by Nan Shepherd
Garry sighed profoundly. The whole interview oppressed him. Her speech was an unseemly mockery of human pain. Yet she was terribly in earnest. He could not refuse to listen to the end. In some tortured and labyrinthine way she was revealing a soul. All was not sham. He sighed and listened.
But the door was opened, and Mrs Morgan came in, cordial but inquisitive. Louie’s demeanour changed. She jumped to her feet, laughing, and said, ‘Mother, I’m defeated. I’ve tried to persuade Captain Forbes to give a brief talk at our concert, and he refuses.’
Mrs Morgan sat down. She took possession of the room.
‘Mother dear,’ said Louie softly at last, ‘Captain Forbes was so good—he called to—to tell me some things about David. Do you mind?’
Mrs Morgan did mind, plainly, but she rose and went. Garry sighed again. She was so enmeshed in falsehood, he supposed, that she hardly noticed when she told a lie.
‘Now, where was I?’ she was asking. Was it possible that she enjoyed this too, that her tale was one huge ostentation? She would have another invention for her mother’s ears, of that he was sure. Mrs Morgan’s knowing smile would invite till she received—received what? What had he to ‘tell her about David’?
She continued. ‘But I didn’t dare to wear the ring, so I hung it round my neck and bought another not unlike it. I wore that, and trusted that Mrs Hunter, who was the only person who knew, would never notice the difference. It does sound deceitful, doesn’t it?’
He did not reply.
‘What are you to do now?’ he asked after a pause.
‘Do? Does anything need to be done?’
He rose and paced the room impatiently.
‘At least I hope you will restore Mr Grey the ring.’
‘The trouble is, how am I to get in without attracting notice?’
‘Without— Good God, you don’t mean that you would put it back and say nothing?’
‘What can I say?’
‘The truth, of course.’
He saw the sheer pain in her eyes.
‘What I’ve told you?’
‘If that is the truth, yes.’
‘If it is the truth! Oh, do you not believe me yet?’
‘Very well, of course you must tell it to him.’
‘And then—then you’ll proclaim it abroad. You’ll tell everyone I am a common thief. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, to tell them all?’
He shook his head. To clear David’s honour was one thing, but a very different matter to set the tongues wagging over such a sordid story. He would have felt it an indecency to expose her, and smiled a little soberly as he thought that those who could not see his point when he talked of his friend’s dishonour would see quickly enough the point of a stolen ring. A profound sadness invaded him as he saw by what strange ties honour and reputation may be bound.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘this is not a matter for the public. But you must go by what Mr Grey decides.’
She was weeping now and said, plea ding, ‘Captain Forbes—Garry. I shall tell him, but need it be now? Listen. Our concert—it’s just two days ahead. And I have so much to do in it. I’m playing. And there’s that sketch. I’ve the curtains to finish, and final rehearsals. And if I tell—I’m so, so—I feel so keenly, it will kill me. I know I shall be ill. I feel I might collapse. Perhaps at the concert. I know that I’ll be prostrate after I tell. Mayn’t I wait? It’s—it’s a sort of public duty, to keep fit for the concert.’
Garry rose to his feet. Blind blundering emotions had hold on him. To his surprise he felt surges of pity where he had thought to feel only disgust; but it was a pity that it hurt him to give, as though some portion of himself had been rent to make the pity possible; and he was profoundly uncomfortable.
‘Yes, yes, tell him when you please.’
‘But you will say—’
‘Nothing, nothing. Till your concert is over, then.’
She accompanied him to the door, talking loud and laughing. Mrs Morgan reappeared. He supposed she had come to hear what had passed. Louie, of course, would dissemble. He went rapidly out.
