The Shadow (2 page)

Well, after all that labour I can see I have produced a very small and obvious mouse. But it's done me good. I never thought I'd enjoy playing with a mouse before. Don't you think he's rather a darling? These small dark eyes, quick and cute, and he's full of the most engaging ways. Ranald, he's stopped. He's gone quite still. He's swelling. He's turned into a rat!

There's a terrible number of rats about the farm. Thousands of them. Old Will, the first horseman, said the other day: War breeds rats. They're horrid brutes. We had a good laugh last night. A schoolboy, aged thirteen, was in, and we made him tell us the nicknames of all the teachers in the school. Will children ever change? Some of them were really amusing and one has stuck. The teacher's name is Mary McNutty. And they call her Bella Rats.

Why Bella? I asked. I don't know, he answered. For no reason in the world, I shake, but softly, with laughter.

Aren't you getting alarmed yet? Don't you think it's high time you took your four days off? Will I reassure you by saying that I am making up these images—or let me go all Freud and say my unconscious is doing it? For why? To draw you here, of course. Do you think the unconscious does things like that? Horrid of it, isn't it? I wish I knew.

Oh, Ranald, this is not the way I meant to write. I meant to take you with me the rest of that magic walk I went yesterday. But I can't to-day. Do you mind? I'm awfully tired. I feel like weeping. And a few tears have in very sooth downfallen. And I haven't my hankie. I'm sure some poet has said that tears are pearls. All the same, they're queer pearls. It would not be difficult to fall in love with them; anyway, to go to sleep with them. They're very wet. I'd like to be morbid again, but I don't want to overdo it. A woman has always got to be careful not to overdo anything. Perhaps that's why she does it so often. Overdoes the doing she shouldn't do, I mean. The tears are pearls because they are the quicksilver of life, and they run away, run down one's poor face.

I have just had, all in an instant, the smallest little twinge of malice. It entered me pop! It's this. Having grown afraid of feeling or emotion, we try to despise it. We look down our noses at it. (So many beaked noses I see! A whole forest of them in the air.) Emotion is so irrational, non-intellectual. Messy. Like an ingrowing toe-nail in a foot that could do with washing. Disgusting. It's subjective. Horrors! Sweep it away, away into the dustbin, and leave life cleansed and sweet as a schoolmaster's equation. We can then proceed to reform society, at least to get out of our present mess.

If I could draw really well, I'd put all an intellectual's intellectuality in his nose. It almost embarrasses me to add that you have a very distinguished nose. At the moment, mine (I have just had a look at it) is not very distinguished. Inward. That's what we think of emotion. But, oh, Ran! Ran! yesterday it was outward. Are you listening to me? It was outward. It raced over the moor. It raced over the sky. The clouds and the blue. Light. Sunlight. The sudden snipe from the bog. The lark. Life. It was life, pure lovely life, and the beating of the heart was the beating of wings. A beating and a singing. The passionate certainty that this was life, that we are stifling it, losing it. Oh, Ran! I told you! I cried to you!

I fall down after that effort. For I'll do anything, say anything, rather than look—at that figure. What made me use the word schoolmaster a little ago? Where has he come from? Who evoked him and gave him the right—to wait by my side with this merciless, appalling patience? He is about forty-five, tall, well-fleshed, straight. His hair is brushed flat, especially along the side of the head, past‘the ears. I know that, without having looked at him. My hand trembles. I can hardly write. Please, Ranald, forgive me these two blots on the paper. They prove I'm messy. I know. They don't look like pearls now. To think he is a creation of my own! From where? Where?

