by Neil M. Gunn
Light in body, and light in the head too, there I was leaving the moor and coming towards our Wood (yours and mine though you’ve never been there). I thought of the Mound, the juniper bushes, the bank that breathes of the warm south. There I would rest. For I hadn’t rested long on the moor. And now the pine trees are at hand and I am looking for the sagging place in the old wire fence that you step over. And then—one of the tree trunks moved. Buttons on a blue tunic. A body. It was a policeman. The policeman looked at me. I was staring at his eyes. I knew the eyes. They were grey like thistledown.
I can only believe I was so bereft of sense and motion that I looked merely astounded. Anyway I stood on nothing, staring at him. A curious hard glimmer came into his face, oddly selfconscious. He was like one caught playing a queer part in an unexpected place. He said good day and I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. And then, Ranald, he asked me: Did you see anyone about?
Oh I knew instantly, overwhelmingly, what he meant. It went crying through me, through the world. My brows gathered. Anyone? I repeated. No.
Before such bewildered innocence he shifted on his feet. He could not have seen me, could not have seen what happened in the trees of the gorge. He could not see the gorge from here, not until he went nearly a mile onto the moor. All that went through my head like lightning.
We are looking for someone—we have reason to believe he may be somewhere about, he said. As I had nothing to say he looked me over and added, You are staying at Greenbank with Mrs. Robertson? I said Yes. Then he asked me, Have you been far? I said I had been to the Altfey burn. The grey eyes considered me. It might be as well, he suggested, if you were more careful; he may be a bit off his head.
I had to move, but in going over the fence I stumbled badly. He at once supported me, kept me on my feet. I didn’t mean to frighten you, he said.
I was trembling and he made to accompany me. I gathered all my resources, thanked him, and smiled. I went on, knowing that if I let go he would be by my side. I shut everything out of my mind except the queer discovery I had made. I hung onto that as to a rope. Remember my telling you in the letter about the thistledown how my imagination produced the face of a schoolmaster with thistledown eyes? It was the policeman’s face. He is the policeman in the village of Elver, over two miles away. Once Aunt Phemie and I passed him there. Aunt Phemie greeted him. He had looked at me then in the way policemen do. Only that once, and I had forgotten him entirely—until I saw his grey eyes by the wood.
When I went to earth I was pretty bad, Ranald. It was a touch of hysteria. I let go only for a minute or two. I fought my best. I was desperately afraid the policeman would come on me. But I kept the bits together. And strangely enough it was not so much what I had just been through as that last spell in London—up it came again.
You would think I had had enough for one day. I was now quite damp with sweat. But when I felt for my hankie to clear my eyes I found I hadn’t got it. I had lost it. The last time I could remember using it was just after I had entered the gorge. It had been warm walking in the sun. I could remember crushing it in my hand. It’s a small square of linen with my initials hand-stitched in one corner. I need not tell you how I imagined its being picked up by the man in the gorge. A curious thing to find in his pocket on being searched. I felt trussed.
3
I couldn’t finish that last letter. My pen wouldn’t make any more writing. I can’t even read it over. To muff such an opportunity of a dramatic finish, too! We were so merry this afternoon, Aunt Phemie and myself. Aunt Phemie is a darling. You’ll love her. I took her in hand over some old frocks of hers. I told her she was becoming dowdy and a perfect fright. How can she expect to impress Will, I asked, if she does not appear at least once in the day as the lady of the manor. For it is really quite a decent farmhouse. All of five bedrooms and an enormous bathroom which may have been another bedroom once. I can’t say I ever liked pitch pine. I think it is because when I was tiny and went to church first, the tall straight-backed pews—like stalls—and the pulpit and the steps up to it and everything except the whitewashed walls were pitch pine. Everyone was so silent and strange, too, and when—being about six—you had to say something and whispered, you were shushed by so solemn a face that for the first time you realised the awfulness of guilt and crime. Yet deep in your little heart you did not believe it and rebelled, for you knew that the crime and the guilt were outside you, like something in the air and not in you. They were in this awful large place, the church, and you looked up under your brows, and down, and you wanted to go away home and you felt the tears surging up. Before the wail could come out a sweet was put in your hand and you fought the good fight because in a vague way you realised the kind bribery of that sweet. Not that it altered anything. Yet the pitch pine is, I think, a more particular memory, because one Sunday I found that by pressing my hot little hand against the wood, I could make it stick just a little. The pew had no doubt been newly varnished. This was an interesting game during the interminable sermon and probably I sat fairly still for a long time with my own thoughts. Besides, I had on a new frock and that is something you just can’t forget. You have to live up to it. With a new frock you are the little lady, you have responsibilities. Wonderful, isn’t it? And then the sermon was over, I got my feet on the floor—and the frock stuck to the seat! It came away with a faint tear—and the colour of the varnished wood was brown in my mind.
