Second Sight (18 page)
Authors: Neil M. Gunn
“Oh Harry,” said Helen, “isn't it just heaven to be alive?”
“You seem to forget hell.”
“How divine of you to come for me! And you lookedâsuch a frightened, awkward boy.”
“I put the heart across you, anyway.”
“Faith and you did.” Nothing could subdue her mirth. “So please don't do it again.”
“Don't worry.”
“Not without warning, anyway.”
He stopped and regarded her back, as she moved on humming an air. She stopped, turned, and raised her eyebrows. “Anything wrong?”
As he came on, she kept time to his deliberate steps: “Grumf! grumf! grumf! grumf!”
But what he was going to say or do was obliterated by a roar that came rumbling out of the hill-side. It was the forest roar of a lion, a deep-throated fearsome sound. Helen stood looking up at Benbeg. She knew what it was. It was the stag's challenge. The mating season had begun.
“What a terrifying sound!”
“Sounds as if he meant it,” Harry answered. There was a disturbing male sarcasm in his voice. Helen ignored it. Alick and Donald were waiting for them. As they came up, Alick said, “It's the twentieth of September. In Gaelic they call it the Day of the Roaring.” The quiet, half-humoured expression was on his face. They all stood together, looking up at the hills. From far in towards Benuain came another roar, much less in volume, but with an added impressiveness from distance. And then the first roar was repeated.
“I think”, said Alick, “that he is in Coireglas. Hinds like that corrie for the flat of green grass in its lower end. You'll often find a few of them there in the morning and evening.”
“Do you think we should make for it?” Harry asked.
“I think we should.”
“Right!” He looked at the sky, but after the dispersal of the mist it was innocent of cloud. However, there was a distinct air of wind. “It should blow into the corrie from the main glen?”
“Yes,” said Alick, “at a slant. Towards the middle of the corrie on the south side”âhe drew the narrowed horse-shoe formation of the corrie with Harry's staffâ“it is steep, with some rocks, just here. If the wind is coming at that slant, as I think it is, then it hits this steep point and swirls round the back of the corrie and along the north sideâto meet the incoming wind again.”
“Which means,” said Harry, “that if we tried to do things along the north side we are liable to have our scent carried on the back eddy?”
Alick nodded. Harry explained to Helen how, though moving against the general direction of the wind, one can run into a betraying eddy going the opposite wayâdead into the wind. “Interesting, isn't it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Very. Are you going after the stag that roared?”
“Yes,âbut, of course, you never know.”
“Quite. I see.”
They all moved on, until at last Alick stopped Donald and told him to wait with the pony for further directions to be given by signal.
“Aren't you coming?” Harry, turning round, asked Helen.
“I don't think I should. I'll just be in the way.”
“No, you won't. This is your day.”
“Oh, I don't think so. You have your stalk.”
Harry looked at her. “You mean you would rather not?”
She nodded. “Yes.” Harry still looked at her, uncertain of her motive, for she was capable of denying herself in any one's interest.
“Wellâas you like. We'll be an hour or two in any case, and, if we wound the beast, any number of hours.”
“I'll really enjoy myself here. I want to have a look around for any strange hill plants. Truly.”
“As you say.” Harry raised his cap. As he was turning away, she smiled.
“Please don't wound him.”
He smiled back, but in a constrained way.
He's put out that I didn't go with him! she thought. Why didn't I? She knew she wouldn't like to see the stag actually being shot. She would hate it. Or so she imagined. But that did not interfere with her common sense.â¦
She started talking to Donald, until she saw that though he spoke calmly enough and politely, he was really embarrassed by her presence. Besides, her only questions could be personal ones, and what right had she to inquire into his hopes or destiny? Yet she felt the seductive pleasure of talking to him, because of his dark eyes and black hair and dusky face and long eyelashes and an utterly indefinable quality of charm. Not exactly the shyness, the awkward grace, that flatters one's vanity, nor altogether the unselfconsciousness that enchants by its natural ease. Actually Donald was rather a gauche, slightly overgrown youth, well fleshed, with hair blue-black and surely too thick, too luxuriant. And then she would see the smile open in his face, like a dark rose, and there she was!
