The Sending (3 page)

When I asked her what his neighbours used to say about that, she just replied: ‘'E were a funny man,' looking as if she could say more but wanted a lead from me. I must have chosen the wrong one, telling her about Meg and her habits in the hope that she would open up about the companionship, if any, of a bantam cock. She did not seem overinterested and returned to the bar.

Alcohol helps—so much that I see danger there and must be careful. I ate well and slept well, but woke up sweating with panic. I am trying to blame it on a slight hangover, but that explanation, I know, is ridiculous. The open is no good; cover is no good; even the sanity and fragrance of a little pub in utter quiet between pasture and the heathlands of Poole Harbour is no good. I might just as well go home.

Chapter Two

June 4

I HAVE AT LAST made myself call on Dr Gargary. I had refused to consider it before I ran away, being almost as afraid of his tough, hearty manner as of my suffering. I knew him only as a Penminster worthy and occasional companion, for I had never needed his services. Consequently I underrated his intelligence. I am prejudiced against the artificiality of the professional manner, whether of doctors, lawyers or priests. Unfair. I never minded the proud bearing and military panache of my Indian officers.

I ran into him at the school sports day and on a desperate impulse told him that I needed his advice and that it was not a matter he could deal with in the surgery. He at once asked me round to his house for a drink. There I told him as much as I thought fit, trying to play down the irresistible terror. I did not expect much skill in psychiatry from a general practitioner in a country district. Again wrong. While the specialist can concentrate on the cases where the ever-changing theories are applicable, the country doctor—in tune with the seasons and the reluctance of his patients (so unlike townsmen) to waste time on medicine men unless in serious trouble—has to keep a more open mind.

‘My dear man,' he said, ‘let's get another fear out of the way first! You are not going mad, whatever mad means. Fear of a fear is fairly common. Call them Fear One and Fear Two! Get at the cause of Fear Two and Fear One vanishes. How's Meg?'

I replied that she was fine and added without thinking that she couldn't see anything wrong with me.

‘Well, we can't take her as gospel,' he said.

That left me staring at him in surprise.

‘I knew Paddy and Meg intimately,' he explained. ‘Meg's diagnosis could give a lead, but she is far better with animals. Ask the vet! Did Paddy ever talk about it to you?'

He never did, at least not in detail. He did say that he paid serious attention to what Meg had to tell him. I knew more or less what he meant: that there was always a reason for Meg's likes, dislikes and reactions. A musician, for example, can spot when a concert pianist plays the wrong note; the rest of us can't. Well, Meg is an expert in the music of personality. Paddy told me little or nothing of his ability to diagnose through Meg. I found out for myself that it was conceivably possible.

Gargary asked if I had always had a close relationship with animals. I told him about my brown mongoose—not all that different from Meg—and my cheetah kitten and the old zebu bull who used to walk on to my verandah to share my breakfast. There was nothing odd about that since, being sacred, he was permitted to swipe anything he wanted from any market stall or any table, but he would rest his great ugly head on my shoulder which impressed people, especially if it was evening and my Scops owl was occupying my other shoulder.

‘You are interested in the religions of India?' he asked, skating round the edges of my problem. ‘Meditation, Gurus, transmigration, all that?'

‘Mildly interested, yes. But much more in primitive religion which is not particularly Indian.'

Painting started it. A British mess would have found my hobby—as it then was—eccentric. The writing of poetry, if kept reasonably private, is permissible; but taking one's leave in hill jungles with an easel and paints instead of a gun would put a question mark over, say, one's choice of a mule track to support a flank attack. Indian officers, however, saw no inconsistency. To worship aspects of Shiva as well as Kali was perfectly acceptable.

But that is by the way. Year after year I used to stay with an old friend very loosely administering the Birhors, lost in the hills of the north-east Deccan and barely out of the Stone Age. As soon as I had learned enough of their language I began to understand all that the human animal abandoned when it turned from hunting and food-gathering to agriculture. Both he and I often accompanied the tribe on hunting expeditions, eating and sleeping as they did. When I tried to sketch them I found that my quick drawings were so vividly alive that they had a quite remarkable resemblance to palaeolithic art. As for him, he was so much at home that when he was dying—a bear broke the net and got him—he gave orders that he was to be buried as a clansman. The tribe obeyed, honouring his spirit with the long incantations of the shaman and touchingly laying in the grave, besides food and drink, a packet of his cigarettes, his official hat, a spear, his gun and two hundred cartridges.

