace. We lived in a village on the outskirts of Edinburgh, which the advance of the city has since swallowed up; and after a year or so at the local school I was dispatched into town to attend a private establishment. I was a bright pupil, heartily loathed by my teachers, who no doubt sensed in me a superior spirit. While always maintaining towards them an unexceptionable politeness, I made it clear that I regarded them as less than my equals, and this consciousness may perhaps have rankled in them. They could never pin anything on me, though, so their resentment could find no 9natural outlet, releasing itself only in meagre driblets, a sarcastic shaft here, a hostile glance there, only occasionally an overt slight. Such gestures I received with icy indifference.

My father was not really so totally unsympathetic a man as I may have seemed to imply. He was a man without doubts, however. To convey a little of the sort of person he was, or rather wasn’t: he was not the sort of man who, if he were looking out of his study window at the newly-mown lawn, and a cardboard cylinder from the centre of a toilet-roll were suddenly thrown over his fence, would immediately think to himself, ‘I wonder what my reaction would be if that cylinder were to get up off the grass and begin to walk towards me?’ No, he would be much more likely to say, ‘Litter bugs! Damned vandals!’ or something of that nature. That gives some idea of his limitations. He had no self-criticism.

One asset which my father did possess was a good ear for music. When I was about eight years old he began to take me to orchestral concerts in the Usher Hall of a Friday evening. I had already acquired a precocious passion for classical music, and in the atmosphere of the great concert hall my experience of the music became a physical, sensual event. The ornate lighting, the great sweep of the tiers, the noble organ, even the plush corduroy of the seats—all had their effect on me. I would watch each group of instruments in turn, and be thrilled by their physical forms, their mellow contours: I wanted to run my hands over the bodies of the violas and cellos and to press my nostrils against 10their elegant scented wood. As I watched and listened, stroking the arms of my seat the while, a primitive sucking reflex would commence in my mouth, which I only much later came to realise was the same action with which I had once drawn the milk from my mother’s breasts.

I had soon mapped out a future for myself as a composer, and spent most of my free time covering sheets of expensive manuscript paper with unperformable compositions, meaningless arrays of notes which I believed to be masterpieces, created by a magic act of will, through which strenuous desire was able to compensate for the knowledge which I was aware I did not possess. I bought the Pelican Lives of the Great Composers, in three volumes, and imagined my own life as it would some day be chronicled in the fourth.

Unfortunately I had extraordinarily little musical ability, and was never able to learn so much as to sight-read. My fingers, too, were abnormally clumsy and unresponsive to my will. However, I persisted with my piano lessons for many years. By the time I was in the senior school my progress had become so exceptionally slow and my performance so unremittingly hopeless that I began to harbour serious doubts as to whether I had been wise in my choice of vocation. The idea caused me great mental torment. I had at that time a blind music teacher, a gentle creature of excessive sensitivity and a monumentally refined ear, to whom my endless incompetencies and barbaric discords were a source of something akin to physical agony. Often when I hit a 11wrong note he would draw his whole body together with a pitiful groan, and cast his sightless eyes up to heaven with a countenance blank with inexpressible suffering; on occasions the sweat would even break out on his brow. His passion afforded me a little comfort in my trouble, for already sadistic and masochistic impulses were jostling for supremacy in my soul. But really it was a bad time, as I came to face the irrevocable dissolution of my dreams. It is from this unhappy period that I date my thirst for the absolute, my yearning for some God-given, exalted destiny which would lift me far above the inherent limitations of my talents and personal attributes.

