by Neil M. Gunn
I hope I thank Aunt Phemie. Innocent of shame I turn to stairs. You’ll burst your heart, lassie! calls Aunt Phemie. It feels like bursting. I subside on bed. The envelope has its own face, charged with character. I am positively shy of it. Totem and not taboo. Magic. I burst it open. At first it’s not quite you. It’s hurry and swiftness and what I find. Then it’s you.
I agree I should have more sense. I wish to goodness I hadn’t sent you that rigmarole about the thistledown. Yet I don’t care—for you do say some nice things about it. I mean I read, between the lines, your concern, and though I love your concern, I’m sorry too. Please don’t be concerned, Ranald. Believe me, that’s not what I need at all! I see now how selfish and emotional I must appear. Dreadful. In view of the way I did my job and carried on, it must now seem to you that I really am going to bits. When you write “Don’t give in, Nan,” you wring my heart. Listen, Ranald. I must have someone whom I can tell. Yet that seems selfish, too, for why should I? Without discipline, life is impossible. I know. Who should know better? I could write you nice encouraging letters. But that—put it down to my breakdown—would seem a blight. Do smile, Ranald. For, you see, what was I wanting? I was wanting news of you and of everything you’re doing. And instead of that you write about me as if I were an extra burden on your back. It makes me feel pretty hollow.
But don’t think I am giving in to you. I am not. You say that I have got to watch this emotionalism with its queer images (you mean demented) or I may escape from you altogether and that would be dreadful. It would indeed! And it’s lovely of you to put it like that. But I am not deceived. I know what you are hinting at. Let me tell you then that I am not escaping out of sanity: I am trying to escape into sanity. I may go quite mad in the process. But that’s the way I’m going. It may be a terrible road, but I’m going. I think it may be terrible because the tears have sprung into my eyes. And lonely. But I’m going. I’ll never go back.
All this talk about escapism. The talk is a horrible trick, a horrible trick of the intellect to guard its own deathly deeds. It’s the talk of the prison guards. It’s the young man with the machine gun on his knees and the cigarette in his mouth. Not to mention the smile, the murderer’s sneer, that Nan is going all D. H. Lawrence. For ages of time I seem to have lived among it. And I know the reaction to the way I have mentioned the intellect. I see their faces. Real faces, pale and avid, or laughing like hyenas. I am now quite mad, they think. In bottomless swamps of horrible emotion. Blood and myth and stuff. But I’m not! We have to rescue the intellect from the destroyers. They have turned it into death rays, and it should be the sun, the sun on our earth, bringing the blossom from the earth——
I collapsed there and lay on the bed with your letter. These last words took an awful lot out of me, as if I had been shouting them. The door opened some time and Aunt Phemie was there quietly. I should have pretended to be asleep but I could not think in time. She asked me if there was anything wrong. She had called me for tea and wondered if I was asleep, she said. But I know what she is wondering and am dreadfully aware of my eyes, so I turn from her and put the pillow straight. I had such a lovely letter, I say to her. I hear her breathe for she understands this, quite understands that a letter could be so dear to the heart that the heart breaks in happiness over it. She smiles sensibly and goes out telling me to come when I feel like it. The elderly woman’s relief at the sight of no more than a child’s joy, and you love her for it.
I feel strangely quietened after my collapse and enjoy my tea. Aunt Phemie reads the newspaper which comes by post every day. She tells me something about what’s happening in the world. I don’t need to answer, but probably say something in reply. I quite forget to ask her if the postman had any news and presently I am up here again, re-reading your letter.
A silent world it is in which I hear the iron gate click. I stand at the window waiting. The policeman appears. He is coming to the house. I step back so that he may not see me but I keep my eye on him. I am not disturbed or nervous. He must be coming in connection with me but I really think of him as going to Aunt Phemie. It’s not my concern. I may have told him a lie about being with a man and there’s that handkerchief, but I do not positively think of them. I know that when I am called downstairs I shall be perfectly cool, polite but distant. Something was emptied out of me when I collapsed and I am quite well again. I am grateful for this because it will keep me from making a fool of myself. When I hear him pull the bell I go and watch as he waits for Aunt Phemie. We have no maid at the moment. He lifts a forefinger to his hat. There are some words. He enters. A door closes upon them.
Well, why not? Let them talk if they want to.
They talk a long time. The situation must be involved. But my position is perfectly clear. Until this moment I had not realised how simple and obvious. Had I met a man of a certain description?—and I reply: Well, a man like that did say good day to me in the birch gorge. It simply had never occurred to me that the police might be interested in one so obviously a gentleman, taking a stroll. And this handkerchief? Oh, it is the handkerchief I had lost on my walk and did not miss until I had come home. I am glad it has been found. Where did you find it? Thank you very much. I can answer any question at once. The man was a complete stranger to me. I have no interest in him. Far from being upset by the policeman’s eyes, I shall have pleasure in answering him with the utmost lucidity.
