The Shadow (9 page)

How I wander! Much in the way I wandered off after tea and ultimately came to the hill burn, which is called Altfey. I knew the first syllable meant
burn
and had wondered if the whole meant
the fey burn.
It would have suited one who is queer or fey enough at times! But it's merely the usual English corruption of the Gaelic, and means the burn of the deer. The deer do come down there in the winter time—and even much lower to certain crofts round on another slope where they eat the turnips. A lovely memory has come back to me. Do you mind if I tell it? I was a very little girl at the time. It is twilight, almost at that stage which we called “in the darkening”. There is frost in the air and white ice on the hoof marks. The world is so still that we hear distant footsteps, and my mother stops by the corner of the house. It is Ian MacGillivray, the crofter from the Heights, a very aristocratic-looking man. He greets us in his courteous way and asks “if he is about himself ”. We know of course that he is referring to my father and my mother answers that he is down in the Hallow. She presses him to come in and wait but he thanks her and says he would go down to the Hallow for the darkness was at hand and he had a few things to do. Yet he does not leave at once; that is not the country way. I don't remember the talk that followed because it was grown-up, but suddenly I am aware that he is talking about deer, deer that have come down
from the hills
and eaten his turnips. They actually had “saved” the turnips, had them in a long pit, but the stags had used
their antlers
to break open the pit. He talks quietly and this somehow makes everything he says extremely clear. He is not angry with the deer, he is thoughtful and mild. My mother asks him if he has ever seen them.
Seen them? Och yes. Sometimes in the grey of the morning they will be over in the fallow field, and when they see me they run together and stand still, their heads up, watching me, as if quietly debating which road they should take.

Why is there something necromantic in that for me? But perhaps one must have seen deer to understand.

I stand by the edge of the pool in the Burn of the Deer and wonder whether I should plunge in or not. Warm from walking, I decide yes, and, as if about to do something positively unlawful, stare about me far as the eye can travel. Short of a spyglass on the mountain top I'm safe! For you can bet I was careful to keep my eyes about me coming over the moor, with a frequent glance in the direction of the gorge for the man with the green tie. I'm not going near that place to-day; I don't need to. Oddly enough the expression of his face that lingered was that of the moment when it stilled and seemed to grow smaller at my words about the ecstasy of the old man while being killed by the axe. I see his face now as a sort of mummy face, and can't get it full of cunning life. Let it mummify, smaller and smaller, until it disappears altogether! I'm going to have a bathe! And in a pool which no human feet can reach until long after I have finished. I am out of my clothes in a minute. I put a toe in. Lace-curtain bubbles go round in a jingaring behind the boulder. I take the full gasp. Lovely! And kick and splash. Green slime fronds, softer than any silk, and clean, wave upon my legs as I lie like a trout. Then out, to dance, to sit doubled on the flat rock like an ancestor of prehistory; to dance again, for the chill makes you feel as light as a Nereid (how I love those Greek legends!). And with a readiness for the panic of the legend too, so that you dance round, with eyes for the intrusions of space, and laugh at the exquisite delight of nothing until your skin is quite dry; then—reluctantly—to dress. I select my cushion of heather and, flat on my back, spread out to the warmth of the sun. Two minutes and, like an animal, I stiffen, my eyes turn up. The man with the green tie is standing a few yards behind my head.

It was an overwhelming moment. To say that I was angry as I sat up with my back to him hardly means anything. In the instant of his appearance against the sky I knew that he had been watching from a short distance the whole of my performance in the pool and on the rock. He could not have appeared from nowhere. He had been there the whole time. It was utterly unspeakable.

But he was speaking all right; had come round nearly in front of me; was remarking that I never exactly seemed pleased to see him, with the smile in his manner and voice, the knowledge of what he had seen and the secret advantage it gave him over me. I turned my eyes farther away, but I hadn't the strength to get up.

Didn't you see me? he asked, and, when I made no answer, Are you long here? Then, as I continued to ignore him, he added: I fell asleep and was wondering how long I had slept when I saw you just now.