The doors and the mantelpieces and the skirtings and the cupboards are all pitch pine, but Aunt Phemie has wallpaper and carpets that tone with, it, taking away the grim bareness and giving quite an impression of warmth. And some of the bedroom doors, inside, are painted cream, with fittings to match. My bedroom has two windows, one to the south looking across the valley, and the other in the west wall through which I can see the steading and, beyond, the tops of spruce trees that are still in the grey evening and quite translated in the moonlight as if the earth had its own mute Christmas trees, and between and beyond them, very far away, a glimpse of blue mountain tops—real tops, like cones, not the great flat squatting mountains beyond the hill burn. There is so much sun in this bedroom that I love it. When I come into it I feel lifted up. I cannot tell you how real a feeling this is. Of course the room is lifted up in a way. I mean, you see over the valley and far away. It’s like being up in the air, on a tree. Perhaps that delicious childhood feeling? If ever I have a house of my own, I should like it to be on a slope, facing south. Never on a flat. Perhaps it was just poverty that sent all the lovable philosophers to the roofs so that their thoughts could fly away past the myriads of chimney pots. Blessed poverty! And dear Ranald!
Do you mind my writing to you all this? But I’m not really asking because of course I’ve decided I’ll only send you what I think is good for you! Aunt Phemie thinks I come up to write letters, or read, and every afternoon—she is imperative about this—to rest for an hour in bed. She thinks this treatment is doing me great good because sometimes—when happiness has come to me all in a moment from writing to you—I bolt downstairs to worry her. (I bolted after the end of the last paragraph—after writing the haunting and distinguished word Ranald.) Anyway, I always come up here to write to you. I could not do it anywhere else.
This is a room of my own. And another astonishing thing about writing you is this. Most times the writing just flows from me. Thoughts teem in my head, each one touching off a hundred others, and if I could get them down fast enough it would be a spate. This is bewildering to me at times, in a wild sort of amazing way, because I once tried to write, seriously, to make a living, as you know. Then I laboured. How I laboured! And what came was dead. I had bits, but when I got them together they were dead. I perfectly understood why editors returned the poor things. The made-up toys that won’t go. Children are impatient with them—except maybe the odd child who thinks they look sad. You’ll always find that odd one. Perhaps he’s the saviour.
My saviour was The Last Word. The word the woman has—in fashion and the a
rts. Aunt Phemie loves the brilliant illustrations and thinks I must be very clever to hold down a job on the staff. What really astonishes her is how the affair comes out every month all new and fresh as paint. “Wizard” is no slang of yesteryear to her.
Aunt Phemie is really a remarkable woman. Let me describe her to you (for I feel well to-day and won’t allow any horrid thought within arm’s length). But first let me dispel a nagging notion, raised a moment ago. I agree that this isn’t real writing, in any literary way. I’m not fancying myself, dear mind-piercing Ranald. Easy, facile. Very well. But if I had to write it, such as it is, as a literary composition, a creation, a work, it would make me sweat and would go dead. It’s because I’m writing to you. Do you understand, Ranald dear? Must I tell you that love is the wizard? Is that perhaps the ultimate secret of all great writing? And not only love of a person. Though always at the core, whether of a tree or a mountain (or a political world theory!), what man finds—or loses—is himself. That’s no new thought. But oh, how suddenly new to me!
May I now proceed, please, with Aunt Phemie? Thank you. Aunt Phemie is not the stout comfortable motherly woman upon whose bosom you can lay your tired head. Such women are the hope and mainstay of the world. When analysis and logic founder in their own despair, the motherly woman abides. From her I see myriads of little feet running down the world in a bright green morning—while you half suspect me of malice! Let me tell you something I have found out. The clever-clever ones in our set affected to despise the comfortable motherly woman as a brainless cow. Actually—they hated her. Think that one out.
