by Neil M. Gunn
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.
In talking like this, he used gesture, continuously moved, alive, his green tie swinging loose. When he talked about Helen being imposed upon you could hardly tell whether he was being ironic or interested, amused or amazed. No doubt he was both at the same time. Some of his language presumably paid me the compliment of having so lived—in circles like his own—that I could not be shocked. He goes on to describe how in the evening David and himself went out for a stroll. It is a lonely landscape with a farm in the distance. The twilight deepens to a fathomless grey dusk and a bird flies overhead. David says it is a buzzard, but as the silent bird disappears they agree it was an owl. Their talk takes on the quietude of the landscape, its illusive distance and height. They discuss theories of art and thought, cave drawings and philosophies, searching for the artist’s meaning, for what the world has lost or needs. This induces an excitement that at once has the shiver of truth and the cool fathomless distances of that landscape in the dusk. They then come home to Helen’s welcoming voice, to friendly movements in and about, slippers and talk of rest, of bed. Had you a good walk and would you like something? Sure you wouldn’t? When he finds himself in bed he can’t sleep, listening now not to the echoes of that talk outside but to the quietude. He feels completely stilled, quiescent; bathed, cleansed, and put in a white bed. An owl hoots. The silence follows. And in this silence, just before sleep comes, he has his strange illusion. It seems to him that he is downstairs again and that they are getting ready to go to bed. David, who is stoking the kitchen stove, turns with the small black shovel in his hand, still talking. But Adam is suddenly aware of Helen. She comes carrying a handlamp with a blue glass bowl and has clearly been busy seeing that the house is all secure for the night. The full responsibility of this is hers, unconsciously as it were, and he realises that a day on earth is being brought to a close. She is folding the day up to put it away, when suddenly she remembers she has forgotten something, or could not quite trust someone (like a maid) to have seen to it. She does not want to interfere, says Adam, with our high and important talk, so turns away, murmuring to herself as she is going: Excuse me! but I’ll just go and see that the moon is properly trimmed and not smoking and that all the stars are lit.
8
I could not write a word more after finishing that story, and all I need add now is that he did contrive to make Helen’s exit absolutely natural. I showed my appreciation, but for his waiting eye it wasn’t nearly enough, so I asked if he told Helen in the morning. Good God no! he said, I got an urge to beat it, borrowed money and painting gear from David, and here I am. He shrugged. And then, with a subtlety of indifference beyond any words, he said: The thought of it still gives me a faint shiver—like the clean shiver you get after bathing in a summer pool.
I compliment myself that I absolutely showed no reaction beyond mild interest. I said it was high time I was home and got up. He did not try to detain me, he just waited. He did not even acknowledge my farewell as I walked away.
I recognise mine is a curious condition in which small things are magnified in an extraordinary way. There are moments when if an unexpected leaf touched me, I’d jump out of my skin. I am far more unstable than even this writing may suggest. When a sudden sound puts my heart in my mouth, I get over it by a squirming in which more than my fingers get knotted up, that is, if nobody is seeing me. I let it go on. Squirming is a tremendous relief, from which I emerge again, freed, if exhausted a little. The body is a very curious thing with a life of its own, and occasionally it indulges in this short rigor not because of any sudden sound or touch but because it is blacking out a thought, a memory, before it has actually appeared in the mind. If anyone saw me at such a moment, with my face twisted and stiff as a mask, he would certainly think I was going off my rocker.
But I am not. I am seven cats, I say to myself. Nothing like an incantation for keeping you sober. And then there is this to it, too, that all the time I am aware that the magnifying of small things is necessary, that it is the only way of truly seeing them. I mean it is the small things which we overlook that matter, and in every way, whether it is a bunch of grass, a tree, the sunlight, a bird, or the thought we have about them. To see them like that is not to magnify them at all, it is just to see them. That I should have felt it necessary to use the word magnify shows the queer condition we have got into. And it is the same for persons as for things.
I suppose I am trying to quieten myself by using all these words. If Adam did see me in the pool, I know it doesn’t matter. I really do know that. It’s not prudery that’s worrying me. After all, says a sly humour far back in me, at least he had something to look at! But that doesn’t quite let me off. I’ll never forgive him for doing it, for the prying way he did it, yet I can’t get him out of my mind. I don’t understand him and wish I could, at least I wish I could be sure my understanding of him is right. It was a remarkable story for him to tell, about Helen, the eternal woman, and I am certain that no-one could ever make up such a story. There can be no doubt about that. So therefore he is a man who could have that profound kind of vision. Yet I don’t trust him. He is capable of using anything and everything that will help him to get what he wants, like a wild beast stalking its prey. And he is stalking his prey as it were from Farquhar’s cottage. There is all that behind him in my mind. Horrible, isn’t it? Particularly when I have the notion that I am prey… That ecstasy of the blackbird—dear God, it’s terrible and unpardonable.
No, Ranald, it’s not morbid. But I cannot write about it. I cannot tell you about this, and so I cannot write at all. There are long pauses. I’ll have to go on with it alone. But I must go on.
9
He was waiting for me to-day in the Dark Wood. This shocked and angered me. He is stalking nearer, as if he knew I wasn’t going to the birch gorge. But after a time I must admit he was friendly, attractive, made no direct inroads, could interrupt himself to follow a bird, he was full of variety, like one searching for laughter and play. I am not deceived, but it is difficult to remain unresponsive, not to acknowledge, for example, that there is something in the neatness, the exquisite surety, of the movements of a blue tit
that must at least be acknowledged by the eye. Yet I have got to be careful, for if I give him an inch he will take two. His excuse for being there was characteristically plausible. He did not in so many words apologise for having intruded too often; all the same he made it plain that if his appearance in the vicinity was a nuisance to me then he had come here to assure me that he would withdraw, permanently absent himself, and on the same breath he drew my attention to the song of an invisible chaffinch in a near tree and went on talking of the variety in the song from bird to bird, and finished up by asking if I understood. I simply said, listening on my own to the chaffinch: Your presumption of importance, your own importance, is terrific. He glanced at me and laughed. That’s what I like about you, he said. As if I were playing his own game! I could have hit him. I did not stay long. He came out with me to the edge of the wood and stood there watching me go away. I could not mention the meeting to Aunt Phemie.
10
I have seen Adam again. I know this looks like blackbird fascination, the dark sex-unconscious! I can hear the laughter, see Know-all’s face. But I cannot let that put me off. I dreamt of Julie last night. She was alive in a fantastic Eastern place, like a room in a palace—or was it a temple?—swaying from the hips, with the smile, the drug-glitter, in her face, and then somehow in a moment I was looking at a close-up of her face (like my hypnogogic illusion) and I saw the child in her woman’s face, and it was lost; this affected me with an extraordinary sense of terror and with a something of pathos in the terror that I could never describe. Sometimes when I think of Julie my heart could break, and never more so than when I know of her dodges and cunning. I know them as I know the branches of a tree. The polite word we used was amoral (our complacency, or insufferable superiority, in the use of such words often now makes me squirm. O God, the bone-dry deathly rattle of them, the emptiness!). The awful thing is that I see the pattern of her behaviour with a clearness, a certainty, that no ordinary moral behaviour pattern ever possesses. Know-all said she demonstrated the irrational. Even writing that last sentence blinded me. But why go on about it, for the terrible fact is that I can foretell with an appalling logic, rationality, what Julie will do at any time. She is like the something given in mathematics (that strange word which haunted the subject for me in school days). Know-all is an intellectual leper.