The Shadow (6 page)

The policeman had finally left the Wood where we met and, going across the moor towards the hill burn, had come on the hankie in the heather. So I had not dropped it in the gorge. Aunt Phemie was able to assure him I had lost it, and my initials completed the evidence. I was genuinely glad about this. It might so easily have been otherwise. In fact we got some fun out of imagining it as a dramatic exhibit in court. The tame returning of it by the policeman was an anti-climax. No author of detective stories could live and throw away a clue that had been so naturally “planted”. I did my best about this, and then Aunt Phemie went one better: the police are hunting a definite man, thin, with lank greying hair.

It's really a miserable story. A shell-shock case from the last war; a local man, who has completely disappeared since the murder. They think he is hiding in the countryside somewhere. Probably has taken to the hills and is lying up in some hole. But unless he dies there, he must come back for food, so there are night patrols. There is a terrific amount of feeling about it, at least the countryside can talk about nothing else. It's everywhere, like the stalking shadow of the man himself. Mothers get their children in early.

In the city we never seemed to come across men suffering from shell-shock (all here call it shell-shock anyway). But in the country things are different. Human beings are living individuals somehow, one apart from the other. Last winter four stacks of hay were burned one night, without rhyme or reason—out in a field where no-one could have been taking shelter—not insured, and a dead loss to the farmer, a decent man. Other more horrid things about animals—all pointing to a deranged condition of mind. In a neighbouring parish there's a somewhat similar case, though in the dark nights of last winter he became a menace through frightening women and girls on the country roads. I don't think he actually did any of them physical harm, but there were one or two bad cases of hysteria. Country folk don't like to do anything to these men. There's a feeling for them, a knowledge that they are as they are because they fought for us. I know you may think that stupid and not even fair to the men. I am not sure about it now. Yet I have a vague understanding too, as of some queer conception of guilt somewhere, and perhaps an unconscious acceptance of responsibility for the guilt, here in the country.

Anyhow, the police have found some clues at Farquhar's cottage. The policeman would not say what they are, but Aunt Phemie was given the impression that the shell-shocked man left unmistakable traces behind. His name is Gordon MacMaster. Aunt Phemie told me a lot about him, about his people, too, and it was like listening to a story in a country that was at once near yet distant, and one saw the strange river of his family blood. This hardly affected me, I saw it so clearly. To be able to see it was part of the mystery and this kept us from feeling too much. All we felt was a profound sadness for the man himself, but even that was distant, like an apprehension of fate. Now I could not leave Aunt Phemie, for if I were alone too soon a hand might touch me, something coming out from the story, and I did not want to lose my detached feeling, the calm emptiness inside me. We wondered where he could be. Aunt Phemie knows a lot about psychology, and not only as a science. She is wise. I mean while telling you about the mind she at the same time remains aware. You feel this, yet not as an intrusion. Cases of this kind, she said, have a sort of primitive cunning. With the money he got—and he must have got some—he may have left the countryside altogether. He would have had a clear two days' start. Very little whisky upset him, and as whisky is almost unobtainable here he may have set out for a city, perhaps where he used to spend a short leave in his old army days, and may be going from pub to pub when they open. If so, he should soon be found. The only alternative, said Aunt Phemie, is that he hasn't gone, and in that case he is already dead, for everyone in the countryside knew him. In a way beyond explanation we feel that he has not gone, as though in an ultimate moment of realisation he would be held, and desire to be held, by the dark matrix of his native earth. He would sink into it, or plunge. Whether we said so or not, I am not sure now. It is a little too like a dream, perhaps, and every dream, we are told, is the result of a wish-impulse.
Our
wish-impulse in this case. But we definitely did not discuss this. Though Aunt Phemie would certainly have done so had she thought it was between us. Perhaps it only came into my mind afterwards—only a moment ago, probably, for you know how old a new thought, or even a new happening, can appear sometimes.

There was one moment when I was nearly upset. I felt the dim tremor coming in the distance, but I deliberately turned from it. Aunt Phemie said: Poor man, he should have been treated somewhere. This raised the idea of an institution, and somehow I can't bear that yet. I very nearly answered with cold bitterness: I know—just shove him into an institution. But I stopped myself. I blacked out.

