by Neil M. Gunn
The man came right up. He had a pale fleshy face with small quick-moving eyes; perfectly shaved, washed, solidly respectable. He gave Ranald a quick glance and something less than a curt nod, “James,” he said, with a jerk of his head, and went on. “Yes, sir,” said James and followed him, carrying his broom.
Ranald left the pens and went back into the town. He had half an hour to wait for his bus and found the pub he had already been in. Sitting on the narrow wooden seat by the window, his pint of beer before him, he lit a cigarette.
A faint smile came to his face as he thought of the “significance” of the dark bowler-hatted man. What was the dream significance of a maze? Something to do with the intestines wasn’t it, the guts? Not inapt. He blew a stream of smoke and the smile faded. He rarely experienced that dream effect in what he saw. Even now there was something of the stuff of nightmare in the advance of the bowler-hatted man through the grey empty pens. The grey slats and rails had the greyness of wood on a sea shore, the weathered greyness of spewed-up wood in peat bogs. But he did not like this kind of vision and snapped it out by a blink of an internal eye—and instantly the vision of Nan drawing the sheet over her face swam before him. There was a perceptible constriction of his features as he snapped that vision out also.
The trouble was the irrational nature of this kind of stuff. Give in to it and no peat bog had a deep enough bottom for it. It was childish, primitive, and so in a certain way shocking. The child’s shock; and fear. So poets and artists, under the impression that they were “revolutionary”, tried to shock the world. Good God. Regression. The denial of the intellect. To call it revolutionary art—good God. Ranald caught the barman’s eye on him. The barman removed his eye to look at the glass he was polishing. Two countrymen in thick tweeds were talking huskily together, standing, their pints in their hands, confidential. The barman was discreetly listening or Ranald would have gone over and spoken to him. As he removed his glance, his internal eye saw the black-hatted figure again. Father of Adam, the man with the green tie. A pastel shade of light green. The internal eye saw the exact shade and the full length of the tie.
Adam wouldn’t get much shrift from that parent. Probably a mother, dominated by the bowler hat, had made Adam her consolation, her darling boy. Eternal struggle of the weak mother to get cash to slip to Adam. Broke, he would come home. The internal eye saw one or two “coterie” poets who would gladly cut each other’s throat, despising, spitting upon, the success they craved. There was an eternal conspiracy to deny them “achievement”. When they went political, they called the conspiracy a “bourgeois” conspiracy. Ranald reckoned he knew them root and branch from college onwards. After a compulsory session of talk in their noisy midst, how refreshing, how sane, to talk to a barman. He took a pull at his pint, and his features went solemnly statuesque; like a death mask, with something uncommunicably sad about its carven intolerance; the barman was glancing at him again.
As he set his pint on the table Ranald had a sudden thought. Aunt Phemie had said nothing about there having been no money on Gordie when he was hauled out of the water hole. That had come as so complete a surprise that he had almost shown it to the policeman. Who the hell would have taken the money—assuming Gordie had done the foul deed? The one thing all these fellows—and his mind was back on his “coterie” friends again—wanted, would do any bloody thing to get, was money. Money! he thought, thinking of Adam and the murdered man. Christ!
The thought narrowed his eyes. Quite deliberately he decided that Adam could have done it, would have done it, had he got the chance. Ranald had never recovered from certain early prewar experiences at college. There had been a small group of “Mythicals” who rampaged about, full of laughter and splendid unintelligibility in their verse. Finding verbal equivalents for the instinctual impulses of the unconscious or id was, they declared, a poetic necessity postulated by the irrational nature of the subject matter, and it was manifestly, scientifically indeed, impossible to body forth the irrational in rational terms. Hence their verse; which thus was truly revolutionary in that it achieved a new freedom of the spirit, a new synthesis.