When I hear the door open and the policeman taking his leave, I have a distinct feeling of being let down. Somehow I don’t want Aunt Phemie up here at the moment, so I open my own door and as I begin to go down she waves a white rag from the hall. Here’s your hankie! she calls, laughter in her voice. What on earth’s happened? I ask, grateful for the warmth that has come into my own. I hate pretending to Aunt Phemie. And soon we are deep in the policeman’s news.
The policeman had finally left the Wood where we met and, going across the moor towards the hill burn, had come on the hankie in the heather. So I had not dropped it in the gorge. Aunt Phemie was able to assure him I had lost it, and my initials completed the evidence. I was genuinely glad about this. It might so easily have been otherwise. In fact we got some fun out of imagining it as a dramatic exhibit in court. The tame returning of it by the policeman was an anti-climax. No author of detective stories could live and throw away a clue that had been so naturally “planted”. I did my best about this, and then Aunt Phemie went one better: the police are hunting a definite man, thin, with lank greying hair.
It’s really a miserable story. A shell-shock case from the last war; a local man, who has completely disappeared since the murder. They think he is hiding in the countryside somewhere. Probably has taken to the hills and is lying up in some hole. But unless he dies there, he must come back for food, so there are night patrols. There is a terrific amount of feeling about it, at least the countryside can talk about nothing else. It’s everywhere, like the stalking shadow of the man himself. Mothers get their children in early.
In the city we never seemed to come across men suffering from shell-shock (all here call it shell-shock anyway). But in the country things are different. Human beings are living individuals somehow, one apart from the other. Last winter four stacks of hay were burned one night, without rhyme or reason—out in a field where no-one could have been taking shelter—not insured, and a dead loss to the farmer, a decent man. Other more horrid things about animals—all pointing to a deranged condition of mind. In a neighbouring parish there’s a somewhat similar case, though in the dark nights of last winter he became a menace through frightening women and girls on the country roads. I don’t think he actually did any of them physical harm, but there were one or two bad cases of hysteria. Country folk don’t like to do anything to these men. There’s a feeling for them, a knowledge that they are as they are because they fought for us. I know you may think that stupid and not even fair to the men. I am not sure about it now. Yet I have a vague understanding too, as of some queer conception of guilt somewhere
, and perhaps an unconscious acceptance of responsibility for the guilt, here in the country.
Anyhow, the police have found some clues at Farquhar’s cottage. The policeman would not say what they are, but Aunt Phemie was given the impression that the shell-shocked man left unmistakable traces behind. His name is Gordon MacMaster. Aunt Phemie told me a lot about him, about his people, too, and it was like listening to a story in a country that was at once near yet distant, and one saw the strange river of his family blood. This hardly affected me, I saw it so clearly. To be able to see it was part of the mystery and this kept us from feeling too much. All we felt was a profound sadness for the man himself, but even that was distant, like an apprehension of fate. Now I could not leave Aunt Phemie, for if I were alone too soon a hand might touch me, something coming out from the story, and I did not want to lose my detached feeling, the calm emptiness inside me. We wondered where he could be. Aunt Phemie knows a lot about psychology, and not only as a science. She is wise. I mean while telling you about the mind she at the same time remains aware. You feel this, yet not as an intrusion. Cases of this kind, she said, have a sort of primitive cunning. With the money he got—and he must have got some—he may have left the countryside altogether. He would have had a clear two days’ start. Very little whisky upset him, and as whisky is almost unobtainable here he may have set out for a city, perhaps where he used to spend a short leave in his old army days, and may be going from pub to pub when they open. If so, he should soon be found. The only alternative, said Aunt Phemie, is that he hasn’t gone, and in that case he is already dead, for everyone in the countryside knew him. In a way beyond explanation we feel that he has not gone, as though in an ultimate moment of realisation he would be held, and desire to be held, by the dark matrix of his native earth. He would sink into it, or plunge. Whether we said so or not, I am not sure now. It is a little too like a dream, perhaps, and every dream, we are told, is the result of a wish-impulse. Our wish-impulse in this case. But we definitely did not discuss this. Though Aunt Phemie would certainly have done so had she thought it was between us. Perhaps it only came into my mind afterwards—only a moment ago, probably, for you know how old a new thought, or even a new happening, can appear sometimes.
There was one moment when I was nearly upset. I felt the dim tremor coming in the distance, but I deliberately turned from it. Aunt Phemie said: Poor man, he should have been treated somewhere. This raised the idea of an institution, and somehow I can’t bear that yet. I very nearly answered with cold bitterness: I know—just shove him into an institution. But I stopped myself. I blacked out.
I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been cool. And I know quite well where this calm has come from. That time when I let go about intellectuals and escapism, it was really as if I had vomited something up. I look over the words I have written about it and see they convey little or nothing of the horrible spasm. And I know how open to misinterpretation they are. But words have little to do with an act of retching.