I couldn't have done it if I hadn't been cool. And I know quite well where this calm has come from. That time when I let go about intellectuals and escapism, it was really as if I had vomited something up. I look over the words I have written about it and see they convey little or nothing of the horrible spasm. And I know how open to misinterpretation they are. But words have little to do with an act of retching.

Of course it is finally clear to me now that I am not going to show you this. You have too much to bear as it is and its egoism would be unpardonable. I am making a story of myself to myself. This will help me. At least I think it will. Like one who suddenly finds himself at sea and is sick; after the bout—what relief! But there are many bouts—before he finds his sea legs and is well again. Isn't that a satisfactory literary figure? But it's a mysterious ship. The queer thing about it all, Ranald, is that I must write it to you. If I hadn't you, I couldn't write. Writing would be impossible, unthinkable. Oh, utterly. What would happen to me then—but I black out. I can afford to, for you are. Which is very marvellous. Also the writing to you will keep me within certain bounds. I know what they are. Also—for I must be honest or all would be mockery—I feel that I am doing this for you. And I am not just thinking selfishly of my getting well for your sake and mine. It's far deeper than that. But I cannot tell you yet. I cannot even write it. I am only hoping that I may some day.

It is after midnight. The house is very quiet and outside the quietness reigns. There should be great healing in this quietness. I wonder if I should put out my light and chance going to sleep without help? I feel I might. I hardly dare risk it. I'll take only one tablet. Good night, Ranald.

I had a lovely sleep. Is there anything more exquisite in the world than wakening from a perfect sleep? The light is new; it greets you. Honestly, Ranald, it does. There is a glance in it, like the glance of laughing eyes, and the sky is blue, and the old wind is wandering about fresh as clover. It's there! you think. That other world is there. It has found you with its sly mirth. It's here.

It was here all the time, of course, but when you have lost it you don't believe it's anywhere. An illusion or delusion that any psychologist can explain away without the slightest difficulty.
Nae bother,
as Hamish used to say. How is he? Did he have his picture show? Do tell me. I never could understand what he meant by
time;
I got lost in his words as in a wood. The only thing I understood was his distrust of people who could explain things slickly. When I saw that momentary sobering come to his face like a dry wind, and heard his
Ay! he's a know-all,
I never could help laughing. Then he looked and laughed himself. Roared. It was always an exhilarating moment. The trees in the wood were scattered about and the sun came in. Many thought his pictures mad. I remember when a certain one—I cannot even write his name—dismissed them with know-all expression and smile as
private phantasies,
I could have slain him. All I managed was to retort that I preferred Hamish's private phantasies to most men's public thoughts. Then, knowing I was getting at him, he looked at me, and the know-all expression and smile conveyed with insinuating silence:
So that's the way the wind is blowing? A crush on Hamish!
And he showed he enjoyed the news. It was at such a moment, Ranald—and this was before the break came—that I knew that I too wanted destruction for its own sake. That awful uprising desire to catch with your hands and tear asunder, to destroy. Remember that night, the race of the two cars? As the excitement and the hectic laughter grew—faster! faster!—what were we all racing upon but destruction? And when the excitement became intolerable and Julie screamed her mad challenge and we crossed the fatal border in our minds, what were we all rushing upon but self-destruction? We knew the craving. I saw it in a face that haunts me. The unbearable craving for the final obliterating crash.

I stopped there and went out for a walk. It angered me that I could not even begin to tell you of beautiful real things without getting messed up by such memories. I know they obsess me and I must get free of them. I could not even write these three words
beautiful real things
without a qualm, without hearing the echo of their jeering laughter, without a feeling of being detected in pulpy sentimentality. Oh, there I go again! What an extraordinary power and vitality the destructive mind has! How sickening the mere quiescence of
good
is to
evil!

Oh, stop it …!

Here I am again, up for the next round. Hullo, Ranald! How lovely—if you came walking in! I would take you out and try to show you that other world. Or would I?—could I? Perhaps I had better tell you about it first. For I feel free to-day. They do say that the unconscious mind goes on thinking its own unconscious thoughts. I believe it anyway, for otherwise how could I have the feeling that what troubled me in some obscure way about the murder has been withdrawn? The sunlight looked at me this morning, then it smiled. I knew.