Unlike Harry, she was quite certain that this was not the charm that deceives. The charm that deceives is much franker, more ingenuous. It is not conditioned by anything, least of all by “morals”. Its deceit has a child's face, a good man's kindness. It is forgiven over and overâuntil it is despised and loathed.
“Do you know anything about the plants that grow on the moor?”
He did not know much, he said. So she left him and began to wander around, until her mind became a maze of colours and marsh and peat-ooze. I could go poking about like this for ever! she thought. She was intensely happy. She found deer's grass crawling amongst the heather like green snakes. And once she lost herself in reverie, staring at the tiny flowers on a stalk of heath. So perfect they were, so beautifully formed, so rich in colour, and honey-fragrant. Her eyes caught a gleam of serpent humour as she found herself drawing the stalk slowly along her lips.
She gave a small smile to herself and remembered Harry. Her teeth gleamed.
That heavy man's sarcasm at the roar of the stag! That dumb brutal male humour of the flesh!
She was not letting it affect her much. She was too quick for that. Elusive as the wind! she thought.
It will overtake you yet!
Will it? she challenged.
But after a time, she confessed, apropos of nothing:
I shall go mad some time! I shall go clean mad!
And she lay down, and drew her knees up to her breast, curled under the sun, and crushed her madness slowly, and let her mind escape.
At the echoing crack of the rifle, her right hand clutched fiercely under her left breast. She felt a pain, no broader than a bullet, pierce her heart. She listened, mouth open. A second shot. She turned over, crushing against her elbows. Oh, Harry! she cried silently. Harry! And buried her face in the hard prickling heather. Then she got up, smoothed her face, and wandered slowly back to Donald.
That young man was eagerly watching the hill-tops and could not tell her what had happened.
“Did he miss the first time?”
“Yes.” Then he added: “Or may be he tried for a second one.”
They stood there for a long time, but neither Harry nor Alick appeared.
“Perhaps he wounded him,” said Donald.
Helen's face winced, as she asked what that would mean.
“When you wound a beast, you have to follow him”, explained Donald, “until you kill him!”
“Will that take time?”
“It all depends. If he is badly wounded it mightn't take so long, but sometimes you may have to follow him into another forest.”
“But you must get him?”
“If you can.”
Helen nodded. Pain and death, pain and death. From the hills, from the moors. The incoming surge hurt and frightened her. Not to-day! cried her spirit. Oh, not to-day!
“Does the wounded beast just run on?” she asked calmly.
“If he is badly wounded, he falls out soon. He tries to find a place. Then you stalk him there.”
“And the others run on and desert him?”
“Not always. Often another stag or two will stay with him and keep guard.”
“Do they?” asked Helen, heartened.
“Yes,” said Donald.
They were silent for a long time. Running deer, lovely running deer. Her sympathies were with the deer and not with the hunters. This was like a betrayal, a betrayal of Harry, of all her men, the hunting men, the hunters that came over horizon after primeval horizon, through dark ages and medieval ages, into the September sun of this day she was alive in.
As she shifted her stance, she glanced at Donald. His eyes never left a certain point in the hills. He had the keen concentrated expression of the hunter, the eyebrows gathered a little over far-sighted eyes. Ruthless, she thought.
And all at once she was struck by something terrifying in the aspect of man, something she had never experienced before, that separated man from her, some dark force of the spirit, that could grip male flesh. Donald never moved. He looked as if he could stand like that for ever.
The moment's sensation carried within it its own visual imageâan aspect of man, a man's questing head, potent and mythological. Deep in her it would remain for ever.
For here was Helen, Helen Marway, in the bright sun, running with the invisible deer, running beyond men, in the light.
