The Shadow (12 page)

When she parted from the grieve she did not want to go back to the house so walked round to the cartshed and examined a front tyre on her car which had a mysterious slow leak. This morning it had been almost flat, but now it was hard as any of the other tyres. It certainly was an odd business, she decided, pleased, however, that the tyre was holding up. There was no one about and she went and had a look first into the small byre where the four milch cows were kept. But all cattle were out at grass; stalls and cribs were empty; yet the warm thick smell was everywhere, a healthy smell that did her good. This was the main part of the steading and its emptiness was felt, asking for a cry and an echo, but with the pleasant thought back in her mind that the beasts were in the fields. Sandy, returning from the top field, would take the four milch cows with him for the evening supply to the farm house and the cottages. No milk was sold.

At last she left the steading and, going up into the vegetable garden, pulled a plump lettuce, two or three carrots, nipped off some chives, decided she would get a knife and cut a cabbage, laid down what she had already gathered in order to pull up a strong growth of groundsel and weeded for nearly an hour. There was nothing she liked better than working in the earth with her bare hands.

By the time she had made her salad, Mrs. Fraser quietly appeared. She was a small stoutish capable woman, naturally kind and good-natured, and was now going home to prepare her husband's evening meal. The men knocked off work at halfpast five and her two children would be home from school, though Teenie, at eleven, was nearly as good as a woman in the house. However, they talked for over ten minutes before Mrs. Fraser went. “You should have had a lie down to yourself,” were her last words, uttered in a softly reproving voice.

Before closing the kitchen door, Aunt Phemie listened to the quietness in the house, then—for her night's sleep had been very broken—she felt not tired so much as the need to sit down. The steading was still about her, the earth, a rough shagginess of strength, and she did not want to lose its comfort. She thought of her husband; as she often did.

This strength, this thickness of living, this comfort and depth of body and hands, had kept her from going back to school teaching when her husband had been killed. Her teaching life in retrospect had seemed thin and washed and pale. Not only marriage but the working of the farm itself had been a new experience, and when Dan began to tell her how he stood with the bank, his desire for a tractor, his difficulties at a time when farming was not doing well, the amount of the mortgage on the farm (he had bought it outright), his plans, the possible switch over to a dairy farm, and all the hundred and one things and personalities involved, she had not only grasped the situation but almost at once had begun to help him. This had been something he had never foreseen, and it astonished him without end. He would look at a page of her writing and figures in her new red -bound account book with a serious air but actually for the secret delight of looking at it. No row of perfectly thatched stacks had ever given him so intimate a pleasure. When he was setting off for market, she would sometimes call him back and fix his tie, fix him up properly and he would kiss her behind the kitchen door. Once, after such a happening, he had met the grieve and demanded, “What the hell are you doing that for?” “Because the damn thing is rotten,” replied the grieve, instantly flaring up. Dan gave the thing a kick. “By God, you're right!” he said and went off laughing, leaving the grieve to stare after him in utter astonishment. Then his birthday drew near and Phemie decided—she had saved a bit before she married—to present him with a tractor. He had really grown serious at that and said, “Listen to me, Phemie. That's your money and I'm never going to touch a penny piece of it. You keep it by you, lass. Then he added, for he had been deeply moved, “Who knows but you may need it yet!” “Thank goodness,” she had replied, “tyrant as you are, you cannot stop me doing what I like with my own.” “Can't I?” “No.” “We'll see about that,” he said and went off with a man's laugh. But what he actually did see, on the afternoon of his birthday as he came down from the hayfield in answer to her summons, was the tractor ticking over in front of the cartshed. Phemie herself was in the driver's seat and the delivery man was explaining to her how it worked. Once out of sight of the hayfield, he had started to run, for he had feared something had happened to her, and he was now breathless. She waved to him gaily, excited as a bairn with a new toy.