Now Ranald had gone over completely to the Socialists and had quite a different notion of revolution, was rapidly becoming adept in the understanding and use of the dialectical method, and in a first notable inter-debate challenged their “synthesis” and, in particular, their concept of “freedom”, which he then proceeded to take to bits as if it were a child’s doll. In fact, he called them “bourgeois dolls” … . And the description had just enough of the irrational in it to achieve a quite furious effect.
This adolescent war continued with gusto—and not without a growing bitterness, particularly in Ranald, who began to believe that “bourgeois dolls” might in fact play a sinister part in the impending collapse of capitalist society. With the strife at its height, Ranald, in a packed debate, was directly challenged on the nature and constitution of a civilised society, was being asked how he proposed to deal in his particular robotised society with the new expansionist forces in human thought and art as represented by pioneering mythicals, when, before the speaker could continue with his mounting rhetoric, he rose in his place as if a direct question had been put to him and said, “Mr. Chairman, the question presents no difficulty to me: I should kill them off.” Then he sat down.
Ranald looked at his watch. Five minutes yet. He had come into town for cigarettes and was bringing back a packet for Aunt Phemie. She had insisted on paying and shown just a momentary confusion when he had raised no objection. The bed, with Nan on it, drawing the sheet up over her face, was there before his internal eye again. He had been avoiding it, refusing to look at it. The thing had seemed too obviously a death gesture. But now he looked at Nan’s face, at that piteous, collapsing, indescribable expression with the eyes on him. Good God, it was pretty terrible. Then an extraordinary sensation of stillness began to advance upon him, to hold him. Hitherto he had accepted Nan’s action as a symptom of her trouble. But a symptom has a cause. Now the stillness had him absolutely, extended beyond him into breathless space. As he stirred his chest slowly packed itself full of air. His reason stirred and he thought: But he couldn’t have raped her—she would have fought?
“Good day, sir,” called the barman, but Ranald, if he heard him, did not answer.
9
“I think I’ll get out for a walk,” said Ranald who had come down from Nan’s room.
“Very well,” agreed Aunt Phemie going with him to the back door. Mrs. Fraser was scrubbing in the kitchen. “What do you think of Nan this morning?”
“She’s coming on all right.” He spoke with a glance at the day, turning from her. Against the bright light he looked more haggard than ever and Aunt Phemie knew he had slept little, although at breakfast when she had asked him how he had slept he had replied “Not too bad”. There was no penetrating that light dismissive manner; it shut a person up.
“Don’t go too far,” she said.
“Right.” But he did not look back at her.
When she got to the top of the stairs she suddenly found she could not go into Nan’s room and swerved away. She would do up Ranald’s room first. Nan would hear her and that would be all right. From the side window of his room she saw Ranald leaving the cart road and strolling up towards the two Irishmen who were mending the drains in the thistledown field. Now he had stopped and was talking to them. He’s a complete mystery to me! she thought in a fatal way and turned back from the window, for she just could not go on looking at him. Her only hope now was to wean Nan away from him after he had left. Her experiment had failed. There was something between these two that could not be broken down. His coming had in a dreadful, drastic way only emphasised it. Aunt Phemie experienced this so sharply in her nerves that she felt the whole house gripped by it. What Nan felt she dared not let herself think. She lifted his folded pyjama suit off the bed and set to in a flurry of work.
Meantime Ranald was getting a lot of informatio
n from the ditchers. They were experts at their job and he admired the neat way in which they cut the turves and laid them beside the opening ditch, the methodical way they dug, the unhurrying sureness of the work. The drains, with their sunken red tiles, were at first like the veins of the field, then, more exactly, they were ducts drawing away the excess of water from its body. When he had grasped the whole underground design, he went on.
Talking to real workmen about what they did always took him out of himself. It had the easing effect upon him of a ritual, in which, because of his beliefs, he participated. They were his brothers and as they extended through all life, in all countries, they were all life. The all-inclusive certainty of this precluded any need for further thought; left an assurance before which doubt was just faintly amusing.