What I am going to tell you is very difficult to put in words. Perhaps quite impossible. All I know is that it is very, very important. For what I want to do is to take you into that other world. It isn't, of course, another world: it's this world. But what has happened to our minds has also happened to our eyes, and we can't see it. You may think it silly of me to say that, because we see it only too well. But don't get impatient, Ranald, please. I have seen you show remarkable patience when listening to fools. And on my part I promise not to mention beauty, sunsets, love, magic, and silly words like these. All I am after, Ranald, is
health;
and if I have a sort of feeling that it is not my own health only, well, don't you feel in your political work that you too are after more than your own health? Let us call it our common delusion! Doesn't that even bring the smile? Let me shake you. Ah, you smile! Sunshine! I mock you, you big intellectual tough.

But where will I begin? For this is not a new discovery to me. It couldn't be, or it wouldn't have set up the conflict which broke me. For a nervous breakdown can only come from an unconscious conflict, what? Let it be whispered it may not always be so unconscious as all that!

I'm reluctant to begin, and indeed after the last sentence I went down and did a bit of washing-up because I spotted Aunt Phemie going over to the steading. A woman from the farm cottages comes every morning to help clean and tidy up. As I was looking out of the scullery window on the field of ripening grain, I saw the wind on the grain, a fitful wandering wind. I watched it as I stood there drying a pan. I felt that the house behind me was empty, that I was alone, and there came the old old sensation of liberation which permits you to smile to yourself and think what you like. Do you know what I mean—that curious enlargement of freedom, with a something of secrecy and gaiety about it? Talk about a vague pantheism if you like; I don't give a hoot. For my toes wanted to race my heart-beats. Suddenly I remembered long ago when the need to race came—and I couldn't move. Let me tell you about it.

I must have been about sixteen at the time (nearly a whole decade ago!). I had had 'flu—our High School had been devastated by it—and I was recovering at home. I hadn't really been very bad, for illness never troubled me much. We had a terribly strict Maths. master, too, and that wasn't my best subject by more than a bit. In fact I had rather enjoyed my illness and one day had gone for a walk up through the little birch wood. It's really a long straggly wood, the narrow path slanting up it, so that you can stop here and there and look out of it. When you're very young that's an adventurous experience. One of my earliest memories is the surprise of thus looking out of it and seeing the little valley (we called it the Hallow) down below. I saw our cattle and I saw sheep and the stone ruins, and then all at once I saw my father. He was doing something to a fencing post. I cannot tell you how strange it was for me to see my father working there and him not to know I was looking away down at him. My elder sister must have been with me I suppose, but I don't remember her at that moment. I wanted to cry to my father, but I couldn't. He was alone and somehow there was a strangeness about his being all alone. Anyway—for I mustn't go on like this—I knew that wood. Birches must grow in my blood! Behold me then at the ripe age of sixteen coming down (not going up) through this wood. It is a still February day, one of those days when the earth, having been busy with the furies and changes of the elements, takes a rest. And all at once, Ranald, I realise that spring is coming. It is at hand. The birches know and are waiting. It is in the quality of the daylight, a grey soft light. I look far up into the sky and the blue is milky. Then I become aware of the birds, chaffinches, tits, the rousing song of a wren, a thrush singing away along the wood. But I don't think of them much, because of this expectancy of the spring itself that is about me, this quiet
waiting
that the singing hardly affects. There is no-one in the Hallow. The stone ruins, grey with age and lichen, are quietly still. You don't think of them as ruins because spring, so infinitely older, is near. You are aware that everything has its own secret awakening. I am only one thing, and I had better go quietly. But oh what a gladness and (I can't find the word) gratitude is in my heart. I am bursting with this knowledge and love of each thing and yet am inwardly stilled. For I mustn't make a noise. I go down the wood and distinctly get the faint fragrance of the approaching spring. It is an earthy fragrance, with a touch of burning wood or heather in it. I am trying to be exact. But it is a fragrance—and I know a few—that nothing else ever quite equals. No other scent
quickens
like this. Bear with me—for I hesitate—if I say that it quickens in a timeless, immortal way.