My father had destined me for the law, for which profession my brother Shugs was already preparing himself, and as the enforced abandonment of my compositional ambitions had left me without a purpose in life I went along with his desires for the time being. During my last year at school, however, my exemplary devotion to my studies was disrupted somewhat by a passion which I conceived for a skinny red-headed serving-wench in a low coffee dive called the Stockpot. I would spend most of my holidays and many of my evenings there, lingering over stale scones, feeding the juke-box and casting furtive glances at the object of my desires, who never evinced the slightest flicker of interest in my person and, indeed, seemed totally unaware of my attentions. My father somehow got to hear of my obsession, probably from a malicious schoolfellow of mine, and encouraged me to pursue my studies south of the border, where he doubtless 12hoped I might form some more salubrious attachment. I therefore proceeded in due course to ——— College, Cambridge, where my scholastic career was facilitated by the award of a Frank Proxmire Exhibition, of value £3 6s 8d per annum, an emolument ordinarily restricted to the younger sons of fishmongers residing within three miles of Norwich Cathedral, but that year magnanimously thrown open pro hac vice. But my heart remained at home in the Stockpot, and I benefited but little from the manifold advantages which proliferated about me for the taking in the gracious old city in the Fens. As soon as I came home for the Christmas vacation I headed straight for the Stockpot and remained ensconced there, more or less, for four weeks, without the least amelioration of my romantic affairs to show for my devotion. My only other current interest in life lay in tinkering with my motor-bike. I would tinker happily for four or five hours at a stretch, tuning and retuning the engine to absolutely no practical purpose, revving and phutting away interminably in the manse garden, and roaring round and round the block emitting din and noxious fumes until our good neighbours were plagued beyond bearing, and began making fruitless representations to the minister, to whom my way of life was fast becoming a source of black-burning shame. As for myself, the aimlessness and vacuity of my existence was far from inhibiting my belief that heaven had marked me out for some high if yet undisclosed destiny, and my manner became saucy, overbearing and contemptuous beyond enduring. 13

One evening I returned home from the Stockpot to find a police car parked outside our front gate. I made my way quietly indoors, and tiptoeing up to the door of my father’s study lent an ear to his conversation with the policeman. They were discussing me. It seemed that the neighbours, obtaining no satisfaction from my father who in truth was already quite unable to control me, had appealed to the law as the only hope of quelling my mechanical activities.

‘I’ve done a’ I can, officer, an’ I can dae nae mair,’ my father was saying, ‘he’s aye in yon Stockpot. I mind fine when he was a bairn, constable, he wouldnae wear his Claxton cap, an’ see the lugs on him the day. I mind I said to my wife, I says we’ve a bad yin here, wife, I says, we’ve a young deil here, Mrs Pagan, that we hae.’

I slunk away in embarrassment on hearing this insulting talk, and sought the peace of the dark garden to nurse my wounded pride; but after the policeman had gone I re-entered the hallway nonchalantly and with a lot of noise, whistling some mindless popular song of the day, and tossing my gauntlets and crash-helmet carelessly on a brass tray. As I hoped, my father emerged from his study pale with fury, with a half-written sermon still in his hand, and accosted me as I made as if to go up to my room.

‘An’ where hae you been, my fine young chap?’ he hissed dangerously, savouring and caressing the words.

‘In the Stockpot, father,’ I replied with a resigned sigh.

‘Stockpot, say ye? I’ll gie ye Stockpot! It’s the back o’ my hand you’ll be feelin’, my jockie! There was nae Stockpot for me, I can tell ye, when I cam up frae Sanquhar 14forty year syne, for tae gang tae the college! Sixty mile I walked, in my bare feet! No, there was nae Stockpot for me, an’ nae grants, but a puckle oatmeal in my pouch, an’ bloody hard darg, an’ a straw pallet to lay my banes on at the end o’ the day. Stockpot, ye say? Out o’ my sicht, ye bauchle, ye’re nae son o’ mine! Out o’my sicht, damn ye, ye’re nae langer a Pagan!’

And he kept on, in this excessive way, until I became more than a little weary. All the time he was speaking my father was circling round me, leering and sniggering and making idiotic little springs backwards and forwards on his toes, attempting no doubt to torment me in a manner time-honoured among Scottish patriarchs. All this in a dog-collar. My mother and sister, meanwhile, were wailing and snivelling in the kitchen. It was a gruesome scene. I waited until he had quite finished and gave him a long, dispassionate look.

