The Red Door (67 page)

Nothing happened for four or five weeks. During the successive Saturdays the dances in the hut went on, the key was handed back to me and the place was left tidy as promised. Unfortunately,
though I didn’t know it, the air around me was rapidly darkening with omens. As everyone knows islanders are not notable for speaking out, and no rumour at first reached me till quite
suddenly out of the blue the Rev. Norman Black made his explosive attack in the pulpit on a particular Sunday. As I wasn’t in church I didn’t hear his exact words but I was given
accounts of it. The Rev. Norman Black is a small fiery man with a ginger moustache who holds the local people in an iron grip. They go out and gather his peats for him, they give him presents of
meat and milk, and in return he exercises dominion over them. They are in fact very frightened of him indeed. I cannot help admiring him in a way since his consciousness of his own rightness is so
complete and utter. He bows the knee to no one and he flashes about in his small red car like a demon from the pit spitting sulphur and flame, and when he feels it is necessary he has no deference
to the high and no mercy on the low. As far as I could gather the drift of his sermon, shorn of theological and ecclesiastical language, was as follows. The shed or hut was infested by young people
intent on fornication: this was in fact the reason why the hut had been built in the first place. As long as the dancing took place in the open then one could see what was going on but when walls
had been erected then privacy suitable for dalliance and immorality had been created. Also why was the hut painted green? This was very ominous indeed. Furthermore why had this hut been built by an
Englishman who never attended church? Was it because he was bent on undermining the morality of the village? What other explanation could there be? Considered from that angle my enterprise did
indeed look suspicious and cunning especially as I had no real explanation for the hut, and even if I were to offer one no one would believe me now. As for my true reason, who would believe
that?

At first I was inclined to laugh at the whole thing but in fact there apparently had been some drinking. Some ‘dalliance’ had, in fact, taken place though it was, I am sure, quite
innocent. Nevertheless people began to sidle past me. They began to wonder. Was I some thin end of the wedge? Had my previous civil behaviour been a mask? Cold shoulders were turned to me. My
visitors dwindled. Anger grew. After all I had been extended hospitality and I was repaying it with lasciviousness cunningly disguised as philanthropy. I felt around me a rather chill wind.
Neighbours began to slant off when I approached.

Steadily as the Rev. Norman Black blew on the flames and lashed his theological whip the village divided itself into two camps, that of the adults and that of the young. One night there was an
attempt to set the place on fire. After that a guard was mounted over the hut for some time each night. Parents warned their children not to go to the dances and the young rebelled. I found myself
at the centre of the cross fire. Messages were scrawled on my door in the middle of the night. The young expected me to stand up for them and I still gave them the key. Even the schoolmaster was
divided in his mind and ceased to visit me. I was alone. My visits to the local shop became adventures into enemy country. The shop was often out of articles that I needed. My letters arrived
late.

One day a group of youngsters came to the door and told me that some adults were intending to march on the green hut and burn it down.

Let me say at this point that I was faced with a particularly interesting scientific problem. I wished naturally to be merely an observer in the experiment I was conducting and for this reason I
couldn’t interfere on either side. However, I walked along with the youngsters towards the hut. When we arrived the adults had not yet reached it, and we waited outside the hut in a group.
There was a number of boys and girls and many of them were very angry. They felt that they were defending not only a hut but a principle. They felt that the time had come when they must stand up
for themselves against the rigid ideology which was demanding the destruction of their hut. My hut had in fact become a symbol.

We waited therefore and saw in complete silence the adults approaching. There was a large number of them and they carried axes and spades. They stopped when they saw us and the two groups faced
each other in the fine sunshine. They were led, as one could see very quickly, by the fiery minister. This was indeed a clash or crash of wills that the prophet had foreseen. The minister came
forward and said, ‘Are you going to allow us to pull down peacefully this habitation of the devil?’

One of the boys who was home from university and whose name was John Maclean said, ‘No, we’re not. You have no right to pull the hut down. It doesn’t belong to you.’ He
was studying, as I remember, to be a lawyer. I said nothing but remained an interested spectator. What was I expecting? That there would be an intervention from heaven?