After his death the shaman begged me to return to them whenever I could, saying that he would know when to expect me and himself would meet me on the track. That proved to be true. The receptors of his mind—at any rate between brothers—were as efficient as the now useless and mildewed radio. And brothers we were, for I had gladly submitted to the ceremony of exchanging blood with him. The gains were many, for I could appreciate the meaning of his rites and dogmas, and express it, for myself alone, in words. Some beliefs were absurd; for example, since his totem was the tiger so was mine, and therefore I could not marry the daughter of a tiger. Others were not absurd, but incapable of proof. He assured me that I could receive thoughts emanating from a tiger. They may have appeared in nightmarish daydreams but I could not recognise them. When once I told Paddy of all this, he accepted to my surprise that the shaman, my tiger brother, possibly could. I prefer the word shaman to witch-doctor. It has the connotation of a priest caring for parishioners rather than the tatty and terrifying antics of rattling gourds, tusk teeth and painted body.

‘Are you yourself religious?' Gargary asked.

‘Profoundly—in the sense that I believe in a Purpose and that all life is one. Benedicite omnia opera!'

‘Then have you any theory yourself about your neurosis? You said that the follower had no form but it was present. Is it present now?'

‘It is waiting for me when I go out.'

‘Shall I ask it to come in?'

I am ashamed to record that I broke down there. I can see now what he was after: to find out how objective it was in my imagination. It was hardly Harley Street treatment, I am sure, to knock down all my defences with seven words instead of an hour a week for six months.

‘Would you like to tell me your own theory?' he asked when I had recovered. ‘A man with your enquiring mind must have one, however bizarre.'

Yes, I do have one and I tried to explain it to him. It's not at all bizarre. Animals know when they are in danger; they also know when they are not. A full-fed tiger can walk past a herd, which will quietly continue to graze. I told him that he could watch the same instinct at work on the Long Down at the head of my valley if he hid on the edge of the gorse and had the luck to see one of our foxes pass through the feeding rabbits, who were aware that it had other business and was not hungry.

Now, when we were only hunted and hunters—in Europe a mere three hundred generations ago—we shared this sixth sense which told us when we were in danger and when we were not; so it is not surprising that in some of us it has never been suppressed. Big-game shikaris all agree that it exists and that they have turned aside, without any conscious reason, when they were walking on into certain death.

‘That is what I think may be happening to me,' I added. ‘That sixth sense is out of control. It is continually telling me there is danger.'

‘Warning you when in fact there is no danger?'

‘I suppose so. But if I really believed there was none I should not be afraid. My trouble is that I believe there is.'

‘Far-fetched. We're not animals, though sometimes I wish we were. Anyway, if you are right, I can destroy your sixth sense at once.'

‘How?'

‘Tranquillisers. And there is a new drug to control hallucination.'

I said that I should want a definition of hallucination, and as for tranquillisers, I was not going to lie about dreaming like an elephant with a sedative dart in his backside.

‘Have you ever taken a tranquilliser?'

‘Unless you count alcohol, of course not!'

‘Yes, you are the lucky sort who has been able to produce his own up to now. By the way, you are sure it has nothing to do with Meg?'

‘Quite sure. Is that why you asked me straightaway how she was?'

‘Not altogether. I was just asking after a common friend to put you at ease. Let me think it over! I must revive some rather vague memories of what Jung had to say. And whenever you need to talk, I'll come round.'

I have not asked him to come round. Gargary has only given me a new fear: of his drugs and their effect. Fear Number Three he might call it if he knew. It would be too easy to stupefy myself until I become indifferent not only to the terror which lurks at my back but to all joy and to all my striving to reveal through paint what is beyond the objects painted.

Does that devotion matter? I think it does. When the achievement is appreciated, when the world beyond the world of sight has been successfully interpreted to another, I know it does.

