The Shadow (21 page)

“And who brought Nan down?” he asked.

“Herself,” answered Aunt Phemie, studying the clots with businesslike care. “The doctor ordered her up for a little while this afternoon.” But she was not satisfied with her work. “I think I'll soak away these clots and bleed them clean.”

“You'll do no such a thing,” declared Ranald. “They're fine—thank you very much.” He turned. “Hullo!” he said, looking at Nan. “Feeling all right?”

Nan had gone pale, was wavering like one about to pass out. “Fine, thank you.” But she visibly pressed the table with elbows and trembling hands. “What next!” declared Aunt Phemie, rushing out. She came back with the brandy bottle and Nan, though she managed to take a good sip, said, “I think I'll go up.”

“I should just think so!” Aunt Phemie caught her arm. “Come along. And next time you'll obey the doctor—or you'll hear about it! Coming walking in on me like that!”

“Sorry, Ranald,” said Nan, throwing him a glance as she went out.

“Keep your teeth on it,” he said encouragingly, following them to the foot of the stairs. Aunt Phemie now had her arm round Nan, was clearly bearing almost her full weight. “I'll be up to see you soon,” called Ranald cheerfully.

Nan lay full out on her bed, eyes closed, her skin drained of blood, ghastly, but one hand held on to Aunt Phemie's fingers. Her breathing began to revive in short shallow gasps. “Oh, I feel such a fool,” she muttered with the tragic weakness that couldn't even cry.

“A wee drop more brandy,” suggested Aunt Phemie tenderly. But the fingers would not let go. “Don't hurry,” whispered Aunt Phemie. “Take your time, my darling.” She suspected that the sight of the blood and the change in Ranald had been too much for Nan.

Nan began to stir, to sniffle; tears came from under her lids, wetting the lashes, running slowly down her cheeks. “Oh-h!” she moaned, and her features crumpled like a crying child's.

“That's my girl!” said Aunt Phemie. “Now, where's your hankie? Oh, but yes, yes,” she added as Nan's head moved from side to side in a sort of utter weakness and negation. Aunt Phemie found the handkerchief under the pillow and began wiping the tears away.

“You're good to me,” murmured Nan. “You—you know.”

“Yes, my dear. I know,” whispered Aunt Phemie.

Nan's head lay still; she opened her eyes and saw Aunt Phemie wiping her own eyes.

Aunt Phemie nodded, smiling. “We're just two silly women,” she said, “but we're tough!”

Nan closed her eyes again and gripped Aunt Phemie's hand hard. She was trying to stop a new outburst of tears. Presently a wavering smile came through the tears and she looked at Aunt Phemie. “I can feel the brandy hot.”

Aunt Phemie nodded. “I can see it in your face.”

“Can you?” She lay back completely relaxed, exhausted, but the smile left its ghostly presence in her face. She said after a little in a quiet natural way, “Death comes so near—you feel yourself—sinking back on him.” Then she looked at Aunt Phemie again, with a strange almost shy expression in her eyes. “That was Ranald,” she said.

“Yes,” answered Aunt Phemie, “that was the real Ranald.”

Nan gave a small nod and pressed Aunt Phemie's hand hard, then drew her own away.

“I'll bring you up a plate of soup in a little while; meantime compose yourself like a good girl, and no nonsense.” At the door Aunt Phemie turned. Nan's eyes were on her in a shy gladness, in a veiled tribute. The unspoken was between them. Nan was very lovely when she looked like that. Aunt Phemie made a face at her and closed the door.

Ranald was waiting for her in the kitchen, drying his hands on the roller towel behind the cupboard door. “How is she?”

“She's come round. But she's desperately weak. We'll leave her to herself for a little while.” She saw the brandy bottle.

“Would you like some?” She looked at his face. The brow showed a slight but definite swelling.

“I would, if you don't mind.”

“Help yourself. I'll get you a glass.”

He picked up Nan's glass, poured himself a stiff one, and drank it off. “I could have done with that earlier.” He smiled. “You said the doctor was in?”