Not pain, not death, not potent mythological facesâbut light and the hooves of the running deer.
Until she felt in herself the dreadful cleavage, the awful balancing, pull and counter-pull, passion and ecstasy, between dark and light.
“There they are,” said Donald.
“Where?”
He did not answer, looking into the hills. He gave a signal with his right arm. “They're not wanting me.”
“Where are they?”
He tried to point them out to her, and when she said that she could not see them, he replied that it was impossible to see them now because they were against a dark hill-side. He obviously kept looking at them for a few more seconds, before suggesting, “Perhaps we should go to meet them. We have the lunch.”
“What's happened, do you think?”
“I don't know.” But as they moved forward, he volunteered the suggestion that there wouldn't likely be any more stalking. And when Helen questioned him, he explained that what with the good day that was in it, the deer would now be on the tops.
“Do you think they have got the stag?”
“Oh no.”
“Perhaps it was wounded and got too far away.”
“I couldn't say.”
“What do you think?”
“I don't think it was wounded.”
“Why?”
“Because if it was wounded Alick would get it.”
“You have great faith in Alick?” She watched the smile dawn in his face.
“Yes, ma'm.”
And Donald proved to be right. Harry gave Helen a wave.
“What luck?” she cried.
“Rotten!” And, as he came up, “I'm ashamed of myself. A really fine head. Ten pointer. And what a weight! I don't know what went wrong. An absolutely clean miss.”
“But didn't you fire again?”
“Yes. Tried him on the run. Don't mention it, for heaven's sake. What a shot!” He sat down with a thump. “Let us eat and forget it. Where's the flask? Alick!”
“It was a long difficult shot.” Alick explained to Helen.
“It wasn't. It wasn't nearly two hundred yardsâand straight acrossâtarget practice!” Harry declared.
“It was the colouring behind. The outline was vague at the distance. A very difficult shot.”
“Bosh! Drink this.”
“Good health!” murmured Alick and drank. Then he turned towards Donald and the pony and they went away some little distance before Alick sat down, and Donald opened out the gillies' lunch. Their backs politely to the toffs, they ate and talked away together.
Harry talked, too, describing the stalk with animation. “I was so keen to bag a good head to-day. I did really want to get you a fine trophy. I was so keen. That's the whole thing. I'm mad at myself, really mad.”
“I'm not.”
“Very decent of you. You can be really decent. All the same, that doesn't let me off. I wish I had that shot over again. Here, eat some of these.”
“Give me time. I'm ravenous.”
“We could have gone much much farther. But we'd never have got back in time for that bally dinner at Screesval. Hang it! Oh never mind!” He shoved most of a sandwich into his mouth, said, “George is certain⦔ and choked.
Helen laughed. “I have a confession to make.”
He looked at her.
“I put a hoodoo on you.”
He swallowed.
“I do not want you to kill the stag to-day.”
His eyebrows gathered and he gazed at her with a male penetrating expression.
Helen's eyes wavered, and she looked across the moor with an enigmatic defensive smile.
“How do you mean?”
“Oh”âHelen lifted her shouldersâ“just a joke.” Then she flashed him a smile. “Was the stag keeping company?”
“Regular old sultan.”
“Poor old chap. Bit tough on him, I thought, on such a fine morning.”
Harry kept looking at her. Then he shrugged also and smiled. “Oh, that.”
“Pretty poor joke, Harry. I'm sorry.”
He kept on eating. “Here, have some of these.”
“Thanks. Been a gorgeous day, hasn't it?”
“Rather. It was a damned hind that spotted me and barked.”
“How mean of her!”
“You for a pukka sahib!”
“I do feel awful.”
“Sentimental. You!”
“Go on, rub it in.”
“Don't you see you're letting down your race?”
“Absolutely. I can assure you, however, that it was merely a temporary aberration.” A danger flash came into her eyes. “I can assure you it shan't happen again. In these circumstances, perhaps you could strain your sahib's conscience to overlook it.”