Of course it is finally clear to me now that I am not going to show you this. You have too much to bear as it is and its egoism would be unpardonable. I am making a story of myself to myself. This will help me. At least I think it will. Like one who suddenly finds himself at sea and is sick; after the bout—what relief! But there are many bouts—before he finds his sea legs and is well again. Isn’t that a satisfactory literary figure? But it’s a mysterious ship. The queer thing about it all, Ranald, is that I must write it to you. If I hadn’t you, I couldn’t write. Writing would be impossible, unthinkable. Oh, utterly. What would happen to me then—but I black out. I can afford to, for you are. Which is very marvellous. Also the writing to you will keep me within certain bounds. I know what they are. Also—for I must be honest or all would be mockery—I feel that I am doing this for you. And I am not just thinking selfishly of my getting well for your sake and mine. It’s far deeper than that. But I cannot tell you yet. I cannot even write it. I am only hoping that I may some day.
It is after midnight. The house is very quiet and outside the quietness reigns. There should be great healing in this quietness. I wonder if I should put out my light and chance going to sleep without help? I feel I might. I hardly dare risk it. I’ll take only one tablet. Good night, Ranald.
5
I had a lovely sleep. Is there anything more exquisite in the world than wakening from a perfect sleep? The light is new; it greets you. Honestly, Ranald, it does. There is a glance in it, like the glance of laughing eyes, and the sky is blue, and the old wind is wandering about fresh as clover. It’s there! you think. That other world is there. It has found you with its sly mirth. It’s here.
It was here all the time, of course, but when you have lost it you don’t believe it’s anywhere. An illusion or delusion that any psychologist can explain away without the slightest difficulty. Nae bother, as Hamish used to say. How is he? Did he have his picture show? Do tell me. I never could understand what he meant by time; I got lost in his words as in a wood. The only thing I understood was his distrust of people who could explain things slickly. When I saw that momentary sobering come to his face like a dry wind, and heard his Ay! he’s a know-all, I never could help laughing. Then he looked and laughed himself. Roared. It was always an exhilarating moment. The trees in the wood were scattered about and the sun came in. Many thought his pictures mad. I remember when a certain one—I cannot even write his name—dismissed them with know-all expression and smile as private phantasies, I could have slain him. All I managed was to retort that I preferred Hamish’s private phantasies to most men’s public thoughts. Then, knowing I was getting at him, he looked at me, and the know-all expression and smile conveyed with insinuating silence: So that’s the way the wind is blowing? A crush on Hamish! And he showed he enjoyed the news. It was at such a moment, Ranald—and this was before the break came—that I knew that I too wanted destruction for its own sake. That awful uprising desire to catch with your hands and tear asunder, to destroy. Remember that night, the race of the two cars? As the excitement and the hectic laughter grew—faster! faster!—what were we all racing upon but destruction? And when the excitement became intolerable and Julie screamed her mad challenge and we crossed the fatal border in our minds, what were we all rushing upon but self-destruction? We knew the craving. I saw it in a face that haunts me. The unbearable craving for the final obliterating crash.
I stopped there and went out for a walk. It angered me that I could not even begin to tell you of beautiful real things without getting messed up by such memories. I know they obsess me and I must get free of them. I could not even write these three words beautiful real things without a qualm, without hearing the echo of their jeering laughter, without a feeling of being detected in pulpy sentimentality. Oh, there I go again! What an extraordinary power and vitality the destructive mind has! How sickening the mere quiescence of good is to evil!
Oh, stop it …!
Here I am again, up for the next round. Hullo, Ranald! How lovely—if you came walking in! I would take you out and try to show you that other world. Or would I?—could I? Perhaps I had better tell you about it first. For I feel free to-day. They do say that the unconscious mind goes on thinking its own unconscious thoughts. I believe it anyway, for otherwise how could I have the feeling that what troubled me in some obscure way about the murder has been withdrawn? The sunlight looked at me this morning, then it smiled. I knew.
What I am going to tell you is very difficult to put in words. Perhaps quite impossible. All I know is that it is very, very important. For what I want to do is to take you into that other world. It isn’t, of course, another world: it’s this world. But what has happened to our minds has also happened to our eyes, and we can’t see it. You may think it silly of me to say that, because we see it only too well. But don’t get impatient, Ranald, please. I have seen you show remarkable patience when listening to fools. And on my part I promise not to mention beauty, sunsets, love, magic, and silly words like these.
All I am after, Ranald, is health; and if I have a sort of feeling that it is not my own health only, well, don’t you feel in your political work that you too are after more than your own health? Let us call it our common delusion! Doesn’t that even bring the smile? Let me shake you. Ah, you smile! Sunshine! I mock you, you big intellectual tough.
But where will I begin? For this is not a new discovery to me. It couldn’t be, or it wouldn’t have set up the conflict which broke me. For a nervous breakdown can only come from an unconscious conflict, what? Let it be whispered it may not always be so unconscious as all that!