“Yes. Do sit down. The potatoes are ruined, I'm afraid. Yes, he was in. After fever, you've got to stay in bed for a day or two, but he now wants her up—and interested.”

“Sounds sensible. He seems a reasonable chap.”

“Yes, he's a good doctor. I hope you like the soup?”

“It's excellent. I always take Scotch broth in a restaurant. You feel there's body in it—though never like this.” His voice and manner now had their casual air, but with an attentiveness, a natural warmth of life underneath, that subtly transformed them. She saw that he could, if he liked, be quite charming—perhaps, even, very charming.

She was still moved, too, over Nan. She felt in a completely irrational way that Nan had taken the turn, that something had happened which, as it were, had headed her off. If only—if only—she could be kept in her present mind! If only that awful wind of chance didn't suddenly blow her again onto the dark course! In her own body, Aunt Phemie had felt Nan's utter frailty. She was still automatically sending out her own strength as she spoke to Ranald, asking him what had really happened in that tree. And Ranald had his story, embroidered it even with a reference to bird-nesting in boyhood. “Infantile regression,” he suggested with a humoured glance that broke into a short laugh when Aunt Phemie smiled.

“And I
was
interested in these Irishmen digging those drains. Experts—but why Irish?”

“Because the Irish are experts at that work. During the war—and right up until now—labour has been our difficulty. That field—Nan calls it the thistledown field—it got beyond us. But that was not the only kind of trouble.”

“No?” He looked at her with genuine interest, even curiosity.

“No. Broken-down fences. Cart roads that only the tractor can take now. Over-cropping year after year with grain. Even the moles—didn't you notice them here and there in immense rashes, the molehills, I mean?”

“Now that you mention it, I did.”

“And rats. Horrible.” She was now wholly concentrated on interesting him.

“Really? You mean they swarmed about?”

“I tried to keep it from Nan. She came here at the tail-end of the last great hunt. She couldn't help seeing something of it. They were not only in and about the stealing. They were in the grain stacks. Everywhere. Burrowing in the banks like rabbits, actually using the rabbit burrows. Horrible—particularly,” she added, “as a subject for lunch! Have some more potatoes?”

“Thanks. I feel hungry.”

“Perhaps the country air is doing you good?”

“I believe it is.”

“Pity you're going away so soon.”

“I should really go to-morrow.”

“Must you?”

“I should really.” He ate his stew and potato.

“I'll slip up with a plate of broth for Nan now, if you'll excuse me.”

When she came back, she looked cheerful, happy. “I do believe she's taken the turn. If she could just have a day or two to get some pith back into her!”

“Have a cigarette,” he said. “Between us, we'll manage all right. Is that coffee? Good!”

“You're driving me into bad habits again.” She stuck the cigarette in her holder.

“Not at all. One must have a burst occasionally—particularly after killing rats. By the way, how did you kill them?”

“It would take me hours to tell you. I remember one night in the wintertime, about bed time, hearing savage cries and going to the window to see lights rushing about the ploughed field out there. It looked as if some strange beast had got loose in the field and they were after it in a weird death hunt. I got frightened in an awful way. At last I couldn't bear it.” She smiled. “Some young lads were after the rats with sticks and electric torches. I had told the grieve I would pay threepence a tail.”

He laughed.

“Then there was the time when Donnie fell through the stack. Getting threshed early was a real problem. Anyway, it was well into the spring. The threshing mill was in place between the stacks in the field. Donnie had climbed up onto a stack to begin forking to the mill—when he suddenly disappeared. They had to tear the stack away to get at him. He was nearly suffocated.”

“But how?”

“You know how a stack is built? Anyway, the rats had eaten the heart out of the stack and he had fallen down through it.”

“Good God!”

Aunt Phemie nodded. “That was during the war—when seamen were being torpedoed and drowned taking grain across the Atlantic.”

“I say! You had your war too.”

“We did what we could.”

“But surely the Ministry of Agriculture should have done something about rats. Hang it, they should know about dealing with them scientifically I mean. It's really pretty bad.”

“I don't know,” said Aunt Phemie: “I suppose they had their problems too.”