“You seem to forget hell.”
“How divine of you to come for me! And you lookedâsuch a frightened, awkward boy.”
“I put the heart across you, anyway.”
“Faith and you did.” Nothing could subdue her mirth. “So please don't do it again.”
“Don't worry.”
“Not without warning, anyway.”
He stopped and regarded her back, as she moved on humming an air. She stopped, turned, and raised her eyebrows. “Anything wrong?”
As he came on, she kept time to his deliberate steps: “Grumf! grumf! grumf! grumf!”
But what he was going to say or do was obliterated by a roar that came rumbling out of the hill-side. It was the forest roar of a lion, a deep-throated fearsome sound. Helen stood looking up at Benbeg. She knew what it was. It was the stag's challenge. The mating season had begun.
“What a terrifying sound!”
“Sounds as if he meant it,” Harry answered. There was a disturbing male sarcasm in his voice. Helen ignored it. Alick and Donald were waiting for them. As they came up, Alick said, “It's the twentieth of September. In Gaelic they call it the Day of the Roaring.” The quiet, half-humoured expression was on his face. They all stood together, looking up at the hills. From far in towards Benuain came another roar, much less in volume, but with an added impressiveness from distance. And then the first roar was repeated.
“I think”, said Alick, “that he is in Coireglas. Hinds like that corrie for the flat of green grass in its lower end. You'll often find a few of them there in the morning and evening.”
“Do you think we should make for it?” Harry asked.
“I think we should.”
“Right!” He looked at the sky, but after the dispersal of the mist it was innocent of cloud. However, there was a distinct air of wind. “It should blow into the corrie from the main glen?”
“Yes,” said Alick, “at a slant. Towards the middle of the corrie on the south side”âhe drew the narrowed horse-shoe formation of the corrie with Harry's staffâ“it is steep, with some rocks, just here. If the wind is coming at that slant, as I think it is, then it hits this steep point and swirls round the back of the corrie and along the north sideâto meet the incoming wind again.”
“Which means,” said Harry, “that if we tried to do things along the north side we are liable to have our scent carried on the back eddy?”
Alick nodded. Harry explained to Helen how, though moving against the general direction of the wind, one can run into a betraying eddy going the opposite wayâdead into the wind. “Interesting, isn't it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Very. Are you going after the stag that roared?”
“Yes,âbut, of course, you never know.”
“Quite. I see.”
They all moved on, until at last Alick stopped Donald and told him to wait with the pony for further directions to be given by signal.
“Aren't you coming?” Harry, turning round, asked Helen.
“I don't think I should. I'll just be in the way.”
“No, you won't. This is your day.”
“Oh, I don't think so. You have your stalk.”
Harry looked at her. “You mean you would rather not?”
She nodded. “Yes.” Harry still looked at her, uncertain of her motive, for she was capable of denying herself in any one's interest.
“Wellâas you like. We'll be an hour or two in any case, and, if we wound the beast, any number of hours.”
“I'll really enjoy myself here. I want to have a look around for any strange hill plants. Truly.”
“As you say.” Harry raised his cap. As he was turning away, she smiled.
“Please don't wound him.”
He smiled back, but in a constrained way.
He's put out that I didn't go with him! she thought. Why didn't I? She knew she wouldn't like to see the stag actually being shot. She would hate it. Or so she imagined. But that did not interfere with her common sense.â¦
She started talking to Donald, until she saw that though he spoke calmly enough and politely, he was really embarrassed by her presence. Besides, her only questions could be personal ones, and what right had she to inquire into his hopes or destiny? Yet she felt the seductive pleasure of talking to him, because of his dark eyes and black hair and dusky face and long eyelashes and an utterly indefinable quality of charm. Not exactly the shyness, the awkward grace, that flatters one's vanity, nor altogether the unselfconsciousness that enchants by its natural ease. Actually Donald was rather a gauche, slightly overgrown youth, well fleshed, with hair blue-black and surely too thick, too luxuriant. And then she would see the smile open in his face, like a dark rose, and there she was!