He was astonished at the pure sweet morning into which he walked—as though he had come from a murky den where the air oppressed. It was incredible that there could be a world as fresh and unashamed as that he saw around him. For a time he stood, breathing the sweet air, then rapidly climbed to the summit of the ridge. There space encompassed him. Space sang again its primal song, before man was, before the tangle of his shames began. Infinite sky was over him, blue land ran on and on until it seemed itself a ruffled fold of sky, a quivering of light upon the air; the blue sea trembled on the boundaries of space; and the man standing there alone was rapt up into the infinitudes around, lost for awhile the limitations of himself. He came back slowly. Strange how the land could be transfigured! A blue April morning, the shimmer of light, a breath, a passing air, and it was no longer a harsh and stubborn country, its hard-won fields beleaguered by moor and whin, its stones heaped together in dyke and cairn, marking the land like lines upon a weathered countenance, whose past must stay upon it to the end; but a dream, wiling men’s hearts. In the sun the leafless boughs were gleaming. Birches were like tangles of shining hair; or rather, he thought, insubstantial, floating like shredded light above the soil. Below the hills blue floated in the hollows, all but tangible, like a distillation that light had set free from the earth; and on a rowan tree in early leaf, its boughs blotted against the background, the tender leaves, like flakes of green fire, floated too, the wild burning life of spring loosened from earth’s control. On every side earth was transmuted. Scents floated, the subtle life released from earth and assailing the pulses. Song floated. This dour and thankless country, this land that grat a’ winter and girned a’ summer could change before one’s eyes to an elfin and enchanted radiance, could look, by some rare miracle of light or moisture, essentialised. A measure of her life this morning had gone up in sacrifice. Her substance had become spirit.
Garry’s thought went back upon the evening when he had seen the land emerge and take form slowly from primordial dark. Now its form was on the point of dissolution into light. And the people whom the land had made—they too, had been shaped from a stuff as hard and intractable as their rock, through weathers as rude as stormed upon their heights; they too (he thought) at moments were dissolved in light, had their hours of transfiguration. In his aunt dancing her wilful reel on the kitchen floor, in Lindsay as she had grieved for Louie’s hurt, he had seen life essentialised.
A shouting caught his ear. The swarm of young Lorimers, skimming the moor, hummed about him. He gave in gladly to their merriment, lunched with them beside the old tower, and led their games. Lindsay’s gaiety, however, was assumed. She was still furious against Miss Theresa for her cynical suggestion of the morning; but though she tried to convince herself that her misery came from that, as the day wore on she was compelled to acknowledge that there was a deeper hurt in what Garry had done the previous evening in the school. After all, he had exposed Louie to public scorn. Her eyes sought his many times, reproachful and sad, but it was only on the homeward way that, lingering by common consent, the two could talk.
‘I thought you would have done what I wanted you to do,’ she said.
She did herself injustice by her complaint. She had no sense of personal grievance; but she had been quite sure that Garry would be good—that he would do nothing out of accord with her creed and standards. Her rebuke was the grieving of a bewildered child.
Garry kept silence. He could not tell her the collapse of Louie’s story. The purloined ring had altered his attitude to the affair, and he almost hoped that Lindsay need never know of it. In any case he could not assert his knowledge of Louie’s perfidy without revealing its proof. Constraint fell between them. They made up on the others, and reached the Weatherhouse in a bunch.
‘What’s he seeking here again?’ said Miss Theresa, looking from the window.
Mrs Falconer looked from the
window too, and saw Garry, as it happened, toss an empty basket laughingly to Kate. The bird sang in Mrs Falconer’s heart—that fugitive bird, that flake from Ellen’s earth that had escaped, far out into the blue air, across distant seas and islands of romance. She ran to set another cup and plate, thinking, ‘How happy they look together!’
‘You needn’t bother yourself,’ said Theresa. ‘He’s away.’
Ellen turned to the glass door, and saw him passing through the gate. She flung the glass door open and ran across the garden with hasty, unsure steps, her long angular body bent forward from the hips, and she reached the low wall before Garry had passed beyond it.
‘Just a cup,’ she panted. And when he would not come she continued to talk, leaning upon the stone-crop that covered the wall.
‘A pack of old women—I don’t wonder. We must seem unreal to you. A picture-book house.’
‘Well.’ He stood considering. Unreal—he could not know all that she had put into the word, her lifelong battle against those figments of her fancy that had often held her richest life, yet it expressed what he had vaguely felt when he took tea with these women. ‘After out there,’ he said.