I can never forget that fellow Julian Molay whom Paddy sent round to see me at the end of March: one of his foreign customers whom he had been supplying for years with English hunting saddles decorated to order. He had an estate in the Amanus Mountains near Alexandretta, Paddy said, and wanted something to remind him in the dry gold of the Mediterranean that there was still grass in the west.

I exhibited what I had: some triumphant, considering how hard the gentle green curves of England are to paint, and some which I disdain as picture postcards in which my craft has not failed me but inspiration has. Molay showed exceptional discrimination, and I felt he might be instinctively fastidious because he himself was such a splendid product of human maturity, tall, hawk-nosed, with a skin of fine bronze, and preserving the tense vitality of youth in spite of his grey hairs. With his large and deep-set eyes he reminded me of one of El Greco's Spanish grandees.

And so on impulse I set up for him my Holy Well: greens beyond browns, browns beyond greens, the shadowed water leading on into an unknown beyond the perception of mere sight.

His intent face was transfigured and he looked long as I have seen a man look into a crystal ball and follow movement. When he turned his dark eyes to mine, my pool seemed to be still reflected in them.

‘In India or England?' he asked.

I replied that there was no difference. Both had entered into my vision.

Then he asked what were my prices and I told him that for my best work I could normally count on three hundred guineas. He chose a study of waking cattle—no picture postcard, for the dawn mist flowed through and under the great trees of the parkland—and said:

‘I will buy this and pay you six hundred. Let each take half, the craftsman and the mystic!'

I did not know what to make of him except that I was sure from his gasp of admiration—a reward far beyond money—that he understood the Holy Well and really wanted that. I told him to leave the cattle and take it.

He would not, saying that neither he nor I had the right to put a price on it. Then, spreading his wings from the too portentous chrysalis, he laughed as if we were easy friends.

‘Free to good home some day,' he said, ‘like a foal one has bred and trained and loved but must not keep.'

Gargary's tranquillisers or drinking myself into numbness, no! And what would Meg think? What a preposterous question! I put myself on a level with some maiden lady who won't let her lover stay the night because of what pussy might think. But there is more to it than that. Through Meg and my painting I am sometimes near a vision of the world beyond the world, elusive but apparently a fact.

June 8

I took Gargary's advice on one point. With Meg in my pocket I called on the vet, waiting in the genial queue at his surgery because I felt that in that way George Midwinter might allude quite naturally to whatever he knew of Paddy without any interrogation on my part.

Most of the visitors were personally acquainted with Meg and those that were not knew of her. There were kind enquiries after her health and I had to invent a torn claw. The waiting room at a vet's surgery must be the most egalitarian spot in England, where the odd dozen of customers, each with ailing animal on knees, at foot or in basket, instantly form a club offering advice and sympathy to the neighbour. Homo Sapiens is unique in showing altruism towards his fellow vertebrates. That cannot be of any value to the preservation of our predatory race. The only explanation is that we cling subconsciously to the unity we have lost.

When my turn came George Midwinter was surprised to see Meg. Instead of asking me what was the matter with her he said half humorously: ‘What have you been doing to her, Alf?'

To George and other close friends I am Alf, Alfgif being hard to get one's tongue round, though easy as Alfred to my Saxon forebears. I wonder if King Alfred had put up with Alf when his thanes were on their third round of mead.

‘As near as possible all that Paddy did,' I answered. ‘I think she has managed to pull a claw.'

When I put Meg on the surgery table, she liked neither scene, scents nor our attitude. She arched her back and began to chatter.

‘Careful!' I warned George. ‘She's damned annoyed.'

‘Well, she has never been to a vet before.'

‘Paddy never took her in?'

‘Paddy and Meg had no need of me.'

I have admired George from the first; in fact if I were physically ill myself I'd as soon be treated by him as Gargary. I must have often talked to him about Paddy, discussing him as a dear curiosity and a fine craftsman and quite ignorant of the vet's special interest in him.

‘Perhaps you needed them.'

‘If I ever did, I kept it quiet. I don't want to be known as a quack. What about Meg's claw?'

‘An excuse, George. There's nothing wrong with it.'

‘I see. Paddy knew you were the only person who could use her. Who is my next patient after you?'