Unlike Harry, she was quite certain that this was not the charm that deceives. The charm that deceives is much franker, more ingenuous. It is not conditioned by anything, least of all by “morals”. Its deceit has a child's face, a good man's kindness. It is forgiven over and overâuntil it is despised and loathed.
“Do you know anything about the plants that grow on the moor?”
He did not know much, he said. So she left him and began to wander around, until her mind became a maze of colours and marsh and peat-ooze. I could go poking about like this for ever! she thought. She was intensely happy. She found deer's grass crawling amongst the heather like green snakes. And once she lost herself in reverie, staring at the tiny flowers on a stalk of heath. So perfect they were, so beautifully formed, so rich in colour, and honey-fragrant. Her eyes caught a gleam of serpent humour as she found herself drawing the stalk slowly along her lips.
She gave a small smile to herself and remembered Harry. Her teeth gleamed.
That heavy man's sarcasm at the roar of the stag! That dumb brutal male humour of the flesh!
She was not letting it affect her much. She was too quick for that. Elusive as the wind! she thought.
It will overtake you yet!
Will it? she challenged.
But after a time, she confessed, apropos of nothing:
I shall go mad some time! I shall go clean mad!
And she lay down, and drew her knees up to her breast, curled under the sun, and crushed her madness slowly, and let her mind escape.
At the echoing crack of the rifle, her right hand clutched fiercely under her left breast. She felt a pain, no broader than a bullet, pierce her heart. She listened, mouth open. A second shot. She turned over, crushing against her elbows. Oh, Harry! she cried silently. Harry! And buried her face in the hard prickling heather. Then she got up, smoothed her face, and wandered slowly back to Donald.
That young man was eagerly watching the hill-tops and could not tell her what had happened.
“Did he miss the first time?”
“Yes.” Then he added: “Or may be he tried for a second one.”
They stood there for a long time, but neither Harry nor Alick appeared.
“Perhaps he wounded him,” said Donald.
Helen's face winced, as she asked what that would mean.
“When you wound a beast, you have to follow him”, explained Donald, “until you kill him!”
“Will that take time?”
“It all depends. If he is badly wounded it mightn't take so long, but sometimes you may have to follow him into another forest.”
“But you must get him?”
“If you can.”
Helen nodded. Pain and death, pain and death. From the hills, from the moors. The incoming surge hurt and frightened her. Not to-day! cried her spirit. Oh, not to-day!
“Does the wounded beast just run on?” she asked calmly.
“If he is badly wounded, he falls out soon. He tries to find a place. Then you stalk him there.”
“And the others run on and desert him?”
“Not always. Often another stag or two will stay with him and keep guard.”
“Do they?” asked Helen, heartened.
“Yes,” said Donald.
They were silent for a long time. Running deer, lovely running deer. Her sympathies were with the deer and not with the hunters. This was like a betrayal, a betrayal of Harry, of all her men, the hunting men, the hunters that came over horizon after primeval horizon, through dark ages and medieval ages, into the September sun of this day she was alive in.
As she shifted her stance, she glanced at Donald. His eyes never left a certain point in the hills. He had the keen concentrated expression of the hunter, the eyebrows gathered a little over far-sighted eyes. Ruthless, she thought.
And all at once she was struck by something terrifying in the aspect of man, something she had never experienced before, that separated man from her, some dark force of the spirit, that could grip male flesh. Donald never moved. He looked as if he could stand like that for ever.
The moment's sensation carried within it its own visual imageâan aspect of man, a man's questing head, potent and mythological. Deep in her it would remain for ever.
For here was Helen, Helen Marway, in the bright sun, running with the invisible deer, running beyond men, in the light.
Not pain, not death, not potent mythological facesâbut light and the hooves of the running deer.