Mrs Falconer had the curious sense of having run, in her stumbling progress through the garden, a very long distance from her home.
‘You’re a dimension short,’ he continued. ‘Or no. You have three dimensions right enough, but we’ve a fourth dimension over there. We’ve depth. It’s not the same thing as height,’ he added, looking up. ‘It’s down in—hollowness and mud and foul water and bad smells and holes and more mud. Not common mud. It’s dissolution—a dimension that won’t remain stable—and you’ve to multiply everything by it to get any result at all. You people who live in a three-dimensional world don’t know. You can’t know. You go on thinking this is the real thing, but we’ve discovered that we can get off every imaginable plane that the old realities yielded.’
‘We can perhaps imagine it a little.’ She kept her adoring eyes upon him, and smiled at undergoing this initiation into a soldier’s world.
‘Imagination’s no good. Imagination has to save the world, but the people who haven’t it will never believe what the others say. Your sister’s beckoning.’
Mrs Falconer turned and saw Theresa signal from the window. Cups clattered, talk and laughter eddied into the garden. Everyone had gone in: except old Mrs Craigmyle, who walked serenely to and fro on the garden path, knitting and carolling. Mrs Falconer looked, and turned back to Garry. She had a certain elation in disregarding Theresa’s summons. There were plenty of them there to serve; but she was choosing a better part. She said, ‘That’s what I’ve always wanted—to have imagination.’
‘You shouldn’t. It’s too cruel, too austere. You should pray your God of Comforts to keep you from imagination. Lead us not into imagination, but deliver us from understanding.’
Mrs Falconer shook her head, slowly, as though to shake away an idea that bemused her.
‘They laugh at you,’ Garry continued (he had not talked like this to anyone since his return, not tried to share, even with Lindsay, the thoughts that had haunted his delirium and convalescence), ‘they laugh at you as foolish or pity you as not quite sane if you try to get past the appearances of things to their real nature. That’s what they said about me: beside himself, cracked. I was in a fever, you see. But I’m convinced I saw clearer then than in my right mind.’ He began to tell her of his adventure with the dead man in the hole. ‘I wasn’t rightly sure which was myself, you understand. And it’s like that all the time. You do things, and you’re not sure after they’re done if it is yourself or someone else you’ve done them to.’
She was listening absorbed.
‘Yes, yes, that Louie Morgan now. She did it just to please herself, but look what she has done to you. You were right to expose her, I think.’
But Garry was thinking (also of Louie) that in unmasking her he had done something to himself regarding which he was not yet quite sure. Nor did he want Louie on the public stage. He stepped back from the wall, said, ‘But she’s not exposed. Now I am keeping you from your tea,’ and walked away.
Not exposed! thought Mrs Falconer, turning back across the garden. But she would be! A fire ran through her veins. Too austere! How could imagination be austere? Your God of Comforts. Another dimension. His words bubbled in her ears. She had run farther than ever from this idle garden, and the air beyond it was sharp and pungent to her nostrils.
The garden was not empty, after all. Lang Leeb still walked the path, serenely singing; and as her second daughter came near with wide unseeing eyes, Leeb raised her voice and sang on a gay and insolent note. She did not look at Mrs Falconer, but kept her fingers on her shank and her eyes straight ahead:
Auld wife, auld wife, will you go a-shearin’?
Speak up, speak up, for I’m hard o’ hearin’.
Auld wife, auld wife, will you hae a man?—
The glass door slipped from Mrs Falconer’s hand and clashed, and Mrs Falconer did not even apologise. She let Miss Theresa talk.
The children had finished tea. It was time they were off. There was noise and bustle.
‘For the love of Pharaoh,’ cried Miss Theresa, ‘wash your faces. They’ll charge you extra in the train for all that dirt.’
Mrs Falconer sat to her solitary tea. The children’s voices came ringing up from the road, fading as the distance grew. Lindsay and Kate had gone with them.