As he looked about the field and saw the countless withering thistles he decided that the farm was not being too well run. But what could you expect? He already knew the agricultural wage rate, plus milk, potatoes, coal, meal, and a free house. Some house! he thought; for he had also found out quite a lot about overcrowding in the farm cottages, with no water laid on, no sanitation. Pretty ghastly, at this time of day. Remarkable that the farm workers should have the interest they did have. And obviously they appreciated Aunt Phemie. He paused and looked about him and away over the broad valley.
It would be so simple to run the valley as a large-scale collective farm, with a real village for all the workers, water laid on and electric light. Aunt Phemie, who was no farmer, running this big farm for her own profit—well! But she would make an excellent secretary for a collective. Then she would really have something to do, something moreover that would deeply interest her, because her life would be mixed up with other lives, would have a concern for them. Her mothering would find an outlet.
It would be so simple to do, too, thought Ranald, going on. As things were, this kind of country life just bored him. Static, so that you went either mindless or emotional. He had had a hell of a night last night, what sleep there was being full of murder dreams. At one point he had borrowed from Nan’s attack on Fanwicke and bitten Adam’s throat out. That kind of stuff. The climbing made his heart beat with some discomfort and he stopped by an elm on the edge of the shallow ravine. There were odd growths on it, like huge warts, right up onto the branches. He examined one of them. It was full of young sprouts, as long as knitting needles, like hairs on a wart. He tried to pull a sprout off but it was flexible and tough as wire. Perhaps each of the warts had once been a bud-point on the tree. Cancerous sex growths? It looked like it. He glanced about the ground and found the same economic basis for all the trees, and the other trees were not cancerous. He smiled dryly, for the explanation would be simple enough to one who knew about trees … and the law of causality. Up in the next field he heard a piercing cawing overhead. But the bird was too big for a crow. Another … and then a silent third. They were like floating kites. Nan’s thistledown letter came back into his mind. Buzzards! He watched them for a time and as the high airiness affected his mind he thought of Nan. He would have to do something about her. But what? As he went on, his mind left the question unanswered, left it alone; he did not want to force his mind to do anything, could not force it. He hadn’t that kind of energy, not at the moment. In front now was the wood—the Dark Wood.
As he sat among the trees, he followed the interstices between their columns to a glade on which the daylight lay. Slender columns because they grew so closely, and, for the same reason, tall and straight. They were silent, very still, and when he glanced by his right shoulder, they closed their ranks as they receded. He twisted further round to look behind him, and again through interspaces saw a flat open mound, with squatting shrubs on green grass, bright as a players’ stage in some antique world. Two legs moved, stealthy trousered legs. But even as he blinked, they vanished. Merely an illusion of movement set up by the turning of his head? He got up and walked onto the mound, slowly but deliberately, around the bushes, pausing to listen, looking for the man. But there was no man. He thought to himself: I could have sworn the legs moved there. Hearkening for footsteps, he heard the silence and, somehow, it mocked him. It had an invisible mocking face. Satire narrowed his own eyelids. The lack of sleep was doing things to him! He sat down on the rabbit-cropped turf; it was softer than velvet, and presently he stretched full length. He stared at the sky for a long time, then closed his eyes and drove his senses from him, but in no time they were back of their own accord, fully alert. They had the notion that the legs might belong to Adam McAlpine. He sat up abruptly and looked penetratingly about him, turning his head slowly. He arose and followed the direction which the legs had taken.
When he came to the far edge of the pine plantation, near the spot where Nan had met the policeman, he stood looking up and down the path that ran by the wood. There was no-one on it and at a little distance on either hand it dipped out of sight. In front the ground rolled upward but only slightly now, with a few stone mounds that were old croft ruins and massed clumps of whin. When he had got through this tumbled ground, he came on a sagging rusty wire fence, beyond which the heather spread far and wide over the moor. He stood for a few moments but saw no-one, then, his eyes lifting about him, continued across the moor until at last it fell away to the hill burn. By the burn he stood, his eyes steady on the distant birches in the gorge. Towards them he went.