Aunt Phemie wasn’t long a mother. She is comfortably slim and though well over forty the gold in her hair hasn’t faded much. I suppose gold doesn’t. She is a tirelessly energetic worker and yet can stand quite still. She is over the average height for women, in fact exactly my own height, for we measured; but when I tried something of mine on her it wouldn’t meet, and I’m no willow wand though a loss in weight produces the willowy sensation.
She was a school teacher. You would never think so until, perhaps, you heard her discussing farm business with the grieve. For of course the farm is hers. When her husband was killed within a year of their marriage, she did not go back to teaching. Everyone thought she would sell out and go back, but she didn’t. I think she loved her husband. Not the wild first love of the poets, but the kind that grows unbeknownst, like a plant or a tree. The other day we were going over the garden and in one corner came on a young rowan, all of four feet, complete with fruit. She had never noticed it before. She was surprised that such a growth could have taken place without her noticing it. We laughed. It was a delightful moment.
Like myself, she comes of farming stock, and at the country school the boy who one day became her husband always had an eye for her. Aunt Phemie does not open her heart, but she can smile and there is a humour in her smile that makes it the most charming self-contained thing you ever saw. Boys at country schools don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. At a country school the profounder emotions are severely disciplined. To admit that you were courting someone—oh boy! There are fights enough in the usual way. A healthy healthy place. And possibly he was shy, because deep in him he was strong and sensitive.
That was the early position and Aunt Phemie was clever. Anyway she was good at her lessons, got a bursary to the secondary school, and won another from there to the university.
She has something—were it only her smile—and must with her red-gold locks have been attractive above the ordinary.
Which meant swains. She enjoyed it all. She would; and must have been devastating because she is kind. You can be either haughty or kind. Being haughty is possibly the more devastating because it upsets man’s unconscious superiority! But kindness lingers. And Aunt Phemie can be kindly firm; which is not so far from being haughty, I suppose. She never actually became engaged. Don’t ask me why. It goes too deep. After my parents had spent all that money on my education it would have been a nice thing for me to have gone and got married, wouldn’t it? she said. I agreed. We also agreed that hard-working parents expect their daughter in such circumstances to do some repaying; otherwise the education would have been wasted. We saluted such wisdom with gratitude; we shook with mirth.
Actually farm people did very well out of the first Great War. Dan, her schoolboy admirer, was the same age as Phemie and old enough to have spent the two years from over seventeen to nineteen in actual fighting. He could have been exempted from fighting, for he was now indispensable on the farm, but instead he gave his age as eighteen. By this time he must definitely have concluded he had lost Phemie.
Does all this bore you? But what an amount of good it’s doing me! I can almost think of the policeman now. And I’m waiting for him. With Aunt Phemie and Dan behind me, I gather strength where it’s needed. Dan wrote her some letters. How I should love to see them! I suspect there was very little in them and certainly, I should say, no declaration. I know she has them tied away somewhere. Not that she definitely said so. A sparseness, an economy, in all this that toughens the last fibre of the heart. Bless them for evermore.
She became a schoolmistress in a southern town. She liked her work with the children and began to take an interest in the child mind and “advanced” systems of teaching. She went abroad during the summer vacation. Our Aunt Phemie was really becoming a very civilised creature. As a little girl, I was absolutely fascinated by her. Finally, it was to her that I owe the Art School and my “freedom”.
The years roll on. Aunt Phemie became thirty-three. She is at home and it is summer. It is, in fact, the night before she is due to leave. It’s as casual as that. She had seen Dan off and on, in the years. He ran his farm now and ran it successfully; interested in all the latest improvements and going ahead. She went out for a walk by herself,just to have a last look around the old place, for the following year she was going abroad to an educational conference. By chance, she ran into Dan. He was scything some bracken by a little wood in order to prove to himself how many cuttings of the young shoot were needed to kill that ravenous weed. He explained the idea to her; it made conversation easy. (I wish you could have seen the smile in Aunt Phemie’s eyes as she explained it to me.) At last she is taking leave of him. He looks at her and does not put out his hand. His fists are gripping the handles of the scythe again anyway. When a person like that looks right into your eyes it takes the strength out. of you; your wits fly away like startled pigeons. At least I must assume as much, for when he said, You’re not going back, are you? she didn’t know what on earth to answer. Then he said, Are you Phemie? And she heard her voice answer, No. I asked her what happened to the scythe. She looked startled for a moment, then she smiled saying she had no idea.
