The farmers have turned men into beasts o’ burden. Life was hard enough, God knows, when the men had their bit o’ land. But he was his own master as well as his own servant. My father often told me of the common land there was here not so many years back. You ken fine how cattle were grazed on what is now Sir Thomas’s Park. It was a sad day for Scotland and a sad day for Galloway when the peasants were robbed of their land. I tell you, when the folk lost the right to live on the land they lost their liberty and independence.’
‘Fine do we know that, Andra. But is the age of machinery that’s upon us now going to improve this?’
‘John: the industrialists could never have brought their schemes to anything if they hadn’t cleared the folk off the land first. The folk lost their power to live. It was only then that they got them submitted to their slavery – just as the farmers have enslaved the folk here.’
‘And yet they seem to submit to their slavery as you call it without protest.’
‘Aye … but the day of reckoning will come and it will be a day when the tyrant will wish he had never been born.’
‘You are anticipating the Day of Judgment, Andra.’
‘There’s another day for that. Do you think folk will submit forever to be driven like beasts and worse than they dare drive any beast? Who’s John MacMeechan that my bairns should sweat their blood out for him?’
‘John MacMeechan will roast in Hell yet, never fear, Andra.’
‘Maybe, John: but I’d rather see him getting a taste of roasting before he gets there. And he’ll get it. He’s no’ out o’ this world yet. Folks are beginning to get their eyes opened. I see in the Mail that the jail’s packed out in Greenock because the sailors refuse to sail in their coffin ships. That spirit will spread. It’ll spread all over the world till Black man, White man. Red man and Yellow man throw the tyrants off their backs. Maybe I’ll never live to see the day. But I know that day will come just as Rabbie knew that day would come. And if Rabbie could sing that the day was coming yet for a’ that, I’d be a coward to deny his words.’
But Sam MacKitteroch shook his ancient head. He knew the Black man and the Yellow man.
‘The coloured races will never unite with the white races, Andra. It’s the heathen Chinese that’ll rule the world yet. The heathen in his blindness may bow down to wood and stone; but he never forgets … never forgets. There’ll be a bloody war one of these days, the like of which the world has never seen and will never see again.’
The glasses were filled and once again silence brooded heavily in the vestry. Each was busy with his own thoughts – and all their thoughts were gloomy.
The Reverend John’s were gloomiest of all. Rome had seen its day of splendour and Rome had seen that splendour laid in the dust. The savage Barbarians had descended in their furious thousands eager for blood and vengeance and they had smashed the idols from their pedestals and pulled the pillars from the temples. And darkness and ignorance and cruelty had come upon the earth and for many long years Christendom had travailed in pain and misery. And then Jehovah had caused the darkness and the Middle Ages to pass away before the light of His word.
But to what purpose? Men had again turned and embraced the darkness of sin and lust and cruelty. Again the tyrant was mighty in the land worshipping his iron engines in place of the Golden Calf, crushing the life from the fatherless child and showing no mercy to the defenceless widow.
It was indeed a black and cruel world. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe the heathen yellow hordes would rise and swarm the earth hungry as a plague of locusts, savage as a pack of wolves. And darkness once more would come upon the earth and the voice of the Lord would be heard afar off crying: ‘Woe unto them that will not worship Me nor obey My commandments.’
And yet: was there not also something in what Andra believed? That men would one day rise in their wrath and destroy even as they had been destroyed?
But either way the vision was a gloomy one for the Reverend John Ross and the dread of being alone with his thoughts in the stillness and gloom of the Sabbath night gnawed at his vitals. His hand went out unsteadily for the bottle. Auld Jamie, the beadle, would come only too soon.
And indeed old James the beadle was already on his way, his oilskin cape draped round his hunched shoulders. He envied the minister and his companions their drunken oblivion on such a night. But his envy was mild and lacked all bitterness. He had assisted them home every Sunday now for over fifteen years. No one thought much of it; drunkenness was not a social crime.
It was not every Sabbath, of course, that his services were required to assist the minister and the elders home. As the drink was the minister’s, he was usually the worst. After he was assisted across to the manse, old James saw to Sam MacKitteroch who lived in a crude but-and-ben off the straggling village street – if the winding cart track that served the handful of oddly placed houses could be described as a street.
Andrew Ramsay could usually manage home himself – even if he slept off some of his liquor in somebody’s peat stack on the journey.
Old James entered the portal of the Auld Kirk and shook the rain from his tweed cap. It was a sair night. The portal was dark and cold but it did provide shelter from the rain. The darkness was over the land – a wet impenetrable darkness. Only a small square of light shone from the kitchen window of the manse. It was too dark to see the light from Achgammie farmhouse – but maybe it wasn’t the darkness so much as the light would be dim and feeble. For though the lighting there was by tallow candles, John MacMeechan in his Presbyterian carefulness never allowed more than one candle to be lit at a time.
But James had known of clear nights when that light had been seen from the door of the Auld Kirk and his eye went in that direction.
Aye: it was a sair night. And a sair day it would be in the fields to-morrow. He was thankful that his old age and bent spine prevented him using the flails now. To-morrow there would be a threshing in the barn at Achgammie and the chaff and the dust would be flying and making the air a pain in the lungs causing a man to cough and spit and hoast for days afterwards.
At the thought, old James’s tongue licked the back of his odd stumps of black-green teeth. He cocked his head towards the vestry door. But there was still a faint drowse of talk. He would need to wait a bit yet before he got his dram …
He forked out his stump of clay pipe. Aye, aye: a sair night – but a grand night to be drunk in.
Inside the vestry, consciousness of the night had long vanished. Listening to Andrew Ramsay’s drunken eloquence – an eloquence he half envied – John Ross came to forget his own black thoughts. But a strange idea began to take possession of his mind. The idea had come to him often before – but vaguely, shrouded in the vapours of liquor. Now the idea took firmer shape. What would happen if he sold himself to the Devil? The thought could not have come to maturity, could not have developed in his sober mind, but drunk, it had possibilities.
Andrew Ramsay saw that they had paid no heed to him. This would not have concerned him had he not been so uncomfortably sober while they seemed so comfortably drunk. He turned his head and looked at the bottle on the table: it was almost empty: barely a dram left for auld Jamie. And the fire was burning low. Ah well: time he was pushing away home. The session had not been as successful as it might have been.
He rose stiffly from his chair.
‘Good-night, John. Good-night, Sam: it’s time I was home. Will I send auld Jamie in?’
But John Ross shook his head. He could not escape from the dark passages of his thought process. Sam MacKitteroch was beginning to snore.
Andrew Ramsay spoke a few words to the beadle and stepped out into the rain and darkness. The light from the manse window was very low. But he scarcely required its guidance. He knew his way by instinct.
There was no love in his home-going. His wife would be ailing and complaining; the house would be wearisome with the burden of his family; his sons brought