The Shadow (26 page)

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.

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.

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.

Men had gone mad. Aunt Phemie saw quite clearly that men had gone mad. Her vision went all over the earth and saw then in the logical movements of their madness, stalking here and there, into council chambers and out of them, into railway stations and air ports, across fields, all the fields of the world, intent and certain, fulfilling the high and urgent law of necessity. Whose necessity? cried her anguished spirit with an obliterating mockery. She flung herself on the bed, face down, and through her smothered mouth cried aloud “Christ! Christ!” but hardly thinking of Christ for her vision had been too much for her, too terrible to bear.

The following morning Aunt Phemie carefully wrapped up the picture and painting materials and stitched the lot together in a piece of canvas sacking which she addressed to Mr. Adam McAlpine and left at Shand's shop. At the same time she posted Adam a note telling what she had done, and returned home with a sense of relief. For she had realised last night that the only thing which mattered now was Nan's recovery; and that Nan was at last firmly on the path to recovery she had felt with a peculiar certainty. It was something in the air, her manner, an assurance, slowness, as though she could now pause in her appreciation of the beauty of the world, pause and reflect, with a simple gratitude and wonder. Tears had brightened her eyes because she was still physically weak and abnormally sensitive to the beauty she found, but now they were like rain, with light in them. Aunt Phemie could see that Nan's secret and profound sufferings had run their course, had burnt themselves out, leaving behind some fine essence which would be forever part of her character. It was an extraordinarily delicate thing, a fragility of convalescence, but of true convalescence, with the promise in it of strength.

How far her last hours with Ranald had contributed to this, she could not be sure. There was something about it all, Aunt Phemie deeply felt, which was more than a personal relationship, which in some vague indefinable way was fundamental and lasting. Yet it was, at the moment anyhow, indissolubly linked with Ranald.

Recent broken weather had delayed the harvest. Now as Aunt Phemie left the cartshed, where she had stabled her car, it began to rain in earnest, and for three days the wind blew and rain showers slashed and tore along the ripe grain fields. Much of the heavier growth was flattened, and old Will, smoking his pipe by a sheltered gable of the steading, thought stoically of scything and extra labour. It so often happened. Ay, that's the way it went. Aunt Phemie could never quite achieve this stoical acceptance; was still inclined to be pursued by the thought: If only it had kept off for a week or two! or had come in some moderation! But no, it must slash away and flatten as if at the very heart of nature waste had no meaning. Yet she understood Will's attitude too; and indeed found in it a strange enduring power. She was satisfied that the men of the land never cursed the weather; just as, she felt sure, real seamen never cursed the sea. There was something in this acceptance of the elements that had in it the strength of a grey rock. This was how real men endured.

But Nan secretly looked upon the rain storm in quite a different way. She could not be kept in, and sometimes in the lee of a hedge or an elm tree she would glance around to make sure she could not be seen and then, the wet slash on her face, would laugh and suck the rain drops from her cold lips.

A flying wildness, a soddenness in the beaten earth, a freshness, a brawling of gushets, a positive spate in the miniature greenbanked burn that wound its crooked way down from the high dam, a dripping lushness of wild flowers, a crush of green stems, clover leaves and silvered rain drops, glistening berries of the wild rose—ah lovely! lovely! She broke a hip with her thumb nail, scooped out the white hairy seeds, and chewed the red skin. Like tasting her childhood, living over again. Crushed red and rain drops in her mouth, and a cold nose. When she began to shiver she went home. Aunt Phemie scolded her and she put an arm round Aunt Phemie's waist, and Aunt Phemie told her she would have less of her blarney, and they had tea. But Nan did not now talk much about Ranald, hardly any at all. Aunt Phemie always knew, however, when she was upstairs writing.

When it looked as if the storm was going to batter everything, leaving the flattened grain as rot for a second growth to penetrate, the atmosphere cleared miraculously, and the sky. The wind blew from the opposite direction, was dry and light, and searched out the dampest places with a remarkable and happy persistence. This scented wind went to Nan's head a little, at times to her feet. The flattened grain under the rain had affected her occasionally with an extreme sense of dismay (not unalloyed, however, with a secret marvelling at so prodigal a waste), but now when the dry wind had done its work, the grain lay as if finally dead.

But when the mowing started on the low fields it was remarkable how the men “worked away with it”; soon in their rows the stooks arose and, beyond a lengthy stubble in places, the harvest was in truth being “won”.

The work in the harvest field fascinated Nan. It aroused in her some obscure atavistic instincts which at moments held a thrill as sharp and clean as frost. Her body felt extraordinarily light, as if every clot and congestion and poison had been purged by her illness. It grew easily tired but only needed a minute's rest for recovery; and inside her head, thought and impulse moved with the fine ease of the wind. The wind—the wind came to her from immense distances, wherein time and space were never confused yet were divided by no more than a momentary emphasis. Men and women were reaping actual fields now and in remote times. As in a dream, time itself became distance backward in space; but being awake, she had the sensation of time as distinct from space. The wind in her face and hair was now and then, for a tranced moment, a sheer laughing intoxication. She shook her head, opened her mouth, and said “Ah-h-h.”

When some of the women from the farm cottages turned out, Nan joined them. The Agricultural Executive Committee had compelled so extensive a cultivation of grain that there was insufficient labour to deal with the harvesting in anything like reasonable time. Aunt Phemie had had several consultations with the grieve about this, but he was inclined to go canny, to suggest that they would manage, said that he had “spoken” some help from the high crofts, and generally did not seem to favour a strong application to the distant “prisoners-of-war camp”. They discussed it right through to the “leading” of the stooks from the fields. “It's not everyone can build a stack,” said the grieve, who held the old notion that finely built and roofed stacks were a farm's crowning glory. “We can work so long as there's daylight in it,” he concluded.

Aunt Phemie kept an eye on Nan who really wasn't much use. She hadn't the pith, and the skin on her hands was too tender, but she was desperately willing. The second night she slept for ten solid hours. She awoke stiff and comically happy. But nothing would finally repress her. For all the time she had one consuming notion of her own: she wanted to drive the tractor.

She made advances to the tractor lad. He was twenty, shy, open-faced, with a swaying lithe body, Will's youngest son and a grand worker. She talked to him about engines, about a highpowered American car which she had driven in London for a time for an American officer. She sat in the driver's iron seat of the tractor, and finally drove it a short distance with George standing on behind.

Before Nan's enthusiasm when the tractor was silent, George admitted, “Och, she's not bad. But if you saw the red International Diesel, with caterpillars—you drive her with two handles and she'll turn on a sixpence.”

“No!”

“Yes,” said George. “They got one—under the American lease-lend, they say—at Balgruan. I had a go at her. She'll do anything.”

When Nan came into the lamp-lit kitchen she said, “Aunt Phemie, I nearly kissed George.”

Aunt Phemie turned from the frying pan, a knife in her hand. “Nan Gordon, you'll please keep your hands off my men. I saw you trying to vamp that fine lad. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”