The minister said no more but walked steadily forward with an axe in his hand. Now this posed another interesting problem. No one had ever laid hands on a minister before, certainly not in a
country village. If anyone did, would there indeed be an intervention from heaven? The minister, small and energetic, advanced towards the hut. The group of youngsters interposed themselves. He
pushed among them while one or two of the girls, their nerve breaking, rushed to the other side to join their fathers, who were waiting grimly to see the result of the minister’s lone attack.
I think they too were wondering what the youths would do. In his tight black cloth the minister moved steadily forward, axe in hand.

The youths were watching and wondering what I should do but I did nothing. How could I? After all I was a scientist engaged in an experiment. Some of them were clearly speculating on what would
happen to them when their parents, many of them large and undeniably fierce, got them home again. In the sunshine the minister advanced. One could see from the expression on his face that for him
this hut really was an abomination created by the devil, that its destruction had been ordered by the Most High, that he, the servant of God attired in his sober black, was going to accomplish that
destruction. Interestingly enough I saw that among the adults was Buckie the builder placidly awaiting the destruction of the work of his own hands. Did I however glimpse for one moment a twitch of
doubt on his face, a fear that he perhaps too was present at a personal surrender? I knew all the invaders, every single one of them, placid, hard-working men, good neighbours, heavy moral men, all
bent on destroying my green hut which was at the same time both Catholic and demonic and perhaps life-enhancing. It was odd that such a construction should have caused such violent passions. But I
had not met a man like this minister before. When he had finally arrived next to the youths he said in a slightly shrill voice (perhaps even he was nervous?), ‘I have come here to lay this
abomination to the ground. Shall any of you dare touch the servant of the Lord?’ Quivering he raised his head, his moustache bristling. There was a long silence. It was clearly a moment
permeated with significance. Were the young going to establish their independence once and for all? Or were they going to surrender? The village would never be the same again after this
confrontation, no matter what happened.

The men waited. The minister pushed. And he slipped on the ground. I am not sure how it happened – maybe he slipped on a stone, or maybe he had done it with the unconscious deliberation
and immense labyrinthine cunning that the service of the Lord had taught him. Anyway as if this had been what they waiting for, the men pushed forward in a perfect fury (would these sons of theirs
defy their elders as represented by the minister?), impatiently pushed their sons and daughters aside and with axes held high hacked away at the hut. Thus in Old Testament days must men such as
this have hacked to pieces the wooden gods of their enemies, coloured and magical and savage. Thus they splintered and broke my hut. Before they were finished the youngsters had left, giving me a
last look of contempt. I was the fallen champion, the uncommitted one. I who had apparently been on the side of youth against the rigid structures of religion, had surrendered. When the men had
accomplished their destruction, their penetration of the bastion of immorality, they too turned away from me as if in embarrassment that I had witnessed such an orgy, almost sexual in its force and
rhythm. Without speaking to me they left.

After they had all gone, leaving an axe or two behind, I stood there beside my ruined hut, the shell which had been ripped open and torn. Not even the Bacchanalians had been so fierce and
ruthless. Thinking hard, I poked among the fragments. Above me the sky was blue and enigmatic. No prophecy emerged from its perfect surface. I remembered the words, ‘When the wood is raised
at the Corner wills will crash.’ Or rather ‘will clash’. Suddenly in a moment of perfect illumination such as must have been granted to the prophets I realised that the words
could also be ‘walls will crash’. But even before I had assimilated that meaning another one so huge and comic and ironic had blossomed around me that I was literally staggered by the
enormous terror of its implications and sat down with my head in my hands. For I now knew that I could not stay in the village. My time there had come to an end. I was ready to start afresh. My
retreat had ended. I must return to the larger world and continue with my work. But then the final revelation had come, as I shivered suddenly in the suddenly hostile day. I thought of my
discussion on predestination with the schoolmaster. I thought of his casual remarks about the prophet. I thought of how I had been led to this particular village to learn about the prophecy and
this prophet. I thought of the hundred years the man had been dead. I thought of the last meaning of all which had just come to me and I laughed out loud at the marvellous joke that had been
perpetrated on me, rational psychologist from an alien land. There the words stood afresh in front of my mind’s eye as if written in monstrous letters, luminous and hilarious, in the sunny
day of clear blue. It was as if the heavens themselves cracked, just like my hut, as if the vase, elegant and beautiful, had shown a crack running right down its side, as if I could see the joking
face, the body doubled over in laughter. For the words that came to me at that moment, the last reading of all, were these: ‘
WHEN THE WOOD IS RAISED AT THE CORNER WELLS WILL
CRASH
.’