‘Before my conception,’ I said, ‘when I was as yet but a profound idea forming in the mind of God, who would have imagined that you would be the instrument chosen for its realisation?’

My father was totally nonplussed by my outrageous audacity, and it was several seconds before he shouted ‘Blasphemer!’ and hurled his sermon at my head. Abandoning it where it lay scattered copiously about the floor, he buried his face in his hands and fled sobbing into his study.

But I too was soon to taste for the first time of the cup of sorrow, for one day my love disappeared from the 15Stockpot, convicted of pilfering from the till. I had no idea where she might have gone and I never saw her again. I had never spoken to her other than to say, ‘A cup of coffee and a soda scone, please,’ nor had I ever learned her name. My failure, however, only drove me to over-compensate once again, and I became more than ever convinced that I was a person quite out of the ordinary run, whose day would dawn at last.

Shortly after this I went back to Cambridge, and did not return home for the Easter vacation; in an effort to forget my pain I turned towards the delights of erotic literature and the idle pleasures of the river. All that halcyon summer I spent lying in a punt near Grantchester, reading Women in Love, Lolita and The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and consuming cream and honey. Reeling under the effects of these gross stimuli, I performed miserably in my preliminary examination, failing even to obtain an allowance towards the Ordinary B.A. degree, and was sent down. A career in the law was now out of the question, and returning home in disgrace I was apprenticed to my uncle in the antiquarian bookselling firm of Bookless and Bone, Pitt Street.16

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Bookless and Bone’s

My maternal uncle, Sean Bookless, was sole proprietor of this little business, Bone having departed some years before to the great knackery in the sky. Sean was a melancholy old fellow with a head rather like a rugby ball or a cantaloup melon set at an angle of forty-five degrees to his neck. He had an habitually resigned, apathetic look on his face, spoke but sparingly and then sadly, and suffered badly from the cold. I can see him now, seated in his little nest at the back of the shop, his knees pressed primly together, his womanish old hands outstretched towards a meagre oil heater, an immensely long pink college boating scarf wound innumerable times round his neck, a drop forming at the end of his nose. He was said to have resembled a gipsy in his youth, but I found this difficult to accept. Uncle Sean taught me all I know about the second-hand book trade, the only field in which I have ever attained even a modest eminence. I was not industrious, and the fact is that he had very little need of me, having an excellent assistant already in the shape of wee Tam Tudhope, of whom more anon. I had been employed mainly as a favour to my unhappy parents, and I was accordingly paid very little. That drawback was compensated for, however, by my access to the infinite riches of the books themselves.

Yes, my true education was received among the musty volumes of Bookless and Bone’s bookshop. The shop specialised in theology, philosophy and eighteenth-century 18historical works, and had a good stock also of translations from classical literature. Reading widely and deep, I soon succumbed to rampant atheism and worse, washing down Rousseau and Kant with great heady draughts of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. I now disdained to enter the portals of my father’s church, which I had always found a gloomy, depressing place. As a child I had positively dreaded my weekly visits there, chiefly because of a vague suspicion that the wrinkled-nosed laundryman lived within it: several times I imagined that I had caught sight of him lurking in one of its shadowy recesses. Now, my alienation was not merely intellectual; the very construct of the building caused in me a physical recoil, and appeared the heavy badge of an unwholesome truth, signifying something foul and shadowy in the very structure of the universe. My apostasy was the final straw for my father, and he banished me from the manse; I was allowed to rent a small flat above the bookshop, which had once been the home of Mr Bone, but since his death had been used only for storage.

Of great importance to me at this time was the influence of wee Tam. Wee Tam was a socialist, as no one who knew him could possibly forget for long. He might not have had the advantage of much formal book-learning, but God, could he argue! He could. And did, boring everyone to rigidity and distraction with his interminable metaphors of chains, loaves of bread and so on. Few people minded about that, however, because Tam was such a good-hearted chap when all was said and done. On one afternoon a week 19