He had been killed that autumn by the visiting threshing mill. The driver of the steam-engine had been trying to manipulate the mill through a gate when it got jammed and was in danger of tearing the gate-post and corner of the stone wall away. Dan had shouted to him to back. He had backed but the ground was very soft. Dan decided to go forward and speak to him at the same moment as the driver, on his own impulse, went ahead again. The mill slid, caught Dan against the gate post, and crushed him. The sight of his body had killed the child in her and an ambulance had taken her to hospital.

Before the warmth of the kitchen fire Aunt Phemie's head drooped, but her eyes were wide open, very wide. Another memory had touched her to-day when she had wept. It now came back like something that explained in some queer fatal way why she had stayed on in the farm.

After convalescence she had returned, intending to wind up all the affairs of the farm and sell out early in the year or by the May term at the latest. It had been a fairly open winter and one January morning—the seventh, for the earliness of the date surprised her—she found that the snowdrops were through, not yet opened but white, folded white on their short green stalks like tiny spears. This had an extraordinary effect on her, piercing sweet, intensifying her loss, her sorrow, even as it pierced through it, and she felt the year opening, the coming of spring, and all the springs of the years ahead.

She had bought numberless bulbs, snowdrop, crocus—yellow and purple, and daffodil, and planted them in the grass, for the house, being built on a slope, had green banks wherever the level ground tumbled over. She was going to have a wonderful show, a transformation, a glory of the spring. And now, behold! the show was beginning, had indeed brought its opening date forward in a press of eagerness as though the given time would be short enough for the full display which the green banks had in mind.

March came in and still she had not made up her mind. She should leave the place but she could not; she was somehow not ready yet. In recent years stock-rearing had been more profitable than crop-growing, and in addition to cattle her husband had a lot of sheep on the ground. The grieve was now completely dependent on her book-keeping.

On a late March afternoon she was busy about a small rockery which she had got Dan to help her to make. Blues were now predominant: grape hyacinth, scillas, and glory of the snow, with aubretia coming along. It was still a marvel to her how fragile these early flowers were. The yellow crocus was a tuning fork out of some sunny underworld, still holding the glow of the note. The snowdrops, full grown, large, in clumps, had but contrived to emphasise their delicate green veining, their bowed heads and nun-like pallor. Marvellous to think that the mature lusty growths of summer would shrivel in weather that gave to snowdrop and crocus a lovelier grace, a deeper colour.

Ah, and here at last some flakes of white—on the cherry tree! Her heart gave a bound. Into the bright cold air of March, the cherry blossom had come! As she gazed at the blown petals, two or three more petals came blowing past them. Snow-petals. Snow! She looked into the depth of the air and saw the flurry of snowflakes, not falling, but swirling darkly in the air. Then they began to shoot past in front of her, all white; to settle on the flowers, her hands, everywhere. A ewe bleated beyond the garden fence; day-old lambs answered in their thin shivering trebles.

In the dark of the night she awoke and heard the fragile voices, crying out in the field. Forlorn they sounded and lost. These particular sheep were Border Leicesters, soft, the shepherd had said, because they were so well bred.

In the darkness the bleating of the lambs was very affecting. And there rose one thin persistent plaint that she knew instinctively to be the crying of a new-born lamb. She thought of the ewes, square market-bred ewes, soft, having their lambs out there in the snow. She wished she could do something for them. A flurry of snow against the window, blind fingers against the glass before the eddy of wind bore them away. Bore them away in a small whining anxious sound into space. Nothing conveyed the idea of space so well as the wind at night. And all the time the lambs kept bleating, and the wind carried away their bleating into the gulfs of space.

To ease this burden, she thought of herself as out in the field, going from ewe to ewe, and saw the lambs with their red birth stains in the driving snow, the mother licking them in the whirling snow, each lick making them stagger. If they weren't licked dry they might die.

The soft snow-fingers at the window went away, defeated. She hearkened for them with a sense of loss, of guilt. She got up and pulled aside the curtain. The snow shower had passed and the sloping lands lay spectral white under the stars. Something in the whiteness of purity, of virgin austerity, touched her to frightened wonder. She dressed quickly, and in the kitchen went quietly lest she waken the servant girl. Into her long gumboots, her heavy mackintosh, tightening the belt about her waist; then to the back door which she opened carefully.

