by Neil M. Gunn
“Yes, it’s an old engine. If you like——”
“Are you in a hurry?”
“No. I have done my business in town.”
“When they brought me in from the shepherd’s house they left my painting gear behind.”
“It would be very simple for me to run out for it now. Shall we?” She caught the gear lever.
“All right.”
They set off. The police inspector was standing at the corner of the street where they turned right towards the mountains.
“He made sure he saw us,” observed Adam.
“You think this will complicate matters still further?” remarked Aunt Phemie almost solemnly.
He glanced at her with appreciation and lines of laughter deepened silently. “They just don’t know what to make of me. Damn them, you would think a man mustn’t have a mind of his own!” He added, “They pry.”
“They do,” she said, assailed by a wild impulse to laugh.
“I was tired, muddled. I said to that police inspector: ‘Aw, get to hell out of this.’ I don’t think he appreciated it.” Laughter came out of him in one or two barks.
Sobered, she felt like a young girl who wasn’t too sure yet where she was. She was beginning to understand Nan’s perverse interest in Adam. He seemed so abnormally natural that he could be, she thought, terrifying. They were now driving through open rising country with farm steadings near the road and croft houses up on the slopes. They crossed and recrossed the Altfey, and presently were leaving the cultivated land behind. He was completely absorbed in the lie and look of things. “I like this spot,” he said.
“You would know it as a boy?”
“Yes.” And then, as though belatedly appreciating her remark, turned his head. “You run pretty deep, I’m thinking.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. If he didn’t tell you anything—how did you find out?”
“Find out what?”
His brows instantly gathered. “Don’t tear it,” he said, warningly.
She had known instantly she had made a mistake; she must be completely frank or shut up. This was disturbingly refreshing, even exciting in its strange bewilderment. “All I know,” she said, “I learned from the postman the following day. That’s all I know.”
“He said nothing?”
“No.”
He studied her face for a moment. “How then did you learn he was the one?”
“I didn’t learn.”
“You just knew?”
“Well—yes.”
He laughed. “Good!” he said. “It’s the kind of knowledge I like.” He looked around the countryside. The road was deteriorating rapidly to grass and ruts. She saw the shepherd’s cottage up on the slope to the left and then had to stop for a gate.
He made no effort to get out. “I just couldn’t stand the bastard and hit him. What was in his mind was sticking out a mile. It came at me—Hell, I just suddenly couldn’t bear it.” He brought a fist in across his stomach.
She took a couple of breaths. “Did you know who he was?”
“Yes. I knew at once. He had been nosing about the town. He asked a policeman where I stayed. But it wasn’t that. That he might be out to get me—well, all right! Fine! But God, that way of coming, that theoretic questioning deadly way—that almighty logical—aw to hell! And all the time, by God, behind it all—the cold death instinct. Don’t tell me! I’ve seen enough of it.”
Aunt Phemie sat still.
He glanced sideways at her after the sharpness of his emotion had subsided. “You think I exaggerate?” he suggested with the ironic humour in which there is no smile.
“Yes,” she replied simply.
“Of course!” He threw up a hand. “I’m only telling you how it happened. I thought you wanted to know.” He saw the gate and got out. “You can turn in there on the green and I’ll go up to the house.” He opened the gate and walked away.
Aunt Phemie turned the car, stopped the engine, and let her hands fall dead in her lap. “Well!” she said. Thought would not focus. Her head turned to follow his figure through the back window of the car. Her body twisted round so that she could keep on following it. He reached the door. A woman appeared. He went into the house.
Aunt Phemie faced round again. He was alive like something charged with electricity. He was like a spoiled child that had come through its fears and frustrations, through its angers and selfishness, to an amazing condition of wilfulness which would not tolerate anything but a vivid real state of being. Once his hands had moved in front of him in a sort of swimming gesture, as if clearing things away, films and obstructions, webs. And towards the end he had grown inwardly excited; the breath swelled his chest, and his brown skin had caught underneath a coldness of rime. She needed no more words to explain what had happened at the falls pool. His apperception of Ranald had been flawless and devastating. What was she to think? to do? What about Nan? But she could not think and was staring through the windscreen when the movement of his figure made her jump. He opened a rear door and dropped his gear on the floor, then he got in beside her.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“No,” he answered laconically. “The wet paint got smudged. I have lost a couple of tubes of paint too.”
“Would you like to have a look for them?”
“Aw,” he said, pursing his lips, “it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s no trouble as far as I’m concerned,” she assured him in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Well——” He still hesitated. Something seemed to have annoyed him. “All right. It’s half-a-mile up.”
“I’ll come with you, if you like.”
As they set off, she said sensibly, “I have never actually seen the falls, so it’s an outing for me.”
“They’re worth seeing,” he said, “though I couldn’t tell you why.”
She remained silent.
“I can’t paint. Though something may come out of it,” he concluded. After a few seconds, he added, “You have a gift of discreet silence.”
“Sometimes it may be necessary.”
