Pagan's Pilgrimage

By John Herdman

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leamington Books
• Release date: Jan 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781914090806

Book preview

1

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 Page

Childhood and Youth

Bookless and Bone’s

The Mysterious Stranger

Under Strain

I Prepare for my Mission

The Journey

Teuchtershards

The Crisis

Repentance and Return

About the Author

Copyright

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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,