‘Your God of Comforts,’ Mrs Falconer continued to think. The phrase brought Louie to her mind. ‘Why, we must go to that concert. But how can she appear in front of them all? Not exposed, he said. Not. But she must be. And playing, they say. Well, if it’s like the last concert, I’m sure I shan’t care if I don’t go. Terrible grand music, she said it was—just a bumming and a going on. But how can she face them? Your God of Comforts.’ Her mind came back always to the phrase A comfortable God—what had the young man meant?
Lindsay and Kate returned. Night came. Lindsay leaned again from her window. She was trying to control her thoughts. They were like horses new let out to grass; brutal and beautiful; unbridled energies. She had never before had so many thoughts at once. Life was too intricate. New complications rose upon her. Getting to know Garry was not what she had supposed it would be like. And now the children would go home and tell that Garry was here, and there would be her mother’s disapproval to be faced. She should have been more stern that afternoon, but he had kissed her, her throat was burning still where he had pressed it. Oh, where was she venturing? The sea grows more immense as the distance widens between us and the shore.
Kate was asleep. The whole house had withdrawn. Only she, awake and aware, tussled with life. She felt creep over her the desolation of youth, that believes no suffering has ever been like its suffering, no heart has been perplexed like it. ‘They’re all happy,’ she thought, ‘and I don’t know what I am. They’re all asleep, and I can’t sleep.’
She did snot know that through the wall, kneeling upon the floor, Mrs Falconer endured an agony of prayer. She too, wrestled, and as she wrestled a strange sense of triumph overwhelmed her, exultation filled her soul.
‘Help me, O God,’ she prayed, ‘help me to overcome the evil and expose the wrong, that Thy great cause may be triumphant. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.’
The words sang to her spirit. No more for her the pallid shadows of her dreams. She would labour now for truth.
‘Grant, O Lord, in Thy mercy, that I may be equal to that which Thou wouldst have me do.’
A shudder ran through her frame. The seraph with the live coal from off the altar touched her lips, and as she rose, chill and quiet, from her prayers, the dreamy innocence habitual to her face had changed to a high and rapt enthusiasm.
TEN
Andrew Lorimer does the Same
The following days deepened the furrows that became so characteristic a feature of Garry’s countenance. Life had always been to him a serious af
fair, but, till the delirium of his recent illness, simple. One worked hard, making boilers and bridges as stable as one could, and played equally hard and sure; and men were good fellows. Evil there was, of course, but always in the next street—the condition that gave fighting its vehemence. The complexity of human motive and desire had not come home to him, and he supposed, without thinking much about it, that right and wrong were as separate as the bridges he helped to build and the waters over which he built them. But in what he had been irresistibly impelled to say to Mrs Falconer that afternoon, his discovery in the dissolution of the solid land of a new dimension by which experience must be multiplied, he was only giving articulate expression to thoughts that had for some time been worrying in his brain. Limits had shifted, boundaries been dissolved. Nothing ended in itself, but flowed over into something else; and the obsession of his delirium, that he was himself the dead man whose body he had lugged out of the slime, came back now and haunted him like the key note of a tune. But what a tune! How hard to play—rude and perplexing, with discords unresolved and a tantalising melody that fluted and escaped. His mind sounded the note again and again throughout that night, but always the tune itself eluded him.
The night was like the morning, soft and still. Earth floated in the radiance the young moon had left above the hills; stars, remote and pure, floated in the wide serene of heaven; nothing moved, yet all was moving, eternally sustained by flight; and Garry walked for hours in troubled impotence, angry at a world that would not let him keep his straight and clean-cut standards. To refute what he had thought a false conception of his friend’s honour had seemed a simple and straightforward matter, but it had led him into a queer morass; and now, as he tramped in the night, he was filled with panic lest the story of the ring should become public through his agency. It would be a degradation to expose that. He was glad he had resisted the impulse to tell Lindsay, though her disapproval had been difficult to bear. He had longed to justify himself, and the frustrate longing had made him rough. He had caught her to him with violence, clutching at her throat until the mark burned upon her flesh. Her young primrose love had not yet learned to endure such heats.