I looked at him. His face was completely open, quite still in its frankness. He held my look and, as it were, wondered why I looked so. I began to shiver and got up. He bent down, felt the place where I had been lying, and nodded. Don't you realise, he asked, that it is very dangerous to fall asleep in the sun even on dry ground?

It's quite dry, I remark coldly, preparing to go.

Dry? Good Heavens! Feel that moss under the lanky heather! And he sank his fingers out of sight. After walking in the sun, he explains, your pores are open and draw the damp up into them. He is full of expressive explanation and astonishment at my dangerous ignorance. You have got to be very careful with the old earth, he adds.

I thought you were asleep yourself, I say with expressionless coldness, looking right into him. I cannot lower myself to accuse him directly of spying, yet I cannot leave now until I have pierced him with my contempt.

Ah, but that's different! he answers. I
know
the old earth. You always ought to choose a spot where the soil itself is dry underneath. And even then the
sun
is dangerous. But to sleep over damp moss—any doctor will tell you you're asking for rheumatic fever or worse. I knew a convalescent woman who died from it. His manner is now really earnest. He takes out a silver cigarette case and offers: Have one—it will warm you up.

I don't smoke, thank you.

Sound judge! I am trying to rid myself of the poison by degrees. It does things to your sight—and also—I think—to your vision. Have you ever smoked?

Yes.

And stopped it? Wait a minute. Please. I am dying for a spot of intelligent talk. And look! have you ever seen the little waterfall up round the bend of the burn—just yonder? Marvellous. And by the time you get there you'll be as warm as a pie. Above it there's an old cart road—actually the old cattle drovers' road through the mountains—and you should see it for this reason. …

Why did I go with him? I try to be honest. Had I not gone, I would have been left in an angry mess. I had got to finish with him, to know him, to let him see that I knew him, and so wipe him out of my mind. He was too closely connected with the policeman and the murder, the shadow. He had become part of what I was fighting. This must sound utterly irrational. It is. That's the trouble. But it has for me an inescapable reality—like the reality in a dream. Only, this is no dream.

He is an engaging companion. His moustache suits him, balances in some way the strong hair of his head brushed straight back, as if brushed with his palms on coming up from a dive. His brown eyes are intelligent and knowing. He is full of gleams of a refreshing animal intelligence. He knows things, the heath, the flowers, stops with an upthrust of eyebrow over a pale yellow saxifrage in a slit of rock, becomes for a moment utterly absorbed, then passes from it with a vivid quickness of eye. When he found a bit of alpine mouse-ear he, exaggeratedly calling it edelweiss, laughed with pleasure and began talking of the Alps, of the South of France. All this makes it easy for me. I find I can answer him quite impersonally, and strength begins to seep back. In fact I permit myself to wonder if he did actually see me bathing. Had he been an ordinary man, I would have said no, because I should have known from a hundred signs. But he is, I recognise, the man who could peep without feeling himself a peeping-Tom. And in some obscure way that has to do with my difficulties, this is dangerous.

But it would take too long to tell everything, the talk and the look of things seen. The waterfall is a bonny place and would be very unexpected if you did not hear it long before you rounded the rock face with the small tree growing out of its brow. The pool is round and dark with a great slab of rock thrusting up from its tail like a rudder. The water chute is only about six or eight feet high and you can easily climb up round it on rock ledges. My instant delight in it was marred a little by finding his eyes waiting for my reaction. He wants to sit by the edge of the pool, but I climb up and sit on the top rock-ledge. He begins contrasting visible colours and I know he paints. I make a contrary suggestion about rock structure and at once he says: You paint? No, I reply coolly, why, do you? No, he answers, I'm a poet. There is something exaggerated and absurd about all this and suddenly he cries, throwing his arms up: Ah, thank God you can smile! He rushes into speech, telling me he has been trying to paint the falls in the gorge. His paraphernalia is down there now. When I am choked with my own poetry, he cries, I try to get rid of it in paint. This fills him with laughter. I know this kind of madness, have the incipient feeling of revulsion but control it, for knowledge of where you are does bring confidence. I feel I can deal with this fellow, have indeed a sudden vindictive wish to take it out of him. To stave off the personal, I ask him something about his treatment of the falls, and he says, looking at me: So you do paint? I reply that I don't; I went through an Art School but that's all. And I didn't go through an Art School, he answers, and that's everything. But I have made my point. I perceive his faint mistrust, his disappointment. Folk of this same kind of feather don't love each other. They know the tricks and rigmarole of reactions too well. The situation for me is perfect! I am going to clean the gorge.