The snow was surprisingly full of light and this suited her secret purpose, for she could not have taken a lantern. She did not want to be seen. Suddenly it was as if she came alive, as if something which had been holding her had let go, and a bounding invigoration went coursing through her. Some of the beasts, with lifted faces white against their fleeces, which were dark-grey against the snow, looked at her coming and, instead of showing fear, cried to her, taking even a step or two towards her. She was moved to cry back to them.

As the bleating seemed to multiply all across the field, she got into a stir of excitement, and kept speaking brightly, encouragingly. It began to snow again and soon she was wrapped about in the whirling flakes and completely blinded so that she could not see a yard in front of her, and when the wind got into her mouth it roared there and choked her. She stood quite still, her back to the wind, leaning against it. She let her voice cry out on the wind, her spirit lifting away in a wild irrational emotion like joy. Then the wind lifted her bodily along, and she kicked into a ewe giving birth to a lamb.

Ewes should give birth later in the morning as the hill ewes did at her childhood home. But now on her knees she could half see what was happening. She spoke to the beast, sheltered her, encouraged her, eased her with a tender hand, wisely, helping her, using terms of endearment in a practical voice. And as though some of her vitality and encouragement were indeed of practical help, the ewe had an easy delivery.

“Feeling it a bit cold now!” she said to the lamb. “Don't get excited, you old fool!” she said to the ewe. She would shelter them until the shower passed, and she looked over her shoulder to see if it was clearing. Coming upon her was a smother of yellow light, swinging, growing … at hand. She rose up.

The light stopped and there was a harsh exclamation. Rising snow-white like a ghost above the crying of a newborn lamb in the whirling ebb of the shower, she might have startled a mind less sensitive than the shepherd's. “It's all right, Colin,” she cried, giving him time. “It was foolish of me to have come out without a light.”

He came forward and said, “I wondered what you were.” He muttered it, as though suspicious of her. She realised that probably he was suspicious, was thinking in his own mind: What brought her out here?

And she could hardly explain! So she talked in an easy friendly way, evolving the half-lie that she had thought a ewe was in difficulties, the cries had wakened her and she had come out to see if she could help.

He muttered something about having been called away somewhere, but soon, under her natural friendliness, he thawed completely. He came from the north of Sutherland and Dan had had complete confidence in him. Of all the men about the place, she liked him best, liked his independence and a certain loneliness that went with him. He reminded her, too, of the son of a crofter from Western Ross whom she had known at college. His native gift for flattery had been disturbing for a while.

“There's a ewe over there I'm worried about,” he said when they had at last got to the top corner of the field. She was now all glowing with warmth. The shower gone, what had been halffrightening in the still, white landscape was no longer so.

“We have been lucky,” he said. “But we can hardly expect it to hold.” So that when they came to the ewe that he had been worrying about she was prepared for death. He did everything he could with a strange concentration. When he spoke to her he was really speaking to himself. She realised his deep instinctive skill. The lamb was born but the ewe died under his hands. On his knees in the snow, he looked at the humped body, his hands hanging. He got up and said quietly, “I'll take the lamb to the bothy. We may have a mother for it soon enough.” He was unmarried and about her own age.

“Come along to the kitchen,” she said. “I'll make you a cup of tea.” The kitchen, with its hot water, was often of service in the ailments of beasts.

“Don't you bother, mem,” he answered. “I have the fire on and can get milk for the lamb in no time.”

“Come,” she said calmly. “I should like to give you a cup of tea.” And she moved on.

She did not want to lose him now, did not want to lose the life that had come into her, did not want to lose sight of the lamb. He began tugging at the stiff iron catch of a cross-barred gate with one hand. “Give me the lamb,” she said and took it from under his arm. He opened the gate and let her through.