He laughed and Aunt Phemie said no more. Suddenly he stopped. “That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
Aunt Phemie looked up the gorge, with its outlines, birches, and glimpses of tumbling water. “Yes.” She nodded. “For me it is not too big to lose its intimacy.”
He turned his face and considered her. “I believe that’s what it is.”
“In Switzerland or the Tyrol,” said Aunt Phemie calmly, “you get bulk and picturesqueness. It may be thrilling and all that, but somehow you can’t enter into it.”
“You can’t have it under your feet?”
“Perhaps,” said Aunt Phemie doubtfully.
“To feel free, man must dominate?”
“No,” answered Aunt Phemie at once and positively. “You can become part of this and still be yourself, only more full of—intimacy, of love of it. You don’t want to dominate it. That’s the very mood that does not arise.” Her cheek bones got whipped with colour.
They came to the falls pool and he searched about the cleared ground but found nothing. “That’s where I went over.” He looked over the ledge and studied the pool. “I was so astonished that I took in water—and I’m quite a good swimmer. I was so flummoxed that I remember clawing at the rock like a silly animal. I don’t remember how I did the last yard or two. Like the hen that runs round when you have drawn its neck.” He glanced sideways at her.
“Where was Ranald?” she asked.
“Lying there. I got my knee in his stomach.”
“He pushed you over?”
“No. I was so pleased at having doubled him up that I forgot where I was and stepped back—and over—by mistake.”
“So he didn’t——” She stared at him.
“No. He tried his damnedest to punch me over, but failed.” There was a real if withering humour in his face, a satisfaction.
“He left you to drown?”
She turned away from him and began walking back. Presently she sat down.
“Feeling a bit sick?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said coldly.
He left her, going back towards the pool. She lay over against the hillside. Deeper than her sudden feeling of nausea was an utter hopeless despair. It had little to do with any individual in particular; something was swimming in below and choking life itself. Vile, awful, terrible. This wasn’t the awfulness of despair she had known once. This was vile. It spread over all life, crawling, choking everything, every thought and hope, everything.
Presently she got some control of this mood which had so blindly assailed her and sat up. Then she arose and began walking down the path. As she rounded a bend, she saw him standing away in front, his head over his shoulder, watching her approach. How he had got there she had no idea, for he hadn’t passed her on the path. There was something startling about this, but she was too weary to let it trouble her. He turned his face away and strolled slowly on so that she might overtake him.
She tried not to look at his body, but saw it, the legs, the length of his jacket, his hair and his neck. He stood to one side, his head slightly tilted, a smile on his face, in his eyes.
“I got one of the tubes,” he said. He held it out on his palm.
She acknowledged it in an indifferent way.
He glanced quickly at her and went on, stepping sometimes off the path in order to give her plenty of room. “I have told you now all I know,” he said. “More than I told the inspector.” That amused him but in an attractive way, as though he were being delicately thoughtful, prepared now to give her every consideration. It was quite plain that he had come to a decision about her, that in fact he liked her.
This did not interest her. She now just did not care about him at all. Weariness had washed her body and left it spent.
“I agree with you, of course, about the intimacy,” he said. “Only it’s not so easy when you want to—get at it.”
“No?” she said, keeping going, but up through the indifference had come a subtle inflection of scorn.
“There was I trying to get the sucking whirls of the pool as if the whole glen was sucked in there to its own peculiar death. But all the time I was aware of—the intimacy. I knew it didn’t get sucked in. At least … I know now.”
She offered no comment.
“Farmers’ wives are not usually so perceptive,” he suggested.
“You seem to know,” she said, lifting her eyes in search of the shepherd’s cottage.
“I’m afraid I have offended you.” He glanced at her, his eyes bright with a mirth in which there was an extraordinary tentative quality like shyness.
“No,” she answered coldly. “You haven’t offended me. You have merely shown me something utterly beastly.”
He did not take this amiss. On the contrary, he looked now more than ever as if he would like to propitiate her. He even remained silent. They walked towards the car. He stepped forward quickly and opened the door for her, shut it and stepped round the car; by the time he got in beside her the engine was running and the gear lever waiting.
They drove in silence. In the mirror near the top of the windscreen she glimpsed his face looking slyly round at her. It not only contained a suppressed humour but also something else more alive. She realised that, given half a chance, he would make advances to her. Age did not matter. It was an intimacy, an understanding, the hidden movement of the spirit that delighted him, that was the sort of air in which he could breathe and live. He wanted this. Yet because the moment was genuine, he would not intrude. The speed of the car increased.
She was aware that he knew why the speed increased better than she did. An anger began to grow in her. She deliberately looked at the farmsteadings which they passed. Within ten minutes they were in town. A policeman seemed to be, somewhat indefinitely, on point duty. “I’ll get out here,” Adam said all at once as if he had seen someone. She immediately drew up. “I should like,” he said, before closing his door, “to see you again.”
She bowed, her eyes on the policeman. The door slammed and she stuck out an arm; the policeman waved her round the corner. Only as she was approaching her own farm road did it strike her that his gear was in behind. She drew up. Yes, it was there. Ignoring it, she sat and tried to think.
