The Pure Land Read Online Free PDF Page A

was the one dealing with the welter of emotion. Far out at sea a ship’s light flickered. The mass of cloud silvered at the edges and the moon slid out again, shone pure and clear and cold.
    *
    Back in the house, Martha had left the gas lamp lit for him, turned down low. The front room reeked of his father’s last pipe of the day, the thick black Bogie Roll he liked to smoke. The family Bible had been left out, conspicuous, on the scoured oak table in the middle of the room. Glover smiled. That was like the old man. Ask the Lord for His guidance.
    The book was old and worn, its cover boards warped, its pages musty from the damp. The page edges were gilt, beginning to fade with years of turning. He’d been amazed at that as a child. Holding a single thin page between finger and thumb,it was hard to see the sheen at all. But flick the pages, let them cascade, and they shimmered, glistered. Closed, the book was a solid block of gold, encased.
    He stood in front of it now, said quietly, ‘Lord, guide my hand.’ And he closed his eyes and opened the book, or let it fall open where it would. And he read. Deuteronomy Chapter 26.
    And it shall be, when thou art come in unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, and possessest it, and dwellest therein …
    Dear God, he knew this passage, read further down the page.
    And he hath brought us into this place, and hath given us this land, even a land that floweth with milk and honey .
    In spite of himself, he was shaken, took the words as a sign.
    *
    ‘A land of milk and honey?’ said Robertson next morning, looking up from behind his desk.
    ‘Well,’ said Glover, pacing the room, restless with the excitement of it all, ‘silk and tea!’
    On a bookcase in the corner was a globe of the world. He rotated it on its axis, found Japan. ‘There’s a fortune to be made, a whole world opening up.’
    Robertson shook his head. ‘Sometimes you worry me, Tom. Looking for signs and wonders.’
    ‘You don’t think we’re guided sometimes, led the way we’re meant to go?’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Robertson. ‘But we can just as easily be misguided, misled.’
    ‘And for fear of that we’d do nothing? Christ, Andrew, sometimes you worry me ! I mean, do you want to be still sitting here, polishing that chair with your arse when you’re thirty? Or forty?’
    ‘There are worse jobs.’ Robertson’s tone was clipped, his top lip tight.
    ‘I just think sometimes you have to take a chance, grab your life by the scruff, say to hell with it!’ Glover spun the globe, blurred continents and oceans. Robertson gave him a thin, wan smile, across a great distance.
    *
    It was raining, a thin drizzle, a smirr. Like the haar it rendered everything grey. It wet the cobblestones, gave the streets a dull sheen. It deadened sounds, the rumble of cartwheels, the clop of hooves, a voice raised, the cry of a gull. Glover was walking home at the end of his day’s work, bareheaded, his jacket collar up, his mind empty, or so full it was numb.
    The summer, such as it was, was passing. Any day now his father, or some old wifie in the kirk, or one of the senior clerks at work, would grimly pronounce that the nights were fair drawing in, and take a miserable satisfaction in it.
    He walked by the docks and the shoreporter’s warehouse, stopped for a moment to watch the stevedores unload cargo in the rain, heaving crates, stacking them on the quay. A gaffer, a thickset terrier of a man with steam rising from his shoulders, shouted up at him, said he should get his arse down there, get his jacket off and do some real work instead of fucking gawping. One or two of the other workmen laughed, hard and humourless.
    Glover said nothing, turned away. He cut up the narrow lanes and wynds, the backstreets where the pubs and grog-shops were just opening, where the whores like the one he’d met would be out after dark, working a night shift in the unlit doorways and vennels.
    He kept his head