“That's the worst of it,” declared Ranald with a restless movement. “You'll all go on excusing them. It's just damned silly. Clearly, over rats, they just had no plan at all. You make that clear. Don't you?”

“Believe me, I was angry enough,” admitted Aunt Phemie. “But that doesn't help. We must try and be fair. Where would the Ministry of Agriculture—though it's the Department of Agriculture in Scotland—where would they get the men—the rat-killers—in war time to cover all the farms in the country? They just hadn't got them. In the end we got two men from the Department for ten days—just before Nan came. In bare traps they caught over seven hundred—I made them lock the heap in a shed until they were counted lest Nan might see them. They also used gas and poison. So we've got them under—for the time being anyway.”

“But how were they allowed to multiply like that?”

“They weren't allowed to,” said Aunt Phemie. “They just did in spite of us. Life is like that.”

Ranald shook his head. “I see your point—but I am not being had. You can destroy that kind of life. You must. You must destroy the rat; or the rat will destroy you.”

Aunt Phemie blew away a stream of smoke.

“You've got to make a plan, a national plan, to destroy rats and stick to it, ruthlessly. There is no other way.” He leaned back. “However, I suppose you'll think that's politics!”

“I shouldn't mind that. It's when you actually come to deal with things, with life itself—it's difficult.” She hesitated. “I know you'll think that's vague. But when you have got to get the real work done, the actual grain and calves and what not produced, the land ploughed, and so on, with real human beings working at it—it's not easy. You're only a human being, and the other person is a human being, and if you're going to respect him as an individual with a right to some freedom of his own—it's difficult to plan him in your way.”

“But surely not—if your plan is the right plan. You may think—I don't know—that I'm interested in some brand of politics, some new party, as that sort of thing is understood—in the press, at election meetings, and so forth. I'm not. Not at all. We've got to get past all that. We've got to have some basis for our political thought. Everyone-for-himself, in the old capitalistic scramble, served its purpose in the historic process by smashing up feudalism. But now it in its turn is finished; it's gone rotten in our hands. It should be buried, or it will rot all life. We need a scientific socialism.” He was in real earnest now, he was alive, not with that air of complacency which had earlier repelled Aunt Phemie but with a driving purpose in him, an obviously deep belief. The intolerant sharpening of the pale features with the dark blood clots held its own warrant. “You mentioned freedom, for example. Everyone, here and in America, and not only the big political bosses, but the writers, the parsons, everyone who thinks he has two ideas to rattle together, shouts
freedom
—we'll die for
freedom
—and yet not one of them has even attempted to define the word.” He stopped abruptly and his features gave an ironic twist. “Like the old woman shouting her blessed word
Jerusalem!”
He lit another cigarette.

“Perhaps it's impossible to define?” suggested Aunt Phemie.

“No.” He shook his head as he blew out smoke. “Take your rats again,” and now he was talking without stress. “You reasoned about rats. You determined they were a menace. You took steps accordingly, and now you have won
freedom
from rats.”

“But human beings are not rats.”

“The same reasoning process applies nevertheless. Only you have to begin by asking how does a human being in fact attain a consciousness of freedom. The notion persists that man becomes more free the more he grows independent of his fellow men, of society. It's the old Rousseau gag about man being born free and yet being everywhere in chains. It's just sentimental nonsense. If you left a child in the forest to fend for itself it would, at the best, grow up an animal, a beast forever hunting its food. You know that. It would be absolutely conditioned by the necessity for grub-hunting. It would have no speech, no music, no literature, no philosophy, no religion. All these things it gets from society. You, in fact, taught children these very things. There are no schools in the jungle.”

“I agree,” said Aunt Phemie. “But I still don't see quite how it gets its consciousness of freedom in society, or what exactly you think freedom is.”

“Let me give a definition of freedom and then we can argue from that. Freedom consists in the act of recognising necessity and taking the best steps you can to deal with it. Freedom, in short, is the
consciousness of necessity.
When you became conscious of the necessity for destroying the rats, you took the proper steps and obtained freedom from them.”