Until she felt in herself the dreadful cleavage, the awful balancing, pull and counter-pull, passion and ecstasy, between dark and light.
“There they are,” said Donald.
“Where?”
He did not answer, looking into the hills. He gave a signal with his right arm. “They're not wanting me.”
“Where are they?”
He tried to point them out to her, and when she said that she could not see them, he replied that it was impossible to see them now because they were against a dark hill-side. He obviously kept looking at them for a few more seconds, before suggesting, “Perhaps we should go to meet them. We have the lunch.”
“What's happened, do you think?”
“I don't know.” But as they moved forward, he volunteered the suggestion that there wouldn't likely be any more stalking. And when Helen questioned him, he explained that what with the good day that was in it, the deer would now be on the tops.
“Do you think they have got the stag?”
“Oh no.”
“Perhaps it was wounded and got too far away.”
“I couldn't say.”
“What do you think?”
“I don't think it was wounded.”
“Why?”
“Because if it was wounded Alick would get it.”
“You have great faith in Alick?” She watched the smile dawn in his face.
“Yes, ma'm.”
And Donald proved to be right. Harry gave Helen a wave.
“What luck?” she cried.
“Rotten!” And, as he came up, “I'm ashamed of myself. A really fine head. Ten pointer. And what a weight! I don't know what went wrong. An absolutely clean miss.”
“But didn't you fire again?”
“Yes. Tried him on the run. Don't mention it, for heaven's sake. What a shot!” He sat down with a thump. “Let us eat and forget it. Where's the flask? Alick!”
“It was a long difficult shot.” Alick explained to Helen.
“It wasn't. It wasn't nearly two hundred yardsâand straight acrossâtarget practice!” Harry declared.
“It was the colouring behind. The outline was vague at the distance. A very difficult shot.”
“Bosh! Drink this.”
“Good health!” murmured Alick and drank. Then he turned towards Donald and the pony and they went away some little distance before Alick sat down, and Donald opened out the gillies' lunch. Their backs politely to the toffs, they ate and talked away together.
Harry talked, too, describing the stalk with animation. “I was so keen to bag a good head to-day. I did really want to get you a fine trophy. I was so keen. That's the whole thing. I'm mad at myself, really mad.”
“I'm not.”
“Very decent of you. You can be really decent. All the same, that doesn't let me off. I wish I had that shot over again. Here, eat some of these.”
“Give me time. I'm ravenous.”
“We could have gone much much farther. But we'd never have got back in time for that bally dinner at Screesval. Hang it! Oh never mind!” He shoved most of a sandwich into his mouth, said, “George is certain⦔ and choked.
Helen laughed. “I have a confession to make.”
He looked at her.
“I put a hoodoo on you.”
He swallowed.
“I do not want you to kill the stag to-day.”
His eyebrows gathered and he gazed at her with a male penetrating expression.
Helen's eyes wavered, and she looked across the moor with an enigmatic defensive smile.
“How do you mean?”
“Oh”âHelen lifted her shouldersâ“just a joke.” Then she flashed him a smile. “Was the stag keeping company?”
“Regular old sultan.”
“Poor old chap. Bit tough on him, I thought, on such a fine morning.”
Harry kept looking at her. Then he shrugged also and smiled. “Oh, that.”
“Pretty poor joke, Harry. I'm sorry.”
He kept on eating. “Here, have some of these.”
“Thanks. Been a gorgeous day, hasn't it?”
“Rather. It was a damned hind that spotted me and barked.”
“How mean of her!”
“You for a pukka sahib!”
“I do feel awful.”
“Sentimental. You!”
“Go on, rub it in.”
“Don't you see you're letting down your race?”
“Absolutely. I can assure you, however, that it was merely a temporary aberration.” A danger flash came into her eyes. “I can assure you it shan't happen again. In these circumstances, perhaps you could strain your sahib's conscience to overlook it.”
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