I'll have to look at him and get it over. For you know why I'm afraid to look. His awful eyes. I hang on to the pen. I keep on trying to move it, to make it go. I'm trying to speak quietly to you, Ranald. Each eyeball is a ball of thistledown. A grey ball of staring thistledown. I can see them, without looking. But I'll have to look. I'm going—to look—now———

In the wood there is a clearing, an open space like a fair-sized field. It is rather boggy, with tall grasses and tall wild flowers (pale purple scabious take over from rose-pink ragged robin). Also in the wood there is a mound, where the sunlight does not sleep but everywhere has its eyes open. You can't see those entrancing eyes. You see by them. The trees stand around and the bushes (juniper) squat lazily here and there. It's the quietest, loveliest place, full of goodness. Really, Ranald, it is. It's all health together and the young rabbits' ears are—I was going to say as pink as shells, but that would be silly for no shell can glow right through as these ears do. But to-day (that is, the day I got there after the storm of thistledown in the field below, for I'm still on that day. I must learn to be methodical) the wind was blowing as I told you, and the trees were dancing like waves of the sea. Throwing their arms about, tossing high their crests, and the sounds they made were the sounds of waves on a strand, but without the pounding beat. And it was warm and sheltered.

The buzzards had followed me. They were mewing, high up, one away to the right and one to the left—the parent birds. They were being ridiculously anxious about their young one. The young one had kept well behind and about midway between them. Like three far-separated kites they were, hanging on the wind. Now and then, as I approached the wood, the young one would fall away in a circle. Actually it did fall lower as it went with the wind, but immediately it came round into the wind it rose again. Once I heard it cry. I knew exactly what it was feeling and smiled. These enormous aerial spaces and the high wind were a little new to it. The mother, away on the right—I knew her by the tone of her voice—cried harshly, piercingly. But there was no need for her to be so anxious. She knew that, of course. She was teaching her offspring, warning it, pointing to the freedom of the sky. Old man father, far to the left, had a keen eye and would rather have sailed right off. But mother was full of bother, for she looked on these fields as her own, her home.

I left the mound and came down to the edge of the clearing in the wood. And then something happened that has stuck most vividly in my mind. It will sound ridiculous as I tell it to you, but you won't mind that. (I realise all in a heap how dreadful it would be if I could not tell you the silly things—the small change that buys the little extras with the groceries. But I shut my mind against that, and the bombed flat, and the awful black abyss of estrangement that opened between us, that valley of nightmare wherein I was broken. … Ran, Ran, I keep telling myself they are no more.) I stepped out on the clearing and at once the boggy ground stung with its wetness. Drawing back, I stood as a small tree in front of the other trees, like a schoolgirl who had pushed her way through to the front of the audience. And the brightness of that open space was indeed like a stage where something was going to happen. I waited. Nothing happened—and the curtain came down in a rush! That's what happened. And it took my breath away, it was so completely realistic, the very perfection of a “quick curtain”. It did take me a few moments to realise that one of the great, sailing clouds had crossed the sun! I wish you could have seen your own face laughing, as I saw it. It would have done you good. It did me a lot. Then up went the curtain just as quickly and the invisible play went on.

The brightness went with me. It ran before me on my own quick feet, while I walked slowly and—I hope—becomingly. Oh, Ran! the gift of such a moment between us, the lightness and brightness, and the swift-tumbling shadow-darkness of the curtains! For that shadow-darkness was itself as exciting and full of life as the light. Entrances and exits an' all. I do love you.

So at last I was on the moor. But I won't tell you about that. Too many things. I don't know how it is that I run on so. Things that I never noticed before—or hardly—have now a life of their own and are full of an exquisite significance. That last word is too, too heavy. Do you think it is because the final curtain so very nearly rang down on me—and so narrow a reprieve does something to the eyes? Anyway, it's done it! When you crashed—but I won't ask. I see you going through the future shadows of the world, crying
Never again!
Oh, I know why you go. I am with you. I am far from you at the moment. It is as if—I had come out on the other side. Please do not be impatient about that. For, Ran! Ran! I know—though I cannot tell you yet—what there
could
be on the other side. And I'm afraid, Ran, of those who think and
think only.
That's a foolish way to put it. We need efficiency, we need certainty, we need thought more than anything. Scientific analysis and construction. Yes, yes, yes. If only we could also keep our eyes real eyes. What happened when the schoolmaster with the thistledown eyes looked? Horror rose—and shook—and died, and what they looked on, withered.