When you find this letter I shall hope to be dead. Though in fact it is not a letter but an explanation. I am as you know your village headmaster and you understand who and
what I am. Or at least you understand me as far as anyone can understand anyone else. You know me as one who takes care of your children. You know me, I hope, as a dedicated man. I am fifty years
old and I have been here a long time. I have presided at your small concerts. I have a wife and children and have loved in my way this village since I first came to it many years ago when I was
twenty-five years old on a fine day in a light such as I had never seen before on earth. I cannot describe to you what I felt that day. If I were a poet I might be able to but I am not. I am, I
think, a very ordinary man and the older I grow the more ordinary and less exceptional I see that I am. But that day was the beginning of a new world, a new life. The air seemed cleaner, objects in
the world more solid and luminous, the sky and sea bluer. It was as if I had undergone a resurrection. Yet there was no question of a previous death. I have seen a painting like that somewhere, but
I can’t remember where.

And indeed my love of the place as a new land communicated itself to my work. I taught as if I were inspired. I loved the minds and motions of children. I saw the world through their eyes, in
flashes, unpredictably. I think that in fact I became a child and that all these years I was in fact a child. The world was immediate to me, I fed on it. I had immense unremitting hope. I woke in
the morning as if to a new world as children do. I taught and read and taught. All that I read was for them. All that I did was for them. I surrendered myself to them. I became their servant. And
in that I was entirely happy.

I cannot remember when that dream faded. Perhaps there was no particular day. Perhaps it is a poison that we all have to drink and that those who love most dearly drink most deeply. It
wasn’t anything that they – I mean the children – did. For I must say that they have always been faithful to me as far as it is possible for them to be so. I believe I have
understood them more than most people do since I have been for so many years a child myself. Even now perhaps I am a child expecting more than the world can give.

I never asked of the world material possessions. You all know that. My life has been very simple and seen from the outside must have appeared even limited and dull. I did not seem to enjoy
riches or to have great passions. I was happily married, as you saw. I used even to read the books the children read. I became fond of fairy stories. I loved especially the story of Little Red
Riding Hood, and saw in my mind’s eye the wolf lounging against a tree while the girl carried her scones or whatever it was to her white-shawled granny. I loved that world of pigs and foxes
and cats and dogs and old women and magic lamps. Indeed the more I progressed in life the more I abandoned my books of philosophy in favour of the fairy story and its animals and its more creative
and happy logic.

Why then am I writing this letter to you telling you that never again will you see me? I will tell you. Yesterday I held a service in the hall. This was one of my concessions to you. I knew and
I have always known that I must appear religious, otherwise I would not be able to teach your children. And I did want to teach, and not only to teach but to teach these particular children. So I
consoled myself with the fiction that if I wished to serve them at all – and I really thought I would serve them better than anyone else – I would simply have to surrender to you on
this point, not realising that this mumbo jumbo of the Old Testament which they did not understand was a poison which was steadily eroding all the other bloom that I was putting on them. But then I
was cowardly; I did not wish to leave. One can only work creatively in one particular place at one particular time, in a place where objects are known long enough to be converted to symbols, and
become beautiful and enduring and permeated with the hue of one’s life-blood. I was not a tourist – that at least I can say. And there is no one I despise more than the tourist.