I suppose I could not keep the amusement out of my face for it is so clear that he thought I was some sort of woodland creature, innocent of poisonous knowledge, with whom he could disport. It is just too bad! Do you paint what you see, I ask him courteously, or your impression of what you see, or your apocalyptic vision of it?

He looks at me steadily and says inwardly: So you're that kind of bitch! He looks away, expression fixed as any stoat's, and says audibly and quietly: I paint what I see.

I make no comment.

I paint what I see with the utmost exactness, he says; I would measure it with an architect's tools if I could; I would have it so like the thing—if I could—that you wouldn't know the difference. He says this quietly but with an extraordinary effect of repressed force, so challenging that any comment might cause an explosion. Needless to say, I offer none. He is looking narrowly at me. I assume a deep and polite interest directed towards the whirls in the pool.

You would have thought otherwise? he probes.

The mockery drives me to my mistake, for I answer: I would have thought that you would want to paint the ecstasy rather than the blackbird.

So that's what's sticking in your gullet! he cries high above the rumble of the waterfall. So you
were
hurt! Splendid! He is vastly amused, knows he has broken down something, emits his familiarity like an animal warmth, yet does not come too near. No, he goes on, I don't
paint
ecstasy: I keep that for my poetry!

But something is cleared, a danger point of explosion is passed. Then he regards me with real questioning in his eyes, as though to plumb my deeps, and asks piercingly: Do you understand? Do you understand that a point may come when
external
reality becomes
an absolute necessity?

The effect upon me is that of an internal light. I could have cried to him I know! I know! Perhaps something does come through my face, for his eyes are on me, but not now with cunning, searching rather through threads—as though I were seeing their darkness, their dark glisten of pain, behind a spider's web. This affects me with discomfort, but whether it is what I actually see, or some notion behind it of strangled integrity in him, I don't know. I know, however, that it is real.

I have the impression of a considerable pause. He shrugs, looking away. Odd, he says, that it should also have been a woman who drove me here; but she was over fifty. And then he told me the story.

I wish I could repeat it as he told it. But how can I? Just as I fancy that two or three of the words are not those which the crofter Ian MacGillivray used about the deer in the fallow field. Ian's own words were immemorially right.

I had been working pretty hard, he began. One of those bouts. Then I had gone out and met everyone. Oh God, talk, talk, and drink. Christ, the awful sucking of your own intestines like macaroni. You see it when you come back to it, the ego-boosting, the desire to achieve in order to be talked of, the clawing scramble through the mirth. The dope we can't do without. Lord, how I love it, and wallow in it! Never mind. There's an' artist I know and his wife. He paints landscapes. Just landscapes. Isn't it divine? Cool perspectives, distance. You can walk through them. Right! I hit the trail and arrive. The house is quiet with order, cool with living, and there are chairs where you sit down. You can also walk from one room to another and look out of a window on a landscape. There is no impediment in that house. You hear the silence or Helen's feet in the kitchen. No electric light, just lamps and candles. Lamps—and candles. Extraordinary thing the naked light of a candle. I am poor enough, God knows, but you don't feel poor with a candle. When your last penny is bust you are at home with a candle. Hell, after that you have to make money again, tear it out of the gizzard of the world. But never mind. People buy David's landscapes occasionally. They buy them, thank heaven. What they really buy is the love between David and Helen, but they don't know that. Neither do the art critics. Never mind. Helen has no theories. She works, looks after David and the house, trims the lamps, puts a box of matches in your candlestick, and sees that light and life go on. Not an interesting job, you may think; too much like God's to be interesting; too full of practical business, boring. I agree. However, that's what she's like; she positively has no notion that she is being imposed upon even. It's incredible, but quite true.