Why had I to think of him again? Where did he come from? What does he mean? But I'm not going to be psychoanalysed. Not on your life! Simply a delusion or illusion of convalescence. You can even say I'm being hallucinated though I'd hate you if you did, not because it may not be true—what does that matter?—but because of an awful smugness in the voice of the analyst!

Now I've fought back to the moor again, to freedom. And oh, Ran!—this
will
annoy you—how awfully smug is our Party's definition of freedom as “the recognition of necessity”! But it's true? Of course! As true as true can be. But oh! with its philosophic highbrowism, how smug! Just plain smug. I know that will annoy you completely, even anger you a little, for haven't whole books, brilliant and earnest works, been written with this definition as the most marvellous all-round tin-opener of our wonder age? They have indeed. I bow—and glance through my long and, I hope, attractive lashes.

Lovely on the moor. Lovely, lovely. But I'll restrict myself, with the economy of the artist, to two pieces of attraction.

Again, I am happy to say, there was nothing in them. Entirely decorative. The first, a matter of colour and curiosity. It was what made me overdo it, for it lay beyond the moor stream, on the up-slope to the mountains. In such a waste land the colour was quite incredible. Exotic. The heather had not yet come into bloom, and upon its vast dun spaces was set down this one acre of glowing colour. You remember the tone of that yellow chartreuse when you held it against the light? That, then. So I took off my shoes and waded the stream, and on I went.

Nothing so marvellous as yellow chartreuse, of course! Only the tough hill grass burnt at the tops. Nothing more—except for the spikes, everywhere, rust-coloured rather than withered, of the golden bog asphodel. But when I took one blade of grass, what variety was there, from the fawn-coloured tip, that was the seed, through the brown, the mottled yellow and green, to the green! And I lay down flat in the midst thereof, and the wind blew.

I got back to the brook, and hung my harp on a salley bush, and did not want to go home. Some day I may tell you what a hill burn says. There are those who say that it tinkles, or even that it sings. But if you care to take it from me—it talks. Please don't think this is childish. Or—can you get this?—think of it as truly childish. Have you ever heard a child tell you a story it believes in, a strange story? Do you know that curious monotone that comes upon the voice, as if the voice itself and the eyes were far off where the story is happening—but careful, too, lest what was far comes near, and overhears, which would be terrible?

But I won't go on. We have, rightly, an awful horror of the grown-up childish. So we avoid it. I chuckle with laughter at the thought of our avoidances. I shake. And the voice of the burn isn't childish, even in the true way. But oh! it has a monotone. And where we go wrong—I suddenly saw this (it would be far truer to say it was revealed to me, for I did not try to see)—is in trying to personify what cannot be personified. If I were to say that the prehistoric mountain spoke out of this prehistoric burn in the voice of a child—how ridiculous! Saints and mystics may say something like that—that's why we don't understand them, even if, for some mysterious reason, we cannot forget them. Their real trouble, I see, is that there are no words for all this. So they make a story of it, a personification, and tell it to us, their children. Us, who know so very much more than they do, us the refugees wrinkled with an age older than the mountains!

Where are all these words coming from? Who is talking them? You know it can't be me. (There are long pauses, and such thrills somewhere, but I try to be restrained. I do my best—but it's difficult when in my vanity I see the rare glow—where? On your face? My pen, absolutely on its own, was going to underline “rare”. Can this be spirit-writing? And how you spurned that! I sway.)

All the time the pool in the burn was waiting. It wasn't talking but only looking up at me, not with veiled, lidded eyes, but quite openly. Full of immense age, of course, but no satire. An immensely ancient ledge of grey rock, moor-brown pebbles, and floating foam-flecks from the throat. A pale heather-honey brown in the water, a softness of warmth. The excitement began to mount. I stood up, and everywhere there was nobody; far as the eye could wander, not a soul. Off everything came. First one foot, then another—I plunged and gasped and it's a wonder you didn't hear me.

Such shuddering ecstasy! Then in a moment—the water was warm. It was all about me and soft and warm. You wouldn't believe it. Though remember it had taken all summer to make it warm.
All summer.
(That's where you pause and the enchantment comes.)

Not having wherewith to dry myself, I did a little dance on the old rock, and then I sat on it.