I can’t go on, Ranald. However lightly I try to write about it, the tragedy of Dan’s awful death comes looming upon me. And then when Aunt Phemie came out of the hospital, alone now as she had never been and within the scene of the appalling accident, how she could decide to stay on is something I can only grope towards.
She was a great comfort to me when I came home after saying No to the policeman. I was terribly shaken. She gave me some brandy. I felt sick inside as if my vitals were melting down. I know the trick of holding on, but oh, sometimes the stitches, the threads, keeping you together grow so thin and rotten. But when I cried, Why did I say No to the policeman? Aunt Phemie answered that that was perfectly natural and that she would have said the same herself. At once that awful question, which had kept crying in me down the fields, was eased of urgency—as if it had been properly answered. Of course I knew it had not been answered, but that now made no difference. Don’t ask me to explain this.
The brandy helped the sense of conspiracy which grew on us and was warming. Aunt Phemie became thoughtful. I challenged her. But she said she was only trying to think who the fellow could be whom I met in the gorge. Obviously he was a visitor to the town who had followed the stream from the town into the hills. His descript
ion suggested to her that he was not the usual kind of visitor or tripper. He sounded more like an artist or musician, she thought. There was a nephew of the provost who had been studying in Rome before the war, but he couldn’t be anything like thirty-five. However, it would be someone like that, and in my overwrought condition I had naturally—and so on. I could see she honestly thought this and was not now merely comforting me. To her it was absurd that the man could be the murderer.
It was then that a section of my past came back on me with a strange fatality, and I shook my head and said it wasn’t absurd. I said that murderers were like that now. I said that murderers were no longer the “criminal type”. Murderers were normal now. They just murdered. When you believe in nothing, why should you believe in not murdering … ?
I was saying a lot more like this, when I saw her eyes. There was in them not horror so much as a sort of horror of concern for me. I did not mind it. I felt suddenly alien and cool, with the trembling gone. I was not talking rationally so much as seeing in pictures. I was not arguing from what the radio called “the wave of crime” sweeping the country. The aftermath of war. The gas chambers. The mass butcheries. Jewish families are taking off their clothes, folding them, placing them in little heaps where they are told. They do this tidily. You can hear the whining sounds in their nostrils. Love sounds and love words and farewell. The naked family, one family and another and another, in the trenches they have dug. A young man is sitting on the edge of the trench with, a tommy gun on his knees. He is smoking a cigarette. You hear it on the radio. You get used to it. But what I see in pictures—I can’t go on. Ran, Ran, do you hear me crying to you? It’s not for myself I’m crying. Shall I ever be able to tell you——
4
You have no idea what the coming of the postman means once a day. It’s the bright spot, the extra, and you never fear him. I was up here at my window trying to pretend I was not waiting for him. And actually, looking over some of this dreadful stuff I have written, I had forgotten him. I was vowing to myself that henceforth I should send you nothing but sunshine when the iron gate clicked. There’s a short curving drive of trees. Behold him in his dark blue—admirable colour—and round hard hat with attractive peak. Up goes my temperature, suspended goes my breath. By flattening nose against glass and forehead hard against angle of window frame, I can just see him. Out goes his arm. I hear the wire in the wall before the bell in the kitchen. Nose over postal bag, he rummages among the oats. Elderly and grizzled, he snorts, for Aunt Phemie has appeared though I can’t see her. Have disciplined myself now never to rush for postman. From him Aunt Phemie gets news, if any. Her daily moment. Out comes the little bundle tied with string. Deft unwinding of string and putting of same in mouth. Mumble mumble, but the hands deal the cards. My heart faints for I fancy I see something known. It vanishes towards Aunt Phemie. That’s all to-day. String is winding round reduced bundle. Short news bulletin begins. It goes on. And on, Cheery farewell, and off the elderly but deft legs go. I wait in breathless suspense. Nan! In a moment I am there.