She did not care how she had behaved coming back to the town. That did not worry her. She tried to think but was merely irritated, angry, that his gear was still in her car. She had a good mind to drive right back to his home and dump it there. Why not? She gripped the wheel. But the grip slackened. Then suddenly what could no longer be denied came before her and she saw Ranald’s brightness when he came in with the bloody face; saw Nan’s quickening love at the new movement of his spirit. Oh God, it was terrifying! Her eyes closed; she hung her head.
3
Men have gone mad, she thought, as she drove on up to the steading. They have gone mad. Their madness stalked about her mind; stalked all over the world. She saw men as beings different from women, saw that they had gone mad. Hard and upright, stalking about, bright from eating the roots of their own logic, full of theories and purpose, aims; bright and hard and deadly; looking with their eyes for figures to pursue and break. Christ! she silently cried as she swung the car round the corner at the steading, swung it too far, and rocked it as she straightened up. When men exclaimed by Christ it had always affected her as a steel probe on a living nerve; her being quivered for an instant, darkening as in pain. She swung the car into the cart shed, backed, and drove on into the stall between the iron pillars. There was no-one there; the place was empty and silent; no beasts beyond the sliding doors in the wall; all animal sounds were out at pasture. She sat for a little while quite still, then got out, shut the door, and, without giving herself time to think, opened the door into the back of the car. She would have to do something with his gear, hide it somewhere. Her brows gathered as she peered down into the dimness. She leaned forward and lifted the picture onto the seat as though it were something wounded she hated to touch but must. One had to handle and bury things. It leaned back against the brown leather, looking at her. The waterfall, the whirls; the blue-black features of the pool boiling and swirling to central holes that sucked down the light—smeared by the brush of a body. Drunkenly the features leered at her. Her chest hardened as from the inward pressure of a suffocating growth. She lifted the palette. Smeared with its own clots, including a livid repulsive olive. A narrow cloth bundle, with the tip of a brush showing. She did not touch it. She was overwhelmed by a nightmarish apprehension of creation broken in the creator’s hands. Design and blood, a fantastic experiment, toys drunkenstill and strewn about, from a Creator who had turned away. She put the small picture and palette back on the floor of the car and closed the door, stood a moment, thoughtful and listening, then went and took the three keys from the engine switch and locked up the whole car. As this was something she rarely did, she moved away from the locked car with the air of one who has hidden her secret, stood for a moment in the entrance glancing along the walls of the building, then walked towards the house.
As it rose on her sight with its windows, she smoothed her face. She would have to deal with Nan, with that living sentient creature whose eyes would take in the page of her face in a glance. She swallowed and stiffened her mouth. She would say she had been upset at the garage. “Nothing can beat the old German Bosch magneto,” the wiry mechanic with the greying hair had said, a certain twinkle in his eye at this tribute to the recent enemy, “and we haven’t got one.” Say something about the magneto to Nan, adding the usual war growl at tradesmen.
There was no-one in the kitchen. She hearkened to the house and knew it to be empty. Nan would be out, adventuring up the fields, back once more at her game of clearing up the shadow.
<
br /> In the wandering movement of Nan’s figure over the fields there was suddenly for Aunt Phemie a childlike, an intense pathos, so that she could have sat and wept, and buried her head. Actually she kept on hearkening, then went along the passage and up the stairs. Nan’s door was standing half open. “Are you there, Nan?” she called in a controlled voice. There was no answer and she went quietly into the room, looking around as if Nan might still be there. The room was clean and tidy, with an impress on the bed where Nan had sat—where her invisible presence still sat by the writing pad. She had been writing Ranald, Aunt Phemie thought, and went slowly towards the pad. She had to twist her body above the bed in order to read the written words at the top of the page without touching the pad. Aunt Phemie has gone to town on business and I am all alone and I hear the world outside. I am going out, Ranald. I wish I could find you there. I think I will. Two pages had been turned over and under the pad. Aunt Phemie had no desire to read them, even if she could have touched the paper. She stared out of a window then looked about the room and saw that the top right-hand drawer of the chest was pulled out a few inches. It was the drawer Nan had looked into that moonlit midnight when in her queer somnambulistic state she seemed about to go to Ranald’s room. Aunt Phemie went to the drawer and glimpsed a thick wad of written sheets. They were the long letters which Nan had not sent to Ranald. She pulled the drawer full out and began to read the top page. She lifted the top page and went on to the next. Another page; her fingers lifted two or three. For fifteen minutes she read here and there down through the wad, then she straightened the pages, pushed the drawer back to its original position, and went into her own room where she sat on the bed staring at nothing.
The child, wandering up through the daylit fields, trying to clean the shadow from its world. Emerging from the terrors of darkness, crying for love. The thistledown, the soft eager balls, seeds on the wing—changing into the grey steady eyes, the searching eyes, of the policeman. Changing, in his turn, into the youth with the tommy gun on his knees and the cigarette in his mouth, while love in its naked family waited in the trench; he mowed them down as a pernicious corn.