The noise of the waterfall grew and, rounding a last corner, he saw below him a man painting the waterfall. The green of his tie was a shade darker than Ranald’s inner eye had seen it. As Ranald approached, Adam looked up at him for a long moment, then turned his back and continued his work.
Ranald stopped behind the painter and glanced from the canvas to the waterfall. Not exactly a representational picture; there was a childish exaggeration of the whirls in the pool, like a childish fear of them, but still there was some resemblance to reality. Immature poet’s work, he decided; a literary subject. The dark-boiling whirls in the pool were designed to suck the shocked eye down. The path had dipped to the flat ledge where they stood so that Ranald was looking back at the waterfall and up to its smooth brow; but the pool was some ten feet below him, rock-bound, with the ledge on which they stood overhanging it.
“Yes?” Adam was staring at him with a penetrative directness, his brows drawn.
“I was thinking,” answered Ranald calmly, “what a waste of potential hydro-electric power.”
The creases between Adam’s eyebrows deepened and concentrated the light that shot from the eyes; then he turned his back. Ranald went to the edge and looked over and around. “It wouldn’t be difficult,” he said conversationally, “to dam this gully and get a pretty hefty head of water.”
Adam, mixing paints on his palette, paid no attention.
“Don’t you think so?” asked Ranald. “Or am I interrupting you?” He smiled.
“I am not an engineer,” said Adam definitely closing the conversation. He did not look at Ranald.
“Neither am I,” replied Ranald, “but it seemed to me the power of water had interested you—if I may say so, not unsuccessfully.”
“Thanks very much,” replied Adam, ready now to go on with his painting.
“Though I suppose, from an æsthetic point of view, you would rather it continued to run what is called free?”
Adam slowly turned his head and looked at Ranald. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“Well, no,” replied Ranald, “I hadn’t thought of that. I did hope it was at least a half-intelligent remark.”
“Well, I don’t. I think it’s just bloody silly.” The last two words were explicit; the eyes flashed, then Adam turned to his canvas.
“Sorry about that.” Ranald’s tone was still casual if now rather coolly amused. “I had wanted to have a few words with you.”
Adam’s head shot round.
“I am staying,” said Ranald, “at Greenbank with Mrs. Robertson.” His eyes considered Adam’s expression. “I perceive you guessed
as much.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Not much,” replied Ranald. “But I had hoped we might discuss it reasonably.”
“What?”
“Miss Gordon’s condition is such that Mrs. Robertson and I thought it might help if we got your version of what actually did happen when you and Miss Gordon found the body.”
“You do, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, to hell with you! I hope that’s clear?”
“Quite. Perhaps, then, you wouldn’t mind telling me what happened just before you found the body?”
Adam’s brown eyes concentrated to gleam-points. It was the restraint of one flaming mad.
“I ask,” continued Ranald, watching the face as though its change of expression would tell him what otherwise he need not hope to find out, “because Miss Gordon, in her heightened mental condition, may possibly exaggerate what actually did occur. We are prepared to make allowances.”
Adam’s features constricted further, the jaw stiffening, shooting forward slightly, so that the mouth pursed and the whole expression gathered a rigid intensity.
Ranald studied the face. “She might even,” he continued, “exaggerate an amusing love passage into something like rape.”
“You bastard!” The words, flat and fierce, spat at him.
Ranald studied the face even more thoughtfully.
Palette and brush hit the ground and Adam stood before him. “Get out!” Ranald did not move. “Get out, damn you!” Adam’s fist smashed into Ranald’s jaw.
At the first movement of Adam’s shoulder, Ranald’s head had begun to duck, but the blow was sufficiently explosive to send him staggering back three yards. There he stood, looking at Adam. “I thought you were that kind of sod,” said Ranald levelly, his eyes never moving from Adam’s face. Then he began slowly moving in.